I don't recall this being said so clearly and so far back...in 2008. But there it is,
published at Global Politician.
Or not.
Global Politician seems to have disappeared, one of many "truther" friendly websites to go "poof" in the last couple of years. It claimed to be credible journalism, but even the founder was embarrassed by some of the material that got published. The next editor in chief,
Sam Vaknin was, to put it kindly,
a nut. Ironically he self published books on Narcissism, something abundant in the "truth" Movement.
Vaknin was introduced to David Ray Griffin by a mutual associate, who I'm assumed didn't inform Sam of Griffin's Barnes Review/Neo-Nazis supporters. Or maybe Sam wouldn't care since he seems to be in the business of spreading the same fringe right anti-Obama propaganda the "truth" movement thrives on. [Complete article
reposted here].
Now Global Politician is gone, deleted in exactly the same way"truther" frauds have not deleted material they should be deleting. I don't know that any other place has Griffin's "no hijackers" statement on record. Part of me is convinced this is proof Griffin is "not all there" and little more than a patsy of same fringe manipulators who recruited Rosalee Grable and Judy Wood to push theories invented by Neo-Nazi propagandists..
Anyway, the article for posterity. "No hijackers" statement highlighted in red, with context.
.....................................................................
What Really Happened on September 11? Interview with David Ray Griffin
Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. - 9/29/2008
On September 11, I entertained a couple of house guests, senior
journalists from Scandinavia. I remember watching in horror and
disbelief the unfolding drama, as the United States was being subjected
to multiple deadly attacks on-screen. I turned to the international
affairs editor of a major Danish paper and told her "This could not have
been done by al-Qaida." I am an Israeli and, as such, I have a fair
"sixth sense" as to the capabilities of terrorists and their potential
reach.
Enter David Ray Griffin. I was introduced to him by a
mutual acquaintance. He is emeritus professor of philosophy of religion
and theology at Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate
University. He has published over 30 books, including eight about 9/11,
the best known of which is “The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the
Cover-Up, and the Exposé.”
On the face of it, his credentials
with regards to intelligence analysis are hardly relevant, let alone
impressive. But, to underestimate him would be a grave error. Being a
philosopher, he is highly trained and utterly qualified to assess the
credibility of data; the validity and consistency of theories (including
conspiracy theories); and the rationality and logic of hypotheses.
These qualifications made him arguably the most visible and senior
member of what came to be known as the 9/11 Truth Movement.
In
our exchange, he proved to be tolerant of dissenting views, open to
debate, and invariably possessed of rigorous thinking. Still, while the
9/11 Truth Movement has succeeded to cast doubts on the official version
of the events of September 11 (correctly labeled by Griffin: "the
official conspiracy theory"), it failed, in my view, to present a
compelling case in support of the alternative conspiracy theory much
favored by many of its members: that the Bush administration was behind
the attacks, one way or the other. Judge for yourselves.
The Incompetence Theory
A.
This administration demonstrated incredible incompetence with Hurricane
Katrina, the governing of occupied Iraq, and the subprime mortgage
crisis. Why should September 11 and the months leading to that fateful
day be any exception?
DRG: It was not an exception: The planning
and the execution were terribly flawed, resulting in so many problems in
the official story, including both internal contradictions and the
obvious contravening of basic laws of physics, that if Congress and the
press had carried out even the most superficial investigation, the fact
that 9/11 was an inside job would have been quickly exposed. I will give
nine examples (in giving these, I cite places in my books where the
issues are discussed more fully):
First, President Bush was in a
classroom in Florida when the second of the Twin Towers was struck.
Although the first strike had been dismissed as an accident, this second
one was taken as evidence that America was “under attack,” as Andrew
Card, Bush’s chief of staff, reportedly whispered in his ear. Back in
the White House, the Secret Service took Vice President Cheney down to
the bunker under the White House. But the Secret Service agents with
Bush allowed him to stay in the classroom for another 10 minutes, as
shown by a video that was included in Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.”
