SEPTEMBER 11 2001 : THE CRIMES OF WAR COMMITTED IN THE NAME OF 9/11

WILL AMERICA FACE THE TRUTH ABOUT 9/11?
Mark H. Gaffney

02/24/07 "ICH" -- - -In June 1, 2001 the US Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a new order regarding cases of aircraft piracy, i.e., hijackings. The new order (CJCSI 3610.01A), signed by Vice Admiral S. A. Fry, Director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, canceled the existing order (CJCSI 3610.01) that had been in effect since July 1997. When I learned about this, recently, I became intrigued. The date of the new order, just three months prior to 9/11, seemed too near that fateful day to be mere coincidence. I should mention that I have always been skeptical of the official 9/11 narrative. The June 2001 order was like a red flag drawing attention to an insistent question: Why did the US military alter its hijack policy a few months before 9/11? Why, indeed?

When I first examined the document, which, by the way, is still posted on the internet, my excitement increased.[i] The order states that when hijackings occur the military’s operational commanders at the pentagon and at the North American Aerospace Command (NORAD) must contact the secretary of defense for approval and further instruction. At that time, of course, this was Donald Rumsfeld. Was the new order, therefore, evidence of a policy change made for the purpose of engineering a stand-down on 9/11? This was plausible, assuming that a group of evildoers within the Bush administration wanted a terrorist plot to succeed for their own twisted reasons. And what might those reasons be? Well, obviously, to create the pretext for a much more aggressive US foreign policy that the American people would not otherwise support. We know, for instance, that the plans to invade Afghanistan were already sitting on President Bush’s desk on 9/11, awaiting his signature.

Did the US military achieve a stand-down on 9/11 by means of an ordinary administrative memo? Several prominent 9/11 investigators had already drawn this conclusion, including Jim Marrs, who is a very capable journalist. Marrs discussed the June 1, 2001 pentagon order in his fine book, The Terror Conspiracy. Filmmaker Dylan Avery is another. He mentioned the order in a similar context in his popular video, Loose Change (Second Edition). A third investigator, Webster Griffin Tarpley, did likewise in his book, 9/11 Synthetic Terror, one of the deepest examinations of 9/11 in print.[ii] Although initially I agreed with their conclusion, after studying the document more closely I found reason to change my mind. Fortunately, the previous July 1997 order is still available for download via the internet.[iii]

Close inspection of the two documents, side by side, shows that the previous order also required notification of the secretary of defense in cases of hijackings. In fact, there was almost no change in the language on this point. Obviously, the basic policy remained in effect, and can be summarized as follows: Although operational commanders have the authority to make decisions of the moment in cases of hijackings, they are also required to notify the secretary of defense, who must be kept in the loop, and who may chose to intervene at any time.

Side by side, the two documents are almost identical. But there is one difference. The new order includes an extra passage in the policy section that mentions two new kinds of airborne vehicles, “unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)” and “remotely operated vehicles (ROVs).” The order states that these are to be regarded as “a potential threat to public safety.” But why did two new categories of aerial vehicles require the drafting of a new order, especially since the basic policy did not change? I puzzled over this for some time, until I stumbled upon a news story about the Global Hawk, prompting further investigations. These have convinced me that the June 1, 2001 pentagon order could be one of the keys to what happened on 9/11.

As we shall see, the answer is not obvious. The technology I will now describe certainly was not on my radar screen. Like most Americans I had no clue. I went about my affairs blithely unaware that technological advances were altering our world nearly beyond recognition. While it is true that technology holds amazing potentials to improve our lives, and to free us from drudgery, make no mistake, it can just as easily enslave us. Nor are technology’s most hopeful possibilities likely to be realized so long as its cutting edge remains shrouded in secrecy for reasons of national security–––in my opinion one of the most abused expressions in our language. It’s become clear to this writer that if ordinary citizens do not awaken, and soon, to the insidious dangers that new technologies pose to our freedoms, the faceless individuals and nameless puppeteers who command them will carry the day. In that case the experiment in self-government that began with the drafting of the US Constitution more than 200 years ago will have come to a dark end.

A Cautionary Tale:

The Flight of the Global Hawk

On April 22-23, 2001, just weeks before the pentagon issued the new hijack order, an unmanned aircraft, the RQ-4A US Global Hawk, completed its maiden 7,500 mile flight from Edwards AFB in southern California to Edinburgh AFB in South Australia.[iv] The nonstop 8,600 mile passage across the Pacific took only 22 hours and set an endurance record for an unmanned vehicle. In early June, after a dozen joint-exercises with the Australian military, the drone returned to California. The previous year the Global Hawk made a similar transatlantic run to Europe, where it participated in NATO exercises.

You are probably thinking: So what? What is so special about the Global Hawk? And how does it relate to 9/11? I’ll get to the second question in a moment. Rod Smith, the Australian Global Hawk manager, answered the first when he said: “The aircraft essentially flies itself....from takeoff, right through to landing, and even taxiing off the runway.”[v] The drone follows a preprogrammed flight plan, although ground controllers monitor it and remain in control. The jet-powered craft is 44 feet long, has a wingspan the equivalent of a Boeing 737, and can remain aloft for 42 hours. It flies at extremely high altitudes, up to 65,000 feet, and has a range of 14,000 nautical miles. The name Global Hawk is not a misnomer. The drone truly has a global reach. Its cruising speed is nothing special, about 400 mph, but its ability to reconnoiter vast areas of geography is amazing. In a single flight the bird can surveil an area the size of Illinois: more than 50,000 square miles. It comes equipped with advanced radar, infrared and electro-optical sensors, i.e., cameras that can return up to 1,900 high-resolution images during a single flight.

No doubt, these impressive vitals explain why the US military immediately drafted the Global Hawk for intelligence gathering purposes. The bird flew during Operation Enduring Freedom, i.e., Bush’s October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan; and it subsequently saw wide use in Iraq. During the last year alone Global Hawk drones flew at least 50 combat missions over Iraq and Afghanistan and logged 1,000 hours of flight time. During the summer of 2006 the Israelis used similar technology during their aerial campaign against Lebanon. In fact, the Israelis pioneered the use of drones in 1982 during a previous invasion of their northern neighbor. The US first employed drones in 1983 when Ronald Reagan ordered the invasion of Grenada, a small island nation in the Caribbean. According to various reports, Global Hawk surveillance of Iran is ongoing as I write.

Development of the Global Hawk began in 1995, with the first air trials at Edwards AFB in 1998. But ROV technology originated long before this. Dylan Avery’s excellent 9/11 film Loose Change (Second Edition) includes a video segment from a NASA flight test carried out in 1984, also at Edwards AFB. During the 16-hour exercise ground pilots remotely controlled a Boeing 720, guiding it through 10 successful takeoffs, numerous approaches, and 13 landings. The test ended with a pre-planned crash. In fact, there is ample evidence the US military began experimenting with radio-controlled aircraft as early as the 1950s. The military’s use of drones for target practice in war games and military exercises is well known, and has been standard practice for many years.

When Was the Beginning?

In late September 2001, just weeks after the 9/11 attack, George W. Bush mentioned ROV technology while discussing ways to improve airline safety. In a public statement reported by the New York Times Bush promised federal grants for stronger cockpit doors, new transponders that cannot be turned off, and video cameras that will allow a pilot to monitor the passenger section of a commercial jetliner. Notably, Bush also hinted that new technology one day would make it possible for air traffic controllers to land hijacked planes by remote-control. He implied that this helpful technology belonged to the future.[vi]

Yet, there is evidence it may already have existed when Bush spoke, and even before 9/11. Shortly after the September 11, 2001 attack a small Arizona-based high-tech company named KinetX, together with another firm named Cogitek, proposed such a system to the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA). In a white paper the two firms claimed that their National Flight Emergency Response System (NFERS), as they called it, would prevent 9/11-style hijackings in the future. They insisted that a prototype could be up and running within a year. The white paper described NFERS as “the integration of existing technology for the purpose of transferring cockpit operations to a secure ground station in case of an emergency.” The paper states: “It is important to note that the essential technology exists now.” [vii] [my emphasis] According to the KinetX web site, the FAA never responded to their proposal. However, in January 2006 the Boeing company announced the patent for a similar system.[viii] Boeing’s “auto-land system” reportedly involves an onboard processor. Once activated, it overrides the cockpit controls and guides a hijacked plane to an emergency landing. The auto-land system can be preprogramed into the plane’s autopilot, or operated remotely by ground controllers. It can be activated in several different ways, either directly by the pilot during a hijacking in progress, or indirectly by sensors installed in the cockpit door, which would be tripped by forcible entry; or, lastly, by ground controllers via a remote link.

Here’s my point: Was Boeing’s auto-land system truly a new development in 2006? Or: did the aircraft giant merely pull preexisting hardware off the shelf, as KinetX proposed in 2001 with its NFERS system? The pentagon order of June 1, 2001 strongly suggests that from the standpoint of the US military ROV technology had matured by the spring of 2001, even before 9/11. When was the last time the US military developed a new technology after private industry, or even simultaneously with it? It’s well known that military research & development programs always receive the best available resources and expertise. For which reason the military generally leads the way in technology, usually by at least ten years, sometimes by much more. The emergence of the internet is an obvious example. As we know, the US military developed cyberspace many years before it exploded into the civilian sector. It stands to reason ROV technology may have followed a similar path.

This raises disturbing questions. Did George W. Bush wander off his crib sheet in late September 2001 in his remarks about aircraft safety? Did Bush blunder when he mentioned ROV technology in the same breath with 9/11? Surely one does not need a Ph.D. in rocket science to know that what holds for the goose is also true for the gander. Could not the same ROV technology designed to foil hijackers also be used to commit acts of terrorism, such as, flying planes into tall buildings? Certainly it could, depending on who is at the controls. It’s tempting to wonder just how much (or how little) George W. Bush knew (and knows) about September 11. It’s a fair question, and here’s another: Did Bush come within a whisker of giving the game away?

Joe Vialls’ “back door” theory

According to an aeronautical engineer named Joe Vialls, the technology to capture planes via remote control has been around for a very long time. If he is correct, the US military developed the technology as far back as the mid 1970s–––in response to a sharp upsurge in terrorist hijackings during this period. According to Vialls the project involved two American multinationals in collaboration with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The goal was to facilitate the remote recovery of hijacked American aircraft. Vialls claimed the effort succeeded brilliantly in developing the means, first, to listen in on cockpit conversations in a target aircraft; and, second, to take absolute control of the plane’s computerized flight control system by means of a remote channel. The aim was to cut the hijackers out of the control loop, meanwhile, empowering ground controllers to return a hijacked plane to a chosen airport, where police would deal with the terrorists. To be “truly effective,” however, the new technology “had to be completely integrated with all onboard systems.” This could only be achieved by incorporating the system into a new aircraft design. Vialls charged this is exactly what happened. A high-level decision was made and Boeing very quietly included a “back door” into the computer designs for two new commercial planes then on the drawing boards: the 767 and 757. Both planes went into production in the early 1980s.

Vialls shocked even internet users when he posted all of this on his web site in October 2001.[ix] He contended that the system, although designed for the best of intentions, fell prey to a security leak. Somehow the secret computer codes fell into the hands of evildoers within the Bush administration, who surreptitiously used the remote channel on 9/11. Armed with the secret codes–––Vialls charged–––the conspirators activated the hidden channel built into the transponders and simply took over the flight controls. Whether or not the alleged nineteen hijackers were actually on board was uncertain. But the issue clearly was of secondary importance since fanatical Muslims were not flying the planes.

Crucially, on 9/11, not one of the eight commercial pilots and copilots sent the standard signal alerting FAA authorities that a hijacking was in progress.[x] Sending this signal, or “squawking,” as it is called, takes only a few seconds, and is done by activating a cockpit device known as an ELT (emergency locator transmitter). A pilot simply keys-in a four-digit code and the message “I have been hijacked” flashes on the screen at ground control. The fact that none of the pilots or copilots transmitted this standard SOS on 9/11 was suspicious, the first indication to Vialls that the planes were being flown by remote means. Vialls concluded that once the evildoers had commandeered the transponders the pilots lost the ability to transmit. Additional evidence turned up in a video of the last seconds of Flight 175. According to Vialls, the footage is anomalous because it shows the plane executing a maneuver during its final approach that exceeds the normal software limitations of a 767. Boeing jets are designed with liability concerns in mind, as well as passenger safety. Flight control software prevents a pilot from making steep turns that pull substantial “g” forces. Such turns run the risk of injuring passengers, especially the aged and infirm, which could result in costly lawsuits. Since a pilot cannot normally make such a maneuver, this was powerful evidence that the plane was under remote control.



The Critics Respond

Debunkers, of course, had a field day trying to discredit both Vialls and his 9/11 scenario. What is surprising is that, five years later, his ideas continue to have traction despite the debunkers. Let us now discuss the more thoughtful criticisms. Some pointed out that the flight controls on Boeing 767s and 757s, while fully computerized, are not fly-by-wire designs like newer planes, including the Global Hawk. On the contrary, they are mechanical beasts with hydraulically assisted cable and pulley controls. Therefore, according to these critics, a Boeing pilot always has the option of turning “off” the autopilot and flying manually.[xi] One anonymous critic who claims to be a Boeing maintenance technician has argued that even in the worst case a 757 or 767 pilot could simply pull the electrical breakers, shutting down the power supply to the onboard computers. This would allow him to regain control and fly the old fashioned way, that is, by the seat of his pants, though, no doubt, with considerably more difficulty. Such criticisms, I fully acknowledge, may well be correct. The problem is that under the circumstances it’s impossible to evaluate them, without additional information. Unfortunately, short of hacking into Boeing’s corporate files there is no way to determine whether the company did or did not engineer a hidden override system into its 767s and 757s. Nor can Vialls help us, unfortunately, since he passed on more than a year ago.

The story has an intriguing addendum. Vialls also contended that after taking delivery of a fleet of Boeing jetliners in the 1990s officials at Lufthansa airlines made a shocking discovery. By chance, they stumbled onto the hidden ROV system, at which point, according to Vialls, Lufthansa, concerned about the security of its fleet, went to considerable trouble and expense to remove the original flight control system, and replace it with one of German design. Insofar as I know, the story remains unconfirmed. On the other hand, it will not die–––there is yet another twist. In 2003 Andreas von Buelow, a former minister of research and technology in the German government, authored a book, The CIA and September 11, in which he discussed Joe Vialls’ remote control theory and called for a new investigation. Von Buelow also made a stunning charge of his own: that the 9/11 attack was not the work of Islamic extremists, but was an inside job orchestrated by the CIA. As a former high official in the German defense ministry, was Von Buelow privy to the details about Lufthansa’s experience with Boeing? At present, unfortunately, there are many more questions than answers. For which reason I call on Lufthansa and Boeing to come to our assistance by disclosing their corporate records to an independent team of inspectors.

In recent years Andreas von Buelow has not backed away from the controversial opinions expressed in his book. In radio interviews he has said that the “hijacked” planes on 9/11 were most likely guided by some form of remote control. He thinks 9/11 was a black operation carried out by a small group within the US intelligence community, numbering fewer than 50 people.[xii]

The Latency Period Issue

Other critics came at Vialls from a different direction. They claimed that potential 9/11 conspirators would never use ROV technology because of the so called latency period issue. In short, flying planes by remote control involves a troublesome time delay, which makes precision flying difficult if not impossible.[xiii] These critics have cited the astronomical accident rate for drone aircraft–––100 times higher than for manned planes. Take, for instance, another type of US surveillance-and-attack drone known as the Predator. Out of 135 of these unmanned planes delivered and used in military operations, at least 50 have crashed, and 34 others suffered serious accidents.[xiv] Obviously, such numbers do not inspire confidence. For this reason, contend these critics, 9/11 conspirators would have rejected ROV technology out of hand as too unreliable.

The argument sounds plausible, but is easily refuted. A look at the specifications for the Global Hawk shows that there are two different ways to remotely control an aircraft, only one of which involves a time delay. The first is via a remote link, i.e., a communications satellite, which does indeed involve a latency period. The second means of control, however, is direct line-of-sight, and involves no such a thing. Evildoers determined to fly planes into the World Trade Center (WTC) could have easily overcome the latency period issue by setting up a nearby command center, for example, in Building 7 (WTC 7). They may also have needed rooftop cameras or other equipment to provide a real-time video feed. Once controllers in the command center established visual contact, they would have merely switched from the remote link to line-of-sight, and then, would have guided the jetliner in during its final approach. Remember, the final approach was the only place where slop in the controls would matter.

Equipment on the Roof?

It’s curious that in 1993, at the time of the first WTC bombing, dozens of workers climbed to the rooftop where they were rescued by helicopters. But no such exodus occurred on 9/11. Many people trapped on the upper floors did try to reach the roof, but, unfortunately, they could not because someone had locked the exit doors. We know this from cell phone calls made by the victims in the final desperate moments. One can well imagine their horror, after fleeing toxic smoke, heat and flames, only to find there would be no escape. Surely at this point they must have known they were doomed. We were told the doors were locked for security reasons, but this was never fully explained. Was the actual reason more sinister? Yes, perhaps, assuming evildoers had installed cameras and perhaps other equipment atop each tower to supply a direct video feed. In that case the plotters had good reason to lock the doors: to prevent the accidental discovery of their foul plan by some unsuspecting tenant wandering about the roof on his noon lunch break. Another even darker motive may have been to minimize the chance that survivors would live to tell undesirable stories about bombs exploding in the core of the buildings. Due to the smoke and heat, helicopter rescue would have been difficult, but not impossible. Notice, this would also explain the demolition of WTC 7. No doubt, the command center had been equipped with a substantial amount of hardware. Nor could this be removed after the fact without running grave risks. Therefore, WTC 7 had to come down, to destroy the evidence.

The Mystery Plane

As for the pentagon strike, there were multiple reports of a second plane in the sky at the time of the attack. Eyewitnesses described it as a C-130 military transport. They say it closely followed Flight 77, but peeled off after the crash and flew away.[xv] The 9/11 Commission Report mentions this second plane, confirms that it was a military C-130H, and briefly describes its involvement, now a part of the official 9/11 narrative.[xvi] According to the report the C-130H “had just taken off en route to Minnesota.” From another source I learned it departed from nearby Andrews AFB, in Maryland.[xvii] Supposedly, air traffic controllers at Reagan Airport (located south of the pentagon) requested the C-130H pilot to “identify and follow the suspicious aircraft,” presumably Flight 77. I shook my head in disbelief when I read this passage, since when has the FAA or the military used C-130 transports to intercept hostile aircraft? Why indeed was this plane shadowing Flight 77? The strange rendezvous raises questions that the panel should have investigated, but the 9/11 report gives us no further information. Evidently, we are supposed to believe this other plane just happened to be in the vicinity at the time of the attack. The panel’s failure to examine a matter of such obvious importance is the clearest indication that the 9/11 commission was not a serious investigation, but a staged event, like a show trial, whose purpose was not to learn the truth but to give the appearance of an investigation.

As Flight 77 approached the pentagon it reportedly made a sweeping 330 degree turn. Whereupon its pilot–––Hani Hanjour?–––“advanced the throttles to maximum power” and rapidly descended 2,200 feet into the west wing.[xviii] The impact site was “lucky,” as we know, since this portion of the building was undergoing renovation. In fact, the job was only days away from completion. For this reason the number of fatalities was sharply reduced. But wait a minute: Why would real terrorists determined to immolate themselves in a fiery suicide attack go out of their way to inflict the fewest possible casualties, when they could easily have murdered thousands in one fell swoop? Wouldn’t real terrorists try to decapitate the US military by taking out the high command? It was no secret the offices of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the other military brass were located in the east wing, on the opposite side of the building. The alleged hijackers could easily have targeted them simply by crashing into the pentagon roof. Out of 125 victims (not counting the passengers) only one general died.[xix] Many of the fatalities were civilian personnel from the pentagon’s accounting office, a majority of whom were killed. Needless to say, I found all of this peculiar.

Recall that on September 10, 2001 Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted in a public statement that $2.3 trillion in military appropriations had gone missing, i.e., was unaccounted for.[xx] Yet, the following day, on the evening of 9/11, just hours after the attack, indeed, even as fires were still burning in the west wing, Rumsfeld had the chutzpah to go before the Senate Armed Services Committee and berate its chairman Senator Carl Levin for inadequately funding the military.[xxi] The shakedown was extremely effective. Soon after, as we know, Congress passed a $40 billion special appropriations bill for the “war on terrorism,” and, ever since, Congress has essentially handed the pentagon a blank check. All of this happened with hardly a word of protest. Notably, the military windfall also meant sharp funding increases for the US Space Command.

The Ultimate High Ground

As a result, today the US military is forging ahead with plans to weaponize space. True, the basic research and development programs were already in place during the Clinton administration, which funded the Space Command to the tune of about $6 billion annually. The actual figures, of course, are unknown, and undoubtedly are higher since a good deal of this research is classified. Much of it falls within the ‘black’ budget, the actual size of which no one seems to know. How all of this came to pass is extremely important, because it set the stage for 9/11. So, let us quickly review, as briefly as possible.

Space satellites first proved their worth to the US military in 1991 during Operation Desert Storm, when the US drove Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. Their vital communications and surveillance role during the desert campaign led to a policy debate within the Clinton administration about the next phase. The policy question was: Should we weaponize space? Hawkish generals saw this as the shape of the future, and some of them made blunt public statements. In 1996, for example, General Joseph Ashy, who then headed the US Space Command, told Aviation Week & Space Technology that the agenda was “politically sensitive, but it’s going to happen. Some people don’t want to hear this, and it sure isn’t in vogue, but, absolutely, we’re going to fight in space. We’re going to fight from space and we’re going to fight into space.”[xxii] No doubt, Ashy was speaking for many in the pentagon who believe that outer space is the ultimate high ground, from which to dominate events on earth. General Ashy put it this way: “We will engage terrestrial targets someday, ships, airplanes, land targets, from space. We will engage targets in space, from space.” Which, of course, means deploying weapons in space. In 1997 Keith Hall, Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, made a similar point in an address to the National Space Club, when he said: “With regard to space dominance, we have it, we like it, and we’re going to keep it.”[xxiii]

Full Spectrum Dominance

The same candid language can be found in a number of vision documents released by the pentagon during this period. All of them made the case for US control of space. One 1997 document called Vision for 2020 outlined sweeping plans for “full spectrum dominance,” which it defined as “the synergy of space superiority with land, sea and air superiority.”[xxiv] Another 1998 report, The Long Range Plan, much in the same vein, used language replete with phrases like “Control of Space,” “Full Force Integration,” and “Global Engagement.”[xxv] These and other vision papers emphasized the marriage of corporate and military interests.

It’s no wonder that as the pentagon’s R&D programs moved ahead in the 1990s, the international community looked on with growing alarm. Many states feared that the US had violated, or was preparing to violate, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. This was ironic, since for many years the US had been a staunch supporter of the space treaty. Indeed, the US played a vital role in its creation. After the launch of Sputnik in 1957, Washington and Moscow both realized that preventing an arms race in space was in their mutual interest. The 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty barred nuclear tests from space, and the 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibited weapons of mass destruction. The latter defined space as a neutral sanctuary available to all nations for peaceful uses.



With the disturbing prospect of an arms race in space looming even during the Clinton presidency, in 1999 China and Russia brought a resolution before the United Nations to strengthen the Outer Space Treaty. The resolution called for negotiations to add a provision banning all weapons from space. The vote was nearly unanimous, with 163 nations in favor, and none opposed. However, the US and two other states abstained–––Israel and Micronesia. The following year the UN debated the resolution again, and it passed by the same wide margin. Again, the US abstained. These UN votes were a signal, obvious to everyone except perhaps Americans, who invariably are the last to know what their government is doing, that the world’s lone remaining superpower, in the wake of the Cold War, might be on the verge of flexing its military muscles. The Republican-controlled US Senate had already put the planet on notice in 1998 when it rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTB), which Clinton supported. The near-collapse of the 2000 Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference was another hint that a sea-change was brewing. As we know, the 2005 NPT Review Conference did collapse, after President Bush sent a budgetary request to Congress for nuclear bunker-busters. The move was a blatant signal to the world that the US government was not interested in taking even one meaningful step toward nuclear disarmament, but, in fact, was determined to move in the opposite direction. Bush’s appropriations request was a clear violation of Article VI of the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). No wonder the conference broke up in disarray after failing even to agree on an agenda.



