By Johan von Kerkoff
September 11, 2001, 5pm New York time. From the Big Apple, the BBC’s Jane Standley is reporting via satellite link that World Trade Centre 7 has collapsed.
There’s just one little snag: in the live shot, behind Standley, WTC 7 still stands. As Standley speaks, the satellite feed cuts. The building falls 20 minutes later, off-air.
Oops. To this day, the BBC has failed to satisfactorily explain the mystery.
What’s really striking was the BBC news anchor’s input. Just before the linkup with Standley, the anchor casually mentioned that the building fell because it had “been weakened”.
He was giving us the reason for the collapse of a building which had yet to collapse.
Not many know that WTC 7 was the third skyscraper to come down on 9/11. It wasn’t hit by a plane, yet fell neatly into its own footprint at virtually freefall speed.
WTC 7 housed US Securities and Exchange Commission files relating to numerous Wall Street investigations. All the files for approximately 3,000 to 4,000 SEC cases, including the Enron scandal, were destroyed.
Yet not a word on WTC 7 in the 9/11 Commission report – more on that whitewash later. And NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) classified the data they used for their computer model of WTC 7’s collapse, because disclosure of the data, quote, “might jeopardise public safety”.
Yep, Johan is a 9/11 ‘conspiracy theorist’. Yet even a cursory review of the material exposes the official 9/11 narrative as a total joke. You know, the ‘man on dialysis directing the attacks from a cave half across the world’ trope.
But in pointing out the innumerable flaws and omissions in the official (cover) story, one doesn’t need to also provide the definitive answer to ‘who did 9/11.’ This is a trap which many fall into. No, the burden of proof is on the US government, whose own version isn’t remotely plausible.
It might surprise some, but there was never any real criminal investigation into 9/11.
This was under the watch of Michael Chertoff, then chief of the justice department’s criminal division. Chertoff is a dual US/Israeli citizen, and co-author of the USA PATRIOT Act, which incidentally was drafted way before 9/11.
The ‘investigations’ into 9/11 were not criminal investigations. Two inquiries were indeed carried out. One was the joint House-Senate inquiry, the other was the better-known 9/11 Commission. Both were stymied by the Bush administration.
The famous 28 pages on Saudi involvement in 9/11 that got a lot of traction lately, come from the House-Senate inquiry. The heavily redacted report speaks of the involvement of foreign governments (with an ‘s’, plural).
Onto the 9/11 Commission. It was delayed, underfunded, and based on testimony extracted from torture, the records of which were destroyed by the CIA. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of 9/11, was water-boarded more than a few times.
The report didn’t mention WTC7, Sibel Edmonds, operation Able Danger, or the drills of hijacked aircraft being flown into buildings that were being simulated at the precise same time as those events were happening.
And guess who was initially appointed to lead the commission – why, none other than Henry Kissinger.
No one knows what then President George W Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney told the commission, because they testified in secret, off the record, not under oath, and behind closed doors.
The panel didn’t bother to look at who funded the attacks because, in its own words: “Ultimately the question is of little practical significance.”
Failure to prevent the attacks was put down to “a failure of imagination”. Yet the incompetence hypothesis collapses like a house of cards, when not a single official of note, civilian or military, was ever sacked, demoted or reprimanded for 9/11.
The commission discarded the testimony of US Transport Secretary Norman Mineta, obliterating his story from the public record. Luckily, TV recordings are still available online.
Mineta, present at the ‘emergency bunker’ where Cheney was in charge, stated under oath: “During the time that the airplane was coming in to the Pentagon, there was a young man that would come in and say to the vice president ‘the plane is 50 miles out’, ‘the plane is 30 miles out’, and when it got down to ‘the plane is 10 miles out’, the young man also said to the vice president ‘do the orders still stand?’ And the vice president turned and whipped his neck around and said ‘Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?’”
Given that the inbound plane was never engaged, despite ample time, one might reasonably infer the unthinkable: that Cheney ordered a stand-down, not a shoot-down. By elimination that’s the only logical conclusion from Mineta’s account. Had a shoot-down order been given, why would the aide keep coming back? That makes no sense whatsoever.
