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Review: “Unanswered
Questions: What the September Eleventh Families Asked and the
9/11 Commission Ignored “
By Edward Curtin
September 13, 2021 -- "Information
Clearing House -
It is impossible to
overemphasize the importance of this book. It is a tour de
force that blows away twenty years of U.S. government lies and
obfuscations about the mass murders of September 11, 2001, the
foundational event of recent times that claimed thousands of
victims whose relatives still cry out for truth and justice.
Reading
Unanswered Questions will
roil you to the depths of your soul and illuminate your mind as
Ray McGinnis presents fact after fact backed up by almost one
thousand endnotes and twelve years of meticulous research.
There is nothing speculative about this book. It is not a
“conspiracy theory.”
McGinnis ingeniously
and brilliantly documents those murders through the eyes of
victims’ relatives and their decades-long, agonizing efforts to
seek honest answers from the U.S. government. To have their
simple and obvious questions answered. To know the truth about
why their loved ones died and who killed them.
Their struggles have
been met with cruel indifference from four presidents (Bush,
Obama, Trump, and Biden), three New York City mayors (Giuliani,
Bloomberg, and de Blasio), the 9/11 Commission, and so many
others in positions of authority who have turned deaf ears to
their cris de coeur. The corporate mass media have
rubbed salt in their wounds as they have stage-managed the lies
and coverups. And controlled opposition operatives have played
slick games to direct attention away from the heart of the
matter.
The families’ search
for answers to their questions have been either ignored or
answered with lies and dissimulation piled upon dissimulation to
protect the guilty. McGinnis is their champion. He insists on
answers.
He powerfully unfurls
layer upon layer of facts and the government’s fictions in a
timeline that brings us to the twentieth anniversary of these
atrocities. While reading it, one cannot help but think of the
thousands of innocent victims of that terrible day and their
suffering families, and the millions of innocent victims
throughout the world who have been murdered by the U.S.
government in the name of 9/11. The “war on terror” has been
waged by a government that continues to refuse to tell the truth
about who the “terrorists” were on September 11, 2001.
By refusing to answer
the families’ questions and thereby hypothetically claiming the
Fifth Amendment for fear of incriminating themselves, government
officials have ironically incriminated themselves.
For McGinnis is like a
prosecuting attorney who works not for the state but for the
people. He forces the issue by asking the questions his clients
want answered. Like them, he is persistent and requests answers
to a litany of interrogations that are met with silence. The
government’s stonewalling is deafening, and readers – who are
the jury – are left to decide the case partially based on those
non-answers, often justified under the sham of “national
security” or just plain arrogance. When answers are
forthcoming, they are incomplete and disingenuous.
Seventy per cent of the
questions the Family Steering Committee asked the 9/11
Commission were left unanswered in The 9/11 Commission
Report. Those that were answered raised more questions
than they answered.
But the reason that
this book is so powerful is because McGinnis answers the
questions that the government does not. And so his title –
Unanswered Questions – is ironically false while also being
true.
This should in no way
put off those who still cling to the official story. For
McGinnis is exceedingly fair in assessing and presenting the
facts and readily admits when there are disagreements.
While focusing on a
core group of bereaved families called The Family Steering
Committee who are insistent on answers, a group that includes
four New Jersey widows known as “The Jersey Girls” whose
husbands died in the Twin Towers, he includes many others and
does not shy away from saying when they are at odds. The only
way a fair-minded person can assess the book is to read it. And
if you don’t read it and you have bought the government’s
official fabrications or are still sitting on the fence, you are
in flight from truth. This book demands attention.
As far as I know, while
there have been many excellent books critiquing the government’s
account of 9/11, led by about a dozen extraordinary works by
David Ray Griffin, and many books supporting the government’s
explanation led by The 9/11 Commission Report,
Unanswered Questions is the first to approach the subject
from the perspective of the questions asked by the relatives of
the victims.
