The 12 year anniversary of that dreadful day is coming up and it is safe to predict that we will be treated to a number of patriotic speeches which will emphasize the strength and resilience of the American people in the face of terror. The media will dutifully extensively report on these happenings, but judging by precedent, they will also studiously avoid reporting on meetings held by concerned citizens who find themselves unable to believe the official government version of events. These will take place in a number of cities around the country, including one in Virginia, literally overlooking the Pentagon.

           The location is symbolic because, as will be discussed later, the Pentagon attack is a crucial link to understanding what really happened on 9/11. The government insists that the 19 hijackers under the command of Osama bin-Laden and Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) were the sole responsible agents for all that happened, and this version is now enshrined in the “ National September 11 Memorial and Museum” on the site of the former Twin Towers. Nevertheless, there are several books from reputable persons which point out that the complexity of the 9/11 events is of an order of magnitude which is beyond the capability of any outside group such as al Qaida.

I have previously discussed Thierry Meyssan’s book 9/11 The Big Lie, which already raised serious questions about the government’s version of the events in 2002 (The 9/11 Truth Movement, June 1, 2012). His observations were supported in the following year by Andreas von Bülow, a former member of the German Bundestag as well as Secretary of Defense and subsequently for Technology and Research. In Die CIA und der 11. September – Internationaler Terror und die Rolle der Geheimdienste, he pointed out that 9/11 cannot be understood simply as the action of some fanatic Muslims. Members of various secret service intelligence organizations must have acted as enablers.

While the official version, contained in The 9/11 Commission Report,  insisted that the success of the hijackers was due to the government having failed to “connect the dots,” as a result of interagency rivalries, Kevin Fenton, who carefully studied all the relevant open source material, came to a different conclusion. In Disconnecting the Dots – How CIA and FBI officials helped enable 9/11 and evade government investigations he pointed out that information, which would have thwarted the impending hijacking was deliberately, rather than accidentally, withheld from the FBI and that there was also a disconnect within the FBI between the field agents and their superiors. He concluded “…there are major flaws in The 9/11 Commission Report, the 9/11 Congressional Inquiry report, the Justice Department’s Inspector General’s report and the CIA Inspector General’s report. The only way that this issue will ever be satisfactorily resolved is by a new, credible investigation.” It needs to be pointed out that these four reports are the only official documents the government has ever produced to explain the success of the hijack operations and thereby justified the notion of “intelligence failure.” This was to have been corrected by the establishment of a new bureaucracy and the appointment of a National Director of Intelligence.

The idea of “intelligence failure,” and its remedy, was thoroughly debunked by Paul R. Pillar who had served for decades in senior government intelligence positions and who is currently a professor in the Security Studies Program of Georgetown University. In his book Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy – Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform he made the point that it was not the intelligence community which failed, but that information was created to provide the justification for the government’s foreign policy. Although he concentrated especially on the Iraq invasion, the deliberate deceptions in The 9/11 Commission Report were also highlighted. The remedy, as far as Pillar is concerned, is not more bureaucracy, but government policies need to change. Currently foreign policy is politicized and “The narrow focus toward reform–extremely narrow in the case of fixation on the intelligence community’s organization chart–has missed most of the images that shape policy and most of the reasons those images are often flawed.” These images are provided via “think tanks” to the media, and are in essence nothing else but propaganda efforts by groups to get their agenda enacted.

The most glaring example of manufacturing “intelligence” was the Office of Special Plans (OSP) in the Pentagon. It existed officially from September 2002 to June 2003 and was created by then Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and headed by Douglas Feith. Its purpose was to provide links of Saddam Hussein to 9/11 and thereby a pretext for the Iraq invasion which the official intelligence community failed to come up with. The operation was “Top secret” and Feith reported directly to “Scooter” Libby in Vice-President Cheney’s office.

A small group of neoconservative Zionists needed the elimination of Saddam Hussein as Israel’s most dangerous enemy. Intelligence, from unreliable sources, including Ahmed Chalabi (The Niger Forgery, August 1, 2003), was slanted and presented to Cheney to provide the needed pretext for the Iraq invasion. Everybody in the intelligence community knew that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11 but the American people had to be made to believe otherwise for the war to occur. The fact that this unprovoked aggression was a crime under international law, ever since the Nuremberg trials, did not matter.   Details can be found in Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker article, “The Stovepipe” http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/10/27/031027fa_fact  and James Bamford’s A Pretext for War – 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies.

