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Born at the Crest of the Empire

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Let's open up the 9-11 debate - The Pentagon lied

I'm going to leave my views out for awhile, just to see what y'all think. (The survey was conducted by telephone from July 6-24 at the Scripps Survey Research Center.)
Thirty-six percent of respondents overall said it is "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that federal officials either participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or took no action to stop them "because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East."

And, just to add to the conversation, the Pentagon lied to the 9-11 commission, (in this morning's WaPo, page A03)
Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon's initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate.

Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources. Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission, hoping to hide the bungled response to the hijackings, these sources said.....

"We to this day don't know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us," said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor who led the commission. "It was just so far from the truth. . . . It's one of those loose ends that never got tied."


UPDATE: Here's the Vanity Fair article released today that spawned the WaPo piece.

16 Comments:

  • I don't think I really believe the government pulled off 9/11. It's too complex a plot and these guys couldn't get ice down to New Orleans after Katrina. I just don't see how they could have pulled it off without anybody else finding out. This is not to say that somebody in the government didn't get wind of it and decided not to stop it. That I could see happening. I have always believed that if Karl Rove knew beforehand that a major attack was coming on the US, he would use that knowledge to utmost political advantage. If that meant stopping the attack, then that's what he'd do. If that meant letting the attack happen for political advantage, then he'd have no problem with that. And I believe Rove had (and perhaps still has) that kind of influence within the administration to be able make the call on that kind of thing.

    I will say one thing I have always found strange - why did WTC 7 collapse? Having spent a lot of time at or around Ground Zero lately and knowing what the area looked like before, WTC 7 was really not near the area of impact for the other two buildings. It's across the street, WTC 5 and WTC 6 were between it and WTC 1 and did not themselves collapse, and the other two buildings around it, the US Post Office and the Verizon Building, sustained damage but nothing structurally.

    It's weird. I suppose it's possible that WTC 7 caught fire and burned most of the day and then collapsed from that. But my girlfriend and I were over at Battery Park City the other day for a Little Feat concert and when we were walking past the new WTC 7 (already completed and open), we both said, "How is it a building this far away from the other two buildings collapsed so much later after the first two came down?"

    By Blogger Reality-Based Educator, at 8:34 AM  

  • WTC 7 is the smoking gun. I drank the Kool-Aid that first day until I got home from work and watched WTC 7 fall into it's own footprint. It was a controlled demolition. I don't care if the government planned it from the start or signed off on it once it got wind of the operation. Either way we have been lied to. The justification for dozens of illegal and abhorrent actions have been predicated on 9/11. The same way that the violent racist bigotry of Israel has been allowed since they can always play the Holocaust trump card.

    I'm sick of the American Gov/Corp/Fundy Xtian pathology of murder and robbery. None of us asked to be born into this sickness but here we find ourselves.

    Is it possible for a like-minded people that take personal responsibility for their words and actions can secede from the social contract and be left in peace?

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 8:47 AM  

  • Again, I am reading these, but I'm gonna hold comment for awhile so as not to skew the opinions.

    Mike

    By Blogger mikevotes, at 9:04 AM  

  • When people are confronted by that which they cannot comprehend, they will invent myths or conspiracies to explain what is unexplainable (to them). Some people can't get their heads around evolutionary biology, so they invent Intelligent Design. Some people can't understand how WTC-7 came down so they see a conspiracy.

    I mean no disrespect, but I've found the rationalization of "I can't understand how, therefore it can't be true," to be the weakest argument one could make. But that's me.

    Politicians, hacks and general -- with their penchant for self preservation and their estrangement from truth-telling -- only feeds the appetite for the conspirist.

    By Blogger -epm, at 10:39 AM  

  • epm

    It's not ignorance, myth or the will 'not to believe' that drives rational theorists. It's being lied to that causes a rational theorist to attempt to explain physical events. It's human nature to categorize and organize the world into a meaningful construct. No matter how sophisticated or simple that system may be.

    WTC 7 looks like what most people have watched on TV and those events have been controlled demolitions. The Discovery Channel has had entire shows dedicated to the process of demolitions. From the careful weakening of load beams to the wrapping of squib charges on strategic columns and beams. Now after all that exposure on TV viewing tapes of controlled demolitions how would it seem that when watching WTC 7 falling straight down one would not rationally decide that it wasn't a controlled demolition? It seems rather irrational and 'fantastic' to believe it wasn't a controlled demolition.