If the attacks had really been, as they seemed, surprise attacks by
terrorists going after high-value targets, the Secret Service agents
would have feared that a hijacked airliner was bearing down on the
school at that very minute. Their failure to hustle Bush away thereby
implied that they knew that Bush was in no danger because they knew who
was in control of the planes. The White House’s apparently belated
recognition of this implication was manifested a year later (before the
video had emerged on the Internet), when it started telling a different
story, claiming that Bush left the classroom within seconds after being
told about the second strike on the Twin Towers (“9/11 Contradictions,”
Ch. 1).
Second, the White House and the Pentagon also later found
it necessary to distort the truth about where Vice President Cheney,
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and General Richard Myers were between 9
and 10 AM that morning. Richard Clarke reported in his book, “Against
All Enemies” that Myers and Rumsfeld were in the Pentagon’s
teleconferencing studio participating in his White House video
conference, but Myers and Rumsfeld both claimed that they were
elsewhere. Although Clarke and Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta
reported that Cheney was down in the bunker before 9:20, the 9/11
Commission claimed that he didn’t enter it until almost 10:00 (20
minutes after the attack on the Pentagon and just before the crash of
Flight 93). And although Clarke reported that he received the shootdown
order from Cheney by 9:50 (at least 13 minutes before Flight 93 went
down), the Commission claimed that Cheney did not issue this
authorization until after 10:15 (“9/11 Contradictions,” Chs. 2-7).
Third,
much of the evidence that the planes had been hijacked was provided by
people who reported that they had received cell phone calls from
relatives or crew members on board the planes. About a dozen cell phone
calls were reported from Flight 93 alone. But after the 9/11 Truth
Movement publicized the fact that cell phone calls from high-altitude
airliners had not been technologically possible in 2001, the FBI changed
its report, saying that the only cell phone calls from any of the four
airliners were two that occurred when Flight 93 had descended to 5,000
feet (at which altitude they would have been at least arguably
possible). This change of story meant, among other things, that the FBI,
having stated in an affidavit in 2001 that American 11 flight attendant
Amy Sweeney had made a 12-minute cell phone call, needed to fabricate a
very implausible tale to support its revised claim that she had
actually used an onboard phone (“The New Pearl Harbor Revisited”
[henceforth NPHR], Chs. 3 & 6).
Fourth, the military’s
original explanation as to why it was unable to intercept the first
three flights before they hit their targets was so obviously problematic
that it needed to be changed. Members of the 9/11 Truth Movement had
shown that, even if the FAA had been as slow in notifying the military
as NORAD claimed in 2001, there had still been sufficient time for the
flights to have been intercepted, especially Flights 175 and 77. So the
9/11 Commission in 2004 simply created a new timeline, claiming, wholly
implausibly, that the FAA had not notified the military at all about
those two flights (“9/11 Contradictions,” Chs. 10 & 11).
Fifth,
after considerable evidence was publicized by the 9/11 Truth Movement
that Flight 93 had been shot down, the 9/11 Commission created a
completely new story about it. Although the military had stated that the
FAA had notified it about this flight and even that fighter jets were
tracking it, the 9/11 Commission claimed that the FAA had not notified
the military about Flight 93 until after it had crashed. Also, as I
pointed out above, the 9/11 Commission claimed that Cheney did not issue
the shootdown order until about 10:15, even though Richard Clarke
reported that he had received this order at about 9:50 (“9/11
Contradictions,” Chs 12-13).
