9/11: The new evidence
Ian Henshall
London: Robinson, 2007, p/b, £9.99
This is a sequel to, an updating of, Henshall’s book (co-written with Rowland Morgan) 9:11 Revealed, reviewed in Lobster 50 (p. 29). Some new bits and pieces are chewed over, some new evidence is presented, some familiar material is reworked. It is done rather well (though, be warned, it has no index). He adopts the same stance as he did in the first book: he presents the views/evidence of what he calls ‘the skeptics’ sympathetically while sort of distancing himself from them. In the first book this didn’t bother me greatly; but on a second go round I found this irritating because it gives Henshall an enormous get out: while he is a member of ‘the skeptics’, this device enables him to not pass judgement on the various claims presented. Up to a point this is legitimate because the data available is so complex and amenable to so many interpretations. But only up to a point. Here’s an example.
In the official story the bodies of the passengers and crew of Flight 77 (which crashed into the Pentagon) and Flight 93 (which crashed in Pennsylvania) were identified by DNA – there not being much left after impact and fire. Indeed, as part of the spin-off of the 9/11 events, those involved in this DNA identification, from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, mounted an exhibition in Washington describing how they had done it.(15)
A considerable chunk of the 9/11 ‘skeptics’ do not believe that a passenger jet crashed into the Pentagon: they think it was a jet fighter, a missile or a drone. From their position, this exhibition must be a fraud. But if it is a fraud, part of the wider 9/11 fraud, that is if the organisers of the exhibition knew that they did not identify the passengers using DNA, then the number of people who are engaged in the 9/11 conspiracy is getting rather large; and this makes the notion of a conspiracy less plausible. Henshall refers to the DNA identification of the bodies and offers another hypothesis:
‘If the Flight 77 passengers were not on the plane that hit the Pentagon, an X-team would have to sneak their remains into the transport chain as it carried those of the many more people killed inside the building. This is not impossible.’
The X-team is Henshall’s hypothesised conspiracy. I don’t know if the allusion to the X-Men, superheros of American comics and recently a couple of movies, is intentional on his part, but to pull off what he is suggesting the X-team would need something like the X-Men’s super powers. Planting the DNA evidence of the passengers – chunks of people, presumably, removed from the corpses, kept somewhere else (where?) for the purpose – if not impossible, as Henshall says, is fantastically unlikely. Even in Conspiracyland this is unlikely. This makes David Lifton’s hypothesis that JFK’s corpse was altered after the assassination look sensible. And Henshall must know this, really. Faced with an exhibition in Washington by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology on their gruesome success, the hypothesis that it wasn’t Flight 77 which hit the Pentagon, should be abandoned, no matter what the blurry CCTV stills or the contradictions in eyewitness testimony may or may not suggest. But Henshall doesn’t want to make those kind of decisions.
For many people on the left in Europe and America, who hate Bush’s America, the idea that the world has been conned by a vast sleight of hand, in effect by a coup d’etat, which is being covered-up, is terribly sexy. It is to me, too. As is the role of campaigner who will pull back the curtain and reveal all. But even if there was an agreed theory from the 9/11 ‘skeptics’, instead of the smorgasbord of notions we have now, I cannot persuade myself that the neo-cons/Cheney/Pentagon/CIA/whoever – Henshall’s X-team – are good enough to do something like this; or would dream of trying something so complicated and so much bigger than they would have needed for the purpose of providing a pretext for assaults on Afghanistan and Iraq.
The discovery that CIA Director at the time, George Tenet, ‘forgot’ about two meetings with George Bush just before 9/11, one lasting most of the day, in Texas, leads Henshall to wonders if Tenet was a member of the conspiracy. But everything we know about Tenet, his behaviour in the run-up to Iraq and his comments since, make this profoundly unlikely.(16) Tenet was a manager, trying to defend the Agency, caught between the White House’s demands for evidence to support their case for war and the contempt of his colleagues who knew the case was bullshit and thought Tenet should not give it the Agency’s seal of approval.(17) This isn’t a member of the biggest conspiracy in American history! This is a Beltway bureaucrat, the head of an agency for which the Bush White House and the Pentagon have nothing but contempt.
Henshall hasn’t changed his position since his first book and neither have I; and maybe we’re too locked onto them to be able to do so. Yes, there are a multitude of questions about the event that have not been officially examined – and never will be. The American political system is incapable of examining events which threaten to reveal its inner workings, what Peter Dale Scott would call its deep politics: the assassinations of the 1960s, for example; the Republican theft of the last two presidential elections; political funding; the drug traffic; and 9/11.(18) Yes, the official report was a whitewash: such reports always are; but as with the Warren Commission, the fact that there was a whitewash tells us nothing specific about the events being covered-up.
Notes
- See <www.washington.org/minisite/calendar.htm>. At <www.afip.org/images/public/June02.pdf> is a short account of the exhibition’s contents.
- See for example the long interview with Tenet at <http://cbs4denver.com/national/topstories_story_119205714.html>
- See for example the letter by former CIA officers at <http://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2007/images/04/29/tenet.pdf>
- See ‘Seven CIA Veterans Challenge 9/11 Commission Report’ at <http://urukvideomachine.blogspot.com/2007/09/seven-cia-veterans-challenge-911.html>