Muristek
CAROL M. HIGHSMITH COLLECTION/LIBRARY OF CONGRESSThis aerial view of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center was taken two months before the 9/11 tragedy.
Back in the late 1960s, anybody who dared say out loud that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by anyone other than “lone nut” Lee Harvey Oswald was dubbed a “conspiracy theorist.”
In fact, it was the CIA which, in 1967, invented the term “conspiracy theorist,” specifically tailored to ridicule anyone who found fault with the since then disgraced whitewash published by the Warren Commission, as stage-managed by Allen Dulles, the agency’s former director who was fired (along with his top two lieutenants) by JFK after the CIA’s Cuba invasion debacle at the Bay of Pigs severely embarrassed his administration, bankrupted our country’s credibility and led to the Cuban Missile Crisis, which almost resulted in a nuclear war with Russia.
Journalists ever since have had to endure being pegged “conspiracy theorists” (an overused cliché) when investigating anything that irks the powers-that-be and questions the “accepted” narrative.
If readers of this column have learned anything, we hope it is this:
1) Always question authority. Never believe those who govern you — and that includes the mainstream narrative emanating from corporate America via conglomerated (non-independent) mass media.
2) If the powers that be accuse you of being a “conspiracy theorist,” you are probably on the right track, meaning, time to triple your efforts to get at the truth.
Which brings us to 9/11, a national tragedy that took 2,977 lives almost 21 years ago.
Anyone who questions the official narrative of 9/11 is immediately made to walk the plank aboard a ship of fools to Narragonia, as were those who in the 1960s into the 1970s so valiantly strove to uncover the truth about who murdered JFK.
But as with many murky doings that are so quickly oversimplified for public consumption, many questions persist about 9/11 — and they continue, 21 years later, to be fought over in court by families who lost loved ones in that attack.
What the powers-that-be count on, as with JFK’s brutal murder, is that life moves on and most folks are consumed with their kids’ soccer games, what cable TV series to binge on this weekend, keeping up with credit card bills and sleight of hand attention-getting diversions such as critical race theory, woke and transgenderism. Those who have time to care and ask questions about what truly matters are marginalized and mocked.
Mainstream reporters cover 9/11 memorials but ignore academic studies and legal proceedings that endeavor to uncover the truth.
This is nothing new. It has always been that way. Napoleon called history “Lies, agreed upon.”
A new book by British author David Gardner titled “9/11 The Conspiracy Theories” endeavors to assess facts and theories, sensibly separating the two.
Writes Mr. Gardner: “The 9/11 families have long complained that nobody has connected the dots for them to satisfactorily explain the lead-up to the attacks. It partly explains why so many of them — 6,000 family members of those who were killed and survivors of the attacks — are still involved in two lawsuits, the biggest in U.S. history, seeking to prove Saudi Arabia’s complicity in the plot.”
The 9/11 Commission, for instance, determined there was no support network for terrorists inside the United States.
Nothing could be further from the truth, according to FBI special agents whose memos about plotting terrorists were ignored by superiors. As early as February 2000, G-men uncovered Saudi connections through the King Fahad Mosque in Culver City, proven by phone and financial records. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudis — along with Osama bin Laden himself.
A Saudi diplomat who served at the Saudi embassy in Washington, D.C., from 1999 to 2000 is now known to have supported the 9/11 hijackers. Musaed Ahmed al-Jarrah was accidentally outed by the FBI in a 2020 court filing. (Elsewhere in the document, his name was redacted).
During his D.C. tenure, al-Jarrah posted a cleric named Farhad Al Thumairy to a mosque in Los Angeles, where he was tasked with aiding two of the hijackers.
In addition to redacting names of Saudis implicated in 9/11, the FBI (whose credibility is hugely in doubt of late) routinely seeks and obtains protective orders for Saudis who are deposed in the lawsuits filed by 9/11 victims, ensuring that their answers under oath remain sealed from the public.
Ask yourself, what is the FBI, the government — our servants (supposedly) — still trying to hide from us after two decades?
COVER UP
In fact, our government has done everything within its power to shield Saudi Arabia from any blame for 9/11, largely due to an intelligence relationship between the Saudis and the CIA that was especially strong under both Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.
Mr. Gardner is not suggesting that both Bush administrations and the House of Saud were somehow complicit in a conspiracy to make 9/11 happen. On the contrary, he points to failure and cover-up — and his book makes an impressive case on both counts.