Hawkish generals in the pentagon, including Richard Myers and Ralph Eberhart, both former chiefs of the US Space Command, viewed these developments through their own dark lens. Pentagon hawks strongly opposed the Test Ban, even though it would have locked the US into a position of nuclear superiority, since it also “threatened” to tie America’s hands–––in their view a disaster. They believed the US must be unconstrained in the use of its power. The generals also chaffed under Clinton’s lackluster, i.e., centrist, performance in foreign policy. But probably their biggest beef was his restraint on space. Though Clinton allowed R&D to move ahead, he remained committed to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, and so, forbade the deployment of space weapons. Hawks found this unacceptable, because they believed the US had to move quickly and decisively to take control of the high ground. For only by consolidating its preeminent position could the US thwart all challengers in the foreseeable future.



Hawks and Neo Cons:

A Marriage of Convenience



Not surprisingly, pentagon hawks welcomed the new Bush administration. After all, the neo cons shared many of the same goals. In 1999 the neo cons had boldly released their own vision document, Rebuilding America’s Defenses. The paper, which can still be downloaded from the internet, calls for the “transformation” of US military forces, and emphasizes the need to control outer space.[xxvi] The document mentions with regret that most Americans do not favor the aggressive use of US military power in the world. For this reason–––the document states–––the necessary changes will proceed slowly, that is, barring some new external threat capable of galvanizing the nation, such as another Pearl Harbor. Here, the neo cons may have borrowed a page from Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter. In his influential 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski had noted with similar frustration and puzzlement this inability of Americans to recognize the imperial virtues. Brzezinski had argued anyway that America must somehow overcome this “weakness” of character and fulfill its historic destiny as global superpower.



Everything Bush and the neo cons have done closely followed this script. A report released by Donald Rumsfeld in January 2001 laid out the plans in more detail. The report warned that US intelligence satellites were vulnerable to a “space Pearl Harbor,” i.e., a sneak attack. Rumsfeld also favored scrapping the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty (ABM), which he regarded as an impediment to “transformation.”[xxvii] Sure enough, before year’s end President G.W. Bush announced the termination of the ABM treaty, paving the way for his so-called missile defense initiative (SDI). Bush’s action prompted a 2002 lawsuit by 33 members of Congress led by Dennis Kucinich (D - Ohio), who charged that Bush’s unilateral action was illegal, a violation of Article II, section 2 of the US Constitution, which invests Congress, not the executive, with the authority to make /abrogate international treaties. By canceling a treaty without the assent of Congress Bush assumed the powers of a dictator.[xxviii]



In Your Face From Outer Space



In fact, Bush misled the nation about SDI, since missile defense of the continental US was only one part of the package. SDI’s broader goal was to secure American global economic “interests and investments.” The neo con logic went as follows: In a world of increasing competition for scarce resources the US military must be prepared to fend off challenges by have-not nations and so called rogue states; and this will entail denying to others the use of space. Why? Simple: to maintain US supremacy–––currently unrivaled. Moreover, and this is crucial, the doctrine also insists that the US has the right to preemptively attack those who seek not to defeat the US, but simply to deter US military power. Toward these ends the US Space Command would eventually deploy offensive weapons such as space-based lasers and kinetic energy weapons, possibly powered by nuclear reactors. By the way, the motto of the US Space Warfare Center, one of the labs where the US conducts research, is: “In Your Face From Outer Space.” This scrap of Ramboesque doggerel is probably a true glimpse of the future, if Americans don’t soon retake control over their government.



The march to the right continued. In 2002 the Department of Defense (DoD) merged the US Space Command with STRATCOM, the Strategic Command (the old Strategic Air Command, or SAC). The logic was simple. The pursuit of full spectrum dominance now required a unified command structure.



In 2005 the US changed its vote at the UN. By now, the space treaty resolution had become an annual event. This time, however, instead of abstaining as in previous years, the US cast the lone “No.”[xxix] It was a historic shift in policy, yet, insofar as I am aware it went unreported in the sleepy US press.



More recently, in August 2006, President Bush authorized a formal statement of US space policy, the first official redraft since 1996. The declassified portion of the document states that in the future the US will reject all arms control agreements that might in any way constrain US flexibility in space.[xxx]



The Chinese Response



All of these developments surely explain the recent brouhaha with China. On January 11, 2007 the Chinese destroyed one of their own aging satellites with a ballistic missile, prompting outrage in Washington and protests from half a dozen other nations.[xxxi] The Chinese exercise was a clear escalation from last summer when, according to reports, the Chinese “painted” a US satellite using a ground-based laser. Not surprisingly, as a result, conservatives are now calling on Bush to take the needed steps to defend US satellites; which, unfortunately, will almost certainly involve deploying weapons in space–––a huge step and a huge mistake, since precipitate action can only make matters worse. While I agree that the recent incidents are alarming, it does not follow that China is an emerging threat. The Chinese are merely responding to what the US is already doing. Two years ago Hui Zhang, a China expert at Harvard, cautioned that the Chinese regard Bush’s SDI program as a serious threat to their national security.[xxxii] The Chinese are worried that the US is trying to achieve a first-strike nuclear capability. They fear that if the US succeeds in neutralizing China’s modest nuclear deterrent (which numbers 20-30 ICBMs), Washington will then be able to use its military prowess to blackmail Beijing, hence, interfere in China’s internal affairs. From China’s standpoint the issue is one of national sovereignty. The Russians have similar concerns, and according to Dr. Helen Caldicott have taken extraordinary measures to preserve their deterrent. In an address at the 2006 Perdana Global Peace Forum, Dr. Caldicott claimed that the Russians have installed a special doomsday facility in the Ural Mountains–––to be activated at the push of a button. Should a US nuclear surprise attack destroy Moscow, decapitating the Russian government, a special communications missile will launch and transmit the attack code to all surviving Russian ICBMs, which will then launch automatically. The dead Russian leadership thus will reach out from the grave to exact nuclear retribution on America.



Unfortunately, both China and Russia have good reason to worry. In 2006 two American professors warned that under Bush the US has indeed been moving toward a first-strike nuclear advantage, and already has come perilously close.[xxxiii] Even as I write the Bush administration is moving ahead with the most sweeping realignment of the US nuclear force structure since the Cold War.[xxxiv]



SDI: back to the future



The actions of the Bush administration, especially its SDI program, have made the world a much more unstable place. Missile defense systems have never been proven effective in principle, and Bush’s SDI program is no different. For this reason the vast expenditures that are involved amount to a huge corporate boondogle–––a swindle of the American taxpayer. Even if the US eventually deploys such a system, it will have no defensive value, since it could easily be overwhelmed. For this reason, as critics have charged, such a system only “makes sense” as part of a nuclear first-strike capability, for the purpose of staving off a much diminished retaliatory response. This is the reason missile defense systems are so destabilizing. Ironically, this was the same argument, no less valid today, that persuaded Washington and Moscow to draft the 1972 ABM Treaty in the first place. The treaty banned most missile defense systems. The difference in 2007, of course, is that the Soviet Union is no more. Evidently the neo cons now feel unencumbered to pursue their mad fantasies of a US global imperium, backed up by the threat of nuclear first use.



After the recent incident, Liu Jianchao, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, emphasized that “China opposes the weaponization of space and an arms race in space.” Jianchao went on: “What needs to be stressed is that China has always advocated the peaceful use of space.”[xxxv] He was not lying. Since 2002 China and Russia have attempted to persuade the Bush administration to sit down and negotiate a new treaty that would ban all weapons from space. Such a treaty makes excellent sense, and would benefit all nations, including the US, for obvious reasons. Verification would present no insuperable problems. In fact, the more nations that possess orbiting intelligence satellites the more secure the world will become, since everyone will be monitoring everyone else. The basic issue is quite simple and is understood around the world, everywhere, that is, except here in the US. The Bush administration has obstinately refused to negotiate–––just as it has refused to talk in the cases of Iran, North Korea, the Palestinians, the International Tribunal, the Kyoto protocols, on and on.



Clearly, the neo cons and hawkish generals have set the United States on a collision course not only with China and Russia, but, indeed, with every nation that has legitimate scientific and economic interests in space. The recent Chinese test is a warning of what the future will hold if the US does not soon join with the world community in banning weapons from the next frontier. Yet, how many Americans understand these issues? Few, I would bet. And even fewer understand the connection with 9/11, the pivotal event that spawned the Bush doctrines of perpetual warfare and the weaponization of space. Looking back in 2004, General Peter Schoomaker, Army Chief of Staff, had reason to feel smug when he pointed out that 9/11 had “a huge silver lining.”[xxxvi] It certainly did–––for some.



Yes, Generals Do Lie



I have shown that pentagon hawks and neo cons share a grand strategy that is inimical to the greater good. For which reason their global agenda was, from a political standpoint, virtually unobtainable through functioning democratic institutions. This establishes a powerful motive. But does it follow that they conspired to subvert democracy to achieve their sweeping goals? Were they complicit in 9/11? Or, worse: did they stage the attack? Such a conclusion, of course, would not necessarily follow–––were it not for the incriminating fact that Generals Eberhart and Myers lied to the 9/11 Commission, and to Congress. This is not just my opinion. It was the opinion of various members of the 9/11 Commission. On August 2, 2006 the Washington Post reported that “...staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public, rather than a reflection of the fog of war. Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of the tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation.”[xxxvii] Thomas H. Kean, panel chairman, told the Post: “We, to this day, don’t know why NORAD told us what they told us. It was just so far from the truth.” John Farmer, another member of the panel, who happened to be a former New Jersey attorney general, described his gut reaction: “I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described.” Unfortunately, the Post story quickly dropped out of the news and was forgotten. Nor is the episode recounted in the 9/11 Commission Report, which goes to great lengths to exonerate the generals of any wrongdoing. Indeed, the final report is a carefully sanitized work of the imagination, with credit going to Philip Zelikow, a Bush insider who stage-managed the 9/11 investigation from start to finish. When Zelikow’s close ties to Condeleeza Rice were revealed in testimony before the commission, the families of the 9/11 victims demanded his resignation, but to no avail. Zelikow and his staff not only controlled the panel’s schedule and agenda, and the flow of information to panel members, they also oversaw the preparation of the final report, hence, made key decisions about what to include and what to leave out.[xxxviii] We know, additionally, that Zelikow sent the draft report to the White House for a final “proofing.” This was the devil’s bargain finagled in return for Bush’s “cooperation.” For all of these reasons the 9/11 Commission was in no truthful sense an independent body. We should not be surprised that its final product is an impeccably scrubbed rendition of the official 9/11 narrative. This Phil Zelikow dutifully accomplished on behalf of his boss, G.W. Bush, by smoothing over impossible contradictions through the practiced arts of deletion and deception.

The NORAD Tapes



The shock of panel members cited above was in reaction to new evidence that came to light, late in the investigation. The evidence was in the form of certain NORAD audio tapes, which for many months the government had refused to hand over. Thanks to a court order, however, the panel eventually obtained the tapes, which revealed serious discrepancies in the generals’ earlier testimony, given in May 2003. It goes without saying that the panel should immediately have subjected these tapes to exhaustive forensic analysis, to authenticate them, that is, to verify that they had not been retouched. The 9/11 report makes no mention of any vetting process, however, and, unfortunately, we must conclude it wasn’t done. This means that the procedures of forensic analysis which are routine in ordinary felony cases of murder and larceny were deemed unnecessary in the case of the greatest crime in US history. Such a glaring departure from procedures usually taken for granted in criminal investigations fatally undermines the 9/11 commission’s final report. Indeed, the omission is so grossly negligent it should have sparked an immediate public outcry. But there was not even a peep. The US media neglected to cover the story. Have we sunk to the level that we will swallow anything?



Based on what we currently know, there is every reason to suspect that the NORAD tapes were doctored before their release. Why would the pentagon do this? Obviously, to effect damage control. As embarrassing as the “new” information on the tapes turned out to be, the truth might have been infinitely more damaging. The pentagon had already changed its story, once. According to the original version of events, as reported by the press on September 11, 2001, NORAD quite simply failed to intercept any of the hijacked planes on 9/11. NORAD failed to put a fighter in the sky to defend the nation’s capital for nearly 90 minutes. Nor did this happen until after the pentagon had been hit. Two days later, General Richard Myers, acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, affirmed this version of events in testimony given on Capitol Hill. At which point it became clear that the pentagon had a serious problem on its hands. The facts were not only evidence of incompetence at the highest level, they were suspicious on their face because they smacked of a stand-down; which, if true, was treason. Within days the pentagon amended its story to allay such concerns. According to 9/11 panel member Bob Kerrey, this occurred after NORAD briefed the president on September 17, 2001.[xxxix] Kerrey’s point was that the White House instructed the pentagon to cover its tracks.



The following day, on September 18, 2001, the pentagon announced a new 9/11 timeline, essentially blaming the FAA for its failure to inform NORAD about the hijacked planes in a timely manner.[xl] For this reason–––we were told–––NORAD could not respond effectively on 9/11. This second account stood for three years, but had serious problems of its own. Not the least of which is that the story was improbable. It so happens that scrambling fighters is a frequent and routine practice. If a commercial or private aircraft deviates from its scheduled flight path by as little as two miles, or if there is a loss of radio contact, or if the plane’s transponder stops transmitting, FAA flight controllers will first attempt to contact the pilot and remedy the problem. However, if this fails the FAA is required to contact NORAD for assistance. If there is any doubt, the FAA’s policy is to assume the worst, in other words, an emergency.[xli] The FAA made 67 such requests of NORAD during one nine-month period alone, from September 2000 to June 2001, and in every single case NORAD responded by scrambling planes, without a hitch.[xlii] That’s an average of about two scrambles a week, more than 100 per year. The procedure, in short, is routine. It’s done all the time.



Why then, the sudden breakdown on 9/11, when for no apparent reason FAA controllers began to behave like a bunch of incompetent morons? Another problem with the pentagon’s account is that it is difficult to reconcile with the high degree of competence and professionalism the FAA otherwise displayed on 9/11, when the agency successfully shut down the entire US air traffic system in about three hours. During this period, FAA officials grounded 4,500 commercial and private aircraft without a single mishap. The feat was unprecedented, and all the more impressive given the conditions of extreme duress on 9/11. As the commission itself admits in its report, the FAA performed “flawlessly.”[xliii] Yet, we are expected to believe this same agency fumbled a simple phone hand-off to NORAD four times in succession on the same morning? Moreover, even if we assume that the pentagon’s version of events was correct, there is an added problem: Arguably there was still sufficient time to intercept three of the four “hijacked” planes, Flight 175 (which hit the south tower), Flight 77 (which hit the pentagon) and Flight 93 (which crashed near Shanksville).[xliv] The time from scramble-to-intercept normally takes no more than about 10 minutes.



The Phantom Plane



To remedy these problems, in July 2004 the 9/11 Commission introduced a third version of the story that put the blame even more emphatically on the FAA. The panel “corrected” the timeline, in effect, declaring that the FAA wasn’t merely late in making the hand-off, no, it failed altogether. This absolved the higher ups at NORAD and the pentagon of any serious negligence. The report mildly rebukes the military, but even this slap of the wrist is not aimed at the generals, but rather, at the scrambled fighter pilots, who, we are told, misunderstood their assignment, or somehow got their signals crossed.



The new version can be summed up as follows: NORAD couldn’t respond effectively on 9/11 because it had no warning that Flights 175, 77 and 93 had been hijacked. As for Flight 11, get a grip, because what I’m going to tell you is so bizarre you probably won’t believe it. Neither did it. But I am not pulling your leg. The panel’s new and revised timeline is supposedly based on a previously unknown transmission, found on the NORAD tapes. This transmission allegedly proves that in the one case where the FAA did alert NORAD, i.e., the case of Flight 11, the FAA got it wrong and passed incorrect information. This sent NORAD on a wild goose chase after a nonexistent plane. Someone at the FAA mistakenly concluded that Flight 11 was still in the air–––did not hit the WTC–––and was heading south toward Washington. Based on this false information, NORAD scrambled jets from Langley Air Force Base, near Hampton, Virginia, to intercept Flight 11, now deemed a threat to Washington. The fighters were armed, and the intercept was supposed to happen near Baltimore. This, we are told, explains why there were no fighters available to defend the nation’s capital when Flight 77 mysteriously appeared on the radar screens just six miles SW of Washington. By then, of course, it was too late. Oh, and by the way, when the error was finally discovered and the fighters were rerouted to the capital, the military learned, to everyone’s great surprise, that the jets were NOT were they were supposed to be, i.e., near Baltimore. No, they were out over the Atlantic Ocean flying in circles in a holding pattern, at least 150 miles from Washington.[xlv] By the way, a similar mix-up occurred in the case of the fighters scrambled from Otis AFB on Cape Cod to defend New York City. Instead of patrolling the skies over Manhattan, they ended up in a holding pattern off Long Island, more than 115 miles away![xlvi]



This whopper is the third (and now official) version of events as presented in the 9/11 Commission Report. Unfortunately, since we have no assurance the NORAD tapes were vetted we can have no confidence in their authenticity, and, it follows, no confidence in this “corrected” story. Beyond this fundamental problem, the revised timeline is not credible for many reasons. For example, there is powerful evidence that the FAA never lost track of Flight 11 on the morning of September 11, 2001. According to multiple reports, air controllers tracked Flight 11 on radar all the way to the World Trade Center, and were well aware it had crashed.[xlvii] For example, Boston flight controller Mark Hodgkins later said, “I watched the target of American 11 the whole way down.”[xlviii] This flatly contradicts the official story.



The 9/11 report also fails to provide even one checkable source substantiating the existence of the phantom plane. The report claims that the story was corroborated “from taped conversations at FAA centers, contemporaneous logs compiled at NEADS [the Northeast sector of NORAD], Continental Region headquarters, and NORAD; and other records.”[xlix] All of which sounds impressive, but where are these transcripts and records? They do not appear in the final report, nor have they been made public. Without a verifiable source, why should we believe the panel?



Moreover, after mentioning these sources the report immediately contradicts itself by conceding that it “was unable to find the source of this mistaken FAA information [that Flight 11 was still airborne]”[l] No source? What then, are the alleged records cited above? The report never resolves this inconsistency. Worse, it contradicts itself again by admitting that the investigation was unable to find a single reference to the phantom plane in any “public timeline or statement issued by the FAA or Department of Defense.”
These admissions do nothing to boost our confidence. On the contrary, they fuel our suspicions. Perhaps the phantom plane does not appear in any of the timelines for the simple reason that the story is a complete fabrication. Certainly the generals did not breathe one word about the phantom plane during their previous testimony before the 9/11 panel in May 2003. This would explain NORAD General Larry Arnold’s embarrassing moments before the panel in 2004, the day of his final appearance, when panel members had to coach him about the phantom plane to help him “remember.”[lii] No wonder the commissioners were shocked and outraged, as reported by the Washington Post, the story I cited above. Shock would certainly be my reaction if I learned that someone had deceived me. Of course, thanks to Phil Zelikow’s editing skills the final report makes no mention of any of this. Instead, we learn that NORAD’s earlier account was merely “incorrect.”[liii] In the absence of verifiable evidence, however, should we believe the report? I think not. In fact, there is every reason to suspect that Phillip Zelikow and his team participated in the deception.



Let us be very clear. The pentagon’s account was not merely “incorrect,” it was a lie. This was the conclusion of Senator Mark Dayton (D -MN), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who after reading the just released 9/11 Commission Report accused the pentagon of the “most gross incompetence and dereliction of responsibility and negligence that I’ve ever witnessed in the public sector.” According to Dayton, the generals “lied to the American people, they lied to Congress, and they lied to your 9/11 Commission.”[liv] Of course, Sen. Dayton was laboring under the belief that the military lied to conceal its incompetence. But what if the motive was quite different? What if the generals lied to conceal their complicity in the 9/11 attack–––or their guilty role in staging it? That would explain their unreserved acceptance of the new timeline, as well as their previous “incorrect” testimony.



There is no doubt that the generals lied about Flight 93 when they insisted it crashed near Shanksville, PA, since overwhelming evidence indicates the US military shot down the plane. The official story is a eulogy for dead passengers who, we are told, bravely sacrificed their lives to save Washington. It all sounds so patriotic, but wait a moment. Have we forgotten our Greek drama and our Shakespeare? Effusive flattery and praise for murdered victims has long been a staple in high crimes involving treachery. (The king is dead. Long live the king!) Something about this threadbare tale is just not right. It stinks of self-serving artifice. It is also convincingly refuted by the pieces of Flight 93 that were found scattered over at least six square miles, and by the conspicuous absence of wreckage at the alleged crash site. And what of the dozens of local eyewitnesses who reported evidence of a midair explosion? Were they all high on psycho-tropic drugs? The plane was carrying bags of mail, which reportedly fell like confetti. David Ray Griffin has covered this body of evidence very thoroughly in his able study of the 9/11 report, and there is no need to review the details, here.[lv]



The generals also lied about NORAD when they claimed that its mission was solely to defend against external threats. For which reason–––we were told–––NORAD was blind on 9/11. General Eberhart gave this lame excuse during his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, and General Myers repeated it to the 9/11 Commission. On that occasion Myers said: “We were looking outward. We did not have the situational awareness inward because we did not have the radar coverage.”[lvi] One of the 9/11 panel’s (few) finer moments occurred when member Jamie Gorelick rose to the occasion and challenged Myers on this point. Gorelick, a former counsel to the Department of Defense, correctly pointed out that the NORAD charter says no such thing. In fact, NORAD is charged with “control of the airspace above the domestic US” in addition to defending against external threats. Yet, incredibly, the final report obscures the significance of Gorelick’s important point, and meekly takes the general at his word.



The generals also lied when they claimed that NORAD could not track the hijacked planes on 9/11 after the transponders went off because of antiquated 1970-1980’s era radar equipment. Every member of the commission should have erupted with outrage at this brazen lie, since even during the Cold War NORAD’s primary radar was fully capable of tracking hundreds of planes or missiles simultaneously over the continental US.

The 9/11 panel should have vigorously pursued this vital question. But, once again, incredibly, they unreservedly accepted the pentagon’s explanation; and so does the final report.



The Botched Langley Scramble



The 9/11 commission reached its all time low, however, in its handling of the fiasco of the scrambled pilots. The report suggests that the lead pilot from Langley misunderstood his orders.[lvii] The report contradicts itself, however, because another passage concedes that the pilot was never briefed. As the pilot himself explained: “I reverted to the Russian threat,” meaning that in the absence of an order he reverted to “plan B”, a default or backup order.[lviii] This explains the holding pattern over the Atlantic Ocean. (Were the fighters from Otis flying in circles off Long Island for a similar reason?) But why would the panel fault the pilot? The issuance of orders is not the responsibility of the pilot, but the commanding officer. Evidently, the 9/11 panel members had never heard of a thing called the chain of command. Here was a golden opportunity to find the truth. The key to what happened on 9/11 lay within reach. All the panel had to do was interrogate the pilots closely and trace the orders (or lack of them) up the food chain. But where are the transcripts of these crucial interviews with the pilots? Conducted in private, they are conspicuously absent from the 9/11 report. Nor have they been made public. Why not? There can be only one reason: to shield the guilty, i.e., certain high-ranking officers, from scrutiny and accountability.



Incredibly, the report also faults the FAA for the botched scramble.[lix] This would pass the laugh test, were the matter not so grave, since we know that once the FAA makes a phone hand-off to NORAD in such cases, the responsibility for the intercept then rests with the military. In short, the fighters scrambled on 9/11 were under NORAD’s control, not the FAA’s. This statement in the report is sheer obfuscation, and, given the panel’s mandate “to provide the fullest possible account,” amounts to malfeasance. There’s no other word for it.



Of course, an evildoer familiar with NORAD’s radar system would have known its weaknesses, and how to exploit them. This might explain why honest technicians at NORAD were confused on September 11 by phony blips on their radar screens, blips generated as a result of military drills. We know that at least 10 and as many as 15 such exercises were underway on the morning of the attack.[lx] Fighters had been dispatched to northern Canada, to Iceland, and to North Carolina, sharply reducing the number available for scramble in the event of a real emergency. The 9/11 Commission Report mentions several of the drills, but studiously avoids delving into them. This is very strange, since at least one of the exercises involved crashing a hijacked plane into a building. The panel should have investigated the drills, and brought the facts to light, but it chose not to go there. More serious omissions.



The panel also failed to explain why fighters were not on highest alert at Andrews Air Force Base, located just 10 miles from the Capitol. The base has always been Washington’s port of exit/entry for US presidents and diplomats. Three squadrons of fighters are based at Andrews, and their role has always been to defend the nation’s capital. One of these squadrons even boasted on its web site that its mission was to “provide combat units in the highest possible state of readiness.”[lxi] This particular squadron was away in North Carolina on 9/11, involved in a drill. But what about the other two? Inexplicably, the 9/11 panel failed to explore this question. Curiously, on September 12, 2001, the day after the attack, someone altered the squadron’s web site, amending the above-cited passage to reflect a lower state of readiness. Was this a blatant attempt to destroy evidence of a stand-down?[lxii]



Did VP Cheney Order a Stand-Down?