It is, therefore, obvious that if we want to understand 9/11 we cannot simply focus on bin-Laden and Muslim fanatics but we also have to study the perceived needs of the Israeli government and the political forces which drive its leadership. Since this is what has been called “the third rail” of American politics, which must not be touched, and which receives practically no media attention, one has to be very careful not only in one’s choice of words but also in presenting whatever facts are available. One fundamental fact is that the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 has profoundly changed the power constellation in the Middle East. Herzl, its ideological founding father, knew that a Jewish state could not exist in the Muslim world without the backing of a foreign power. He had initially hoped that it would be Germany, but during WWI Zionists settled for the U.K. When the Brits had second thoughts about the wisdom of the enterprise they were made to yield through terror tactics (Bowyer Bell Terror out of Zion – The Fight for Israeli Independence), and the patronage was bestowed on America. President Truman was the first to recognize the country and by small steps Israel advanced from a friendly state, which could still be made to accede to America’s wishes by Eisenhower, to our most important ally in the region whose foreign policy goals have now become identified with ours.

The Ben-Gurion government, as well as all subsequent ones, never defined Israel’s borders and never produced a codified Constitution which would ensure equal rights to religious and ethnic minorities. The wars of independence from 1947-1949 created the Naqba, the forcible expulsion of Arabs from their homes and confiscation of their property, with the resulting Palestinian refugee problem. From the Zionist point of view which desired, and to some extent still desires, a Greater Israel on both sides of the Jordan, the absence of internationally accepted borders, of a codified Constitution and expulsion of Arabs was, of course, a means to an end and these fundamental factors are still operative today. The assumption was and still is that Palestinians, who have no power, are irrelevant.

Palestinians on the other hand didn’t see it this way. After the 1967 war the West Bank and East Jerusalem were de facto annexed by Israel, and when King Hussein of Jordan declared himself uninterested in the West Bank, its Muslim and Christian inhabitants became stateless. Since the rest of the world likewise did not care about the Palestinians’ problem some of them resorted to the only means available to attract attention – terrorism. There was the Israeli athletes’ hostage taking and their subsequent murder during the failed rescue attempt at the Munich Olympics. This was followed by several plane hijackings with the most spectacular one of Air France 139, which resulted in the raid on Entebbe airport. It led to the death of its Israeli commander, Jonathan Netanyahu, the brother of the current Prime Minister. In his memory the Netanyahu family founded the Jonathan Institute which from July 2-5, 1979 sponsored a “Conference on International Terrorism,” at the Jerusalem Hilton Hotel. It was the blueprint for what became America’s “War on Terrorism” after 9/11.     

The Conference proceedings were published by Benjamin Netanyahu in 1981 under the title International Terrorism – Challenges and Response. I strongly recommend to readers of this article that they study this important document. It is readily available on Amazon.com and lays out the strategy which the world community was urged to employ to meet a supposed universal threat. The language of the Israeli participants, largely echoed by other speakers, became that of President George W. Bush on the evening of September 11, 2001 when he declared that we shall make no difference between terrorists and states that harbor them. The underlying theme of the Conference organizers and their like-minded participants was: Terrorists, of whatever stripe, but especially the Soviet Union and the PLO, have declared war on all democracies and it therefore behooves the world to act in unison in the defense of the free world. The Conference’s goal was a call to arms. “There is no room for compromise. If free society does not awaken to the danger, that danger will threaten its very existence.” “Our main problem: The climate of Appeasement” was the title of Lord Chalfont’s presentation. In it he chastised journalists who did not refer to terrorists by that name and regarded it as Orwellian “newspeak” when they were referred to as “commandos, urban guerillas, or even ‘freedom fighters.’” He also urged that “the democratic countries of the world must act with great deal more courage, resolution, and even ruthlessness [emphasis added], than they have shown in the past.” It was a call to war with only a few dissenting voices from Europe and Canada who insisted that these acts need to be regarded as crimes.

The irony that some of the Israeli participants had officially been labeled terrorists by the British prior to 1948 seems to have eluded the attendees. For instance when then Prime Minister Begin talked about “Freedom Fighters and Terrorists” he excused the tactics which created the state of Israel with the statement that it was a “… fight for physical survival. That was the fight we, the Jews, conducted in the country historically known as Eretz Israel or the land of Israel since the days of the Prophet Samuel.” That the area was known as Palestine for the past 2000 years was not to be remembered.

The conference proceedings are a superb example of propaganda which eventually bore fruit. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the war advocates immediately shifted their attention to the Arab states in the Middle East. In 1996 a group of neoconservative American Zionists prepared a position paper for the newly elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu entitled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” I have briefly  mentioned it in the April 1, 2003 article (The Neocons’ Leviathan) and pointed out that not only did it urge the abrogation of the Oslo accords but also pushed for regime change in Iraq, Syria and Iran as well as a missile defense system. Furthermore,

To anticipate U.S. reactions and plan ways to manage and constrain those reactions, Prime Minister Netanyahu can formulate the policies and stress themes he favors in language familiar to the Americans by tapping into themes of American administrations during the Cold War which apply well to Israel. If Israel wants to test certain propositions that require a benign American reaction, then the best time would be before November 1996 [U.S. presidential elections].

