NK - 9/11 and the Enemy Within

[TonyGosling]

9/11 and the Enemy Within
by Nick Kollerstrom

The Four allegedly-hijacked plane flights were:
* American Airlines flight 11 left Boston 7.59 am for Los Angeles, deviated from its scheduled path at 8.13 am, then at 8.46 am hit the World Trade Centre.
* United Airline flight 175 departed from Logan airport at Boston 8.14 am for Los Angeles and hit the South Tower of the WTC at 9.03 am.
* A.A. flight 77 left Washington 8.20 am for LA, and hit the Pentagon at 9.43 am.
* U.A. flight 93 left New York Newark airport at New Jersey at 8.01am for San Francisco, and at around 10 am was terminated.

The UK’s Stop the War Coalition was conceived on 14th September 2001, mere days after 9/11, and was announced publicly a week later. I invite Stop the War Coalition members to examine this war-precipitating event.

We here compare three views concerning the event. The first is ‘Bin Laden did it’ and the US was a mere victim – the official story. This option seems unlikely from the general character of the US response. The second we may call the ‘sensible’ conspiracy theory, as expounded by Nafeez Ahmed in The War on Freedom, How and Why America was Attacked on September 11, 2001, and more recently by Michael Chossudovsky, in War and Globalisation, the Truth Behind September 11. Gore Vidal in his Dreaming War- blood for Oil and the Cheney-bush Junta endorsed the Ahmed book, with its view that the US knew the attack was coming, and deliberately held down its normal responses to allow it to happen. This is called ‘LIHOP,’ ‘Let it happen on purpose.’ Both these views gave the attack planned and engineered in Afghanistan. A key statement of this second view appeared in The Guardian on the 2nd anniversary of 9/11, by the respected British MP Michael Meacher www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/090803_meecher.html , concluding that the Iraqi and Afghani wars had been planned before 9/11.

The third view is conspiracy-theory more based on robotics, whereby upper echelons in the US military intelligence caused the event to happen: the New American Century needed an event of this kind to enable its racist wars, by establishing the new Muslim ‘enemy’ of terrorism. This view is caqlled ‘MIHOP,’ ‘make it happen on purpose’.On this view, the status of the multiple advance warnings which the US received of the impending attack remains unclear. Classic works on this theme are Mike Ruppert’s ‘Crossing the Rubicon’ and Webster Tarpley ‘9/11 Synthetic Terror.’ The huge majority of publications and speeches support the first and second views, the third being mainly found in web-articles.

No Arabs on Board
There remains virtually no evidence for the identities of the supposed 19 Muslim-Arab hijackers, beyond the word of the FBI. The event appears as a kind of phantom attack in that no-one claimed credit for it. Merely hours after the conflagration, the world was shown an image of Muslims (Pakistani) dancing in the street supposedly rejoicing because of the event, then this film turned out to be spurious (its shadows were at the wrong angle for the time of day) and from a different occasion. Within 48 hours the FBI had produced its all-Muslim list of hijackers. There turned out to be no airport pictures of these shadowy persons at Boston or New York where they supposedly boarded, no corroboration from the lists of names given out by American and United Airlines, of persons who had been on board the four planes – in fact there were no Arab names given out as passengers, and no telephone calls from any of the hijacked planes which mentioned that Middle-Eastern looking persons were on board, or were hijacking them. Then, a week after the event, Arabic newspapers pointed out that seven of the FBI’s list of nineteen were still alive. For the ‘fuzzy identities’ of the alleged hijackers, see Ian Henshall’s second book, 9.11 The New Evidence.

Lists of persons who were on the four planes (www.geocities.com/mknemesis/passengers.html or, www.911dossier.co.uk, 3:1 - 3:4) show no names of Arabs or suspected terrorists as having boarded that morning amongst the 45 passengers on flight 93 (Newark NJ to San Francisco), the 56 pilots on flight 175 (Boston to LA), the 56 (or 59) passengers on flight 77 (Washington to LA) or the 86 passengers on flight 11 (Boston to LA). To board the planes, passengers had to show ID containing their picture and name, corresponding to the passenger name on their ticket and as held by the aviation ground staff. Giving out these names to grieving relatives is a serious business.
When I mention the above fact to people, they surmise that fake I.D.s would have been used. On September 27th the FBI named and published pictures of the five ‘terrorists’ on board American Airlines plane 77 as Khalid Alimhdar, Majed Moqed, Nawaf Alhazmi, Salem Alhazmi and Hani Hanjour. For most of the given list of passengers the address and other details are specified, ie they have an identity, but a few don’t, eg, one John Jenkins. What possible motive would these Arabs have for getting an alias such as, say, John Jenkins? Five Arabs attempting to board having English-sounding names would be a sure way to arouse suspicion.