Robert Kupperman was one of the earliest pioneers of terrorism studies. Sitting at his desk at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in 1987, Dr. Kupperman penned a manuscript about what would happen if the U.S. government did not pay proper attention to state-sponsored terrorism and terrorists. As Dr. Kupperman’s literary agent, I sold his manuscript to Doubleday & Co., which published the book in 1989.
Title: “Final Warning.”
That’s exactly what it was.
Everyone got warned. Everyone in our nation’s capital knew way back then. But Dr. Kupperman’s warning about “how to avert disaster in the new age of terrorism” went unheeded, even though it was proffered by a respected Washington insider who most certainly knew his stuff.
There is no question, when all is said and done, that 9/11 was the biggest intelligence failure in U.S. history (despite the gargantuan budgets afforded to 16 federal intelligence agencies), not least because of an almost total lack of cooperation between the CIA and the FBI.
“While here,” FBI Director Bobby “Three Sticks” Mueller lied point blank to a congressional joint intelligence Inquiry, “the hijackers effectively operated without suspicion, triggering nothing that alerted law enforcement.”
In other words, the national security establishment of official Washington, following Mr. Mueller’s example, circled its wagons to cover up a dereliction of their duties and the disastrous collective ineptitude they had all (Republicans and Democrats) presided over.
In fact, pre-9/11, the CIA was running its own illegal domestic operation without the FBI’s knowledge in the (unrealized) hope of recruiting (instead of arresting, as the FBI would have done) a pair of 9/11 terrorists crucial to the terrorist mission.
It is believed that if Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar had been apprehended, the 9/11 plot would have been disrupted enough to ensure that those fateful flights could not have been hijacked. Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were among five Saudis who hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon.
Thereafter, the Bush White House, shocked and flustered by the intelligence community’s screw-up and its potential ramifications, commenced a colossal cover-up out of their concern that such a revelation could result in a) the dismantling of the CIA for running an illegal operation that resulted in catastrophe and b) demands that Mr. Bush resign as President.
RANCID BALONEY
The lies would continue, leading to CIA Director George Tenet’s big whopper, probably contrived to remove attention from his own leadership inadequacies: It was a “slam dunk,” he told President Bush, that Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction.”
We, of course, now know this pronouncement was nothing more than a pound of rancid baloney. Yet it resulted in the invasion of Iraq. Never mind that our “intelligence” community possessed zero evidence Baghdad was in any way responsible for 9/11.
President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and the neo-cons within that administration wanted, one way another, to find an excuse to put an end to Saddam Hussein. And this was as good an excuse as any because, simultaneously, it would muddy their 9/11 bungling and protect their own backsides, at this expense: The unjustified invasion of Iraq cost 4,431 American lives; 31,994 more servicemen were wounded in action. Few, if any, of these casualties were the sons and daughters of Washington insiders.
And what else did they do?
They enacted the Patriot Act, which ever since has infringed upon the liberty and freedoms of American citizens. Which means that all of us got “slam-dunked” due to the serious shortcomings and lack of accountability from those we counted upon to lead us and keep us safe.
And it wasn’t just the Bush White House that found it necessary to run for cover.
Acting as former President Bill Clinton’s designated representative, former Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger blatantly stole documents from the National Archives during the four visits he paid to that institution between May 2002 and October 2003. Does anyone remember the subject of the documents Mr. Berger desired to remove from the record and destroy? They all dealt with what the Clinton administration knew about Osama bin Laden’s plans — and did nothing about.
Some of these documents were returned to the archives after Mr. Berger got caught red-handed. But when a congressional committee investigated “Sandy Berger’s Theft of Classified Documents,” staffers discovered that “because Berger was provided with so many original documents, there is no way to ever know if the 9/11 Commission received all required materials.”
Counterterrorism Czar Richard Clark, who served Presidents Clinton and Bush and whose warnings about Osama bin Laden were repeatedly ignored, told the 9/11 Commission: “Your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you, and I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn’t matter, because we failed.”
(Is it any surprise that Mr. Clarke’s office files were those Mr. Berger sought to eradicate? Specifically, a 15-page report Mr. Clarke produced in 2020 after being asked for a review of White House efforts to respond to the terrorist threat. It must have been a doozy of a document: Before walking out of the building, Mr. Berger stuffed the original and two copies into his pants and socks.)
