9/11 + 11/22 = Conspiracy²

November 22, 1963 with the Kennedy Assassination and September 11, 2001 with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon should respectively be seen as the seeding and the birth of a new creature: “The Conspiracy Nation”.

Philip Coppens

Robin Ramsay is one of many who have noted that the collapse of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 is what the John F Kennedy assassination on November 22, 1963 was for their parents’ generation: a test to see whether people believe their government when it gives them an explanation about an event that rocked the nation. In the immediate aftermath of the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Report that set into stone that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman, the earliest voices of dissent, from Mark Lane to Harold Weisberg, planted a seed that over the following four decades has grown into a public acceptance that all governments lie all the time about everything. Today, the official version of 9/11 is, like any other official version, not accepted by a majority of the people. As a consequence, the “do people still trust their government” test of 9/11/2001 failed miserably. Most Americans, as a CNN poll revealed in August 2006, now believe that there is a cover-up behind 9/11. Many believe that the US government itself has created the debacle and no foreign terrorist was involved. It is proof that people have lost their trust in the government… and whether that is right or not is of secondary importance.

The murder of President Kennedy came to be seen as a template: that important political players are always killed by disgruntled lone gunmen. In subsequent years, we would see his brother Robert and Martin Luther King killed, whereby Arthur Bremer and John Hinckley respectively failed to kill George Wallace and Ronald Reagan. With the three planes that crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the “lone assassin” template had to be abandoned; or not? Indeed, though no single person could execute 9/11 on his own, the official version states that the attacks were the result of “just” 19 disgruntled Muslims. And, “in truth”, the lone assassin was really Osama bin Laden, who, like the lone gunmen before, was upset because Americans had freedom and democracy.
In the afternoon of November 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested as a suspect in the murder of Dallas police officer J.D. Tippitt. In a matter of hours, by innuendo rather than proof, he was promoted as the man who killed Kennedy. It was a rush to judgment… one which was equally executed in 2001. By September 12, 2001, the FBI had the names of five hijackers and had even been able to obtain their photographs the day of the attacks itself. However, not one of the accused hijacker’s names appeared on the passenger lists made public by American or United airlines. The FBI stated they had boarded under pseudonyms. On September 12, 2001, the bodies of the hijackers were still encased in the rubble of the World Trade Center. In short, there is no way that the FBI could have identified five hijackers by September 12. It was another rush to judgment, to give the people a quick and easy solution as to who had done it. The same errors as in 1963 were once again repeated; the perception that the FBI and police can solve such crimes quickly superseded the search for the real men responsible for the crime.
So what was the evidence upon which the FBI relied? It stated that it had found the identity papers of some of the hijackers in the streets below the World Trade Center –arguing that the identity papers had somehow escaped from a closed Boeing 767, had survived the collision, had not become lodged in the WTC structure itself, but had instead fallen vertically on the street below… intact. This while at the same time were led to believe that various items, such as the planes’ black boxes had “vapourised”. And this had only appeared, it seemed, to the identity papers of the hijackers; no papers of the passengers were found. If ever there was a case where the term “planted evidence” should be used…

No surprise therefore that by September 2006, the FBI had to admit that the identities of four of the 19 suspects that had been “identified” as having carried out the attacks were in doubt. The latest “undead” was a Saudi Arabian pilot Waleed Al Shehri, who was one of five men that the FBI said had deliberately crashed American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center. Not so. From Casablanca, in Morocco, he told journalists that he had nothing to do with the attacks on New York and Washington and had been in Morocco when they happened. He acknowledged that he had attended flight training school at Daytona Beach in the United States and was indeed the same Waleed Al Shehri to whom the FBI has been referring. But rather than learn to fly planes to fly into the WTC, he had trained to become, and became, a pilot with Saudi Arabian airlines and was still. Faced with this proof that the FBI had it thoroughly if not totally wrong, FBI Director Robert Mueller had to acknowledge that the identity of several of the suicide hijackers was in doubt.
In short, on September 11, the FBI had to come up with a list of people responsible and went in search of Arab names that had been at some point in the US, ideally at the time of the attack, and who ideally had trained as a pilot. Fortunately, within 24 hours, they found people who fitted this profile… but it is equally clear that 24 hours was insufficient time to find out where these people were and whether or not they were truly connected with the attacks. The case against Oswald has long crumbled and the 19 9/11 terrorist is rapidly following suit.
Though officially four are known to be alive and had nothing to do with the attacks, the unofficial number of “suicide bombers” that are still alive is as high as seven… and may eventually reach 19… leaving the FBI with not a single real person responsible.

