9/11: “The Big Magic Trick” Ten Years Later

SUPERB SUMMARY

MUST READ!!!

President Barack Obama's bizarre claim on May 2nd that U.S. commandos had "killed" the long-dead Osama bin Laden in Pakistan is just the latest – and one of the most preposterous – in a long series of official lies about the so-called "terrorist attacks" of September 11th, 2001.
 
As veteran U.S. intelligence analyst Dr. Steve Pieczenik wryly observed: "This was the first commando raid in history in which the commandos killed a guy who had already been dead for almost ten years."
 
Sadly, however, the mindless cheering triggered by Obama's announcement and all the related lies and fabrications that have poured out of Cass Sunstein's disinformation factory in the White House demonstrates once again that if you tell big enough lies and repeat them often enough, they will usually be believed.

As we approach the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the U.S. authorities will undoubtedly tell us more new lies and repeat a lot of old ones as they desperately try to keep the lid on Pandora's Box and counter the growing worldwide awareness that the so-called "terrorist attacks" of September 11th, 2001, were a fraud.
 
This article is dedicated to the memory of Hal Sisson, the distinguished lawyer, author and activist who was among the first to question "the official 9/11 fairy tale" and who inspired me and others to investigate the events of September 11th, 2001, to try to discover the truth about what really happened that day.
 
 
[First published in the Victoria Street Newz, September 2011 edition.]
 
In Germany, for example, a recent opinion poll by the prestigious Emnid Institute showed 89.5 per cent of Germans no longer believe the official story that the "attacks" were carried out by Osama bin Laden and 19 Arab "hijackers."  And more than 1,400 professional architects and engineers from all over the world have now signed a petition saying they believe it was physically impossible for the twin towers to have come down in the way the authorities claim.

Indeed, after ten years there is now overwhelming evidence that the "terrorist attacks" on the twin towers in New York City were actually orchestrated by a small cabal at the pinnacle of U.S. power to provide a pretext for waging two phony wars, pillaging the energy resources of the Middle East and Central Asia, drastically curtailing civil liberties and diverting hundreds of billions of dollars of public money into the coffers of oil, arms and security companies.

Let me first confess that at the time of 9/11 I was taken in by the official lies and deceptions along with most people around the world.  The events that day were so shocking and spectacular that it seemed to me the story the authorities were telling us must surely be at least basically true. Indeed, for five years thereafter I continued to accept the official version of 9/11 without seriously questioning it since I didn't have the time, or initially even the inclination, to undertake the huge task of personally examining all of the massive amount of evidence available on 9/11.

But in 2006, after prodding from some friends, I began to carry out an intensive study into the 9/11 issue, and, on the basis of my five years of investigations, I now believe it is as clear and certain as anything can ever be in historical research that the events of September 11th, 2001, were masterminded, not from some cave in Afghanistan by Osama bin Laden, but from the inner sanctum of power in Washington, D.C., by a small cabal headed by then Vice-President Dick Cheney.

Like many other incidents that have occurred in history over the centuries, the 9/11 "attacks" have turned out to be what is known as a "false-flag" operation – that is, a clandestine operation which the leaders of one country carry out in such a way that they deny responsibility for their actions and instead falsely accuse some of their foreign enemies of having perpetrated the incident, thereby providing a pretext to wage war against those enemies.

This has now become clear even to a number of retired U.S. military officers who have taken the time to study this issue and are brave enough to face the truth. For example, Lieutenant Colonel Guy Razer, who served for many years as a fighter-pilot and commanding officer in the U.S. Air Force, says: "After four years of research, I am 100 per cent convinced the 9/11 attacks were planned, organized and committed by treasonous perpetrators at the highest levels of our government."

Veteran U.S. Air Force fighter-pilot Jeff Dahlstrom says: "This was definitely a false-flag operation. It was an attack on America by Americans – and was used to justify the Patriot Act, which took away half of the Bill of Rights." Another retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, Robert Bowman, who served as Director of the "Star Wars" Defense Program under Presidents Ford and Carter, calls the official report of the 9/11 commission "a sham and a whitewash" and thinks the "prime suspect" for mastermind of 9/11 is Dick Cheney.

Retired U.S. Air Force Captain Russ Wittenberg, who was a fighter-pilot in Vietnam and flew military and commercial planes for more than 40 years, is even more blunt in dismissing the official version of 9/11: "The story our government has told us about 9/11 is total bullshit, plain and simple."

Those views are shared by American theologian Dr. David Ray Griffin, who has long been considered one of America's foremost theological scholars but who has become better known in recent years as perhaps the world's leading independent expert on 9/11. Griffin, who has written nine meticulously documented books about 9/11, says "The truth about 9/11 is so shocking and has such horrifying implications that I can understand why so many people can't bring themselves to face the reality – just as I couldn't at first.  But the evidence is indisputable. The truth is that 9/11 was an inside job, orchestrated by forces within our own government.
 
It was a false-flag "attack," with evidence planted to make it appear to have been planned and carried out by Arab Muslims… The Bush-Cheney administration had already decided, months before 9/11, to attack Afghanistan and Iraq. In planning and carrying out the 9/11 "attacks," the perpetrators planted evidence to implicate Middle Eastern Muslims – evidence which, when examined, can easily be seen to have been fabricated… it is especially shocking that these "attacks" were orchestrated to pave the way for launching unprovoked wars on two countries that provided no threat – imminent or long-term – to the people of the United States."
 
Although it took quite a long time for me and some others to understand what really happened on 9/11, one man realized right away that the story the authorities were telling us that day wasn't true. He was William Rodriguez, who was on duty on 9/11 as chief custodian in the WTC North Tower when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the building at 8:46 a.m.

A few seconds before the plane hit the tower, Rodriguez says he and 14 others who were with him heard and felt a large explosion below them in the sub-basement of the building, and they later heard a series of smaller explosions along the walls far below the level where the plane struck. Many others also heard such explosions in all three of the buildings that collapsed. For example, one of Rodriguez's co-workers in the North Tower, Teresa Veliz, says: "There were explosions going off everywhere. I was convinced there were bombs planted all over the place and someone was sitting at a control panel pushing detonator buttons."

It should also be noted that 118 of the firefighters who fought the blazes that broke out in the three WTC buildings testified they heard what sounded to them like the kind of explosions that occur during controlled demolitions. For example, firefighter John Schroder, who arrived in the lobby of the North Tower shortly after the first plane struck, said: "Everything in the lobby was exploded, blown out. It wasn't from the jet fuel – no way! It looked like a bomb went off in the lobby. There was no fire – it just looked like a bomb went off."

