9/11 Revisited: A Thumbnail Sketch

For whatever reason, I have been drawn today - 11/11, I notice - to revisit the subject of one of my truthseeker areas of interest in particular. '9/11' has continued to be a thorn in the side of humanity, that has not yet been drawn.

Where are we at with it.

From all that I have read of the matter, and continue to read, we are closer to an answer - a true, definitive answer - than we were years ago; whereby, in point of fact, we continue to have new information come out about it that emphasizes the view that the official theory - that Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda cronies, from their cave headquarters in the mountains of Afghanistan, planned and caused execution of the whole thing - does not hold up. Nor does the main alternative theory, in total.

A quick review of the main questions, for those of you who have not had the time or inclination to follow the story, or just to set the scene.

* Three highrise steel-frame buildings - one not even hit by an airplane - come down neatly in their footprints at or near freefall speed, merely from the damage of fires initially caused by jet fuel. Regardless of the initiating source of the fire, this is something that no highrise steel-frame building had ever done before or has done since. (When asked about WTC7, the building not hit by an airplane, only on fire from collateral damage, the official investigative authority - NIST - had no explanation, merely stuck doggedly to their 'pancake theory' about WTC1 & 2.)

* Molten steel was still burning extremely hot for weeks afterwards in the basement pits. Jet fuel alone cannot account for this.

* Many eyewitnesses - firefighters and building occupants, plus being captured on various videos - have said that there were multiple explosions in the buildings before they fell. This was also indicated by puffs of smoke seen coming from floors below the levels of the collapsing buildings.

* Residues of the explosive material thermite have been found on material from the buildings.

* The concrete was pulverized into dust, not just rubble. And even vaporization was going on: one video shot in particular exists showing standing material just disappearing into fine, even invisible smoke; plus the amount of rubble at the sites is far too little to account for the total that should have been there from such tall buildings (I refer in particular to WTC1&2.)

Beyond the buildings themselves; questions:

* Who made huge amounts of money that day. (1) On the insurance itself (both buildings and occupants). (2) On put options on the airlines involved. (I.e., bets that their stock would go down, from some days ahead of Der Tag. Hint: One such company was found to be a front outfit run by an ex-CIA high official.) (3) On the Chicago Futures Market Exchange.

* Who else benefited.

Now it gets really interesting.

For this angle, let me first turn to the curious issue of an apparent 'stand-down' order that day, that kept the Air Force from doing its job. To put the matter in its context, I can't do better than quote from a paper by one Steve Bhaerman titled 'Unquestioned Answers: Nonconspiracy theorist David Ray Griffin takes aim at the official 9-11 story', dated June 14-20, 2006. Steve went to a lecture by Prof Griffin the year previously, and in his paper summarized the contents. I herewith summarize his summary, as it deals with the matter specifically in question. The first section is headed 'False Flags':

"While Griffin professes no formulated alternative theory of what did happen, he offers a clue in the title of his first book. 'A New Pearl Harbor' refers to a passage in a document called Project for the New American Century - the neocons' blueprint for what they call 'pax Americana' - which says that for the American people to accept the overt military mission of creating security through world domination, a 'new Pearl Harbor' would be needed. Griffin believes that the 9-11 attacks were just that.

"This is a pretty serious - and horrific - assertion to make: that the leaders of our country would see fit to sacrifice some 3,000 civilians so that we could launch a preemptive attack on a perceived enemy. And yet, Griffin is quick to point out, our history is rife with just such incidents, from the 'remember the Maine' boosterism preceding the Spanish-American war to the Gulf of Tonkin lie that launched U.S. involvement in Vietnam to the Pearl Harbor attacks themselves. Indeed, recent scholarship on Perl Harbor suggests that President Roosevelt knew of the attack plan in advance and even purposely provoked the Japanese, because he knew it was the only way we could join the war against Germany...

"During the Cold War, two more chilling examples of so-called false flag operations have come to light. (False flag operations are covert situations conducted by governments or other organizations that are designed to appear as if they are being carried out by other entities.) In his recent book, 'NATO'S Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe', Dr. Daniele Ganser, a senior researcher at the Center for Security Studies, Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, reports that NATO, guided by the CIA, supported terrorist attacks on civilians in various European countries to discredit the left and create fear on the part of the populace.

