9/11 - After Ten Years, It Is Time to Wake Up
by Paul Donahue
“The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it.” - Adolf Hitler
“A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” - Vladimir Lenin
"To see what is in front of one's nose is a constant struggle." - George Orwell
“No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” - Edmund Burke (1729 - 1797), Irish statesman, author, and political philosopher
"The deeds of men have been affected more by the beliefs in what was false than by the knowledge of what was true." - William Archibald Dunning (1857-1922), American historian
“If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.” - James Madison, 4th President of the United States
"Of course the people don't want war... that is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” - Nazi leader Hermann Goering
“Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.” - Julius Caesar
I love quotes, and in regard to 9/11, the quotes above seem particularly appropriate to me, summing up the situation as I see it. After ten years of life trapped in a nightmare that just won’t end, it is way past time for Americans to wake up and smash the 9/11 myth.
Ten years now have passed since that horrible day when Americans watched their television screens as planes crashed into the north and south towers of the World Trade Center. The attacks of 9/11 were a tragedy for Americans, with 3000 lives lost. However, the events of that day and the dangerous myths attached to them led to a far bigger and ongoing tragedy for the Muslim world, where societies have been destroyed and well over a million lives have been lost to U.S. wars of aggression.
Not everything has changed since that day, as many pundits claimed, but many things have. 9/11 was responsible for sending this country down a very, very dark road from which it is looking more and more like there is no return. What would Americans have said on September 10, 2001 if told that….
Yet, because of 9/11, Americans have accepted all these things and with hardly a whimper of protest. These horrific changes to U.S. policy and society began under George Bush, and they have continued almost seamlessly under Barack Obama, becoming even further entrenched and institutionalized. It would be bad enough if these things were based on reality, but it is much, much worse if they are based on fiction and lies.
The myth that 19 Muslim extremists, armed with nothing more than box-cutters, evaded the gargantuan security apparatus of the United States to carry out four near-simultaneous attacks on U.S. jetliners is hard enough to swallow. In case that’s not enough, we’re also asked to believe that this whole plot was hatched in caves in the mountains of Afghanistan, presumably with Osama bin Laden lugging his kidney dialysis machine from cave to cave.
The attacks of 9/11 are arguably the biggest crime in U.S. history. Due to the chain of events set in motion by these attacks, understanding what truly happened on that day is also arguably one of the most important things Americans can do. You would think that with a crime of this magnitude, Americans would have demanded proof, to be sure the right people were made to pay. After all, in the words of Carl Sagan, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
However, to this day, the government has failed to produce a single shred of credible evidence to back their version of events. Some of this evidence, like the conveniently discovered videotapes of Osama bin Laden, is highly suspect. Other evidence, like the hijacker’s paper passport found in the World Trade Center rubble, doesn’t even pass the laugh test. None of the evidence would stand up in a court of law.
It is widely believed in Europe and other parts of the world that 9/11 was an inside job, but Americans have lagged way behind when it comes to questioning the official account of events. Instead of credible evidence to back up the official story, the word of George Bush was all the proof most Americans needed. Even liberals who despised Bush still bought his story when that very same night when he blamed the events of the day on Osama bin Laden. For reasons beyond my ability to really comprehend, the majority of Americans have simply accepted the government’s version of events on that day, unwilling to ask for proof or face the plethora of anomalies and unanswered questions. Perhaps they are simply unwilling to pull back the veil for fear of what they might find beneath. In the words of a friend, this is what constitutes belief - the acceptance of a proposition without any supporting evidence.
Some people who have problems with the official version of events have been afraid to speak up for fear of being ridiculed as conspiracy theorists. However I’m not even a little afraid of that but I am very, very afraid of living in a police state. And besides, whether 9/11 was carried out by Osama bin Laden and company or by Dick Cheney and his cohorts, either way it's a conspiracy, so it’s just a question of which conspiracy theory you choose to believe.
Admittedly, I have been obsessed for the last decade with trying to expose the lies of 9/11, but not because I am enamored of conspiracy theories, nor because I want to see the true perpetrators brought to justice (which I do), but because the trajectory of this nation has been dictated by the 9/11 myth for the past decade. Politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike, continue to use 9/11 as the justification for the repressive domestic policy and homicidal foreign policy of the U.S. The continuing trajectory of this nation, and hence of the world, for the coming decades may be dependent on exposing the official lies and getting this story straight. I certainly do not claim to know what happened on that fateful day, but I know what did not happen.
There are so, so many problems with the government’s fictional account of 9/11 events - about the events leading up to 9/11, about the events on the day itself, and about the obvious cover-up afterwards - that it is hard to know where to begin. There is the meeting in Dubai in July 2001 between the CIA station chief and Osama bin Laden, already on the U.S. most wanted list for the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. There is the U.S. threat made to the Taliban in August 2001 to “bury you under a carpet of bombs” if they did come around on a deal for a natural gas pipeline across the country. There are the many U.S. military war games that were taking place on 9/11, the most ever in a single day, including one that specifically dealt with terrorists taking control of commercial jetliners.
