Ever since the moment of the first impact at the World Trade Center, a
struggle has raged between two broad, competing ideas of what really
happened on September 11th, 2001.
The
US administration
delivered an almost immediate verdict, which can be described as
follows: Dispatched by Osama Bin Ladin’s network and motivated by hatred
and religious fanaticism, 19 suicide bombers hijacked four planes,
crashed three of them into their targets, and caused the collapse of the
Twin Towers as a consequence of the resulting damage and fires. The 19
men did not necessarily require any accomplices within the United
States; and no one in the US government could have possibly anticipated
or prevented the attacks.
Even as the administration exploited this
Official Story (or
“Official Conspiracy Theory”) as the pretext to launch new wars long in
the making, independent researchers began to accumulate a vast body of
evidence suggesting a different narrative for 9/11: that of the
False Flag Operation.
The 9/11 events and the anomalies in the official story raised
Unanswered Questions about:
The suspicions received further confirmation a few weeks after September 11th, with the arrival of
anthrax letters targeted only at opposition politicians and media figures, and timed to coincide with the introduction of the
USA PATRIOT Act.
Already within those first weeks, loose networks of researchers and
investigators formed via the Internet to generally become known as the
“9/11 skeptics.” They presented
substantial bodies of evidence
to show that elements within the US government must have been involved
in facilitating or orchestrating the attacks – in other words, that 9/11
was possibly a classic case of “false-flag” or synthetic terrorism,
such as corrupt states have often perpetrated on their own citizens.
What motive would people in the US government or establishment have
to commit crimes of this magnitude? The outrage caused by September 11th
allowed the
Bush administration
to instantly implement policies its members have long supported, but
which were otherwise infeasible. 9/11 was exploited to launch an
open-ended, perpetual “war on terror,” actually a war against any and
all enemies the US government may designate. The case of
Iraq shows that the target countries of this war need have nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11.
The invasions of
Iraq and
Afghanistan
were both planned and prepared in advance of September 11th, with the
apparent motive of gaining geostrategic advantage and seizing vital
resources. The architects of the
Iraq invasion within the Bush administration had earlier been members of the
Project for a New American Century. In the
PNAC
manifesto of September 2000 (“Rebuilding America’s Defenses”), they
admitted that the American people would be unwilling to pay the stiff
price for US global hegemony, full-spectrum military dominance, and the
imposition of a new order in the
Middle East – unwilling, that is, in the absence of a catalyzing event, an epochal lesson such as a “new
Pearl Harbor.”
9/11 put the nation on a permanent war footing, allowed the extension
of secrecy doctrines, and temporarily deified the President. The
unprecedented public fear was stoked and exploited to allow a roll-back
of
domestic rights and liberties,
as had long been advocated by key members of the Bush administration
(and their allies in both major parties). 9/11 allowed the designation
of “enemy combatants” in violation of international law; preventive
detention and the open use of torture; the activation of long-standing
“shadow government” plans; the passage of measures officially
undermining constitutional government; and a wholesale re-definition of
US geopolitics and American society itself.
Perhaps most important of all to potential conspirators, trillions of
dollars in spending priorities were predictably shifted from “butter”
to “guns” in the years after September 11th, unleashing a new wave of
growth and profiteering in the war and security industries. 9/11 became a
pretext for economic crisis management and transformation under the
cover of war and counterterror.
From the beginning, those who doubted the official story saw the
potential for achieving a different kind of global transformation. By
exposing the great fraud to the public, the 9/11 dissidents hoped to
reverse the policies adopted after September 11th; to end the wars; to
reveal a long and sordid history of covert operations, black budgets and
hidden economics; to wake up the American people to the reality of the
globalist drive to corporate feudalism, which is destroying the natural
environment and the lives of the planetary majority; and to motivate the
people to act against this sea of troubles.
The first two years after September 11th saw the rise of the
Families’ Movement, which kept the issue of the “unanswered questions” alive, and which forced the creation of the official
9/11 Commission.
The Bush administration acted to delay, stonewall and starve all
official investigations – with the complicity of the mainstream media,
who ignored the festering questions or at best ridiculed those who asked
them.
Many signs confirmed that there was indeed a
9/11 Cover-up: outrageous
conflicts of interest within official investigating bodies, such as the appointment of Henry Kissinger and then
Philip Zelikow to the 9/11 Commission;
destruction of evidence; the silencing of
whistleblowers; and the
promotion of the very officials
who were responsible for the supposed failures of September 11th. For
many, the 9/11 cover-up itself became the smoking gun pointing to
wrongdoing: the untenable excuses of massive serial incompetence; the
endless coincidences; the insulting fairy tale that “no one could have
imagined planes as weapons”; the omission and suppression of any
evidence contradicting the official story.