For many people, the
murders of that day are abstract, although they naturally stir
the human emotions of pity, fear, and terror. But from a
distance, for they are now fading into history and are not
personal. For some, there may have been a catharsis with
The 9/11 Commission Report which they no doubt never read
although it was said to be a “best-seller.” That would be fake
catharsis, for such fiction fails to tell the truth since it was
written by people blind in mind and ears as well as in their
eyes. But then again, who reads Sophocles or Aeschylus any
longer? Better to read The New York Times, Slate
magazine, Time, The New Republic, The
Nation, etc., all of which effusively praised the 9/11
Commission Report when it was released. As McGinnis
reports, “The New York Times called the Report
‘an uncommonly lucid, even riveting narrative’ and an
‘improbable literary triumph.’” This is simply propaganda.
But let us take a look
inside Unanswered Questions, a genuine non-fiction book
motivated by a deep compassion for the victims and a scholar’s
dedication to the truth. It is divided into four parts, each
containing multiple chapters.
“Part
One: From Grief to Advocacy”
is the briefest and introduces the reader to firefighters, first
responders, and family members who lost loved ones in the
calamity. We learn how their grief turned to advocacy when they
formed many groups to channel their energies. We learn how
President Bush and his minions (or was Bush the minion and
others like Cheney in charge?) opposed establishing a special
commission to probe into the events of September Eleventh and
how when his opposition was overcome he had the audacity to try
to name Henry Kissinger to head the 9/11 Commission and how this
was stopped. Finally, McGinnis tells us how the families’
questions were greatly expanded after discovering Paul
Thompson’s extraordinary Internet timeline with its vast numbers
of links to news reports that was later published as
The Terror Timeline.
“Part
Two: Family Steering Committee Statements to the 9/11
Commission”
examines how the 9/11 Commission
was a setup from the start, not even close to being an impartial
investigation. It began with the naming of Philip Zelikow as
the Director. Zelikow had deep ties to the Bush administration
and its neocons. He had been a member of Bush’s transition
team. Even “Richard Clarke, chairman of the ‘Counterterrorism
Security Group,’ said ‘the fix is in’” when Zelikow was
appointed. Zelikow completely controlled the investigation and
the final report despite many conflicts of interest. He
essentially wrote the report before the hearings commenced. He
had authored a book with Condoleezza Rice and was an advocate
for preemptive war that was used to attack Iraq in early 2003,
etc. His appointment was a sick joke, and the Family Steering
Committee called for his immediate resignation but was rebuffed
just as quickly by Chairman Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton. As a
result, the final report ended being a fictional account
authored by Zelikow (who earlier this year was named to
lead a planning group for what
has become the
Covid Collaborative).
This section also
covers the lies told by Mayor Rudy Giuliani when he testified.
Three hundred and forty-three FDNY members were killed that day,
heroes who didn’t have to die. Giuliani’s testimony so outraged
the families of first responders that their fury was
uncontained. McGinnis tells us:
They held up signs
that read ‘lies’ and ‘liar.’ Family Steering Committee
member Sally Regenhard held up a sign that read ‘FICTION.’
She hollered, ‘My son [Christian Regenhard, a probationary
firefighter] was not told to get out! He would’ve gotten
out! My son was murdered, murdered because of your
incompetence and radios that didn’t work!
McGinnis captures the
increasing anger felt by family members throughout this section
as the final report was rammed through despite their protests.
“Part
Three: The Family Steering Committee’s Unanswered Questions”
is the heart of the book. It contains eleven chapters devoted
to questions addressed to NORAD, the FAA, the CIA/SEC/FBI, Mayor
Giuliani, President Bush, the Port Authority/WTC/City of New
York, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld but never answered. Over a thousand questions were
posed to the 9/11 Commission to aid the investigation. McGinnis
writes:
The questions were
intended to direct the focus of the inquiry, and ask those
most directly involved what led to the failures that day.
They understood that it would not be the FSC members
themselves asking the questions. Instead, they would be
posed to witnesses by 9/11 commissioners in public hearings,
or asked by Commission staff behind closed-door proceedings.
Some of these
questions were directed at the North American Aerospace
Defense Command (NORAD). One question the FSC asked the 9/11
Commission was: ‘Why weren’t NORAD jets able to intercept
the hijacked planes if they were airborne within eight
minutes of notification?’
