The events that took place on September 11, 2001 were the most important of our generation. Possibly the most important of our lifetimes and certainly the since the bombing of Pearl Harbour and the Second World War.
But they will definitely not be the Crime of the Century. There is much more to come, although hopefully not in my lifetime.
For over a decade we have been told on every news program, every radio bulletin, in speeches, statements & announcements, front page stories, magazine articles, Government policy announcements and by every government official throughout the West; that the world has changed. And we have to react with it.
We are told that 9/11 has changed the course of our domestic and foreign policy. (It certainly has) Our civil liberties must be amended with the changing times. Those responsible and their allies must be hunted down and punished, however loosely connected they are, regardless of the cost, either in human or financial measure.
The event must not be forgotten. It should dominate debate, both public and private. We must reconfigure, adapt, refocus, reprioritise and come together as one, with our allies, to defend our freedoms and liberties. And we should do everything we can to make sure it never happens again. And that means we must rely on the elected policy makers, who are advised by experts with minds immeasurably greater than ours. And then do as we are told and pay for it.
Some of this, of course, is true. We do face a great threat from Islam and some of its followers. Well, millions of its followers actually. Let there be no misunderstanding here that some of them intend to destroy us. They love death more than we love life and they will keep coming at us. Wave after wave, generation after generation and each finding new and darker ways of reaching us. We must accept that if the good guys are becoming more and more clever, and advanced, in their ways of protecting us, then the dark side is moving just as cleverly in the other direction.
And never was this more obvious (at the time) than on the morning of September 11, 2001. It was a statement of intent. This is how much respect we have for you. This is how much we hate you. It was so extraordinary that we have to wonder what on earth we have done, by way of Foreign Policy since the Second World War, to make them hate us that much. So passionately. Who has such hate? Have we made mistakes? What are they? Have we been doing things deliberately? Then why?
The obvious way to try and understand this is to begin with an investigation of the 9/11 attacks and try to find out how a bearded caveman was able to strike at the heart of the world’s military superpower. Really, how does a projectile manage to hit the Pentagon in Washington DC? How can that even happen, never mind New York for the moment. How do Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble manage to pull that off?
We all expected to find the 9/11 Commission’s Official Report to answer some, if not all, of these questions. For any serious, detailed, forensic and independent investigation into the attacks would reveal who the actual forces behind the conception, planning, and execution of this seminal event were. It would prove conclusively that dirty, scruffy, bearded Islamic extremists living in a cave in Afghanistan planned it all. And then pulled it off. However, as we know, unless you have been living in a cave yourself, the commission report raised more questions than it gave answers to.
In a speech in San Francisco on April 19, 2002, the Director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, said that, ‘During our investigation we have not uncovered a single piece of paper, either here in the United States or in the treasure trove of information that has turned up in Afghanistan and elsewhere, that mentioned any aspect of the September 11 plot.’ There was an element of surprise in Mueller’s voice because he, like so many of us, had up until that point assumed, as self-evident truth, that the given narrative of nineteen Arab hijackers, employed by Osama bin Laden, were responsible for the whole thing.
Such a complex and well coordinated crime would have left a paper trail from here to Timbuktu and provide a mountain of evidence for investigators to climb up. But there was nothing. In fact, the FBI’s page on bin Laden in their ‘Most Wanted Terrorist’ section does not even include 9/11 among his crimes. When asked why an FBI spokesman revealed, ‘because their is no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.’
And the reason for that should be so easy enough to figure out that I dare not patronise you by reinforcing it here. So the conspiracy theorists (and I am not one) all pointed to the American Government instead and a self-inflicted False Flag operation. Without much thought and with little evidence George Bush’s administration came under suspicion. It is a hard to understand why. For a start, what real reason would they have? And before you point to oil then remember that all Western nations, including America, have managed to trade oil with Arab nations quite nicely for nearly a century. Why invade them?
Regime change? Ok, that’s a fair point but why attack themselves first? Besides, George Bush’s administration were too stupid for that and no U.S. Government has been to keep secrets successfully. Look at Kennedy. Look at Nixon and Watergate. Bill Clinton’s administration could not even keep the whereabouts and activity of his penis a secret.
So you point to the media and an orchestrated cover up. Ok perhaps, to a point, some media outlets are controlled by wealthy paymasters who ‘direct news.’ But all of them? Are we to assume they are ALL in on it, every one of them, whatever ‘it’ is? And that whilst Bill Clinton’s penis is fair game for the Free Press, thousands dead on 9/11, and hundreds of thousand more during the aftermath that continues today, is not fair game?
The problem with any investigation of this nature is not only the time that has passed and the evidence that has distorted, but it is a problem that the perpetrators themselves failed to see coming. The internet. You see, in 2001 the internet was still an infant. Some would argue that is still is, but growing fast. In 2001 there was no youtube so that amateur (or professional) investigators could pour over every image and film footage with ever more sophisticated software programs.
In 2001 we were used to seeing a couple of days of footage and news reporting and then it largely moved on. Something else happened. Then, apart from the odd documentary, which could only use controlled footage, that was the end of that. Imagine if we had the internet at the time of JFK’s assassination. Or that everybody in the crowd had a movie camera on his or her phone. Or that every soldier in Vietnam had an iPhone and Facebook accounts. Or that youtube existed during Apartheid in South Africa. How different the world would be.
But, some people did have cameras on their phones on 9/11 in 2001. Enough people to provide credible evidence of advanced knowledge of the attacks. How many of you have see that mobile phone footage of nothing but blue sky way off to the right of the Twin Towers. And then, all of a sudden, a black or dark grey plane swings into shot and is followed to its target.
The other Twin Tower was already burning at the time. Who in the world is standing and watching what was thought to be a bomb, at that particular moment, in the World Trade Center which is billowing with thick smoke, but is holding his, or her, camera way off to the right hand side and into the far distance. Who does that? Somebody who was expecting something else, that’s who.
There are certainly some crazy conspiracy theories going around the world connected to 9/11, but none more crazy or conspiratorial that the official account. That’s the real conspiracy theory. So, using the Occam’s Razor principle, let’s shave away the crazy, the improbable, the internet conspiracies, the truthers, the ranters and the ravers and consider only what we actually know to be true.
And only then try to make sense of their relevance. As Sherlock Holmes himself famously said, ‘Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.’
Or was that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?
Albert Jack, Boston
September 2015
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