Firefighter Louie Cacchioli said: "In the lobby we saw elevator doors completely blown out and people being hit with debris – we all thought there were bombs set in the building." Firefighter Dennis Tardio said he heard a series of explosions: "It was as if they had detonators and they planned to take out a building – boom, boom, boom." Firefighter Kenneth Rogers said: "There were explosions floor after floor after floor… I figured it was a bomb because it looked like a synchronized deliberate kind of thing." Firefighter Richard Banaciski, who was one of the first responders in the South Tower, said: "There were explosions like on television when they blow up buildings. These explosions seemed to be going all the way around the building like a belt."

Outspoken firefighter Paul Isaac Jr. says most of the firemen and policemen who were on duty that day know the official story about 9/11 is a lie but they are afraid to say so publicly for fear of reprisals against themselves and their families. "There is no question," Isaac says, "that explosives were used in the buildings. I know 9/11 was an inside job. The police know it and the firefighters know it too."

Custodian William Rodriguez says he was shocked when he heard the authorities claim that fire and the impact of the planes had caused the buildings to collapse since it had been obvious to practically everyone in the buildings that they had actually been brought down by controlled demolition. On the morning of 9/11 Rodriguez bravely fought through billows of smoke and dust to lead hundreds of people out of the doomed North Tower – and for the past decade, perhaps even more bravely, he has fought through billows of official lies and deceptions, as well as constant threats and harassment, to insist that the authorities tell the truth about what happened on 9/11.

Ironically, Rodriguez had once worked as a magician's assistant, so he was no stranger to the world of trickery and deception – and he drew on that experience to summarize what happened on 9/11. "It's easy," Rodriguez says, "to do misdirection – to make people look in one direction while you do the magic with the other hand. That's the real story of 9/11. It was just a big magic trick. It was an illusion."

After studying the 9/11 issue for five years, I fully agree with Rodriguez. In fact, we could easily fill every page of every edition of Victoria Street Newz for the next year describing all of the "magic tricks" (i.e. the lies and deceptions) that the U.S. authorities used in planning, carrying out and covering up the "attacks" of 9/11. While that obviously won't be possible, we will take a look at a dozen of the most significant of these lies and deceptions: four in this issue and four more in each of the October and November editions.

•  The alleged ring-leader of the 9/11 "terrorists," Mohamed Atta, wasn't really an ascetic, fanatically devoted follower of Osama bin Laden as the authorities claimed – he was actually a very worldly, wild-living young fellow who had close ties, not to al Qaeda, but to the CIA-backed Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI.

This supposedly devout, Koran-obsessed warrior of Allah actually spent much of his time drinking alcohol, dabbling in cocaine and other drugs, eating pork and other foods shunned by fundamentalist Muslims and watching pornographic videos. He sometimes lived with prostitutes and frequently visited Las Vegas where he gambled, cavorted with lap dancers and often brought call girls to his room. So much for the official claim that Atta "hated America's freedoms and was determined to strike a blow against U.S. decadence"!

For several months prior to 9/11, Atta was being closely monitored – and apparently also manipulated – by U.S. intelligence agents. He was also receiving money, not from al Qaeda, but from the U.S.-backed Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI.

Indeed, even the FBI now acknowledges that a payment of $100,000 was sent from the ISI to Atta's Florida bank account on the personal orders of the head of the ISI, General Mahoud Ahmed, shortly before 9/11.

And, by the strangest of "coincidences," General Ahmed just happened to be in Washington, D.C., on September 11th, 2001, conferring with then CIA Director George Tenet and other senior U.S. intelligence officials.

It is now also clear that the "incriminating evidence" against Atta "found" at Logan Airport in Boston was planted, rather clumsily, by the authorities. Their story about how and where this "evidence" turned up changed many times in the days following 9/11, as David Ray Griffin explains in detail in his book Cognitive Infiltration.

    For more details also see:

    •  Welcome to Terrorland: Mohamed Atta and the CIA Cover-up in Florida by Daniel Hopsicker
    •  9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in the U.S.A. by Webster G. Tarpley 
    •  The widely-publicized photo collage of the 19 alleged hijackers which the authorities produced so remarkably quickly after the "attacks" is a complete fabrication – several of these "suicide hijackers" turned up very much alive after 9/11, and none of the names of the "hijackers" appeared on the original flight manifests released by American Airlines and United Airlines immediately after the "attacks."


The authorities moved with dazzling speed to produce the names and photos of the 19 alleged hijackers. We were immediately told, in effect, that these were the men who had committed the crime, and we should all blindly believe that claim and not ask any embarrassing questions.

In fact, however, no remains or other physical evidence of the "hijackers" was ever found at the crash sites – except for five identification documents and one red bandana which, we are told, somehow miraculously survived three of the plane crashes and were found in remarkably good condition.

According to the official story, the passport of alleged hijacker Satam al Suqami magically survived the fiery crash of Flight 11 into the North Tower and was found in the rubble in near-perfect condition. And in Pennsylvania at the site where Flight 93 was said to have spiraled into the ground, there was, astonishingly, no wreckage of the plane or bodies of any of the people on board – just the "magic passport" of alleged hijacker Ziad Jarrah and a red bandana supposedly belonging to one of the "hijackers."

An even greater "miracle" – or actually three "miracles" – occurred in Washington, D.C., where Flight 77 allegedly struck the Pentagon. Again there was no plane wreckage or bodies of any of those on board – the only items that somehow magically survived were three identification cards belonging to alleged hijackers Majed Moqed, Nawaf al Hamzi and Salem al Hamzi.
 
[pentagon strike]

Moreover, in the days following 9/11, several of the "suicide hijackers" turned up very much alive. For example, it turned out that "hijacker" Abdul Aziz al Omari had been working at his office at Saudi Telecom in Riyadh on 9/11. Another "hijacker," a young pilot for Saudi Airlines named Saeed al Ghamdi, was in Tunisia attending a flight training course when some friends came rushing up to him a couple of days after 9/11 with a newspaper showing his picture on the front page and describing him as "one of the 9/11 suicide pilots."

Alleged hijacker Salem al Hamzi was found working at a petrochemical plant in Yanbou, Saudi Arabia. And another "hijacker," Waleed al Shehri, who was working as a pilot in Morocco at the time of 9/11, saw his picture in a Casablanca newspaper and notified the authorities that he was still alive.

Indeed, nine days after 9/11, Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal met at the White House with President George Bush and after that meeting Al-Faisal told reporters: "It has been proved that at least five of the men on the FBI list had nothing to do with what happened on 9/11."

All of the still-alive "hijackers" offered to appear before the official 9/11 commission and to submit to any tests or investigations required to prove their identity. But the commission and other U.S. officials simply ignored them, and to this day the American authorities continue to stonewall and use the clearly phony 19-photo collage of the "hijackers."

