How
Controlled Explanations Are Achieved
By Paul
Craig Roberts
January
02, 2020 "Information
Clearing House"
- In 2014 Progressive Press
published a book by a French author, Laurent
Guyenot, titled JFK-9/11: 50 Years of Deep
State. The book contains much interesting
reporting that shows that the official
explanations we are given about even major
events, such as the assassination of a President
and 9/11, are transparently false. Yet, these
transparently false explanations are hard to
challenge despite all available evidence being
against the explanations.
Reviewing such a book is a challenge that I
avoided by securing permission to reprint two
chapters from the book. One chapter, “Ghost
planes,” deals with the mystery of the four
allegedly hijacked airliners. No trace of the
one that allegedly hit the Pentagon has ever
been found, and the many videos of the event
remain under lock and key. No trace of the one
that allegedly crashed in Pennsylvania has ever
been found. Neither has any trace of the two
that allegedly hit the two World Trade Center
towers ever been found, although an unburnt
passpost was allegedly found in the ruins of two
massive buildings.
Readers
might remember that I raised the question why we
did not hear demands for explanations from the
families of the victims of the four destroyed
airliners like we did from the families whose
relatives were in the twin towers. Guyenot
reports that of the alleged casualties of AA77
“only five of these have relatives who received
the 9-11 Compensation Fund offered by the State.
. . . no family of the victims of Flight UA93
requested compensation.”
How can
this be?
The
other chapter, “The Art of the Patsy,” shows
that the key to the ability of the authorities
to control the explanation is to have an
explanation of the event ready at hand. No one
expected President Kennedy’s assassination or he
wouldn’t have been riding in a convertible. Yet
it was instantly known that Oswald was the
assassin. The explanation for 9/11 was also
instantaneous. It was CIA-asset Osama bin Laden,
who was dying from renal failure and no longer
useful to the CIA.
If you find Guyenot interesting, you might want
to read his book. What Guyenot shows us is that
what the CIA has schooled the dumbshit
presstitute media to ridicule as “conspiracy
theory” is indeed a conspiracy, a real one
usually involving the CIA.
Sorry. The images didn’t transfer.
Ghost Planes
The
government’s narrative on 9/11 says that the
Boeing 757 of Flight UA93 (from New Jersey to
San Francisco) crashed at Shanksville,
Pennsylvania, after the passengers fought the
hijackers and prevented them from flying the
aircraft into the White House or Camp David. But
in the images of the impact site released on the
same day, it is impossible to distinguish any
wreckage of an airliner; even the reporters who
had rushed to the scene were perplexed. The
first to arrive there, Jon Meyer of WJAC-TV, an
NBC affiliate in Pennsylvania, declared: “I was
able to get right up to the edge of the crater.
[…] All I saw was a crater filled with small,
charred plane parts. Nothing that would even
tell you that it was the plane. […] There were
no suitcases, no recognizable plane parts, no
body parts.” The Mayor of Shanksville, Ernie
Stull, early on the scene with his sister and a
friend, declared in March 2003: “Everyone was
puzzled, because the call had been that a plane
had crashed. But there was no plane. […]
Nothing. Only this hole.”
[Image
LG17-1 Shanksville]
Photographer Scott Spangler recalls his surprise
when looking at the crash scene of UA93: “I
didn’t think I was in the right place. I was
looking for a wing or a tail. There was nothing,
just this pit.”
The
Boeing 757 of Flight AA77 (from Washington to
Los Angeles) that allegedly crashed into the
Pentagon also could not be found. French
journalist Thierry Meyssan was the first to draw
conclusions in 9/11: The Big Lie, a dissenting
investigation published in March 2002 based on
pictures from the Department of Defense and
Associated Press. The lawn before the crash site
was immaculate, the two or three pieces of
debris that could be seen were ridiculously
small, and could not be identified as belonging
to a Boeing. The reporter Jamie McIntyre of CNN,
who arrived at the Pentagon an hour after the
crash, was perplexed: “From my close-up
inspection, there is no evidence of a plane
having crashed anywhere near the Pentagon. […]
the only pieces left that you can see are small
enough that you pick up in your hand. There are
no large tail sections, wing sections, fuselage,
nothing like that anywhere around which would
indicate that the entire plane crashed into the
side of the Pentagon.”