NORAD had an extremely
successful history of intercepting errant aircraft, and a part
of their mission was “surveillance and control of the [domestic]
territorial airspace “ in the U.S. and Canada. Nevertheless, on
September 11, 2001 none of the hijacked aircraft were
intercepted even though they were allegedly being flown by
inexperienced and incompetent hijackers who, according to
experts, could never fly such massive commercial airliners into
the World Trade Towers or the Pentagon. Government witnesses
either lied about the systemic failures to intercept the planes,
omitted important details, or gave contradictory stories. Of
course, they were then promoted. And although there was an
unprecedented number of war games being “coincidentally” held on
September 11, none of the 9/11 Commissioners asked any witnesses
about them.
It was clear that all
the questions about the failure to intercept the planes would
not be answered, but McGinnis makes it obvious that their
non-answers were indeed answers by omission, for in this section
and all the others, he makes sure the questions are indeed
answered and the cumulative effect is devastating. He does this
not simply by expressing his own opinions but by quoting others
and always giving sources.
In a similar vein, the
FSC wished to know from the Federal Aviation Administration
(FAA) why these hijacked planes were able to evade all of the
highly sophisticated radar? McGinnis says, “The 9/11 Commission
concluded that NORAD had failed to do its job on September
Eleventh; NORAD’s decisions impaired the FAA radar operator’s
conduct.” Of course the radar questions were linked to the war
games issue and since the war games questions were never asked,
these massive failures were explained away in gobbledygook
worthy of the Three Stooges.
Mindy Kleinberg, a FSC
member whose husband Alan died in the North Tower, told the
Commission that its theory of luck was bullshit, although she
phrased it more diplomatically:
With regard to the
9/11 attacks, it has been said that the intelligence
agencies have to be right 100% of the time and the
terrorists only have to get lucky once. This explanation for
the devastating attacks of September 11, simply on its face,
is wrong in its value. Because the 9/11 terrorists were not
just lucky once; they were lucky over and over again…Is it
luck that aberrant stock trades were not monitored? Is it
luck when 15 visas were awarded on incomplete forms? Is it
luck when Airline Security screenings allow hijackers to
board planes with box cutters and pepper spray? Is it luck
when emergency FAA and NORAD protocols are not followed? Is
it luck when a national emergency is not reported to top
government officials on a timely basis? To me luck is
something that happens once. When you have this repeated
pattern of broken protocols, broken laws, broken
communication, one cannot still call it luck.
Comically, The 9/11
Commission Report concluded that, as McGinnis notes, “The
reason for the attacks was due simply to a [U.S. government]
failure of imagination.”
In regard to
foreknowledge of the attacks, the families asked the CIA, the
SEC, and the FBI for the names of the individuals and financial
institutions who placed “put” orders on American and United
Airlines in the three weeks prior to 9/11.
This involved the
number three man at the CIA, CIA Executive Director Alvin
“Buzzy” Krongard, former Vice Chairman of the board at Bankers
Trust that had been acquired by Deutsche Bank through which many
of these suspect stock trades passed. This insider trading that
anticipated the 9/11 attacks was connected to a security firm
named Stratesec that provided security to Dulles Airport, the
World Trade Center, and United Airlines, and to Wirt Walker III,
a business partner of the president’s brother, Marvin Bush.
Walker III was a board member of the Carlyle Group that was in
turn connected to the bin Laden and Bush families.
Despite these and other
highly suspect connections, the “9/11 Commission wasn’t
interested in exploring leads about possible foreknowledge of
the attacks.” Nor were they interested in the strange matter of
Larry Silverstein, who had already owned World Trade Center
Building 7, but who obtained a 99-year lease on the Twin Towers
two months before the attack and who insisted that insurance
cover a terrorist attack for $3.5. billion dollars. Silverstein
was later awarded $4.55 billion when it was determined that
there had been two suicide attacks.
Silverstein later
claimed that there was agreement to “pull” (a controlled
demolition term) Building 7, which happened at 5:20 PM that day
despite never having been hit by a plane. Questions about the
collapse of Building 7 were of course never answered, but the
videos of its collapse are available for all to see with their
own eyes. An excellent film about Building 7,
Seven
by Dylan Avery, should be seen by all. Seeing is believing, and
what any objective observer can only conclude is that the
building was taken down by controlled demolition, which the
government denies.