Mr. Clarke’s admonishment did not prevent a slew of well-paid memoirs by Washington insiders — the same insiders who indeed failed and failed miserably — from using their ghosted prose to abdicate responsibility and/or appoint blame elsewhere, a behavior learned while strolling the corridors of power and mastering the art of obfuscation and deflection.
THAT EVER-REVOLVING DOOR
Perhaps it is George Tenet who should have been slam-dunked. But as is usually the case with top-tier Washington bigwigs, no one (Watergate aside) ever goes to jail for illegal actions or covering them up. (Sandy Berger was fined $50,000 and sentenced to two years’ probation plus 100 hours of community service.) Beltway etiquette dictates that if you cover everything up nicely, you are rewarded with medals and “distinguished service” plaques.
Oh, and thereafter the D.C. revolving door system takes care of its own by revolving such distinguished insiders into a high-on-the-hog existence in the private sector.
For Mr. Tenet, it was a $4 million book deal from HarperCollins. Modest compared to his job as chairman of Allen & Co., known as “The Invisible Investment Bank.”
Let’s also use Joseph Cofer Black as a revolving door example. This career CIA officer was director of the agency’s Counter Terrorism Center in 1999 through 2002. Two days after 9/11, Mr. Black led the charge into the White House to convince President Bush to move on Afghanistan, saying with much bravado about the Taliban and al Qaida. “When we’re through with them, they will have flies walking across their eyeballs.”
Gee, last time we checked, the Taliban is running Afghanistan and protecting al Qaida —extra-strengthened by $7 billion worth of military hardware left behind by President Joe Biden last summer when he recklessly chose to abandon Afghans loyal to the United States.
And Mr. Black?
Well, sorry to have to tell you this, folks, but Joseph joined Burisma’s board of directors.
Burisma?
Yup, that’s the Ukrainian company from which Hunter Biden took hundreds of thousands of dollars for doing diddly squat. And when Burisma was placed under investigation for such corruption, VP/daddy Joe Biden successfully blackmailed the Ukrainian government into firing the prosecutor in charge of investigating Burisma.
A side note here: While reading the staff report of the congressional investigation into Sandy Berger’s unlawful cover-up, we came upon this gem: “Shortly after Berger’s July 18 visit (to the archives), staff from the Clinton Library discovered code-worded classified documents that were stored in Little Rock.”
Whoa, hold on there just a second!
Classified documents stored in Little Rock, Ark.?
Holy moly — shouldn’t the FBI have raided the Clinton Library for possessing classified materials that belonged to the National Archives?
Just another example how, in Washington, double standards are the rule, not the exception.
Go to irp.fas.org to read that congressional report.
JAMAL KHASHOGGI
While we are remembering 9/11 on this upcoming anniversary, let us also remember the dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi dissident journalist who was brutally murdered by operatives of Saudi intelligence after being lured, in a meticulously planned operation, to the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.
Huh? Are you saying there is a connection to 9/11?
Better believe it.
The families of victims had been desperately hoping that Mr. Khashoggi would help them connect the dots as they quested for truth and peace of mind.
Before breaking with the current royal regime in Saudi Arabia and relocating to the U.S., Mr. Khashoggi had been closely connected to Saudi intelligence. He knew where all the bodies were buried. The Saudis knew he knew. And this is likely what made him dead.
Specifically, Mr. Khashoggi, who had once been a very close friend of Osama bin Laden and knew way too much about the Saudi connection to 9/11.
Catherine Hunt, a former FBI counterterrorism expert working for Kreindler & Kreindler, the law firm headquartered in NYC that represents 6,000 9/11 victims and their families, had been trying to solicit Mr. Khashoggi’s assistance in their piecing of the Saudi puzzle into shape.
In a fit of pique on Oct. 26, 2017, after learning that his son had been blocked from leaving Saudi Arabia, Jamal met Ms. Hunt at a coffee shop in Tysons Corner, Virginia, where he offered his services as a consultant. In doing so, he signed his own death warrant.
Writes Mr. Gardner, “Khashoggi was under no illusions that by agreeing to meet with former FBI agent Catherine Hunt he was venturing onto dangerous ground.”
According to Ms. Hunt’s account, Mr. Khashoggi told her, “Is my country responsible for tolerating and even supporting radicalism? Yes.And they must take responsibility for that (and the ensuing acts of terrorism it caused).”