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[Image
LG17-2 Pentagon lawn]
Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski of the U.S.
Air Force, who was on the scene within minutes
after the explosion at the Pentagon, reported:
“I saw nothing of significance at the point of
impact—no airplane metal or cargo debris was
blowing on the lawn in front of the damaged
building as smoke billowed from within the
Pentagon. […] all of us staring at the Pentagon
that morning were indeed looking for such
debris, but what we expected to see was not
evident.”
Was the
plane buried deep into the building? No photo
taken inside the crash site shows even the
slightest credible scrap of a plane, and
witnesses say that they did not see anything
that would suggest an airplane. April Gallop was
in her office with her son of two months, 10 or
15 meters from the impact zone. She felt an
explosion, and then the ceiling fell in on her;
in making her way towards the exit with her
child, she saw nothing that made her think that
a plane had crashed, “no wreckage, no airplane
fragments, no engines, no seats, no luggage, no
fuselage sections with rows of windows, and
especially, no blazing quantities of burning jet
fuel.”
[Image
LG17-3 Does not fit]
“I look at the hole in the Pentagon, and I look
at the size of an airplane that was supposed to
have hit the Pentagon, and I say: the plane does
not fit in that hole. So what did hit the
Pentagon? What hit it? Where is it? What’s going
on?” (General Albert Stubblebine, head of the
U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command from
1981 to 1984).
Did
Flight 77 just vanish? Did the fire, hardly
noticeable in the photos, melt its hundred tons
of metal, as was suggested by the government? If
that were in fact the case, how did they manage
to identify all the passengers through their
fingerprints and DNA analysis, as has been
claimed? (None of the allegedly dead bodies, by
the way, has been identified by a relative: they
were all transferred to a military base, where
they were incinerated.)
[Image
LG17-4 Pentagon hole]
We are asked to believe that the plastic nose of
a Boeing 757 made this hole after going through
five other reinforced concrete walls, as
Rumsfeld himself announced on Good Morning
America (ABC), September 13. It resembles rather
the damage done by a shell with a hollow charge,
designed to perforate such walls.
The
recordings of 85 video cameras, either placed at
the Pentagon or in the general vicinity, were
seized by government agents, but no recognizable
image of the aircraft was made public. Only one
sequence was released by court order in May
2006, and it includes four images that show an
object exploding as it hits the Pentagon, but
they do little to suggest that it is an airplane
that caused the blast. Curiously, the film is
dated September 12, not 11. According to some
experts, the yellow light emitted by the
explosion in the images could not have been
caused by jet fuel, and neither can the odor of
cordite (an explosive made from nitroglycerine,
nitrocellulose and nitroguanidine) that some
Pentagon employees have reported.
Professional pilots united around Rob Balsamo as
part of Pilots for 9/11 Truth have analyzed the
trajectory of Flight AA77 provided by the
National Transportation and Safety Board (NTSB)
and demonstrated that it was physically
impossible for a Boeing airliner. The aircraft
descended in an extremely perilous spiral
maneuver, finally hitting the second floor of
the west façade horizontally, without hitting
the turf in front of the building. It is
impossible, since at such low altitude and high
speed, such a plane loses all of its lift. And
even if it were possible, the feat would have
been beyond the capacity of Hani Hanjour, the
alleged pilot of the aircraft. A few months
before September 11th, Hanjour was written up
for incompetence by his Arizona flight school
JetTech, who then called for the withdrawal of
his license. An instructor at JetTech is quoted
in the New York Times, April 5, 2002 saying:
“I’m still to this day amazed that he could have
flown into the Pentagon. He could not fly at
all.” The other supposed hijackers in the plane
were no better: Nawaq al-Hazmi and Khaid al-Mihdhar’s
instructor in San Diego declared to the
Washington Post (September 24, 2001): “Their
English was horrible, and their mechanical
skills were even worse. […] It was like they had
hardly even ever driven a car.”
