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Our take on the 911 events
Mon Jul 28 19:38:33 2003
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Our take on the 911 events
http://www.911dossier.co.uk/

On this page is our take on the official story, how it's changed, the unofficial investigation and what the truth could be. Would you dispute any of the facts here or in the key articles?

Prologue

According to the official story, on 11 September 2001, 19 arab hijackers crashed four airliners in America as part of an ongoing war against the US, organised by the Al Qaida terrorist network, headed by Osama Bin Laden. They were able to succeed because they had a $60b organisation behind them, they had operated with invisible sleeper cells, they had the clever idea of turning off the plane's transponders, they took America completely by surprise. Because the CIA had ceased any contact with Al Qaida no warnings were received. In case there was any doubt as to the perpetrators, one of the hijackers' passports was soon found in the ruins of the WTC along with flight manuals in the hijackers cars.

For about 24 hours there was a confusing flurry of reports: put options had been placed by mystery financial players on the stricken airlines a week before 911, bombs were heard going off in the WTC, a truck bomb was reported at the Pentagon well before the plane attack there, the hijackers had aroused suspicions at their flight schools, there were surprisingly few people on the planes or killed at the WTC. Many commentators agreed that a state must have helped Bin Laden. Critics asked why the USAF failed for two hours to scramble fighters. Some dared to mock Bush's strange movements on the day of the attacks.

But within a week the Washington media were speaking with one voice. All dissent on the facts was now a conspiracy theory. The official story was now agreed: the fanatics from Al Qaida did it alone. The FBI identified the culprits, and many reports which by implication confirmed the official story appeared in the Washington media. It seemed an open and shut case. No doubt an investigation would clear up the details. The media moved on. To war in Afghanistan.

In February 2003 it is now clear that by 12 September 2001, a political team apparently caught gobsmacked by the attacks a day earlier had already made dramatic long term decisions. The key response to 911was a vague but potent declaration of war against terrorists and rogue states. Within a week or two came huge budget hikes for the Intelligence agencies that had failed so spectacularly and, planned before the attacks, radical changes to the US legal system in the form of the US Patriot Act.

No enquiry

But the final 911 act never happened. In contrast to say the Kennedy assassination, there has been no comprehensive or public enquiry into the facts of the attacks, the background or indeed the remedy. Even the secret 2002 Congressional Intelligence enquiry was bitterly opposed by the White House with complaints from congressmen of obstruction and warnings of more bombshells to come.

Despite the tidal wave of emotion, there was no political coming together in America. Within weeks of his inauguration Bush had thrown away the compassionate conservative label which brought him to the White House. After 911 things only got worse with massive handouts to corporate welfare recipients, the shredding of constitutional freedoms and the suggestion that anyone who opposed this far right pre-set war agenda was unpatriotic.

Candidate Bush implied that he was a new type of Republican, not to be compared to his predecessors. Post-911, in an open challenge to the rule of law President Bush recently appointed officials convicted of Iran-Contra offenses to senior posts in his administration.

As the shock of the 911 attacks wore off, people began to notice that Bush has gained big time from 911. Doubts over the truthfulness of the official 911 story grew.

The doubts are not confined to the traditional enemies of Washington. In Germany respected elder statesmen Horst Ehmke and Andreas von Bulow have said they don't believe the official 911 story. At least one active US serviceman has been reprimanded for saying in public what many believe privately, and activists are saying openly on websites like truthout (Democrat) and apfn (Republican): the President knew about it and let it happen, even maybe helped it happen.

Evidence withheld

The doubts have been fed by the FBI policy of withholding evidence even when it should be easy to release it and confirm the official account. For instance, although critics say the Pentagon attack was suspicious, all footage of it has been confiscated, and a year later the only publicly available picture seems to show a smaller plane or missile.

Again, even the fire authorities, hardly a hotbed of conspiracy theorists, angrily criticised the abrupt scrapping of the remains of the WTC steel pillars by Mayor Guilliani, blocking the investigation of how four inch thick construction grade steel could collapse so completely.

What possible reason could the US government have to foster dissent in the US and abroad if there is nothing to hide? It is part of the folklore of US politics: if you don't have anything to hide, then don't behave as if you have.

