Truemors
Every one will have a theory about what happened on 9/11. Some think it
was the government, some think it was Muslim terrorist, and eve some
others think it was aliens. No matter what your thought is, the simple
fact that the evidence does not match the official story should be
reason enough to question it, no matter who you think did it. That is
what being an investigator is all about, you have to look at all the
facts and see where the money goes. Robert Fisk, in an interview, made
these points quite clear and I applaud him for it. I like the term "raver", as I once was a raver, but not in the same sence of the word.
Robert Fisk:
Each time I lecture abroad on the Middle East, there is always someone
in the audience – just one – whom I call the "raver".
Apologies here to all the men and women who come to my talks with bright
and pertinent questions – often quite humbling ones for me as
a journalist – and which show that they understand the Middle
East tragedy a lot better than the journalists who report it. But the
"raver" is real. He has turned up in corporeal form in Stockholm
and in Oxford, in Sao Paulo and in Yerevan, in Cairo, in Los Angeles
and, in female form, in Barcelona. No matter the country, there will
always be a "raver".
His – or her – question goes like this. Why, if you believe
you're a free journalist, don't you report what you really know about
9/11? Why don't you tell the truth – that the Bush administration
(or the CIA or Mossad, you name it) blew up the twin towers? Why don't
you reveal the secrets behind 9/11? The assumption in each case is that
Fisk knows – that Fisk has an absolute concrete, copper-bottomed
fact-filled desk containing final proof of what "all the world
knows" (that usually is the phrase) – who destroyed the twin
towers. Sometimes the "raver" is clearly distressed. One man
in Cork screamed his question at me, and then – the moment I suggested
that his version of the plot was a bit odd – left the hall, shouting
abuse and kicking over chairs.
Usually, I have tried to tell the "truth"; that while there
are unanswered questions about 9/11, I am the Middle East correspondent
of The Independent, not the conspiracy correspondent; that I have quite
enough real plots on my hands in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran, the Gulf,
etc, to worry about imaginary ones in Manhattan. My final argument –
a clincher, in my view – is that the Bush administration has screwed
up everything – militarily, politically diplomatically –
it has tried to do in the Middle East; so how on earth could it successfully
bring off the international crimes against humanity in the United States
on 11 September 2001?
Well, I still hold to that view. Any military which can claim –
as the Americans did two days ago – that al-Qa'ida is on the run
is not capable of carrying out anything on the scale of 9/11. "We
disrupted al-Qa'ida, causing them to run," Colonel David Sutherland
said of the preposterously code-named "Operation Lightning Hammer"
in Iraq's Diyala province. "Their fear of facing our forces proves
the terrorists know there is no safe haven for them." And more
of the same, all of it untrue.
Within hours, al-Qa'ida attacked Baquba in battalion strength and slaughtered
all the local sheikhs who had thrown in their hand with the Americans.
It reminds me of Vietnam, the war which George Bush watched from the
skies over Texas – which may account for why he this week mixed
up the end of the Vietnam war with the genocide in a different country
called Cambodia, whose population was eventually rescued by the same
Vietnamese whom Mr Bush's more courageous colleagues had been fighting
all along.
But – here we go. I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies
in the official narrative of 9/11. It's not just the obvious non sequiturs:
where are the aircraft parts (engines, etc) from the attack on the Pentagon?
Why have the officials involved in the United 93 flight (which crashed
in Pennsylvania) been muzzled? Why did flight 93's debris spread over
miles when it was supposed to have crashed in one piece in a field?
Again, I'm not talking about the crazed "research" of David
Icke's Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster –
which should send any sane man back to reading the telephone directory.
I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example, that
kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel
beams of the twin towers – whose melting point is supposed to
be about 1,480C – would snap through at the same time? (They collapsed
in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower – the so-called
World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon Brothers Building) –
which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11
September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft
had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards and Technology
was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of all three
buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7. Two prominent American
professors of mechanical engineering – very definitely not in
the "raver" bracket – are now legally challenging the
terms of reference of this final report on the grounds that it could
be "fraudulent or deceptive".
Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11. Initial reports
of reporters that they heard "explosions" in the towers –
which could well have been the beams cracking – are easy to dismiss.
Less so the report that the body of a female air crew member was found
in a Manhattan street with her hands bound. OK, so let's claim that
was just hearsay reporting at the time, just as the CIA's list of Arab
suicide-hijackers, which included three men who were – and still
are – very much alive and living in the Middle East, was an initial
intelligence error.
But what about the weird letter allegedly written by Mohamed Atta,
the Egyptian hijacker-murderer with the spooky face, whose "Islamic"
advice to his gruesome comrades – released by the CIA –
mystified every Muslim friend I know in the Middle East? Atta mentioned
his family – which no Muslim, however ill-taught, would be likely
to include in such a prayer. He reminds his comrades-in-murder to say
the first Muslim prayer of the day and then goes on to quote from it.
But no Muslim would need such a reminder – let alone expect the
text of the "Fajr" prayer to be included in Atta's letter.
Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the ravers.
Spare me the plots. But like everyone else, I would like to know the
full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole
lunatic, meretricious "war on terror" which has led us to
disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East. Bush's
happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that "we're an empire
now – we create our own reality". True? At least tell us.
It would stop people kicking over chairs.
Robert Fisk Bio:
Born July 12, 1946 in Maidstone, Kent is a British journalist and is currently a Middle East correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent. He was married to the American journalist Lara Marlowe. He lives in Beirut, Lebanon, where he has resided for over 25 years.
Fisk is one of the few Western journalists to have interviewed Osama bin Laden - three times (all published by The Independent: December 6, 1993 July 10, 1996, and March 22, 1997).
During one of Fisk's interviews with Bin Laden, Fisk noted an attempt
by Bin Laden to possibly recruit him. Bin Laden said, "Mr Robert, one
of our brothers had a dream. He dreamed ... that you were a spiritual
person ... this means you are a true Muslim." Fisk replied, "Sheikh
Osama, I am not a Muslim ... I am a journalist". Bin Laden and Adam Gadahn, an alleged Al-Qaeda spokesman and translator of American birth, have apparently mentioned Robert Fisk in speeches. Osama bin Laden said Fisk's reporting was "neutral". According to a MEMRI report, on September 2, 2006, in a videotaped statement, Adam Gadahn, said that Fisk and George Galloway
have a "respect and admiration for Islam," have "sympathy for Muslims
their causes", and added "I say to them, isn't it time you stopped
sitting on the fence and came over to the side of truth?"
Fisk described the September 11, 2001 attacks of the "9/11 killers" as a "hideous crime against humanity." In the aftermath of 9/11, he called for an honest discussion for identifying explanations for the attacks. He believes that Al Qaeda ordered attacks on the United States because of U.S. policies in the Middle East, especially its support for Israel, and disagrees with President Bush's statements that the perpetrators of 9/11 did it because "they hate our freedoms."
After the U.S. launched its attack on Afghanistan shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Fisk was for a time transferred to Pakistan
to provide coverage of that conflict. While reporting from there, he
was attacked and beaten by a group of Afghan refugees but was also
saved from this attack by another Afghani refugee. In his graphic
account of his own beating, published in The Independent of December 10, 2001,
Fisk excused the attackers of responsibility ("I couldn't blame them
for what they were doing,") and said that, in his view, their
"brutality was entirely the product of others, of us — of we who had
armed their struggle against the Russians and ignored their pain and
laughed at their civil war
and then armed and paid them again for the 'War for Civilisation' just
a few miles away and then bombed their homes and ripped up their
families and called them 'collateral damage."
In August 2007 Fisk publicly expressed, for the first time, doubts
about the historical record of the September 11 attacks. In an article
for The Independent, he raised such concerns as missing aircraft parts, the melting point of steel, the collapse of 7 World Trade Center, and other familiar criticisms that have circulated within the 9/11 Truth Movement.
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