[Image
LG17-5 Mubarak]
In a CNN interview on September 15, 2001, then
again on BBC on September 19th, Egyptian
President Hosni Mubarak questioned the official
U.S. explanation regarding 9/11. As a fighter
pilot, he said in a later article, “I find it
hard to believe that people who were learning to
fly in Florida could, within a year and a half,
fly large commercial airlines and hit with
accuracy the towers of the World Trade Center
which would appear, to the pilot from the air,
the size of a pencil.” Mubarak would soon pay
the price.
Air
defense is the responsibility of NORAD (North
American Aerospace Defense Command), and in
particular its NEADS (Northeast Air Defense
Sector) department. NORAD had successfully
intercepted 67 planes throughout the twelve
months preceding September 11, 2001, each time
in less than twenty minutes. Intercept tactics
are triggered at the slightest alarm, as part of
precautionary measures. Even if we assume that
NORAD could not have intercepted Flights AA11
and UA175 before they crashed into the Twin
Towers, it is incomprehensible that it could not
intercept Flight AA77, which supposedly crashed
50 minutes later into the Pentagon, the most
secure building in the world. Something or
somebody must have deliberately prevented normal
procedure, as Robert Bowman, Director of
Advanced Space Programs Development for the U.S.
Air Force, has assumed: “If our government had
done nothing that day and let normal procedure
be followed, those planes, wherever they were,
would have been intercepted, the Twin Towers
would still be standing and thousands of dead
Americans would still be alive.”
Contradicting Condoleezza Rice and President
Bush, who declared in 2002 that no one could
have predicted this kind of attack, USA Today
revealed on April 18, 2004 that NORAD was
conducting, four times a year since 1999,
military drills—or war games—that involved
aircraft hijacked by terrorists and directed
against the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.
With these new facts, the rather shallow excuses
for American air defense ineffectiveness on
September 11 were turned on their head: it was
then explained that on that very day, NORAD was
occupied with five military exercises, three of
which, under the names of Vigilant Guardian,
Global Guardian, and Vigilant Warrior, were
simulated hijackings, both with real and virtual
flights. Consequently, according to Colonel
Robert Marr, head of NEADS, as many as
twenty-nine “hijacked planes” were on the radar
screens at NORAD on that day. According to
Lieutenant Colonel Dwane Deskins, head of
Vigilant Guardian quoted in an article in the
Syracuse Post-Standard on January 20, 2002,
everyone concerned at NEADS initially thought
that the announcement of the hijacking of Flight
AA11 was part of the ongoing military exercises.
This
aspect of the case is crucial to understanding
the unfolding of the attacks on September 11th.
As explains Captain Eric May, a former
intelligence officer in the U.S. Army, “the
easiest way to carry out a false flag attack is
by setting up a military exercise that simulates
the very attack you want to carry out.” Once the
exercise is fully developed, it will require
nothing more but to change a single parameter to
turn the operation from simulated to real. Those
who plan and oversee the drill are not
necessarily those who hijack it to turn it into
real. Most participants in the 9/11 synthetic
terror act, accustomed to obey military orders
and the established “rules of the (war) game,”
perform their appointed mission without knowing
that the attack will turn out to be “real”. When
they realize what they have been involved in,
they simultaneously grasp the danger of raising
objections; they themselves have been framed. As
in the Kennedy assassination, military
discipline is the key to ensuring the necessary
silence of all unwilling, or unknowing
participants.
[Image
LG17-6 Peter Power]
Hours after the London bombings of July 6, 2005
(claimed by an improbable “Secret Al-Qaeda in
Europe”), Peter Power, a former Scotland Yard
official turned manager of a private security
company, revealed on BBC Radio 5, then again on
ITV News, that he was conducting on that very
morning, for a private company of the City, a
simulation employing one thousand persons,
“based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely
at the railway stations where it happened this
morning.” “So we had to suddenly switch an
exercise from ‘fictional’ to ‘real’.” The
website of his company Visor Consultants
emphasizes that the crisis drills they design
aspire to be “Making the scenario come alive and
be as realistic as possible.” It would be
foolish to think that Power has made a blunder
by his revelation; he probably saved his life.