For flight 77 which crashed into the Pentagon, forensic pathologists claimed that over the next couple of months they could identify all of the bodies, as well as those of the Pentagon workers, using latest DNA methods, etc, and announced they this on November 16th. The plane may have vaporised but bodies remained! After this great achievement, they were strangely reluctant to disclose the identities of the bodies they had found. Only 14 months later did a researcher succeed in obtaining this list, under the Freedom of Information Act: there were 59 bodies (three extra, named), but it was clear that no Arab bodies were present: www.sierratimes.com/03/07/02/article_tro.htm The post-mortems were claimed to tie-up with the published air-flight list, suggesting that the FBI list of ‘terrorists’ was merely fictional.

Remote-Control of Flights?
On September 28th Bush stated that aviation might one day develop ‘new technology, probably in the far future, allowing air traffic controllers to land distressed planes by remote control.’ All four planes had their ‘transponders’ cease function between 8.20 and 8.50 a.m. so that they ceased broadcasting their airline names, flight numbers and altitude, and became mere anonymous blips upon the FAA radar screens. The transponder cannot be switched off, however it can be disconnected. Pilots are not trained in how to do this - it forms no part of their training. A skilled aviation-engineer is required, using special tools to open the requisite flaps etc. and to know which plug one would disconnect. The flight-instruction manuals the hijackers were said to have learnt from, would in no way have mentioned this. Persons plotting this event from a cave in Afghanistan might have difficulty in doing this.

The first action of a pilot on apprehending a hijack is to put out a standard ‘I’ve been hijacked’ radio message which is a four-digit code. Experts were baffled by the absence of any such response from any of the four planes and surmised that remote-control of the planes may have been attempted, to account for these features (www.geocities.com/mknemesis/homerun.html), as well as the fact that two of the four planes had their cockpit voice recorders recovered (flights 77 and 93), and these were blank. These have a continuous loop that records the last thirty minutes of whatever happens in the cockpit. The question of whether remote control of passenger planes was feasible is a central issue amongst the hijackologists of cyberspace who mull over 9/11 (www.public-action.com/911/robotplane.html) . One phone call from hijacked plane American Airline 77 had the pilot at the back of the plane asking passenger Barbara Olson to try and contact her husband, Bush’s solicitor-general Ted Olson, about what could be done – what, after all, do you do when your plane has started flying by itself?

The plane that struck the Pentagon came in quite high, then did a breathtakingly skilled 360-degree turn as it lowered itself then flew in more or less at street level – various experts evaluating this have dismissed the idea that hijackers with rudimentary training as this lot were supposed to have had, could have managed such a stunt (www.narconews.com/goff1.html . One is bound to add, that any ace suicide pilot flying into Washington, would find the White House a far more evident and easy-to-hit target than the Pentagon which is very low.

A group of experienced aviation experts, both civilian and military, met and wrestled with this issue for 72 hours, and their press report stated:
“The so-called terrorist attack was in fact a superbly executed military operation against the United States, requiring the utmost professional military skill in command, communications and control. It was flawless in timing, in the choice of selected aircraft to be used as guided missiles, and in the coordinated delivery of those missiles to their pre-selected targets.
“As a tactical military exercise against two significant targets (world financial center and the citadel of world strategic military planning), the attack, from a psychological impact on the American public, equaled the Japanese "surprise" attack on Pearl Harbor 7 Dec 1941. The over-riding question: If we are at war, who is the enemy?
“The group determined that the enemy is within the gates, that he has infiltrated into the highest policy-making positions at the Federal level, and has absolute control, not only of the purse strings, but of the troop build-up and deployment of our military forces, including active, reserve and National Guard units.
“One General officer remarked, "I seriously question whether these novices could have located a target dead-on 200 miles removed from takeoff point... much less controlled the flight and mastered the intricacies of 11FR (instrument flight rules) -- and all accomplished in 45 minutes." The extremely skillful maneuvering of the three aircraft at near mach speeds, each unerringly hitting their targets, was superb. As one Air Force officer -- a veteran of over 100 sorties over North Vietnam -- explained, ‘Those birds (commercial airliners) either had a crack fighter pilot in the left seat, or they were being manoeuvred by remote control.’" http://www.geocities.com/mknemesis/colonels.html
Some details of who organised this group emerged a year later (Colonel Grand-Pré, in Portugal), and this report seems to be the nearest thing we are likely to have, to an expert judgement on the matter.