It should also be noted that none of the names of the 19 alleged "hijackers" appeared on the original passenger lists for the four "hijacked" flights, which were released by American Airlines and United Airlines immediately after 9/11, even though all of them had supposedly purchased tickets in advance. It was only after this rather embarrassing discrepancy was reported on CNN and some other news outlets that the authorities issued revised versions of the passenger lists on which the names of all the "hijackers" now magically appeared.

Moreover, if hijackers had really broken into the cockpits of the planes on 9/11, surely the pilots would have followed standard procedure and "squawked" the universal hijack code (7500) on their transponders, an act that takes only a couple of seconds. But, amazingly, that was not done by even one of the eight pilots on the four "hijacked" planes.

    For more details see:

    •  "The Patsies: The 19 Alleged 9/11 Hijackers" in Global Outlook (Issue 11), 2006
    •  The New Pearl Harbor Revisited by David Ray Griffin
    •  The Hidden History of 9-11-2001 by Paul Zarembka
    •  The real reason why the "hijacked" planes were not intercepted by air force fighter-jets – like all 67 of the planes that had veered off course in U.S. airspace in the eight months prior to 9/11 were intercepted – was not because the air force was caught off guard on 9/11 but because it had been given a stand-down order by Vice-President Dick Cheney.


In their "explanation" for why the planes weren't intercepted, the authorities tried to muddify the fuzzification, as Allan Fotheringham used to say, by producing three mutually contradictory versions of the timelines for the flights of the "hijacked" planes. This is eerily reminiscent of what happened after President John Kennedy was assassinated on November 22nd, 1963, when the authorities produced three contradictory versions of the Dallas Police radio log for that day. It's d»já fraud all over again, so to speak!

In any case, if we cut through all the flim-flam and disinformation, there is clear evidence that the U.S. authorities learned of the "hijackings" of: Flight 11 at least 31 minutes before it struck the North Tower, Flight 175 at least 20 minutes before it hit the South Tower, Flight 77 at least 38 minutes before it allegedly hit the Pentagon, and Flight 93 at least 31 minutes before it crashed in Pennsylvania.

Under standard U.S. air defense procedure, any planes veering off course without explanation are routinely intercepted within about 10 minutes. On 9/11 there was clearly ample time for the 14 jet-fighters available at four bases in the Northeast Air Defense Sector to have intercepted all of the "hijacked" planes.

It is especially mind-boggling that no fighter-jets were deployed from Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, the main military base protecting the U.S. capital, until 10:42 a.m. – more than an hour after the Pentagon was struck. As former British cabinet minister Michael Meacher says: "There is simply no rational way to explain why planes weren't deployed immediately from Andrews, which is just 11 miles from the Pentagon and which had always said it maintained scramble-ready fighter-jets around the clock."

So why didn't the air force follow normal procedure on 9/11 and intercept the "hijacked" planes? Quite simply because it had been ordered not to do so. According to Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, who was in the basement bunker of the White House where Dick Cheney was directing operations that morning, an alarmed-looking young officer came into the room three times reporting on the movements of the "hijacked" Flight 77. The third time the young man asked Cheney, "Do the orders still stand?" and Cheney reportedly snapped, "Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?" Not surprisingly, there is no mention of Mineta's stunning testimony in the official 9/11 report.

But veteran CIA operative Ray McGovern says he and other intelligence experts who have studied this issue believe that the Mineta testimony, along with other factors, clearly indicates Cheney had issued a stand-down order.

There were also a number of reports across the U.S. on 9/11 that a stand-down order had been given. For example, at Los Angeles International Airport, security expert Charles Lewis said he and others monitoring FAA and NORAD communications were shocked when they learned that "a stand-down order had come from the highest level of the White House." Lewis says that in a private conversation he had in 2006 with La Ponda Fitchpatrick, head of security operations at the Los Angeles airport on 9/11, "she told me LAX security was well aware that 9/11 was an inside job."

    For more details see:

    •  The Terror Timeline: Year by Year, Day by Day, Minute by Minute by Paul Thompson
    •  Cognitive Infiltration by David Ray Griffin
    •  Crossing the Rubicon by Michael C. Ruppert
    •  Towers of Deception by Barrie Zwicker
    •  American Conspiracies by Jesse Ventura and Dick Russell
    •  It should now be obvious to "anyone with two eyes and a brain" that all three of the buildings that collapsed in New York City on 9/11 (WTC 1, WTC 2 and WTC 7) were brought down by controlled demolition using high-temperature cutter-charge explosives – not by hydrocarbon fires and the impact of the "attacking" planes.


There is simply no way the 656 huge solid-steel beams supporting the three buildings (287 in each of the twin towers and 82 in Building 7) could have been melted and cut by fires fed by jet fuel, which burns at a maximum temperature of 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Steel requires a temperature of at least 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit to even begin melting, and the pools of molten steel that flowed like lava in the debris of the fallen buildings for weeks after 9/11 couldn't have been produced without a temperature of at least 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit.

In addition, some melted molybdenum was found in the rubble at Ground Zero – and that substance requires a temperature of at least 4,753 degrees Fahrenheit to melt. And there were also pieces of steel that appeared to have been partly evaporated – a process that would have required a temperature of at least 5,182 degrees Fahrenheit. Temperatures of this kind couldn't possibly have been generated by jet fuel.

Moreover, all three of the buildings collapsed in just a few seconds at near free-fall speed – and this couldn't have happened without the use of pre-positioned cutter charge explosives, according to physicist Dr. Steven E. Jones, who has carried out by far the most detailed independent study of the WTC collapses, using elaborate scale-models of the buildings. After several years of tests and analysis, Jones said: "There is only one honest conclusion that can be made: the buildings couldn't have collapsed the way the authorities claimed without violating several of the basic laws of physics." Jones had been a long-time physics professor at Brigham Young University in Utah but was fired when he refused to either suppress his 9/11 research or lie about it.

Internationally renowned architect and New York City planner David A. Johnson, who has also carefully studied the WTC collapses, says: "I am very familiar with these buildings and their design, and I know they couldn't possibly have come down the way they did without using explosives and severing the core columns at the base."

Another prominent expert on the WTC collapses, San Francisco architect Richard Gage, studied all of the fires that have broken out in steel-framed high-rise buildings around the world and concluded: "In more than 100 steel framed high-rise fires which have occurred before and after 9/11 (most of them very hot, very large and very long-lasting), not one of these buildings has collapsed, ever."