In 1963, in the immediate aftermath of President Kennedy’s death, various parties within the US government spread disinformation, in an effort to link Lee Harvey Oswald with Cuba and Russia, hoping that the assassination would trigger renewed attempts to invade Cuba (see This Is Not America). Identifying the hijackers as Muslims could be seen as the first step in a similar campaign, with a Middle Eastern rather than Cuban agenda.
Indeed, 9/11 was used to push through Republican neoconservative plans, known as Project for a New American Century. In 2000, this group of Republicans created a position paper, “Rebuilding America’s Defences”, which called for “a New Pearl Harbour” – which is exactly what happened a year later. Richard A. Clarke, the government’s top counter-terrorism expert under Bush charged that the administration began to make plans to attack Iraq on September 11 itself, which was later echoed by CBS News on September 4, 2002, stating that five hours after the attacks, “Donald Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq – even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks.” In 1963, President Johnson did not play the hand of those who tried to made spurious or faked links between Oswald and the Communist Threat. In 1963, these originated from largely disgruntled members of the intelligence community, who were upset with Kennedy over his cessation of hostilities against Cuba. In 2001, the government itself made spurious link between 9/11 and Afghanistan and Iraq. It failed to convince many, but in 2006, 85% of the American soldiers serving in Iraq nevertheless believed that the invasion of that country was retaliation for Saddam Hussein’s role in the 9/11 attack and 77% said they also believed the main or a major reason for the war was “to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq”. It shows that even though a majority of the American population do not believe the 9/11 official version, those that do believe do so blindly… and against all evidence.
There are other parallels between a Cuban invasion and 9/11, specifically the “script” that was carried out on 9/11, by whomever was responsible. Operation Northwoods dates from 1962 and was designed as a pretext to invade Cuba. In the Pentagon, a top secret team drew up a plan to simultaneously send up two airliners painted and numbered exactly the same, one from a civil airport in America, the other from a secret military airbase nearby. The one from the airport would have military personnel on board who had checked in as ordinary passengers under false names. The one from the airbase would be an empty drone, a remote-controlled unmanned aircraft. Somewhere along their joint flight paths, the passenger-carrying plane would drop below radar height and disappear, landing back at the airbase and unloading its occupants in secret. Meanwhile, the drone would have taken up the other plane’s designated course. High over the island of Cuba, it would then be exploded in mid-air after broadcasting an international distress call that it was under attack from enemy fighters. The world would be told that a plane load of blameless American holidaymakers had been deliberately shot down by Fidel Castro’s Communists. This would allow – force – the US to declare war and topple Castro’s regime. Substitute Cuba with Afghanistan and Iraq and 9/11 is born. No wonder that it has become a pet theory of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists.

