9/11: New Doubts on the "Official Story"

Revolution #013, August 28, 2005, posted at revcom.us

This week an Army intelligence officer risked his career to disclose that by mid-2000, a secret Pentagon surveillance program code-named "Able Danger" had identified and was tracking Mohammed Atta, supposedly the ringleader of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and three other alleged hijackers. This is just the latest in an ongoing stream of revelations that show that the whole Bush "war on terror" is a fraud based on lies--and that the full truth about what took place on (and before and after) Sept. 11 is being suppressed.

Many different writers and researchers have dug into what happened that day. While a definitive account has yet to emerge, their work casts serious doubt on the "official story," shows how much more needs to be unearthed, and points to the real possibility that U.S. officials--at the very least--may have allowed the attacks to happen.

For example, David Ray Griffin, a retired Claremont School of Theology professor, has written two in-depth studies of Sept. 11: The New Pearl Harbor--Dis-turbing Questions About the Bush Admin-istration and 9/11and The 9/11 Com-mis-sion Report: Omissions and Dis-tor-tions. As Richard Falk pointed out at the recent World Tribunal on Iraq, "Read David Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor and you will never be able to take 9/11 at face value in the future."

Page after page, Griffin raises profound, well-documented doubts concerning the official story (including stark contradictions in what different officials have said at different points). The issues he covers include:

• Bush and Rice claimed no one ever imagined airplanes would be used as guided attack missiles; in fact intelligence agencies had been issuing just such warnings since 1994. And in the months before Sept. 11, why were various warnings by FBI agents in Phoenix, Minneapolis, Chicago, and New York of suspicious activity at flight schools and possible attacks ignored or suppressed?
  
• Why weren’t standard FAA/Air Force procedures followed for scrambling fighter jets in the event of a hijacking? "In light of standard procedures for dealing with hijacked airplanes," Griffin told the National Press Club, "not one of these planes should have reached its target, let alone all three of them."
  
• Why did United Airlines Flight 93 crash over Pennsylvania? "The Commission also failed to discuss the considerable evidence that Flight 93 was shot down by the U.S. military, perhaps when passengers were about to wrest control of it," Griffin says.
  
• Why did Bush proceed with a photo-op some 15 minutes after news broke of the crash into the WTC, and why did he stay another 30 minutes, rather than being whisked away by the Secret Service, when the country was supposedly under attack and he would presumably have been a target?
  
• What accounts for the collapse of both WTC Towers, which Griffin argues is inconsistent with the physics of burning steel-framed buildings, but is consistent with a controlled demolition? In particular, why did Building 7 collapse, even though it was not hit by a plane, and, according to Griffin, "steel-frame buildings had never before been caused to collapse by fire alone, even when the fires had been much bigger, hotter, and longer-lasting." And why wasn’t this discussed in the Sept. 11 Commission report?
  
• Why did the U.S. invasion immediately focus on ousting the Taliban and occupying Afghanistan--not capturing Osama bin Laden? And was bin Laden allowed to escape?
  
• Griffin writes that he identified "115 sins of omission and distortion" in the Sept. 11 Commission report, and states that the "9/11 Commission, which had the opportunity to rebut the prima facie case against the Bush administration, failed to do so."

Why does this matter? First, because in reality the Bush regime saw September 11 not as a shocking horror, but as an opportunity to implement an agenda in the works for over a decade. A year before Sept. 11, the Project for a New American Century laid out a detailed plan for expanding and fortifying the U.S. empire--and singled out Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as immediate targets nearly two years before George W. Bush labeled them an "axis of evil"--but warned that implementing it would be a long process unless there were "some catastrophic and catalyzing event--like a new Pearl Harbor." Among the authors of the plan were Bush administration heavyweights like Paul Wolfowitz, Dov Zakheim, Stephen Cambone, and Abram Shulsky in the Pentagon, and Vice President Cheney’s Chief of Staff, Lewis Libby. On the night of 9/11, Bush wrote in his diary, "The Pearl Harbor of the 21st Century took place today."

And it matters because the U.S. rulers are still using "terrorist attacks" to advance their agenda of ongoing war and fascistic repression--for example seizing on the London bombings to renew the Patriot Act. Another attack or incident in the U.S. could witness levels of repression on a whole other level. All the more urgent to generate a culture in which millions refuse to buy government explanations or swallow false promises of "safety," but instead think critically, and actively repudiate the entire direction the Bush regime is taking the world, including its "war on terror."