It literally would take several large volumes to expose the suspicious coincidences and inconsistencies and lay bare the official lies. Others have already done this in quite a detailed manner, so here I will try to stick to just a bit of the verifiable and inescapable physical evidence - or conspicuous lack of evidence.
While this evidence or lack thereof does not definitively prove who was actually behind the attacks, and cannot answer all the hundreds of unanswered questions - that’s what subpoenas, witness boxes, and testimony under oath are for - it does blow apart the official lie. There is ample evidence that the government’s story is an almost complete fairytale from one end to the other. About the only part of it that’s true is that planes struck the north and south towers of the World Trade Center. Everything else in the government’s fictitious account falls apart under scrutiny.
Some of problems with the government’s version of events are glaringly obvious, some take just a little more digging to become clear. The World Trade Center attack is a bit more complicated, so I’ll begin with Flight 77 and the simpler attack on the Pentagon.
We are told by the government that Hani Hanjour, an inexperienced small plane pilot with poor piloting skills, performed an extremely difficult 330 degree spiraling dive in a Boeing 757, crashing it into the side of the Pentagon. The rather obvious problem with this story is that no significant airplane wreckage (wings, tail section, fuselage, engines, landing gear) was ever seen or photographed or reported on (see paragraph below) from either inside or outside the Pentagon. In fact, all reporters at the scene as well as the people who escaped the building, commented on the absence of evidence of a plane crash.
Most curious is the case of CNN reporter Jamie McIntyre. Reporting at the scene almost immediately after the crash he stated, “…from my close-up inspection, there's no evidence of a plane having crashed anywhere near the Pentagon. The only site is the actual site of the building that's crashed in, and as I said, the only pieces left that you can see are small enough that you can 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 and then caused the side to collapse.”
In 2006 McIntyre spoke again about the “crash” site, but by then his story had changed dramatically - “...had a camera with me. I took pictures of some of the wreckage, some of the parts of the fuselage, a part of the cockpit, until they told us we had to move back away from the scene.” Still later, referring to the idea that something other than a Boeing 757 hit the Pentagon, McIntyre stated, “Having been there on September 11th, having seen the plane wreckage and photographed it myself personally, I can tell you that’s nonsense.”
Hmm, so which version of events are we to believe, Jamie? Video clips of both are available online - you decide.
The surveillance video cameras that would have recorded the incoming jet all had their tapes confiscated by the FBI within minutes of the crash. All we have seen of these tapes since are a few highly edited clips that show nothing. Pentagon employees who escaped the building were later visited in the hospital by federal officials who tried to pressure them into changing their stories about not having seen plane wreckage.
The few small bits of airplane wreckage found at the scene have not been confirmed by either the government or the manufacturers as coming from a Boeing 757.
Through a Freedom of Information Act request, the group Pilots for 9/11 Truth was provided with data that is supposedly from Flight 77’s Flight Data Recorder. Unfortunately for the government’s version of events, the latitude-longitude coordinates do not fit the flight’s supposed route. Another problem is that the Flight Data Recorder shows that the cockpit door remained closed throughout the flight. I wonder how Hani and his friends managed to get up there with their box-cutters?
Just the same, something made an approximately 19 foot wide initial hole in the Pentagon’s outer wall, before the wall later collapsed. Photographs of this tiny hole are easily available online. Even if the fuselage of the Boeing 757 had somehow managed to squeeze through the 19 foot wide hole, wouldn’t the wings, tail, and 2000 pound steel engines have been left outside? The official fairy tale is that part of the landing gear broke off and flew through the wall, with the rest of the plane vaporizing on impact. Honest, that’s the government’s story - the plane vaporized. Apparently this was not any ordinary landing gear that caused the hole, because it broke through not only the Pentagon’s outer ring, but the next two rings inward, as well, before finally coming to a stop. Of course, we’ve never been shown any photos or video of this magical landing gear.
While aluminum and steel airplane components completely “vaporized” in the fireball, we were told that deceased passengers of Flight 77 were identified by DNA, fingerprints, and drivers licenses. Maybe flesh and plastic “vaporize” at a higher temperature than aluminum and steel? Who writes this stuff?
Then there’s the purported Flight 93 crash site in Shanksville, Pennsylvania - you know, the plane where the brave passengers supposedly tried to overpower the evil terrorists. Just like the Pentagon crash site, once again no significant airplane wreckage (wings, tail section, fuselage, engines, landing gear) was ever seen or photographed or reported on from the twenty foot wide hole in the ground in rural Pennsylvania. In fact, once again, all reporters at the scene commented on the total absence of evidence of a plane crash. I refused to watch even a second of the 9/11 tributes this past week, but I’m willing to bet that none of these inconvenient first hand reports were re-broadcast. Luckily, the original footage of their comments is still readily available online.