The chief architect was Richard Perle who after 9/11 became one of the driving forces for the war against Iraq and among the co-signers was the already mentioned Douglas Feith. http://www.iasps.org/strat1.htm. 

Their efforts did not stop with advice to Netanyahu. The same group, on an enlarged basis, created a think tank in 1997 under the name “Project for the New American Century [PNAC],” which urged increased military spending to make the U.S. the unrivaled global power for the 21^st century. Any perceived threat should be met in a “preemptive manner” by overwhelming military force, with allies when available without them when not, and democracy was to be spread throughout the world. (December 1, 2005 (Albert Wohlstetter’s Disciples). In September 2000 PNAC published an extensive Position paper, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses.” It outlined in detail what military and political steps the U.S. should take in order to enact the 1997 recommendations and also pointed out that the suggested “transformation strategy” should be carried out “in a manner so as not to unduly alarm America’s allies.” “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”  http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf.

These ideas found no fertile ground in the Clinton administration but with the appointment of President Bush by the Supreme Court the entire neocon group became the dominant voice. Some of the signatories of the 1997 document like: Elliott Abrams, PaulWolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Zalmay Khalizad, I. Lewis Libby and Donald Rumsfeld moved into government positions, while others lent a helping hand with the media. It, therefore, should surprise no one that the positions advocated by this group became official policy as the “Bush doctrine” on the very day of 9/11 and the catastrophe was promptly called the “New Pearl Harbor.”

Although there have always been lingering doubts about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor having been entirely unforeseen, the majority of Americans still believe that it was an unprovoked surprise attack. But Robert Stinnett has recently done his best to put this myth to rest in Day of Deceit – The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor, which was published in 2000. His diligent search of documents, aided by the Freedom of Information Act, produced a key position paper by Lt. Commander Arthur H. McCollum, dated October 7, 1940, which detailed a proposed American Strategy towards Japan. The main aspects were: Japan was to be deprived of all natural resources, not only by the U.S. but also the U.K. and the Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia). China’s Chiang Kai-shek was to be logistically supported in his war against Japan, heavy cruisers and submarines were to be deployed in the Orient and the Pacific fleet was to be kept permanently in the vicinity of the Hawaiian Islands. Since Japan has no natural resources of its own it was felt that the economic measures would force it to go to war.

The memorandum was immediately sent to President Roosevelt, who over the coming year implemented all of its measures. Keeping the fleet in Hawaii was bitterly opposed by the Navy because its exposed position was regarded as dangerous and Admiral James O. Richardson urged it be returned to its home port in San Diego. He was overruled by FDR, relieved of his command, and replaced by Rear Admiral Husband S. Kimmel who also was promoted to full admiral. Roosevelt knew that sooner or later America would have to join the British in their fight against Hitler, but the country was vigorously opposed to entering the war. This is why the Japanese strategy was employed as a “backdoor” approach. Japan had to be maneuvered into firing the first shot. The attack did not come as a surprise to the Roosevelt administration because the U.S. had broken not only Japan’s diplomatic code but also that used by the navy. FDR was at all times fully aware of Japan’s activities. By November 1941 it was obvious that war was imminent but Admiral Kimmel and General Short, who were in charge of the defense of Pearl Harbor, were not included in the distribution of critical information. The fleet was sacrificed for the greater good: the defeat of Germany, Italy and Japan.

Stinnet concludes the book by stating that the moral justification for provoking Japan to go to war will be argued for years to come, but Roosevelt “must be viewed in the total context of his administration, not just Pearl Harbor.” In view of the “new Pearl Harbor” the following sentences deserve to be taken to heart.

The real shame is on the stewards of government who have kept the truth under lock and key for fifty years. It may have been necessary for wartime security to withhold the truth about Pearl Harbor until the war ended, but to do so for more than half a century grossly distorted the world’s view of American history. … Because they [cryptographers, interceptors, other military leaders and witnesses] were never called to testify for their country, we have been denied a full account of what happened from their perspective.