Sixth, the FBI first told reporters
that proof of al-Qaeda’s responsibility for the attacks was
incriminating material, including Mohamed Atta’s last will and
testament, that was found in a Mitsubishi rented by Atta and left in the
parking lot at the Boston airport. The FBI also reported that two other
members of al-Qaeda who were on Flight 11, Adnan and Ameer Bukhari,
drove a rented Nissan on September 10 from Boston to Portland, where
they stayed overnight and then took a commuter flight back to Boston the
next morning in time to catch Flight 11. On September 13, however, the
FBI realized that neither of the Bukhari brothers had died on 9/11: one
was still alive and the other had died the year before. So the FBI
simply changed the story, saying that Atta and another al-Qaeda
operative, Abdul al-Omari, had driven the Nissan to Portland. The
incriminating materials were now said not to have been found in the
Mitsubishi in the parking lot but in Atta’s luggage, which had failed to
make the transfer from the commuter plane to Flight 11. One problem
with this new story, besides the fact that it did not get fully formed
until September 16, is that it made no sense, because it implied that
Atta had planned to take his will on a plane that he intended to fly
into the World Trade Center (“9/11 Contradictions,” Ch. 16).
Seventh,
the official story about the attack on the Pentagon said that the pilot
of Flight 77, which was a Boeing 757, executed an amazing maneuver in
order to strike the first floor of Wedge 1. But the authorities also
claimed that this pilot was Hani Hanjour, who could not, as was reported
by several stories in the mainstream press, safely fly even a
single-engine plane. The identification of the incompetent Hanjour as
the pilot was evidently a last-minute decision, because his name was
even not on the FBI’s first list of al-Qaeda operatives on Flight 77
(NPHR Chs. 2 & 6).
Eighth, eyewitness accounts by journalists
and Pentagon employees, along with photographs and videos taken right
after the attack on the Pentagon, reveal that there was no sign that the
Pentagon had been hit by a giant airliner. Although about 30 people
claimed to see an airliner strike the Pentagon, their testimonies were
often in contradiction with each other and the physical facts (“NPHR Ch.
2).
Ninth, WTC 7 was evidently supposed to come down at about
10:45 in the morning, shortly after the collapses of the Twin Towers. A
massive explosion occurred in the basement at about 9:15, which would
have been 90 minutes before the explosions that were supposed to bring
the building down (which would have been the same time-interval as that
between the 8:46 explosion in the basement of the North Tower, as
reported by janitor William Rodriguez, and the explosions that brought
the building down at 10:28). But evidently most of the explosives that
were supposed to go off at 10:45 failed to do so. As a result, the
building did not come down until late in the afternoon, at which time
the collapse was captured on several videos, which show the collapse to
have been identical to typical implosions caused by pre-set explosives.
This fact necessitated trying to keep most people in the dark about the
collapse of WTC 7 as long as possible: Videos of WTC 7’s collapse were
never again (after 9/11 itself) shown on mainstream television; the 9/11
Commission did not even mention this collapse; and the National
Institute of Standards and Technology repeatedly delayed its report on
this building, finally issuing it only late in 2008, shortly before the
Bush administration was to leave office.
As shown by these and
many other problems, almost every aspect of the 9/11 operation revealed
incompetence. If any of the resulting problems had been pursued by
Congress or the press, the 9/11 hoax would have been quickly exposed.
WTC7
Q:
Did the US Government possess in-house the expertise necessary to
control-demolish WTC 7? Surely they didn't sub-contract or farm out the
demolition?
DRG: Apart from an investigation, we have no way to
know for certain. But the planners probably did hire someone: As
explained by ImplosionWorld.com, true implosions, which cause a building
to come straight down into its own footprint (as WTC 7 clearly did),
are “by far the trickiest type of explosive project, and there are only a
handful of blasting companies in the world that possess enough
experience . . . to perform these true building implosions" (“Debunking
9/11 Debunking,” Ch. 3). If the point of your statement that they
“surely” would not have farmed out the demolition is that they would
have feared that doing so would result in someone spilling the beans,
this is an unrealistic assumption. No one would have been brought into
the operation who could not be trusted to keep quiet. And why would
someone confess to having participated in a project that killed
thousands of fellow citizens?
Q: Why didn't the conspirators wait
until a few hours after the attacks and then publicly demolish all
three buildings as hazards to the public and for public safety reasons?