Crass stupidity won't do as an explanation here: Bush is aware that what he calls the war on terror is being undermined by widely held 'conspiracy theories'. We know this because he took precious time in his UN General Assembly speech in autumn 1991 to say so. Tony Blair has characteristically taken the already empty expression to new absurdities by asserting that the oil motive in Iraq is a conspiracy theory.

With the shock and fear wearing off, Americans of all political hues who share the Founding Fathers' suspicion of government activity abroad have remembered that America's previous publicly revealed wars have begun with suspicious incidents or outright fraud. Either the defences have been suspiciously relaxed (Pearl Harbour, 911), or there has been a complete fabrication (Gulf of Tonkin incident, USS Maine) or provocative risk-taking (Lusitania).

Many Democrats remember that every Republican Administration since the second world war has been tainted by a contempt for democracy ('McCarthyism') through political dirty tricks and perjury (Watergate) to the waging of a murderous terrorist war in direct defiance of laws passed only months earlier (Iran-contra).

But surely it was inconceivable that the US government would effectively bomb its own people? Not at all. A deadly email went all over the internet drawing attention to the discovery of a Pentagon document on the proposed Operation Northwoods. It is undeniable that Pentagon bosses explicitly suggested a mass murder plot against US citizens to justify an attack on Cuba.

Official story changes

Most people dependent on the corporate media in US/UK are still unaware of most of these disturbing precedents. But in December 2001 the official story began to wobble in the official media. The anthrax accusations against Iraq were discredited as US scientists proved that the anthrax used in the murderous attacks on key Democrat senators Daschle and Leahy came not from Iraq but from the US military-industrial complex.

But the White House was heading in the opposite direction. With Osama bin Laden still on the loose, and the vast majority of his alleged fearsome resources still unaccounted for, Iraq was suddenly promoted to enemy number one. Bin Laden was now 'an irrelevance' (Rumsfeld). Even the unsuspicious began to smell a rat.

These were only eddies in comparison with the earthquake that threatened to topple Bush in May 2002 with the leak from the secret Congressional enquiry that as the New York Post put it, 'BUSH KNEW' about the 911attacks. The White House was forced by FBI leaks to admit that the administration was given far more specific warnings of the 911 attacks than they had admitted. When asked on September 14 if there had been any warnings Cheney had lied to the media with this reply: 'not really, nothing specific'.

As fast as it came, this flurry of accusations was mysteriously forgotten by the official US media. But shortly after this Bush's long awaited speech on the Middle East gobsmacked the world. The Oslo accords were dead, and in flat contradiction to Bush/Powell positions of only weeks earlier Sharon was now given a green light to do anything he wanted on the West Bank.

Cynics concluded that Bush was being blackmailed by pro-Likud American media corporations, who knew all along that he was complicit in the 911 attacks. It was therefore no surprise that after Bush caved in to Sharon, the veil of wilful amnesia came down again.

Who helped the hijackers?

Unlike the Kennedy assassination, there is no suggestion that the hijackers acted alone. 911 was not a lone-nut street level crime, it was a conspiracy. At the heart of any enquiry into the attacks lies the simple question: who were the hijackers and who helped the hijackers? Any answer is inherently a conspiracy theory. The official story is probably the most unlikely conspiracy theory to be believed in mainstream politics since the bogus Protocols Of the Elders of Zion was used to attack Jewish people in the 20th century.

Al Qaida certainly had the motive, but did they have the capacity to carry out the 911 attacks unaided? The skills needed were such that at first American security experts, trying to blame Iraq, argued strongly that they must have had the help of a state intelligence service.

At the time of the 911 attacks it was confidently expected that Al Qaida would make more such coups. It has not happened.

One thing is certain. The terrorists were aided by an effective US defence stand-down which was the result of policy decisions of the Bush administration in the preceding summer. Was there merely misjudgement and incompetence by what many are calling the Bush Junta or was it deliberate?

Why not a false flag operation?

Lawyers distinguish between prima facie evidence - appearances - and proof. If your neighbour comes out of his house dripping with blood and his wife is dead it is a good bet that this prima facie evidence will develop into proof.

But infiltration and false flag operations are standard currency in the world of terrorism. If your neighbour turns out to be from an intelligence agency or terrorist organisation, the prima facie evidence could turn out to be very misleading.