On September 28, 2001, bin Laden stated in an interview with the Pakistani newspaper Ummat: “I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people. Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of battle. It is the United States, which is perpetrating every maltreatment on women, children and common people.” The bin Laden of this interview is far removed from the public profile we have of this “incarnation of evil”. Depicted by the American authorities as a man who takes every opportunity to take responsibility for 9/11, here he forcefully denied any involvement with 9/11 – just like Oswald denied any involvement in the Kennedy assassination, shouting in the cameras that he was a patsy.
The US does not know the “real” Osama bin Laden, for even though he was not gunned down by a nightclub owner like Oswald was, the American media have self-censored any statement from bin Laden. Bin Laden can therefore protest his innocence as much as he likes, the American media will not report it. Worse, it has since been discovered that the Pentagon specifically mistranslated one bin Laden statement, adding and changing key phrases in translation which make it appear, in translation, that bin Laden had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks.
In truth, the original interview shows that bin Laden did not have prior knowledge of 9/11. In late 2001, the CIA offered a videotape of Osama bin Laden, which Bush identified as “a devastating declaration of guilt”. In the aftermath of 22/11, the FBI was able to isolate and scare Oswald’s Russian-born wife Marina to do as they wanted, but his mother could not stand by. And neither could Osama’s mother. She stated that “there are too many gaps and the statements are very unlike him”, claiming it was doctored. The words of a mother who cannot accept the awful truth about her own son? Not quite. On December 20, 2001, German state television ran the report of two independent translators that had analysed the tape. Dr. Abdel El M. Husseini stated that “I have carefully examined the Pentagon’s translation. This translation is very problematic. At the most important places which have been presented as proof of bin Laden’s guilt, it is not identical with the Arabic.” Bin Laden was quoted as “We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy”, but the words “in advance” were not present in Arabic. Elsewhere, bin Laden was reported to have said that “We had notification since the previous Thursday that the event would take place that day.” “Previous” was once again missing from bin Laden’s own mouth. Elsewhere, “We ordered each of them to go to America”, actually was voiced as “they were ordered to go to America”. Finally, “they didn’t know anything about the operation” was not even on the original Osama tape. Professor Gernot Rotter concluded that “the American translators who listened and transcribed the tapes have apparently written a lot of things into the text that they wanted to hear, which are actually not heard on the tape no matter how many times you listen to it.” Or: if there is no incriminating evidence, make it appear as if the person identified as responsible for the crime identifies himself as the perpetrator… and make sure that any subsequent statement, in which he denies any involvement with the crime, cannot be aired.

The Cuban exile community in 1963 was a mixture of Cuban exile, CIA agents, maffiosi and small-time criminals, intent on recuperating the loss of income they had experienced when Castro socialised Cuba and closed the profitable casinos. The Taliban ruled most of Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001. In February 2001, UN drug control officers said that the Taliban had nearly wiped out opium production in Afghanistan since banning poppy cultivation in the summer of 2000. A 12-member team from the UN Drug Control Program spent two weeks searching most of the nation's largest opium-producing areas and found so few poppies that they believed no opium would be exported out of Afghanistan in 2001. "We are not just guessing. We have seen the proof in the fields," said Bernard Frahi, regional director for the UN program in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He laid out photographs of vast tracts of land cultivated with wheat alongside pictures of the same fields taken a year earlier, when they carried a sea of blood-red poppies. This was good news. But following the invasion of Afghanistan and the removal of the Taliban regime, Afghanistan has once again turned to opium production, with cultivation reaching all time highs (pun intended). By the end of 2002, the figure has risen to an estimated 3,400 tons (compared to 185 tons in 2000); in 2005, a still occupied Afghanistan earned $2.7 billion from opium exports, amounting to 52 percent of the country’s $5.2 billion gross domestic product. Order, it seems, had indeed been restored. As for Iraq, the story of this country’s vast oil reserves at a time when the US was facing massive problems in procuring foreign oil is too well-known to be repeated.