All
things considered, it is highly doubtful whether
any of the airline flights reportedly hijacked
on 9/11 were involved in the attacks. The Bureau
of Transportation, which holds precise records
of all flights, has no trace of Flight AA77 on
September 11th; it was not planned at Dulles
Airport that day, and its takeoff was not
recorded. As for Flight UA93, it doesn’t
normally circulate Tuesdays, but as an
exception, it had taken passengers initially
planned for Flight UA91, which had been canceled
due to a “crack in the windshield.” This flight
was recorded at takeoff, but then it is also
recorded as having landed in San Francisco at
noon, 45 minutes late. Finally, the mayor of
Cleveland, Michael White, was quoted at 11:50 am
on ABC News saying that a Boeing 767 flying out
of Boston was forced to make an emergency
landing in Cleveland due to a bomb threat, and
had been taken to a secure area of the airport
to be evacuated. The plane was identified as
Flight UA93—although a Boeing 767 out of Boston
corresponded rather to the Flight UA175.
The
problem of the “transponders” is also
perplexing. This device transmits the position
of aircraft to control towers, and also allows
the pilot to send alert and emergency messages.
Incredibly, none of the eight pilots or their
professional copilots entered the four-digit
code on the transponder which signals an assault
on the cockpit—a maneuver that takes only three
seconds. In fact, each aircraft actually cut
their respective transponders, and then
completely disappeared from secondary radars for
nearly an hour while going through radar gaps.
For example, AA77 left Washington for Los
Angeles, disappeared from radars near Ohio and
was spotted again an hour later near Washington
DC.
According to official reports, many passengers
of Flights UA93, UA175 and AA77 had made calls
to relatives or friends from their portable
phones. Details of these calls (by passengers
named Jeremy Glick, Peter Hanson, Brian Sweeney,
Mark Bingham, Elizabeth Wainio, Marion Britton,
Sandra Bradshaw, Tom Burnett, Edward Felt,
CeeCee Lyles) were reported as early as
September 13th on mainstream TV channels and
newspapers (like The Washington Post). But they
are highly problematic, because the technology
required to make high-altitude phone calls was
not developed until 2004. Moreover, some calls
include oddities completely incongruent with the
context, exemplified by Mark Bingham’s call to
his mother a few seconds before his death: “Hi,
Mom. This is Mark Bingham.”
Two
calls were allegedly made from AA77 by Barbara
Olson to her husband Ted Olson. The Olsons are
both public figures: Barbara was a well-known
CNN reporter, and Ted has been Solicitor General
during the first Bush term (after defending Bush
in the disputed 2000 election, and then Dick
Cheney when he refused to submit to Congress
Enron-related documents during their
investigation). Barbara Olson’s calls, reported
on CNN in the afternoon of September 11th,
contributed to crystallizing some details of the
official story, such as the “box cutters” used
by the hijackers. Repeatedly invited on
television shows, Ted Olson frequently
contradicted himself when questioned regarding
the calls from his wife. Sometimes he said she
“called him twice on a cell phone ” adding that
the second call was cut because “the signals
from cell phones coming from airplanes don’t
work that well.” Sometimes he said that his wife
called collect from the “air phone” because “she
somehow didn’t have access to her credit cards.”
This second version is as impossible as the
first, because a credit card is required to
activate the phones in the seats, even for a
collect call, though really the entire argument
is moot, given that the seats on AA77 were not
equipped with telephones (as confirmed by
American Airlines). The most troubling
contradiction appeared in 2006, during the trial
of supposed terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui: in
their report on Flight AA77, the FBI attributed
only one call from Barbara Olson, and it was an
unconnected call lasting 0 seconds.
Given
the many impossibilities woven throughout the
official story, the alternative hypothesis that
seems most likely is that none of the four
airplanes were in fact the Boeing 767 or 757s
the world was told about. Flights AA77 and UA93
probably never existed. As for Flights AA11 and
UA175, which reportedly hit the Twin Towers,
several hypotheses are in competition among 9/11
truthers. Many surmise that they had been
replaced by drones—planes equipped with
automatic remote control technology, and without
passengers. But numerous witnesses have declared
having seen no planes, while others saw
missiles. No consensus has been reached on these
matters. Simon Shack, in a groundbreaking
documentary (September Clues, 2007), has
analyzed the images of the second crash (South
Tower) broadcast on September 11th and later,
and argued that they are fakes, fabricated with
various video editing software. This also
applies to the only image of the first crash
(North Tower), miraculously captured by the
mysterious brothers Jules and Gédéon Naudet. The
TV forgeries have been further explored by Ace
Baker in his 2012 documentary 9/11 The Great
American Psy-Opera, where he gives credence to
professor Morgan Reynolds who has long claimed
that the aluminum planes shown to penetrate the
steel towers without resistance, defy physical
laws and therefore must be video artifacts.