Which brings us to
other key questions that the FSC asked, McGinnis explores, and
that went unanswered: Why did President Bush enter a Sarasota,
Florida elementary classroom, stay there as the attacks
unfolded, and not immediately return to Washington, D.C.? Why
did he enter that classroom at 9:03 AM and remain there for
fifteen minutes when it was clear the U.S. was under a terrorist
attack? Why was he, unlike Dick Cheney, not immediately taken
out of the building by the Secret Service but was allowed to sit
and read to children and not depart the building until 9:34
A.M.?
“The vice president was
reported by President Bush’s personal secretary as being ‘seized
by arms, legs, and his belt and physically’ carried out of his
office at 9:03 A.M. Cheney was taken to the Presidential
Emergency Operations Center below the White House, where
Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta saw him prior to 9:25
A.M.” Yet Bush stayed to read a book when colleagues of the
Secret Service agents protecting him had already been evacuated
from the largest Secret Service Field Office in WTC 7.
“However,” writes
McGinnis, “on December 4, 2001, President Bush made the
following statement at a Town Hall meeting about the moment –
9:01 a.m. – that he said he learned about the attack. ‘And I
was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an
airplane hit the tower – the television was obviously on, and I
used to fly myself, and I said , “That’s one terrible pilot.”
And I said, “It must have been a horrible accident.” But I was
whisked off there – I didn’t have much time to think about it.’”
You can’t make this
stuff up, yet it’s offered to the public and the victims’
families as acceptable. Bush was informed that a second plane
had hit the South Tower by Andrew Card who came into the
classroom and whispered in his ear. But three months later he
claims he saw on television the first plane hit the North Tower
when no one could have seen it since video of the first plane
hitting the building at 8:46 A.M. was not available until much
later.
These ridiculous
discrepancies and other questions the FSC wished the 9/11
Commission to ask Bush under oath in sworn public testimony went
unasked and unanswered. Instead, as McGinnis writes:
But, the meeting
with Bush and Cheney took place in secret on April 29, 2004.
It was not held under oath. No transcript was made available
of their conversation with the commissioners. Nothing was
learned about why the president remained at an elementary
school during the attacks. Nothing was learned about what
the president knew regarding foreign intelligence agencies
forewarning the U.S. Nothing was learned about why the
president had authorized America to prepare for war against
Afghanistan in the days and weeks prior to the attacks of
September 11.
Nor was anything
learned about why Pentagon brass suddenly cancelled flights
scheduled for September 11. Nothing about who warned them and
why.
Essentially all the key
questions the families asked were not answered. But McGinnis
answers them, including those addressed to Cheney, Rumsfeld,
Giuliani, the CIA, and the Port Authority/WTC/City of New York.
By using the documented records against them, he does the job
the 9/11 Commission refused to do. He unravels the lies,
circumlocutions, and straightforward propaganda used to hide the
truth, including the following:
- Cheney’s
deceptions about when he got to the Presidential Emergency
Operations Center and what he was doing there and his orders
to his young assistant about the hijacked plane headed
toward the capitol.
- Rumsfeld with his
lies about not knowing anything about the World Trade Center
attacks until fifteen minutes before the Pentagon was hit
and why the Pentagon was not defended.
- Giuliani and the
obvious controlled demolition of Building 7 at 5:20 P.M. and
the lies about the faulty telephones the firefighters
carried.
Since this is not meant
to be a book about a book but a book review, I will stop there.
I would be remiss, however, if I failed to mention “Chapter 22:
The Missing Accounts: FDNY.”
It is part of
Part Four: Acceptance And Dissent that leads to
McGinnis’s conclusion. Whatever one’s position on the events of
September 11, it is generally accepted that firefighters and
first responders are objective and brave in the extreme. Of the
emergency workers who responded to the call to help save the
people in the Twin Towers, the vast majority who lost their
lives in attempting to save their fellow human beings were
firefighters – 343 of them perished that day. They were doing
their duty. So their surviving colleagues’ testimonies are
priceless and beyond dispute. They had absolutely no reasons to
lie. McGinnis tells us:
On September 11,
2001, Thomas Von Essen, the fire commissioner of New York
City, ordered that oral histories be gathered from first
responders, firefighters, and medical workers. He wanted to
preserve the accounts of what they experienced at the World
Trade Center. In the weeks and months following 9/11, 503
oral histories were taken. However, they were not released
to the public. The 2002 mayor of New York City, Michael
Bloomberg, refused.
