[chottala.com] The 11th Anniversary of 9/11

The 11th Anniversary of 9/11

by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Editor's note: Our position at CounterPunch on the events of 9/11 is
well-known to our readers and to some of our most popular writers,
like Craig Roberts, who hold a dissenting opinion. That opinion hasn't
changed and we wear the battle scars to prove it. Sometime in April of
this year, when Alex was undergoing treatments in Germany for his
cancer, he sent me a note about a recent PCR column that had
delicately weaved a few sentences of 9/11 Trutherism into an otherwise
cogent attack on the loss of civil liberties in America. Alex joked
about it, saying Roberts had embedded these sentences like land mines
for the sole purposed of wondering if we would detect them. We always
did and promptly amputated them from the essays. In fact, Alex had
wanted to publish a book debating the Truther's best case scenario. He
said that Roberts had been such a good sport all these years that
perhaps we should let one of them slip through. Indeed, Alex had
wanted to publish a book where the Truthers' best case scenario would
be put to the test and thoroughly debated. So here you are, Craig, a
present from the shade of Alexander Cockburn on the eleventh
anniversary of 9/11. –JSC

The article below was written for the Journal of 9/11 Studies for the
eleventh anniversary of September 11, 2001, the day that terminated
accountable government and American liberty. It is posted here with
the agreement of the editors.

In order to understand the improbability of the government's
explanation of 9/11, it is not necessary to know anything about what
force or forces brought down the three World Trade Center buildings,
what hit the Pentagon or caused the explosion, the flying skills or
lack thereof of the alleged hijackers, whether the airliner crashed in
Pennsylvania or was shot down, whether cell phone calls made at the
altitudes could be received, or any other debated aspect of the
controversy.

You only have to know two things.

One is that according to the official story, a handful of Arabs,
mainly Saudi Arabians, operating independently of any government and
competent intelligence service, men without James Bond and V for
Vendetta capabilities, outwitted not only the CIA, FBI, and National
Security Agency, but all 16 US intelligence agencies, along with all
security agencies of America's NATO allies and Israel's Mossad. Not
only did the entire intelligence forces of the Western world fail, but
on the morning of the attack the entire apparatus of the National
Security State simultaneously failed. Airport security failed four
times in one hour. NORAD failed. Air Traffic Control failed. The US
Air Force failed.

The National Security Council failed. Dick Cheney failed. Absolutely
nothing worked. The world's only superpower was helpless at the
humiliating mercy of a few undistinguished Arabs.

It is hard to image a more far-fetched story–except for the second
thing you need to know: The humiliating failure of US National
Security did not result in immediate demands from the President of the
United States, from Congress, from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and from
the media for an investigation of how such improbable total failure
could have occurred. No one was held accountable for the greatest
failure of national security in world history. Instead, the White
House dragged its feet for a year resisting any investigation until
the persistent demands from 9/11 families for accountability forced
President George W. Bush to appoint a political commission, devoid of
any experts, to hold a pretend investigation.

On 9/11 Doubts Were Immediate

By Paul Craig Roberts

On September 11, 2001, a neighbor telephoned and said, "turn on the
TV." I assumed that a hurricane, possibly a bad one from the sound of
the neighbor's voice, was headed our way, and turned on the TV to
determine whether we needed to shutter the house and leave.

What I saw was black smoke from upper floors of one of the World Trade
Center towers. It didn't seem to be much of a fire, and the reports
were that the fire was under control. While I was trying to figure out
why every TV network had its main news anchor covering an office fire,
TV cameras showed an airplane hitting the other tower. It was then
that I learned that both towers had been hit by airliners.

Cameras showed people standing at the hole in the side of the tower
looking out. This didn't surprise me. The airliner was minute compared
to the massive building. But what was going on? Two accidents, one on
top of the other?

The towers—the three-fourths or four-fifths of the buildings beneath
the plane strikes–were standing, apparently largely undamaged. There
were no signs of fire except in the vicinity of where the airliners
had hit. Suddenly, one of the towers blew up, disintegrated, and
disappeared in fine dust. Before one could make any sense of this, the
same thing happened to the second tower, and it too disappeared into
fine dust.