Richard D. Hall of richplanet.net, however,
after having attempted to show that the virtual
planes added to the images were masking a
missile-type object, has pointed out
shortcomings in the video-compositing theory,
and proposed an alternative theory based on
holographic projections. Although there is yet
no consensus on the method employed to create
illusion, it is today clearly established that
the planes penetrating the towers like butter,
without being shattered or even decelerated at
the impact, as seen on multiple TV footages, can
in no way be real. The initial explosions seen
at that precise moment must have another
explanation.
[Image
LG17-7 CNN ghost plane]
On this pic from the CNN footage of the second
crash, the aluminum plane has half disappeared
into the steel tower: a physical impossibility.
If no
planes hit the Twin Towers any more than the
Pentagon or the field outside Shanksville—all
9/11 Flights having been probably created
virtual in the context of a drill—, then all
speculations on the military identity of those
planes can be counted as diversions. So can
discussions on the failures of U.S. air
defenses. Of course, if the planes did not fly
on that day, neither did the passengers. False
identities were created, and it would seem that
the Intel agencies involved suffered severe
shortages in this regard. For Flight AA77, for
example, only 53 passengers are listed, while
the plane’s capacity is 239. Among the 53
passengers plus 9 crew members, only 14 persons
are listed in the Social Security Death Index.
And only 5 of these have relatives who received
the 9-11 Compensation Fund offered by the State.
Moreover, the passenger list comprises an
abnormal percentage of Navy officers and
aeronautic engineers (13 out of 53). The other
three “flights” show similar percentages of
capacity and recorded deaths (no family of the
victims of Flight UA93 requested compensation,
for example).
The Art of
the Patsy
Peter
Dale Scott was one of the first scholars to
point out some parallels between the Kennedy
assassination and the September 11th attacks.
Each of these events was specifically designed
to justify the illegitimate invasion of a
foreign country and the overthrow of its hostile
regime: Cuba in the first case, Afghanistan in
the second, with the difference that the
invasion of Cuba was eventually called off. Each
of the two false flag crimes also preceded a
second lie that justified war, conducted
unilaterally by the United States against a far
away country: the mock incident in the Gulf of
Tonkin justified the aggression against North
Vietnam, just as the lies surrounding Saddam
Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction”
justified the war against Iraq. Unlike the first
two crimes, the two secondary lies are today
publicly recognized as such by politicians and
historians alike. In both cases, the plot
originated in the upper echelons of the National
Security State, and directly served the
interests of the military-industrial complex and
all its parasites. In both cases, the goal was
to traumatize the American nation with a crime
so heinous as to transform the public’s fear
into hatred and build a national consensus for
war against some stereotypical enemy who poses a
mortal threat: Communism in the former case,
Islamism in the second.
It is
also interesting to look at the preparation and
eventual execution of the two “deep events”;
doing so reveals a characteristic pattern and
thereby allows for the development of a “theory
of false flag operations,” and an increased
ability to expose them. In both cases, for
example, we note that the pseudo-culprit is
identified almost instantaneously, along with
the murder weapon. Oswald was arrested and
accused in the hour that followed his alleged
crime. Bin Laden was not arrested, but his name
was plastered across TV screens everywhere by a
slew of so-called terrorism experts in the hours
following the collapse of the towers. The aim is
to quickly and efficiently cut off any
alternative theory and inspire confidence in the
veracity of the official narrative,
marginalizing in advance all the skeptics.