We have all seen stills and television footage of plane crashes. Not surprisingly, they are generally recognized as such by plane wreckage. How many plane crash scene photos or videos have you ever seen where plane wreckage was absent? On September 11, 2001 we were asked to believe that this happened not once, but twice, the first two times in history.
As I said above, the World Trade Center crash sites are more complicated. Jetliners certainly crashed into the north and south towers, that part of the story we know for sure. However, these buildings were designed to withstand the impact of a large jetliner. The architect of the buildings described the effect of a jetliner crash into one of the towers as analogous to sticking a pencil into a screen door. You are left with a large hole, but the screen is otherwise still intact.
Even the government does not claim that the crashes themselves brought down the buildings. They claim instead that the buildings were brought down by the resulting fires, with the steel beams melting in the heat. This is where the government’s fabrication breaks down again. While there have been many high-rise fires over the years, never before in history has a steel-frame office building been brought down by fire. Yet, on September 11, 2001 we were asked to believe that this happened not once, not twice, but three times, the first three times in history.
Steel melts at approximately 3000° F., but the fires in the World Trade Center towers, as measured on the scene by the New York Fire Department, never got above 2000° F. You could claim that the steel was significantly weakened by the heat, bringing about the collapse, but there are a number of laws of physics that make that scenario not just unlikely, but impossible. Regardless, even if the weakened steel scenario was true, it does not explain the fact that all three WTC towers that collapsed that day had significant pools of molten steel in their basements - steel that has to have been heated to at least 3000° F. Beyond that, some of this steel remained molten for up to six weeks afterwards, indicating it reached a temperature far above its melting point of 3000° F.
Very few things can generate temperatures in excess of 3000° F. One of them is a substance called thermite, a high energy incendiary-explosive that generates temperatures in the neighborhood of 4000° F. and is used for cutting through steel. Guess what researchers found in both the molten steel and in dust samples from the surrounding area? The chemical signature for thermite was found in the molten steel in the basements of the towers and military-grade nano-thermite chips were found in the dust surrounding ground zero. That is about as clear an indication as you could ask for that the buildings were brought down through controlled demolition.
Finally, there’s World Trade Center Building 7. This building was not hit by an airplane and had only minor fires that had subsided by the time the 47-story structure came crashing down late in the afternoon of 9/11. The building collapsed at freefall speed (measurable in the videos taken) into its own footprint, with many people in the business considering it the most perfect execution ever of a controlled demolition. All the major television networks aired footage of this spectacular collapse when it first occurred, then rapidly disappeared their footage down the memory hole. Again, I don't suspect this inconvenient footage was aired during the 9/11 retrospectives. Luckily, once again, these clips are still widely available online, complete with the voice-overs of Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and others commenting on how much the collapse resembles a controlled demolition.
When presented with this evidence for the first time, many people ask why elements in our government would have done such a horrible thing. They just can’t see any rational reason for such horrific acts. However, with $4.00 a gallon gasoline at the pump, the answer is staring them in the face. Like it or not, our society has reached the end of the era of cheap fossil fuels. We have entered the end game for these resources, an era of constricting supplies and increasing demand. 9/11 plays a key role in this new reality.
Wars are not about retribution, or protecting freedom, or spreading democracy, or any other claptrap spouted by so-called leaders, they are about resources. Wars are always about resources. The war on Afghanistan was and is a war primarily about the control of fossil fuel resources, and the control of the planet’s dwindling fossil fuel resources has been a dominating factor in every other U.S. military involvement since 9/11 - Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya. The 9/11 myth, a jihad on America and our freedom perpetrated by Muslim extremists, has provided the pretext for these U.S. wars of aggression on the hydrocarbon-rich Muslim world. The story never changes - the same public justifications about fighting terrorism and restoring democracy, with the same underlying yet unspoken true goals.
The events of 9/11 are why the American people tolerated the U.S. entry into fossil fuel wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya. It’s why, when that fateful day arrives, that they will go along with war against Iran, a country with more oil than Iraq. So effective was 9/11, so afraid are Americans, that even self-described liberals voted en masse for a presidential candidate that promised to escalate the illegal war in Afghanistan - about the only campaign pledge Obama has kept, by the way.
