9:11 Revealed. Challenging the facts behind the War on Terror
Ian Henshall and Rowland Morgan
London: Robinson, 2005; £8.99, p/b
A declaration of a kind of interest: one of the authors of this book, Ian Henshall, is the Chair of INK, the Independent News Collective, to which Lobster belongs and whose leaflets Lobster has been distributing.
A couple of days after 9-11, Tony Frewin rang me and suggested that this was the JFK case for the Internet generation. There are some obvious similarities; but there are obvious differences, too. For one thing, if this was a fraud, it is infinitely bigger than the killing of JFK. Kennedy was just a politician and killing politicians isn’t that unusual in American history. Another difference is the existence of the Internet and the vast amount of information that it makes available. I began collecting the conspiratorial thinking on 9-11 two days after the event and within a fortnight had over 2 Mbs of data – more than could be comfortably filed, let alone digested. And it has continued growing since. ‘9-11 + conspiracy’ on Google will now produce getting on for 6 million hits. By comparison, the critical information in the JFK case appeared in dribs and drabs over many years so students could digest it slowly as it appeared. The JFK thing didn’t really get going until 1966 when the first few books had appeared; but the 9-11 critics galloped past where the JFK case was in 1966 in about three weeks. Trying to handle the 9-11 material is a huge task and the authors deserve much respect for simply getting through it. And they have done an impressive job: the book is nicely produced, some extremely complicated research is presented clearly, and many of the pictures in the case – and many I hadn’t seen – are reproduced.
The authors lay the material out along parallel tracks. They present the official version of what happened and then the views of what they call ‘the sceptics’.(1)
The official world in the US knew it was al-Qaeda without needing to investigate. Bin Laden had been near or at the top of the security agenda in the US for a decade; his desire to attack America had been on lots of official bits of paper. Sections of the US security and foreign policy bodies were literally waiting for an attack to come, having failed in the months before the event to persuade the new Bush White House team to take the threat seriously. When the Twin Towers were hit they knew who had done it. Starting there, with the passenger lists producing clusters of Arab-sounding names, routine investigative work produced the hijackers. At any rate it produced the names and pictures of Arab-sounding and Arab-looking men, some of whom could be traced back to al-Qaeda networks.
The ‘critics’ or the ‘sceptics’ are a mirror-image of the US state’s presumption that it was al-Qaeda. There were pieces on the net within 36 hours asserting that it was obviously a fake: an ‘American Reichstag fire’ was the expression used in those early days. It was just too convenient for the Bush regime then under pressure for stealing the presidential election: it had to be a fake.
The authors break down the many theories into two categories: MIHOP – make it happen on purpose; and LIHOP – let it happen on purpose. Inside MIHOP there are many variations. Mini nukes were used, by Americans, to destroy the Twin Towers (there are said to be high radiation readings in places in the rubble). Remote controlled planes were used (the hijackers weren’t competent enough pilots to do the manoeuvres they did). The planes which hit the towers were not the planes that were hijacked (alleged photographic evidence). The Twin Towers were demolished by explosives, not the planes (the planes were a cover story). The hijackers, run by the Americans, were not al-Qaeda. The hijackers were al-Qaeda but since al-Qaeda is a creation of the Americans, the operation was run by them (or the Israelis). Whatever hit the Pentagon it wasn’t Flight 77 (the hole is too small). Etc. etc..
The authors work through the entire event, presenting these and many other variations; and, oh yes, there is a truck load of loose ends, contradictions and anomalies in the official picture – so many that in almost any other instance I would conclude: critics’ case made; it’s a fake. But with this one I can’t do it. The world is weird and the US state is capable of great evil but the people at the top of its military-intelligence complex are not stupid enough or bold enough to have sanctioned something like this. The MIHOP ‘sceptics’ presented in this book want us to believe that the US military-intelligence complex which, two years before, could not persuade itself to try to kill Bin Laden in Afghanistan because of the risk of civilian casualties, pulled off a stunt like this.
The meaning of Northwoods?