Gage believes it was physically impossible for the WTC buildings to have come down the way they did without the use of high-powered explosives and he has circulated a petition calling for a new, honest investigation into why the structures collapsed. As we noted earlier, that petition has now been signed by more than 1,400 professional engineers and architects from all over the world.

It should also be noted that several huge pieces of steel from the towers – some weighing as much as 50 tons – were propelled laterally more than 500 feet, which couldn't possibly have happened in a gravity-driven collapse. Indeed, Dwain Deets, a former director of research engineering at NASA, says: "The fact that these massive chunks of steel were hurled horizontally for such distances leaves no doubt in my mind that explosives were involved."

When the buildings collapsed, there were also huge pyroclastic clouds of pulverized concrete, which drifted across much of Lower Manhattan – the type of clouds often produced by controlled demolitions, but not by fires or gravity-driven building collapses.

Moreover, the 9/11 commission blatantly lied when it said there was a hollow shaft at the core of each of the twin towers. Actually there were 47 gigantic solid-steel girders at the core of each tower, and after the towers fell on 9/11 most of these girders were found in quite neatly cut 30-foot-long pieces – just the right size to be loaded on to flatbed trucks and quickly whisked away from the site (more than 40 truckloads were removed in the first 24 hours). Such precision "slicing" of steel is quite common in carefully planned demolitions but never occurs in random hydrocarbon fires.

One man who became fascinated by all the controversy about the WTC building collapses was the respected Danish scientist Dr. Niels Harrit, who taught chemistry at the University of Copenhagen for 34 years and has published more than 60 articles in major scientific journals.

Harrit and eight colleagues decided to get to the bottom of the matter by carrying out an intensive independent study. As part of their investigations, these scientists examined samples of dust from the WTC rubble and were astonished to find millions of microscopic chips of nanothermite – an ultra-high-tech incendiary explosive which is capable of slicing through steel beams.

At the end of their two-year study, Harrit concluded: "The evidence couldn't be more clear. Anyone with two eyes and a brain can see that all three of the WTC buildings were brought down by controlled demolition involving extraordinarily high temperatures and enormous explosive force – not by random hydrocarbon fires and the relatively minor impact of the planes."

As Harrit notes, even though the images of the jetliners crashing into the towers were so dramatic, the impact of the planes would actually have caused only relatively minor structural damage. Indeed, the towers had been specifically designed to withstand multiple impacts from a four-engine jetliner travelling at up to 600 miles per hour. On 9/11 the north tower was hit by a two-engine jet travelling at 440 miles per hour and the south tower by a two-engine jet travelling at 540 miles per hour.

Hyman Brown, the construction manager at the time the twin towers were built, said: "The buildings were over-designed to withstand almost anything, including hurricanes, bombings and an airplane hitting them."
 
Sadly, the WTC's construction manager at the time of 9/11, Frank DeMartini, perished in the "attack" on the north tower. But, in what turned out to be a remarkably prescient interview in January, 2001, he said: "I believe the towers could probably sustain multiple impacts from jetliners because their structure is like the mosquito netting on a screen door – the jet plane would be just like a pencil puncturing that screen netting."

And one last point about the buildings: some might wonder how agents of the Cheney-led cabal could have gained access to the WTC buildings to plant the cutter-charge explosives. Actually, however, that wasn't much of a problem since the company in charge of security at the WTC complex, Securacom, was headed by none other than George W. Bush's brother Marvin and cousin Wirt Walker III.

    For more details see:

    •  www.AE911Truth.org
    •  9/11: Blueprint for Truth – The Architecture of Destruction (DVD) by Richard Gage
    •  9/11 Revisited: Scientific and Ethical Questions (DVD) by Steven E. Jones
    •  "Active Thermitic Material Observed in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Centre Catastrophe" in  The Open Chemical Physics Journal (vol. 2), 2009
    •  "The Impossible Free-Fall Collapses of the Three WTC Towers" by Tony Bird in Global Outlook (Issue 13), 2009
    •  Waking Up From Our Nightmare: The 9/11/01 Crimes in New York City by Don Paul and Jim Hoffman
    Next month, when we continue our look at the sordid but fascinating story of 9/11, we will see that:
    •  The story we were told about "heroic passengers" overpowering four "hijackers" aboard United Airlines Flight 93 and sending the plane plummeting to the ground was pure fiction – actually the plane was shot down by two F-16 fighter jets dispatched from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia on the orders of Vice-President Dick Cheney, and the plane's debris was scattered over 13 square kilometres of the Pennsylvania countryside.
    •  WTC 7, the building that mysteriously collapsed even though it wasn't hit by any plane, was brought down by controlled demolition on the afternoon of 9/11 because the "emergency command centre" on its 23rd floor had been used to guide the "attacking planes" into the twin towers, and the authorities wanted to make sure any incriminating evidence would be destroyed.
    •  The Pentagon wasn't really hit by a jetliner on 9/11 but by a small missile, and great care was taken to minimize damage and casualties – and also to make sure that records related to one of the biggest military spending scandals in American history would be destroyed in the "attack."
    •  The so-called "smoking-gun videotape" purporting to show Osama bin Laden chortling about the 9/11 "attacks" has been exposed as a fake – and, contrary to all the ridiculous hype and hoopla about U.S. commandos supposedly killing bin Laden in Pakistan, he actually died quietly and undramatically in the mountains of southern Afghanistan in mid-December, 2001, when he lost the long fight he had been waging with chronic kidney disease.

 
 

9/11: "The Big Magic Trick" Ten Years Later (second of three parts)

written by Gordon Pollard
 
by Gordon Pollard

In September's Street Newz we began looking at how the so-called "terrorist attacks" of September 11th, 2001, were actually a "false-flag" operation orchestrated by the small ruling cabal in Washington, D.C., to provide a pretext for waging two bogus wars, looting the energy resources of the Middle East and Central Asia, cracking down on political dissidents and pouring hundreds of billions of dollars of public money into the coffers of oil, arms and security companies.

Let's look now at four more of the most significant of the official 9/11 lies and deceptions.
 
This series is dedicated to the memory of Hal Sisson, the distinguished lawyer, author and activist who was among the first to question "the official 9/11 fairy tale" and who inspired me and others to investigate the events of September 11th, 2001, to try to discover the truth about what really happened that day.
 
 
 
 

•  Of all the lies we were told on 9/11, none was more dramatic or more heart-rending than the story about how a group of "heroic passengers" aboard United Airlines Flight 93 had supposedly overpowered four "hijackers" and sent the plane plummeting to the ground near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Sadly, however, this story has turned out to be pure fiction: a fairy tale concocted by the authorities to cover up the fact that the plane was actually shot down by two F-16 fighter jets dispatched from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia on the orders of Vice-President Dick Cheney, and its debris was scattered over 13 square kilometres of the Pennsylvania countryside.