"In Italy, right-wing terrorists, supplied by a secret army (named 'Gladio', Latin for 'sword'), carried out bomb attacks in public places, blamed them on the Italian left and were thereafter protected from prosecution by the military secret service. As right-wing terrorist Vincenzo Vinciguerra explains in Ganser's book, 'The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security.'

"In our own country during the early '60s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff...came up with a similar plan to provoke an attack on Cuba." There follows an account of that episode in American history, which President Kennedy nixed - "But it did have the approval of top military brass, and with the right president - or the wrong one - it could very well have come about.

"In the aftermath of 9-11, Griffin initially dismissed any speculation that the attacks could have been an inside job. 'I subscribed to the "blow-back theory," Griffin says. 'After generations of exploitation and interference by Western powers, these people had such fury that they had to lash out any way they could.'

"At the time, Griffin...was working on a book on global democracy. In the wake of 9-11, he decided that he needed a special chapeter on U.S. imperialism. He worked on that chapter for over a year before he came to the view that 9-11 was an inside job. 'As much as I knew about prior false flag operations, as much as I knew or thought I knew about the nefariousness of the current regime, my fIrst take was not even the Bush administration could or would do such a thing.'

"It wasn't until a colleague sent Griffin an e-mail with Paul Thompson's timeline - an exact, minute-by-minute accounting of the events of Sept. 11 based entirely on mainstream media accounts - that he changed his mind. 'The most glaring anomaly,' Griffin now says, 'was that none of the hijacked planes were intercepted, even though all of them would have been, had standard procedure been followed...'

"So what happened on that morning?

"The government has given three conflicting answers to this question.

"Since a full 32 minutes elapsed between the time the first hijacked airliner was detected and the time it crashed into the World Trade Center, it initially appeared that 'stand down' orders must have been issued to suspend standard procedures. Indeed, the first reports from both NORAD and Gen. Richard Myers, the acting chair of Joint Chiefs of Staff, indicated that no jets were scrambled until after the Pentagon was hit at 9:38am.

"By Sept. 13, however, the original story had morphed into an explanation that 'the planes were scrambled but arrived too late'. The delays were blamed on the FAA, said to have been slow in notifying NORAD. If that were the case, Griffin points out, it was strange indeed that no FAA personnel were fired or even cited for the breakdown in procedures and the resulting disaster. Griffin notes, moreover, that the FAA flawlessly handled - on the same day - the unprecedented task of grounding thousands of domestic flights." [NB: And to mention here that at the time, the FAA person in charge that day vehemently denied that she & they had not done their job properly.]

And now we get to a key piece of this story:

"Meanwhile, Griffin reports, transportation secretary Norman Mineta testified [to the 9/11 Commission - Ed.] that at 9:20am - about 18 minutes before the Pentagon was hit, allegedly by Flight 77 - he went down to the shelter conference room under the White House. According to Mineta, a young man walked in and said to the vice president, 'The plane is 50 miles out' and later, 'The plane is 30 miles out.' When the young man reported, 'The plane is 10 miles out,' he also asked the vice president, 'Do the orders still stand?'

"'Of course the orders still stand,' Cheney is alleged to have replied. 'Have you heard anything to the contrary?'

"When Mineta was asked by the 9-ll Commission how long after he arrived the conversation occurred, Mineta said, 'Probably about five or six minutes,' which would have placed it around 9:25 or 9:26am. However, in the final version of the story, 'The 9/11 Commission Report' maintained that no one in our government knew about the approaching aircraft until 9:36am, too late to shoot it down. How did the Commission deal with this apparent contradiction? Like just about every other piece of testimony that conflicted with the official story, Griffin avers, they ignored it.

"With regard to the question, 'Do the orders still stand?' Griffin says, 'Mineta seemed to assume those orders were to shoot the plane down. But really, the young man's question makes sense only if the orders were to do something unexpected - that is,not to shoot the plane down.'

"So what did happen? Whodunnit?"

Indeed...

Let's look at this particular testimony further. Why wasn't this curious and most important piece of information - or at least, testimony - picked up and properly followed up on during the 9/11 hearings? Either by the commission members themselves, or the overall director of the hearings? It is still hanging, like a chad that could have great bearing on the final outcome of this whole matter.