The TV news anchors compared the disintegration of the towers to
controlled demolition. There were numerous reports of explosions
throughout the towers from the base or sub-basements to the top. (Once
the government put out the story of terrorist attack, references to
controlled demolition and explosions disappeared from the print and TV
media.) This made sense to me. Someone had blown up the buildings. It
was completely obvious that the towers had not fallen down from
asymmetrical structural damage. They had blown up.

The images of the airliners hitting the towers and the towers blowing
up were replayed time and again. Airliners hit the top portions of
the towers, and not long afterward the towers blew up. I turned off
the TV wondering how it was that cameras had been ready to catch such
an unusual phenomenon as an airplane flying into a skyscraper.

I don't remember the time line, but it wasn't long before the story
was in place that Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda gang had attacked
the US. A passport had been found in the rubble. Another airliner had
flown into the Pentagon, and a fourth airliner had crashed or been
shot down. Four airliners had been hijacked, meaning airport security
had failed four times on the same morning. Terrorists had successfully
assaulted America.

When I heard these reports, I wondered. How could a tiny undamaged
passport be found in the rubble of two skyscrapers, each more than 100
stories tall, when bodies, office furniture and computers could not be
found? How could airport security fail so totally that four airliners
could be hijacked within the same hour? How could authorities know so
conclusively and almost immediately the names of the perpetrators who
pulled off such a successful attack on the world's only superpower,
when the authorities had no idea that such an attack was planned or
even possible?

These questions disturbed me, because as a former member of the
congressional staff and as a presidential appointee to high office, I
had high level security clearances. In addition to my duties as
Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury, I had FEMA responsibilities in
the event of nuclear attack. There was a mountain hideaway to which I
was supposed to report in the event of a nuclear attack and from which
I was supposed to take over the US government in the event no higher
official survived the attack.

The more the story of 9/11 was presented in the media, the more
wondrous it became. It is not credible that not only the CIA and FBI
failed to detect the plot, but also all 16 US intelligence agencies,
including the National Security Agency, which spies on everyone on the
planet, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, Israel's Mossad, and the
intelligence agencies of Washington's NATO allies. There are simply
too many watchmen and too much infiltration of terrorist groups for
such a complex attack to be prepared undetected and carried out
undeterred.

Washington's explanation of the attack implied a security failure too
massive to be credible. Such a catastrophic failure of national
security would mean that the US and Western Europe were never safe for
one second during the Cold War, that the Soviet Union could have
destroyed the entire West in one undetected fell swoop.

As a person whose colleagues at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies in Washington were former secretaries of state,
former national security advisors, former CIA directors, former
chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I was troubled by the story
that a collection of individuals unsupported by a competent
intelligence service had pulled off the events of 9/11.

As a person with high level government service, I knew that any such
successful operation as 9/11 would have resulted in immediate demands
from the White House, Congress, and the media for accountability.
There would have been an investigation of how every aspect of US
security could totally fail simultaneously in one morning. Such a
catastrophic and embarrassing failure of the national security state
would not be left unexamined.

NORAD failed. The US Air Force could not get jet fighters in the air.
Air Traffic Control lost sight of the hijacked airliners. Yet, instead
of launching an investigation, the White House resisted for one year
the demands of the 9/11 families for an investigation. Neither the
public, the media, nor Congress seemed to think an investigation was
necessary. The focus was on revenge, which the Bush neocon regime said
meant invading Afghanistan which was alleged to be sheltering the
perpetrator, Osama bin Laden.

Normally, terrorists are proud of their success and announce their
responsibility. It is a way to build a movement. Often a number of
terrorist groups will compete in claiming credit for a successful
operation. But Osama bin Laden in the last video that is certified by
independent experts said that he had no responsibility for 9/11, that
he had nothing against the American people, that his opposition was
limited to the US government's colonial policies and control over
Muslim governments.

It makes no sense that the "mastermind" of the most humiliating blow
in world history ever to have been delivered against a superpower
would not claim credit for his accomplishment. By September 11, 2001,
Osama bin Laden knew that he was deathly ill. According to news
reports he underwent kidney dialysis the following month. The most
reliable reports that we have are that he died in December 2001. It is
simply not credible that bin Laden denied responsibility because he
feared Washington.