In its official report, the 9/11 commission acknowledged that Dick Cheney issued an order to shoot down Flight 93 but said the order wasn't given until 10:10 a.m. – seven minutes after the plane had crashed, supposedly because of a revolt against the "hijackers" by a group of "heroic passengers."

But the 10:10 a.m. time claimed by the commission was flatly contradicted by a number of key figures, including White House counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke who said he received word of Cheney's shoot-down authorization no later than 9:45 a.m. Moreover, the records show a "scramble" order was issued at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia at 9:24 a.m. and two F-16 jet-fighters took off from the base at 9:30 a.m.

Even Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz publicly stated two F-16 fighter-jets were tailing Flight 93 before 10:00 a.m. – and there is compelling evidence they executed Cheney's order and blasted the plane out of the sky at 10:03 a.m.

Multiple witnesses who lived in the part of rural Pennsylvania over which Flight 93 was flying reported hearing noises and seeing flashes in the sky consistent with missiles hitting a plane. Several people also observed what looked like a shower of debris from an aircraft falling from the sky.

On the ground, a number of investigators, including a special unit from Asahi Television of Japan, combed the area and discovered small fragments of debris from the plane strewn across a 13-kilometre swath of territory. Also part of one of the engines from the aircraft was found far from the site where the plane had allegedly spiralled into the ground. Astonishingly, at that site near Shanksville there was no indication at all that a plane had crashed there – no wreckage, no luggage, no bodies – just an eerily smouldering crater.

On 9/11 reports that Flight 93 had been shot down were circulating widely in military and intelligence circles. For example, Major Daniel Nash, an F-15 pilot who had been dispatched from Otis Air Force Base in Massachusetts, said that after returning to his base, he was told that a military F-16 had shot down an airliner in Pennsylvania.

At Los Angeles International Airport, Charles Lewis, who, as we mentioned in last month's instalment, was carefully monitoring FAA, NORAD and FBI communications, said: "We were told fighter-jets had been scrambled and had shot the plane down over Pennsylvania – and that was way before they started telling us the 'hero' story."

The main "evidence" produced by the authorities to support the official story of a passenger revolt consisted of a number of cell-phone calls which passengers allegedly made from the plane, including the most famous one in which the "revolt leader" supposedly shouted, "Let's roll!" It now seems quite clear, however, that this "evidence" is bogus. Extensive tests by independent experts have demonstrated that the kind of high-altitude cell-phone calls allegedly made from Flight 93 were simply impossible with the technology available at that time. But the technology to produce realistic-sounding voice-morphing fakes certainly did exist in 2001.

Moreover, the other "evidence" which the authorities produced, the melodramatic dialogue on a tape supposedly from the cockpit voice-recorder on Flight 93, is also quite clearly fraudulent. That strange tape (released 1,670 days after 9/11) is full of anomalies and absurdities. At one point, for example, we hear passengers talking about using a drink cart to break down the cockpit door. But in reality, of course, the "black box" in the cockpit couldn't possibly have recorded voices in the passenger compartment with the cockpit door closed.

I found the story of the "passenger revolt" aboard Flight 93 to be one of the saddest aspects of the 9/11 fraud. What seemed at first to be a wonderful story of heroism and self-sacrifice turned out to be a cruel and cynical hoax that the authorities used to "sell" the 9/11 lies to the public.

For more details see:

•  "The Impossible Phone Calls of 9/11" by Rowland Morgan in Global Outlook (Issue 13), 2009

•  The New Pearl Harbor Revisited by David Ray Griffin

•  Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror by Richard A. Clarke

•  "Debunking 9/11 Lies" by Jim Hoffman in Global Outlook (Issue 10), 2005

•  WTC Building 7, the 47-story structure that mysteriously collapsed even though it wasn't hit by any plane, appears to have served as a key co-ordination centre for the "attacks" on the twin towers, and the building was literally blown to smithereens with high-powered explosives on the afternoon of 9/11 to make sure any incriminating evidence would be destroyed.

Among the many weird things that happened on 9/11, perhaps the most bizarre of all was the live BBC television report at 5:14 p.m. in which reporter Jane Standley told us World Trade Centre Building 7 had collapsed – even though we could clearly see that the building was still standing in the background behind her.

Indeed, the BBC had begun reporting the collapse of WTC 7 at 4:53 p.m. on radio and 4:54 p.m. on television. And CNN television anchor Aaron Brown had started reporting the building's collapse even earlier, at around 4:00 p.m. As with Mark Twain's death, reports of WTC 7's demise had been greatly exaggerated.

But not for long! At 5:21 p.m. all the remarkably prophetic reports came true and WTC 7 did, in fact, collapse into its own footprint in just 6.5 seconds. It marked the highly unusual end of a highly unusual building.

Contrary to what the authorities claimed, WTC 7 wasn't "just an ordinary office building." It was actually one of the most important buildings in New York City, housing major offices of the CIA, FBI and Department of Defense. Also the Securities and Exchange Commission kept vast records of bank transactions on floors 11 through 13, including many involving financial officials who were under investigation at that time for fraud. All these records were destroyed, as bad luck would have it, when the building collapsed!

But by far the most important offices in WTC 7 were those of Mayor Rudy Giuliani's Emergency Management Command Centre, which had been set up on the 23rd floor in June, 1999, to serve as a headquarters "bunker" where officials would deal with any possible terrorist attacks or other major crisis.

Given the obvious importance of WTC 7, one would have thought the authorities would have given high priority to explaining why this building collapsed on 9/11. Astoundingly, however, the 571-page official 9/11 report not only gives no such explanation but doesn't even mention the fact the building collapsed.

On 9/11, immediately after learning that the North Tower had been "attacked," New York City's Emergency Co-ordinator Barry Jennings and Corporation Counsel Michael Hess rushed to WTC 7's emergency command "bunker" where they had expected to find Mayor Giuliani taking charge of operations. But, to their amazement, the "bunker" had been largely abandoned and one of the few people still there told them to leave immediately and to go to 75 Barkley Street, where they would find Giuliani.