Lee Harvey Oswald moved within Cuban exile circles, in the capacity of what some have seen as an agent provocateur (the most likely scenario) and others as an agent who had infiltrated a conspiracy to kill the president, only to have the game turned against him and being set up as the patsy. Oswald’s link with the American intelligence community are on occasion obvious, specifically his defection to the Soviet Union which is now largely accepted as a false defection, as he had, upon his return from the Soviet Union to the US, the use of a personal American Express card, which he could not have owned if he had been a “genuine” defector. It is believed that the Kennedy assassination was carried out by a group of mafia, Cuban exiles and CIA personnel that had been involved in stealth US government campaigns to invade Cuba, which Kennedy had abruptly stopped in 1962. They were disgruntled with Kennedy and they no doubt hoped that his assassination would become the pretext for an invasion of Cuba.
According to Peter Lance, author of "Triple Cross: Bin Laden's Spy in America", US law enforcement officials were negligent in tracking down Ali Mohamed, an alleged Al Qaeda agent in the United States. Lance alleges that Mohamed was hired by the CIA and worked for the FBI, all the while providing information to the terrorists – which propels us in the same murky waters of the Cuban exiles community of New Orleans of the early 1960s. Mohamed turned up in FBI surveillance photos as early as 1989, training radical Muslims who would go on to assassinate Jewish militant Meir Kahane and detonate a truck bomb at the World Trade Center in 1993. He not only avoided arrest, but managed to become an FBI informant while smuggling bin Laden in and out of Afghanistan, writing most of the Al Qaeda terrorist manual and helping plan attacks on American troops in Somalia and US embassies in Africa. Lance states that “the FBI allowed the chief spy for al-Qaeda to operate right under their noses. They let him plan the bombings of the embassies in Africa right under their noses. Two hundred twenty-four people were killed and more than 4,000 wounded because of their negligence.” If true, it reveals that the CIA and FBI had blood on their hands; it also meant that they could be coerced by anyone who wanted and had the power to bully or blackmail the FBI and CIA. The CIA could, for example, be blackmailed to create inflated reports about weapons of mass destructions in Iraq, weapons that according to UN inspections were known not to exist. It is this power to blackmail that is required to execute a successful cover-up. And when that position of power is contaminated, the cover-up slowly begins to erode.
The story of the Cuban exiles and the CIA’s supports in their efforts to invade Cuba, their links with the mafia, etc., was greatly damaging and at various stages, both before and after the Kennedy assassination, key aspects were deemed to be so damaging to the US intelligence community and the government that it got continuously buried. The same applies to 9/11, as the late British Labour Minister Robin Cook stated: “Bin Laden… was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al Qaeda, literally the database, was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians.” In short, if Al Qaeda was indeed behind 9/11, then in origin, the CIA trained these people to fight a war which they then exchanged for a new war, one against America. Cook later resigned as he could not accept British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s commitment to invade Iraq.
Though it remains unclear whether Al Qaeda was behind 9/11, there is no doubt whatsoever that Al Qaeda has been responsible for a long terror campaign against America, with the majority of these attacks executed against American targets in Muslim countries. That in itself is clear evidence that America has created its own enemy – unintentionally, for sure, but definitely not unknowingly.

The downfall of the official line of the Kennedy assassination was the promoter of that official line: the Warren Commission. Once people began to uncover details of its investigation, what it had deliberately left out, altered or not addressed, opinions began to slowly turn. The same applies to the 9/11 Commission, which is yet another example that forty years later, a government commission still practices the same techniques and is still able to wash whiter than white.
First example: the collapse of a smaller 47-storey block known as WTC7 was absent from the report and on September 11 itself largely ignored by the world’s media. It had not been hit by a plane, yet it too mysteriously collapsed. The official explanation for this was that fuel stores caught fire as a result of debris from the burning towers, that the building began to bulge in one corner, after which it was unsalvageable.
Building 7 was supposedly evacuated around 9am. The area around the building was evacuated in the hour before the collapse. Photographer Tom Franklin, who took the famous photograph of firemen raising the American flag on the rubble of the World Trade Center, said: “There are no photographs that show large fires in Building 7.” The reason for that was that there were no large fires. Still, Building 7 underwent a total structural collapse at around 5.20pm. Although there were few people in the area to witness its destruction, several videos had captured the event. Like the collapses of the Twin Towers, the collapse of Building 7 commenced suddenly and was over in seconds. At first the penthouse, which rests on central columns, began to drop. Within a second the entire building began to drop as a whole, falling into its footprint in a precisely vertical fashion.
The landlord of the World Trade Centre site, Larry Silverstein, explicitly stated that WTC7 was deliberately demolished. He told a US TV documentary that a decision was taken to “pull” the building, rather than risk loss of life, though this was later denied. As the critics then produced a recording of the interview, it was stated that Silverstein was referring to “pulling the fire fighters” from the building, something which had however occurred hours earlier. The building’s fall in seven seconds was equally as textbook-tidy and as suspicious as the collapse of the Twin Towers. So was this a controlled demolition?
Building 7 was actually a very intriguing tower, for not only did Mayor Rudolph Giuliani have a bunker on the 23rd floor, it also housed offices of the US Secret Service, the CIA and the Defence Department. Most intriguing is that after the ENRON scandal, other companies were in danger of being sued. “Unfortunately”, most of that evidence was located in WTC7… and thus became a victim of 9/11. Though the symbol of the American economy collapsed on September 11, icons of the American economy itself, it seems, was salvaged when WTC7 collapsed.
9/11 also came as a godsend for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. On September 10, the Secretary of Defense held a press conference to disclose that over $2,000,000,000,000 (read: two trillion dollars) in Pentagon funds could not be accounted for. This is a gigantic black hole, which makes the ENRON scandal look like the tiniest solar flare. Such a disclosure normally would have sparked a huge scandal and resignations and investigations would have been called for. After all, super-gigantic amounts of tax payers’ money was unaccounted for. But the attacks in New York City and Washington the following morning assured that the story was not followed up; rather than “navel gaze” and see where that money had disappeared to, Rumsfeld immediately ordered that plans were drawn up to spend more taxpayer’s money and invade two countries, though, it has to be said, somewhat in the interest of the American citizen, so that they could get high on opium if they wanted to and enjoy cheap oil prices.