The most compelling evidence of a stand-down, however, came to light quite unexpectedly during the 9/11 Commission hearings. Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta told the panel how, at 9: 20 AM on September 11, he entered the command center located under the White House, where he joined Vice President Cheney, who was already present. A few minutes later Mineta overheard an exchange, but failed to comprehend its significance. On May 23, 2003 Mineta told the commission what happened:



MR. MINETA: There was a young man who had come in and said to the vice president, “The plane is 50 miles out. The plane is 30 miles out.” And when it got down to, “The plane is 10 miles out,” the young man also said to the vice president, “Do the orders still stand?” And the vice president turned and whipped his neck around and said, “Of course the orders s...

9/11 AND THE AMERICAN EMPIRE : HOW SHOULD RELIGIOUS PEOPLE RESPOND?

David Ray Griffin

1. Religious People
2. American Empire: Divergent Views
3. 9/11: Four Interpretations
4. 9/11 and the American Empire
5. Evidence for Foreknowledge by US Officials
6. Evidence that US Officials Planned and Executed the Attacks
Fully Facing the Truth about the American Empire
How Should Religious People Respond?

[NOTE: This lecture was delivered at the University of Wisconsin at Madison on April 18, 2005, and first broadcast by C-SPAN2 (BookTV) on April 30. Although this text does not correspond exactly to the lecture as orally delivered, all the differences are trivial except that, of course, the oral presentation had to get along without footnotes.
- David Ray Griffin]

I will begin by unpacking the key terms in the title of my talk: “9/11,” “American empire,” and “religious people,” beginning with the last one.

1. Religious People

Although I am a Christian theologian, I am in this talk addressing religious people in general. I am doing so because I believe that religious people should respond to 9/11 and the American empire in a particular way because of moral principles of their religious traditions that are common to all the historic religious traditions.[1] I have in mind principles such as:
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbors’ oil.
Thou shalt not murder thy neighbors in order to steal their oil.
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbors, accusing them of illicitly harboring weapons of mass destruction, in order to justify killing them in order to steal their oil.
This language is, of course, language that we associate with the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. But the same basic ideas can be found in other religious traditions.
I turn now to “American empire,” which has been a highly contentious term.


2. American Empire: Divergent Views

In his 2002 book American Empire, Andrew Bacevich points out that it was long a “cherished American tradition [that] the United States is not and cannot be an empire.”[2] The words “American empire,” he adds, were “fighting words,” so that uttering them was an almost sure sign that one was a left-wing critic of America’s foreign policy. But as Bacevich also points out, this has all recently changed, so that now even right-wing commentators freely acknowledge the existence of the American empire. As columnist Charles Krauthammer said in 2002: “People are coming out of the closet on the word ‘empire.’”[3] This new frankness often includes an element of pride, as exemplified by Krauthammer’s statement that America is “no mere international citizen” but “the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome.”[4]

Given this consensus about the reality of the American empire, the only remaining matter of debate concerns its nature. The new frankness about the empire by conservatives is generally accompanied by portrayals of it as benign. Robert Kagan has written of “The Benevolent Empire.”[5] Dinesh D’Souza, after writing in 2002 that “American has become an empire,” added that happily it is “the most magnanimous imperial power ever.”[6] According to Krauthammer, the fact that America’s claim to being a benign power “is not mere self-congratuation” is shown by its “track record.”[7]

Commentators from the left, however, have a radically different view. A recent book by Noam Chomsky is subtitled America’s Quest for Global Dominance.[8] Richard Falk has written of the Bush administration’s “global domination project,” which poses the threat of “global fascism.”[9] Chalmers Johnson was once a conservative who believed that American foreign policy aimed at promoting freedom and democracy. But he now describes the United States as “a military juggernaut intent on world domination.”[10]

Andrew Bacevich is another conservative who has recently changed his mind. Unlike Johnson, he has not come to identify with the left, but he has come to agree with its assessment of the American empire.[11] He now ridicules the claim “that the promotion of peace, democracy, and human rights and the punishment of evil-doers--not the pursuit of self-interest--[has] defined the essence of American diplomacy.”[12] Pointing out that the aim of the US military has been “to achieve something approaching omnipotence,” Bacevich mocks the idea that such power in America’s hands “is by definition benign.”[13]

3. 9/11: Four Interpretations

If “American empire” is understood in different ways, the same is all the more true of the term “9/11.”

For those Americans who accept the official interpretation, 9/11 was a surprise attack on the US government and its people by Islamic terrorists.

For some Americans, “9/11” has a more complex meaning. This second group, while accepting the official interpretation of the attacks, thinks of 9/11 primarily as an event that was used opportunistically by the Bush administration to extend the American empire. This interpretation is effectively presented by writers such as Noam Chomsky, Rahul Mahajan, and Chalmers Johnson.[14]

For a third group of Americans, the term “9/11” connotes an event with a more sinister dimension. These citizens believe that the Bush administration knew the attacks were coming and intentionally let them happen. Although no national poll has been taken to ascertain how many Americans hold this view, a Zogby poll surprisingly indicated that almost half of the residents of New York City do.[15]

According to a fourth view of 9/11, the attacks were not merely foreknown by the Bush administration; they were orchestrated by it. Although thus far no poll has tried to find out how many Americans hold this view, polls in Canada and Germany some time back indicated that this view was then held by 15 to 20 percent of their people.[16]

4. 9/11 and the American Empire

Religious people who take the moral principles of their religious tradition seriously will probably have very different attitudes toward the American empire, depending upon which of these four views of 9/11 they hold.

If they accept the official view, according to which America was the innocent victim of evil terrorists, then it is easy for them to think of America’s so-called war on terror as a just war. This is the position taken by Jean Bethke Elshtain, a professor of ethics at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, in a book called Just War Against Terror.[17] From this perspective, the “war on terror” has nothing to do with imperial designs. It is simply a war to save the world from evil terrorists.[18]

The second interpretation of 9/11, according to which the Bush administration cynically exploited the 9/11 attacks to further its imperial plans, has quite different implications. Although it thinks of the attacks as surprise attacks, planned entirely by external enemies of America, it usually regards these attacks as “blowback” for injustices perpetrated by US imperialism. This second view also typically regards the American response to the attacks of 9/11, which has already led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, as far worse than the attacks themselves. This interpretation of 9/11 would lead people who take their religion’s moral principles seriously to support a movement to change US foreign policy.

An even stronger reaction would normally be evoked by the third interpretation, for it entails that the Bush administration allowed thousands of its own citizens to be killed on 9/11, deliberately and cold-bloodedly, for the sake of advancing its imperial designs, and then used this event as an excuse to kill hundreds of thousands of people in other countries, all the while hypocritically portraying itself as promoting a “culture of life.” Of course, those who accept the previous interpretation know that hypocrisy with regard to the “sanctity of life” has long been a feature of official rhetoric. And yet most Americans, if they learned that their government had deliberately let their own citizens be killed, would surely consider this betrayal qualitatively different. For this would be treason, a betrayal of the oath taken by American political leaders to protect their own citizens.

If this third view implies that the Bush administration is guilty of a heinous and even treasonous act, this is all the more the case with the fourth view. For many Americans, the idea that we are living in a country whose own leaders planned and carried out the attacks of 9/11 is simply too horrible to entertain. Unfortunately, however, there is strong evidence in support of this view. And if we find this evidence convincing, the implications for resistance to US empire-building are radical.

As Bacevich has emphasized, the only remaining debate about the American empire is whether it is benign. The interpretation of 9/11 is relevant to this debate, because it would be difficult to accept either the third or the fourth interpretation and still consider American imperialism benign.

I turn now to some of the evidence that supports these views. I will look first at evidence that supports (at least) the third view, according to which US officials had foreknowledge of the attacks.

5. Evidence for Foreknowledge by US Officials

A central aspect of the official story about 9/11 is that the attacks were planned entirely by al Qaeda, with no one else knowing the plans. A year after the attacks, FBI Director Robert Mueller said: "To this day we have found no one in the United States except the actual hijackers who knew of the plot."[19] Since that time, federal officials have had to admit that they had received far more warnings prior to 9/11 than they had previously acknowledged. But these admissions, while raising the question of why further safety measures were not put in place, do not necessarily show that federal officials had specific foreknowledge of the attacks. One could still, as did the 9/11 Commission, accept the conclusion published at the end of 2002 by the Congressional Joint Inquiry, according to which “none of [the intelligence gathered by the US intelligence community] identified the time, place, and specific nature of the attacks that were planned for September 11, 2001.”[20]

Unfortunately for the official account, however, there are reports indicating that federal officials did have that very specific type of information. I will give two examples.

David Schippers and the FBI Agents: The first example involves attorney David Schippers, who had been the chief prosecutor for the impeachment of President Clinton. Two days after 9/11, Schippers declared that he had received warnings from FBI agents about the attacks six weeks earlier--warnings that included both the dates and the targets. These agents had come to him, Schippers said, because FBI headquarters had blocked their investigations and threatened them with prosecution if they went public with their information. They asked Schippers to use his influence to get the government to take action to prevent the attacks. Schippers was highly respected in Republican circles, especially because of his role in the impeachment of Clinton. And yet, he reported, Attorney General Ashcroft repeatedly failed to return his calls.[21]

Schippers’ allegations about the FBI agents were corroborated in a story by William Norman Grigg called “Did We Know What Was Coming?”, which was published in The New American, a very conservative magazine. According to Grigg, the three FBI agents he interviewed told him “that the information provided to Schippers was widely known within the Bureau before September 11th.”[22]

If Schippers, Grigg, and these agents are telling the truth, it would seem that when FBI Director Mueller claimed that the FBI had found no one in this country with advance knowledge of the plot, he was not telling the truth.

The Put Options: The government also would have had foreknowledge of the attacks because of an extraordinarily high volume of “put options” purchased in the three days before 9/11. To buy put options for a particular company is to bet that its stock price will go down. These purchases were for two, and only two, airlines--United and American--the two airlines used in the attacks, and for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, which occupied 22 stories of the World Trade Center. The price of these shares did, of course, plummet after 9/11. As the San Francisco Chronicle said, these unusual purchases, which resulted in profits of tens of millions of dollars, raise “suspicions that the investors . . . had advance knowledge of the strikes.”[23]

For our purposes, the most important implication of this story follows from the fact that US intelligence agencies monitor the market, looking for signs of imminent untoward events.[24] These extraordinary purchases, therefore, would have suggested to intelligence agencies that in the next few days, United and American airliners were going to be used in attacks on the World Trade Center. This is fairly specific information.

These two examples imply the falsity of the Joint Inquiry’s statement that “none of [the intelligence gathered by the US intelligence community] identified the time, place, and specific nature of the attacks.” Indeed, one of the FBI agents interviewed by William Grigg reportedly said: “Obviously, people had to know. . . . It’s terrible to think this, but this must have been allowed to happen as part of some other agenda.”[25]

He was right. This would be terrible. There is considerable evidence, however, that the full truth is even more terrible---that the reason some US officials had foreknowledge of the attacks is because they had planned them.

6. Evidence that US Officials Planned and Executed the Attacks

The evidence for this fourth view consists largely of features of the attacks, in conjunction with behavior by US officials, that cannot be explained on the assumption that the attacks were planned and executed entirely by foreign agents. I will give four examples.

The Military’s Failure to Prevent the Attacks and Its Changing Explanations: One feature of the attacks that suggests complicity by US officials is the twofold fact that the US military failed to prevent the attacks on 9/11 and then, since that time, has give us conflicting explanations for this failure. These changing stories suggest that the military has been trying to cover up the fact that a “stand-down” order was given on 9/11, canceling the military’s own standard operating procedures for dealing with possibly hijacked airplanes.

It is clear that some agency—either the military or the FAA--failed to follow standard procedures on 9/11. When these procedures are followed, the FAA, as soon as it sees signs that a plane may have been hijacked, calls military officials, who then call the nearest air force base with fighters on alert, telling it to send up a couple fighters to intercept the plane. Such interceptions usually occur within 10 to 20 minutes after the first signs of trouble. This is a routine procedure, happening about 100 times a year.[26] (One of the many falsehoods in the recent debunking essay in Popular Mechanics is its claim that in the decade before 9/11, there had been only one interception, that of golfer Payne Stewart’s Learjet.[27] Actually, at about 100 a year, there would have been closer to 1,000 interceptions during that decade.) On 9/11, however, no interceptions occurred.

Why not? The military’s first story was that no planes were sent up until after the Pentagon was hit. The military leaders were admitting, in other words, that they had left their fighters on the ground for almost 90 minutes after the FAA had first noticed signs of a possible hijacking. That story suggested to many people that a stand-down order had been given.[28]

By the end of the week, the military had put out a second story, saying that it had sent up fighters but that, because the FAA had been very late in notifying it about the hijackings, the fighters arrived in each case arrived too late. One problem with this story is that if FAA personnel had responded so slowly, heads should have rolled, but none did. An even more serious problem is that, even assuming the truth of the late notification times, the military’s fighters still had time to intercept the hijacked airliners before they were to hit their targets.[29] This second story implied, therefore, that standard procedures had been violated by the military as well as the FAA.

To try to defend the military against this accusation, The 9/11 Commission Report gave us, amazingly, a third version, according to which the FAA, after giving the military insufficient warning about the first hijacked airliner, gave it absolutely no notification of the other three until after they had crashed. But as I have argued in The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, this account is wholly implausible. Besides portraying FAA personnel, from top to bottom, as incompetent dolts, the 9/11 Commission’s account rests on claims that contradict many credible and mutually supporting testimonies. In some of these cases, the fact that the Commission is simply lying is abundantly obvious.[30] In addition, this third story implies that the military’s second story, which it had been telling for almost three years, was almost entirely false. If our military leaders were lying to us all that time, why should we believe them now? And if our military is lying to us, must we not assume that it is doing so to cover up its own guilt?

In sum, the behavior of the military both on 9/11 and afterwards, combined with the fact that the 9/11 Commission had to resort to lies to make the US military appear blameless, suggests that military leaders were complicit in the attacks. A similar conclusion follows from an examination of the attack on the Pentagon.

The Strike on the Pentagon: One of the debates about this attack is whether the Pentagon was hit by American Airlines Flight 77, as the official account says, or by a military aircraft. Either story, however, implies that the attack was, at least partly, an inside job.

If we assume that the Pentagon was struck by Flight 77, we must ask how this could have occurred. The Pentagon is surely the best defended building on the planet, for three reasons. First, it is only a few miles from Andrews Air Force Base, which has at least three squadrons that keep fighter jets on alert at all times to protect the nation’s capital. To be sure, part of the official story is that Andrews was not keeping any fighters on alert at that time. But as I argued in my critique of The 9/11 Commission Report, that claim is wholly implausible.[31]

Second, the US military has the best radar systems in the world. One of its systems, it has bragged, “does not miss anything occurring in North American airspace.” This system is also said to be capable of monitoring a great number of targets simultaneously, as would be necessary in the case of a massive missile attack.[32] Given that capability, the official story, according to which Flight 77 flew toward the Pentagon undetected for 40 minutes, is absurd, especially at a time when the Pentagon knew the country was under attack. Any unauthorized airplane coming towards the Pentagon would have been detected and intercepted long before it got close.

Third, the Pentagon is ringed by anti-missile batteries, which are programmed to destroy any aircraft entering the Pentagon’s airspace, except for any aircraft with a US military transponder.[33] If, by some fluke, Flight 77 had entered the Pentagon’s airspace, it could have escaped being shot down only if officials in the Pentagon had deactivated its anti-aircraft defenses.

So, even if we accept the official story, according to which the Pentagon was hit by Flight 77 under the control of al Qaeda hijackers, we must conclude that the attack succeeded only because the Pentagon wanted it to succeed.

There are, furthermore, many reasons to reject the official story. First, the alleged pilot, Hani Hanjour, was a terrible pilot, who could not possibly have flown the trajectory allegedly taken by Flight 77. Second, this aircraft hit the Pentagon’s west wing, which for many reasons would have been the least likely spot for alien terrorists to target: Hitting the west wing would have required a very difficult maneuver; this wing was being renovated, so it contained very few people, and many of them were civilians working on the renovation; the renovation involved reinforcement, so that a strike on the west wing caused much less damage than would have a strike on any other part of the Pentagon; and Rumsfeld and all the top brass, whom terrorists surely would have wanted to kill, were in the east wing, as far removed from the west wing as possible. A third problem with the official story is the fact that the initial damage caused to the west wing was far too minimal to have been caused by the impact of a Boeing 757. A fourth problem is that photographs and eyewitnesses in the immediate aftermath failed to provide any unambiguous evidence of the remains of a Boeing 757. Fifth, the fact that the aircraft was not shot down by the Pentagon’s anti-aircraft defense system suggests that it was an aircraft of the US military. Sixth, there are videos that would show whether what struck the Pentagon was really a Boeing 757, but the FBI confiscated these videos right after the strike and, since then, authorities have refused to release them.[34]

So, whether we accept or reject the claim that the Pentagon was struck by Flight 77, the evidence indicates that the attack was, at least partly, an inside job.

The Collapse of the WTC Buildings: We can conclude the same thing about the attacks on the World Trade Center. Why? Because the collapses of the Twin Towers and Building 7 had to have been examples of controlled demolition, brought about by thousands of explosives placed throughout each of the buildings. No foreign terrorists could have obtained the kind of access to the buildings that would have been required.

One reason for concluding that these three buildings were brought down by explosives is the very fact that they did collapse. High-rise steel-frame buildings have never---before or after 9/11---been caused to collapse by fire, even when, as in the Philadelphia fire of 1991 and the Madrid fire of February 2005, the fires were much larger, much hotter, and much longer-lasting than the fires in the Twin Towers and Building 7.

The second reason is the specific nature of the collapses, each feature of which points to explosives. For example, the buildings collapsed straight down, and at virtually free-fall speed, as in controlled demolitions, and then the rubble smoldered for months. With regard to the Twin Towers in particular, many people in the buildings said that they heard or felt explosions; virtually all the concrete of these enormous structures was pulverized into very fine dust (try dropping a piece of concrete from a great height; it will merely break into small pieces, not turn into very fine dust particles); much of this dust, along with pieces of steel and aluminum, was blown out horizontally several hundred feet; most of the steel beams and columns came down in sections about 30-feet long, conveniently ready to be loaded on trucks; and pools of molten steel were found beneath the rubble. These and still more effects point to the existence of very powerful, precisely placed explosives.[35]

The third fact supporting the theory of controlled demolition is evidence of a deliberate cover-up. If the buildings’ steel beams and columns had indeed been broken by explosives, an examination of the steel would have revealed this fact. However, although it is normally a federal offence to remove evidence from a crime scene, the steel was quickly loaded on trucks and put on ships headed for Asia.[36]

I will mention one more sign of a deliberate cover-up. Insofar as there is an official theory as to why the towers collapsed, it is the “pancake” theory, according to which the floors above the destruction caused by the airplanes collapsed to the floor below, which then started a chain reaction. This theory does not even begin to explain the actual nature of the collapses, such as the fact that they occurred at virtually free-fall speed. But even if the pancake theory were otherwise remotely plausible, it would not explain what happened to the 47 massive steel columns that constituted the weight-bearing core of each tower. They should have still been sticking up many hundreds of feet in the air (just like the spindle of the old-fashioned phonograph player, when the records pancaked). The 9/11 Commission Report avoided this problem, incredibly, by simply denying the existence of these columns. After saying, falsely, that most of the weight of each tower was born by the steel columns in its exterior walls, this supposedly authoritative report said: “The interior core of the buildings was a hollow steel shaft, in which elevators and stairwells were grouped.”[37] Such a desperate lie is a sure sign of a deliberate cover-up.

In any case, when we look at all these features of the collapses, the idea that they could have caused by the impact of the airplanes plus the resulting fires is ridiculous. This is even clearer with regard to Building 7, which was not hit by an airplane. Its collapse remains so impossible to explain, except as controlled demolition, that The 9/11 Commission Report did not even mention it--as if there were nothing remarkable about the fact that for the first time in history, fire alone was said to have caused the sudden collapse of a high-rise steel-frame building (an event that would have been even more remarkable given the fact that the building had fires on only a few floors).[38]

In sum, the collapses and the cover-up--like the strike on the Pentagon, the military’s failure to prevent the attacks, and its changing stories--show that the attacks must have been planned and executed by our own political and military leaders.

The same conclusion can be inferred from the behavior of the Secret Service agents with the president that morning.

The Behavior of the Secret Service: As everyone who saw Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 knows, President Bush was in a second-grade classroom in Florida when he was informed about the second strike on the World Trade Center. This report left no doubt that the country was suffering a terrorist attack. And yet the president simply sat there. Many people have asked why he did not spring into action, assuming his role as commander-in-chief.

But the real question, which Michael Moore mentions in passing, is why the Secret Service did not immediately rush him away from the school to a safe place. Bush’s location had been highly publicized. And if the attacks were a complete surprise, executed solely by foreign terrorists, the Secret Service agents would have had no idea how many planes had been hijacked. They would have had to assume that the president himself might be one of the targets. For all they would have known, a hijacked airliner might have been headed towards the school at that very minute, ready to crash into it. And yet these agents, who are highly trained to respond instantly in such situations, allowed the president to remain in the classroom another 10 minutes. They then allowed him to deliver his regularly scheduled TV address, giving any suicide hijackers and even wider window of opportunity. This behavior makes sense only if the head of the Secret Service detail knew that the planned attacks did not include an attack on the president. And how could this be known for certain unless the attacks were being carried out by people within our own government?

Although many more examples could be given, these four are sufficient to suggest that there is no escape from the frightening conclusion that 9/11 was engineered by members of the Bush administration and its Pentagon. As to why they would do this, at least part of the answer is clear from the way in which they have used 9/11: to advance the American empire. Immediately after 9/11, in fact, members of the Bush administration repeatedly referred to the attacks as an opportunity—-in the words of Donald Rumsfeld, an opportunity “to refashion the world.”[39] Seeing this connection between 9/11 and US imperial ambitions can be a stimulus to face up fully to the awful truth about the American empire.

Fully Facing the Truth about the American Empire

To be sure, as Chomsky, Falk, and Chalmers Johnson illustrate, strong portrayals of American imperialism as far from benign can be drawn without any suggestion that the Bush administration arranged 9/11. These portrayals can be drawn from publicly available documents.

One such document is the “National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” published by the Bush administration in September of 2002. David North says, not unfairly, that this document “asserts as the guiding policy of the United States the right to use military force . . . against any country it believes to be, or it believes may at some point become, a threat to American interests.” “No other country in modern history,” adds North, “has asserted such a sweeping claim to . . . world domination.”[40]

Another such document, called “Vision for 2020,” was published in February of 1997 by the US Space Command. The mission statement at the head of this document reads: “U.S. Space Command--dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect US interests and investment.”[41] There is no mention of democracy and human rights. In the body of the document, in fact, we find this amazingly candid statement: “The globalization of the world economy . . . will continue with a widening between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’” The point of this statement is that as the domination of the world economy by the United States and its allies increases, the world’s poor will get still poorer, making the “have-nots” hate America all the more. We will need, therefore, the power to keep them in line.

The United States can do this---and this is the document’s main message--through “Full Spectrum Dominance,” which will involve merging “space superiority with land, sea, and air superiority.” Dominance in space will include, the document frankly says, the power “to deny others the use of space.”

By speaking only of the Space Command’s effort to develop a “missile defense system,” the Pentagon and the White House like to suggest that its purpose is purely defensive. But the goal includes weaponizing space so as to give US forces, in the words of a more recent document, a “prompt global strike capability, whether nuclear or non-nuclear, [that] will allow the US to rapidly and accurately strike distant . . . targets.”[42] The fact that the U.S. Space Command’s program is an aggressive one is announced in the logo of one of its divisions: “In Your Face from Outer space.”[43]

Simply from these and other documents, taken in conjunction with the actions of the Bush administration and the US military, we can see through the claim that the US project of creating the first truly global empire is a benevolent or at least benign enterprise. However, we can fully grasp the extent to which this project is propelled by fanaticism based on a deeply perverted value system only when we realize that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were orchestrated by our own leaders--and that they did this to provide the justification, the fear, and the funding for the so-called war on terror, which would be used as a pretext for enlarging the empire.

