September 16, 2004
Well, another Sept. 11 anniversary has come and gone. I thought this year’s seemed more subdued, less fraught with anxiety.
Perhaps after three years the attack no longer has the same immediacy; perhaps the U.S.’s record of murder, stupidity and greed in Iraq have started to make us uneasy about condemning Arabs as terrorists.
In any event, the media dutifully reinforced the emotional impact of that day. Television stations replayed videotape of the planes hitting the Twin Towers; people called into radio shows to recount how they felt that day, and decry how horrible it all was; and the theme of Islamist terrorists attacking a Western democracy was implicitly assumed throughout all media.
Next year, we’ll get more of the same. In 2006, we can expect a fifth-anniversary publicity package.
Boilerplate “news” like this is usually associated with religious observances. Coverage of Easter ceremonies, for example, is the same year after year. No reporter is going to say that the story of the Resurrection is absurd. Faith is not compatible with critical analysis.
Problem is, the WTC attack has also been rendered impervious to rational discussion. George W. Bush declared Sept. 10–12 to be National Days of Prayer and Remembrance, meaning that the event calls for introspection not investigation. In the Theocratic States of America, no reporter is going to call into question canonical verities, much less criticize the U.S.’s carefully nurtured sense of martyrdom.
Yet, the WTC collapse isn’t a matter of faith; it’s a matter of fact, and therefore it can and should be discussed critically. The fact that our mainstream media are afraid or unable to do this should make us wonder what we’re not being told.
For starters, the recently published 9/11 Commission Final Report has been roundly denounced as a sham. Despite interviewing 1,200 witnesses and poring over 2.5 million pages of documents, the commissioners ignored key evidence and committed howling errors of fact.
Take its description of the attack on the Pentagon—please!: “At 9:37, the west wall…was hit by hijacked American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757. The crash caused immediate and catastrophic damage.” (page. 314). Let’s examine the evidence.
• The impact hole
was 16 feet wide and circular; the width of a Boeing 757 is
125 feet and assuredly not circular.
• Military photographs showed no damage to the upper floors of
the Pentagon or to any objects in the path of the attack.
• No fuselage, fuel or other wreckage was found on the grass
in front of the impact site, which curiously suffered no
damage.
In sum, the 757 theory is as much a contrived fraud as is the Warren Commission’s “lone gunman” theory of the Kennedy assassination.
Also highly disturbing is the report’s uncritical endorsement of Bush’s “9/11 changed the world” dogma. Chapter 2 is actually devoted to “The New Terrorism,” a term that is just as meaningless and propagandistic as “The New Anti-Semitism.” So, if the report reflects the official story, and the official story contains absurdities like the 757 story, then our touchy-feely “religious” reporting of it perpetuates a lie. It’s time the media found some backbone and treated the WTC collapse as a act of sabotage. Keep an open mind, and compare these two events.
Reichstag Fire,
Feb. 27, 1933
Blame for the Reichstag fire fell solely on a deranged, mostly
blind Dutch Communist named Marinus van der Lubbe, who was
found cowering behind the building. He had earlier openly
declared his intention to burn the Reichstag as a sole act of
protest against capitalism, but the Nazi leadership declared
the fire to be an act of International Communists, and
demanded the arrest and trial of the leaders of Communist
Party leaders.
The day after the fire, Chancellor Adolf Hitler convinced Germany’s senile president Paul von Hindenberg to issue an emergency decree to suspend civil liberties in the name of national security. It read:
“Articles 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124 and 153 of the constitution of the German Empire are suspended until further notice. It is therefore permissible to restrict the rights to personal freedom [habeas corpus], freedom of speech, including the freedom of the press, the freedom to organize and assemble, the privacy of letters, mail, telegraphs and telephones, order searches and confiscations and restrict property, even if this is not otherwise provided for by present law.”
On Dec. 23 in Leipzig, the two-month “Reichstag Fire Trial” of the Communist leaders ended with the German Imperial Court acquitting most of the defendants. In fact, one of the defendants presented convincing evidence against high officials in the National Socialist (Nazi) German Workers’ Party.
Upon hearing of the acquittals, a furious Hitler decreed that a newly established Nazi-run “People’s Court” would hear cases of treason, among other crimes.
Although, van der Lubbe was clearly involved, historians generally agree that the Nazi hierarchy used him as a cover to commit an act of sabotage for political gain. Testimony at the post-war Nuremberg Trial revealed that the fire was accelerated by Hitler’s paramilitary storm troopers, who applied a self-igniting liquid throughout the assembly hall.*
Who these people were, we don’t know, but the Nazis clearly benefited from the fire.
The Collapse of the
Twin Towers, Sept. 11, 2001
Blame for the attack has fallen solely on Islamists who
hijacked passenger jets and flew them into the towers. The
U.S. leadership declared the attack to be the work of
international terrorists (al-Qa‘ida) and demanded the
Afghanistan government hand over Osama bin Laden, who had
issued a declaration of war against the U.S.
Nineteen days later, George W. Bush declared the country to be at war with terror and established the Office of Homeland Security, which is disturbingly close to “Committee of State Security,” or KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti).
On Oct. 25, Bush seized on the attack to stampede a panicked and intimidated Congress into passing the USA PATRIOT Act, which gave the government virtually dictatorial power and suspended numerous civil liberties, including the right to counsel and protection from arbitrary arrest, illegal search and seizure.
Also, suspected terrorists would no longer be tried in civilian courts, but in military tribunals where they had no constitutional protection.
Although the aircraft were clearly involved in the attack, the collapse was too orderly to have been solely the result of the impact. The heat generated was not high enough to melt the asbestos-insulated steel structure; the cement columns were pulverized into dust as in a controlled implosion; and explosions away from the area of impact were clearly visible.
The logical conclusion is that saboteurs in the know exploited the attack for political gain. Who these people were, we don’t know, but the Bush government and Israel clearly benefited from the collapse.
Any questions?
* For a description of what happened see the review of Der Reichstagbrand - Wie Geschichte gemacht wird (The Reichstag Fire - How History is Created) by Alexander Bahar and Wilfried Kugel.
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