A key piece of evidence in the Kennedy assassination was the Zapruder film, a unique piece of footage that contradicted the official line. It was a young Arlen Specter who had to create the “magic bullet theory” so that the lone gunman theory continued to hold up. It was a “magic bullet” for all the evidence suggested that Kennedy and Connally had been injured by two separate shots, fired at an interval that made it impossible they came from Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano. It was the Zapruder film that had established this timeline and it was a piece of evidence that seriously incapacitated the imagination of the Warren Commission… though not Specter’s.
In the Pentagon “crash”, FBI and other authorities immediately rounded up all CCTV footage. This could be seen as collecting evidence, but at first they claimed that the dozens of cameras had not filmed the impact. Eventually, four photographs of the impact were leaked, and then released. They presented a highly Photoshop-esk explosion with the impact itself not typical at all of a large plane impact – though the FBI tried to claim it showed just that. This absence of footage meant that there was no evidence to substantiate the official version and the only four photographs indicated a different scenario. As such, the FBI had created an evidentiary hole, a blank canvas upon which it – but also any conspiracy theory – could paint whatever they wanted.
It also meant that the FBI had to rely on eye witnesses, rather than the more modern video footage. One of the paraded eyewitnesses to the Pentagon crash was a police officer. He claimed his head was almost touching one of the wheels, which could be seen as a misperception of the actual height of the plane, were it not for the fact that he also claimed that the landing gear of the plane collided with a lamppost. This eyewitness account was actually too good to be true. In this scenario, the plane was a few yards from the ground just above his head, yet continued for several more hundred yards, the plane never touching the ground, not even yards before it impacted the wall of the Pentagon. It seems to require superhuman piloting abilities, which is directly conflicting with the official training record of the hijackers – and the general public’s familiarity with flying. If all pilots could land a commercial airliner as accurately as Flight 77 hit the Pentagon, all runways can substantially be reduced in length… and most pilots while landing should definitely use less of it; I have never seen a pilot perform a landing where he got the landing perfect within a five yard area of the runway… yet the evidence – photographs of the impact zone – of the Pentagon suggest this is exactly what the pilot of Flight 77 accomplished.

The Warren Commission produced a spurious timeline of events, but the timeline of 9/11 is even more blatantly falsified than 11/22. The Commission claimed that Rumsfeld was not located until 10.30am, though the record shows that Rumsfeld was on a teleconference as early as 9.05am, along with top officials of the FAA. As early as 9.50am and no later than 10.00am, Bush had issued a shoot-down order that was transmitted to the military. The Commission listed this as “given at 10.25”. Why push all of these times out? Because at 10.06am, United Flight 93 crashed in Western Pennsylvania. By claiming Bush and Rumsfeld were at that time not yet involved, it “proves” that they could not possibly have given a shoot down order – which some critics allege is precisely what was given, and what happened.
At 8.42am, United Airlines Flight 93 took off from Newark International Airport, 41 minutes after its scheduled departure time. At 9.16am, the FAA informed NORAD that the flight might have been hijacked. Several communications with air traffic controllers indicated that Flight 93 was hijacked at around 9.27am. At 9.30am, the transponder signal ceased. At about this time, the plane apparently reversed direction and began flying toward the capital. There are several independent lines of evidence that establish that it crashed at 10.06am in Shanksville, PA. These include seismic signals recorded by seismic observatories at Solder’s Delight, MD, and Millersville, PA, which pegged the impact time at 10h06’05”, with an error margin of five seconds. A report from Cleveland Air Traffic Control states that they had lost radar contact with Flight 93 at 10.06am. Despite this extensive body of credible evidence establishing Flight 93’s impact time at 10.06am, NORAD and the 9/11 Commission asserted that the impact was at 10.03am. It may be a small difference, but a difference nevertheless. Why go against all the evidence?