It is, therefore, clear that the American people have been deceived for decades about the full truth of December 7, 1941 and it is equally clear that we have not been told the full truth about September 11, 2001. I can say this with confidence because the Bush administration, instead of immediately calling for a full inquiry into this massive crime, first obstructed the Joint Inquiry by the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, and subsequently the establishment as well as the work of The 9/11 Commission (The 9/11 Cover-up, October 1, 2006). There has never been a full and impartial investigation and those members of our society who call for it are maligned as conspiracy theorists, and whistleblowers are persecuted. This bodes ill for the future of our country.

While one can understand the government’s motive to shield itself, it is more difficult to fathom why some obviously intelligent and thoughtful British writers would pour scorn on those who regard the government’s explanations as inadequate. Summers and Swan have recently published a magisterial tome of over 500 pages The Eleventh Day – The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin-Laden which, although faulting the Bush administration for having hidden the potential culpability of the Saudi and Pakistani secret services, gives full credence to the explanation of the destruction of the WTC, the damage to the Pentagon, and the fate of UA93. When one studies this book it becomes obvious that selective reading was involved in its genesis and that in some instances the wish to exonerate the Bush administration overcame reason. One example is the treatment of the attack on the Pentagon. The authors document that Hani Hanjour, the purported hijacker of AA77 which was supposed to have inflicted the damage, was a terrible pilot. But on the same page he is credited with having performed a manoeuver which military pilots stated they could not have performed (see Pilots for 9/11 Truth). Although Barbara Honegger, a former senior Military Affairs Journalist with the Naval Postgraduate School, has spent years on elucidating what happened at the Pentagon her work was not mentioned and the name appears only in an endnote as one of reputable persons who take issue with the government’s account in regard to the WTC.

The Pentagon attack has always taken a back seat in favor of the dramatic Twin Towers destruction but as Ms. Honegger points out it was the crucial aspect needed to turn a crime into a war. A destruction of private property, regardless of scale, might not have been sufficient but an attack on the country’s foremost military installation surely was. This was the second Pearl Harbor!

I have previously discussed why the government’s explanation is untenable (The 9/11 Cover-Up, October 1, 2006; 9/11 Remembered, October 1, 2011; The 9/11 Truth Movement, June 1 2012; The “Truthers,” July 1, 2012; Attempts at Raising 9/11 Awareness, August 1, 2012; The Vancouver 9/11 Hearings, September 1, 2012) and will, therefore, add only a few examples of misleading information by Summers and Swan. The authors mention that April Gallop, an Army information management specialist, had brought her baby boy to work because the baby-sitter was sick and that “After the plane hit, and waist deep in debris, she was horrified to see that the infant’s stroller was on fire–and empty. She found the baby, however, curled up in the wreckage and virtually unscathed, and both were rescued.”

Honegger had interviewed Gallop, who under oath provided a different version. Gallop stated that when she turned on her computer, rather than “after the plane hit,” a massive explosion occurred. Furthermore, she was not in the area of the plane impact but more than 100 feet to the north, in Wedge 2. She also smelled cordite and thought that a bomb had gone off. “Being in the Army with the training I had, I know what a bomb sounds and acts like, especially the aftermath, and it sounded and acted like a bomb…. There was no plane or plane parts inside the building, and no smell of jet fuel.”  Finally this event did not occur at 9:37, which is the official time for the plane impact, but Gallop’s wristwatch had stopped at 9:30 or just thereafter. That a major destructive event had occurred between 9:31 and 9:32 is also apparent from the stopped clock on the heliport firehouse, as well as an additional one from inside the Pentagon. Since these early times are indisputable, the 9:37 plane impact could not have been the only event.

Summers and Swan must have known this but they failed to report on it in their “Full  Story.” They also knew about Meyssan’s book but did not mention that he had quoted an important CNN interview on September 15, 2001 with Egypt’s then President Mubarak.

You remember Oklahoma… there came rumors immediately that the Arabs did it, and it was not Arabs, who knows… let us wait and see what is the result of the investigations, because something like this not an easy thing for some pilots who had been training in Florida, so many pilots go and train just to fly and have a license, that means you are capable to do such terrorist action? I am speaking as a former pilot, I know that very well, I flew very heavy planes, I flew fighters, I know that very well, this is not an easy thing, so I think we should not jump to conclusions for now.

Although Summers and Swan had mentioned Mubarak on several occasions in regard to pre 9/11 intelligence reports, the omission of this interview practically amounts to deception. The authors also used the tactic employed earlier in The 9/11 Commission Report of putting material which does not quite fit the version to be propagated, into the endnotes where readers usually don’t look. As all of us know the anticipated investigation Mubarak alluded to never took place.

