http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MCC311A.html
Making a Case for 9/11 Skepticism by John A. McCurdy http://www.globalresearch.ca 20 November 2003 The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MCC311A.html
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Most should by now be familiar with the proposition that the administration of President George W. Bush in the United States had prior knowledge of, or was complicit in carrying out, the attacks of September 11, 2001. The proposition clearly points to the existence of a sinister and seemingly preposterous - even paranoid - conspiracy conjecture: that the basis for two years of "War on Terror," which have held the globe hostage to fear and threats of U.S. retaliation, may be a half-truth at best, or a complete fabrication at worst. The idea has appeared on the Internet to date in a thousand guises, some clearly more credible than others (why this phenomenon of virtual proliferation should surprise anyone, in a culture that now generates a 30 percent increase in information internationally and annually, begs consideration).
A diverse community of researchers, authors, activists, and believers has emerged over the last two years to advance a range of alternative understandings of how and why America was attacked on 9/11 that revolve around this core thesis. They call themselves 9/11 Skeptics and use Internet websites, e-mail, videos, books and magazines to scrutinize, advance and disseminate empirically grounded, vociferously documented, and increasingly sophisticated ideas about the real meaning of Sept. 11. For over two years now I have counted myself among their number.
Most Skeptics acknowledge that immediately something about the attacks did not sit right, defied rules of logic and credibility. Both their execution and success, as well as their immediate fallout, were suspicious in the extreme. There was the certainty, within only hours of the collapse of the Twin Towers, of the guilt of Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. There was the extensive data on the alleged hijackers, churned out by the FBI for the media only days after the attacks. There was the righteous call for a "War on Terror," one that - it turns out - had been in the works at least one year, if not four.
To date, the leading official narrative, put forward by the U.S. Government to account for the unprecedented series of airline hjiackings carried out that morning, consists in claiming American intelligence services experienced a collosal "intelligence failure," prior to the attacks, that essentially assured their success. Blame it all on intelligence "turf wars" and the conscientious constraints imposed on intelligence gathering activity and capability in the United States, explained officials in the days and weeks after the attacks.
By July 2002, official accounts of the "intelligence failure" theory had reached a level of disclosure which admitted the U.S. Government had had foreknowledge of the method of attack, along with their probable targets, their approximate timing, as well as their likely perpetrators, most of whom - Osama bin Laden included - had been under intermittent surveillance, or, as the story goes, went about their business literally under the intimate and watchful nose of FBI Informants without detection in at least two states.
The openwire publishing network of the Independent Media Center (IMC) ( http://www.indymedia.org ), an international web of grassroots alternative media sites authored by the very same activists marching against corporate-led globalization in the streets of Seattle, Washington, Quebec City and Genoa, was filled the morning of Sept. 11 with insights and conjectures that, two years later, either continue to resonate or appear to describe the fact as 9/11 Skeptics have managed to reconstruct them.
Only hours before Flight 11 collided with the North Tower of the World Trade Center, Italian journalist Francisco Monico was full of praise for the IMC. Activists were successfully using the Internet as form of "'collective intelligence,'" he wrote, breaking the media monopoly. "[F]or anyone interested in news on the G-8" summit in Genoa, Monico explained, "the virtual news world is more concrete and complete than the real one."
By 9:17 a.m. Sept. 11, fifteen minutes after Flight 175 collided with the South Tower, exploding into a ball of flame, an American had posted the following observation to the IMC newswire: "We are spoon-fed soap-opera news that is highly ... filtered ... anything that points to underlying causes dies on the cutting room floor ... Whatever comes out in the immediate future regarding today's attacks, you can be sure there's much more to the story that we won't hear."
A short time later, a direct conjecture appeared: "I REALLY THINK that this has been committed by ANGLO-SAXON interests." Later still, another:
"What will be the consequence if [remember IF ... this is entirely conjecture] we find US citizens responsible for the WTC/Pentagon attack? We all know of the economy's instability and continued downturn, and of Congress' pleas yesterday to find some way to give [it] a shot in the arm. What else has proved more historically helpful to the US economy than full-scale war? Just a little conspiracy theory for you to ponder. I realize it's unlikely, but I believe there is a small part of George W. that is enjoying this."
"That was one of my initial reactions -- CIA," another wrote in response.
Then, around 12 p.m., a piece titled "Burning of the Reichstag" appeared. "The critical historical analogy for people to bear in mind at this present time is not the 'bombing of Pearl Harbor'," the piece began, "but the Burning of the Reichstag." Adolf Hitler blamed the fire set in the Reichstag on the night February 27, 1933 (in the parliament of the German Republic) on a Communist plot against the state, historian John Merriman writes. Today, most historians agree, a member of the Prussian ministry of the interior - most likely a member of the Nazi Party - torched the Reichstag. At Hitler's insistence an emergency decree was soon passed, Merriman continues, "suspending virtually all individual rights and giving the government authority to maintain order as it saw fit."
By the 3rd of October in the United States, less than a month after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the PATRIOT Act assault on basic civil liberties had been passed, over a thousand persons had been disappeared without charges or trial, and tens of billions of government revenues had been redistributed to corporations and arms contractors. Four days later American forces were bombing Afghanistan. The morning of Sept. 11th Newt Gingrich had declared on FOX News: "You're either for the United States or for the terrorists. There is no middle ground!" Seven days later President George W. Bush repeated the same in a nationally televised address. A year later, in September 2002, the United States unveiled its new National Security Strategy. It would enshrine the unliteral American right to wage preemptive war against any nation in the name of fighting terrorism. Martial Law may not have ensued in the United States, but the basis for international law had been formally discarded.
Michael Meacher, a minister in the Blair government for six years until this past summer, proposed a Skeptic view of the attacks in The Guardian on September 6th in his landmark article "This war on terror is bogus." Meacher’s summary of aspects of the Skeptic position on 9/11 offers a useful segway for constructing a brief overview of what I call the 9/11 Complicity Counter-Narrative.
U.S. authorities "did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11," Meacher wrote. "Instructive leads prior to 9/11 were not followed up." Why was there "such a slow reaction on September 11" to the unprecented hijacking of four civilan airliners, he also asked. "It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate." Noting that "no serious attempt had ever been made to catch bin Laden," Meacher asserts that "the so-called ‘war on terrorism’ is being used largely as a bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Sept. 11, he concluded, "offered an extremely convenient pretext to put the ‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses’ Project For A New American Century [PNAC] plan, "a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana," into action, "securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project." Indeed, the PNAC plan was personally drawn up for none other than Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Jeb Bush (President Bush’s brother, Republican Governor of Florida), and Lewis Libby - the heads of the Bush 2000 team and now firmly installed in the driver’s seat at the White House.
Were such a nightmare vision of recent history empirically and rationally varifiable - and I have personally confirmed that it is - the collapse of the "War on Terror" would presumably create a domino effect - to borrow a Cold War Eisenhower analogy - bringing down not just the Bush Administration, but more generally American credibility. The international community would turn against and isolate the United States, perhaps even expel its military forces, economic advisers, spies and apologists the world over. The trajectory of recent history and of a future which the United States openly intends to dominate would be decisively opened to fresh approaches to international relations for perhaps the first time since 1945 or earlier.
I submit that the nightmare is indeed a reality........
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