DRG:
Again, apart from an investigation, in which people are induced to talk
by subpoenas and threats of prison, we cannot know why they made the
various decisions they made. We can, however, make reasonable guesses in
some cases. In this case, the desire to demolish these particular
buildings was surely a secondary motive, important to only a few of the
conspirators. The main purpose was surely to create a traumatizing
spectacle---the planes hitting the buildings and then the buildings
coming down shortly thereafter, killing thousands of people---in order
to get the American people and Congress psychologically prepared to
support attacks on Muslim countries, starting with Afghanistan (against
which a war had already been planned), and to accept restrictions on our
constitutional rights (the PATRIOT Act). This spectacle could then be
replayed endlessly on television to reinforce the public’s fury and
readiness to support the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” which
could be morphed to attack Iraq (a war against which had also been
planned in advance) and, assuming that the wars in those first two
countries would go well, some of the other countries on the
administration’s “hit list,” which has been reported by General Wesley
Clark and neocon Michael Ledeen (NPHR Ch. 7).
Q: Why was WTC7 targeted and not other WTC buildings which suffered worse damage from debris and fires?
DRG:
Again, we could learn the answer to this question easily enough through
a genuine investigation, in which the usual types of inducements are
used to get people to talk. Because that has not happened, some people
have offered theories. One theory is that the building contained records
that some authorities wanted destroyed. Another theory is that
Giuliani’s Emergency Operations Center on the 23rd floor had equipment
for drawing the two planes into the Twin Towers, which meant that the
building needed to be totally demolished in order to destroy all the
evidence. I myself do not speculate about this, as I do not try to
develop a complete theory as to what happened that day. I concentrate
instead on the various types of evidence that the official story is
false, which is all that is needed to point out that another---a
real---investigation is in order.
United 93
Q: The
conspiracy at the government level, according to the 9/11 Truth
Movement, involved a stand-down order: an instruction to the military
not to interfere with the hijacked aircraft and to allow them to crash
into their targets. If so, why was UA 93 the exception? Why was it shot
down (according to the Truth Movement)?
DRG: Let me begin by
correcting your first statement.
Many, perhaps most, people in the 9/11
Truth Movement do not believe there were any hijackers on board and
hence do not believe that there were any “hijacked aircraft” that were
simply “allowed” strike their targets. I at least do not believe this
(I’ve explained why at great length in NPHR) and assume, instead, that
the whole operation was carried out by the White House and the Pentagon,
with Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Myers being three of the central figures.
As
to what happened to Flight 93, we will probably never know unless there
is an investigation. There is indeed strong evidence that a plane was
shot down near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. And this could have been the
original plan, in order to have a basis for fabricating the story about
the heroic passengers foiling the intention of the evil Arab Muslims to
strike another target (such as the White House or the US Capitol
building), so that this story could be used by Bush as the beginning of
the “war on terror,” in which the American victims would strike back
against the Muslim terrorists and “the countries that harbor them.” But
we have no way of knowing for sure.
We can, however, say one
thing with certainty: that the official story---according to which there
was no wreckage at the site because the plane, headed down at 580 miles
per hour, buried itself completely in the ground, although a red
headband (like those allegedly worn by the hijackers) and the passport
of the al-Qaeda pilot were found on the ground---is not true. For one
thing, that description of the plane’s descent does not fit what any of
the eyewitnesses reported. Also, different eyewitnesses of an airliner
flying over the area reported it as going in two different directions,
and then two crash sites were cordoned off. From the evidence,
therefore, it’s very hard to figure out much beyond the fact that the
official story is a lie (NPHR Ch. 3).
Q: In your book, "9/11
Contradictions", you accept a purported phone call from the aircraft to a
fixed line as a fact (pp. 116-7). Why, then, do you reject the veracity
and existence of the other phone calls, allegedly made from other
aircraft?