The Family Steering
Committee asked the 9/11 Commission why, but the Commission
refused to answer their question. After a law suit, the oral
histories that run to 12,000 pages were released. They contain
copious accounts of explosions going off in the Towers before
the Towers collapsed.
FDNY firefighter John
Coyne, who was in the South Tower, recalls how he had called his
father and said:
I finally got
through to my father and said ‘I’m alive. I just wanted to
tell you, go to church, I’m alive. I just so narrowly
escaped this thing.’ He said, ‘Where were you? You were
there?’ I said, ‘Yeh, I was right there when it blew up.’ He
said, ‘You were there when the planes hit?’ I said, ‘No, I
was there when it exploded, the building exploded.’ He said,
‘You mean when it fell down?’ I said, ‘No, when it
exploded.’ … I totally thought it had been blown up. That’s
just the perspective of looking at it, it seemed to have
exploded out.
Captain Karin DeShore,
who was standing outside, said she saw a sequence of orange and
red flashes coming from the North Tower:
Initially it was
just one flash. Then this flash…kept popping all around the
building and that building started to explode … These
popping sounds and the explosions were getting bigger, going
up and down and the all around the building.
Keith Murphy: “There
was tremendous damage in the lobby…like something had exploded
out…a distant boom sounded like three explosions.”
Assistant Commissioner
Stephen Gregory: “I saw low-level flashes…[at] the lower level
of the building. You know when they demolish a building?”
Explosions were
being reported everywhere and by reporters as well. Researchers
Graeme MacQueen and Ted Walter viewed 70 hours of television
coverage and found that most reporters were saying the Towers
came down as a result of explosions and demolition. Take a look
here.
There were explosions
reported in the sub-basements before the planes hit. William
Rodriguez, who was in the sub-basement of the North Tower and
heard and felt very loud multiple explosions, told this to 9/11
Commission staff and this never appeared in The 9/11
Commission Report.
The evidence for
explosives planted in the Towers and Building 7 is overwhelming
but was completely discounted by the 9/11 Commission and the
mass media complicit in its coverup. In fact, the demolition of
Building 7 at 5:20 P.M was not worthy of a mention in the
best-selling report. It should be obvious to any objective
thinker that if these buildings were wired for explosives and
were brought down via controlled demolition, then this could not
have been done by Osama bin Laden or his followers but only by
insiders who were granted secret access to these ultra-high
security buildings.
Bob McIlvaine, whose
son Bobby died in the North Tower, has persevered for twenty
years to expose the lies surrounding September 11. McGinnis
reports on his 2006 interview with the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation host Evan Solomon:
I believe 100% that
the US orchestrated 9/11 with the help of other agencies
around the world…There’s people within the US that knew it
happened, that planned this to happen.
To Solomon’s question
“You think your son was therefore murdered by Americans?”
McIlvaine replied, “absolutely.”
He is joined by many
others, including Matt Campbell, a British citizen and family
member, whose brother Geoff Campbell died on the 106th
floor of the North Tower. Matt Campbell and his family have
recently demanded a new inquest based on a 3,000 page
scientifically-backed dossier claiming the buildings were blown
up from within.
After reading
Unanswered Questions, you very well might believe it too.
Learning about the
determination of such stalwart souls as McIlvaine, Campbell, the
FSC, and so many others to extract truth and justice from a
recalcitrant and guilty government is inspirational. They will
never give up. Nor should we.
There is no doubt that
this extraordinary book will answer many questions you may or
may not have had about the mass murders of September 11, 2001.
So don’t turn away.
It will break your
heart but restore your faith in what a writer dedicated to the
truth can do for those family members who have so long sought
the bread of truth and were handed stones of silence.
In their ongoing grief,
Ray McGinnis has handed them the gift of a bitter solace. He has
answered them.
He has also given the
public an opportunity to see the truth and demand an independent
investigation forthwith.
Edward Curtin -
Educated in the classics, philosophy, literature, theology, and
sociology, I teach sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal
Arts. My writing on varied topics has appeared widely over many
years. I write as a public intellectual for the general public,
not as a specialist for a narrow readership. I believe a
non-committal sociology is an impossibility and therefore see
all my work as an effort to enhance human freedom through
understanding.
http://edwardcurtin.com
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