| QUESTIONS ABOUT 9/11 by LeRoy Moore Two books published last year show in disturbing detail that the U.S. government has not told the truth about the 9/11 disaster – why it happened, who was behind it, what response was made in advance and at the time. We at RMPJC have been urged by a number of friends to call attention to these books as a source of alternate information. What follows is offered not as an endorsement of either book but as a summary of key points intended to foster awareness and to provoke discussion. The War on Freedom: How and Why America Was Attacked on September 11, 2001, by British human rights activist and political analyst Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, is the more thoroughly documented of the two books while being also more tentative in its conclusions. Written rather like a lawyer’s brief, it makes tedious reading. But the reader’s patience will be rewarded with crucial evidence and clarifying insight. Here are some of Ahmed’s main points: Having through the 1980s supported various factions in Afghanistan in their fight against the Soviets, the U.S. helped create the Taliban. After the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan in 1994, the U.S. supported them in the hope that they would allow construction of an oil pipeline from Central Asia across Afghanistan to the Pakistan seacoast from which oil could be shipped to China and elsewhere, bypassing Iran. When the Taliban balked at meeting U.S. expectations about the pipeline, the U.S. government threatened the Taliban and began preparing for war. The Bush administration set mid-October 2001 as the time to attack. The war that actually began that month thus was planned well before 9/11 and had as its primary goal gaining control of the vast Central Asia oil reserves. Osama Bin Laden was irrelevant. The 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington may have been retaliatory. U.S. intelligence agencies had considerable advance knowledge that an attack was coming, perhaps including even details about 9/11, yet investigations were blocked and no preventive measures were taken. Investors with evident knowledge of what was about to happen made millions of dollars in a flurry of last minute trading of shares in the airlines whose planes were crashed on 9/11. These investors have not been identified. Several prominent individuals received warnings not to fly on 9/11. When the attacks actually happened, standard operating procedures for rapid Air Force interception of hijacked airliners were not followed. High-ranking U.S. officials may have allowed the 9/11 attacks in order to justify the war they intended to wage against Afghanistan. Within 24 hours of the 9/11 attacks the FBI provided detailed information on the attackers, showing it already had this information. Osama Bin Laden, who was immediately blamed for the attack, is not so alienated from his family as has been reported. His family is close to the Saudi royal family, and both have economic ties to the Bushes, mainly through the Carlyle Group for which Bush Sr. works, a Washington-based international merchant bank with strong links to military interests. Investigation of Saudi funding of Al Qaeda has been forbidden. Despite U.S. claims that it has wanted for several years to capture and prosecute Osama Bin Laden for various terrorist acts, until the Afghan war it acted more to protect than to apprehend him. On July 12, 2001, just weeks prior to 9/11, while Bin Laden was hospitalized at the American Hospital in Dubai, he was visited by a CIA official. The U.S. supported Pakistan’s support of the Taliban. The head of ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service, was in Washington meeting with U.S. officials at the time of 9/11. When it became known that shortly before the attacks he had sent funds to Mohamed Atta, one of the 9/11 suicide bombers, he was quietly removed from his position. Some analysts believe the 9/11 attacks were beyond the capacity of Al Qaeda alone and thus had to have had state sponsorship. Bin Laden received support from Pakistan. U.S. ties to ISI and the Pakistan military are particularly close. Investigation of ISI’s role in 9/11 has been blocked. Ahmed concludes that 9/11 “provided the crucial pretext the Bush administration needed to consolidate its power and pursue a drastic unlimited militarisation of foreign policy . . . while crushing domestic dissent and criminalising legitimate protest.” 9/11: The Big Lie, by writer Thierry Meyssan of the Voltaire Network in France, is based solely on U.S. government documents and statements by U.S. civilian and military leaders, observers, and independent analysts. What follows focuses on points where Meyssan diverges significantly from Ahmed. Meyssan begins by looking closely at photographs of the section of the Pentagon reportedly hit by a Boeing 757-200 transport. If a plane of this size crashed into the Pentagon wall, why did it make such a small hole? The hole may have admitted the plane’s fuselage but certainly not its wings. What happened to the wings? The fragments one would expect to see scattered over the area outside the Pentagon wall are not there. Meyssan concludes that the Pentagon was hit not by a large airplane but by a missile fired from a plane that roared away. Because the plane penetrated the Pentagon airspace without being fired on, Meyssan concludes that the missile was launched from a U.S. military aircraft. The planes that hit the World Trade Center towers were probably guided to their targets by radio signals beamed from inside the towers, and the buildings fell not simply from the explosion of the planes’ fuel but also because dynamite had been placed inside the towers. Though all these points are supported by the remarks of observers or of outside specialists, none of them have been investigated mainly because the government immediately blamed the attack on Al Queda terrorists. The 9/11 attacks – “masterminded from inside the American state apparatus” – closely resemble a plot to make war on Cuba hatched within the Pentagon in the early 1960’s but never implemented (Meyssan reprints the key documentation). The existence of a plot within the U.S. military to perpetrate the 9/11 attacks is detailed in a deposition prepared in advance of 9/11 and given in a Canadian court by a former U.S. Navy information officer. The 9/11 attacks “allowed what was nothing more than a classical colonial expedition [the war against Afghanistan] to be disguised as a legitimate operation.” Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s new U.S.-supported Prime Minister, has old CIA connections as well as ties to the oil company that is behind plans for the Afghanistan pipeline. Meyssan’s final conclusion is that the main purpose of the internal plot in the U.S. was to get increased funding for the military, especially for weapons in space, a prime tool in U.S. imperialism. |
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