DRG: Actually, you misunderstood. I did not accept the
purported call from Tom Burnett as a fact. What I accepted is that Deena
Burnett “received a phone call that she believed to be from” her
husband, Tom Burnett. The passage to which you refer is from Chapter 12
of “9/11 Contradictions.” If you look at Chapter 17, you’ll see that I
used the calls received by Deena Burnett as a central part of the
evidence that the calls were faked. Here’s why: She reported that she
was certain that the calls were from Tom, because she had recognized his
cell phone number on her Caller ID. But when the FBI changed its story
to get rid of all claims about high-altitude cell phone calls, it said
that the calls from Tom Burnett were made on an onboard phone (even
though the FBI report written on 9/11 had cited Deena’s assertion that
Tom had used his cell phone to make the calls). If one accepts this new
FBI report (which was presented at the Moussaoui trial in 2006), how
does one explain the fact that Deena reported seeing his cell phone
number on her caller ID? Surely, given the fact that she reported this
to the FBI that very day, we cannot assume that she was mistaken. And
surely we cannot accuse her of lying. But an explanation becomes
possible once we become aware of technology that can fake people’s phone
numbers as well as their voices. The conclusion that these calls were
faked is also supported by internal problems in the statements
purportedly made by Tom Burnett.
Once we realize that the cell
phone calls were faked, moreover, we must assume that calls reportedly
made using onboard phones were also faked: If hijackers really surprised
everyone by taking over the planes, why would have people been ready to
make fake cell phone calls reporting the existence of hijackers on the
planes? (NPHR Chs. 3 & 6).
Al-Qaida and Atta
Q: Why
would the FBI and the 9/11 Commission endorse a fallacious timeline
regarding Atta's whereabouts and activities throughout 2001? They admit
that they cannot explain his movements. They do not use this timeline to
support the official history.
DRG: I explained above that the
FBI did have a reason for giving a false account of Atta’s movements on
September 10 and 11: The story about two Flight 11 hijackers having
driven a Nissan to Portland had become so well known that, when the FBI
discovered that the Bukharis had not died on 9/11, it evidently felt
that the best solution was to say that Atta had taken the Nissan to
Portland. This revised account did become part of the official story.
With
regard to the FBI’s timeline for Atta in the early months of 2001, part
of the motive for saying that he had left Venice, Florida, never to
return, was evidently to cover up the fact that during March and April
of 2001 he had lived with a stripper, Amanda Keller, which many people
in Venice knew (especially the people who rented the apartment to them).
Another motive, suggested by investigative reporter Daniel Hopsicker,
is that Atta---who, according to Keller, took cocaine, which he would
obtain from Huffman Aviation, where he was supposedly taking flight
lessons (although Keller reported that he was already an expert
pilot)---was perhaps involved in a drug-smuggling operation
headquartered at Huffman. In these respects, therefore, the denial that
Atta was in Venice in 2001 evidently did serve to support the official
story.
In NPHR, incidentally, I reported still more evidence that
the FBI timeline on Atta is false. Although this timeline claimed that
Atta first arrived in the United States in June 2000, several credible
individuals, including a Justice Department official, reported that Atta
was in the country much earlier in 2000, as did the military
intelligence operation known as Able Danger. It was clearly very
important to the authorities to maintain otherwise, as shown by the fact
that the Pentagon’s inspector general went to great lengths to get Able
Danger members to change their stories or, when they would not, to
defame them (NPHR Ch. 6). But why it was so important, I do not know.
Perhaps the FBI and Pentagon simply felt that, having strongly insisted
that Atta did not arrive in the United States until June 3, 2000, they
had to stick with it. But it may have also been motivated by the concern
to keep his real activities during that period secret.
Q: If
al-Qaida were not involved, how do you explain Project Bojinka as well
as multiple warnings (by the foreign minister of Afghanistan, various
agents, and the intelligence services of countries from Russia to
Israel), all of them pointing the finger at Usama bin-Laden? How do you
account for multiple intercepted communications that clearly point the
finger at al-Qaida and bin-Laden?