I will illustrate this point with one of the most brazen examples of the use of 9/11 to get funding. Shortly before the current Bush administration took office, a document entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses was published by an organization called the Project for the New American Century,[44] founding members of which included Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld. This document focused primarily on getting more tax money allocated for the technological transformation of the US military, with the centerpiece of this technological transformation being the US Space Command’s project to weaponize and thereby control space. Because this transformation of the US military will be very expensive, the document said, it will probably proceed very slowly--unless America suffers “some catastrophic and catalyzing event--like a new Pearl Harbor."[45] It is interesting that on the night of 9/11, President Bush reportedly wrote in his diary, “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today.”[46]

In any case, earlier that evening, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was on message. We might assume that he would have been disoriented by the fact that the Pentagon had just, on his watch, suffered an unprecedented attack. Instead, he was ready to use the attacks to obtain more money for the US Space Command. In front of television cameras, Rumsfeld berated Senator Carl Levin, then chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, saying:

Senator Levin, you and other Democrats in Congress have voiced fear that you simply don’t have enough money for the large increase in defense that the Pentagon is seeking, especially for missile defense. . . . Does this sort of thing convince you that an emergency exists in this country to increase defense spending . . . ?[47]

This strategy worked. Congress immediately appropriated an additional $40 billion for the Pentagon. Since then, furthermore, the president has gotten every additional appropriation he has sought for the so-called war on terror.

Besides being a rousing success in obtaining increased spending for military purposes, 9/11 also provided the pretext for putting many military bases in Central Asia. Zbigniew Brzezinski, in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, had said that doing so would be crucial for maintaining “American primacy,” partly because of the huge oil reserves around the Caspian Sea. Indeed, it may have been from this book that the Project for the New American Century got its idea that a new Pearl Harbor would be helpful. Brzezinski, explaining that the American public had “supported America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,”[48] suggested that Americans today would support the needed military operations in Central Asia only “in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.”[49] And indeed, thanks to the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration was able to carry out its plan to attack Afghanistan—-a plan that, we now know, had been formulated several months before 9/11.[50] The White House now has a friendly government in Afghanistan and the Pentagon has military bases there and in several other countries of Central Asia.

We also know that the intention to invade Iraq existed long before 9/11 and that this intention was based on imperial designs, not disgust with Saddam’s wickedness.[51] In the Project for the New American Century’s 2000 document, we read: “While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”[52] The US military is now intending to build several permanent bases in Iraq, which has the world’s second largest known oil reserves. The attacks of 9/11 again provided the pretext, as the Bush administration deceived a majority of the American people into believing that Saddam was connected with Osama bin Laden and even directly responsible for the attacks of 9/11.

I suggested earlier that seeing the true connections between 9/11 and the global domination project helps us understand how fully this project reflects “fanaticism based on a deeply perverted value system.” This is a value system that is diametrically opposed to the value systems on which all the great religious and moral traditions of the world have been based. These traditional value systems say that we should not covet, steal, and murder, and that we should make sure that everyone has the necessary means for a decent life. But our government’s project for global domination is carried out in the name of the greed of the “haves” of the world to have still more, even if it means killing hundreds of thousands of people and letting millions more die every year of starvation and poverty-related diseases. We can now see, furthermore, that some political and military leaders are so fanatically infected with these perverted values that they are willing to kill thousands of their own citizens, then endlessly use a deceptive account of these terrorist attacks to justify “a war on terror,” in the name of which they claim the right to do virtually anything they wish, ignoring all principles of morality and international law.

How Should Religious People Respond?

I now turn, finally, to the question of how religious people should respond to 9/11 and the American empire. My discussion of this question must be very brief, consisting merely of four suggestions.

First, discover and then speak the truth: I would suggest that religious people should--if they have not done so already--study about both 9/11 and the American empire to see if they find the claims I have made about them true. If they do, then they should do everything in their power to make others aware of these facts.

Second, create new means to spread the truth: It is clear that the mainstream press in America is complicit in the cover-up of the truth about the American empire in general and 9/11 in particular. For example, my second book, which exposes many outrageous lies in The 9/11 Commission Report, has not been reviewed by any mainstream publication; the same was true of my earlier book, The New Pearl Harbor. There are, of course, alternative publications, both in print and on the internet, that seek to expose the truth about the American empire. Most of these, however, fail to deal with 9/11. And most of them are indifferent or even hostile to religion, so they do not provide effective organs to communicate with religious communities. Perhaps the most important thing that could be done by religious groups concerned with getting out the truth about 9/11 and the American empire would be the creation of new means of communication, means through which the total contrast between the values of the religious traditions and the values of the global domination project can be made clear. On this basis, an ecumenical religious movement to oppose the global domination project, partly by exposing the truth about 9/11, might be formed.

Third, formulate proposals for subverting the global domination project: As such a movement begins to form, it will need to decide rather concretely how to go about trying to subvert the global domination project. We need, therefore, proposals for how to do this from religious thinkers of the various tradition. I will soon, I hope, be publishing my own proposal, which is centered around the idea of global democracy.[53] Other people will favor different proposals. But I stress the importance of having such proposals from religious thinkers. It is probably only such proposals, drawing explicitly on the moral principles of the religious traditions, that will have the power to move large numbers of people.

Fourth, form alliances with other moral nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). I have emphasized that it is important for representatives from the various religious traditions who take their common moral principles seriously to join forces. Indeed, my motto is: “Religions of the world unite! You have nothing to lose by your impotence.” But it is essential, at the same time, for these religious groups to forge alliances with what we can call the other moral NGOs of the world. Whether they are working for human rights, for peace, for ecological sustainability, or some related cause, the moral principles that motivate these NGOs are diametrically opposed to the values of the global domination project. By emphasizing the moral principles that we have in common, NGOs that are and are not explicitly religious can join forces in opposing that radically immoral project.

I will close with the observation that, insofar as Americans participate in this anti-imperialist movement, their activities will be deeply patriotic, because they will be seeking to call our nation back to its moral ideals, which stand diametrically opposed to the values implicit in the global domination project.


***** ENDS *****
Notes:

1. On the idea of moral principles common to all traditions, see Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), and Gene Outka and John P. Reeder Jr., eds., Prospects for a Common Morality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). This idea of a common morality presupposes moral realism, according to which some basic moral principles exist in the nature of things. I have defended moral realism in “Morality and Scientific Naturalism: Overcoming the Conflicts,” in Philosophy of Religion in the New Century: Essays in Honor of Eugene Thomas Long, ed. Jeremiah Hackett and Jerald Wallulis (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publications, 2004), 81-104, and in “Theism and the Crisis in Moral Theory: Rethinking Modern Autonomy,” in Nature, Truth, and Value: Explaining the Thought of Frederick Ferré, ed. George Allan and Merle Allshouse (Lanham, Md: Lexington Books, 2005).

2. Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 30, 218-19.

3. Krauthammer’s statement is quoted in Emily Eakin, “All Roads Lead To D.C.,” New York Times, Week In Review, March 31, 2002.

4. Charles Krauthammer, “The Bush Doctrine,” Time, March 5, 2001, quoted in Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Henry Holt [Metropolitan Books], 2004), 68.

5. Robert Kagan, “The Benevolent Empire,” Foreign Policy, Summer 1998: 24-35.

6. Dinesh D’Souza, “In Praise of an American Empire,” Christian Science Monitor, April 26, 2002.

7. Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Era,” in Andrew J. Bacevich, ed., The Imperial Tense: Prospects and Problems of American Empire (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003), 47-65, at 59. This track record, he says, proves that “the United States is not an imperial power with a desire to rule other countries.”

8. Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (New York: Henry Holt [Metropolitan Books], 2003). As shown by this and many of Chomsky’s previous books--one of which is titled Deterring Democracy (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992 [2nd ed.])--his reading of America’s “track record” is very different from Krauthammer’s.

9. Richard Falk, “Will the Empire Be Fascist?” Global Dialogues, 2003; “Resisting the Global Domination Project: An Interview with Prof. Richard Falk,” Frontline, 20/8 (April 12-25, 2003).

10. Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, 33, 4.

11. In light of the fact that the present lecture was delivered at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (April 18, 2005), I should point out that Bacevich discusses two left-leaning historians from whose analysis of US foreign policy he has benefited, Charles Beard and William Appleton Williams, and that Williams studied at Madison (where Beard exerted great influence) and then began teaching there in 1957, becoming the founding father of what historians have dubbed the “Wisconsin school” (see Bacevich, American Empire, 3-31).

12. Bacevich, American Empire, 7, 46.

13. Ibid., 133, 52.

14. See Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival, his 9-11 (New York: Seven Stories, 2001), and his Foreword to Phyllis Bennis, Before and After: US Foreign Policy and the September 11th Crisis (Northampton: Olive Branch [Interlink Books], 2003); for Rahul Mahajan, see The New Crusade: America’s War on Terrorism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003) and Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003); for Johnson, see The Sorrows of Empire.

15. See www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=855. This information, however, was evidently not considered news fit to print by the New York Times and other mainstream sources. Also generally unknown is the fact that already in 2002, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, believing that Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney had charged that the Bush administration had foreknowledge of the attacks, conducted a poll that asked its readers if they were “satisfied the Bush administration had no advance warning of the September 11 attacks.” Surprisingly, 46 percent of the respondents said “No, I think officials knew it was coming.” See “Poll Shocker: Nearly Half Support McKinney's 9/11 Conspiracy Theory,” Newsmax, Wednesday, April 17, 2002 (www.newsmax.com/showinside.shtml?a=2002/4/17/144136). I discussed the McKinney episode in The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 (Northampton: Olive Branch [Interlink Books], 2004), 161-64, 242-44nn.

16. On the Canadian poll, see the Toronto Star, May 26, 2004. On the German poll, see Ian Johnson, “Conspiracy Theories about Sept. 11 Get Hearing in Germany,” Wall Street Journal, September 29, 2003.

17. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (New York: Basic Books, 2003).

18. This interpretation is given in the most extreme, simplistic, and misleading terms in David Frum and Richard Perle, An End of Evil: How to Win the War on Terror (New York: Random House, 2003). To mention Frum and Perle as publicly endorsing the official view of the 9/11 attacks does not, of course, imply that they actually hold this view.

19. I quoted this statement in The New Pearl Harbor (henceforth cited as NPH), 69.

20. This statement is contained in the summary of the final report of the Joint Inquiry conducted by the House and Senate intelligence committees, posted at http://intelligence.senate.gov/press.htm under December 11, 2002; it is quoted in NPH, 69.

21. See The Alex Jones Show, Oct. 10, 2001; “David Schippers Goes Public: The FBI Was Warned,” Indianapolis Star, Oct. 13, 2001; and “Active FBI Special Agent Files Complaint Concerning Obstructed FBI Anti-Terrorist Investigations,” Judicial Watch, Nov. 14, 2001.

22. William Norman Grigg, “Did We Know What Was Coming?” The New American 18/5 (March 11, 2002).

23. The San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 29, 2001. The 9/11 Commission tried to scotch these suspicions. Its most important claim is that it found that 95 percent of the puts for United Airlines were purchased by “[a] single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda” (The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, Authorized Edition [New York: W. W. Norton, 2004], 499 note 130). But this argument is viciously circular. What is at issue is whether people other than al Qaeda knew about the attacks in advance, perhaps because they had helped plan them. But the Commission simply assumes that al Qaeda and only al Qaeda planned and knew about the attacks. Accordingly, runs the Commission’s logic, if the investors who purchased the put options in question had no ties with al Qaeda, they could not possibly have had insider knowledge. They were simply lucky.

24. UPI, Feb. 13, 2001; Michael Ruppert, “Suppressed Details of Criminal Insider Trading Lead Directly into the CIA’s Highest Ranks,” From the Wilderness Publications (www.fromthewilderness.com), Oct. 9, 2001.

25. William Norman Grigg, “Did We Know What Was Coming?” The New American (www.thenewamerican.com) 18/5: March 11, 2002.

26. Major Mike Snyder, a NORAD spokesman, was quoted right after 9/11 as saying that interceptions are carried out “routinely”; see Glen Johnson, “Otis Fighter Jets Scrambled Too Late to Halt the Attacks,” Boston Globe, Sept. 15, 2001 (http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Arch...tion=print). With regard to the figure of about 100 times a year, the FAA has reported that there were 67 interceptions between September 2000 and June 2001 (FAA News Release, August 9, 2002, cited in William Thomas, “Pentagon Says 9/11 Interceptors Flew: Too Far, Too Slow, Too Late,” in Jim Marrs, Inside Job: Unmasking the 9/11 Conspiracies [San Rafael: Origin Press, 2004], 145-49).

27. This “fact” in the cover story of the March 2005 issue of Popular Mechanics, “9/11: Debunking Myths,” is typical of the quality of research provided by its “senior researcher,” 25-year old Benjamin Chertoff, cousin of Michael Chertoff, the new head of the Department of Homeland Security (see Christopher Bollyn, “Ben Chertoff of Popular Mechanics: Cousin of Homeland Security Director, Michael Chertoff,” www.911wasalie.com/phpwebsite/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=33). Young Chertoff’s debunking article, published shortly after a coup at this Hearst-owned magazine in which the editor-in-chief was replaced (see Christopher Bollyn, “The Hidden Hand of the C.I.A. and the 9/11 Propaganda of Popular Mechanics,” www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/members/forum.cgi?bem=67011), has itself been effectively debunked by many genuine 9/11 researchers. See, for example, Jim Hoffman, “Popular Mechanics’ Deceptive Smear Against 9/11 Truth,” http://911review.com/pm/markup/index.html, and Peter Meyer, “Reply to Popular Mechanics re 9/11,” www.serendipity.li/wot/pop_mech/reply_to_popular_mechanics.htm. To be sure, these articles by Hoffman and Meyer, while agreeing on many points, take different approaches in response to some of the issues raised in Chertoff’s article. But both articles demonstrate--in their distinctive points as well as the points they have in common--that Popular Mechanics owes its readers an apology for publishing such a massively flawed article on such an important subject. (As a professor, I would give it a D-, unless, of course, it had been written for a class in the art of composing effective propaganda, in which case a grade of B- would be assigned--nothing higher because its distortions and outright falsehoods can be so easily exposed by anyone knowing much about the topic.)

28. See David Ray Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (Northampton: Olive Branch [Interlink Books], 2005), 141-43 (this book is henceforth cited as 9/11CROD).

29. See 9/11CROD, 143-51.

30. My accounts of the Report’s lies aimed at defending the US military’s behavior, which I cannot even begin to summarize here, fill Chapters 12-16 of 9/11CROD.

31. 9/11CROD, 159-64.

32. Thierry Meyssan, Pentagate (London: Carnot, 2002), 115, quoting “PAVE PAWS, Watching North America’s Skies, 24 Hours a Day” (www.pavepaws.org).

33. Thierry Meyssan, 9:11: The Big Lie (London: Carnot, 2002), 112, 116.

34. For my discussion of these problems in the official story, see either Chapter 2 and the Afterword of NPH (updated edition) or Chapter 3 of 9/11CROD. Confirmation from the Department of Justice that such videos (from the Citgo Gas Station and the Sheraton Hotel near the Pentagon) do exist is provided at http://www.flight77.info/pics/2.jpg.

35. For discussion of these features of the collapses, see NPH, Chapter 1 and the Afterword (updated edition), or 9/11CROD, Chapter 2.

36. See NPH, 20, 177; 9/11CROD, 30.

37. The 9/11 Commission Report (see note 23, above), 541 note 1.

38. See NPH 20-23 or 9/11CROD 28-32.

39. “Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with the New York Times,” New York Times, October 12, 2001. Condoleezza Rice made a very similar comment, which is quoted in Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, 229. Also The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, published September 2002, frankly said on page 28: “The events of September 11, 2001 opened vast, new opportunities” (www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html).

40. David North, “America’s Drive for World Domination,” in Bacevich, ed., The Imperial Tense, 66-77, at 66.

41. This document, which was signed in February 1997 by then USAF Commander in Chief Howell M. Estes III, was at one time available at www.spacecom.af.mil/usspace. This website is, however, no longer functional. Also, although the US military has a website devoted to “Joint Vision Historical Documents” (www.dtic.mil/jointvision/history.htm), the February 1997 document is not included. There is a document from May of that year entitled “Concept for Future Joint Operations,” which is subtitled “Expanding Joint Vision 2010.” The website also has that previous document (Joint Vision 2010), which was published during the tenure of General John Shalikashvili as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1993 to 1997). But it as if the document from February 1997 never existed; perhaps it was later deemed too candid. However, at this writing it could still be found on the website of Peace Action Maine (http://www.peaceactionme.org/v-intro.html). And it was discussed in Jack Hitt, “The Next Battlefield May Be in Outer Space,” The New York Times Magazine, August 5, 2001.

42. Air Force Space Command, “Strategic Master Plan FY06 and Beyond,” October 1, 2003 (www.peterson.af.mil/hqafspc/Library/Library.asp).

43. Quoted in Hitt, “The Next Battlefield May Be in Outer Space.”

44. The Project for the New American Century, Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century, September 2000 (www.newamericancentury.org).

45. Ibid., 51.

46. This according to the Washington Post, Jan. 27, 2002.

47. Department of Defense News Briefing on Pentagon Attack (www.defenselink.mil/cgi-bin/dlprint.cgi), quoted in The New Pearl Harbor, 100.

48. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 24-25.

49. Ibid., 212; cf. 35-36.

50. See NPH 89-92 or 9/11CROD 122-28.

51. See NPH 92-95 or 9/11CROD 129-34.

52. Rebuilding America’s Defenses, 14.

53. Fair-minded people will, of course, wait until I have actually published this proposal, with my explanations of what I mean--and do not mean--by “global democracy” and why I believe it to be necessary, before they proceed to offer criticisms of it.

9/11 AND AMERICAN EMPIRE :
INTELLECTUALS SPEAK OUT

David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott
Reviewed by Carolyn Baker
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20070121&articleId=4538


Surely there can be no higher duty for academics and other intellectuals at this time than to expose the big lie of 9/11, thereby undermining the primary pretext for the global domination project. Morgan Reynolds, Professor Emeritus of Economics, Texas A& M University (P. 115 of 9/11 And American Empire)


Professors David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott have edited a masterpiece of critical thinking and scholarly analysis in this collection of articles by intellectuals who have broken silence on the atrocities of September 11, 2001. I have revered Peter Dale Scott for many years, having used his books and articles in my college history classes. This wise elder, professor emeritus of English, is one of few in academia who have addressed the United States government’s half-century role in drug trafficking and money laundering, and he has offered us the concept of deep politics, which “posits that in every culture and society there are facts which tend to be suppressed collectively, because of the social and psychological costs of not doing so. Like all other observers, I too have involuntarily suppressed facts and even memories about the drug traffic that were too provocative to be retained with equanimity.”[1] Scott’s co-editing of this volume is particularly significant because if ever the issue of deep politics were germane, it is in relation to 9/11

David Ray Griffin, professor emeritus of religion, theology, and philosophy is the critical thinker’s thinker, having authored two previous masterpieces, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About The Bush Administration and 9/11 and The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions And Distortions. If you have been privileged to watch Griffin on video or DVD, you must confess that his demeanor, as well as his research on 9/11, adds a human dimension to his analysis that conveys both compassion and objectivity.

As a member of academia myself, I am buoyed by the caliber of scholars included in the Griffin-Scott volume, particularly in the light of what I consider higher education’s abject paranoia regarding skepticism of the official story of 9/11. As I stated when recently interviewed by Jason Miller at Civil Libertarian Blogspot, [2]professors at the end of their academic preparation often emerge with rigid concepts of how they “should” think or how they “should” teach, to such an extent that they become almost terrified of being viewed as conspiracy theorists and develop what I call “conspiracy phobia” in which case, they become as intellectually stilted and irrelevant as the tormenters of Galileo during the Spanish Inquisition. At one time in history the notion that microscopic organisms called bacteria even exist, let alone foster and spread disease, was considered an outlandish violation of reason and logic, as was the theory that the earth was not flat or that human beings would someday travel around the globe in “flying machines.” Academics of those eras took enormous pride in their ability to think critically and not engage in fallacies of logic, but history has proven that for these individuals, things were anything but what they seemed.

Currently in so-called progressive discourse about 9/11, there appear to be two perspectives regarding the political, economic, geopolitical, Constitutional, and social significance of the event. The first group believes that 9/11 was used opportunistically by the Bush administration to extend its global domination project and that the administration knew the attacks were coming but allowed them to happen; the second group believes that more than having foreknowledge, the Bush administration, in fact, orchestrated the event. Within these two perspectives, there exist myriad theories regarding the evidence for either allowing the event or orchestrating it.

Some individuals believe that physical evidence is important to analyze, while others do not. Still others believe that some other object besides a plane hit the Pentagon on the morning of September 11, while other individuals are virulently opposed to that notion. I personally believe that a consideration of the physical evidence, although it has virtually all been destroyed and removed from any possibility of examination, is relevant, and I disagree with those who assert that debates regarding the physical evidence are a distraction from the analysis of motive, means, and opportunity. For me, it is not either/or but both/and. Critical thinking demands an inclusive examination of all facets of any crime.

Although I’ve used the term critical thinking, I have done so without defining it. Here is one comprehensive definition:

Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. In its exemplary form, it is based on universal intellectual values that transcend subject matter divisions: clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, relevance, sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth, and fairness.[3]

In my opinion, one of the most important aspects of critical thinking is asking questions which is due, in part, to my preference for questions rather than answers written in stone. This is the paramount reason for my enthusiastic support for the 9/11 truth movement. As long as a community of thinkers, and indeed, the citizenry at large, continue to question the events of September 11, there is at least a spark of hope that at some point, with the proper conditions and at the right time, that spark might be fanned into a flame of revolution. And of course, as our Founding Fathers incessantly reminded us, there are many ways to make revolution besides the use of bombs and bullets, and if we are not willing to do so once a democratic republic has become antithetical to its principles, then we do not deserve to live in a democratic republic. Citizenry in a democratic republic, the Constitutional framers told us, is attended by momentous responsibilities, including the willingness to “alter and abolish” it should it cease to be a democratic republic.

Or as Professor and Ret. Lt.Colonel, Karen Kwiatkowski, states in her article in 9/11 American Empire, entitled “Assessing The Official 9/11 Conspiracy Theory” :

To question the official 9/11 story is simply, and fundamentally revolutionary. In this way, of course, questioning the official story is also simply and fundamentally American.

Two chapters in the book are devoted to physical evidence, one by Physics Professor, Steven Jones of Brigham Young University and engineer, Kevin Ryan. For those who insist that physical evidence is not important in the discourse regarding 9/11, I would simply ask: Why have Jones and Ryan been so harassed by their superiors for their assertions? If discussion of physical evidence is irrelevant, why would there be any backlash against the “peripheral distraction” of analyzing it?

Swiss history professor, Daniele Ganser, in his article, “The ‘Strategy Of Tension’ In The Cold War Period” makes one of the most profound statements in the book when he says that “It is important to stress that all of the theories about 9/11 are conspiracy theories,” adding that a conspiracy is merely a secret agreement between two or more persons to engage in a criminal act—nothing new or unusual in the field of historical research. Therefore, says Ganser, “Once we realize that none of the theories can be dismissed on the grounds that it is a ‘conspiracy theory’, the real question becomes: Which conspiracy theory correctly describes the 9/11 conspiracy?”(P. 80)

The “strategy of tension” is essentially psychological warfare which targets the emotions of humans and aims to spread maximum fear. Not only are political opponents discredited through incessant terrorist attacks, but most importantly the innocent are kept in a state of tension, which serves the purposes of those benefiting from the attacks.

Ganser takes on two very common arguments of those who insist that the U.S. government could not have been involved in orchestrating the attacks, namely, the assertion that our government would “never do such a thing” and the premise that if the U.S. government had helped carry out the attacks, the planning and execution of that could not have remained secret for long. Ganser emphasizes that both are a priori arguments—a priori simply meaning reasoning from a general law to a particular instance or a phenomenon that is valid independently of observation.(P.99)

Richard Falk, Professor Emeritus of Law at Princeton University, in his article “Global Ambitions and Geopolitical Wars: The Domestic Challenge”, notes that many extraordinarily suspicious events have occurred in the United States in the last century—events which bear on the legitimacy of the process of governance, and these have been repeatedly shielded from mainstream inquiry by being re-inscribed as the wild fantasies of conspiracy theorists. Thus, “the issue never gets resolved and lingers in the domain of limbo, beclouded by suspicion, but unresolved so far as opinion-makers are concerned—and thus ignored.” (P.120) Certainly, individuals of my generation are all-too familiar with the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King as stellar examples of suspicious events that have never gotten resolved.