NORAD, built under the Cheyenne mountains, keeps a lookout for planes or missiles invading US airspace, and any such invaders would lack a ‘transponder.’ Thus, switching off the plane transponders in this most high-security area of America would have tended to bring the hijacked planes to the attention of NORAD. NORAD declared that they were informed of hijacks at 8.40 am by the FAA, and they at first wondered, was this ‘part of the exercise?’ – an attack-simulation game was being played out that day, to which we return. If the planes were remotely guided, then whoever did it would have had no view through the cockpit windows, but would have to use either the Global Positioning System, using the geostationary satellites, or a Global Hawk remote surveillance aircraft (The latter hovers at some 60,000 feet, invisible from the ground).

The President Watches the First Impact – Not the Second
Mr Bush was listening to a pet goat story at a Florida elementary school from nine o’clock that morning, right through the second Twin-Tower impact, after having been informed of the first impact. After the event, he on two occasions recalled how he felt as he watched the first tower being hit on TV at 8.45, and this could be truthful – if we allow ourselves to surmise a high-level complicity in the event, then those involved would want their President complicit, by his watching what was supposedly not televised. He recalled this in question and answer sessions on US TV channels, on December 4th (see the official White House website www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/12/20011204-17.html towards the end), then again on 5th January. The UK’s Independent asked, ‘What TV station was HE watching?’ The President could not have watched the second crash because he was then listening to the goat story, so this remark was no slip of the tongue.

On the first anniversary of 9/11, attempts were made to claim that the President somehow responded decisively to the second impact by abrogating this visit. However the classroom visit was filmed and this clearly shows him bantering pleasantly with the staff and pupils and waiting around in the classroom even until the press had left, waiting for his pre-scheduled time of 9.20 to finish this classroom visit. Bush was Supreme Commander of the US military, the only person with authority to permit shooting down of a civilian airline: after the second impact, with the twin WTC towers transformed into a blazing inferno, the first priority by way of response should have been to have the President at a command centre, to be able to authorise this. Instead, his security staff stood timidly outside the classroom door while the pet goat story unfolded. The President emerged onto the lawn at 9.30 to make a televised statement that ‘America is under attack,’ vowing to find ‘those folks’ who were responsible. Do these events sound like an unplanned response to the emergency?

The fourth plane which crashed (or more likely, was shot down in mid-air) was half an hour late leaving Boston, and after ten o’clock it would have become hard to construct a credible story as to why fighter planes would not have caught up with it, or why NORAD had not identified it. If NORAD had not noticed four passenger planes diverging simultaneously from their scheduled flight-paths (as we are told), then for how long even after two planes had impacted into the Twin Towers, could it and the FAA still claim they had not noticed the other two - one heading straight towards the Pentagon for forty minutes? Half an hour maybe? So the United Airlines flight 93 had to be disintegrated. Debris from this plane was finely scattered over several fields with no main fuselage from this crash that could be photographed (its CVR was recovered on September 13th). Photographers on the scene were arrested and had their film confiscated, so no pictures are available. With binoculars, one can today view a slight indentation that remains in the field, a small hole hardly compatible with the nose-dive impact of a medium-sized passenger-jet. For comparison, the Lockerbie disaster in Scotland, where a Boeing 747 jumbo-jet crashed, had a sixty-foot deep gash in the earth gouged out and its wrecked fuselage-hull was much-photographed. The 757 is only half the size and would be expected to gauge out something like a furrow twenty-feet deep.