    The burning of the Reichstag was a false flag op that gave final power to the Nazi's. Kristol and the Neocons weren't wanting a new 'Pearl Harbor' they wanted a new 'Reichstag Fire'. Isn't it convenient that they got what they wanted?

    Claiming that someone 'can't get their head around' an idea is fine. I'm not talking about ideas. I'm talking about facts.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 11:11 AM  

  • Perceptions are as powerful as certain knowledge. 36% is a lot of perception.
    The closest I’ve been to New York is my delightful little NY demitasse, from which I sip my espresso, and I rarely watch TV. So I’m pretty much left to read a wider canvas, not to mention a troubling one.
    What I have seen, maybe since the end of the cold war, is a lack of cohesion in US intelligence and military establishments. We have all witnessed to power plays there.
    It is, under those circumstances, all too easy to see the potential for a faction of that establishment to generate such a convenient trigger.
    Perception of course, but there is little to give confidence in the alternative scenario – that the US was simply caught be surprise.

    By Blogger Cartledge, at 12:49 PM  

  • epm, I don't think I said "I can't understand why WTC 7 fell, therefore the official version must not be true." I simply said it is odd that it collapsed the way it did as far from the area of impact as it was when WTC 5 and WTC 6 were closer to the main buildings, took a lot more debris from the falling towers, were hit by parts of the airplanes and yet were still standing. I was down in the area four days after 9/11 and I remember looking at WTC 5, which was burnt out but clearly nowhere near collapse, and saying "It's odd #5 and #6 are still up while #7 is down." Now I was looking at the scene from just off Broadway, past St. Paul's Chapel, so I didn't have a great view of Ground Zero and couldn't see where WTC 7 had been at all. Obviously I'm making no definitive claims or theories other than "Gee, that seemed odd."

    Who knows? Odd things happen in the world - just look at a platypus. But one thing you have to admit - when you're dealing with lying, thieving scumbags like the people in the current administration, you can see why you might want to be suspicious of anything they say or do.

    By Blogger Reality-Based Educator, at 1:47 PM  

  • FWIW, my initial comments were general observations and not meant to address any individual in this thread. Rebuttal is unnecessary.

    If anything I was addressing the nameless "thirty-six percent of respondents overall said it is "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that federal officials either participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or took no action to stop them"

    By Blogger -epm, at 2:02 PM  

  • I have no problem believing 9/11 was engineered to advance the PNAC plan. These thugs in power are the same ones that engineered Iran-Contra and black ops are their speciality. I've seen countless programs on controlled demolition and one can hardly deny that the similarities are evident in NY. The lack of debris at the Pentagon, the shape of the hole in the building, the lack of debris in that field in PA as well. They didn't fit the pattern of regular plane crashes. Why weren't the black boxes recovered when they miraculously found an intact passport of one of the hijackers? And where were the bodies in that field? Which brings us to the sticking point in the conspiracy theories.

    It's not that hard to believe a handful of players could have engineered the whole thing in terms of the destruction, but what happened to the passengers on that PA flight? If you watch that program the 4400, it's not that difficult to imagine them being spirited away to the same kind of hole in a mountain they hide the DARPA program in but that's a hard sell for the ordinary Jake. No one wants to believe our government would disappear Americans.

    Too many unanswered questions and I believe it's entirely possible it was an elaborate black ops but I don't think anyone will ever be able to prove it.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 4:51 PM  

  • Again, I'm staying hands off for awhile longer.