But Osama bin Laden was too useful a bogeyman, and Washington and the
presstitute media kept him alive for another decade until Obama needed
to kill the dead man in order to boost his sinking standings in the
polls so that Democrats would not back a challenger for the Democratic
presidential nomination.

Numerous bin Laden videos, every one pronounced a fake by experts,
were released whenever it was convenient for Washington. No one in the
Western media or in the US Congress or European or UK parliaments was
sufficiently intelligent to recognize that a bin Laden video always
showed up on cue when Washington needed it. "Why would the
'mastermind' be so accommodating for Washington?" was the question
that went through my mind every time one of the fake videos was
released.

The 9/11 "investigation" that finally took place was a political one
run from the White House. One member of the commission resigned,
declaring the investigation to be a farce, and both co-chairman and
the legal counsel of the 9/11 Commission distanced themselves from
their report with statements that the 9/11 Commission was "set up to
fail," that resources were withheld from the commission, that
representatives of the US military lied to the commission and that the
commission considered referring the false testimony for criminal
prosecution.

One would think that these revelations would cause a sensation, but
the news media, Congress, the White House, and the public were silent.

All of this bothered me a great deal. The US had invaded two Muslim
countries based on unsubstantiated allegations linking the two
countries to 9/11, which itself remained uninvestigated. The
neoconservatives who staffed the George W. Bush regime were advocating
more invasions of more Muslim countries. Paul O'Neill, President
Bush's first Treasury Secretary, stated publicly that the Bush regime
was planning to invade Iraq prior to 9/11. O'Neill said that no one at
a National Security Council meeting even asked the question, why
invade Iraq? "It was all about finding a way to do it."

The leaked top secret Downing Street Memo written by the head of
British intelligence (MI6) confirms Paul O'Neill's testimony. The
memo, known as the "smoking gun memo" whose authenticity has been
confirmed, states that "President George W. Bush wants to remove
Saddam Hussein, through military action, justified by the conjunction
of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed
around the policy." In other words, the US invasion of Iraq was based
on nothing but a made up lie.

As an engineering student I had witnessed a controlled demolition.
When films of the collapse of WTC building 7 emerged, it was obvious
that building 7 had been brought down by controlled demolition. When
physics instructor David Chandler measured the descent of the building
and established that it took place at free fall acceleration, the case
was closed. Buildings cannot enter free fall unless controlled
demolition has removed all resistance to the collapsing floors.

If airliners brought down two skyscrapers, why was controlled
demolition used to bring down a third building?

I assumed that structural architects, structural engineers, and
physicists would blow the whistle on the obviously false story. If I
could see that something was amiss, certainly more highly trained
people would.

The first physicist to make an effective and compelling argument was
Steven Jones at BYU. Jones said that explosives brought down the twin
towers. He made a good case. For his efforts, he was pressured to
resign his tenured position. I wondered whether the federal government
had threatened BYU's research grants or whether patriotic trustees and
alumni were the driving force behind Jones' expulsion. Regardless, the
message was clear to other university based experts: "Shut up or we'll
get you."

Steven Jones was vindicated when chemist Niels Harrit of the
University of Copenhagen In Denmark reported unequivocally that the
scientific team in which he participated found nano-thermite in the
residue of the twin towers. This sensational finding was not mentioned
in the US print and TV media to my knowledge.

Several years after 9/11, architect Richard Gage formed Architects and
Engineers for 9/11 truth, an organization that has grown to include
1,700 experts. The plans of the towers have been studied. They were
formidable structures. They were constructed to withstand airliner
hits and fires. There is no credible explanation of their failure
except intentional demolition.

I also found disturbing the gullibility of the public, media, and
Congress in the unquestioning acceptance of the official stories of
the shoe-bomber, shampoo and bottled water bomber, and underwear
bomber plots to blow up airliners in transit. These schemes are
farcical. How can we believe that al Qaeda, capable of pulling off the
most fantastic terrorist attack in history and capable of devising
improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that kill and maim US troops and
destroy US military vehicles would rely on something that had to be
lighted with a match? The shoe and underwear bombers would simply have
pushed a button on their cell phones or laptops, and the liquid bomb
would not have required extended time in a lavatory to be mixed (all
to no effect).