We are prisoners of our pictures of how the world works and in mine I cannot conceive of a high level US group deciding to do what occurred. I can just about imagine such a group deciding – à la Operation Northwoods (2) – to arrange a terrorist attack on Americans. As many people have pointed out, there are precedents for the American state faking a causa belli: the sinking of the USS Maine to provide the pretext for the war with Spain over Cuba; the Gulf of Tonkin; and we could add a vast array of examples of smaller psy-ops. But I cannot imagine any such group deciding that this was the best of the options they considered. Even if we imagine a group meeting with the aim of manufacturing an atrocity, this scheme would not be considered. Ignoring the more baroque variations for the moment, a plan which involved hijacking and crashing four planes into American cities is ridiculously complicated; there are too many moving parts; it would not make it onto the agendum. There is nothing in the literature remotely resembling the scale and complexity of what the MIHOP theorists are suggesting. To their credit the authors face this problem and describe how they think various LIHOP and MIHOP plots might function. They point out that big plots can go undetected and they cite Oliver North and the Iran-Contra affair. But are the two things comparable? Iran-Contra merely used for the state’s interest some activities – smuggling and money-laundering, essentially – which existed already and with which the clandestine services of the US state were familiar. But a 9-11 conspiracy, especially any variant of the MIHOP conspiracy, is on a different planet from North’s White House basement caper.
We could speculate. If it was a fake, why did the Americans attribute it to Bin Laden? He was already top of their shit-list. They didn’t need a pretext to go after him: his network had already killed hundreds of Americans. They were going after him already – they were just not going hard enough for some within the Washington foreign policy networks. What was the geostrategic point of blaming Bin Laden? The Bush regime’s real target was Iraq and their attempts to link Iraq to the Twin Towers were feeble and incompetent. If it was a fake, could they not have manufactured more plausible Iraqi links? Why give al-Qaeda such a massive propaganda victory? And even if blaming al-Qaeda made any kind of sense, why do something so massive and so economically destructive? The same propaganda effect, the same stampeding of Congress, could have been achieved with infinitely less. LBJ stampeded Congress with nothing more than radar contacts between North Vietnamese and US boats in the Gulf of Tonkin. If you wanted to blame al-Qaeda for something, why not another, better placed truck of explosives in the basement of a large building, as in 1993? This could be organised and executed by a small number of people.
We could speculate further. Flight 77 didn’t hit the Pentagon, say many: it was a missile or a smaller plane. Yet on the Net there is a report by Christopher Kelly from the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, which begins:
‘What some experts have called “the most comprehensive forensic investigation in U.S. history” ended Nov. 16 with the identification of 184 of the 189 who died in the terrorist attack on the Pentagon.'(3)
But if you believe Flight 77 did not strike the Pentagon, either this is investigation (or the report) is faked, or the bodies and body parts from the real site of Flight 77’s crash were collected and moved and presented to the pathology team as if they were from the Pentagon site. And yes, it’s possible that there is no Christopher Kelly; or that he is a stooge for ‘the conspirators’; or that the website <dcmilitary.com> on which this report appears is willing to run a fabricated report. But if one takes this line seriously, at each of these steps the number of people ‘in the know’ increases. In this one instance the total would include the people who found and processed the real site of Flight 77’s crash, collected the bodies, ordered the refrigeration trucks and moved the bodies; plus all those who worked on the Pentagon site who know there was no Flight 77 and no bodies. This particular pathology thread continues. An exhibition has been running this year in Washington at the National Museum of Health and Medicine,
‘highlighting efforts used by its parent organization, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP), to identify the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks at the Pentagon and the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 in Somerset County, Pa.’ (4 )
Which means that if the report by Kelly cited above is faked then so, too, is this exhibition. And so on. On a much smaller scale, the well known conspiracy researcher, John Judge, who is sceptical about aspects of 9-11, knows a stewardess in Washington who normally flew on Flight 77, who identified some of the remains as being those of a stewardess friend of hers.(5)
A controlled demolition as well as plane strikes, say some. If so, what is the point of the duplication (doubling the difficulty and the danger of exposure)? If we consider controlled demolition, how many charges would it take to demolish something of that size? The advocates of controlled demolition point to the appearance of some apparent puffs of smoke just before the buildings fall; but in the demolition of tower blocks which TV news shows occasionally, there are dozens of charges and dozens of puffs of smoke as each floor is taken out. How long and how many tons of explosives would it take to wire a building this size for demolition? And how could this be done in secret? In any case structural engineers have explained why the buildings fell the way they did.(6)
LIHOP
The LIHOP theories are initially much less implausible. There is evidence of a great many warnings of some kind of attack; some even referred to planes being used. It is conceivable that the US administration at some level decided that such an attack (undefined; were they expecting hijackings?) would be useful politically and chose to ignore it. But there is as yet no direct evidence of this. There is the indirect evidence suggested by the still unexplained failure of American air defence systems; but this may yet turn out to be incompetence, indecision and/or confusion created by the US Air Force exercises taking place at that time. (7)
There are examples of US security and intelligence forces not pursuing apparent leads to al-Qaeda people in the US before the event and blocking inquiries after it; but these seem to be explicable by bureaucratic demarcations, interagency rivalries, laws passed by the Clinton administration which made it more difficult for security agencies to pursue intelligence leads and – this might be the smoking gun – some (as yet slight) evidence that some of the hijackers were part of a protected drugs-smuggling ring and thus received a ‘pass’. (8) The ‘sceptics’ complain that the official inquiry, the 9-11 Commission, didn’t answer their points. Official investigations are political events, not truth-seeking endeavours. Complaining that the 9-11 Commission has failed to get to the bottom of things is to compliment not criticise it. (9)
The lessons of Warren
Some of the 9-11 critics don’t seem to have learned one of the most important lessons of the Warren Commission: in situations where the shit is flying bureaucracies go into cover-up mode automatically. Yes, it probably means they have something to hide; but with intelligence and security agencies this might just be ongoing operations; it doesn’t necessarily mean that they had anything to do with the crime. Like the events in Dallas, 9-11 was a potential disaster for the agencies who might have prevented it. In such a situation ‘the truth’ is not an issue for them.
