This article on 9/11 is from Eric Margolis, an old school journalist who not only knows what he is talking about in the Middle East but actually went "there", talked to the people and at the time, reported actual information in real newspapers and magazines. Unfortunately, that was last century. All this is gone now replaced by propaganda or useless spin written to obfuscate, not enlighten. All these people without exception have been fired or retired.
20 years ago, none of these journalists would have accepted the Covid-19 narrative and all the spin around the virus. They would have interviewed virologists and epidemiologists, asked the right questions and presented their conclusions in mainstream newspapers and magazines. Gone, all gone!
"Truth" died with 9/11. 20 years later, it is our freedom which is on the chopping block. A sad but unfortunately predictable evolution. When China told us in 1997 that 50 years later Hong Kong and China would have the same political system, absolutely everyone in the West understood that China would become more democratic, more like us. Little did we know that not only Hong Kong but most Western countries would over time become more "Chinese"!
By Eric S. Margolis
September 13, 2021
NEW YORK – Ever since 9/11, readers keep asking me my views on these
attacks. I have been barraged with emails until my head spins with
engineering studies about melting steel, controlled explosions, claims
about nefarious plots, and wreckage analysis.
One of the most colorful theories comes from Gen. Hamid Gul, former
director of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, ISI. He insists that 9/11
was staged by Israel’s Mossad and a cabal of rightwing US Air Force
generals.
I inspected the ruins of the New York’s Twin Towers, atop which I
often dined, right after the attack. Downtown Manhattan was enveloped by
a hideous, stinking miasma from the attack. I have never smelled
anything so awful. It took me days to scrub the foul odor off my body.
As a native New Yorker, I was shaken to the core by 9/11 – but hardly
surprised, as I had predicted a major attack on the US nine days
earlier.
While visiting the Pentagon to consult on the Mideast, I also inspected its outside wall hit by the third hijacked aircraft.
I saw photos of the impact site and could not understand what had happened to all the aircraft wreckage. There was almost none.
In 1993, I was hijacked over Germany on a Lufthansa flight bound for
Cairo. The Ethiopian hijacker took us all the way back to New York City.
The hijacker was threatening to crash our A310 jumbo jet into Wall
Street.
Our flight was shadowed by US F-15 fighters that had orders to shoot,
if necessary. Where, then, was US air defense on 11 Sept. 2001?
A day after 9/11, I was asked on CNN if Osama bin Laden was behind
the attack. `We have yet to see the evidence,’ I replied. I maintain
this position today.
Bin Laden denied he or al-Qaida was behind 9/11 and the death’s of
nearly 3,000 people. The plot was hatched in Hamburg, Germany and
Madrid, Spain, not in Afghanistan. A Pakistani, Khaled Sheik Mohammed,
claimed he was the mastermind – after being tortured by near-drowning
183 times by the CIA.
While denying involvement, Osama bin Laden did say he believed the
attack on New York was in part motivated by Israel’s destruction of
downtown Beirut during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon that inflicted some
18,000 civilian deaths.
Tapes that appeared to confirm bin Laden’s guilt were clumsy fakes.
They were supposedly “found” in Afghanistan by the anti-Taliban Afghan
Northern Alliance, which was created and funded by Russian intelligence.
I had met Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and told CNN viewers that he was not the man in the tapes.
After 9/11, Secretary of State Colin Powell promised Americans the
State Department would issue a White Paper detailing bin Laden’s guilt.
Afghanistan’s Taliban government asked for this document before it would
extradite bin Laden, as the US was demanding. The White Paper was never
produced, and the US ignored proper legal procedure and invaded
Afghanistan. We still wait for evidence.
I remain uncertain that Osama bin Laden was really behind the
attacks. Much circumstantial evidence points to him and al-Qaida, but
conclusive proof still lacks. One thing is certain: the attacks were
planned and mounted from Germany, not Afghanistan. Of the 19 hijackers,
15 were Saudis, two from the United Arab Emirates, one an Egyptian and a
Lebanese.
By the way, I’ve said ever since 9/11 that the danger and size of
al-Qaida has been vastly exaggerated – as an explosive report this week
by the London’s esteemed International Institute for Strategic Studies
has just confirmed. Al-Qaida, dedicated to fighting the Afghan
Communists, never had more than 300 members at its peak.
Today, according to CIA chief Leon Panetta, there are no more than 50
al-Qaida men in Afghanistan. Yet President Barack Obama has tripled the
number of US troops in Afghanistan to 120,000 because of what to calls
the al-Qaida threat. What is going on?
Many people abroad believe al-Qaida is an American invention used to
justify foreign military operations. I do not share this view. Osama bin
Laden was never a US agent, though his group indirectly received funds
from CIA to fight the Communists.
Back to 9/11. I still cannot understand how amateur pilots could
manage to maneuver in low to hit the World Trade Center and Pentagon. As
a Pakistani intelligence agent told me, “if they were really amateur
Arab pilots, they would have crashed into one another, not the World
Trade Center!”
The arrest of Israeli “movers” filming the attack and dancing with
joy, and the subsequent arrest of groups of Israeli “students”
supposedly tracking the would-be hijackers remains a deep mystery. So
does the immobilization of US air defenses.