Perhaps Mineta was missing some of the context. Well, the commission’s own account is patently absurd. It states that Cheney, having conversed with Bush, gave the order to engage the plane. After this, the military aide comes in, again, asking for another authorisation to engage. Then Cheney calls the president a second time to ‘confirm’, wasting at least another two minutes.
Next, “Minutes went by and word arrived of an aircraft down in Pennsylvania.”
“Minutes went by”? With a hijacked plane closing in fast and every second counting? The commission doesn’t bother to ask about this gap and moves along.
The 9/11 Commission report is riddled with such problems. It’s a yarn unfit for kids.
John Farmer Jr, senior counsel on the 9/11 Commission, stated: “What government and military officials told Congress, the commission, the media, and the public about who knew what when – was almost entirely, and inexplicably, untrue.”
On September 11, following calls to authorities, New Jersey police stopped and searched five Israelis in a van belonging to Urban Moving Systems. Explosive traces were found inside the vehicle.
Eyewitnesses had earlier seen three of the five men celebrating and ‘high-fiving’ while taking photos of the WTC, between the first and the second plane strikes. The Israelis later admitted to being in a jubilant mood.
Inside the van, officers found maps of the city with certain locations highlighted, box cutters, $4700 cash stuffed in a sock and foreign passports.
Sivan Kurzberg, the van driver, without being asked volunteered: “We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.”
The FBI seized and developed the men’s photos, one of which shows Kurzberg flicking a cigarette lighter in front of the smouldering WTC ruins in an apparently celebratory gesture.
The five men were detained and questioned. Their statements were contradictory, and some of them failed their polygraph tests.
They became known as the ‘Dancing Israelis’. Two of them were already on the US’ counterintelligence database. Urban Moving Systems, the ostensible employer of the five Israelis, was a front operation.
The Israelis were held in custody for 71 days before being quietly released and deported on visa violations.
A few days after 9/11, Urban Moving Systems’ Israeli owner, Dominick Suter, dropped his business and fled the country for Israel. He was apparently in such a hurry to flee that some of Urban Moving Systems’ customers were left with their furniture stranded in storage facilities.
Redacted FBI reports on the ‘dancing Israelis’ were obtained by independent journalist Ryan Dawson via a FOIA request. You can find them on his website: http://www.ancreport.com/report/dancing-israelis-reports/.
In all, some 200 Israelis were rounded up before and after 9/11. These included the Israeli ‘art students’ who were spying on the DEA. See: http://www.ancreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/DEA_Report_redactedxx.pdf.
I saved the best for last: of the 19 men the FBI ‘identified’ as the hijackers, who were all supposed to be dead, seven later turn up alive and well, even contacting newspapers to complain about their photos being splashed across front pages. US authorities have never produced flight manifests with the names of the alleged hijackers. Yet the myth of the 19 hijackers – including those pesky resurrected ones – persists.
Some of the alleged hijackers had duplicate licences, and some reported their passport stolen. This identity theft reeks of an intelligence operation.
We were told that alleged ringleader Mohammed Atta was a devout Muslim. Yet it turns out Atta – or some imposter – liked booze and pork, snorted cocaine and was out partying hard the night before the attacks.
Also, around April 2000, ‘Atta’ walks into the Florida Department of Agriculture seeking a loan to finance a crop-dusting plane. When the loans officer refuses, he threatens to slit her throat. He then spots a picture of Washington DC hanging on the wall and asks about the various sights in the US capital, such as the Pentagon and the White House, even offering to buy the picture.
Exactly what you’d expect from a would-be terrorist – leaving a trail and going out of his way to get noticed.
The above doesn’t even cover 1 percentile of what’s wrong with the official 9/11 story. We need a proper investigation with subpoena powers, and we need it yesterday. And let the chips fall where they may. Justice must be done for some 3,000 people who died on the day, likewise for the countless others around the world who have perished in the never-ending ‘War on Terror’.
The views expressed in this article are not those of the Sunday Mail
