The 9/11 Truth Movement is one of the most remarkable such movements of our age; sadly, it has a hard core of people who refuse to accept prosaic facts and continue to postulate outrageous nonsense.
First, let me make my position clear; it is right that the American public and the world ask questions about 9/11 and the official responses to it, particularly those of the American Government. It is right that people express skepticism, especially about our leaders. This is something I have always said, and anyone who asserts otherwise is either lying or hasn’t read any of my articles on related subjects.
In short, I know as does everyone, that the world is full of liars; unfortunately, not everyone within the 9/11 Truth Movement is capable of grasping this simple fact, and insist or infer that the only liars out there are government agents or “globalist shills”, whatever that is supposed to mean.
I have at times been the only person in the world who has proselytised the truth about a certain lie, something of which I am immensely proud. For example, in April 2001, I set up a website about convicted murderer Satpal Ram, having written my first articles about him earlier the same year. Ram’s supporters had been and continued to churn out all manner of lies, libels, slanders and hatred directed against his victim and the friends and family of his victim. They even managed to dupe Parliament and had his case made the subject of an Early Day Motion. Who has heard of Ram now? Here’s why.
I was also the only person in the world proselytising the truth about the 1960s Synagogue Arsons, in which a certain Gerry Gable claimed responsibility for solving a murder that never happened. I did this in the face a barrage of smears and a whispering campaign behind my back from among others certain people at the Jewish Chronicle newspaper. Incredibly, though Gable was forced to admit he had lied about this non-murder when he was questioned by the police, he continues to lie about it, and continues to be endorsed not only by the Jewish establishment but by academe. If that is not a conspiracy, it sure looks like one. Please don’t anyone accuse me of being in the pay of International Zionism!
Now let me turn to the 9/11 Truth Movement; the term is or can be misleading, because this movement is clearly a broad church, not everyone who might be described as a 9/11 Truther spreads insane conspiracy stories about the US Government or anyone who is in broad agreement with the proven facts of 9/11, namely that it was the work of 19 or 20 self-proclaimed Moslems with the usual peripheral actors, and that these men committed the greatest single act of mass murder outside of wartime in the past hundred years.
Some 9/11 Truthers are concerned solely with the breaches of security that were said to have allowed the atrocities to happen, and the lies that followed from both George Bush and his equal partner (not his puppet) Tony Blair. These lies have led us into two wars – Afghanistan and Iraq – and now the overthrow of the Gaddafi régime, with who knows what to follow; the subversion of the American Constitution, intensified surveillance of Moslems within the United States (with intensified surveillance of other “subversives” to follow); incitement and entrapment operations; extraordinary renditions; the use and indeed the justification of torture, and the detaining of hundreds of individuals for years without due process. In short, in order to “protect” us from Islamist fanatics whom we are told are intent on enslaving the world, the Bush and now the Obama Administration has been enslaving and imprisoning people. The real story is horrifying enough without its being embellished with nonsense and outright lies. Now, to these lies, seven of the biggest:
1) President George Bush ordered the attacks personally.
Can anyone imagine a scenario in which this could happen? To whom would he have given the order? How would this have been planned? How many people at the White House would have known about it? When one considers the logistics, this scenario is absolutely ludicrous.
Furthermore, it should not be forgotten that the same sort of lunatic allegations were made against Bill Clinton in connection with the 1995 Oklahoma City atrocity. As the target of this attack was the FBI, and 168 people were killed in it, including 99 Federal Government employees, 8 of them Federal Agents, one might have imagined the FBI would have taken an interest in any rogue agents who were involved in this act of mass murder, and if the President himself had ordered it...
2) The Twin Towers were brought down by controlled demolition.
There are lots of videos on the YouTube website that refute this nonsense in detail, but earlier this month, the BBC screened a programme that took a group of 9/11 conspiracy believers from these islands to the Promised Land, and in one scene it was explained to them by an expert that a controlled demolition takes detailed preparation; it is not like you see in the movies where there is a big bang, or more likely several big bangs, and the building falls down.
Another fact the true believers miss is that there were no such bangs at the time the buildings fell. Furthermore, a simple fact that many of these conspiracy mongers overlook, is that in a controlled demolition, the building collapses from the bottom, as can be seen here.
It is or should be clear from the many videos of the collapses of the North and South Towers that these buildings collapsed from the top down. They were each hit by a massive plane fully loaded with thousands of gallons of fuel. This damaged these enormous structures, and when the fires had weakened their frames, the floor above crashed through the floor below, and so on. The true believers would have us and the world believe that some group of people had somehow planted charges in both these buildings prior to September 11, 2001, and after the planes hit, succeeded in detonating them without anyone noticing, and at just the right moment to simulate a collapse from the ostensible cause.
3) A missile hit the Pentagon, not a plane.
At the time of the attack, some people may genuinely have believed this. One eyewitness whose account has been doctored in order to give spurious credence to this claim is the journalist Mike Walter, who decided to make a video that he posted to YouTube in which he explained what he saw and how his words had been twisted. Not only was Walter an eyewitness, but he went on record at the time. Unsurprisingly, some of the braindeads have claimed he is lying; those who want the truth can read an interview with him here.