Canadian philosophy professor, John McMurtry in “9/11 And The 9/11 Wars: Understanding The Supreme Crimes” examines denial among U.S. citizenry, including the so-called progressive media, which has ignored the Project For The New American Century (PNAC) and Zbigniew Brzezinski’s infamous The Grand Chessboard book of 1997, both of which clearly elucidated the ruling elite’s agenda for global domination on behalf of acquiring resources such as petroleum, gold, and water. McMurtry reminds us of the “staggering payoffs” that accrued to a plethora of beneficiaries of 9/11, but concludes that “With or without 9/11 as a pretext for ‘war without end’, the post-1991 global capitalist experiment has failed as a form of economic organization that serves human life and conditions on our planet.” (P. 148)

The grand conclusion to 9/11 American Empire is its final chapter, “Parameters Of Power In The Global Dominance Group: 9/11 And Election Irregularities In Context”, by Peter Phillips, with Bridget Thornton, and Celeste Vogler, a frightening termination to a collection of exceedingly thoughtful articles about September 11 in which the authors analyze very succinctly and incisively the principal players in the global dominance project, individuals as well as organizations and financial systems, and raise disturbing questions about the role of these in the 2000 election fraud and 9/11. The scope and power of these entities is nothing less than jaw-dropping, thus preparing the reader for the article’s and the book’s final paragraph:

We are past the brink of totalitarian fascist-corporatism. Challenging the neocons and the GDG (Global Dominance Group) agenda is only the beginning of reversing the long-term conservative reactions to the gains of the 1960s. Re-addressing poverty, the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and our own weapons of mass destruction is a long-term agenda for progressive scholars and citizen democrats. (P.188)

I strongly recommend 9/11 And American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out not just for members of academia, but for anyone interested in moving beyond the red herring of “conspiracy theory”. Even if one has already analyzed many of the unanswered questions of 9/11, one is certain to discover more in this book and experience further intellectual validation from these remarkable thinkers.

Carolyn Baker, Ph.D. is an adjunct professor of history and author of U.S. HISTORY UNCENSORED: What Your High School Textbook Didn’t Tell You. She also managers her website at www.carolynbaker.org where the book may be ordered and she may be contacted. Carolyn Baker is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

AMERICAN MUSLIMS AND 9/11 TRUTH

Faiz Khan, MD

9/11 First Responder,MUJCA-NET Founding Member

http://mujca.com/muslims.htm



The Paralysis of Discourse; The Incompetence of Academia, and The Need for an Accurate Diagnosis – by Imam Faiz Khan, M.D., 9/11 First Responder and Founding Member, MUJCA-NET



[Muslims gone Bad] + [Incompetent/overwhelmed Surveillance] = 9/11



At some point, silence before a lie becomes betrayal…



Introduction



Most American Muslims, both lay, and “educated' had lost their way from the very start.  However, for a few American minds of various religious persuasions, or no religious persuasion - as of September 12th, 2001 onward, the widely displayed “good Muslim – bad Muslim” dialectic just didn't cut it as an explanation of why the attacks of 9/11 occurred and succeeded.  Their instincts served them correctly.  



The surest sign of intellectual incompetence within the mass of 9/11 discourse is blindly accepting the limits that are constructed in discussing the phenomenon, especially when this blind acceptance occurs in the face of clear and compelling evidence that the limits of discourse must be expanded if some sort of explanation of the attacks of 9/11 is to surface.  In effect, what occurred from September 12th onward was the emergence of a sustained yet unbelievably ludicrous mainstream explanation as to the factors that produced 9/11, followed by this mainstream's frantic inquiry to “American Islam” asking how could such a thing emerge from ‘the nebulously frightful geographic and ideological Islamic World' – as if the main cause of the assaults and their success on 9/11 came from this quarter. Naively, yet predictably, the American Muslim scene performed its role by reeling onto the defensive, and sucking the bait. Prominent Muslims busied themselves trying to explain “real Islam”, distracted by and then swallowing the “mainstream thesis.” Most completely neglected the grotesque inconsistencies and outright lies which suggest that the success of the attacks had less to do with “militant Islam” and more to do with the inescapable fact that 9/11 was an inside job.



The ‘9/11 Truth' thesis categorically rejects the mainstream thesis and asserts that the prime factor for the success of the criminal mission known as 9/11 did not come from the quarter known as ‘militant Islam' although the phenomenon known as ‘militant Islamic networks' may have played a partial role, or even a less than  partial role - perhaps the role of patsy and scapegoat.



Moreover, the rise and popularization of so called militant Islamic networks, from these networks' ideology to actual empowerment, and the linking of this to western corporate driven government covert operations - this relationship is one that needs to be explicitly and loudly proclaimed by Islamic voices.



Let us be clear about our opinion here, as it relates to the phenomenon of “militant Islamic networks”, just in case the infantile minds within the Islamic activist scene confuse our application of intelligence in analyzing “why 9/11” with a denial of the very real need to “clean out our own house”, or confuse a legitimate inquiry into 9/11Truth with an unwillingness to face the “ideological ills found in the Islamic world.” This kind of accusatory self-righteous indignation obstructs clear thinking. Such sentimental nonsense has no place in legitimate discourse.



We do not deny the reality of an ideological trend known as ‘militant Islamic networks' and the grave pathos that arises from this trend. Any sincere Muslim must be disgusted with the ideology that feeds this medley of “militant Islamic networks”, most of whom continue to receive tactical, logistical, and financial support from western quarters, usually by proxy.  The arms they use don't simply materialize – often times, these “counterfeit religionists” have been directly armed by US government and corporate backers. We use the term counterfeit, because 1) we are unsure of the origins of this “extremism in modern militant Islamic form” and 2) these militants openly preach and practice aggression, despite wearing the right costumes, using Arabic terms, and growing the beard to the specified length. Hence the term counterfeit, which also means counter- religious (the descriptive Islamic religious term in Arabic ‘ dajaaliyyat ' carries a meaning which reflects both counterfeit and counter-religious.)



Now, if we must use this term counterfeit, we must be fair:  The foreign policy that is referred to as “American” is counterfeit for the same reasons the policies of these militant networks are counterfeit Islamic, since the agendas and consequences of the former policy lie squarely opposed to the principles enshrined in our American Constitution, as well as our American Declaration of Independence.  We wish the term “American” would be dropped from the foreign policy that originates on Wall Street and is enacted through Washington D.C.  For the sake of completeness, let us also speak clearly about the supposed “Islamic nation states”, because it takes more than cosmesis to function in accord with Shariah. The “Islamic Republics”, in terms of their domestic and foreign policies, are no more in accord with the tenets of authentic Islam than Israel is in accord with the Sublime Way of Moses, authentic Judaism.



Getting back to 9/11 Truth, we understand that militants exist who label themselves as “Islamists” and they are generally a most vile lot. But it is more than a stretch, indeed outright false, to conclude it was this bunch alone who brought the WTC down on 9/11. The crime of 9/11 was most definitely “an inside job” far more than it was an outside one.  



Who's doing the talking anyway?



Nearly all of those within the American Islamic Community who were asked, or felt prompted to respond to the mainstream were, and are, for the most part outside their areas of competence when it comes to explaining the crime of 9/11.  As I will explain, at best their input into the mainstream discourse elucidates only a small part of an equation.  Only a holistic explanation, adhering to minimal standards of intelligent inquiry, can explain the phenomenon of 9/11.  The “religious extremism” thread is often mistaken for whole cloth, and this analytic error has disastrous consequences.



In this case, partial explanations are false explanations because they are presented to, or taken by, an audience as complete explanations. The numerous glaringly inconsistent aspects of the mainstream thesis are largely ignored by the self-appointed American Muslim leaders who use the mainstream thesis to ‘explain things' to the public—a public that is represented by media figures who turn to “American Islam” to ask “ Why did your co-religionists do these things?”  Those who respond by limiting themselves to the mainstream thesis without assessing its legitimacy feel a terrible need to speak and comment prematurely without examining the facts of the case. One thing to note is that most “explicators of Islam and 9/11” who limit themselves to responding to the mainstream 9/11 thesis are basing their response on a thesis which is in essence outright false, but it is layered with partially valid premises. Yes – Islamic militancy does exist; Yes - the third world does indeed hate American corporate driven foreign policy and American corporate state-sponsored terror; Yes – there is tremendous bureaucratic obstruction and inefficiency in our national security apparatus, mainly at non-essential levels. But to these accurate observations should be added … “ But if you think these were responsible for 9/11 – well, you got another think coming!” Hence at best, the mainstream thesis is full of accurate observations but false as an explanation of why 9/11 was successful. When American Muslims use a largely false thesis as a premise to respond, the explanations put forth are a priori “handcuffed” from digging deeper and uncovering the truth about why the 9/11 attacks occurred and succeeded.  This is also dangerous because this hasty error leaves the real explanations uncovered and hides the complicity of perpetrators.   Most individuals from the American Islamic activist and academic have utterly failed to address the issue of 9/11 Truth.



Hence, that sector of American Muslims who commented or continue to comment on 9/11 within the confines of a limited dialectic that has reduced the explanation to “angry Muslims gone bad,” adding the allowed liberal sentiment, “ well OK, these were criminal actions, but let us give some thought to the reason for their anger…”  All such commentary that does not include acknowledgements of “9/11 Truth” is either knowingly or unknowingly culpable of aiding and abetting the criminal elements responsible for the tragedy.  We emphasize the point again: to promote a partial explanation as complete is to hinder the emergence of a complete explanation.    On an intellectual level, I am afraid that these “American Islamic voices” demonstrate incompetence and irresponsibility.



Honest scholars remain silent when they are outside the limits of their competence, yet there is a terrible need to speak , or desire to speak on the part of folks who don't possess the insight, qualifications, or discipline to adequately address this topic.  



Perhaps an analogy is in order here.  What would you think of a physician who addressed your cough and fever by explaining the afferent and efferent neural pathways of the laryngeal cough reflex as it relates to mucus production, and then proceeds to give you a great cough suppressant, but all the while misses the pneumonia?  How about a physician who addressed the cough as above, and then elucidated the various interactions between your immune system and the invading microbes in the alveoli of your lungs, gave you a great cough suppressant and antibiotic for the pneumonia, but neglected to address the 30 pound weight loss accompanying your symptoms, thereby missing the cancerous lung tumor etiologically responsible for both the cough and pneumonia? Let us gloss over the question of what forces are at work in our above analogy that cause the doctor to miss these crucial diagnoses, or rather delude him into not entertaining these other diagnoses; however, what is clear is that partial explanations are dangerous, and the MD in our example is guilty of serious incompetence.  Pursuing the analogy further, if this were a primary care doctor, he ought to have deferred to an opinion of a lung specialist once he realized that his diagnoses were not adequate to explain the given symptoms, rather than maintaining his own ill-informed diagnosis.



To be intellectually honest in offering a diagnosis of “why 9/11,” what in the Good Lord's name are we doing building our explanations from professors and academics, and even lay, semi-educated or pseudo-educated scholars or commentators of Islam?  I use the term pseudo-educated because the whole host of religionists, academics and ‘policy studies majors' who have never worked in the realm of overt and covert geopolitical conflict don't really offer much and waste a lot of ink when they try to pose as authorities and analysts of geopolitical catastrophes and conflicts.



This kind of category mistake is beautifully illustrated by a scene from the 1985 Rodney Dangerfield Comedy Back to School . In this film, Rodney Dangerfield plays an elderly self-made business tycoon. He never got past high school, so he decides to enrol at the college where his son is studying, hoping to get closer to his son and complete his education.



One of the most memorable scenes has Dangerfield's character sit through a lecture on Business Economics by a prestigious “expert” professor and academic.  The topic of the class is on starting a business enterprise.  After every statement the professor makes, Dangerfield cannot but comment on its incompleteness or outright falsity given the actual world of business. During one such interruption, the class actually begins to turn around away from the prestigious professor and his chalk-board and take notes on what Dangerfield elaborates: the reality of labor cost differentials, political implications of securing raw materials, zoning laws that would need to be negotiated or circumvented, and so on.  This is too much for the  “expert academic” to handle, and the professor finally reprimands Dangerfield and states that what the lecture is about is the “legitimate business world.”  After the professor regains his composure, he asks the class to choose a name for the site of this enterprise. From the back we hear Daingerfield's classic toned response: “How 'bout Fantasy Land?”  The class cracks up.



To seek opinions from academia in the case of 9/11 is analogous to looking for a PhD of  lung physiology  for a friend stricken with cough and fever.  Rather, what is called for by proponents of 9/11 Truth are the opinions of experts in various disciplines which cover the following arenas: covert conflicts, the history of false flag operations, espionage, demolition sciences, military response protocols, aviation, journalism, immigration policy, corporate financial money flow, the emergence and real world operations of militant Islamic networks, securities trading, and finally the governing dynamics of geopolitical warfare, which recurrently show that on levels known as  “deep politics,” nominal allegiances are completely subordinate to functional allegiances .  In other words, functional allegiances may exist between nominally opposing parties due to a symbiosis based on the mutual self interest between upper strata members of both opposing groups. This self interest is aimed at maintaining:  A) conflict, and   B) any other particular type of hegemony in their respective camps— the common denominator of such hegemony being a desired distribution of some form of material wealth, be it political, fiscal, or social wealth. In other words, two groups who are nominal enemies may consciously be functionally cooperative within the upper policy making personnel of each.



It would be wonderful to assemble such a panel of experts in genuinely relevant disciplines, who could then be consulted to shed light on the reality of 9/11. Until now, the only such efforts have been pursued by the 9/11 Truth movement.  If some members of such a panel happen to be experts on Islamic theology or Qur'anic exegesis, all the better, but Islam, even militant Islam, is a very small part of the picture as to why the attacks occurred.  



I am a diagnostician, and trained to be extremely careful in arriving at a diagnosis. I cannot help this.  I cannot, and will not turn away from the ‘proverbial elephant in the living room,' when one exists; and I am aghast at the silence of the American Muslim Activist scene in its lack of support of 9/11 Truth. The first step in accurate diagnosis is always to build as thorough a data base as possible, and maintain, what in medical diagnostics is called a ‘broad differential' – which means a full range of possible diagnoses to explain a given phenomenon (symptom complex) until I can safely exclude them.  This is a matter of life and death – If you walk into my ER with a severe headache, it can be a spontaneous intracranial haemorrhage, or a simple tension headache, and until I am sure it is not the former, you are not leaving my ER.  Going to an ‘Islamic Scholar' for a diagnosis of “what happened on 9/11 and why” is quite absurd.  It is less absurd to walk into the ER with a crushing headache and ask to be seen by a Neuroscience professor instead of a trained emergency physician. The neuroscientist may be able to explain a little, and even offer some answers and potential remedies, but as an academic, this neuroscientist cannot and should not try to offer definitive diagnoses nor attempt to find what is wrong based on a theoretical expertise that covers a limited knowledge base (neuroscience) when it comes to headaches (remember, headaches can be caused by non-neurological disorder that can be just as deadly as a neurological one).



The Defective Package  



When you build on a flawed foundation, the structure is always unsound.



We begin with what is offered by our mainstream (corporate sponsored) media as to the etiology of 9/11.  All such explanations can be boiled down to the following equation…



[Muslims gone Bad]    +  [Incompetent/overwhelmed Surveillance] = 9/11



Based on the overwhelming amount of evidence, pulled from mainstream sources, investigative journalism, and foreign mainstream press, the 9/11 truth thesis maintains the following critical differences…



[Maybe Muslims gone bad, or persons posing since identities still suspect]



+



[ facilitation by members of our own national security apparatus]



Equals



[9/11...to be blamed and spun into the work of “militant Islam”]



It is amazing to see the American Islamic activist scene screaming and ranting so loudly about the consequences of 9/11, PATRIOT act and all.  The massive impact of this event in the daily life of the world cannot be overstated.  Specifically, for the American Muslim activists, its distal effects have been quite devastating and these folks work so tirelessly to alleviate the symptoms produced by 9/11.  I find it astounding that they are so silent about questioning the legitimacy of the mainstream thesis – for it is from this very thesis that all the misery for the American Muslim activists began .  



Covering the evidence is beyond the scope of this essay; however, the following general lines of inquiry will aid a truth seeker in trying to make an accurate diagnosis as to the why and what of 9/11.  In addition, sources for further reading will be listed at the end of this section.



Required Background Understanding of Topics…(none of which can be authoritatively supplied by a professor of Islam)



• Wall Street/ Corporate America/Banking industry, and the fact that all directors and highest-ranking officials of the national security apparatus (e.g. CIA) are from this sector.  The CIA is a creation of Wall Street/corporate America, designed specifically to ensure a fiscal inertia securing a one-way flow of cash, labor, and resources.  It is cosmetically presented and conceived of as looking out for national security, but functionally speaking, it behaves as described.  If you have no understanding of the difference between cosmetic and functional definitions, than don't bother with the topic of 9/11.  You may happily go on believing the mainstream thesis.  



• Agendas and utterly violent modalities used (past and present) in sustaining our US economy. The implication is that violence may be sanctioned onto US soil, as the drive for fiscal inertia cannot logically be constrained by loyalties based on citizenship; when fiscal logic dictates that livelihoods or that actual lives must be sacrificed, then they must be sacrificed, whether these livelihoods or lives be in Indonesia, Iraq, Chile, Nicaragua, or on the campus of the World Trade Center. As far as ‘betrayal of loyalty to protecting livelihoods or lives of co-citizenry goes,” ask the employees of ENRON or the thousands who have seen their pension funds disappear, or tens of thousands whose share of social security or health benefits have literally disappeared. Or ask the surviving crew of the USS Liberty, or the sufferers of Gulf War Syndrome, or the families of the victims of the USS Lusitania or Pearl Harbor.  



• The vulnerability of fiat money and sustaining “Dollar Hegemony.”



• The hydrocarbon industry and interests in the Caspian basin. The Afghans were explicitly warned in July, 2001 by US officials that by October 2001, they were either going to receive carpets of gold, or carpets of bombs.  Troops had already mobilized into Uzbekistan, and other allied military were scrambled, headed toward central Asia prior to 9/11 .  



• The geo-political implications of post peak production of oil (peak oil).



• The at least 500 billion, if not more, inflow of liquid cash dollars per year laundered through correspondent US banks by the heroin industry, whose largest proximal supplier is Afghanistan.  After the US invasion, 2002 was the biggest export year EVER.  



• The rise of militant Islamic networks, of Salafi / Wahaabi ideology, and their empowerment both financial and military, with particular emphasis on Afghanistan, the Pakistani ISI, and its liaison with US covert operations.



• The use, frequency, and utility of false flag operations.



• The petro-dollar relationship – the prototypical example being the ruling elite of Saudi  Arabia.



• The ISI (the Pakistani equivalent of CIA).  The ISI is a creature of CIA, and the head of ISI has to be approved by our security apparatus. It is well known that all of the backing for the militant Islamic networks in the 80's and 90's went from CIA to ISI, to the militants…most notably Mujahadeen and thereafter, Taliban.  



• The State of Israel – its criminal establishment, secret service, and false flag operation history and capability.



• Our American mainstream media and its egregious conflicts of interests between honest journalism and the corporate sponsored mainstream agenda.  Absence of a thesis from the mainstream media cannot be taken as a sign of its illegitimacy; if anything, absence of a thesis is probably an indication of its authenticity.  



• The Bin Laden group, and the Saudi elite relationship to our economy.  Investigations of Saudi elites are continuously thwarted from within our own security apparatus. (The Bin-Ladens lived in Falls Church, VA – next door to CIA headquarters.) Clinton's regime specifically mandated that the FBI back off from investigating anything that involved the Bin Ladens or the Saudi elite.  They were quickly flown out of the country on 9/11, while general air-flight was suspended.



• Reports in mainstream foreign press reports that Usama Bin Laden meet with CIA officials in July 2001 during his hospitalization in the American Hospital of Dubai.  This is when he was supposedly wanted dead or alive.  The press has not retracted the story to this day.



•  FBI agent complaints and accusations that some of their superiors suppressed action based on terrorist leads; many of these complaints and the persons issuing them have been silenced or gagged. (Coleen Rowley, Sibel Edmonds…etc).



• Why were the 50 or so documented warnings of terrorists' strikes scheduled for the week of 9/11 not listened to, including ones that came from intelligence services of six different nations, including Israel and Egypt?





Required Knowledge: The Disturbing Questions and Anomalies Surrounding 9/11 Proper



**ALL BASED ON REPORTS FROM MAINSTREAM PRESS**



• Who were the hijackers, given that at least six of the “19 suicide hijackers” are still alive and had their identities stolen?  How was their continued entry into the US allowed if they were on security risk lists? How are we to explain the debaucheries  in their behavior if they were Islamists?  Why were some reported to be at two different ends of the US at the same time?  Based on cell phone conversations, why didn't the seat numbers match the names of the hijackers?  Why weren't the hijackers names on passenger lists? Who made the cell phone calls?  Why was a Mosad agent shot on board one of the planes…and why hasn't anyone mentioned the fact that there were guns on the plane?  Why isn't concrete video of the hijackers boarding the plane shown?  



• Why did different US grade school students (of foreign descent) proclaim the WTC was going to be bombed the week of the tragedy while our intelligence agencies were taken by ‘surprise?' Why did many White House and other officials stop flying commercial flights the week of 9/11?



•  Why did investigators not pursue the massive record dumping of United and American airline stock during the week before 9/11 during the activity (monitoring real time suspicious activities of Stock Trades is standard procedure), or after the event of 9/11?  Why did the SCC stop the investigation after it discovered the transaction were carried out through Deutche Bank, whose head is A.K. Krongard, ex-deputy director of the CIA. Why did Mayo Shattuck (CEO of Deutche bank) abruptly retire following 9/11?  



• What about the Israelis in the white van who were arrested in New Jersey on 9/11? They were seen celebrating and taking clown shot photographs and videos with the WTC burning in the background and reported to the police, arrested, and interrogated. They were confirmed to be Mosad agents, yet released without investigation.  And why were there forty Mosad agents literally living within hundreds of yards of some of the hijackers, in the tiny town of Hollywood, Florida? Why were all the witnesses who knew the hijackers in Florida either silenced by the FBI or made to disappear to “the island of lost witnesses” as reported in Daniel Hopsicker's Welcome to Terrorland ? Why were the “hijackers” apparently being run by a CIA-linked drug cartel that owned the “flight schools”—actually fronts for drug smugglers—where they were posing as “Muslims learning to fly”? Why the attempted cover up of the fact that the “hijackers” were brought to the US by the CIA and trained at US military facilities?



• Why is it that Odigo Inc. – an Israeli instant messaging company based in the WTC – mandated that all its employees leave two hours before the strike, and acknowledges that it received information on the strike and acted on it?  



• Why the scores of documented accounts of foreknowledge of this event from a diverse source base? To assume “we were taken by surprise” is ludicrous.  



• What hit the Pentagon? To this day, there is zero evidence it was a Boeing. The place is sprawling with video surveillance, yet no video is available. And why was there no mention of the White House fire?  



• Why did Mr. Bush behave so oddly that day? Why had the President apparently been removed from the chain of command, and the Vice-President put in his place, that day? Why have the Vice President and the 9/11 Commission apparently lied about evidence reflecting this unconstitutional and deeply damning shift in the chain of command? Specifically, why have they apparently lied in inventing a nonexistent phone call between Bush and Cheney, and by making up a false story about Cheney's whereabouts—lies whose apparent purpose is to conceal the fact that Cheney was in command throughout the 9/11 operation?



• Why does the wreckage from Pennsylvania (Flight 93) indicate that the “fourth plane” was indeed shot down, or suffered a mid-air explosion? Why did Mr. Rumsfeld recently say that Flight 93 was shot down, and then quickly correct himself?



• Why did WTC building 7 collapse? This happened long after the strikes, and in a manner that suggested it was demolished.  Why did its owner, on TV, say, “they told me they had to ‘pull the building'” – which is an expression for demolishing a building?  Who were “they?”  Why did the fire rescue personnel also state that WTC-7 was demolished?    If this happened, when were the explosives planted?



• Why have so many civil engineers, including one that worked for the steel company that built the WTC, stated there was no way a crash like 9/11 could have caused the whole structure to fall?  Why was the steel whisked away without a forensic analysis (the one conducted was called “a half-baked farce” by the editor of Fire Prevention Engineering)? What of the credible reports that the black boxes had been found—not unlikely, since black boxes almost always survive crashes, and a “hijacker's passport” of paper and plastic supposedly survived the crash and fire!