And now we come to a key question:

Who was Philip Zelikow? Besides the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, responsible overall for the organizing of the details of the hearings?

To answer that, we need to go back a bit in time. It's an interesting story in its detail, and is well-covered in Chapter 6 of Prof. Griffin's book 'Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11'. But the short of it is that Philip Zelikow was the primary drafter of a document called NSS 2002, which subsequent to 9/11 - and before the hearings themselves - set out the neocon doctrine of preemptive-preventive war, become policy because OF 9/11.

And this fox was then put in charge of the chicken coop?...

It's too important a story not to go a little more into its detail. Quoting Prof. Griffin:

"We can assume that in drafting this document, [Zelikow] was expressing ideas with which he agreed, since Condoleeza Rice brought him in to do the writing because she wanted 'something bolder' than had been provided in a first draft...Given the content and tone of the document, one might assume that Cheney, Rumsfeld, or Wolfowitz had been involved in the process of creating it. But, according to James Mann in 'Rise of the Vulcans', 'The hawks in the Pentagon and in Vice President Cheney's office hadn't been closely involved, even though the document incorporated many of their key ideas. They had left the details and the drafting in the hands of Rice and Zelikow.' This hands-off behavior by those neocons suggests that they had full confidence that Zelikow shared their views.'"

Background to this confidence?

"Some insight into Zelikow's views before coming to this task might be garnered from an essay he coauthored in 1998 on 'catastrophic terrorism.' In this essay, which suggests that he had been thinking about the World Trade Center and a new Pearl Harbor several years prior to 9/11, Zelikow and his coauthors say:


"'lf the device that exploded in 1993 under the World Trade Center had been nuclear, or had effectively dispersed a deadly pathogen, the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America's fundamental sense of security. Like Pearl Harbor, this event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures, scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and use of deadly force.'

"In any case [Griffin goes on], in light of Zelikow's authorship of NSS 2002, it is certainly no surprise that, as I reported in 'The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions', one of the omissions is any mention of imperial interests that might have served as motives for the Bush-Cheney administration to have orchestrated the attacks of 9/11. The Zelikow-led Commission did not, for example, mention that PNAC's 'Rebuilding America's Defenses' had suggested that the transformation of the military, through which unipolarity could be enforced more effectively, could occur quickly if there were to be 'a new Pearl Harbor'; it did not mention that the administration had had plans...to attack both Afghanistan and Iraq prior to 9/11; and it did not mention that 9/11 had been described as representing 'opportunities' by Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld, and yes - NSS 2002.

"Moreover, once it is realized that Zelikow, who was in charge of the preparation of 'The 9/11 Commission Report', was also the primary author of NSS 202, in which the post-9/11 foreign policy of the Bush-Cheney administration is officially stated, it is no surprise to see that 'The 9/11 Commission Report' contains a chapter - 'What to Do? A Global Strategy' - that provides propaganda for the Bush-Cheney administration's post-9/11 foreign policy."

His summary:

"The claim in the preface of the '9/11 Commission Report' that the Commission sought to be 'independent, impartial, thorough, and nonpartisan' is absurd. The fact that the Commission was directed by Zelikow, combined with the fact that it was composed of people willing to be led by him, guaranteed that it would be none of those things."

So: Open and shut?

Not quite.

There's the little matter - as discussed on 9/11 truther sites - of the possibility of two scenarios here, besides the official 'conspiracy theory': that of MIHOP - that is, Make It Happen On Purpose, whereby the theory is that the Bush administration indeed was the instigator behind the scenes of the event; and of LIHOP - that is, Let It Happen On Purpose, whereby the theory is that the Bush administration knew about what was going down, and let it happen, to further their very clear agenda and desire for 'a new Pearl Harbor', to allow them to install a Pax Americana in the world, courtesy of a spooked American citizenry.

And I happen to be a believer in the LIHOP angle, rather than the MIHOP angle, because of the additional information about this caper dug out by some 'forensic economists' on a site called hawkscafe. Whereby the case is that some left-wing folk dun it. With the Vulcans happy to let them, in furtherance of their own ends...

Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive...


to be continued