Official information, in this kind of event,
circumvents public discussion and debate,
preventing the people from collectively building
hypothesis, interpretations, and meaning. Less
than a week after September 11th, the Pakistani
General Hameed Gul, a former ISI Director, who
knew ben Laden and didn’t believe him to be able
to orchestrate such operation, said to Arnaud de
Borchgrave, UPI’s inter- national editor at
large: “Within 10 minutes of the second twin
tower being hit in the World Trade Center, CNN
said Osama bin Laden had done it. That was a
planned piece of disinformation by the real
perpetrators. It created an instant mindset and
put public opinion into a trance, which
prevented even intelligent people from thinking
for themselves.” Studies show that information
received from an authority during a period of
emotional shock—and thus rational
vulnerability—is embedded into the memory of the
trauma, in such a way that the distinction
between facts and interpretation becomes
impossible.
[Image
LG18-1 Ideal witness]
Mark Walsh was interviewed by Fox News (for
which he works as a freelancer) in the hour
following the disintegration of the towers,
providing the ideal eyewitness testimony. “I saw
this plane come out of nowhere and just ream
right into the side of the Twin Tower exploding
through to the other side, and then I witnessed
both towers collapse, the first, and then the
second, mostly due to structural failure because
the fire was just too intense.” Conflating the
observation and the technical explanation, in
the very terms destined to become official,
serves to cover the explanation which naturally
comes to the mind of a neutral witness, such as
journalist Don Dahler commenting on ABC News:
“The entire building has just collapsed, as if a
demolition team set off…”
Once
the authorities assuredly designate a patsy, it
becomes almost unnecessary to provide evidence
of his guilt. It is remarkable that the FBI
never formally charged bin Laden for the attacks
of September 11th; he appears on the list of the
ten most wanted criminals on their official
website, but only as a suspect in the attacks
against the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and
Kenya. When questioned by journalist Ed Hass of
the Muckraker Report in June 2006, FBI spokesman
Rex Tomb said: “The reason why 9/11 is not
mentioned on Osama bin Laden’s ‘Most Wanted’
page is because the FBI has no hard evidence
connecting bin Laden to 9/11.” Even the
identification of the hijackers was presented to
the public without any evidence; instead,
conflicting information abounds, casting serious
doubt about those identified: the flight
manifests first provided by United Airlines and
American Airlines did not include the name of
any of the 19 hijackers, and there are no video
images showing them boarding. The little
evidence of their identity that has been made
public is so convenient it’s rendered hardly
credible, for example two passports and one
identity card of the hijackers recovered
miraculously from the crash sites of Flights
AA11, AA77 and UA93, or a Qur’an and flight
manual in Arabic left by Mohamed Atta in a
rental car.
[Image
LG18-2 Passport]
The “magic passport” of Satam Al Suqami,
supposed to have escaped Flight AA11 at the
moment of the impact, to be then picked up in a
street of Manhattan by an anonymous passerby and
handed to the FBI. Likewise, the passport of
Ziad Jarrah, pilot of Flight UA93, was found at
Shanksville near the crash site, and the ID of
Majed Moqed, one of the hijackers of Flight
AA77, came out unburnt in front of the Pentagon,
while the plane had vaporized.
A
further parallel between the immediate
identifications of the pseudo-culprits Oswald
and bin Laden deserves to be mentioned: in both
cases, they were charged with a second crime
which strengthened the suspicion of their guilt
in the public mind. An hour after Oswald was
pinpointed, he was reported to have shot a
police officer, J. D. Tippit, who had recognized
him and approached him in the street. Similarly,
the responsibility of the Taliban in the attacks
of September 11th was made easier to believe by
the report, one day before, of Commandant
Massoud’s assassination, readily attributed to
the same Al-Qaeda-Taliban alliance.
A good
patsy is a dead patsy; that is another
fundamental rule of false flag operations that
we can see applied in both Kennedy’s
assassination and September 11th. Once
designated, the falsely accused culprit must be
eliminated as soon as possible, because he will
have nothing to lose in speaking out, and he
knows enough to realize that he is the subject
of something malicious. Lee Harvey Oswald was
shot by Jack Ruby two days after his alleged
crime. That was already a bit late; the plan was
probably to shoot him dead while trying to
arrest him in the Texas Theater, where Jack Ruby
was present according to manager George Applin.