• What of the complete contradictory official versions of what transpired in the sky around Washington—and why hasn't anyone inquired why the air-defense response took so long, seeing that Mr. Cheney revealed that the Secret Service, FAA, and NORAD keep open lines of communication 24/7?



• How do we explain the complete incapacitation and overt stand-down of standard Air Space defense protocols, (which functioned effectively over 50 times the last year) and the lies and contradictions between NORAD, the FAA, Secret Service, and the Air force?  How is it that there were “war game” scenarios based on hijacked Boeings going on as the real events were taking place?  When asked about these issues, General Eberhardt's response was simply “no comment.”



• Why has the current regime obstructed any serious attempt to investigate the circumstances that led to 9/11?  Why was known war criminal and cover-up specialist Henry Kissinger Bush's first choice to lead the investigation?  Why was the Kean commission comprised of members who had egregious conflicts of interest by their presence on such a panel?  Why did one member, Max Cleland, resign from the commission after accusing it of incompetence and lack of dedication, saying “The Warren Commission blew it...I will not be part of that”?  



• Why have all pressing enquiries been completely ignored, and enquirers gagged?  Sibel Edmonds (FBI and gagged) posited relations between illicit drug profiteering, the flight schools, and the “terrorists” themselves, as indicated by the fact that 43 pounds of heroin were found at one “flight school” – and records of operations of that school were moved out of the country, as per orders of governor Jeb Bush. The 9/11 family steering committee has explicitly stated their dismay of the incompetence and inability of the Kean Commission to even address the serious questions.  



• Why was an FAA supervisor found destroying evidence of flight patterns and other data that was crucially relevant to any investigations?



These are just a few leads that I can think of off the top of my head; there are so many more, any one of which causes serious doubts or completely disproves the mainstream 9/11 thesis. It is the job of authentic journalism to chase these leads, and these are quite simply the tips of many, many icebergs.  The mainstream (corporate press) has not just “dropped,” but also literally “hid the ball.”   The only arena where these leads are pursued is by intrepid independent media outlets and journalists – who often don't have the training or funding to produce analyses that would reach and penetrate the public mind.



9/11 Truth seekers are, from the global perspective, in the majority.  Most reports indicate that citizens of other nations believe that 9/11 was an inside job. Domestically, a recent Zogby poll demonstrates 49% of New York City residents and 41 % of NY state residents overall believe that members of the federal government were complicitous in the 9/11 attacks, and more than 56% of New York State Residents (66% of NYC residents) believe an independent investigation should be re-opened. As they are right. For there is no doubt that the official version of why the 9/11 attacks were successful is a lie.



Now, we turn to an analysis as to why the “American Muslim academic/activist scene” has been  grossly negligent in their lack of support for 9/11 truth.  Before we do this, let me cite a list of required reading for anyone who wishes to pursue further information on the subject of 9/11 truth.



• Books: The New Pearl Harbor and The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (David Ray Griffin), Crossing The Rubicon (Mike Ruppert), The Complete 9/11 Timeline (Paul Thompson), The Big Lie and Pentagate (Thierry Messan), Welcome to Terrorland (Daniel Hopsicker).



• Websites –911research.wtc7.net, 9/11truth.org, unanswered questions.org, whatreallyhappened.com, copvcia.com, cooperativeresearch.ca



• Video – The Truth and Lies of 9/11 (Mike Ruppert), The Great Deception (Barry Zwicker)



Why The Silence ?



Incompetence. Mediocre analysis.  By definition, these are more common than excellent, high intelligence and penetrating analysis.  When the former dominate the discourse, you are going to have an impotent response that falls prey to underlying agendas.  The forms of mediocrity and incompetence come in the following guises:



• Not accumulating data before arriving at a conclusion.



This is synonymous with getting the story from FOX or CNN, or the New York Times, and then assuming one is ready to effectively respond and discuss 9/11.

 

• Confining dialectics to allegiances based on nation states.



When it comes to geopolitics, the concept of nation states is largely superfluous.  The governing dynamics of geopolitical conflict transcends allegiances based on the idea of nation states.  Indeed, the concept of nation state is more of a public relations tool at this level than anything else. Simply looking at fiscal flow, how else can you explain the unbelievable sums of taxpayer money (and now jobs) that flow to other lands and peoples, while the “citizens of this country” live quite often in poor conditions, especially in rural and inner city areas?  From this perspective alone, the nation state based on geographical borders has very little meaning.  Wars and conflicts do not ensue for the sake of ‘nation state.'  



The reason why the meaninglessness of nation state needs to be emphasized is that some who are critical of the 9/11 Truth thesis ask,



“Do you really believe that America attacked itself?”



To this question, which suffers from the delusional error of misapplying the notion of  ‘nation state' in to an arena where it has no meaning, we can only respond, “can you please define America?”  Or, we can say that we, “Part of America” is blaming “another part of America” for allowing harm to come to yet “another part of America.”  So to those who cannot see past this idea of nation state, we say “America attacked itself, and America is looking for that cancerous part of itself that was complicit.”  Assuming the 9/11 Truth thesis is correct, we may ask – “which party is America? The complicit ones or the truth seekers? “





• Rejection of the 9/11 Truth thesis: The etiologies



The 9/11 Truth Thesis often meets with a priori disbelief. Yet this disbelief is irrational at best. Such irrational disbelief has the following etiologies….



Disbelief etiology A)



“You don't expect me to believe in this conspiracy theory, do you?”



As one of the prime investigators of 9/11 truth once wrote, “I don't deal in conspiracy theory, I deal in conspiracy facts.”  The data documented in the suggested works above are facts – which any 12 year-old with sufficient mental capabilities can put together in an effort to formulate a diagnosis of what happened, or at least realize that the mainstream thesis is utterly false.  The term “conspiracy theory” is often used to discredit valid lines of inquiry – and the uninformed usually are dissuaded from using their intelligence in evaluating data they believe relates to “conspiracy.”  But conspiracies are all around us. Any time more than one party act in concert and without publicity for a given agenda it is conspiracy. And if the actions or agenda involve any activities that are against the law, the behavior fits the legal definition of criminal conspiracy. To belief that such behavior is not ubiquitous is the height of naivete.



Conspiracy is actually one of the most common criminal legal terms used in this country: “conspiracy to commit murder,”  “conspiracy to fraud,”  “conspiracy to racketeer”, “conspiracy to embezzle,” “conspiracy to libel,” ...etc.  Along the same lines of naïve a priori rejectionism, we hear: “How can this be so hidden, I mean – wouldn't it take so many people to pull this thing off?” The short answer is no.  For an explanation of why, again, I refer all to the above works, and add: Bureaucracy and hierarchies are structured in such a way that there are key “nodal” positions, which are akin to a narrow part of a funnel.  If you imagine a funnel upside down, narrow side up, there is a “gatekeeper,” usually the superior, that sits at this nodal position, and all activity/information goes through this node upward to the next layer.  It was severe criticism of people in such positions that characterized the complaints by the FBI field officers for examples– who used adjectives like “obstruct,” and “sabotage,” and “undermine” to describe the behavior of certain personnel involved in concealing terrorist activities.   FAA, NORAD, NSA, CIA, and other organizations are structured in the same manner.



Disbelief Etiology B)



How can a group of people actually do this to others?



This is sheer sentimental naïveté.  Anyone who asks this question has been distracted by the spectacular and horrifying drama of the attacks.  In essence, this was a murder of almost 3000 people, and destruction of infrastructure closely related to US covert operations. (The WTC possessed many departments related to such activities – including building 7, which was nowhere near the attacks, and whose collapse cannot be rationally explained except as a controlled demolition with explosives.)  In order to overcome this sentimental and naïve question, a question that poses as an obstruction in so many minds to arriving at an “accurate diagnosis” – one must understand that we are speaking about a criminal mentality that operates when necessary.  Take away the faces that you would be forced to associate as criminals, and just think only of a faceless mentality – perverted, and criminal – which takes possession of collectivities devoted to maintaining financial-political hegemony.



Now that the culprit is an abstract entity in your mind – try to understand that this same faceless mentality promoted the nuclear incineration of hundreds of thousands of human beings, sponsored the genocide of literally millions of people in Asia as well as hundreds of thousands in Europe and on this continent. This mentality has been around for millennia – and has expressed itself through people of all skin colors, ethnicities, times, climes, and colors.   Moreover when it comes to our times, it is a faceles s mentality that by definition cannot be constrained by allegiances based on nation state .  It's like asking a criminal rogue to adhere to rules of some sort.   Loyalties and allegiances are not in the ‘mindset' of this faceless mentality .   In other words, if need be, it will express itself on US soil.  It does so all the time in the form of looting taxpayers and honest citizens who are victimized by financial scams and deceptive accounting practices that ruin  livelihoods and destroy lives.  Third-world nations are impoverished because of these practices, which lead to loss of life in so many other ways.  If maintaining hegemony for this mentality means absorbing losses of life on US soil – so be it; Pearl Harbor was an excellent example.



One of the driving forces of the mentality that we are describing is the desire for sustained material wealth – securing a one-way flow of cash, resources, or labor.  We may term this drive “fiscal inertia,” – and this inertia is a compulsion of such weight and might, all of the world's prophets, saints, and scriptures have warned about it over, and over, and over again.  There is a reason for such dire warning of what happens to the human psyche when pursuit of material wealth is at hand. Unguarded, the human psyche, collective or individual, falls prey to the criminal mentality of which we speak.  And this is what is behind events of mass killing and destruction.  Make no mistake by pointing fingers…it lurks in most of us, and expresses itself often in different forms. Put another way – if we found ourselves in the same position as the perpetrators, we too might well succumb to this mentality. Humans do remarkably dishonorable things when getting or staying ahead financially is at stake.



Ironically, it is fiscal inertia that was a great peacekeeper in many traditional civilizations.  Such “fiscal inertia,” used for honorable ends, was the basis of the “blood penalty” that kept the peace in traditional societies.  In many tribal societies, if a member of one clan was slain wrongfully (manslaughter or murder) the aggrieved clan had the right to forego instituting punitive measures and demand hefty financial compensation.  This option was often taken, and since the desire to stay fiscally sound was powerful, manslaughter and murder were extremely rare in such societies, as would-be perpetrators knew that acting on their impulses would bring their families great hardship – and often cost the perpetrator a falling out with his clan, a social connection which provided critical support for individuals.



Fiscal inertia is terribly real.  I witness the aforementioned mentality succumb to it day in and day out, harming and betraying the people of this nation, through increasing morbidity and mortality in a field that I know intimately– health care.  Parasitic folks with a corporate mentality have assaulted what was once a sacred relationship between healers and healed – and because of the “worship” of “fiscal inertia”, this mentality wreaks havoc by consciously forcing decisions by handcuffed and cowardly policy makers that result in sustaining sickness, and even loss of life – be this through hospital policies which prioritize profits over patient care, or through stamping out medical progress that would threaten profits for industries that have entrenched themselves in health care,  or through promoting the  pharmaceuticals industry based on flimsy or even fraudulent data. This is one of the reasons why the 9/11 truth thesis was not too surprising for me to grasp.  Health care is ridden by forces promoting sickness and slow loss of life and suffering for the sake of fiscal inertia; 9/11 exemplified the same process in acute form.

Disbelief Etiology C)


Are we still naïve outsiders?

The incompetence of immigrant American Muslims in both understanding Islam and then operationalizing institutions and mosques based on that understanding is enormous – and largely unknown. Had it been known, it would have been remedied.  This incomprehension lies with both  the “elite western educated modernist immigrants,” and with the “mentally incompetent, literalist/Phariseeistic immigrants”; both types who attempt to implement and practice The Way of Muhammad suffer from an intellectual backwardness of a profound sort.  The whole American Islamic culture is based on the residues of the flavor and mentality brought to these shores by the immigrant generation hailing mainly from he Arab world and Indian Subcontinent. The major exceptions are the African American and white American converts, whose role in the build-up and maintenance of mainstream American Islamic sentiment and ethos is (unfortunately) at best marginal or contained in a separate sub-culture.  

These immigrant residues are just beginning to wear off from the second generation, the immigrants' children – most of whom are slowly realizing how tainted their own understanding of Islam is by an immigrant third world mentality.  There are a lot of facets of this mentality that we can expose, but we will focus on a few that have enormous bearing on understanding the silence and lack of vigorous support for 9/11 Truth by American Islam.

The first is fear. Huge segments of American Muslims came to this country looking to better their lives through opportunities afforded by American society.  Thankfully, many have found success.  For them, the reality is that the US is the best place on earth in terms of opportunity, and returns on hard work, honesty and obeying rules.  They see that the blatant nepotism, corruption, bribery, and cut throatedness necessary to socio-economically ascend in their home-countries was relatively absent here. This is true – and as an American, I am proud of this.  However, this feeling of gratitude does not absolve anyone from his or her spiritual responsibilities to speak out against crime.  This gratitude, this “thank-God I'm here and not there” mentality has led to an “I don't care to rock the boat by sticking up for justice in the manner My Prophet would ask of me” mentality, or “I am not going to bite at the hand that feeds me” mentality. The logical unsoundness of this position is obvious, so I won't bother exposing it.  The hand that feeds us is not the same hand that killed almost 3000 people on 9/11. The reason why the immigrants are doing so well is thanks to a nation state which some intrepid, bright men and women set into motion circa the late 1700s – and those same men and women would be crying bloody murder at the attitudes “American” Muslims display in their avoidance of 9/11Truth.   “Don't call yourself American,” they would tell us.  “Don't Call Yourself Muslims either” may be a voice some of us hear in our hearts when we realize what transpired and our lack of response.  

The second “immigrant Muslim psychological complex” that has left its residues on The American Muslim response (or lack of) to 9/11Truth has to do with a naïveté and inferiority complex which most of this group projects onto the “shiny modern white man's world.” This is a world where the trains run on time, infrastructure is maintained, a sense of professionalism and obeying the law and following rules exists, and fair play still occurs to the extent perceivable by most.  What people who are in the grip of such a complex (the majority) need to do, is to talk to those of us who have had access to the arenas where the maintenance of fiscal inertia is ‘the only guiding precedent' – and if fiscal inertia dictates the creation of a false flag operation which sacrifices some lives on US soil for ‘a greater good,' so be it.  In the context of the world of healthcare, if it means keeping certain beneficial breakthroughs or beneficial knowledge away from the public markets – so be it, let some lives be sacrificed, let some people remain sick.  Such arenas, where fiscal inertia demonstrably reigns supreme over the public welfare, and where policies dictating such inertia originate, are accessible to those of us who have had the distinct pleasure to sit in on board meetings at the top of the hierarchies of a given institution that has a for-profit component.  Most folks have no such experience.  Such folks suffer from a delusional perception that mixes the ‘glitter' of living in a society with functional infrastructure and institutions, with a guarantee of ethical conduct when fiscal inertia is at stake.  It is an interesting paradox, because in the third-world, the corruption and criminality that have leeched into policy-making institutions, be they governmental or corporate, is so much more transparent and intuitively expected by third-worlders.  But in the ‘shiny west', this immigrant Muslim generation that influences the tone of American Islam somehow believes all of that has magically disappeared.  In short,  most folks who have been imprisoned in this thought pattern need to learn that there are indeed cracks and cobwebs in the walls at Disneyland, and underneath, Mickey and Goofy are not Mickey and Goofey – they are two guys getting paid 10 dollars an hour, and they do take their masks off once they are in the sub-basement underneath the Magic Kingdom.  Such folks ought to listen to those who have been to the sub-basement.

Disbelief Etiology D)

Can we afford to acknowledge this 9/11 truth?  

Many individuals who consider themselves activists, academics, or commentators have found a niche for themselves. There is a great deal of personal energy, egoistic pride, and even financial interest invested into the niche within which they operate.  Suppose a thesis comes along and exposes the very basis of your activist, academic, or analytic platform as misdirected, diluted in comparison to an alternative choice of activism, or patently false.  The whole construct of your work is pulled out from underneath you.  This does not take away from any of the good work that you may do, but the very basis of your perceptions and diagnosis of a given problem that you are trying to remedy has been found to be profoundly lacking, and it may be time to face the facts and re-organize if you are sincerely committed to dealing with the issue (in this case, 9/11).  The problem for a given activist may be that they have so many material and non-material factors (or other psychological obstructions – see below) invested in sustaining a given misdiagnosis, a misdiagnosis which yields the coveted opportunities to soapbox, pontificate, lead, organize, rally, dialogue, or be the spokesperson in the limelight. Remember our doctor from above who misdiagnosed the cancer?  He helped your cough, and even the pneumonia – but had he found the cancer, he would have lost his relationship with you as a patient.  This re assessment is tremendously difficult to deal with for many – and this difficulty often hides deep in the subconscious of those whose niche 9/11 Truth threatens, subtly obstructing what should be the embrace of 9/11 Truth.

Putting this into specific contexts, there is a whole arena, and even an industry, that is based on bringing healing between “Islam” and “the West.”  This has exponentially grown through 9/11.  After all, the mainstream thesis, which 9/11 Truth exposes as false, is based on a “ nasty thing done to the West by angry Muslims.”   “Please, let us try to understand each others grievances,” cry the darling moderates of both sides.  On their proverbial soapboxes, in the spotlight, and at times, seduced by the notoriety and ego massage, you can hear the American Muslim activist: “Shame on those bad Muslims…. Islam means peace…damn those Wahaabies…. We are gonna cleanout our own house!”

The “good Muslim versus bad Muslim” dialectic that “moderate Muslim commentators” use is a direct result of uncritically swallowing the mainstream thesis.  Once the slip is made into allowing the  “bad Muslim versus good Muslim” theme to predominate in explaining why 9/11 happened, the devil wins. Indeed, this flawed Muslim moderate stance is one side of a poor coin.  The other side of the coin is the religious extremist stance from which moderates are trying to dissociate themselves.  Unbeknownst to the moderates themselves, the moderates are in the same bag as extremists.   The extremists state that this crime was about religious jihad – or hold a sentiment which sort of silently nods in approval at 9/11 as a kick in the groin by ‘dar-al Islam' at The Great Satan .  The reason the extremists and moderates are two sides of the same coin when it comes to their perception of 9/11 is that they quickly succumb to injecting religious discourse into the matter, instead of seeing the ever so many flaws in the mainstream thesis, a thesis that coerces weak minded analyses to start from the platform of religious discourse, yet prevents the sound mind from saying ….” wait a minute, what is it really that caused the success of these heinous attacks? ”  The mainstream thesis must be rejected, and 9/11 must be seriously rethought as a crime that was perpetrated for many strategic reasons – and by parties that have nothing to do with religious discourse, except to use religious discourse as a false flag and scapegoat.

As stated above, there is even an ego massage that comes for many who occupy the niche of ‘darling Muslim moderate,' the person who leads, organizes, or pontificates – a real attachment can develop to such roles, and the roles keep coming as long as they stick to the “good Muslim versus bad Muslim” dialectic and use the mainstream 9/11 thesis as a platform for their analyses and activism.  “Shame on the bad Muslims amongst us” they say, as if 9/11 occurred solely by the hands of “the baddies.” Being moderate does not mean we stop using our intelligence, nor does being moderate mean compromising the truth of things, or neglecting the facts of a case.  Being moderate means politely presenting ones view and condemning aggression in any way shape or form.

What is perhaps needed is a platform of “ intelligent moderation.”  This is a platform that rejects the immediate leap to the  “good Muslim versus bad Muslim” dialectic as pertaining to the case of 9/11, and instead asks,  “Wait…why does the evidence show that this mainstream thesis is false?”  “Wait – if the mainstream thesis is false, let's put a hold on the ‘bad Muslim versus good Muslim' explanation, perhaps there were some other factors at work that led to the perpetration of this crime.”

It is necessary to reiterate that the proponents of 9/11 truth dutifully acknowledge the existence of the phenomenon known as ‘militant Islamic networks' and the ideologies that espouse such a phenomenon – “the bad Muslims.”  But assigning full blame to them for the attacks of 9/11 is patently false.  

I am not suggesting that we should stop defending the religion of Islam from the slanderous implications that spring directly from the mainstream thesis; even pre-9/11, clarifying the Islam of Muhammad from its counterfeit forms and the various misperceptions (either ignorantly or deliberately) promoted by various agendas has been a mandate for anyone who loves Muhammad.  It is important to bring healing to the relationship between Islam and the typical western modern psyche.  However, to use another analogy, if we liken the work of defending Islam from recurrent slurs, to jumping into a river to save an increasing number of drowning babies who have fallen in by some terrible accident, at some point, it might be wise to deploy one of us to head upstream to see what the nature of the accident was. Continuing with the 9/11 Truth metaphor, we may be surprised to find a cabal of folks throwing them in to the river deliberately. Would it be wise in this scenario to pay no attention to what causes the babies to end up in the water in the first place?  What a waste of resources if we remain blind to this. Perhaps if we were to draw attention to the perpetrators, the need to jump into the river and save the babies would dramatically decrease.

Disbelief  Etiology E)

If 9/11 Truth is true, isn't the situation hopeless? I mean, what difference can we make?   (Psychological weakness)

The psychological need to maintain some feeling of control, or need to believe we possess the ability to make an impact which brings about change in the manner we'd like, this psychological need is quite powerful in those who feel the need to answer the call of activism and address 9/11.  This need is so strong, that in light of the obvious evidence that suggests 9/11 was an inside job coordinated through our own US security apparatus – many still can not process this data correctly and cannot admit that yes, perhaps there are rogue elements in our own US covert operations and security apparatus who helped make 9/11 happen; and it is pressure from these same rogues which is squashing attempts at bringing 9/11 Truth into the mainstream discourse.

The implications of the 9/11 Truth thesis are very psychologically disempowering, for they imply perpetrators within the US and indeed the world who are “above the law.” People are notorious for avoiding a feeling of disempowerment at all costs– even to the extent that they are willing to look away from evidence that suggests precisely this.  People are so scared of feeling disempowered that often they'd like to cling to delusional constructs rather than face facts.  The truth does indeed sometimes hurt.  Even in individual social relationships, if we may use this as a microcosmic example – the capacity for one individual to delude oneself into maintaining a dysfunctional situation is astounding, when the alternative is facing a feeling of disempowerment. Those who avoid the issue of 9/11 Truth indeed have a dysfunctional relationship with the topic of 9/11 and activism. We may prefer to remain on our soapboxes for various psychological reasons, one of which mentioned above is the vested egoistic and materialistic interests we have to maintain our niche, even when faced with facts there is something profoundly flawed with our version of things.  Added on this, there is the avoidance of facing facts in order to avoid a feeling of hopelessness and disempowerment – and the soapbox in our niche remains standing, rather than us donating the wood of our soapbox to raise the one representing 9/11 Truth a bit higher.

Yet again, there are scores of examples to illustrate that within large bureaucracies and hierarchical organizations, there are those individuals, groups, and agendas – that can quite literally ‘get away with murder.' For those of us who have had access to witnessing the functioning of this dynamic – we need no proof that it is possible for groups to be so socio-politically and financially insulated and leveraged, that getting away with tacitly approving even mass murder and hiding within the blitz of hierarchy, bureaucracies, plausible deniability, excuses of incompetence, etc...  is certainly a plausible scenario Remember – fiscal inertia is a most powerful compeller..  

So, how do our efforts, our “symptomatic relief efforts” that can't touch the cause of the disease measure up in this case?  As activists, do we have the courage to understand what we are up against?  If we don't, we will continue clinging to our delusions that things will get better if we just keep on writing, lecturing, sloganing, marching, shouting – convincing others that these were “bad Muslims”, but we are good Muslims because Islam is good.  

The way to correctly face this, from the spiritual perspective – is to fully assimilate (not just mentally understand) one of the maxims taught by all of the great prophets and saints, be they in the Hindu, Parsi, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, or Islamic traditions.  Since, I try my best to adhere to the Islamic tradition – the words I always keep in mind are…

La Hawla wa La Quwataa illa billahil Aleeyul Adheem

There is no Power or Might Save Through God The Most High and Magnificent.

That is, any dominion, temporal authority, leveraged command and advantage, is only possible through Gods Leave; it is borrowed; on loan – which means in the end, His Will is always Manifested. Sooner, or later, Justice Cometh.  In the face of such perpetrators then, our response can never be a feeling of disempowerment, and its attendant hopelessness or avoidance of facing facts.  Rather, a rise to Holy Struggle against criminality ensues in the heart of one who is conscious of The Sacred, which is accompanied by a feeling of pity at those perpetrators, that have necessarily deluded themselves in thinking their schemes are leading them to success.   They abuse the dominion and authority, which is granted them (although they believe that they are the beneficiaries of nothing else but their own cunning and devices) – and ultimately, this will be their ruin, whether we witness this or not; whether in this temporal life, or not.  While we work against their scheming, both by “relieving symptoms” which their actions cause, and trying to expose them directly (the cause of the symptoms), we know that the effort, no matter how small or negligible the result here in the mortal phase of our existence, is always exalted in The Eyes of The Divine Audience, and bears fruit no matter what.   Our response to those perpetrators is a stern warning, and then if they persist doing what they do, we persist on opposing them, and we say “wait then…. and we shall wait with you, for The Last Day.”

Hence, from the theistic perspective – there can be no feeling of disempowerment .  Avoiding this feeling of disempowerment goes a long way in allowing us to face the facts of the situation.  From the perspective of secular humanistic activism, the ways to avoid disempowerment also exist, but this is beyond the scope of our discussion.

Disbelief Etiology F)

Failure in pursuing the truth, whole truth, and nothing but the truth – so help us God?  Disinformation patterns.

The best kind of disinformation is that which is full of lots of accurate information, but contains just the right amount of falsehood, either by omission of key facts, or addition of wrong information – such that perpetrators may continue their course.  Remember, the best counterfeit is that which mimics the real thing best.  In this light, we need to look at the common phrase that used to be repeated by folks who were swearing in testimony in a court of law, as they raised their right hands. It protected against disinformation in its basic forms.  First, was a swearing to tell the truth .  Next, this was qualified by a request to reveal the truth in its entirety, because it is possible to misinform through telling the truth, but not the whole truth . Even more, it is possible to tell the whole truth, but sprinkle onto it something else which misinforms a jury about a given situation, hence the additional pledge of telling nothing but the truth .  There you have the basic forms of misinformation – to not tell the story, or not tell the whole story, or tell the whole story, but add stuff with the aim of keeping people in the dark.

In the context of 9/11, let us just mention two misinformation patterns that have arisen.  In bringing these up, I am not accusing their proponents of consciously disseminating misinformation; what I am stating is that in light of the corpus of data found by the 9/11 Truth movement, the following explanation must be seen as misinformation.

1) Misinformation #1 – The Blowback hypothesis:  This essentially acknowledges the truth of corporate sponsored US creation and build-up of militant Islamic networks, and states that shame should be upon us for training those “Muslim militant rogues out there.”  Shame on us Americans for training them, teaching them the logistics and operations of espionage, high tech arms, and the like.  Shame on us for financing them. We used them to further our interests, but like a Frankenstein monster, they have turned against us.

This is false based on evidence that proves our foreknowledge of 9/11, and evidence of continued liaisons and support of these “militant Islamic networks,” and based on the obstructive behavior of the present regime and various oversight committees toward efforts in getting to the bottom of why 9/11 occurred.  

2) Misinformation #2: Damn those Saudis – We are at their mercy. This was one of the recurrent themes of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit – 9/11.   Remember, not telling the whole truth is just as bad as not telling the truth.  I am not accusing Mr. Moore of consciously engaging in misinformation – but not telling the whole story can be misleading.  Mr. Moore stuns the audience in exposing just how deep the US corporate – Saudi ties run, and how much of our economy they influence.  The typical American would obviously feel that they have been “invaded” by the Saudis in a non-military fashion.  

What Mr. Moore was partially describing is the Saudi Petro-dollar relationship.  The crux of this relationship lies in a dynamic that commands the Saudis to sell oil to  the corporates (Western)  at massively subsidized prices, and the cash the Saudis get from this is to be largely re-invested back into western banks and wall street – these petro-dollars play a large role in keeping our economy afloat; Corporations and Banks need the Saudis to re-invest the cash they get from selling us oil, back into our economy. Yet this is presented as some ‘invading malignant threat.'  In actuality, it is a rigged game, rigged to ensure that hydrocarbons, and cash, keep flowing in a one-way fashion into Wall Street – with the Saudi regime taking a cut for its own uses.  It is not very difficult to understand – most things having to do with business transactions are not.  If US corporations get even a slight inkling, that the Saudis are planning to take the cash from oil sales and proceed to some other market – it will be bye-bye for that particular regime, and hello to another more ‘friendlier' one.  People should never forget – we have the guns to enforce this.   This “regime change” for the sake of keeping profit margins plump, and our economy afloat, would make complete business sense, and has been implemented plenty of times.  

The last thing to realize is that these dynamics have nothing to do with America, or Saudi Arabia.  People who use the idiom of nation state often get thrown off by believing that at this level, nation st...

AN AMERICAN MUSLIM SPEAKS OUT
http://mujca.com/scholars.htm


“They try to deceive Allah and those who believe, but they only deceive themselves, and realize it not.” Qur’aan II:9
Below are selections from the book-in-progress The Myth of 9/11: An American Muslim Speaks Out by Kevin J. Barrett.

About the author

Kevin Barrett, a Muslim since 1992, has taught Islam, English, French, Arabic, Humanities, African Literature, American Civilization, and Folklore at colleges and universities in the San Francisco Bay Area, Paris, and Madison, Wisconsin. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in African Languages and Literature (Arabic). In November, 2004, Barrett co-founded MUJCA-NET, the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth. Barrett explains his decision to move from literature to activism by citing a story from Israel Shamir, the Israeli intellectual and MUJCA-NET endorser who moved from Russain literature to anglophone activism in response to Ariel Sharon’s outrages of 2001:

A Jewish folk tale relates the story of a mute child who had never said a word despite all the efforts of the doctors. Then one day, at the ripe age of ten, he dropped his spoon and cried out, "The soup is too salty!" His parents asked him in amazement why he had kept silent for years, and the child replied, "Until now, everything was all right.”

Since 9/11, the USA has not been all right. (Okay, it wasn’t perfect before—but on 9/11/01 we went from Weimar America to the Neocon Reich.) An African proverb from the Wolof people of Senegal states, “If you are lost, turn around and go back to the place where you went wrong. ”Ku xamul foo jëm, dellul fa nga jogewoon.” Literally, “If you don’t know where you’re going, go back where you came from.” (Thank you to Cherif Correa for calling my attention to this proverb.) For the USA, that place is 9/11/2001.

Bismillah ar-rahmân ar-rahîm.
Dedication: This book dedicated to my brothers and sisters—be they Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Hopis, or those of any other faith—of whatever kind—including faith in goodness, decency and justice—with the courage and integrity to stand up against our modern Pharaohs and demand 9/11 Truth.
Table of Contents

Introduction: The 9/11 Truth Honor Roll Part One: Myth as Big Lie

Chapter 1: Myth #1: “19 Muslim Hijackers”Chapter 2: Myth #2: “We Tried to Stop Them!”Chapter 3: Myth #3: “The Pentagon Was Hit by AA Flight 77”Chapter 4: Myth #4: “The Twin Towers Collapsed Because of the Plane Crashes and Fires”Chapter 5: Myth #5: “Let’s Roll!”Chapter 6: Myth #6: “My Pet Goat”Chapter 7: Myth #7: “After 9/11, Everything Changed—So We Went to War”

Part Two: Myth as Sacred Narrative

Chapter 8: 9/11 as Sacred StoryChapter 9: Mythic Heroes and VillainsChapter 10: The Mythic Rhythm: (In)security as Dramatic TensionChapter 11: TV and Cinema: Our Tribal HearthChapter 12: The Myth of DemocracyChapter 13: Myth, History, and Criticism

Chapter 14: Countermythologies and Truth Strategies: Can Storytelling Save the World?

Introduction: The 9/11 Truth Honor Roll
This book is not a conspiracy theory. It is a conspiracy fact.

No, I’m not talking about 9/11. I’m talking about the book.

The book you are about to read is a ticking time bomb. It is part of a massive global conspiracy of peace-loving truth terrorists who are on the verge of blowing the official myth of 9/11 to smithereens.

No, I’m not talking about Muslims. I’m talking about the 9/11 Truth Movement. I’m talking about brave people like Mike Ruppert, Nafeez Ahmad, Stan Goff, Gore Vidal, Barrie Zwicker, Michel Chossudovsky, Thierry Mayssan, Paul Thompson, Erick Hufschmid, Faiz Khan, Catherine Austin Fitts, David Griffin, Richard Falk, Jimmy Walters, Ellen Mariani, Sibel Edmunds, and of course the Jersey Girls—especially those whose need for truth is greater than their need for closure. I dedicate this book to them, to the many worthy others I haven't mentioned, and to their thousands of brave comrades.

These wonderful people come from a variety of religious and non-religious backgrounds. Though the media’s increasingly monolithic voice tells us that American Christians accept the myth of 9/11 and support Bush’s neocon oil crusade in the Middle East, it turns out that Christians are overrepresented on our 9/11 Truth honor roll. When I began to round up endorsers for MUJCA-NET, the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth, my earliest and strongest supporters were mostly Christians. Amazingly, as I was going around introducing myself as a Muslim who didn’t buy the official myth of 9/11, many Christians were listening to me and supporting me. I was impressed by their courage to stand up and demand the truth, whatever the consequences. Listen to Mike Ruppert, who comes from a Christian background. Ruppert was one of the earliest, bravest and most outspoken 9/11 truth-tellers.

“The question I am asked most frequently at my lectures is why I haven’t been killed yet. I have two answers. First, is it is not cost-effective, and the response would cause more problems than it would solve. I am not important enough to kill.

“Secondly, I will not die one minute before God has decided.” (Mike Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon, p.305)

Catherine Austin Fitts, like Mike Ruppert, is a Christian. She was an Assistant Secretary of Housing in the Bush I administration. It is her commitment and faith that led her to expose the oil-guns-drugs mob of corrupt spooks who currently rule America. She wrote a blistering public letter to Condi Rice charging Rice and the rest of the Bush II foreign policy mob with complicity in 9/11. Recently she came up with the idea of setting aside a time for universal prayer and meditation for 9/11 truth.

David Griffin, also a Christian, is one of the most respected theologians in America. The author more than twenty books on philosophy and theology, Griffin risked his life and reputation by publishing The New Pearl Harbor and The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions. Together, these two books present a solid prima facie case that 9/11 was an inside job, and that the Kean-Zelikow Commission’s 9/11 report is pure fiction: “As this book was going to press, I learned that The 9/11 Commission Report had been included among the finalists for the National Book Award. I would not have been shocked by this news except for the fact that the nomination was in the nonfiction category.” (David Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 291.) Griffin has been asked whether he worries about being killed. His reply (I am quoting from memory): “If they shoot me my book will shoot to the top of the bestseller lists, and if they leave me alone I’ll get to write my Summa Theologica in peace. It’s a win-win situation.” Though Griffin does not explicitly evoke God, he is a process theologian whose remarkable courage surely stems from his faith in the God-process.

By now it should be clear that some of the smartest and bravest “truth terrorists” are Christians. This should not surprise us. We Muslims consider Christians, like Jews, to be our fellow People of the Book, and the Qur’ân tells us that many of them are on the path of salvation. Surely Christians like Fitts, Ruppert and Griffin are among them. The Qur’ân tells us that those Jews and Christians who believe and do good and righteous deeds are the best of creatures; while those who ungratefully reject God and God’s beautiful creation are the worst of creatures and will abide in the fires of hell (98:6-7). Jews and Christians who bravely pursue truth and justice are surely among the best of creatures; while those who long for the destruction of God’s beautiful creation in apocalyptic violence—thinking that they can “force the hand of God” and bring Jesus back if they only murder enough darker-skinned people—are among the worst of creatures and are surely on the path to perdition. Those Muslims who think the wholesale slaughter of innocents is justifiable “jihad” are their companions on the path of misguidance.

We have seen a number of prominent Christians on the 9/11 Truth honor roll. But where are the Muslims? Our honor-roll of 9/11 truth-tellers contains only two Muslim names: Nafeez Ahmed and Faiz Khan.

Ahmed wrote the first topnotch revisionist account of 9/11, The War on Freedom: How and Why America Was Attacked on September 11th, 2001. Ahmed’s book convinced Gore Vidal, America’s greatest historical writer and essayist, that 9/11 was an inside job (Gore Vidal, Dreaming War; and The Enemy Within). Like Griffin’s work, Ahmed’s is a scholarly, objective historical account, and makes no mention of the author’s religious affiliation or beliefs.

Imam Faiz Khan, M.D., the other Muslim name on our 9/11 Truth honor roll, has not written a book on 9/11. But Imam Khan is surely among the bravest men and women on our list. A 9/1l first responder, Imam Khan is a doctor at Long Island Jewish Medical Center and Associate Professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Since the horrible events of September 11th, which he experienced firsthand as he treated the victims, Imam Khan has been tirelessly working for peace, interfaith understanding and 9/11 Truth. He has noted and deplored the reticence of Muslims on the 9/11 Truth issue:

"I have commented in various circles about the ghastly silence I have observed from the American Muslim "activist" sector regarding 9-11 truth. The silence stems from multifactorial reasons - certainly tact and fear is a legitimate reason for some within the American Muslim community to be silent and not rock the boat- but there is definitely a sub-sector within American Muslim activism whose neglect of this issue is bordering on malignancy."

Imam Khan raises a vitally important question: Why is the whole Muslim Umma not up in arms—figuratively, I mean—and screaming from the rooftops for 9/11 Truth? I think Imam Khan is on the right track when he answers “tact, fear, and malignancy.” Muslims tend to be polite and circumspect, especially when they are guests in somebody else’s house. The Qur’ân and the Prophet Muhammad (saas) teach us to use good words and avoid bad or injurious words. Most American Muslims still consider ourselves guests in the house of America. We are afraid that if we say to our non-Muslim fellow citizens, “Your government did this, not us” our words will be taken as a terrible insult.

The tact, as Imam Khan suggests, is augmented by fear. We are afraid that our fellow Americans will react to our “insult” by shipping us to a concentration camp at Guantanamo and torturing us. This fear is not unrealistic: A recent poll showed that nearly half of all Americans believe the U.S. government should restrict the civil liberties of Muslim Americans. In this Nazi-like climate, with thousands of our Muslim brothers and sisters being tortured, martyred and disapeared to secret concentration camps simply because they are Muslims, a discrete silence strikes many as the best policy. (Personally, I disagree. Silence and denial did not work for the Jews in 1930s Germany, and it won't work for American Muslims now.) have brought up the 9/11 Truth issue literally hundreds of times with fellow Muslims, and all but one of them have agreed that it was almost certainly an inside job. Then why not speak out? The answer I keep hearing is simple and ugly: “There is no more freedom of speech in America.” Over and over, my Muslim friends point out that when you are visited by the FBI—as a great many of them have been—you are threatened with arrest if you tell anyone, even your spouse, about the visit. You can be disappeared by the US government, taken to Guantanamo, denied access to a lawyer, denied due process, tortured, and executed by the direct order of high-ranking US officials, without anyone ever being told what happened to you. Is it so farfetched to suggest that this is exactly what might happen if you accuse those same top US officials of staging 9/11 and murdering 3000 people in a covert operation designed to trigger wars in the Middle East? Was not the real purpose of the wholesale shredding of the Constitution after 9/11 to instill precisely this fear in order to protect the real 9/11 criminals—the very people who wrote the “Patriot Act” ?

This kind of fear, understandable as it is, is indeed, in Imam Khan’s words, a “malignancy.” As Muslims, we are obliged to stand up for truth and justice. The sorry state of much of the Muslim world today is due to precisely this malignant fear of rising up to demand truth and justice. All across the Islamic world, tyrannous, corrupt rulers threaten their populations in exactly the same way the Bush Regime is threatening Americans. Muslims need to gather the courage to stand up for truth and justice wherever they live, including here in the USA.

Another kind of malignancy affects a relatively small proportion of the world’s Muslims, and an even smaller segment of American Muslims. Whereas the great majority of the world’s Muslims are inclined to believe that 9/11 was an inside job—89% of viewers according to an October, 2004 al-Jazeera poll—among the small minority that thinks “al-Qaida acted alone” are those who believe that the 9/11 attacks were justifiable. Of course, those who believe this are not all Muslim. One of my best friends, a very smart, committed political activist from Berkeley who happens to be Jewish, thinks that America got exactly what it deserved on 9/11. It was a magnificent blow against the empire on behalf of the oppressed people of the world, my friend says. He is so happy with the story of the “heroic al-Qaida attack” that he just doesn’t want to hear that it was an inside job. And he isn’t alone. A lot of other people feel that way too, and, let’s face it, many of them are Muslims.

That kind of thinking, like the craven fear that keeps most Muslims silent, is also a malignancy. The 9/11 attacks killed a fairly random cross-section of office workers from all national and religious backgrounds, including more than a hundred Muslims. As the Qur’ân says of the victims of female infantacide, a common pre-Islamic practice: On Judgment day, God will ask, For what sin were these people slain? What was the sin of living in the New York area and working in a particular office building? The random killing of innocents is an abomination. This means, of course, that all modern warfare is an abomination. (Since World War II, it has been the express policy of the US, Britain, Israel, and other nations to mass-murder civilians in order to destroy the morale and productive capacity of the “enemy”—remember the firebombings of Germany and Japan, and the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Operation Phoenix in Vietnam? Sharon’s razing of Rafah? The destruction of Falluja by US troops who were apparently ordered to shoot every man, woman and child, and shell every building?) Those who conduct modern wars are evil. All of those who planned and participated in the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq will answer for their actions on Judgment Day. So will those who perpetrated the 9/11 atrocities. Ultimately, I believe, history will show that the architects of 9/11, and the architects of the criminal Iraq and Afghan wars it triggered, were the same individuals. In the event that some of them were nominal Muslims—which is unlikely but not impossible—they will face the same judgment as the non-Muslim warmongers and killers of innocents. As Imam Khan writes:

"9-11 truth is an issue that unites the sincere and honest within all faith traditions, as it reflects simply a desire for truth, safety, and an accurate drawing of conflict lines that neccesarily do NOT coincide with religious parochialisms. The lines - Quranically speaking are between those who are willing to use zhulm (oppression and injustice) no matter how cleverly clothed in the guise of secular political policy or religious doctrine as a means to egoistic/materialistic ends - and those who will not stand for it." And we, as Muslims, must not stand for it. It is time for Muslims to get over their tact, fear and malignancies, and stand united as one Umma deploring the murder of innocents and demanding 9/11 truth. And it is time for non-Muslims of good will to join us.

Part Two: The Sacred Story of 9/11

Part One of this book summarized some of the evidence that the official story of 9/11 is a myth in the popular sense: A story that is untrue. Part Two will argue that it is a myth in a deeper sense: A sacred narrative whose purpose is to inaugurate and legitimize a particular social order.

It is important to point out that this argument is not dependent on the argument presented in Part One. That is, you do not have to believe that the official story of 9/11 is false to accept that it is a myth in the deep, scholarly sense of “sacred legitimizing narrative of origins.” The scholarly approach to myth does not usually concern itself with whether a myth is true, false, or something else. Scholars of mythology, like those of literature, find such stories fascinating in part because they convey information in a way that is more powerfully profound and world-shaping than is possible in modes of discourse that foreground verifiable truth claims, such as scientific writing, journalism, non-fiction, biography, and historiography. (Those “non-fictional” forms, upon closer inspection, often turn out to be rich in mythography themselves, and it is usually the mythical element at least as much as the truth-value that is responsible for their appeal.)

Though we can analyze the official story of 9/11 as a myth without concerning ourselves about whether or to what extent it is true, that does not mean that, in the final analysis, the truth of the story does not matter. That way lies nihlism—whether the vicious and mendacious nihlism of the neocons, avatars of the Big Lie, or the less pernicious nihlism of certain postmoderns, who believe that truth is boring and passé. The truth does matter. Though the myth of 9/11 functions in about the same way whether 19 extremist Muslim hijackers actually did it, or whether they were framed by intelligence agents working for the US High Command, the question of whether and to what extent this myth was consciously authored, and by whom, is obviously relevant to its ultimate meaning. Roland Barthes, the first and greatest analyst of the mythologies of modern life, supposedly oversaw the death of the author. According to Barthes, the author’s intended meaning is irrelevant to the meaning of her text. Maybe that’s true for Finnegan’s Wake, but not for 9/11. If the myth of 9/11 is false, a fictional creation intended to inaugurate an era of an endless “war on terror,” the meaning that we draw from it, and the historical effect we create as we draw that meaning, will be quite different from what we would have drawn and done as true believers in an egregiously false myth.

Our analysis of the official story of 9/11 as a myth in the deep sense can also help us understand why so many people believe it, despite the existence of so much evidence against it. The official story in general, and the Kean-Zelikow novel in particular, is a terrific story. It is woven around a stunning mythic image, has an unbelievable cast of larger-than-life heroes and villains, hails its American audience by casting it on the side of the angels, exerts a strong yet subliminal sexual fascination, sustains itself through a powerful structural rhythm of tension (insecurity) and partial release, and forces itself upon us through repeated tellings around our modern tribal hearth until it is deeply engrained into our consciousness. Questioning it begins to feel like sacrilege. Thus Thierry Mayssan has argued that Americans have come to see 9/11 as a religious event, and that this aura of sacrality has blinded them to the obvious falsity of the official story.

In short, many Americans have accepted the official version of 9/11 simply because it is such a good story. And we love good stories, as every storyteller knows. Nobody wants to be awakened from the “storylistening trance,” that pleasurable state evoked by a well-crafted narrative. And if the awakening is a rude one—if the storyteller and his biggest heroes turn out to be vicious, cold-blooded murderers posing as our protectors, wielding the power of life and death over all of us with a murderous, cynical sneer—it may be a whole lot less painful to remain half-asleep, dreaming the pleasant dreams that flicker so evanescently from the televisual hearth.

The official story of 9/11 is not only a good story, but (on the surface, at least) it is a coherent one. The allegedly relevant facts are arranged in such a way that they appear to all fit together. Those who point out the existence of a massive body of evidence contradicting the official story cannot, if they are honest, produce an equally coherent counter-narrative to explain the event. They must admit that they don’t know whether there were any hijackings or not, whether occupied passenger planes or remotely-guided dummy planes hit the buildings, who the relevant actors were and exactly what they did, and so on. All the critics of the official version can do is make educated guesses. And educated guesses are not as appealing as a tightly-woven, thrilling narrative, with each of its threads apparently in place, and its myriad of loose ends concealed.

Our examination of the deep myth of 9/11 will explore the ways that it is such a good story. How do you enchant me, 9/11? Let me count the ways.

The core of the official 9/11 story is its central mythic image: The collapse of the Twin Towers. Who will ever forget the sight of those massive, looming monuments imploding into dust and collapsing at free-fall speed? And though the sight itself was unforgettable, even on a 19-inch television screen, the major TV networks, largely owned by defense contractors that would be lapping up 9/11’s trillion-dollar windfall, made absolutely sure we wouldn’t forget it, by running the same footage over...and over...and over. Cognitive psychologists tell us that the most effective way to transfer data into long-term memory is repetition, repetition, repetition. That is why the best way to learn a new acquaintance’s name is to use it several times in quick succession.

The images of planes hitting skyscrapers, and of skyscrapers collapsing, possess the kind of scope and power that makes them potent mythical icons. Humans have always dreamed of flight and trembled with fear and longing—look at Icarus. And the dream of trying to build a tower to the skies, and then watching it collapse into ruins, is to building things what the dream of Icarus is to flying. The collapsing tower dream is the core image of the Babel myth. In fact, the parallels between 9/11 and the Babel myth are rather stunning. In the story of the Tower of Babel, the tower-builders got their power from the gradual unification of humanity under a single language. On 9/11/01 the world was nearly united under single global language, English, the natural-language expression of the underlying techno-economic language of global capitalism. The triumph of anglo-style capitalist “democracy” was being forecast in all quarters. It would, according to the wildly and inexplicably popular nice-cop-neocon Francis Fukuyama, bring the “End of History.” In fact, Fukuyama claimed, history had already ended, we just didn’t realize it yet. The world was unified under the anglo-capitalist Tower of Babel that was destined to reach the stars. On 9/11/01, the towers collapsed and capitalist globalism collapsed with it. Rabid neocon nationalism—the mean cop complementing Fukuyama's nice cop—arose on the ruins of the towers, and in proclaiming an incipient American Empire, the Bush administration set the stage for the confusion of nationalistic tongues that increasingly drives the world toward chaos. Fukuyama’s report of history’s death turned out to have been greatly exaggerated.

It is one of history’s exquisite ironies that the presumable architects of 9/11 were trying to preserve the very empire they are so efficiently destroying. The US empire, and especially its Israeli outpost, were doomed in the medium-term anyway, with or without 9/11. Inexorable demographic and economic trends were working against them. The European Union was already bigger, both in population and GNP, than the United States, and Israel was losing its demographic race with the Palestinians it had always needed to ethnic-cleanse as a precondition for being an apartheid “Jewish state.” Peak oil was coming soon, and with it the empowerment of whoever controlled the remaining oil reserves—meaning the Arabs and Muslims, absent a US invasion and occupation of the oil-producing regions. Meanwhile, China was shaping up as the superpower of the second half of the 21st century. The neocons, through their think-tank PNAC, stated the obvious: The US had a limited window of opportunity to shape the international environment, and it had better take advantage of its unmatched military power, the only card in its hand, while it still could. But US military might would only be fully unleashed, the PNAC neocons wrote, after “some galvanizing event like a new Pearl Harbor.” Without this New Pearl Harbor, Americans would not make the necessary sacrifices—like accepting widespread poverty, unemployment, the destruction of Social Security and the limitation or even end of their Constitutional civil liberties—that would be necessary for the US to put all its eggs in the military basket, and then lob those eggs at every imaginable potential adversary. Unfortunately for the US empire, these neocon strategists had not understood the point Charles Kupchan makes so forcefully in The Vulnerability of Empire: Empires fall when they make stupid, rash decisions, and those bad decisions are almost always driven by the same psychological factor: A fear of homeland vulnerability. By killing 3000 Americans as they staged what was intended to be the inaugurating myth of the New American Century, the neocons spurred the US into a frenzy of pathological overextension, uniting the whole world (especially Muslims) against America. Instead of preserving US power, they virtually assured their own empire of a much earlier, more violent and complete demise than would have been the case had it merely faded slowly and wisely from its position as world hegemon.

Mythic associations make the images of the plane strikes and tower collapses gripping, stunning, unforgettable...and available to mythologizers to weave their webs of meaning around. The first meaning that has to be woven, if a powerful myth is to be created, is that of the creation or inauguration of a new era. The core mythic image represents the explosive transition from one epoch, one state of being or non-being, to another. It separates the time and space we know from an earlier condition of chaos, void, or nonexistence. The best-known creation myth in Western culture, of course, is Genesis:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

—Now the earth had been wild and waste,

darkness over the face of Ocean,

breath of God hovering over the face of the waters—

God said: Let there be light! And there was light.

God saw the light: that it was good.

God separated the light from the darkness.

God called the light: Day! And the darkness he called: Night!

There was evening, there was morning: one day... (Everett Fox translation)

God goes on to separate waters from waters with a dome, creating heaven and seas; he separates the seas from land; life from non-living matter; man from woman; and so on. Note the pattern: One big moment of creation, the birth of somethingness (heaven and earth) out of nothingness, is followed by lesser acts of creation by division. In each case, something chaotic or amorphous is divided, resulting in two less-amorphous entities, one of which is better, being less chaotic or amorphous than the other. Chaos is broken into light and darkness (light is better); the waters are broken into above and below, and the above ones (heaven) are better; dry earth is divided from the seas, and dry earth is better; plant life appears from the earth (life is better than mere earth); animals appear (an improvement over plants); and finally humans are created in God’s own image, with men supposedly being better (less amorphous and chaotic) than women. This magnificent but self-aggrandizing myth is a monument to the human ego: The process of creation that led to ME consisted of cutting chaos in two, discarding the worse half, and keeping the better half, until finally I was created in the spit and image of God.

The Bible’s creation myth is clearly derived from earlier Middle Eastern creation myths. The one preserved in the Gilgamesh epic posits a somewhat more violent sundering of chaos, in the person of the oceanic female, and the bloody carving out of the domain of (aggressive male) order. That aggressive male ego is then held up as the tribal norm.

The core mythic image of 9/11, the destruction of the WTC, is more like the Gilgamesh/Sumerian versions of creation than the one in Genesis. For one thing, it is ultra-violent. Thousands of human bodies are smashed, pulverized, and exploded into pieces. But unlike the Sumerian version, in which the primordial chaos goddess is dismembered by the male warrior hero, here the sacrificial victim is ambiguously gendered. The Towers, of course, are phallic symbols, and the American audience is invited to view their destruction as a kind of symbolic castration. Yet this symbolic castration of America is linked to the “our women are threatened” motif, perhaps the most powerful single motivational myth available to those who wish to stimulate warlike behavior. The media propaganda machine works overtime cranking out portrayals of Arabs and Muslims as vile sexist villains who abuse, oppress, and sexually exploit women. Thus the destruction of the Towers is blamed on these dusky-hued sexist scoundrels who threaten womenfolk everywhere, and the image of the collapsing Towers made into a kind of rape. America, robbed of its two towering phalluses, is feminized, symbolically penetrated by gigantic, explosive airplanes ejaculating jet fuel, whose crews and passengers had already been penetrated by Arab-Muslim blades, box-cutters that had somehow penetrated airport security. The image of a nation vulnerable to penetration is heightened by the story about the alleged “19 hijackers” who supposedly snuck into the country to do the dastardly deed.

This violent, spectacular, sexually-charged image separates the forces of order, namely US, from the forces of chaos and evil, namely THEM—a primal sundering that repeats the pattern of all creation myths, which cleave before from after, good from evil, day from night, inaugurating the whole social reality which the myth-participants and their descendants subsequently experience. “If you are not with us,” George W. Bush famously warned, “you are against us.” This bifurcation of the world into light and dark, white (Americans) and dark (Ay-rabs and Nee-groes), pure unsullied Judeo-Christians and swarthy, sexually aggressive Muslims, repeats the pattern of earlier Euro-racist mythologizers, notably Aldolf Hitler. Like Bush and the neocons, Hitler and the Nazis inaugurated their new era by destroying an architectural monument and blaming its destruction on their designated enemies, swarthy, sexually-aggressive Semites whose penetration of the pure white homeland would have to be stopped. The new, post-Reichstag Fire world would be one of endless aggressive war. Bush’s obsession with this idea of a whole new era of perpetual war, an era inaugurated by the destruction of an architectural monument, produced one of the most bizarre Presidential Freudian slips in history. In a story that should have been headlined, BUSH THREATENS SUBMARINE ATTACK ON CLINTON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY, Sidney Blumenthal described President Bush wandering beside the Arkansas River just after the opening ceremony of the Clinton Presidential Library:

CHRISTIANS, MUSLIMS AND JEWS FORGE AN INTERFAITH 9/11 TRUTH ALLIANCE OVER THE WAR ON TERRORISM

Dr. Kevin Barrett
http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/Fr...01441.html


When I tell people I work for the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth, LINK, I can see their eyes glaze over for a moment as they try to process the information. The idea of any Muslim- Jewish-Christian alliance is "hard to compute." The 9/11 truth part further boggles the already boggled mind of the neophyte, provoking stupefaction or, occasionally, amazed laughter.

Jokes subvert expectation, and the idea of a Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 truth seems so subversive it sounds like a joke: "A rabbi, a priest, and an imam walk into a bar...bartender says, what are ya having"; Rabbi says, "A glass of kosher wine and some 9/11 truth please. Priest says, "Amen to the truth, but make mine whiskey." Imam says, "Glad to hear you arggh both helpeeng clear zee names of zee slandered Muslims... but what zee hell am I doing in a bar?

Traitors among Us is a book for further reading on this subject. Minimum Member Pledge of $60.00 required to get this book as a thank you gift.

Seriously, MUJCA is no joke. Short version: We're the interfaith wing of the 9/11 truth movement. Co-founded in November 2004 by myself and Faiz Khan, a physician, imam, 9/11 first responder, and interfaith activist, MUJCA has been spearheading a worldwide effort to get people of the Abrahamic faith traditions to talk about the facts and meaning of the events of September 11th, 2001. As our mission statement puts it: We do not necessarily agree about the probable level of official complicity in the events of September 11th, but we agree that a new investigation is a matter of the utmost importance.

As theologian and 9/11 truth advocate David Griffin has noted: Jews, Christians, Muslims, and good people of other outlooks share a commitment to basic moral precepts including, "Thou shalt not steal thy neighbour's oil; thou shalt not kill thy neighbour in order to steal his oil; thou shalt not lie about thy neighbour in order to justify killing thy neighbour in order to steal his oil." Now that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has allegedly confessed to being the lone nut behind every major crime since the Lindberg baby kidnapping, I might add: "Thou shalt not torture thy neighbour into lying about himself in order to justify killing thy neighbour in order to steal his oil."

As the 9/11 truth movement continues its explosive growth, people of faith are facing the unpleasant likelihood that their communities have been manipulated into hating and killing each other by a psy-op of gargantuan proportions. A recent New York Times/CBS poll showed that only 16% of U.S. Americans believe the government is telling the truth about 9/11, while an Ohio University Scripps-Howard poll shows that 36%, or about 100 million U.S. citizens, believe top US officials committed high treason and mass murder on 9/11/01 in order to launch their pre-planned war in the Middle East. A 2005 poll by the Toronto Star showed that 63% of Canadians agree.

MUJCA is spreading the word, and organizing people to take back their country and their world, by:

-- Bulk-distributing 9/11 truth DVDs to individuals, congregations, and religious leaders;

-- Organizing and sponsoring conferences, lectures, film screenings, and speaking tours;

-- Organizing and empowering individuals to approach religious leaders in their communities with the 9/11 truth message;

--·Sponsoring publications, including web-publications as well as such books as 9/11 and American Empire v.2: Christians, Jews and Muslims Speak Out (ed. Barrett, Cobb and Lubarsky), and Truth Jihad: My Epic Struggle Against the 9/11 Big Lie (Kevin Barrett).

By organizing David Griffin's nationally-televised U.W.-Madison lecture "9/11 and American Empire", in spring 2005, MUJCA propelled the 9/11 truth movement into the mass media. With their sponsorship of the Chicago conference "9/11: Revealing the Truth, Reclaiming Our Future" (June 2006) MUJCA and 911truth.org brought 9/11 truth into mainstream publications including the New York Times. But mainly, MUJCA and the rest of the 9/11 truth movement has been conducting an end-run around the corporate monopoly media, using the new technologies of internet video distribution and cheap DVD copying to show people, as opposed to just telling them, that the World Trade Center was demolished by insiders, and that all our major institutions are lying about it.

Such a disillusioning awakening can be depressing and faith- shattering. Yet it opens up the possibility of a brighter future, and a renewed commitment to God, country, and the principles of freedom and justice that anchor the Constitution of the United States of America, and the national traditions of other countries as well. It can put an end to the current era of psychopathic misrule by megalomaniacal Globalists and "neoconservative" followers of the insane cult leader, Leo Strauss, himself an acolyte of the leading Nazi philosopher, Carl Schmidt.

9/11 truth activism can force an end to the crusade-jihad that otherwise "will not end in our lifetimes." It can trigger a needed radical reduction of world military spending, led by the United States, which spends more military money than its next several rivals combined. By putting this money to use solving real human problems, rather than illusory ones like "global terrorism", 9/11 truth can quite literally save the world. And by starkly revealing the forces of propaganda and mind-control at their ugliest, 9/11 truth can help put an end to technologies of mass mind manipulation, and usher in an era of human autonomy and dignity.

The choice is ours: A better world, or an ever-worsening Orwellian nightmare. To educate yourself about 9/11 truth, the key issue of our time, begin by reading the 9/11 truth statements of 100 military, intelligence and governmental leaders at, LINK. Then read David Griffin's articles archived at, LINK. Finally, email me at kevin@mujca.com and join the struggle for truth and justice.

As Archimedes said, Give me a long enough lever and a place to stand and I can move the world. Truth is our lever and our place to stand. A better world awaits.

About the author:

Dr. Kevin Barrett is the author of Truth Jihad: My Epic Struggle Against the 9/11 Big Lie, and the lead editor of 9/11 and American Empire V. 2: Christians, Jews and Muslims Speak Out.

REVISITING  9/11/2001
APPLYING THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD

http://www.journalof911studies.com/volum...Method.pdf

RADICALISATION, EXTREMISM & ISLAMISM :
REALITIES AND MYTHS IN THE WAR ON TERROR

http://www.hizb.org.uk/hizb/resources/ht...error.html

The Muslim community in Britain has been under a continuous spotlight since the events of 9/11 and 7/7 in particular. The bombings triggered a wide-ranging debate that sought to understand the processes at work within the Muslim community, map its changes, scrutinise the influences it is subject to and identify events in its recent history that may explain why Muslim British citizens would want to turn on Britain.


This debate to date has blamed a number of different factors for contributing to this heightened terror threat, but has been offset by sensationalist claims and alarmist comments that have only acted to obscure an accurate picture and to entrench stereotypes in an already polarised debate. It has sought to discredit legitimate Islamic political ideas by suggesting they increase the Muslim community’s susceptibility to using violence. To date, the debate has lacked an honest, dispassionate assessment of the forces at play within the Muslim community. The impact of which has been dangerous characterisations of Islam and the Muslim community, misinformed public fear and misguided government policy.



This report by Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain aims to expose the many inconsistencies in the 'War on Terror' narrative and the manipulation of security fears to attack political ideas that carry considerable support in the Muslim world. Our report challenges misconceptions about radicalisation, 'extremism' and political violence, explains Islam’s political tenets and maps a way forward for the future.



The report describes how the language used in the security debate has become politicised to counter dissenting voices, particularly to falsely claim Islamic political ideas are at the part of the problem. It challenges the view that the association between Islam and contemporary politics – often termed ‘Islamism’ - is part of a process that increases the Muslim community’s vulnerability to the use of violence. It is an assumption that it is built on a false characterisation of the relationship between Islam and politics in general. The report argues that there has, over many years, been a process that first saw a general ‘politicisation’ of the Muslim community and subsequent ‘Islamicisation’ of Muslim politics in Britain, rather than ‘radicalisation’. The false labelling reflects a failure to understand Islam and therefore to position its ideas within a secular political system.



The report goes on to cite credible research that calls into question the Bush-Blair argument that Islamic political ideas inherently cause violence and insecurity. The trend towards greater Islamic political practice, far from being a precursor to violence, often provides people with an alternative. The report argues that politically motivated violence is a broader issue often occurring as a response to political oppression and injustice rather than because of ideology or theology. Hence, the association of Islamic political ideas with violence is misleading. Importantly, recent poll evidence shows there is little support for violence as a means of change in the Muslim world, polls which simultaneously show increasingly levels of support for Islamic politics. The report also highlights the need to separate goals from means so as to not to link widely held legitimate political ideas with violence.



The report challenges attempts to discredit one of the central goals of current Islamic political activity in the Muslim world: the establishment of an independent Islamic political system in the Muslim world, or Caliphate. Just as with Islamic politics more generally, a host of arguments have been forwarded to suggest such the Caliphate would be unwelcome prospect and that its emergence should be opposed, including attempts to link its reality with violence. The report address failures in the Western discourse on the Caliphate, explains the position of the Caliphate in Islamic orthodoxy and describes how the Caliphate is a distinct and alternative political system. Crucially, it argues the Caliphate will be a stabilising force for the Muslim world.


In discussing a way forward, the report highlights how attempts at reforming Islam itself have been discredited and gained little traction amongst Muslims - Islamic orthodoxy has won the opinion in the Muslim world. As part of diagnosing the problem, the report argues Western colonialism not Islam has been at the heart of the political instability and crises of the Muslim world. The onset of colonisation also disrupted indigenous efforts at modernising the Muslim world. Importantly, Islam played a historic role in preventing political excess, tyranny and totalitarianism in the Muslim world and its absence has allowed these to go unchecked, as has been acknowledged by senior academics. Importantly, the Muslim world should be allowed to determine its own political future, not the West.



Through examining the statements of senior politicians, the report demonstrates the primary concern of many has, and still remains, preventing Islamic political change so as to protect
the US and Britain’s unrivalled influence over events in the Muslim world. In the corridors of Washington and Westminster, Islam's political ideas are seen as a potential threat - not to security - but to the control, exploitation and interference that has continued for decades. Yet on the 'Muslim street' these ideas mean liberation from tyranny and oppression, a connection
to their beliefs and history and the ability to shape their own political destiny.


THE FEAR OF KHILAFAH NOT “TERRORISM”
Abid Ullah Jan
http://www.icssa.org/article_detail_parse.php?m_link=&slink=&a_id=929&rel=907,763&pg=&m_id=1169


Tied to general fear of Muslims is the real fear: the fear of Khilafah. In chapter 3 of the Book (Afghanistan: The Genesis of the Final Crusade) , we will explore the reason for this fear. Here we will establish the existence of this fear.

A prominent leader from South Asia, Mohammed Ali Johar, predicted in 1924:


It is difficult to anticipate the exact effects the “abolition” of Khilafah will have on the minds of Muslims in India. I can safely affirm that it will prove a disaster both to Islam and to civilization. The suppression of the time honored institution which was, through out the Muslim world, regarded as a symbol of Islamic unity will cause the disintegration of Islam...., I fear that the removal of this ideal will drive the unadvanced and semi-civilized peoples..., into ranks of revolution and disorder.175

Eighty-one years later, we witness that the “civilized” world is busy in the noble cause of digging out Saddam’s atrocities, but at the same time tries to burry deep Uzbek president, Islam Karimov’s massacre of civilians in Andijan. The reason for such a silence is the justification which Islam Karimov put forward for his massacre and continued human rights violations in Uzbekistan. In Karimov’s words, the victims “wanted to establish Khilafah.”176 Atrocities of similar, dictatorial regimes in many Muslims countries are acceptable to the “civilized” world because these are considered as secular bulwarks against Hizb ut Tahrir-like movements, whose main crime is the struggle for establishing Khilafah.


The so-called mainstream media and the architects of war at the political and religions levels, make everyone believe that the trouble started, at the earliest, around the Taliban’s coming to power in Afghanistan. In fact, the global troubles have been attributed to Khilafah since its inception in the 7th century. Thirteen centuries later, when the British Empire abolished the remnants of Khilafah in 1924, it took a sigh of relief and considered it as the ultimate victory against Islam. 

To the utter disappointment of Britain and its allies, the problem, nevertheless, remains. Khilafah still provides motivation to many actions and reactions; movements and counter-movements in the Muslim world. Consequently, the centuries old zeal of Islamophobes to abolish Khilafah is as much the root of all unacknowledged terrorism of the United States, Britain and their allies as the renewed zeal among Muslims to seek self-determination and real liberation from the colonial yoke. Although a majority may not be thinking in terms of establishing Khilafah, but it will be the natural consequence of true liberation and unified approach towards tackling the prevailing problems. That is why the totalitarian warlords in Washington and London are opposed to granting real independence to Muslim masses and spread the fear of “Caliphate.”


Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times points out in his December 11 column that policy hawks in the Pentagon have used the term Caliphate internally since the planning stages for the war in Iraq, but the administration’s public use of the word increased this past summer and autumn:



Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said it in a speech last Monday in Washington and again on Thursday on PBS. Eric Edelman, the under secretary of defense for policy, said it the week before in a roundtable at the Council on Foreign Relations. Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, said it in October in speeches in New York and Los Angeles. General John Abizaid, the top American commander in the Middle East, said it in September in hearings on Capitol Hill.177


The major problem with Khilafah is the morbid dread it strikes in the hearts of those who are determined not to allow Muslims to become united, exercise their right to self-determination and live by the Qur’an. The key to materializing these objectives lies in thwarting Muslim’s organized struggle towards real liberation from the puppet regimes and uniting the divided world of Islam.


Just the thought of this struggle leads the Islamophobes into taking many pre-emptive measures, which, in turn, lead to grievances, reaction and counter measures on the part of Muslims.

The more time passes, the more people realize the importance of a central, independent authority for Muslims. Unlike all the now defunct revolutions of human history, the 7th century revolution in the heart of Arabia not only culminated in establishing a way of life but also setting guidelines for human governance, which are still valid today.


This realization of the need to have a central, independent authority for Muslims is directly proportional to the struggle on the part of the architects of war on Afghanistan who will never allow Muslims to take any steps that may lead to the establishment of an alternative model to the existing unjust socio-political and economic order.

The “war on terrorism” is a post 9/11 slogan. In fact, it is a summary title for all the anti-Islam efforts: from intellectual escapades to legal hurdles, wars, occupations, detentions, torture and criminalizing the concept of Khilafah. In this process, terrorism is used as a synonym of Khilafah.

One can notice this by carefully listening to the brief statements at the end of summits and conferences these days. It seems as if there is nothing going on in the world except terrorism. The crux of all messages is: We are committed, determined and stand as one against the evil of terrorism. We would not allow terrorists to win. They are against our values and way of life.

A realistic look forces one to ask: Where does the alleged ‘Muslim terrorism’ stand in comparison to the mass killings, tortures, detentions, and exploitations carried out to deter Muslims from being organized and united. This proves that the war is actually on something other than the deceptively labeled terrorism. The first physical action of this war was the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

One month before 9/11, the New York Times reports that most Americans are made to believe that terrorism “is the greatest threat to the United States and that it is becoming more widespread and lethal.” The Americans are made “to think that the United States is the most popular target of terrorists and they almost certainly have the impression that extremist Islamic groups cause most terrorism.” Larry C. Johnson, nevertheless, concludes: “None of these beliefs are based in fact.”178

Johnson cites figures from the CIA reports. Accordingly, deaths from “international terrorism fell to 2,527 in the decade of 1900’s from 4,833 in the 80’s.” Compare the 2,527 deaths in the 90s due to acknowledged terrorism with the death of 1.8 million in Iraq during the same years due to unacknowledged terrorism of the United States, its allies and the United Nations. The United States and allies’ terrorism remained unacknowledged because they justified it with lies about Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. For example, compare the 4,833 deaths due to acknowledged Muslim terrorism with the one million deaths due to unacknowledged aggression of Iraq against Iran on the behest of the United States and its allies.

So, what is consuming the world: the acknowledged terrorism of Muslims or the unacknowledged terrorism of the United States and its allies? This brings us to the point that the endless tirades about Muslim terrorism are directed at holding Muslims from exercising their right to self-determination. Anything in the name of Khilafah in particular becomes part of the struggle towards this end and is instantly criminalized.


Many people believe these measures are part of the wider crackdowns for safety and security in the wake of 9/11. This, however, is not true. The reality is that anything in the name of Khilafah has been ridiculed and presented as a threat to safety since 1924 in particular. The reason: Islamophobes do not want to see real Khilafah re-emerge after their assuming in 1924 that they are done with the remnants of a symbolic Khilafah forever.

An example of this attitude is the reaction in the British press at the eve of Khilafah Conference in London in 1994, long before the staged 9/11 and 7/7. A headline in Independent (August 07, 1994) reads: “Muslim body accused of racism: Muslim rally angers Jews.” A headline in Telegraph (August 8, 1994) reads: “Wembley survives the Muslim call to arms.” An inset in the same story reads: “Fundamentalists’ Elusive Dream of An Islamic Empire.”

The morbid dread of Khilafah is evident from the editorials in the leading British dailies at this occasion. “The threat of Jihad,” reads the title of the Telegraph editorial, which goes on to link the Khilafah conference with the happenings in Algeria: “Islamic fundamentalists won a majority in recent elections, but, for political reasons, have been denied by the old guard.” The editorial goes on to sow the seeds of dissention among Muslims: “in Britain yesterday, for example, a rally of Islamic fundamentalists caused nothing but alarm by its challenge to the British Muslim community’s moderate leadership.”

The Guardian attempted to belittle the conference in its August 8, 1994 report with comments such as: “Much of the Islamic rhetoric meant little to many of the young British Muslims,” as if the participants were forced to join the conference, or that popular opinion decides what is Islamic and what is not.

The fear-mongering trend was not limited to a few presstitutes. Times titled its editorial: “Marching Muslims: Reminder of the need for vigilance” (August 08, 1994) and went on to scare the public: “The rally yesterday of some 8000 Muslims in Wembley Arena provoked understandable nervousness in Britain and abroad.” That “understandable nervousness” is not there since 1994, or 7/7, but since 1400 years. It did not end with systematically abolishing Khilafah in 1924.

A report in The Independent (August 8, 1994) by Tim Kelsey went to the extreme in fear mongering. Headline of the report tells the whole story: “Fundamentalist gathering seeks political overthrow of Western democracies: Muslims call for Israeli state to be destroyed.” One must remember that this is coming from a more progressive paper and not from some right-wing publication and that too in 1994, when even the Taliban had not come to power.

It is understandable that the enemies of Islam would go to any length, beyond these fear-mongering reports, to discredit the concept of Khilafah and deny them the right to self-determination. This includes staged terror attacks, lies for justifying invasions and occupation, and support to criminal regimes, which promise, in turn, not to let Muslims live by Islam. That is how the turmoil widens and the hopes for peace diminish with each passing day.