The mayor said later he hadn't gone to the WTC 7 23rd floor "bunker" because it was "obvious" to him that Building 7 was going to collapse. One of the greatest mysteries of 9/11 to this day is why Giuliani was so certain WTC 7 was going to collapse even though the city's emergency officials and firefighters weren't certain – and even though only fairly small fires were burning in that building.
In any case, after 9/11 the authorities hoped at first they could get away with ignoring the WTC 7 collapse. But they soon discovered that a 47-story building couldn't be swept under the rug without a huge bulge showing. Complaints from some of the families of 9/11 victims eventually forced the authorities to call an "investigation," and that unenviable task was given to the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

As we've already seen, Building 7, like the twin towers, was clearly brought down by pre-positioned cutter-charge explosives. But for NIST, of course, the truth wasn't an option, so they came up with an astonishingly convoluted story about one of the building's pillars, the magical "Column 79," supposedly having fallen in such a highly unusual way that it caused "a chain reaction" among the other pillars.

In his painstakingly detailed 328-page book, The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report about 9/11 is Unscientific and False, David Ray Griffin calls NIST's explanation "a thoroughly unscientific theory, resting on a combination of observation, free speculation, implausible claims, fudged data and outright fabrications."

Those views are shared by David L. Griscom, who was a research physicist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory for 33 years. He says: "Griffin's book provides unequivocal evidence of massive scientific fraud committed by a politicized NIST." Griscom was one of more than 15,000 U.S. scientists (including 52 Nobel laureates) who signed a statement in 2008 accusing the Bush administration of "distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends."

The release of the NIST Report on August 21st, 2008, was also shrouded in additional controversy and mystery by the sudden, still unexplained death just two days earlier of New York City's 53-year-old Emergency Co-ordinator Barry Jennings, who had been an outspoken critic of the official version of the WTC 7 collapse. Indeed, David Ray Griffin dedicates his book on Building 7 "to the memory of Barry Jennings, whose truth-telling may have cost him his life."

But the biggest question of all, of course, is why Building 7 was brought down on the afternoon of 9/11 – and the most compelling explanation came from former German cabinet minister and internationally-respected security expert Andreas Von Buelow, who believes Rudy Giuliani's 23rd floor "bunker" was used to co-ordinate the "attacks" on the twin towers. "It would have been the optimal place," he says, "to run the 'attacks' using remote-control technology." And the building's collapse would destroy any incriminating evidence.

Our look at the strange saga of Building 7 would not be complete without noting that one person above all emerged as the "big winner" from the collapse of WTC 7: the building's lease-holder, "Lucky Larry" Silverstein, who pocketed a cool $475-million after buying the building for $386-million just six weeks before 9/11 and winning an insurance claim for $861-million after it collapsed.
The ease with which he obtained that super-generous payout was especially remarkable in view of Silverstein's startling statement in an interview with PBS in September, 2002, that he had told firefighters on the afternoon of 9/11 that Building 7 should be "pulled" (the industry term for controlled demolition).

For more details see:

•  The CIA and September 11th by Andreas Von Buelow

•  "Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse?" by Steven E. Jones in Global Outlook (Issue 11), 2006

•  63 Documents the Government Doesn't Want You to Read by Jesse Ventura and Dick Russell

•  Towers of Deception by Barrie Zwicker

•  The Pentagon was struck on 9/11, not by a Boeing 757 jetliner as officially claimed, but by a much smaller projectile in an "attack" carefully planned and controlled to make sure there would be only minimal damage and casualties – and also to make sure key documents related to a $2.3-trillion military spending scandal would be destroyed in the "attack."

If we were to believe the official story about how the Pentagon was "attacked" on 9/11, it would surely have had to be the strangest attack that had ever been carried out on any building in history.

If the "hijacked" Boeing 757 jetliner had really approached the Pentagon from the west, as we were told, the "suicide hijackers" would surely have plunged the plane directly into the roof, causing massive damage and almost certainly killing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and many top military officials. But instead, we are told, these remarkably considerate "hijackers" circled around the building for no apparent reason and struck a section known as Wedge One, which, as good luck would have it, was being renovated at that time and was therefore largely unoccupied.

Moreover, the plane's circling manoeuvre was nothing short of astounding since the pilot had to descend 7,000 feet in two minutes while travelling at 530 miles per hour and performing a steep 270-degree banked turn and then crash into the Pentagon's first-floor wall without touching the lawn. And this nearly impossible feat was supposedly accomplished by a young "hijacker," Hani Hanjour, who hadn't even been able to fly a single-engine Cessna at a flight-training school a month earlier.

Even more amazing, however, was the fact that the "hijacked" jetliner had a wingspan of 124 feet but whatever hit the Pentagon left a hole in the wall just 18 feet in diameter – and there was absolutely no physical evidence at the "crash site" indicating a large jetliner had hit the building. Indeed, a number of Pentagon employees, such as April Gallop and Karen Kwiatkowski, who rushed to the site of the "crash" found no signs of an aircraft – no fuselage wreckage, seats, luggage or human remains. Even the plane's two six-ton engines, made of tempered steel and virtually indestructible titanium, just magically vanished and neither has been found to this day. Gallop, a veteran military data analyst, says the official claims that a jetliner struck the building are "utterly ridiculous."

That view is shared by a number of military and civilian aviation experts who have studied this issue, such as retired Air Force Colonel George Nelson, who worked for 30 years as an aircraft accident investigator. Colonel Nelson says: "Any unbiased rational investigator could only conclude that a Boeing 757 did not fly into the Pentagon as alleged."

Indeed, none other than Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld inadvertently let the cat out of the bag in a recorded interview with Parade magazine on October 12th, 2001, when he referred to "the missile" that struck the Pentagon before correcting himself and saying he had meant to use the word "plane."

So, since American Airlines Flight 77 obviously didn't really hit the Pentagon, what actually happened to the plane? According to Federal Aviation Administration records, the plane dropped off the radar screen at 8:56 a.m. (41 minutes before the Pentagon was hit) and it apparently went down in a remote part of northern Kentucky near the Indiana border. It remains unclear to this day exactly how and why the plane went down and what became of the aircraft and its passengers. What is absolutely clear, however, is that the journey of Flight 77 on 9/11 ended in the Midwest, hundreds of miles away from the Pentagon.

That being the case, what really struck the Pentagon? All of the evidence indicates the "attack" was a self-inflicted wound. The building was hit by a small missile in a very carefully controlled operation to keep damage to a minimum and, above all, to make sure Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the top Pentagon officials who were in the building at the time wouldn't be harmed. I understand it is very difficult, or perhaps even impossible, for many people to face the shocking reality that the "attack" on the Pentagon was a hoax – but the truth doesn't cease to be the truth simply because its implications are so horrifying.

In any case, the truth about what happened at the Pentagon could have been made clear to everyone by releasing the video tapes from the 87 surveillance cameras known to be in operation in the area around the Pentagon – especially the tapes from the cameras at the Sheraton Hotel and Citgo Gas Station across the street from the Pentagon, which both had clear sight-lines to Wedge One.