The news of Tippit’s murder would have been used
to present Oswald as armed and dangerous and
justify the shooting that led to his killing. It
is unfortunate for the conspirators that Oswald
had time to realize what was happening and say
to the press: “I’m just a patsy.” This might be
one of the mistakes that prompted them to
abandon their Communist conspiracy theory, which
would have incurred too many
inconsistencies—including FBI agents
interrogating him and thereafter not recognizing
his voice on the Mexico tapes produced by the
CIA.
In any
case, a patsy’s claims to innocence are barely a
speed bump when up against the steamroller of an
aligned media; bin Laden’s denial meant nothing.
As for the suicide hijackers, they were dead by
definition. Again, however, problems arose: a
few days after the FBI identified the culprits
(September 14th), seven of the nineteen
hijackers came forward through various channels,
proving that they were alive—in Morocco, Saudi
Arabia and elsewhere—and consequently innocent.
The father of the supposed ringleader Mohamed
Atta, a respected lawyer from Cairo, told the
German magazine Bild am Sonntag in late 2002
that “[his] son called [him] the day after the
attacks, September 12,” and that he was hiding
out of fear for his life.
As for
bin Laden, it’s not until April 30, 2011, in the
operation known as “Neptune’s Spear,” that he is
supposed to have been eliminated by a SEAL
commando, shot fatally in the head in his home
in Abbottabad, Pakistan. His body, we were told,
was dumped in the sea after identification. The
only picture presented to the public was a
vulgar photomontage, as the media quickly
acknowledged. The farce would be funny if not
for the tragic epilogue: Friday, August 5th,
2011 around 11 pm, a Chinook helicopter of the
U.S. Army crashed in a province in central
Afghanistan after being hit by two
rocket-propelled grenades (RPG-7s) shot, we are
told, by the Afghan resistance. The attack
killed 38, including 30 members of Navy SEAL
Team 6, the elite unit who had led Neptune’s
Spear. And thus there will be less chance of
contradiction to the official story of bin
Laden’s death. Family members of the dead SEALs
are now raising questions, however.
[Image
LG18-3 Fake corpse]
The cheap Photoshop fake of bin Laden’s corpse,
sold to the public before being denounced as a
fraud days later.
It’s
likely that bin Laden actually died in late
2001, as was announced by the Pakistani
President Musharraf (CNN, January 18, 2002), the
Afghan President Hamid Karzai (CNN, October 7,
2002), and the leader of the anti-terrorism
division of the FBI, Dale Watson (BBC, July 18,
2002). On January 28, 2002, CBS reported that on
the eve of September 11th bin Laden had been
treated in a military hospital in Pakistan for
kidney dialysis, and was escorted by the
Pakistani army. How could he have survived until
2011, holed up in the caves of Afghanistan, when
he had to undergo dialysis every three days?
More troubling still: two months earlier, bin
Laden stayed at the American Hospital in Dubai,
where he was visited by the local CIA station
chief Larry Mitchell. This information comes
from credible sources (administrative management
of the hospital, members of the Saudi royal
family, and French Intelligence) and was covered
by French newspaper Le Figaro in October 2001.
There
were two advantages in holding back the
announcement of bin Laden’s death until 2011.
First, it allowed the continued invasion of
Afghanistan under the auspices of a manhunt.
Second, it allowed bin Laden to “speak” when
needed, and thus clear the doubts raised by his
denials; better than a dead patsy, the
architects of the September 11 deception created
for themselves a virtual patsy. The guilt of bin
Laden is based mainly upon three video
confessions “accredited by the CIA.” The first
was mysteriously found in December 2001 in
Jellalabad, translated and released two months
later. Despite the poor image quality, it is
easy to see that the character presented as bin
Laden is hardly a credible semblance.
[Image
LG18-4 Fake Ben Laden]
On the left, the bin Laden of the December 2001
video. On the right, the real bin Laden.
The
second video appeared in October 2004, a week
before the elections that reappointed George W.