But rather than taking any responsibility, Saudi Arabia, one year later, took Jamal’s life. A hit team of Saudi operatives, at the behest of Saudi Arabia’s ruling prince, Mohammed bin Salman, ambushed Mr. Khashoggi, injected him with drugs, suffocated him with a plastic bag, dissected his body (hopefully he was dead by then), and disposed of the evidence, thus sending this message to all Saudis everywhere: Keep your gobs shut. Or else.
“My belief,” says lawyer Jim Kreindler of Kreindler & Kreindler, which specializes in aviation disasters and represents the 9/11 victims and families, “is that Khashoggi was killed not because he was a dissident — there are lots of dissidents — but because he was holding this ax over the Saudis’ heads.”
A March 2020 letter written to U.S. Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn from the Kreindler law firm stated, “The murder of Jamal Khashoggi constitutes nothing less than an act of state terror intended to intimidate journalists, dissidents and exiled critics the world over.”
SLEIGHT OF HAND: NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON’T
“The thing that is important is the thing that is not seen.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
A third World Trade Center building collapsed on 9/11, about seven hours after the Twin Towers fell.
Building 7, or WTC 7, as it was known, was not hit by an airplane.
It was not hit by anything other than debris.
Most people don’t even know a third building imploded into dust that day. And, oddly, the 47-story WTC 7 was not even mentioned in the 9/11 Commission report.
The official finding by the National Institute of Standards and Technology: Debris and fires caused by the nearby Twin Towers resulted in the collapse of WTC 7, making it, writes Mr. Gardner, “the only steel skyscraper to have ever collapsed as the result of a fire alone.”
Which only proves you don’t have to buy into 9/11 conspiracy theories — farfetched allegations that no planes ever crashed into the Pentagon or Shanksville, Pennsylvania — to understand that something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
In March 2020, a little-known study titled “A Structural Reevaluation of the Collapse of World Trade Center 7” was published by the Institute of Northern Engineering at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, which conducted the study.
Their exhaustive four-and-a-half-year investigation conducted by impartial academics, engineers and architects concluded that “the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near simultaneous failure of all columns in the building and not a collapse involving sequential failure of columns throughout the building.”
Moreover: “Despite simulating a number of hypothetical scenarios, we were unable to identify any progressive sequence of failures that could have taken place on 11 September 2001 and caused a total collapse of the building with approximately 2.5 seconds of free fall and minimal differential movement of the exterior.”
Translation into layman language: Their study proves beyond any doubt that the official narrative is seriously flawed; that Building 7 could only have been brought down by a controlled demolition.
Think about this for a moment. Think about the planning and placement that go into a controlled demolition.
Or Google it. This is what you will find: “It can take up to six months to survey the structure and prepare it for the blast by removing non-load bearing walls.”
The conclusion of this study should, obviously, ring alarm bells; should result in serious questions about what truly went down (literally) — and why —that tragic day 21 years ago. Or at least attract some media attention, right?
Yet here you are, reading about this study for the first time in our column.
If you’d like to know more, go to www.files.wtc7report.org and see for yourself.
And you will see that this isn’t theory, “conspiracy” or otherwise. It is pure unbiased physics and architectural engineering.
New efforts are under way, because of this report, to push Congress into reopening the investigation.
But don’t hold your breath. Officialdom is doing its very best to ignore the UAF rather than challenge what their study found.
J. Leroy Hulsey, the civil engineer and Fairbanks university professor who authored UAF’s report on the study, told The Investigator: “No one has challenged the UAF findings. AE911 Truth has submitted a request to the National Institute for Standards and Technology for them to change the findings in their report on the cause of the failure of WTC building 7, and they have refused to address the issues that were raised.”
Let that sink in: “refused to address the issues.”
Furthermore, said Mr. Hulsey, “There has been no significant news coverage or interest from political leaders regarding the UAF report.”
As Napoleon pointed out, “Lies, agreed upon” is what becomes history.
And most of us, knowing no better or not caring to know, accept what is agreed upon, disbelieving of — or oblivious to — an ongoing deception by those in control who purport to look after our interests but who preserve or proliferate their power while padding their privileged pockets and lording over us as if we were their serfs — or worse, little more than mushrooms to be kept in the dark and fed manure.
Time to wake up and take a whiff.
Robert Eringer is a longtime Montecito author with vast experience in investigative journalism. He welcomes questions or comments at reringer@gmail.com.
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