The widespread debris field from the crash, together with eyewitness reports, strongly suggest that the jetliner was shot down by a missile fired by a pursuing jet, even though the official statement is that passengers were able to overpower the hijack the plane and bring it down, in an area with no other loss of life then their own. The crash site comprised a central debris field and several smaller debris fields some distance away. One of the engines was found over half a mile away from the main field. Other debris fields were found 2, 3 and 8 miles away. This evidence is virtually impossible to reconcile with the official story.
An article in Popular Mechanics attempted to explain the far-flung debris by suggesting that the engine “tumbl[ed] across the ground” and that the light debris was “blasted skyward by the heat of the explosion from the crash.” Such scenarios are impossible given the nature of the crash, wherein the plane dove into the soft ground from a nearly vertical trajectory. This is evident in the deep impact crater whose shape mimics the cross-section of the aircraft and by the agreement among eyewitness that the plane dropped from the sky in a vertical fashion. Are we led to believe that a plane hitting soft ground could propel some of its material back up in the air, for it to land eight miles away? With official scenarios that are impossible to believe, no wonder a majority of people accept a more logical scenario: that the plane exploded in mid-air.

One of the most memorable aspects of this flight are the numerous calls allegedly made from passengers to their family and loved ones. Nearly all of these calls were supposedly made from cell phones and were relatively short. The exception was the supposed call from passenger Todd Beamer on an Airfone, which was routed to Verizon supervisor Lisa Jefferson. Jefferson interviewed Beamer in detail in a conversation that would last from 9.45am until his famous last words before leading a passenger revolt: “Let’s Roll.”
But these phone calls from the planes are themselves virtually impossible. Everyone is familiar with the fact that a mobile phone is useless unless there is coverage. And coverage is normally created by planting phone masts from high-rise buildings, showering the area underneath with reception. For obvious reasons, no signal is broadcast up… as birds do not have mobile phones. As I personally experienced while flying into Berlin once, I had accidentally left my mobile phone on. I realised my oversight when we were on final approach to the airport, and the mobile phone got a signal again, making the well-known – and somewhat embarrassing – sound. Experts agree that it is impossible to make a mobile phone call above 8,000 feet – let alone four times that altitude, as the jet passengers are alleged to have done. So how were these calls on which so much of the 9/11 narrative has been built ever made? Could they possibly have been invented? Fabricated? It may explain why one person phoning his mother from the hijacked plane introduced himself with his surname to his mother –his mother must have known the full name of her son, so on this level, it does not make sense. But fabricated evidence often doesn’t, for it serves a different purpose, and in this case, a man using his full name was “proof” that an identified passenger on the plane had indeed phoned from the plane. Such “evidence” was then used to back up the official position of hijackers taking control of four planes. The phone calls were used as cement in the official story, for these were not the words of the FBI, but the victims of 9/11 themselves who confirmed the official version. Since, it has become clear that the cement was porous.