The US 9/11 Commission was a whitewash, as are all such government
commissions. They are designed to obscure, not reveal, the truth.
A 2006, a Scripps Howard/Washington Post poll found that 36% of the
1,000 Americans sampled believed the US government was behind 9/11. Many
Americans still do not believe the official version of 9/11.
Neither do many Europeans. The entire Muslim world believes 9/11 was
the work of Israel and far right American neocons, led by Dick Cheney.
If the official story about 9/11 is true, the attacks caught the Bush
administration asleep on guard duty. Bush’s incompetent national
security advisor, Condoleeza Rice, brushed off serious warnings of the
impending attack and actually cut spending on anti-terrorism just before
9/11.
The White House and media were quick to blame Muslims who hated
America’s lifestyle and values, launching the concept of “Islamic
terrorism” – i.e. that the Muslim faith, not political issues, prompted
the attacks.
This dangerous canard has infected America, leading to a rising tide
of Islamophobia. This week’s continued uproar over a Muslim community
center in downtown New York, and a Florida preacher’s threat to burn
Korans, are the latest doleful example of cultivated religious hatred.
The suicide team that attacked New York and Washington made clear its
aim was: a. to punish the US for backing Israel’s repression of
Palestinians; and b. what they called US “occupation” of Saudi Arabia.
Though they were all Muslims, religion was not the motivating factor.
As the CIA’s former bin Laden expert Michael Scheuer rightly
observed, the Muslim world was furious at the US for what it was doing
in their region, not because of America’s values, liberties or religion.
These motives for the 9/11 attack have been largely obscured by the
whipping up hysteria over “Islamic terrorism.” The planting of anthrax
in New York, Florida and Washington soon after 9/11 was clearly designed
to promote further anti-Muslim furor. The perpetrators of this red
herring remain unknown. But the anthrax attack hastened passage of the
semi-totalitarian Patriot Act that sharply limited the personal freedoms
of Americans and imposed draconian new laws.
Faked bin Laden videos and audio tapes. Planted anthrax. An intact
Koran implausibly found at ground zero. Evidence in a hijacker’s bag
that had somehow failed to make his ill-fated flight. Immediate claims
that al-Qaida was behind the attacks. Those amateur kamikaze pilots and
collapsing towers.
Perhaps most damning, tapes taken in London of meetings between
President George Bush and PM Tony Blair revealed a sinister proposal by
the US president to provoke war with Iraq by painting US aircraft in UN
colors, then buzzing Iraqi air defenses until they fired on them, thus
providing a “casus belli.” Bush also reportedly told Blair that after
Iraq, he would “go on” to attack Saudi Arabia, Syria and Pakistan.
In 1939, Nazi Germany dressed up soldiers in Polish uniforms to
provoke a border fire-fight to justify Berlin’s ensuing invasion of
Poland. Bush’s plan was of the same ilk. A president who would
contemplate such a criminal operation might go a lot further to achieve
his imperial dreams.
As a veteran journalist, to me, all this smells to high heaven. There
are just too many unanswered questions, too many suspicions, and that
old Roman legal question, “cui bono” – “to whose benefit?”
On 28 February, 1933, fire, set by a Dutch Jew, ravaged the Germany’s
parliament, the Reichstag. While the Reichstag’s ruins were still
smoking, Adolf Hitler’s government declared a war against “terrorism.” A
“Decree for the Protection of People and State” was promulgated
suspending all legal protections of speech, assembly, property, and
personal liberties. The Reichstag fire allowed the government to round
up “terrorism” suspects without due process of law and made police
powers near absolute.
Sound familiar? Here’s another startling coincidence. Two years
before 9/11, a series of mysterious apartment building bombings in
Russia killed over 200 people. “Islamic terrorists” from Chechnya were
blamed.
Panic swept Russia and boosted former KGB agent Vladimir Putin into
full power. Russian security agents of FSB were caught red-handed
planting explosives in another building, but the story was hushed up. A
former FSB agent, Alexander Litvinenko, who tried to reveal this story,
was murdered in London by radioactive polonium.
Similarly,
the Bush administration’s neocons shamelessly used 9/11 to promote the
invasion of Iraq. Just before the attack, polls showed 80% of Americans
erroneously believed Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. Dr. Goebbels would
have been proud.
So what, in the end, can we conclude? 1. We still do not know the
real story about 9/11. 2. The official version is not credible. 3. 9/11
was used to justify invading strategic Afghanistan and oil-rich Iraq. 4.
The attacks plunged America into wars against the Muslim world and
enriched the US arms industry. 5. 9/11 boosted pro-Israel
neoconservatives, formerly a fringe group, into power, and with them
America’s totalitarian far right. 6. Bush’s unprovoked war against Iraq
destroyed one of Israel’s two main enemies. 7. 9/11 put America in what
may turn out to be a permanent state of war with the Muslim world – a
key goal of the neoconservatives .
But I’ve seen no hard evidence to date that 9/11 was a plot by
America’s far right or by Israel or a giant cover-up. Just, perhaps, the
Mother of All Coincidences. In the end, it may just have been 19 angry
Arabs and a bumbling Bush administration looking for someone else to
blame.