The events of 9/11 are also why the American people tolerate the continuing erosion of their civil liberties. Elements in the government undoubtedly see the handwriting on the wall. Our society is dependent on cheap oil - not just for transportation and heating, but for agriculture, electricity, manufacturing - for just about everything. As the supply of oil is constricted and prices rise, it will not be pretty. Throw in the ever-increasing meteorological disasters brought on by climate change and a government devoting more and more of its resources to fossil fuel wars, and you have a pretty good recipe for chaos. If you don't believe this, check out what the Pentagon has to say about climate change. With the PATRIOT Act and numerous other laws and policies instituted since 9/11, more every year, the government is putting in place the tools it feels it needs to control this coming chaos.
It is clear that our so-called leaders intend to continue milking 9/11 as long as they possibly can to justify their fossil fuel wars abroad and draconian policies at home. On the tenth anniversary of the attack, Leon Panetta, U.S. Defense Secretary said to the assembled crowd, "To this day, and by these memorials to each victim, we pledge to never forget the enemy that made this happen, why we fight them, and why we will never stop fighting them to make sure that what happened here, in New York City, and in that field in Pennsylvania never happens again."
We will NEVER stop fighting them? Never is a really long time. When 9/11 no longer works as motivation, it is reasonable to expect another similar event to reinvigorate us.
In case you still believe that all these wars and retractions of our civil liberties are designed to protect American lives, think again. It should be pretty obvious to Americans that the U.S. government is not interested in protecting the lives of its citizens, not really. As just one of hundreds and hundreds of examples I could point out, on the Friday before Labor Day, President Obama asked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw a plan to limit smog pollution that was projected to prevent 2,200 heart attacks and 23,000 asthma attacks annually, and prevent as many as 12,000 premature deaths annually from heart and lung complications. 12,000 premature deaths a year! And how many people died in the 9/11 attacks? Weigh the 12,000 premature deaths against the number of people killed in this country by Muslim terrorists since September 10, 2011. If you discount the 9/11 attacks, which I do, that number is exactly zero.
We also know that the U.S. government is not interested in protecting the lives of its citizens because our own intelligence services have told us that the actions of the U.S. military in the Middle East and Central Asia are actually creating a greater terrorist threat for U.S. citizens. That only makes sense doesn't it? How would you respond if the invading armies of a foreign power killed your innocent children, wife, or mother? Every time U.S. forces kill another innocent civilian, they potentially create at least several more terrorists, people out to avenge the deaths of their loved ones.
During the Republican presidential debate on Sept 12th, Republican candidate Ron Paul was more forthright than most candidates dare to be. He told the audience, "We’re under great threat because we occupy so many countries…..We have to be honest with ourselves. What would we do if another country, say China, did to us what we do to all those countries over there?"
We now have an unprecedented situation in this country, with an ever-increasing militarization of U.S. global policy, a war-making apparatus insisting on a state of permanent war, and war becoming the new “normal”. The illegal war on Afghanistan is now the longest running war in U.S. history. Since taking office in January 2009, the current war criminal in the Oval Office has kept the U.S. war machine set on “KILL”. Now with General David Petraeus elevated to director of the CIA, we can expect that agency’s secret drone war to be ramped up throughout the Middle East and Central Asia, along with the operation of CIA assassination teams.
The U.S. security apparatus, already huge before 9/11, has grown exponentially since then. The U.S. has 16 main agencies dealing with intelligence and counterterrorism, but according to an exposé published a year ago by the Washington Post, “Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.”
At a time when social services in the U.S. are being cut left and right, we’ve entered an era of military spending that is the highest since World War II. When all is said and done and everything is counted, including all the hidden costs (e.g. nuclear weapons development under the Dept. of Energy and the CIA’s secret drone war), the U.S. is now spending more than $1.2 trillion a year on the national security budget.
We can’t go on like this. I don't want to live in a police state or a surveillance state, I don’t want to live in a nation where the constitution is considered irrelevant, I don't want to live in a nation run by war criminals, and I don't want to live in a nation engaged in an endless war on the Muslim world for control of its fossil fuel resources.
I want to live in a nation that recognizes the need to leave fossil fuels behind and shift to renewable energy to combat global warming. I want to live in a nation that respects an individual’s right to privacy and free speech. I want to live in a country that respects the rights of other nations and respects the lives of the citizens of those nations. I want to live in a nation that recognizes that we have grave challenges ahead and decides to tackle them in a sane, humane, and democratic fashion.
However, before those changes in governance can happen, the truth about 9/11 needs to come out, and it needs to come out yesterday. Instead of a 9/11 commission stacked with administration insiders, we need a truly independent investigation of the events of 9/11 by a commission with the power to subpoena witnesses, and the power to compel testimony under oath.
If these issues concern you and you would like to become more informed or more involved, the 9/11 Truth Movement is a good place to begin - www.911truth.org
I’ll end with several more appropriate quotes…
“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” - Benjamin Franklin
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire
“No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” - James Madison
“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.” – Lao Tzu
Paul Donahue
Pacifica, California
15 September 2011