DRG: I have never claimed that
al-Qaeda was “not involved” at all. I claim only that there is no
evidence that al-Qaeda operatives hijacked the planes. They appear to
have been involved as paid assets to provide plausible people on whom to
blame the “hijackings.” The White House and the 9/11 Commission, for
example, went to great lengths to cover up the fact that both Pakistan
and Saudi Arabia funneled money to them (NPHR Chs. 6, 8).
Q:
Everyone al-Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah mentioned in his testimony had
died shortly thereafter. Why has Abu Zubaydah survived? How come he
hasn't been liquidated as well?
DRG: I would not presume to know.
And perhaps this is a good time to respond explicitly to your apparent
assumption that, to challenge the official conspiracy theory, one must
have an alternative theory of equal specificity, with answers to all the
questions that could conceivably be raised about it. But this is not
true. Let’s say that you were accused by the authorities of murdering
Bill Jones. You would assume that, to get the case dismissed, all you
and your lawyer had to do was to prove that you could not possibly have
killed Jones. But imagine that, after you had done so, the judge then
declared: “Sorry, that’s not good enough. You must also tell us who did
kill Jones, how the murder was committed, and why.” You would surely
consider that unreasonable. By analogy, the 9/11 Truth Movement has
provided abundant evidence that the 9/11 attacks could not have been
carried out by al-Qaeda terrorists. We need not also specify exactly who
did organize and carry out the attacks, all their motives, and why they
handled each part of the operation and the cover-up as they did. So
there is simply no need for us to try to explain why Zubaydah was not
liquidated.
Q: The removal of Mahmoud Ahmad from office (as head
of Pakistan's ISI) - ostensibly in order to silence him - could have
actually provoked him to spill the beans and reveal what he knows.
Alternatively, if he were being punished, at the behest of the CIA, for
his collaboration with the 9/11 hijackers, this would seem to prove that
the Bush Administration has not been complicit in the attacks.
DRG:
I do not find it plausible that because Ahmad was removed, he would
have been likely to spill the beans. People, especially long-time
professionals like Ahmad, usually do not, out of spite, confess to
participation in mass murder. And he was probably rewarded handsomely to
resign quietly.
Government and Other Institutions
Q:
Americans are prone to distrust their government and to attribute to it
the worst motives, intentions, and conduct (consider, for instance, the
conspiracy theories whirling around the Kennedy Assassination). Isn't
the Truth Movement another instance of this brand of
"anti-establishment" paranoia?
DRG: Like other a priori charges
against the 9/11 Truth Movement, this one fails to fit the facts. If
this characterization, according to which we joined the movement because
we suspected the worst of the Bush administration (rather than because
we became convinced by good evidence), were true, most of us would have
started calling 9/11 an inside job the very first week. But if you look
at the histories of most of the leading members of the movement, they
joined much later. I myself first heard the inside-job theory near the
end of 2002 and, when the advocate of this theory sent me what he
considered good evidence, I did not find it convincing. It was not until
I learned of Paul Thompson’s “9/11 Timeline” in March 2003 that I
started moving in that direction. To give two more examples, Steven
Jones, our leading physicist, did not become involved until 2005, and
Richard Gage, who started Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, until
2006.
Another consideration is that paranoid people are usually
not very good at weighing evidence carefully. If you look at the
writings of people such as Kevin Ryan (a chemist formerly employed at
Underwriters Laboratories), Rob Balsamo (founder of Pilots for 9/11
Truth), A. K. Dewdney (former columnist for Scientific American), Robert
Bowman (former head of the “Star Wars” program), as well as Jones and
Gage, you will see that they exemplify careful, empirical observations,
not paranoid thinking. The claim that the leading members of the 9/11
Truth Movement are paranoid is a purely a priori charge, not supported
by empirical observation.
Q: Previous false flag operations did
not take place on American soil and involved a minimal number of
casualties. Not so September 11. Why the change in MO? Wouldn't the mere
destruction of the Twin Towers (at night, let's say and with
explosives) been enough? Why the enormous - and easily avoidable - toll
in lives (for instance, in the Pentagon)?
