[Peace-discuss] Fisk puzzles over 9/11

[n.dahlheim at mchsi.com]

Mort,
    This is an excellent piece, and I am glad Robert Fisk had the courage to 
write it.  The sad reality is 
that few people were asking these questions from the very beginning.  The whole 
9/11 narrative as 
constructed by the powers that be in our country, particularly the White House 
and Pentagon, forms the 
justification for the policies conducted hence.  The sheer mendacity of the 
Administration, while not 
cause in and of itself to conclude that they participated in the 9/11 murders, 
certainly should have 
given people much greater pause to examine the events of that fateful day much 
more carefully.  After 
all, the presence of "Al-Qaeda" has been the reason why the United States is 
officially no longer a 
constitutional Republic but now an empire hell-bent on world domination for the 
corporate elite that 
essentially own the government.  Don't mistake me, I do believe in the existence 
of Al-Qaeda---but, 
they are not some enemy wholly separate from the United States as they were a 
creation of U.S. 
intelligence dating back to the Carter Administration.  Rather, they probably 
function as something of 
double agents.  The long-time business partnership in the private equity firm 
the Carlyle Group 
between the Bushes and the binLadens (of whom there is no solid evidence that 
Osama was actually 
estranged from them; Osama even appeared in a U.S. military hospital in Dubai in 
July 2001 for kidney 
dialysis when he was simultaneously interviewed by the local CIA station chief 
according to the French 
Press) also is extremely suspicious.  Considering the oil, defense, and 
construction contracts Carlyle-
owned firms and their allies were poised to receive in the aftermath of 9/11 
benefiting both the Bushes 
and the bin Ladens; wouldn't you just have to wonder if the two patrician 
families got together and 
orchestrated this political theater around which the deaths of 3000 Americans in 
Manhattan and 
Washington would be used to spark an imperial adventure in the Middle East?   
   The ignorance of the American people and their servility only feeds this 
monster, and the lack of 
reasoned public discourse of the past several years has certainly been ample 
evidence of this fact.  
Sadly, I've come to the conclusion that nothing can and will be done about the 
9/11 issue.  The 
legitimate questions about the building collapses, the standown order given by 
Cheney (as the Mineta 
testimony in front of the Kean-Hamilton Commission suggests strongly), the missing debris from the 
Pentagon, and the mstery of Flight 93 among others cast serious doubt upon Al-Qaeda's sole 
responsibility for 9-11.  Even if 9-11 were just allegedly committed by Al-Qaeda, their likely role as 
double agents in the intelligence community would still necessitate that heads should roll in the U.S. 
government.  
    I highly recommend the now FOUR books on White House/Pentagon complicity in the 9/11 attacks 
penned by Dr. David Ray Griffin.  Dr. Griffin's extensive work on outlining the parameters of the 
epistemilogical parameters of science and religion qualifies him to assess the empirical evidence and 
the competing scientific claims separating the "official" story from the alternative account.  His 
conclusions are damning, and he has support from dozens of intellectuals.  Among religion scholars he 
Dr. Griffin has the support of Islamic scholar Dr. Kevin Barrett as well as the support of Rabbi Michael 
Lerner.  Author Gore Vidal and historian Howard Zinn support Griffin.  International relations expert 
Peter Falk supports Griffin's work...  The list is quite long and illustrious.  The awful truth of 9/11 must 
sink in and change people's working paradigms---the time wasted on this War on Terror has cost this 
country dearly and the planet more generally in efforts that should have been devoted towards 
confronting climate change.


----------------------  Original Message:  ---------------------
From:    "Morton K. Brussel" <brussel4 at insightbb.com>
To:      Peace Discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fisk puzzles over 9/11
Date:    Sat, 25 Aug 2007 21:17:00 +0000