Although he may not have been responsible for the genesis of this claim, the French author Thierry Meyssan was the first person to achieve widespread publicity with the surreal idea that a Cruise missile rather than a plane had hit the Pentagon. His first book on this subject is called L’effroyable imposture: 11 septembre 2001, which needs no translating, even for people like myself who can but count up to ten in French and utter the odd swear word.
When this book was first published it was quite widely reported in the British media, with some humour; the novelty effect has now long since worn off, and nobody laughs at it anymore, certainly not good humouredly. An analysis of his wider claims can be found in the on-line Journal of Debunking 9/11 Conspiracy Theories; the PDF article by James Bennett is located here; it also takes a swipe at David Ray Griffin and the low standards of the so-called peer reviewed journal to which he contributes.
4) There was no/insufficient wreckage.
This can be construed as part of the missile hit the Pentagon lie, but it warrants a section of its own because it is applied not only to the Pentagon but also to United Airlines Flight 93.
This is one of those myths that grow because people who should know better are either too trusting and gullible, or can’t be bothered to do the simplest fact checking. After I published an article debunking 9/11 nonsense, another regular contributor to Digital Journal remarked that no plane wreckage had been found at the Pentagon, a claim that was as sincere as it was dumb.
United Airlines 93 came down near Shanksville; this was the plane that was hijacked and then crashed after the passengers stormed the cockpit. Both the Mayor of Shankville and the Coroner have been misquoted in connection with this tragedy to the effect that there were no bodies or that the wreckage was insufficient, and so on.
There was indeed plane wreckage at Shanksville as there was at the Pentagon. I heard the claim awhile ago that no bodies were found. There are photographs of bodies from the wreckage available on the web, including on the YouTube website. They are not easy to find, nor are they easy to view, so unless like me you have a strong stomach, don’t. It is worth noting that the American authorities adopt a very different approach to this sort of thing from the British authorities.
Generally speaking, crime scene photographs are not made public here; I personally have been able to obtain and publish “sensitive documents” from two murder trials including post mortem (autopsy) reports on three murder victims – Clarke Edward Pearce and the victims of the Chillenden Murders, but under normal circumstances, neither I nor any member of the press would be able to do this. The reader should also compare the way the American authorities handled 9/11 with the way the British authories handled the (admittedly much smaller) 7/7.
5) Jews were forewarned of the Twin Towers attacks.
Way back in November 2001, I wrote an article called Islamophobia Is A Two-Way Street; this resulted in some correspondence with a Moslem; I can’t remember the details but she wrote fluent English. She pointed out to me that 4,000 Jews did not turn up for work on the morning of September 11. This myth appears to have originated in the Middle East, as has much of the conspiriology of September 11, and the reason is not hard to find.
Moslems in the Middle East are especially aware of the reality of Zionist power, and of the double standards of the West (read predominently the American establishment) towards them and Israel. However much some Moslems may have suffered under Western perfidy from the days of the Balfour Declaration, the vast majority wish to have no truck with the fanatics who perpetrated 9/11 in the name of Islam; far better to blame the atrocity on the hated Zionists, who with the atrocities of Sabra & Shatila, and the two Intifadas can be considered capable of just about anything.
An interesting aside here, in 1605 a conspiracy organised by Catholics (rather than Jews) attempted to blow up the English Parliament. The Gunpowder Plot was uncovered after one of the conspirators, Francis Tresham, wrote a letter to his cousin Lord Monteagle warning him to stay away from Parliament on that day.
There were fourteen plotters, and word leaked out to the authorities. Surely, if 4,000 Jews had been warned to stay away from the Twin Towers, word would also have leaked out to the FBI or the police?
Earlier this month I was listening to an extremist radio programme I won’t name. One of its guests claimed that only one Jew had died in the Twin Towers attacks. It took me all of thirty seconds to find the names Florence G. Cohen and Kevin Sanford Cohen, who presumably were not Moslems. There are of course many more, depending on how one defines a Jew; those known or believed to be Jewish include such unlikely candidates as Harold A. Covington, Josef Stalin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and of course, Adolf Hitler.
6) Larry Silverstein and Building 7.
Larry Silverstein is a big name in American real estate (property in Britain); he was also the owner of both the World Trade Center and Building 7, the latter of which has been at the centre of conspiracy mongering on a grand scale. Silverstein’s “pull it” remark has been the subject of much manufactured debate amongst the conspiracy mongers, whose ignorance knows no bounds; Silverstein may be a billionaire, but that does not give him authority over the New York Fire Department.
Much has been written and will undoubtedly continue to be written about how this building collapsed and why, but this simple three and a half minute video is a good introduction, and as much as most people will need to know, and also a good antidote to the convoluted garbage churned out by the conspiracy mongers of the 9/11 Truth Movement.
One final point, and arguably the most important one, if Larry Silverstein had been named Larry Smith, we probably wouldn’t have heard half of this nonsense.
7) It was all a false flag operation.