DRG: My answer to this
would be much the same as my response to your second question under the
WTC 7 (which actually dealt with the Twin Towers as well), namely, that
the spectacle of the planes hitting the buildings and then the buildings
collapsing (which would be replayed endlessly on television), along
with the toll in lives, was surely considered essential to get the
American people, and our representatives in Congress, fired up to give
the administration carte blanche to do as it wanted.
With regard
to your observation that no previous false-flag operation had taken
place on American soil, that is true only because President Kennedy
vetoed Operation Northwoods. The Pentagon’s joint chiefs of staff all
signed off on plans to kill American citizens in 1962 in order to have a
pretext for a war to regain control of Cuba (“The New Pearl Harbor,”
Ch. 7).
Q: If not al-Qaida operatives, then who flew the planes? Who were the suicide pilots? Surely not Americans?
DRG:
I doubt if anyone was flying the planes that struck the Twin Towers and
whatever it was that hit the Pentagon. They were most likely all flown
remotely. The evidence suggests that the Pentagon, besides having bombs
go off inside, was struck by a missile or some small airplane (which
could have been flown by remote control). And the planes that hit the
Twin Towers might have been taken out of the pilots’ control by means of
a technological override. Or, more likely, drones may have been
substituted for them when their transponders went off near the Air Force
base at Rome, New York (hence exemplifying one of the scenarios
suggested in Operation Northwoods). In any case, I do not assume that
there were any American pilots who volunteered to commit suicide.
Q: If a missile hit the Pentagon, then where is or was flight 77?
DRG:
I have never argued that a missile hit the Pentagon. I reported in my
first book (The New Pearl Harbor) that Thierry Meyssan argued this case.
But I also mentioned that his main point was that there is no good
evidence that a Boeing 757 hit the Pentagon and some evidence that it
was a missile or a small military plane. That still leaves, of course,
your question: If Flight 77 did not hit the Pentagon, what happened to
it?
I never cease being amazed at how many people think that,
unless those who deny that Flight 77 hit the Pentagon can answer this
question, our claim is discredited. But that is simply the most
prevalent example of the assumption that, to provide a convincing
argument against the official theory, one must provide a fully detailed
alternative theory---in this case explaining what happened to Flight 77.
But that does not follow. There are many possible things that could
have happened to it. It might, for example, have been the airliner that
reportedly crashed on the Ohio-Kentucky border; or it could have been
taken to a US Air Force base. But apart from an investigation, there is
no way for those of us not involved in the operation to know what really
did happen to it. And there is no need for us to have an answer, just
as you, to prove you didn’t kill Bill Jones, would not have to be able
to say who did it and how.
We do, I might add, have strong
evidence that the government used deception to convince us that Flight
77 hit the Pentagon. US Solicitor General Ted Olson---who had been
instrumental in putting the Bush administration in power by successfully
arguing that the US Supreme Court should stop the 2000 vote count in
Florida---claimed on 9/11 that he had received two phone calls from his
wife, TV commentator Barbara Olson, from Flight 77 shortly before the
Pentagon was hit, during which she reported that the flight had been
taken over by hijackers armed with knives and boxcutters. This was used
as evidence that Flight 77 had been hijacked and that it had not crashed
in the Mid-West. When the FBI presented its evidence about phone calls
from the planes at the Moussaoui trial in 2006, however, it said this
about Barbara Olson: She attempted one call, which was “unconnected,”
and hence lasted “O seconds.” Accordingly, although the FBI is part of
the Department of Justice, its report indicates that the story told by
Ted Olson, the DOJ’s former solicitor general, was untrue---which
implies either that Olson lied or that he was duped. In either case, the
claim that Barbara Olson gave information about Flight 77 was based on
deception. And such deception is one more piece of evidence that the
whole story about Flight 77 and the attack on the Pentagon is false
(NPHR Ch. 2).