Nonetheless something or some things are being concealed; but I think it will turn out not to be the usual suspects: political embarrassment on the part of someone important and/or drugs and/or money. Who is being prevented from speaking? Atta’s social circle in Florida have had the federal frighteners put on them; and the translator of FBI intercepts, Sybil Edmonds, whose testimony, before she was legally gagged, referred to a source of campaign funds preventing proper inquiries. (10)
Daniel Hopsinger, in Florida, poking around on the ground where some of the hijackers lived, has discovered a Mohammed Atta who doesn’t fit our idea of an Islamist terrorist: a party animal, was this Atta, living the single life in Florida, with lots of cocaine. There is the curious tale of the $100,000 apparently wired to Atta by the head of Pakistan’s intelligence service (ISI). How reliable is this story? The original report came from ‘federal authorities’ to ABC television and said merely that $100,000 had been sent to Atta from Pakistan. The ISI gloss came later from Indian intelligence (no friends of the Pakistanis) via Agence France-Presse (AFP) (no friends of the Americans?). The ISI elaboration could be disinformation(11) but, with or without it, we seem to be heading into drugs and dirty campaign funds – normal American parapolitics.
On the other hand it may be that my inability to believe the Americans organised it just tells you that I finally reached that point where I am unable to comprehend the reality of the criminal gang that is the current Republican administration. Either way, this is the best account so far of the ‘sceptics” views. Some of the research presented here is intricate and fascinating, whether or not one is inclined to believe its conclusions.
A survey recently found that more than half the American population thinks the US authorities knew the planes were coming; and, like the JFK case, there are enough people committed to the cause to ensure that it will still be alive for decades to come.
Notes
[1] ‘Sceptics’ is the wrong word for most of them. There may be sceptics about 9-11 but the vast majority of those quoted in this book are certain that it was not what it looks like.
[2] The Northwoods documents are at <www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/>
[3] <www.dcmilitary.com/airforce/beam/6_49/national_news/12466-1.html> [4] <http://www.washington.org/index.cfm?ID=5451&Page=0&blnShowBack=False&idContentType=480&IDPG=0>
[5] Interview with John Judge in Steamshovel 22, September 2005.
[6] See, for example, <www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/wtc/collapse.html>
[7] I got 10,000 hits on Google for ‘9-11 + drills’. There seem to have been several running that day, including one testing the US response to an attack by Russian bombers. Bombers?
[8] See, for example, Daniel Hopsinger at <http://64.70.236.57/08172005.html> and Wayne Madsen at <www.waynemadsenreport.com/Bushsaudidrugs.htm>
[9] This is one of the differences between 9-11 and JFK. So much information was available via the Net to the 9-11 ‘sceptics’, they had critiqued the ‘official’ version of the story before the official report appeared. The authors here, like David Ray Griffin, author of The New Pearl Harbour, complain that the official inquiry didn’t examine the sceptics’ analyses. I haven’t read the official report. I intended to and began with the Executive Summary which was an insult to the intelligence at least as bad, and transparently bad, as the Warren Commission report and gave up.
[10] See, for example, the interview she gave at <www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/31/1616221>
[11] Peter Dale Scott discusses this at <www.globalresearch.ca/articles/SCO410A.html>