As far as the Pentagon is concerned other eyewitnesses also stated that bombs had gone off at different times in various sections of the building including the innermost A and B rings which are far distant from the supposed “exit hole” in the C ring. High level military officers likewise stated that they had smelled cordite rather than jet fuel. In addition one needs to know that the section of the Pentagon, which the government states was hit from the outside, had recently been reinforced to withstand such terrorist attacks. It was used by military intelligence personnel who were trying to track $ 2.3 trillion which Secretary Rumsfeld had declared as missing only the previous day, September 10. Important financial records also disappeared in the destruction of the Twin Towers and WTC7 which included offices of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Crucial records for uncovering illegal financial operations were thereby lost. None of this critical information is mentioned in official reports or in Summers and Swan’s book. An extensive exposition of Honegger’s work exists on a DVD “Behind the Smoke Curtain – What happened at The Pentagon on 9/11, and What Didn’t, and Why it Matters,” which can also be seen on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fvJ8nFa5Qk and a summary is available in The 9/11 Toronto Report.

I have previously discussed the Toronto 9/11 Hearings (Attempts at Raising 9/11 Awareness, August 1, 21012), which were held from September 8-11, 2011 at Ryerson University, and the Proceedings are now available Amazon.com in the above mentioned Report. This book is currently the best account of the numerous questions the 9/11 Commission has left us with and it deserves the widest circulation. It also includes the comments by the four panelists who assessed whether or not the various speakers had indeed shown that a prima facie case exists, which demands a full inquiry by a duly constituted legal body with subpoena powers. Although one panelist felt that not enough evidence in favor of the government’s view had been presented, what was shown did create serious doubts in regard to the veracity of the government’s explanation. It was agreed that a crime had been committed which has never been properly investigated. As Italy’s former Supreme Court Justice, Ferdinando Imposito, stated

In case of inert behavior of the State, which has the duty to punish the culprits, it is possible to access the International Criminal Court, which has jurisdiction complementary to national criminal prosecutions. In 9/11, we have 1) Crimes against humanity committed as part of the widespread attack directed against the USA and civilians of other States; and 2) The case has not been investigated or prosecuted in the USA or any other country that has jurisdiction over it. The only possibility to have justice is to submit the best evidence concerning the involvement in 9/11 of specific individuals to the ICC [International Criminal Court] Prosecutor and ask him to investigate ….

Judge Imposito then listed the relevant statutes under which this could be done. If one were now to object that Osama bin-Laden was the guilty party and by killing him “justice was served,” as President Obama declared, we have to answer that civilized societies do not execute their adversaries without a proper trial. The same applies to KSM who likewise never had a public trial in criminal court. He is still in Guantanamo under military detention and the full transcript of a trial has never been made public. Since his “confession,” not only for 9/11 but a whole host of other terrorist acts, had been elicited by torture it would not be admissible in a public criminal court of law.

Inasmuch as the U.S. is not a signatory to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court it could ignore its proceedings, if the case were ever brought before it. Nevertheless, indictments would send a powerful message that U.S. citizens, regardless of their status, are not above the law of civilized countries and their conduct can be censured. Why is this important? The “new Pearl Harbor” succeeded in promoting the goals of a small fraction of neoconservative Zionists. Israeli security has become fully identified with American security and attacks against Israel have become attacks against America. The Netanyahu sponsored 1979 conference goals were achieved via 9/11. Since “Pearl Harbor” appears to have worked twice for a powerful insider group, if we do nothing now a third one is virtually guaranteed.

While the role of some members of government members in the perpetration of 9/11 remains unclear, that an ongoing cover-up exists is obvious. We must remember Watergate. It was not necessarily the burglary which cost Nixon the presidency, but the subsequent cover-up. “I am not a crook” he told us on TV because “when the president does it, it’s legal.” This holds for authoritarian states but cannot be condoned in a republic. Covering up malfeasance is a crime and this crime also needs to be investigated by a special prosecutor.

Unless our country comes to grips with these fundamental aspects of 9/11 we will go from war to war and disaster to disaster. This is also exemplified by the current drive to “punish Syria.” The planned military action makes no sense from an American point of view, but the destruction of the Syria-Iran axis has been a long standing goal of Israel, as documented by Israel Shahak in his book Open Secrets – Israeli Nuclear and Foreign Policies, which was in part discussed on August 15, 2002 (The Impending War with Iran). Only when we begin to listen to authentic Israeli voices who disagree with their government’s policies and those of America’s neoconservative Zionists will there be a possibility for a more peaceful future.

The War on Terror and “national security” will continue to be the pretext for increased secrecy and erosion of civil liberties. This is why the people of our country have to rise from their lethargy and demand government accountability. We need an international impartial investigation of all the 9/11 events and a special prosecutor who deals with the subsequent cover-up. This is the only way to save our democracy and regain the trust of the world.