Q. Can you please comment on the role of terrorist attacks in domestic politics in the US?
DRG:
Clearly the 9/11 attacks played a major role in the elections of 2002
and 2004, helping the Republicans gain control of the Congress and the
White House. This role was not, to be sure, sufficient to keep Bush and
Cheney in the White House in 2004, as the Republicans also had to resort
to distorting John Kerry’s war record and also to stealing the election
through various means, most clearly in Ohio (see Mark Crispin Miller,
Fooled Again). But there seems to be little doubt that the use of 9/11
to scare people into voting for Republicans played a role (even if
irrationally, because the 9/11 attacks, if not either orchestrated or
deliberately allowed by the Bush administration, were allowed by its
incompetence).
By 2006, the 9/11-based appeal to fear had little
effect, and thus far it is still weaker in 2008. This fact has not,
however, prevented the Republicans from trying to use it one more time
to scare people into voting for them, as the addresses to the Republican
convention by Bush, Giuliani, and McCain illustrated.
Many
people in the 9/11 community, however, fear that another false-flag
attack, perhaps this time employing a nuclear weapon, will come before
the 2008 elections, whether to help McCain win or, more fatefully, as a
pretext for Bush to declare martial law and cancel the elections,
allowing him, by the power he gave to himself in Presidential Directive
51, to assume unilateral control of the federal government. I am not
saying that I expect this to happen. But I do not consider the fear
unrealistic.
Q. In the days prior to September 11, the volume of
put options on the stocks of firms involved in the attacks (mainly
airlines and companies whose headquarters were in the WTC) soared. Do we
know who bought these options and was it a case of insider trading?
DRG:
It does appear to have been a case of insider trading (as I reported in
“The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions,” citing the
careful study by Allen Poteshman, who teaches finance at the University
of Illinois).
But the 9/11 Commission, while assuring us that it
was not a case of insider trading, refused to tell us who bought the
extraordinary numbers of put options on these companies. In illustrating
its purported evidence that all the purchases were innocent, it said
that “[a] single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable
ties to al Qaeda purchased 95 percent of the UAL puts.” The Commission
thereby employed circular logic. Beginning with the assumption that the
attacks were planned and carried out entirely by al-Qaeda, with nobody
else knowing about the plans, it argued that unless the put option
purchasers were connected to al-Qaeda, the purchaser could not have had
any inside information. But that argument begs the basic question at
issue, which is precisely whether the attacks were planned by al-Qaeda,
with no one else knowing about the plans (NPHR Ch. 5).
By not
telling us who the investors were, the 9/11 Commission made it
impossible for us to confirm its assurance that the purchases did not
reflect insider information. We must simply take it on faith---which is
difficult to do, given the dozens of lies of omission and distortion
within the Commission’s report (“The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions
and Distortions”).
Sam, thanks for your questions, which have
perhaps allowed me to reach a new audience with evidence that the
official story about 9/11 is a lie. This evidence---only a small portion
of which I have mentioned here---means that the policies that have been
based on the assumption that America was attacked by Muslims on 9/11
need to be reversed. This point is especially germane in the light of
Barack Obama’s argument that one reason to wind down our involvement in
Iraq is to have the troops and resources to “go after the people in
Afghanistan who attacked us on 9/11.” His position, which was stated
repeatedly by speakers at the Democratic convention, is also reflected
by the New York Times, which refers to the US attack on Iraq as a “war
of choice” but the attack on Afghanistan as a “war of necessity,” and by
Time magazine, which has dubbed the latter “the right war.” If we were
not really attacked by Muslims on 9/11, these two wars were equally
unjustified (as well as equally illegal under international law).
Sam Vaknin
is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After
the Rain - How the West Lost the East as well as many other books and
ebooks about topics in psychology, relationships, philosophy, economics,
and international affairs. He served as a columnist for Central Europe
Review, Global Politician, PopMatters, eBookWeb , and Bellaonline, and
as a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent. He
was the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in
The Open Directory and Suite101. Visit Sam's Web site at
http://samvak.tripod.com You can download 30 of his free ebooks in
http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/freebooks.html.