Little known is that most of the witnesses of the Warren Commission were greatly upset with how their testimony was either excluded from the report, or often radically altered – doctored. In the 1960s, “assassination buffs” confronted witnesses with what the Commission had made of their affidavits and stated that it had little or nothing to do with what they actually said. Others were intimidated and conspiracy theorists believe that some eyewitness who had seen the true events were killed off; there is indeed a long list of eyewitnesses that tragically died, at best suggesting that being an eyewitness to key events in history can dramatically shorten your life expectancy.
Forty years on… little change. The 9/11 report omitted Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta’s testimony given to Commission that Cheney and others in the underground shelter of Pentagon were aware at least by 9.20am that an aircraft was approaching the Pentagon. Instead, the Commission concluded that no-one in Pentagon knew that an aircraft was approaching. Mineta said: “During the time that the airplane was coming in to the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President, ‘the plane is 50 miles out.’ ‘The plane is 30 miles out.’ And when it got down to ‘the plane is 10 miles out’, the young man also said to the Vice President, ‘Do the orders still stand?’ and the Vice president turned and whipped his neck around and said ‘Of course the orders still stand.’”
New York fire fighter Louie Cacchioli stated: “I felt like I was being put on trial in a court room. They were trying to twist my words and make the story fit only what they wanted to hear. All I wanted to do was tell the truth and when they wouldn’t let me do that, I walked out.” In fact, his name does not appear in the report and neither does William Rodriguez’s: “I met with the 9/11 Commission behind closed doors and they essentially discounted everything I said regarding the use of explosives to bring down the north tower.” WTC janitor Rodriguez pulled victims to safety after a basement explosion rocked the north tower seconds before a jetliner hit its top floors. Declared a hero for saving numerous lives at Ground Zero, Rodriguez claims that he felt explosions coming from below the first sub-level while working in the basement, that the walls were cracking around him. Rodriguez was an eye-witness, but the government enquiry acted as if Rodriguez did not exist, basically ignoring his statements and the fact that he rescued a man burnt and bleeding from explosions. His eyewitness account, backed up by at least 14 people at the scene with him, isn’t speculation or conjecture. It isn’t a story that takes a network out on a journalistic limb. It’s a story that can be backed up, a story that can be verified with hospital records and testimony from many others. It’s a story about 14 people who felt and heard the same explosion and even saw Rodriguez, moments after the airplane hit, take the severely burnt Felipe David to safety. His testimony should be one of the pillars of the investigation. Instead, Rodriguez has been ignored by government officials, the 9/11 Commission and the National Institute of Safety and Technology (NIST). “I disagree 100% with the government story,” stated Rodriguez. “I met with the 9/11 Commission behind closed doors and they essentially discounted everything I said regarding the use of explosives to bring down the north tower. And I contacted NIST previously four times without a response. Finally, I asked them before they came up with their conclusion that jet fuel brought down the towers, if they ever considered my statements or the statements of any of the other survivors who heard the explosions. They just stared at me with blank faces and didn’t have any answers.”

The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald was the lone gunman involved in the Kennedy assassination. In This Is Not America, there is a clear overview that all evidence “proving” Oswald was the lone assassin had no “chain of evidence” attached to it: the Commission could not prove that e.g. the gun found at the scene of the crime (the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository) was the same that had been analysed or was the same in their possession (police officers could not find their identifying marks and sometimes even stated the evidence presented by the Commission was not identical to what they had identified on the scene of the crime). The Commission used a legal loophole, for if a person is mentally unstable, the “chain of evidence” becomes irrelevant. Oswald was thus deemed to be mentally unstable, which meant that the chain of evidence problem with which the Commission was faced, suddenly vanished.
In the case of the Twin Towers, FEMA did not preserve the crime scene and fire- specifically fighters have highlighted this breach of the criminal code. Instead, all the evidence of the crime scene was removed as quickly as possible, with the black boxes from the two planes officially “lost”. Even though this meant that the 9/11 Commission had once again a blank canvas to work with, they did not do brilliantly: their end conclusion was that “with the information and time available, the sequence of events leading to the collapse of each tower could not be definitely determined.” Indeed, no-one knows why the Twin Towers collapsed and scientists fall over themselves to either prove or disprove that a plane impact could result in the collapse of not one, but two towers – if not three, if we include Building 7.