None of this makes any sense. Moreover, experts disputed many of the
government's claims, which were never backed by anything but the
government's story line. There is no independent evidence that
anything was involved other than firecracker powders.

The case of the underwear bomber is especially difficult to accept.
According to witnesses, the underwear bomber was not allowed on the
airliner, because he had no passport. So an official appears who walks
him onto the airliner bound for Detroit on Christmas day. What kind of
official has the authority to override established rules, and what did
the official think would happen to the passenger when he presented
himself to US Customs without a passport? Any official with the power
to override standard operating practices would know that it was
pointless to send a passenger to a country where his entry would be
rejected.

The circumstantial evidence is that these were orchestrated events
designed to keep fear alive, to create new intrusive powers for a new
over-arching federal policy agency, to accustom US citizens to
intrusive searches and a police force to conducting them, and to sell
expensive porno-scanners and now more advanced devices to the
Transportation Safety Administration. Apparently, this expensive
collection of high-tech gadgetry is insufficient to protect us from
terrorists, and in August 2012 the Department of Homeland Security put
in an order for 750 million rounds of ammunition, enough to shoot
every person in the US 2.5 times.

Naive and gullible Americans claim that if some part of the US
government had been involved in 9/11, "someone would have talked by
now." A comforting thought, perhaps, but nothing more. Consider, for
example, the cover-up by the US government of the 1967 Israeli attack
on the USS Liberty that killed or wounded most of the crew but failed
to sink the ship. As the survivors have testified, they were ordered
in a threatening way not to speak about the event. It was twelve years
later before one of the USS Liberty's officers, James Ennes, told the
story of the attack in his book, Assault on the Liberty. I continue to
wonder how the professionals at the National Institute of Standards
and Technology feel about being maneuvered by the federal government
into the unscientific position NIST took concerning the destruction of
the WTC towers.

What will be the outcome of the doubts about the official story raised
by experts? I worry that most Americans are too mentally and
emotionally weak to be able to come to grips with the truth. They are
far more comfortable with the story that enemies attacked America
successfully despite the massive national security state in place. The
American public has proved itself to be so cowardly that it willingly,
without a peep, sacrificed its civil liberty and the protections of
law guaranteed by the Constitution in order to be "safe."

Congress is not about to expose itself for having squandered trillions
of dollars on pointless wars based on an orchestrated "new Pearl
Harbor." When the neoconservatives said that a "new Pearl Harbor" was
a requirement for their wars for American/Israeli hegemony, they set
the stage for the 21st century wars that Washington has launched. If
Syria falls, there is only Iran, and then Washington stands in direct
confrontation with Russia and China.

Unless Russia and China can be overthrown with "color revolutions,"
these two nuclear powers are unlikely to submit to Washington's
hegemony. The world as we know it might be drawing to a close.

If enough Americans or even other peoples in the world had the
intelligence to realize that massive steel structures do not
disintegrate into fine dust because a flimsy airliner hits them and
limited short-lived fires burn on a few floors, Washington would be
faced with the suspicion it deserves.

If 9/11 was actually the result of the failure of the national
security state to deter an attack, the government's refusal to conduct
a real investigation is an even greater failure. It has fallen to
concerned and qualified individuals to perform the investigative role
abandoned by government. The presentations at the Toronto Hearings,
along with the evaluations of the Panel, are now available, as is the
documentary film, "Explosive Evidence–Experts Speak Out," provided by
Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

The government's agents and apologists try to deflect attention from
disturbing facts by redefining factual evidence revealed by experts as
the product of "a conspiracy culture." If people despite their
brainwashing and lack of scientific education are able to absorb the
information made available to them, perhaps both the US Constitution
and peace could be restored. Only informed people can restrain
Washington and avert the crazed hegemonic US government from
destroying the world in war.

Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury
and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. His latest book,
Wirtschaft am Abgrund (Economies In Collapse) has just been published.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/09/11/the-11th-anniversary-of-911/


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