Bush. An independent analysis by the Swiss
institute IDIAP specialized in perceptual
intelligence, basing their study on comparisons
with twenty previous recordings of bin Laden,
concluded with 95% probability that the voice on
the October tape is not that of bin Laden. A
third video reached the public on September 8,
2007, in which bin Laden announced an
intensification of Al-Qaeda activities in Iraq;
this just before the debate in Congress
regarding the need for new troops in Iraq. The
image is frozen for most the message, and even
when it is not, the quality is so bad that it is
impossible to verify whether the movement of the
lips corresponds to the soundtrack.
Additionally, the videos of 2004 and 2007 were
filmed in the same studio with the same frame
and the same posture, but bin Laden looks
younger on the second (he had dyed his beard
black, it was explained).
[Image
LG18-5 Ben Laden 2004-2007]
On the left, the bin Laden of the 2004 video. On
the right, the same, three years later.
The
2007 video was provided to the government by the
Search for International Terrorist Entities
Institute (SITE), founded by Israeli-American
Rita Katz, daughter of an Iraqi Jew executed by
Saddam Hussein on the charge of spying for
Israel.
After
September 11th just like after Kennedy’s
assassination, it was necessary to appease
doubts with a Presidential Commission of
inquiry. The 9/11 Commission was created in
November 2002, and was led by Thomas Kean and
Lee Hamilton, but its executive director was
Philip Zelikow, who also happened to be the
senior editor of the NSS 2002 document defining
Bush’s preemptive war doctrine. In 2006, Kean
and Hamilton revealed in their book Without
Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11
Commission, that the Commission “was set up to
fail” from the beginning, Zelikow having already
written a synopsis and a conclusion for the
final report before the first meeting. He
controlled all the working groups, prevented
them from communicating with each other, and
gave them the singular mission to prove the
official story; Team 1A, for example, was tasked
to “tell the story of Al-Qaeda’s most successful
operation—the 9/11 attacks.” All information,
and any request for information, had to pass
through him. On top of that, most of the
information obtained by the commissioners from
the CIA and NORAD was “far from the truth,”
according to Kean and Hamilton. The Commission
had no access to any direct evidence or even the
recordings of the interrogations of the
suspected Al-Qaeda members, which came to them
third hand “in the form of reports, not even
transcripts.” Commission members had to be
content, for example, with CIA affirmations that
the confessions of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
(described as the operational manager of the
attacks), obtained between 183 waterboarding
sessions, were certifiable evidence that bin
Laden had authorized and supported the
operation. Before the Commission published its
final report in July 2004, several members
expressed their frustration and resigned. One of
them, Max Cleland, called the Commission a
“national scandal”: “One of these days we will
have to get the full story because the 9-11
issue is so important to America. But the White
House wants to cover it up.” John Farmer, the
Senior Counsel, said for his part in The
Washington Post: “what government and military
officials had told Congress, the Commission, the
media, and the public about who knew what
when—was almost entirely, and inexplicably,
untrue.”
The
Commission also threw a veil over one of the
most disturbing facts around 9/11, which
happened on the stock exchange: between the 6th
and the 10th of September 2001, there were
massive purchases of “put options,” twenty-five
times higher than average, on American Airlines
and United Airlines, whose shares fell 40% after
the attacks, but also on companies housed in the
WTC such as Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. and
Merrill Lynch & Company. The International
Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO)
concluded on October 15th that the gains had
been in the hundreds of millions of dollars and
could be the “largest insider trade ever
committed.” The Commission rejected the
hypothesis in a few lines: “further
investigation has revealed that the trading had
no connection with 9/11. A single US-based
institutional investor with no conceivable ties
to Al-Qaeda purchased 95 percent of the UAL puts
on September 6 as part of a trading strategy
that also included buying 115,000 shares of
American [Airline] on September 10.” In other
words: postulating that the culprit was
Al-Qaeda, and noting that the investors in
question did not have the Al-Qaeda profile,
enabled the Commission to conclude implicitly
that these suspicious transactions were just an
unfortunate coincidence. The “institutional
investor” in question was Alex Brown Inc., a
subsidiary of Deutsche Bank whose former CEO and
Chairman A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard (until 1998) had
just become Executive Director of the CIA in
March 2001.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of
the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate
editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was
columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News
Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many
university appointments. His internet columns
have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts'
latest books are
The Failure of Laissez Faire
Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West,
How America Was Lost,
and
The Neoconservative Threat to
World Order.
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