> This piece from Robert Fisk may somewhat appease some on this list,  
> who believe that there are many unanswered and disturbing questions,  
> still, about 9/11.
> 
>  Discuss this story  Printer Friendly Version  E-Mail This  
> Article
> 
> 
> Published on Saturday, August 25, 2007 by The Independent/UK
> Spare Me The ‘Ravers’, But Even I Question The ‘Truth’ About  
> 9/11
> by Robert Fisk
> Each time I lecture abroad on the Middle East, there is always  
> someone in the audience - just one - whom I call the “raver�.  
> Apologies here to all the men and women who come to my talks with  
> bright and pertinent questions - often quite humbling ones for me as  
> a journalist - and which show that they understand the Middle East  
> tragedy a lot better than the journalists who report it. But the  
> “raver� is real. He has turned up in corporeal form in Stockholm  
> and in Oxford, in Sao Paulo and in Yerevan, in Cairo, in Los Angeles  
> and, in female form, in Barcelona. No matter the country, there will  
> always be a “raver�.
> 
> His - or her - question goes like this. Why, if you believe you’re a  
> free journalist, don’t you report what you really know about 9/11?  
> Why don’t you tell the truth - that the Bush administration (or the  
> CIA or Mossad, you name it) blew up the twin towers? Why don’t you  
> reveal the secrets behind 9/11? The assumption in each case is that  
> Fisk knows - that Fisk has an absolute concrete, copper-bottomed fact- 
> filled desk containing final proof of what “all the world  
> knows� (that usually is the phrase) - who destroyed the twin towers.  
> Sometimes the “raver� is clearly distressed. One man in Cork  
> screamed his question at me, and then - the moment I suggested that  
> his version of the plot was a bit odd - left the hall, shouting abuse  
> and kicking over chairs.
> 
> Usually, I have tried to tell the “truth�; that while there are  
> unanswered questions about 9/11, I am the Middle East correspondent  
> of The Independent, not the conspiracy correspondent; that I have  
> quite enough real plots on my hands in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran,  
> the Gulf, etc, to worry about imaginary ones in Manhattan. My final  
> argument - a clincher, in my view - is that the Bush administration  
> has screwed up everything - militarily, politically diplomatically -  
> it has tried to do in the Middle East; so how on earth could it  
> successfully bring off the international crimes against humanity in  
> the United States on 11 September 2001?
> 
> Well, I still hold to that view. Any military which can claim - as  
> the Americans did two days ago - that al-Qa’ida is on the run is not  
> capable of carrying out anything on the scale of 9/11. “We disrupted  
> al-Qa’ida, causing them to run,� Colonel David Sutherland said of  
> the preposterously code-named “Operation Lightning Hammer� in  
> Iraq’s Diyala province. “Their fear of facing our forces proves  
> the terrorists know there is no safe haven for them.� And more of  
> the same, all of it untrue.
> 
> Within hours, al-Qa’ida attacked Baquba in battalion strength and  
> slaughtered all the local sheikhs who had thrown in their hand with  
> the Americans. It reminds me of Vietnam, the war which George Bush  
> watched from the skies over Texas - which may account for why he this  
> week mixed up the end of the Vietnam war with the genocide in a  
> different country called Cambodia, whose population was eventually  
> rescued by the same Vietnamese whom Mr Bush’s more courageous  
> colleagues had been fighting all along.
> 
> But - here we go. I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies  
> in the official narrative of 9/11. It’s not just the obvious non  
> sequiturs: where are the aircraft parts (engines, etc) from the  
> attack on the Pentagon? Why have the officials involved in the United  
> 93 flight (which crashed in Pennsylvania) been muzzled? Why did  
> flight 93’s debris spread over miles when it was supposed to have  
> crashed in one piece in a field? Again, I’m not talking about the  
> crazed “research� of David Icke’s Alice in Wonderland and the  
> World Trade Center Disaster - which should send any sane man back to  
> reading the telephone directory.
> 
> I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example,  
> that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the  
> steel beams of the twin towers - whose melting point is supposed to  
> be about 1,480C - would snap through at the same time? (They  
> collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower - the so- 
> called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon Brothers  
> Building) - which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at  
> 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when  
> no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards  
> and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction  
> of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7. Two  
> prominent American professors of mechanical engineering - very  
> definitely not in the “raver� bracket - are now legally  
> challenging the terms of reference of this final report on the  
> grounds that it could be “fraudulent or deceptive�.
> 
> Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11. Initial  
> reports of reporters that they heard “explosions� in the towers -  
> which could well have been the beams cracking - are easy to dismiss.  
> Less so the report that the body of a female air crew member was  
> found in a Manhattan street with her hands bound. OK, so let’s claim  
> that was just hearsay reporting at the time, just as the CIA’s list  
> of Arab suicide-hijackers, which included three men who were - and  
> still are - very much alive and living in the Middle East, was an  
> initial intelligence error.
> 
> But what about the weird letter allegedly written by Mohamed Atta,  
> the Egyptian hijacker-murderer with the spooky face, whose  
> “Islamic� advice to his gruesome comrades - released by the CIA -  
> mystified every Muslim friend I know in the Middle East? Atta  
> mentioned his family - which no Muslim, however ill-taught, would be  
> likely to include in such a prayer. He reminds his comrades-in-murder  
> to say the first Muslim prayer of the day and then goes on to quote  
> from it. But no Muslim would need such a reminder - let alone expect  
> the text of the “Fajr� prayer to be included in Atta’s letter.
> 
> Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the ravers.  
> Spare me the plots. But like everyone else, I would like to know the  
> full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the  
> whole lunatic, meretricious “war on terror� which has led us to  
> disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East.  
> Bush’s happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that “we’re  
> an empire now - we create our own reality�. True? At least tell us.  
> It would stop people kicking over chairs.
> 
> Robert Fisk is the Middle East correspondent for The Independent.
> 
> © 2007 The Independent
> 
> 
> 
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