Mr Rumsfeld, watching TV in the Pentagon, claimed not to know any plane was heading straight for it until something ploughed into the far side of the building from him at 9.43 am. He alleged that he had been told of the Twin Tower impacts fifteen minutes earlier! Fortunately, we have the testimony of the Pentagon’s Assistant-Secretary for Defence Torie Clarke, alluding to ‘the terrible moment’ at 8.46 am when, ‘we realised that a plane had hit the WTC’ http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Sep2001/t09162001_t0915wbz.html . There is nothing surprising about the Pentagon knowing about the impact as soon as it happened, one should expect nothing less – and this also implies, lest there be any doubt, that Bush’s entourage would also have known about it, at this key moment. After that, the Pentagon in essence did nothing for an hour. Did anyone there phone the Andrews Air-Base nearby? They did not. Idly watching events on TV, Donald Rumsfeld precognitively remarked:
"Believe me, this isn't over yet. There's going to be another attack, and it could be us."
And then ‘moments later’, the plane hit. No-one was rebuked afterwards, for this decisive hour of inaction, in the face of Clear and Present Danger.

US historian Gore Vidal argued (in his Dreaming War) that the US government had held down any response to the hijacking over a period of an hour and a half. The Andrews Air Force Base ten miles from the Pentagon had two combat-ready squadrons of fighter planes, dedicated to protecting the Washington area, with at least one orbiting the base at any given time and hundreds of full-time staff, and its specific mandate was to intercept any intruders within minutes. Instead, they were kept on the runway for an hour after NORAD was informed of the event, then they launched planes immediately after the Pentagon crash. By the 12th, the next day, its website had deleted references to its two ace fighter-squadrons - it had become home to transport squadrons only!

It turned out that a war-game simulation was ongoing at the Pentagon that morning: ‘In what the government describes as a bizarre coincidence, one US intelligence agency was planning an exercise last Sept 11 in which an errant aircraft would crash into one of its buildings.’ Had the date of 9/11 for this event thereby been selected by the Government, perhaps because 911 is the number Americans dial in an emergency? Vice President Cheney was ‘in charge of the plane(s)-into-building(s)’ counter-terror ‘exercise’ the morning of September 11. That’s why he was in the White House sit room’ (www.911pi.com/honneger.htm). The game-simulation for that day was announced by the National Reconnaissance Office at Washington DC, the top-secret outfit that monitors spy satellites, and it stated that both the Pentagon and the CIA knew about the game. Checking up on this story, Barbara Honegger found out that the Pentagon medic Matt Rosenberg had been in the health clinic on Corridor 8 on the morning of 9/11 ‘grateful for an uninterrupted hour when he could study a new medical emergency disaster plan based on the unlikely scenario of an airliner crashing into the Pentagon (Washington Post Sept 16th) in case it was hit by a civilian airliner. Instead of being ‘unthinkable,’ something like the event had been deliberately planned as a game for that day. It had been scheduled to begin at 9 am … This story broke in August 22, 2002 on Associated Press, in a report from a ‘Homeland Security’ conference. Soon after it vanished from their website - the reports were erased, faster than the black votes in Florida. Did the game somehow get a bit too real?

Could all normal responses to plane hijacking have somehow been inoperative that morning by an unlucky fluke, despite all the forewarnings of an attack - after all, mistakes do happen? The point here, surely, is that no foreign ‘terrorists’ could have planned in advance for such to happen. From earlier precedents, planes on a non-authorised path, in that sensitive East-coast area around the seat of government, would expect to be detected and intercepted within at most 19 minutes after departure from scheduled path. Thus the event was not plannable from abroad: what group are going to plan a collective suicide attack, given that on any rational analysis, jets from Andrews’ Airbase at Washington DC are going to be flying beside them, ten to twenty minutes after diversion of flight-path?

Hours after the attacks on that day, the US Navy deployed aircraft carriers off the coast of New York to “guard the city” as if a mass invasion were in the offing – rather evidently preplanned, I’d say.

Other Clues
* Ahmed detailed the close links between the Bush and bin Laden families via the Carlyle group. Bin Laden stayed a week in a US hospital in Dubai for kidney dialysis treatment, leaving it on July 14th, 2001. A senior CIA agent came to visit him in this period according to French intelligence (Le Figaro Oct 11, 2001) – the CIA has denied this story. Bin Laden again underwent kidney dialysis treatment in a Pakistani military hospital, on September 10th in Rawalpindi (Reuters, 19 Jan, 2002). It appears that ‘The US has consistently blocked attempts to investigate and capture Bin Laden’ (Ahmed, p.203), and ‘Since the Cold War era, Washington has consciously supported Osama bin Laden, while at the same time placing him of the FBI’s “most wanted list” as the World’s foremost terrorist’ (Chossudovsky).