In the case of 911 there has been no official interest in the possibility of a false flag job except in relation to Iraq. This is odd because Israel has a good track record in infiltrating arab terrorists and a history of false flag jobs. The Palestine Authority alleges that Hamas was created by Israel. The possibility that 911 was an Israeli false flag job is widely recognised in the Middle East and has been highlighted among others by the writer Rana Kabbani in The Guardian (London). Some currents in the US are highly suspicious of China and have suggested that 911 was a Chinese false flag job.

Perhaps the most horrific single example of a false flag operation was the attack on the USS Liberty in the 1960's, when at least two waves of Israeli jets destroyed the US target in the Mediterranean. The attacks were aborted before all the survivors could be killed, leaving angry witnesses. [See ussliberty.org]

911 would have been a particularly easy false flag job in two respects: the target, Bin Laden, was running a very loose federation of terrorist groups and was only too willing to take credit for the attacks. It may be worth noting that in his official videos Bin Laden said that he welcomed the 911 attacks but did not organise them.

Last year the 120 strong Israeli 'art student' spy ring, operating from addresses near to those of the hijackers, was expelled from the US, and reports have slipped out that a number of Israelis have been in custody since 911.

Media silenced

If there has been no trial and no official inquiry, what about the media? Most US media outlets are owned by a handful of huge conglomerates the majority of which have extensive interests in the arms business. A wave of blind patriotism engulfed the US in the shocked aftermath of 911 prolonged by the anthrax attacks. Critical syndicated columnists were dropped, even satirical tv shows were cancelled. Long before Bush announced that the world was either for him or against him, every working journalist in the US knew that to doubt the official story was taboo.

Open dissent was exiled onto the web, to be nurtured by the many awkward facts that continued to emerge. The official story (original version) insisted for instance that there was no White House prior knowledge. But senior journalist Mark Hosenball of Newsweek slipped in at the bottom of a long article the devastating fact that senior Pentagon officials had cancelled all flights the day before the attacks.

The official story had it that the Bush entourage were confused as to what was going on until after 9.00 am, but the air traffic authority confirmed months later that the Pentagon was informed at 8.25.

With Blair instantly announcing that he was standing shoulder to shoulder with America, making it clear this meant Bush, not just the American people, and helped by Jack Straw's grossly inflated figures for UK casualties the same taboos operated here in the UK as in America.

Even in relatively normal times the US/UK media extend a mind-boggling credulity to their governments. During the Kossovo war the Blair government stated night after night that up to 100,000 people were being killed by Serbs. Later it emerged that the true figure was much less than 10 percent of this. No other source than a government would be believed again after such flagrant lies. The US/UK media, browbeaten by 45 years of the Cold war, may not be totally state controlled but it is state friendly.

Because the corporate media frequently accuse government of dishonesty on relatively minor matters, much of the public wrongly infers that the media would publicly air its doubts if the official 911 story is suspect.

911 Dossier

Meanwhile an army of investigators has been beavering away on the web, from seasoned professionals like ex-LA cop Mike Ruppert to tenacious individuals like Dick Eastman.

This web site is essentially a guide to the official story, its problems and the alternative possibilities. In this overview the arguments are summarised to familiarise visitors with the enquiry. You can decide what angle you are interested in and then use this site to find the best sources to follow it up.

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The main problems with the official story

The corporate media did not entirely fail in its duty. Simple obvious questions were put and answers given. But the answers often do not stand up.

1.

How could they have done it? Official answer: they took flying lessons, turned off the plane transponders. Problem: transponders do not make a plane invisible to military systems, and the FAA has confirmed that it recognised the hijackings by around 8.20 and notified the Pentagon. Problem: flight instructors said the hijackers had little or poor flying skills, but pilots have said the attack on the Pentagon would require great skill.
2.

This was unprecedented, what was new about this operation? Official Answer: It's only now that we have a demented group of religious fanatics who hate Americans and want to go to paradise. Problem: Bin Laden later made a statement by video of clear political demands. Problem: such fanatics have been around since at least the fall of the Shah of Iran in the late seventies, Why now?
3.

Why did the planes not scramble from Andrews Airbase, five minutes from Washington? Answer: it was all a surprise and anyway what could we have done (Cheney)? Problem: they did scramble planes from other more distant bases. Problem: it is standard procedure to scramble for all hijackings, who stopped it this time? Problem: We now know it wasn't a surprise. Problem: Bush, Cheney and co supposed to be security professionals, not ordinary bemused voters.
4.

Why was Bush not immediately whisked away from the Florida