But all of these tapes have been suppressed (FBI agents seized the Sheraton and Citgo tapes only minutes after the Pentagon was hit). All that the authorities have released are a few still-frames which show a small fire and a fuzzy white streak but which provide no proof at all that a jetliner hit the building.

It is also important to note that while the phony "attack" on the Pentagon was carried out mainly to whip up public fear and hysteria, so Dick Cheney and his friends could proceed with their imperial adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, it also served another purpose: helping to cover up a major military spending scandal.

On September 10th, 2001, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld made the astonishing public announcement that an estimated $2.3-trillion of Defense Department money had apparently gone missing and the matter was under investigation. Less than 24 hours later, the 9/11 "attacks" occurred and, as bad luck would have it, the part of the Pentagon "attacked," Wedge One, just happened to be the place where financial records were kept, and hundreds of important documents were destroyed.

Officially, of course, this was all pure coincidence and the "attack" on the Pentagon wasn't intended to destroy any evidence or divert attention away from the spending scandal – but if you believe that, please contact me immediately and I will be happy to offer you a bargain-basement price for a certain bridge I own in New York City or one of several tourist resorts I operate on the moon!
For more details see:

•  "The Pentagon: Big Plane, Small Holes" by Jim Hoffman in Global Outlook (Issue 11), 2006

•  Cognitive Infiltration by David Ray Griffin

•  American Conspiracies by Jesse Ventura and Dick Russell

•  Although the U.S. authorities have waged one of the most high-powered propaganda campaigns in history to try to brainwash and intimidate people into believing Osama bin Laden was responsible for 9/11, there is actually not a shred of credible evidence that he orchestrated the "attacks" – the so-called "smoking-gun videotape" purportedly showing bin Laden chortling about the "attacks" is as phony as President Barack Obama's claim that bin Laden was killed by U.S. commandos in Pakistan.

Osama bin Laden was the perfect "terrorist bogeyman" to serve as a credible scapegoat for Dick Cheney and his cohorts when they pulled off their false-flag operation on September 11th, 2001. By bin Laden's own admission, al Qaeda operatives had carried out a number of anti-U.S. attacks around the world such as the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, so it was fairly easy to con the U.S. public into believing bin Laden was also responsible for the events of 9/11 – especially amid all the blind fear and hysteria that followed the "attacks."

Shortly after 9/11, then U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell promised he would provide clear proof that bin Laden was responsible for 9/11 "within a few days." And the Taliban leaders in power in Afghanistan at the time publicly stated they would turn bin Laden over to the U.S. authorities if the Americans provided proof bin Laden was responsible for the 9/11 "attacks." But no such evidence has been produced to this day. Indeed, even FBI spokesman Rex Tomb publicly admitted: "The FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11."

Following every previous al Qaeda operation, bin Laden had quickly claimed responsibility and boasted that it demonstrated al Qaeda's power – not surprisingly, since one of the main goals of these operations was to win new recruits for al Qaeda. If bin Laden had really masterminded the 9/11 "attacks," he would undoubtedly have trumpeted his involvement to the heavens and proclaimed it the greatest "achievement" of his life.

But instead bin Laden emphatically denied any responsibility for 9/11. Indeed, speaking on Al-Jazeera on September 16th and to the Islamic Press on September 17th, bin Laden swore "in the name of Islam" that he had nothing to do with the "attacks." This was a very powerful denial since, whatever one might have thought of Osama, he was undeniably a very devout Wahabi Muslim.

As the weeks went by, the U.S. authorities came under increasing pressure to come up with at least some proof of bin Laden's involvement, so on December 13th they released what they called "a smoking-gun videotape," which they claimed American soldiers had found in an abandoned house in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and which purports to show bin Laden chortling with some friends about the 9/11 "attacks." Actually, however, it is a sad commentary on the gullibility of the public and the news media that this transparently fraudulent tape was taken seriously let alone accepted as authentic. Indeed, even America's leading academic expert on bin Laden, Dr. Bruce Lawrence of Duke University, dismissed the tape as "bogus" – but that comment was never reported, of course, in the mainstream media.

On close examination, the "bin Laden" in the video is clearly an impostor. He has darker skin, fuller cheeks, a broader nose and much shorter fingers than the real bin Laden. The "bin Laden" in the video also had a serious weight problem and looked more like Santa than Osama. At the time this tape was allegedly made, the real bin Laden's body was severely emaciated: he was in the final stage of dying from kidney disease and was thin as a rake. Also by that point, the real bin Laden's left arm was paralyzed, but the "bin Laden" in the video casually raises his left arm above his head. Moreover, part of Osama bin Laden's shtick was that he always made a point of moving slowly and gracefully like a ballet dancer – but the "bin Laden" in the video jerks about like a drunken fan at a UFC fight.

As it turned out, the "Jalalabad tape" was the first of a long series of phony bin Laden video and audio tapes that the U.S. authorities would produce. At the time of 9/11, bin Laden was very seriously ill with severe kidney disease and was being kept alive only with intensive dialysis treatments. In his last authentic videotape message, recorded sometime after November 16th and aired by Al-Jazeera on December 27th, 2001, bin Laden looked shockingly gaunt and almost cadaverous, with his left arm hanging limp. After carefully examining this tape, CNN's medical specialist Dr. Sanjay Gupta said bin Laden appeared to be "in the final stage of renal failure" and noted anyone in such condition "would be unlikely to survive beyond several days or a week at the most."

Indeed, there is compelling evidence that bin Laden finally lost his long struggle with kidney disease and died in mid-December, 2001 – less than 100 days after 9/11 – and he was buried near Tora Bora in southeastern Afghanistan. This evidence is explained in great detail by David Ray Griffin in his book Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive?

The first reports of bin Laden's death appeared in The Observer newspaper in Pakistan on December 25th, 2001, and these reports quickly spread around the world. By the end of 2001 these reports were being widely accepted as true even by many political leaders and news organizations in the West.

Suddenly, however, in early 2002, the Osama saga took another weird twist when officials of both the U.S. and al Qaeda told us – without offering any credible evidence – that we should stop believing bin Laden was dead and start believing he was still alive. Old Osama had apparently experienced a miraculous resurrection!

Actually, as former CIA operative Robert Baer and others have noted, both the U.S. and al Qaeda had a huge mutual interest in "breathing life" into bin Laden's corpse.

"In fact," Baer says, "there was a vast industry of contractors, corporations and pundits who needed bin Laden alive – all of them eating at the trough."

The U.S. needed a "live" super-bogeyman – with bin Laden dead, the highly lucrative "anti-terrorist" gravy train might come screeching to a halt. And al Qaeda also needed a "live" Osama to serve as its superstar leader since it had no potential successor with the same kind of charisma and ability to attract new recruits.