Ten years ago the expression “false flag” was not widely known, although the phrase “hate crime hoax” was. I am proud to have contributed in my own small way to exposing the latter, with regard to the aforementioned case of Satpal Ram, and my short study of Column 88, another of those scams nobody has heard of nowadays, although for about two years the quasi-mythical Nazi Underground was reported quite widely in the mainstream British press.
A false flag operation is an act of violence, terror, etc, committed or initiated by “own our side” and blamed on the enemy. Although a false flag may be used to initiate a war, once the war is underway, black propaganda does the rest.
False flags are real, as are attempts by the legal authorities to entrap suspects or even incite crimes from scratch. Let no one have any doubt about that. In Britain, the recent revelations of Mark Kennedy may be only the tip of the iceberg. Mostly, these operations are carried out at a low level, and there is no doubt that the police for example are capable of the most incredible perfidy. In Northern Ireland, the police have been implicated in the murders of unarmed civilians. Such a thing couldn’t happen here, could it? Those of us who have seen the way the police operate in Britain and elsewhere cannot help but conclude that this is at least possible. Which brings us to Operation Northwoods.
This was a top secret memorandum written in 1962 when the US was seriously considering invading Cuba. Among other things it proposed all manner of nefarious activity such as starting riots and “We could blow up a US ship in Guatanamo Bay and blame Cuba.”
The operative word here is “could”. This document was declassified and placed in the public domain where now anyone with Internet access can view it.
As stated, false flags are real, as are conspiracies, but can a conspiracy on this scale exist? The answer is yes and no. If one uses the strict dictionary definition of a conspiracy – combination of persons for an evil or unlawful purpose – yes, it can. For example, it is well known that recreational drugs – including cannabis and harder drugs – can be obtained freely in every city and large town throughout the UK, and probably in many smaller towns and villages. Any individual who knows what he or she is doing can actively seek out and obtain recreational drugs, and in the event of a police investigation, will be protected by a culture of silence, so conspiracies on a grand scale are indeed possible. In some cultures this can extend to the sexual abuse of women or children, or even to murder, such things as “honour killings”.
But a conspiracy to instigate a false flag operation the size of that postulated by some of the 9/11 Truthers beggars belief. If the likes of Alex Jones truly believe that the Bush Administration ordered 9/11 as a pretext for invading Iraq and turning America into a police state they have to include the following people as active – not passive, but active – participants.
Senior members of the Admininstration itself
Senior members of domestic security services
Some fairly senior members of the FBI, the New York Police Department and the New York Fire Department
Larry Silverstein
Mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani
Demolition experts, two, perhaps three teams, who somehow managed to plant explosives in three skyscrapers and detonate them at the precise moment
Mike Walter and other civilian witnesses at and around the Pentagon
US military personnel at the Pentagon or somewhere close by of sufficiently high clearance so that they could fire a Cruise missile from some as yet undisclosed location in total secret, and account for the disappearance of this missile.
Some – whom I won’t name because I know a handful of them personally and they mean well – go much further than this and claim the London 7/7 cell was part of this false flag network, that they were duped into carrying out their bombings, even though the leader of this cell, Mohammed Siddique Khan, and a second member, Shehzad Tanweer, made martyrdom videos which were released after their deaths – here and here.
In addition to this, a certain Mr Netanyahu and the Mossad are also roped in, and yes, you guessed it, the same cabal were behind the Kennedy Assassination as well. Oh, and I forgot Masonic cells in the local police and intelligence services.
The above list is by no means exclusive and indeed will almost of necessity need to be extended. Then there is the little matter of the victims. Were all the people on this list willing to sacrifice the lives of thousands of innocent people, some of whom they must surely have known personally or even have been related to? Ardent conspiracy theorist that I am, I am afraid I cannot subscribe to this utter lunacy, even if it means my total ostracism by people I am otherwise proud to call my friends.
The greatest tragedy of all is that by perpetuating such nonsense, the likes of Alex Jones undermine the genuine good work they are doing. Isn’t it bad enough that the TSA is groping – in effect sexually assaulting – young boys and girls at airports? That there are people pushing for these powers to be extended to Amtrak, and even to NFL stadia?
Isn’t it bad enough that the Federal Reserve is a law unto itself, and that the rule of law has been systematically undermined in America?
I could go on, but if they haven’t got the message now, they never will; the hard core 9/11 Truthers are confusing cause and effect; there doesn’t need to be any great government-inspired terrorist plot for them to use as a pretext for stealing our freedoms, they are doing it regardless. What we have to do is stop all this ludicrous conspiracy mongering and concentrate on the task of stopping them, otherwise the game will soon be up.
[The above op-ed was first published September 19, 2011 (London time), not September 18, 2011 as indicated here. There are two suicide videos linked in this article, downloaded from YouTube. When I returned to the first one in April 2023, it had been set to private. The edit uploaded here is a nes report from another account. If it differs from the original upload, it does so only marginally as far as I can recall. The video of a controlled demolition originally used was unavailable so I have replaced it with a similar one from Frankfurt, Germany.]
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