    Mike

    By Blogger mikevotes, at 5:22 PM  

  • Okay, here goes:
    WTC 7 owner Larry Silverstein said they pulled #7 (demolition speak for a controlled demo-they pull the outer walls inward, causing it to collapse into it's own footprint)because the fire damage on the top two floors was too extensive. In order for them to be able to do it on that day, the building would have had to have been wired prior to the attacks.
    Radio messages from firefighters who reached the crash impact area on #2 reported the fires were under control, no raging inferno present. The designer of the towers has stated that the building was built to withstand an aircraft flying into it, that if one did, it would be like poking a pencil through a screen. The towers had to be built to be able to withstand forces greater than the impact because of their height and wind velocity factors at such an altitude.
    John Ashcroft was pulled from civilian aircraft flights in July 2001.
    In March 2001, we had told overseas allies we intended on invading Afghanistan.
    SOP in a highjacking is for the FAA to try to raise the cockpit. Once it has been determined a plane has been highjacked, fighter jets are scrambled immediately to intercept the highjacked plane to force it to land, but NORAD didn't scramble jets right away. In Norman Mineta's testimony before the 9/11 comission he told of how he was with Cheney that day, and an aide kept coming in and briefing the VP about the plane that eventually crashed into the Pentagon."It's twenty minutes out", "It's fifteen minutes out", until finally, at five minutes out, the aide asks the VP "Does the order still stand?"
    When George W was at Booker elementary, the secret service did not immediately move the president to safety, as is their job. They left him in full view in a classroom full of children at a school eleven minutes from an airport while his presense there had been on the White House website for the previous four days. How did they know that Bush wasn't a target?
    The debris field from flight 93 was eight miles long and more consistent with a mid air explosion than a crash into the ground.
    PDB, Aug. 6, 2001-Bin Laden determined to strike in US.
    Sibel Edmonds, whistle blower, has been silenced by the government for what she found listening to and interpreting tapes.
    I copuld sit here all night and bring out evidence that makes me think that the government was in someway involved, but unless a person is willing to accept it with an open mind, it's really a moot point.

    By Blogger Lew Scannon, at 7:40 PM  

  • Great comments. I think I'm gonna wait a full 24 hours and comment tomorrow.

    Mike

    By Blogger mikevotes, at 9:24 PM  

  • The cult surrounding conspiracy theories have always fascinated me. Regardless of what becomes known there is always unexplained events that take on an exaggerated importance. Whether it is the JFK assassination, UFO sightings, faked Moon landings or Yetis trampling through the forests, no amount of evidence will disprove preconceived notions.

    Common sense suggests to me that 1) this government is so inept that no group could have pulled off such a grand conspiracy, 2) faced with such embarrassment, they covered up their own incompetence and 3) these events will be heatedly debated as long as humankind lives on this planet.

    The only ones who will profit will be those opportunists who will perpetuate this cottage industry.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 11:18 PM  

  • I saw "Loose Change" recently and I found one thing stood out for me...to make me stop short of swallowing it. It all seemed feasible enough as it was...but when they spoke of the hijackers that were indeed alive...Atta being one of them...it struck me as odd that they didn't prove it be filming them talking on camera. They even said what they were doing and where they were living. All they had to do was go find them and interview them on camera and they would have made a believer out of me.

    By Blogger sumo, at 4:05 AM  

  • Okay. My opinion. This is not intended to be thr right or wrong of the matter, just where I stand.

    I do not believe that 9-11 was a government conspiracy. I just don't se how such a thing could be pulled off without somebody talking or letting something slip.

    However, I do agree that WTC 7 is highly suspect. I find it plausible that it was brought down. No backing, but, after the 1993 WTC bombing, it became clear that the goal was to topple one of the towers so that it would fall taking out may other buildings and causing great damage. Off of that, since the WTC complex was a oft mentioned target, it would not surprise me if some sort of demolitions mechanisms were put in place. It makes sense. So WTC7 could have been brought down. I view that as a possibility.

    Now, on to the bigger point, I do believe it's possible that there was some prior knowledge floating around, although at what level of the beareaucracy, and at what level of creedence, I don't know. One of the smoking guns of this is the outsized short sale trades on the airline stocks that were never claimed. The investigation on that more or less just disappeared, but I find it impossible to believe that any brokerage house would take such a position without some sort of identification being left. Even if it came through a numbered account somewhere, after 9-11 the US had the world support to break all bank secrecy provisions. So, somebody knew it was coming, as to who, that's still very unclear.

    My belief is that there has been a coverup of this and some other points in the official story. This doesn't mean that the short seller was Don Rumsfeld, for instance. It could've been an Israeli, or Ghorbanifar, or a Saudi, whose prior knowledge would've been problematic for the US as it could've added another villian to the piece.


    There are a bunch more points like the actions of the Pakistani ISI chief and some of the details on flight 93 that I think have been cleaned up in the official version of the story. Personally, I don't believe that the White House organized 9-11, but I do believe that there were efforts to cover up some elements.

    Just my opinion. I'm not judging anyone's opinion on this one though, becuase I have actually dug through alot of the problematic evidence, and I do think there's enough discrepancy to warrant questions. As to how far those questions go and what they imply, I don't know. At this point I think it's still a matter of belief.

    And, I should've included the huge 9-11 timeline link. If you want a starting point for questions, this is probably a great place to start.

    http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/project.jsp?project=911_project

    Mike

    By Blogger mikevotes, at 12:53 PM  

  • By Blogger Unknown, at 9:00 PM  

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