Saturday, December 24, 2005

Read This! Do you still believe the official party line?

When you hear people claim that the government "did" 9/11, or at least let it happen on purpose, is your response "But the 9/11 Commission investigated all that and concluded that it was only Osama Bin Laden and his terrorists"?

If so, a quick look at the government's investigations reveals that -- not only has there never been a real investigation -- but the behavior of government representatives in willfully obstructing all attempts at investigation comprises evidence of guilt. Specifically, in all criminal trials, evasiveness, obstruction, and destruction of evidence all constitute strong circumstantial evidence that the accused is guilty or, at the very least, not to be believed. 9/11 is no different. (Indeed, there are even indications that false evidence was planted to deflect attention from the real perpetrators).

Preliminarily, Bush and Cheney took the rare step of personally requesting that congress limit all 9/11 investigation solely to "intelligence failures", so there has never been a congressional probe into any of the real issues involved.

The administration also opposed the creation of a 9/11 commission. Once it was forced, by pressure from widows of 9-11 victims, to allow a commission to be formed, the administration appointed as executive director an administration insider (and see this article), starved the commission of funds, providing a fraction of the funds used to investigate Monica Lewinsky, failed to provide crucial documents (and see this article also), and refused to require high-level officials to testify under oath, and allowed Bush and Cheney to be questioned jointly.

More importantly, the 9-11 Commission refused to examine virtually any evidence which contradicted the administration's official version of events. As just two of numerous examples, the 9-11 Commission report does even mention the collapse of World Trade Center building 7 or any explosions in the buildings (the word "explosion" does not appear in the report), and refused to allow any firefighters to testify publicly.

Indeed, former 9/11 Commissioner Max Cleland reputedly resigned in disgust from the Commission. See for example this article.

A very well-documented book by a distinguished professor shows that the 9-11 Commission was a whitewash. According to law professor Richard Falk of Princeton, the author of this book "establishes himself, alongside Seymour Hersh, as America's number one bearer of unpleasant, yet necessary, public truths" (Seymour Hersh, as you might know, is the Pullitzer prize-winning reporter who uncovered the Iraq prison torture scandal). See brief article here.

Indeed, the very 9-11 widows who had pressured the administration to create the 9/11 Commission declared it a failure which ignored 70% of their detailed questions and "suppressed important evidence and whistleblower testimony that challenged the official story on many fronts".

Moreover, a leading firefighters' trade publication called the investigation concerning the world trade center a "half-baked farce". In addition, the official investigators themselves were largely denied funding, access to the site and the evidence contained there, or even access to such basic information as the blueprints for the world trade center. Similarly, a professor of fire protection engineering, and the former chief of the fire science and engineering division of the agency now investigating the world trade center disaster, wrote that the world trade center buildings could not have collapsed due to jet fuel fires, that evidence was being destroyed, and that there was no real investigation into the collapses.

Indeed, the blueprints for the world trade center are apparently STILL being withheld from reporters and the public, and the government agency in charge of the investigation has grossly mischaracterized the structure of the buildings.

And the government agency tasked with examining the collapse of the World Trade Centers did NOT investigate any anomalies in the collapse of the buildings, failing to even examine any evidence regarding the buildings’ impossible near free-fall speeds and symmetrical collapses, apparent demolition squibs, the fact that the buildings turned to dust in mid-air, the presence of molten metal in the basement areas in large pools in all of the buildings, or the unexplained straightening out of the upper 34 floors of the South Tower after they had precipitously leaned over and started toppling like a tree. See also this question and answer exchange at a recent government press conference (skip to 1 minute and 23 seconds into the video). And
this short video on building 7 and the subsequent investigation (you may wish to disregard brief partisan portion).

And did you know that investigators for the Congressional Joint Inquiry discovered that an FBI informant had hosted and even rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these blocking maneuvers were undertaken under orders from the White House?

Or did you know that the tape of interviews of air traffic controllers on-duty on 9/11 was intentionally destroyed by crushing the cassette by hand, cutting the tape into little pieces, and then dropping the pieces in different trash cans around the building as shown by this NY Times article (summary version is free; full version is pay-per-view) and by this article from the Chicago Sun-Times?

Indeed, while he focuses on a very superficial issue, even the former director of the FBI says there was a cover up by the 9/11 Commission

Still think the government really investigated and disclosed what happened on 9/11?

 

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