Consequently, over the past decade, as David Ray Griffin has documented so brilliantly, we witnessed a truly bizarre spectacle, with a steady stream of dire warnings coming from the long-dead Osama bin Laden in phony voice-morphing tapes. Although these voice-from-the-grave tapes were blindly accepted as genuine by almost all of the North American media, they were widely ridiculed in more sophisticated political and diplomatic circles. For example, former U.S. Foreign Service officer Angelo Codevilla joked in American Spectator magazine that bin Laden had become "Osama bin Elvis".

By early 2011 we began to see indications bin Laden had finally out-lived his usefulness to both the U.S. and al Qaeda – and it seemed the "Ghost of Osama" might soon be exorcised, so to speak! On February 9th U.S. counter-terrorism director Michael Leiter announced the U.S. no longer considered bin Laden the biggest terror threat to the U.S. – he had lost his number-one bogeyman spot to the relatively obscure Anwar al Awlaki in Yemen. Leiter said bin Laden was "no longer able to organize terrorist plots the way he once could" – which was no doubt true since most people who have been dead for ten years are no longer quite as productive as they once were!

The stage was now set for Barack Obama to go before the cameras on May 2nd and tell the world, with as much dramatic flair as he could muster, that U.S. commandos had "just killed" bin Laden in a raid on a mansion located near a large military base in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Just a short time after Obama's address, however, the official story began to unravel when U.S. officials made the astonishing claim that bin Laden's body had been "buried at sea in accordance with Muslim tradition." One person who immediately expressed skepticism was George Noory, host of the widely-syndicated radio show "Coast to Coast AM," who happened to be broadcasting live on more then 500 stations at the time of Obama's announcement.

When told bin Laden's body had been dumped in the ocean, Noory exclaimed: "This surely must be a joke!" He later added: "This is one of the most ridiculous things I've heard in all my years of broadcasting. Anyone who knows anything about Islamic practices would be aware that a Muslim should never be buried at sea unless the person dies on a boat. A Muslim should be buried in the ground with the head facing toward Mecca." Noory's comments were echoed by Islamic clerics around the world who said most Muslims would consider the action allegedly taken by the U.S. to be insulting, not respectful.

The official account of the Rambo-style shootout on bin Laden's "hideout" was also immediately ridiculed by a number of independent military and intelligence experts such as Craig Hulet and Dr. Steve Pieczenik, who pointed out that such a raid would have been the worst possible tactics to use in the circumstances described. In a real scenario of this kind, Hulet noted, "every effort would have been made to take bin Laden alive and this would almost certainly have been achieved using the right kind of tactics." And even if bin Laden had been killed in the operation, his body certainly wouldn't have been chucked into the ocean – it would have been made available to independent forensic experts for examination and verification.

In any case, the debate about "what happened to bin Laden on May 1st" is totally irrelevant since, as we've already seen, old Osama had already kicked the bucket almost a decade earlier. Dr. Pieczenik, who has worked as a high-level military and intelligence advisor in the U.S. capital for many years and has a lot of insider friends, says: "Practically everyone of consequence in Washington is well aware bin Laden died of renal failure in December, 2001. Privately, some people even talk and joke about it. But no one ever dares to say anything about this in public, for obvious reasons."

In the days following Obama's announcement, the official version of the raid changed so often and there were so many contradictions and discrepancies that at one briefing session White House Press Secretary Jay Carney almost broke down, pleading with reporters that all the problems with the official story had resulted from "the fog of war."

Nonetheless, even though the "we-just-killed-Osama" routine was carried out with about as much aplomb and finesse as might have been expected from the Three Stooges, Obama was immediately hailed by most of the ever-gullible public and the brain-dead mass media as "the great terrorist slayer," so he now gets to cash in politically on the 9/11 lies just as George Bush and Dick Cheney did earlier. Perhaps Obama should change his campaign slogan for the next election from "Yes, we can!" to "Yes, we con!"

In any case, the "anti-terrorist" gravy train keeps rolling along, with further fuel provided by all the "scary" information contained in the so-called "treasure trove" of documents supposedly found in bin Laden's "hideout. Not surprisingly, these "frightening" documents warn of more possible al Qaeda "attacks" to come, perhaps this time in Los Angeles, Chicago or Washington, D.C. With trillions of dollars at stake, the big "terrorism" show must go on – Osama or no Osama!

Meanwhile, right on cue, al Qaeda's Ayman al-Zawahri weighed in with a suitably sleazy, hypocritical video claiming he was "shocked" to learn of the U.S. "commando raid" and telling us bin Laden's role in the ongoing drama had now changed from romantic elusive warrior to glorious martyr. Ten years earlier, of course, it had been al-Zawahri who made the decision that it was to al Qaeda's advantage at that point to keep the dead bin Laden "alive". In his video, al-Zawahri even managed to "one-up" Barack Obama in terms of show-biz presentation by delivering his spiel wearing flowing white robes and brandishing a Kalashnikov rifle!
For more details see:

•  The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

•  Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia by Ahmad Rashid

•  Unholy Wars by John K. Cooley

•  Conspiracies, Conspiracy Theories and the Secrets of 9/11 by Mathias Broeckers

Next month, when we conclude our look at what really happened on 9/11, we will see that:

•  The conflict in Afghanistan is a totally bogus war – the Bush-Cheney administration had already decided months before 9/11 to invade the country and use it as a pipeline corridor so the huge Cent Gas energy consortium could transport hundreds of billions of dollars worth of oil and gas from the Caspian Basin to the Indian Ocean.

•  9/11 was not just one of history's greatest frauds but also one of history's greatest "robberies" – "lucky" WTC lease-holders and stock-market investors pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars while even "luckier" oil, arms and security companies gained hundreds of billions of dollars.

•  The official report of the 9/11 commission is one of the most blatantly dishonest documents in all of human history – its 571 pages are a concoction of literally hundreds of distortions, omissions and even outright lies such as, for example, the astonishing claim that none of the four "black boxes" aboard the planes that hit the towers were recovered when, in fact, all four were found.

•  9/11 was one of the great watershed moments in history and it produced some of the very best of genuine patriotic heroes such as WTC custodian William Rodriguez but also some of the very worst of pseudo-patriotic zeroes such as Vice-President Dick Cheney.
 
 
 
Gordon Pollard, who is a native of Victoria, has a MA in History from Columbia University in New York City and a BA in History and English from the University of Victoria.  After working for 10 years as a journalist in B.C., Alberta, and Ontario, Gordon spent 20 years teaching English and History in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka