In the public interest. Courtesy of the Guardian.
It is the truth that sets all free.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/sep/12/911thebigcoverup
9/11 – the big cover-up?
Six years after 9/11, the American public have still not been provided with a full and truthful account of the single greatest terror attack in US history.
What they got was a turkey. The 9/11 Commission was hamstrung by official obstruction. It never managed to ascertain the whole truth of what happened on September 11 2001.
The chair and vice chair of the 9/11 Commission, respectively Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, assert in their book, Without Precedent, that they were “set up to fail” and were starved of funds to do a proper investigation. They also confirm that they were denied access to the truth and misled by senior officials in the Pentagon and the federal aviation authority; and that this obstruction and deception led them to contemplate slapping officials with criminal charges.
Despite the many public statements by 9/11 commissioners and staff members acknowledging they were repeatedly lied to, not a single person has ever been charged, tried, or even reprimanded, for lying to the 9/11 Commission.
From the outset, the commission seemed to be hobbled. It did not start work until over a year after the attacks. Even then, its terms of reference were suspiciously narrow, its powers of investigation curiously limited and its time-frame for producing a report unhelpfully short – barely a year to sift through millions of pages of evidence and to interview hundreds of key witnesses.
The final report did not examine key evidence, and neglected serious anomalies in the various accounts of what happened. The commissioners admit their report was incomplete and flawed, and that many questions about the terror attacks remain unanswered. Nevertheless, the 9/11 Commission was swiftly closed down on August 21 2004.
I do not believe in conspiracy theories. I prefer rigorous, evidence-based analysis that sifts through the known facts and utilises expert opinion to draw conclusions that stand up to critical scrutiny. In other words, I believe in everything the 9/11 Commission was not.
The failings of the official investigation have fuelled too many half-baked conspiracy theories. Some of the 9/11 “truth” groups promote speculative hypotheses, ignore innocent explanations, cite non-expert sources and jump to conclusions that are not proven by the known facts. They convert mere coincidence and circumstantial evidence into cast-iron proof. This is no way to debunk the obfuscations and evasions of the 9/11 report.
But even amid the hype, some of these 9/11 groups raise valid and important questions that were never even considered, let alone answered, by the official investigation. The American public has not been told the complete truth about the events of that fateful autumn morning six years ago.
What happened on 9/11 is fundamentally important in its own right. But equally important is the way the 9/11 cover-up signifies an absence of democratic, transparent and accountable government. Establishing the truth is, in part, about restoring honesty, trust and confidence in American politics.
There are dozens of 9/11 “truth” websites and campaign groups. I cannot vouch for the veracity or credibility of any of them. But what I can say is that as well as making plenty of seemingly outrageous claims; a few of them raise legitimate questions that demand answers.
Four of these well known “tell the truth” 9/11 websites are:
1) Scholars for 9/11 Truth, which includes academics and intellectuals from many disciplines.
2) 250+ 9/11 ‘Smoking Guns’ a website that cites over 250 pieces of evidence that allegedly contradict, or were omitted from, the 9/11 Commission report.
3) The 911 Truth Campaign that, as well as offering its own evidence and theories, includes links to more than 20 similar websites.
4) Patriots Question 9/11, perhaps the most plausible array of distinguished US citizens who question the official account of 9/11, including General Wesley Clark, former Nato commander in Europe, and seven members and staffers of the official 9/11 Commission, including the chair and vice chair. In all, this website documents the doubts of 110+ senior military, intelligence service, law enforcement and government officials; 200+ engineers and architects; 50+ pilots and aviation professionals; 150+ professors; 90+ entertainment and media people; and 190+ 9/11 survivors and family members. Although this is an impressive roll call, it doesn’t necessarily mean that these expert professionals are right. Nevertheless, their scepticism of the official version of events is reason to pause and reflect.
More and more US citizens are critical of the official account. The respected Zogby polling organisation last week found that 51% of Americans want Congress to probe President Bush and Vice-President Cheney regarding the truth about the 9/11 attacks; 67% are also critical of the 9/11 Commission for not investigating the bizarre, unexplained collapse of the 47-storey World Trade Centre building 7 (WTC7). This building was not hit by any planes. Unlike WTC3, which was badly damaged by falling debris from the Twin Towers but which remained standing, WTC7 suffered minor damage but suddenly collapsed in a neat pile, as happens in a controlled demolition.
In a 2006 interview with anchorman Evan Soloman of CBC’s Sunday programme, the vice chair of the 9/11 Commission, Lee Hamilton, was reminded that the commission report failed to even mention the collapse of WTC7 or the suspicious hurried removal of the building debris from the site – before there could be a proper forensic investigation of what was a crime scene. Hamilton could only offer the lame excuse that the commissioners did not have “unlimited time” and could not be expected to answer “every question” the public asks.
There are many, many more strange unexplained facts concerning the events of 9/11. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to be puzzled and want an explanation, or to be sceptical concerning the official version of events.
Six years on from those terrible events, the survivors, and the friends and families of those who died, deserve to know the truth. Is honesty and transparency concerning 9/11 too much to ask of the president and Congress?
What is needed is a new and truly independent commission of inquiry to sort coincidence and conjecture from fact, and to provide answers to the unsolved anomalies in the evidence available concerning the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Unlike the often-stymied first investigation, this new commission should be granted wide-ranging subpoena powers and unfettered access to government files and officials. George Bush should be called to testify, without his minders at hand to brief and prompt him. America – and the world – has a right to know the truth.
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by James Corbett
BoilingFrogsPost.com
April 9, 2013
Last week on this program we explored the tired old cliche that is the last refuge of a skeptic who cannot refute the evidence of systemic criminality in the halls of governmental power or the bowels of the intelligence agencies: “But someone would have talked.” As often as this argument is trotted out in other areas of discourse, nowhere is it used quite so often as it is when discussing 9/11.
Whatever one thinks of the attempt to equate talk of the moon landing with documentable lies and omissions in the 9/11 commission report, or the logical fallacy implicit in this argumentum ad ignorantium, there is an even more fundamental flaw in this argument. Namely, it assumes that there have in fact been no 9/11 whistleblowers. On the contrary there have been literally dozens of whistleblowers from within the intelligence agencies, government, and the private business world who have been utterly ignored by the self-proclaimed skeptics and the corporate and foundation-funded media who realize that this is the biggest Achilles heel of the official 9/11 story.
Barry Jennings was the Deputy Director of Emergency Services for the New York City Housing Department. On the morning of 9/11, he rushed to the city’s Office of Emergency Management in World Trade Center Building 7 with Corporation Counsel Michael Hess. Discovering the office had been abandoned, they attempted to flee the building but were stuck in the stairwell after a series of explosion. After finally being rescued by first responders, Jennings claimed that they had to step over dead bodies on their way out. Jennings died on August 19, 2008 under extremely suspicious circumstances just two days before NIST released its final report on Building 7 concluding the collapse resulted from ordinary office fires.
J. Michael Springmann served 18 months as the head of the visa section at the U.S. consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in the late 80s. He attempted to blow the whistle on a visas-for-terrorists scheme that was being operated by CIA personnel in the consulate, funneling Afghan mujahedeen into the U.S. for training, facilitated by the CIA on behalf of their asset, Osama bin Laden. After numerous complaints up the chain of command, Springmann’s contract with the State Department was not renewed. The Jeddah consulate later went on to issue visas to 15 of the alleged 9/11 hijackers.
In August 2001 the Federal Reserve Board of Governors issued a non-routine supervisory letter warning Fed banks to be vigilant in monitoring suspicious activity reports. At the same time, the United States’ economy was experiencing its largest June-August spike in the currency component of the M1 money supply since 1947, with more than $5 billion being added to the currency in circulation over that period. Piecing this information together at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago two years later, economist Bill Bergman wondered if the sudden infusion of currency might have been an indicator of foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, as those with assets in danger of being frozen in the wake of such an attack would naturally want to liquidate their holdings before an investigation could occur. When Bergman phoned the Board of Governors to ask for clarification as to why they had issued their supervisory letter, he was told that he had committed “an egregious breach of protocol in calling the Board staff and asking the question.”
Of all the 9/11 whistleblowers, however, perhaps the most prominent are among the 9/11 commission members themselves. 6 out of 10 of the commissioners have questioned the commission and its conclusions personally (namely Kean and Hamilton, Kerrey, Roemer, Lehman and Cleland). Commission co-chair Lee Hamilton once famously remarked that the Commission was “set up to fail.” Commission members considered bringing criminal charges against Pentagon officials who had deliberately lied to them about the military’s complete lack of response on that day. One of the commissioners, Max Cleland, even resigned because the commission had been “deliberately compromised by the president of the United States.” Bob Kerrey, meanwhile, has cryptically remarked that 9/11 was a 30 year conspiracy, but no mainstream reporter has ever followed up with him to clarify this statement.
We could go on and on with literally dozens of other stories from other witnesses and insiders who have attempted to blow the whistle on various aspects of the 9/11 story, but it should be apparent by this point that the old argument that “someone would have talked” is not an argument at all, but a dishonest diversion from the truth. What is especially dishonest about this oft-repeated argument of the so-called skeptics is that these whistleblowers have by no means been attempting to hide their stories or keep it from the public. Many of them, in fact, have appeared at conferences, filed formal appeals, joined whistleblower organizations, and made themselves available for interviews throughout the past 12 years, but they have been scrupulously shunned by the so-called fourth estate whose monetary interests rely on the 9/11 terror paradigm to justify the ever-expanding warfare/surveillance state.
As usual, it has fallen on the alternative media to shine a light on the remarkable stories of these brave whistleblowers. Over the past six years, I have had the chance to interview many of them for The Corbett Report.
James Corbett interviews J. Michael Springmann
James Corbett interviews Bill Bergman
James Corbett interviews Sibel Edmonds
Once again we find that the argument of the peculiarly unskeptical skeptics is not just fallacious, but factually incorrect. There have, in fact, been numerous whistleblowers with documentable evidence of the frauds and lies that have been constructed around the official 9/11 narrative. This leads those who use the “But someone would have talked” argument in an uncomfortable situation. Either they are incompetent—boldly pronouncing on issues they have not bothered to investigate—or they are lying. The next time someone attempts to use this argument in your presence, it might be worthwhile to inquire which term applies to them.
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