* Anthrax-letters were received by Congress members and journalists in the wake of 9/11, ending abruptly once it became established that this type of spore was brewed only in US Pentagon-linked weapons labs – the US is the only country to have produced weapons-grade anthrax in the last 25 years. Bush owned shares in BioPort the sole US company to manufacture the vaccine (no, really). The anthrax scare was effective in intimidating Congress into passing the Patriot Act, before they had read it. In 2008 a ‘lone nut’ who had conveniently committed suicide was blamed for having manufactured this anthrax scare.

* Mohammed Atta, the alleged ringleader who lived in Hamburg, was given a fairly credible ‘terrorist’ past of assembling bomb-making equipment etc, but it is claimed that he was able to enter and leave the US three times in 2001 on a tourist visa which had expired the previous year. His father claims to have rung him on September 12th, but he was dead soon after, a victim of identity theft? http://feralnews.com/issues/911/dewdney/ghost_riders_1-4_3.html His father claimed his son hated flying and couldn’t fly. A biographical study of Mohammed Atta exploring his ‘Jekyll-Hyde’ duality would be worthwhile.

* Not one person has been sacked, court-martialled or even rebuked for intelligence failure, nor has anyone been charged or put on trial for planning the event - supposed lawsuits pending against the presumed terrorists Zaccarias Moussaoui and Richard Reid have been shelved indefinitely for whatever reason, nor has there been any enquiry over how it happened – “What is happening in the US took me by surprise. I anticipated that in the aftermath of September 11th, there would be an enormous hue and cry to find out what went wrong. There has been no hue and cry in the United States. No recriminations, nothing even similar to what happened after Pearl Harbour in 1941. The United States has drawn a veil of silence over the issue of intelligence failure” (Wesley Wark, Canadian intelligence expert, Ahmed, p.81). Only one class of persons were rebuked and sacked after 9/11, viz. journalists who were too questioning and not loyal enough to the official line. One could draw the conclusion from all this, that what happened was not an intelligence failure.

* Massive bidding occurred on the US stock markets prior to the event of ‘put options,’ these being ones which profit from a drop in price of stocks, in United Airlines (4,744 ‘put’ options and only 396 ‘call’ options over Sept 6-7) and likewise for American Airlines, while no other airlines showed a similar trading patterns.

* Persons inside the towers reported hearing a sequence of explosions: (www.thememoryhole.org/911/veliz-bombs.htm).

* A Canadian maths professor doubted whether the reported phone calls could have been made above 7,000 feet altitude as reported, and he took a plane up to that height to checkup, and his results (in the negative) can be viewed at www.911dossier.co.uk: there is a suggestion here of use of digital-morphing technology. Mobile phones broadcast at five watts energy, and work by establishing a ‘handshake’ with a local transmitter; in planes flying at near-mach speeds, experts have doubted whether the phones would have been able to connect with the sequence of transmitters, far below.

* An alleged phone call from Flight 93 from ‘Jeremy Glick’ to his wife, first reported belatedly on September 22, featured a hijacker with a box wrapped in red paper and said to be a bomb – with no description of the hijackers; more than a month later, Mrs Glick embellished her story with ‘Arab-looking guys wearing red headbands.’ That is the only alleged phone call alluding to Arabs. Most of the calls were very brief; one, supposedly speaking to his mother, introduced himself as ‘Mark Brigham’ then hung up after a couple more lines of conversation. http://feralnews.com/issues/911/dewdney/ghost_riders_1-4_2.html Would a person ringing his mother for the last time, introduce himself using his first and second name? In April 2002, distraught relatives were allowed to listen to a hardly-audible recording of what was supposedly the end of flight 93, in which passengers were attempting to storm the cockpit leading to a fight, then the plane takes a nose-dive; but, no tape was ever released.

* An online Petition to the Senate lists major issues that need resolving, e.g.: “Cell phone calls made by passengers of the four hijacked flights on 9/11 which never emerged on their cell-phone bills … eyewitness accounts describing Flight 93’s explosion prior to its landing … role of remote-control software technology implicated in 9/11 hijacks and crashes” (www.petitiononline.com/11601TFS/petition.html ).

Pure Hollywood Evil
On September 17th, Osama Bin Laden told the Afghan Islamic Press News, in Arabic: “The US is pointing the finger at me but I categorically state that I have not done this” (ABC News Online), and he reiterated this message in an interview with a Pakistani newspaper:
“I was not involved in the September 11 attacks in the United States nor did I have knowledge of the attacks. There exists a government within a government within the United States. The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself; to the people who want to make the present century a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity. That secret government must be asked as to who carried out the attacks....The American system is totally in control of the Jews, whose first priority is Israel, not the United States ... I have already said that we are not hostile to the United States. We are against the system, which makes other nations slaves of the United States, or forces them to mortgage their political and economic freedom.” (Bin Laden, to Pakistani newspaper Ummat, 28 September www.public-action.com/911/oblintrv.html also www.911dossier.co.uk 5:1-5:10)
This interview went unreported in America. A book of Al-Quaeda documents with authentic letters by Bin Laden (In the Name of Osama bin Laden, Jacquard, 2002) contains one post-9/11 letter, of 24 September, addressed to Pakistani Muslims. This contained no hint that his outfit had just been involved in the only attack on mainland America since 1812, one defining the new millennium. His statements merely emphasised the right of defence of Muslim nations and of freeing Saudi Arabia from American bases (the defined goal of Al-quaeda) and expressed no wish to attack America.

Only one of the alleged 19 hijackers might just possibly have visited Afghanistan, Mohammed Atta. Britain and America did sow ‘hell’s teeth’ in that nation in the 1980s by assembling and training a huge army of rootless mercenaries to fight the Soviets, and then just walking away when it was over: that unholy brew metamorphosed into the Taliban and much of the Al-Quaeda there present, such that a fairly credible enemy-image could be projected onto them after 9/11, given the public’s short memory. After 9/11 the Taliban offered to hand over Bin Laden to America if any evidence could be given regarding his complicity. That turned out not to be forthcoming, and the Taliban then offered to hand him over to a Muslim court in Pakistan, with his consent; soon after which, the bombs started falling.

In mid-November a videotape appeared supposedly found in Jalalabad featuring someone faintly resembling Bin-Laden (see picture), claiming to have known about 9/11 five days before (www.whatreallyhappened.com/osamatape.html, or www.public-action.com/911/hvideo.html, also Blum, Rogue State, p. xii). The voices are slurred and semi-audible. The Swiss Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence in Lausanne expressed itself as 95% certain that the tape did not feature Bin Laden’s voice, after having been commissioned to review it by France-2 television. We are here reminded of the several Korans, flight-instruction manuals and

suicide notes ‘found’ in rented cars near the airports involved in the event, and of the passport of Mohammed Atta which the FBI claimed to have found in a street near the Twin Towers, averring it had fluttered down from the inferno (Passports are not required for domestic flights). ‘It thus seems that we are in the presence of manufactured evidence left intentionally, i.e., of planted evidence,’ http://geocities.com/aauaplanes09112001whathappened/insearch.html#sept ember1 - indeed. Two weeks later on December 13th the Pentagon released its English ‘translation’ of this video, portraying Bin Laden as the fiendish mastermind gloating over the event http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/terrorism/july-dec01/video_12-13a.html.

Wars Planned before 9/11
At 8.30 pm, just twelve hours after the hijackings, the Bush Doctrine was spelt out by the President from the White House, a blueprint for future wars: ‘We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbour them’ he told America. He did not need to sleep on the matter before defining the foreign nature of the threat and the ‘harbouring terrorists’ concept.

Ahmed analysed the Afghan situation, showing how the invasion was planned prior to 9/11: the need for that war was not a response to 9/11 but if anything it was the other way round. As the millennium drew to a close, the US Government ‘neo-cons’ realised that they needed a new Pearl Harbour to make possible their dreams of World Domination. An Eternal War doctrine was formulated by Bush Junior, with a new list of Enemy Nations drawn up. The Patriot Act was passed to deprive citizens of constitutional rights and ensure that they would keep living in fear.

There are two ‘progenitor’ events leading up to 9/11, of essential relevance: Pearl Harbour went ahead in 1941 with full foreknowledge by President Roosevelt, after the US had provoked Japan to the act and penetrated its wartime codes. Three thousand US troops in Hawaii were thereby sacrificed, to make fighting a foreign war publicly acceptable (See eg recent Gore Vidal books on this topic). Then in 1993, the Oklahoma bombing incident saw a ‘lone nut’ claim responsibility, by parking a van full of explosives outside a tall building. He is convicted. Problem: by simple physics, such an explosion outside the building could not have demolished it - only broken the windows, maybe. In common with 9/11, no analysis of the wreckage was permitted: experts studying the tangled steel would have been able to reach fairly definite conclusions about how it was blown up. Instead, in both cases the wreckage was just taken away as debris (The motive here was unlikely, with McVeigh supposedly having a gripe against a tobacco company – but let’s not go into that). If the basic question about a crime is, ‘Who benefits?’ then the answer here was: the FBI, the security services and ‘FEMA’ the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The New York fire services were so confident that the Twin Towers would not collapse they bet their lives on it, and if only for their sakes one would have expected an inquest into how it collapsed, as was not permitted.

Who benefited from 9/11? “After the attack it was Christmas every day for the national security establishment and its corporate cohorts. All their wish lists were fulfilled, and then some. In short order, they massively increased defence spending; shamelessly stifled social spending; promoted obscenely extensive tax breaks for the largest corporations; greatly increased surveillance and prosecutory powers over the citizenry, including license to enter their homes virtually at will, to an extent a dictatorship might envy; tore up the Bill of Rights for non-citizens, including legal residents; created a new Office of Homeland Security”, etc. (Blum, Rogue State, xxi).

Need for ‘the Enemy’
I suggest that Dubya Bush would have had no clue as to what his foreign policy was supposed to be, without 9/11. It gave him Terrorism as the new Enemy, able to threaten all that we hold dear, and his presidency is unthinkable without it. The Enron scandal and Bush’s transparent electoral fraud were closing in on him, when he was rescued by 9/11.

The Bible of the new American right has been Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997), spelling out the brutal and devious world-domination strategies of the US. It encountered the problem that, ‘… as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.’ So, where might that come from? Likewise the ‘Project for a New American Century’ (2000, ‘Rebuilding America’s Defences’), a key document written by the ultra-right wing now in power, lamented that America hardly had the capability of waging two wars at once (p.3). The process of transforming the US into "tomorrow's dominant force," it explained, could be a long one in the absence of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor" (p.51). Thus, two of the sacred texts of the New American Right have called for a cataclysmic event, of just the kind which then materialised.

The US military had endured twelve difficult years without an Enemy. Did it generate its own, somewhat as a virtual reality exercise? The alleged Arab hijackers refuse to come into focus and appear increasingly as media-constructed images. None of us know what the answer is, though the event affects all of us. Of one thing we may be sure: the world will not be a safe place, until we find the guilty culprits.

The US has always in the past relied upon deceptive war-precipitating incidents to make possible the wars that it wants, eg the sinking of the Lusitania 1915, Pearl Harbour 1941 and the Gulf of Tonkin 1964. A review of these terrible but phoney events concluded that: “If, indeed, September 11 was caused solely by Al Quaeda, then that would be the first time in history that the U.S. hasn’t used ‘deception’ to start a war” (‘How to start a War’, Global Outlook, Summer 2002 17).

References
The new site www.911review.org is the best all-round intro, with www.911dossier.co.uk as a close second. For course of the day, see: http://www.cooperativeresearch.net/timeline/main/essayaninterestingday .html
For fake message from flight 77, see: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/steveseymour/roboplanes/cleveland2.html
For a rather profound in-depth analysis, translated from the French: http://geocities.com/aauaplanes09112001whathappened/insearch.html#sept ember1
The quarterly journal ‘Global Outlook’ features articles on 911: www.globalresearch.ca
Canadian mathematics professor A.K. Dewdney, science writer and composer of mathematical puzzles for the Scientific American, published his Ghost Riders in the Sky in December 2002, http://feralnews.com/issues/911/dewdney/ghost_riders_1-4_3.html. There is a gritty realism to his conclusion:
“Whoever heard of 3,000 deaths and no inquest? … It's a sad reflection of our times that citizens have to carry out this investigative work, while the budgets of 'intelligence' agencies grow from massive to gigantic. Yet what else can we do, when these agencies 'go feral' - and elements within them are the most likely perpetrators of some terrible atrocities? Trusting the Government to think on our behalf is no longer a safe option - if it ever was ... The official inquiries into both Pearl Harbor (see 1, 2 and 3) and the JFK assassination (see 1, 2 and 3 and 4) were exercises in dishonesty. It's futile to imagine a worthwhile investigation of 9/11 could take place under the auspices of a US Government corrupted at the highest levels.”

Acknowledgement: I’m grateful for discussions with British Aerospace engineer T.H.
NB This essay was composed in 2002.