President Johnson saw the creation of the Warren Commission as an opportunity to get “closure” and move on. That of course never happened. Bush and Cheney vehemently opposed the creation of a 9/11 Commission, claiming that it would oppose the “War on Terror”. In the end, public opinion prevailed, even though the public should perhaps have known better by 2001 to put faith in government enquiries, which wash whiter than white. A ten person panel, equipped with the power to subpoena, a $3 million budget, was approved by the Senate in a 90/8 vote in September 2002. $10 million were later added to the budget. In comparison, the Columbia space shuttle disaster in 2003 received a budget of $112.6 million. Then again, a whitewash should best not spend too much taxpayers’ money. Officially known as “The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States”, the Commission produced a 567 page report. Lyndon Johnson noted how the Warren Report was “heavy” and in good government tradition, this one was too. Neither report has an index.
Bush’s opposition to this commission was not the only sign of his unwillingness to co-operate with the wishes of his nation. For the next two years, the Bush Administration tried to block public access to some of President Bush’s Presidential Daily Brief reports (PDB). The 9/11 Commission eventually got them in 2004. One PDB for August 6, 2001 reads: “Bin Laden determined to Strike in US”. It detailed a strike on Washington, stating that Al Qaeda had support members including US citizens training for attacks and that bin Laden had wanted to hijack US aircraft in 1998. Michael Moore has since graphically shown in Fahrenheit 9/11 that Bush was more interested in practicing his golf swing that day.
Lyndon Johnson did not have to testify before the Warren Commission, but Bush was asked to testify. Not before February 2004 did he agree, with the meeting occurring on April 29, but with the following conditions in place:
- Vice President Cheney had to be present too
- The two men were not to testify under oath
- The meeting had to take place in the Oval Office
- No recording was to be made, nor a stenographer present, nor were notes of the meeting to be circulated.
This in essence meant that the evidence was useless.

The Warren Commission got its name from Chief Justice Earl Warren, who chaired the Commission. Bush’s first choice to head the 9/11 enquiry was Henry Kissinger, but he quickly withdrew when Bush got out of his own reality and realised that he was about to appoint one of the most disliked and conspiracy-controversial men in the US as the chairman of a Commission that was obviously going to conclude there was no conspiracy… in this scenario, even the mainstream media would unlikely have resisted the temptation to shout “cover-up”.
The final choice settled on former New Jersey Governor Thomas H. Kean and former Indiana Representative Lee Hamilton. Like the Warren Commission, the leaders of the Commission were largely there to chair. The 9/11 Commission’s executive director was Philip Zelikow, heading the team of people who did the real work. Professor David Ray Griffin has stated that Zelikow was the principal author of the Administration’s National Security Strategy statement of 2002, in which the neoconservative doctrine of pre-emptive warfare was first articulated and adopted. Griffin adds: “[the] Commission, under Zelikow’s leadership, […] ignored all evidence that would point to the truth: that 9/11 was a false flag operation intended to authorize the doctrines and funds needed for a new level of imperial mobilization.”
In August 2006, Kean and Hamilton published their book about the trials and tribulations of the panel's work and personally seemed to distance themselves from the Commission’s report. They stated that “unidentified commissioners” wanted to cover up the fact that US support for Israel was one of the motivating factors behind 9/11. Although Hamilton argued for saying that Al Qaeda committed the strike because of the US military presence in the Middle East and American support for Israel, the panel watered down that conclusion to state that US policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iraq were "dominant staples of popular commentary across the Arab and Muslim world." In alternative medicine, such a watered down version would be described as homeopathic.
The commissioners wanted to cover up the link between the 9/11 attack and US support for Israel because this obviously implied that the United States should alter its foreign policy in order to guarantee the safety of its citizens. Take Public Enemy Number One: Osama bin Laden has repeatedly stated that he is anti-American because of its military presence in the Persian Gulf and its support for Israel and corrupt regimes in the Arab world. Nothing else. Compare this with the Cuban exile’s disgruntlement with President Kennedy – and Kennedy alone – for his unwillingness to invade Cuba, which they considered to be his greatest weakness.

9/11 has signalled the birth of “The Conspiracy Nation”, in which the US is following other Western nations in distrusting everything their government tells them. This renaissance of the United States of America was conceived on November 22, 1963 and born, September 11, 2001.
The Warren Commission report was a whitewash and not at all a search for the truth. It merely tried to cement the official stance and close the case. Similar political assassination that were officially all the work of lone gunmen, the continued Vietnam crisis and the resignation of Nixon following the Watergate scandal tarnished the public’s perception of elected officials and government enquiries. Some openly honest investigations following the Watergate scandal had a short-lived positive impact, but with Iran-Contra and related scandals of the 1980s, the public’s validation of the official line was once again placed in doubt. The Lewinsky affair, the clumsy public performances of George W. Bush and to some extent the deliberate disinformation on UFOs, actually designed to make the public belief the government is hiding a final truth, have made the public extremely sceptical about any government explanation or position. This has even led to a percentage of the population to question whether or not we ever went to the Moon. Though America continues to trust in God, the same can no longer be said about its government.