Sins of Commission
(A report on 'Confronting the Evidence: 9/11 and the Search for Truth' - Sept. 11, 2004)
The controversies surrounding 9/11 are typically portrayed as a battle between the official version of events, on the one hand, and conspiracy theory on the other, but the struggle is really between competing conspiracy theories, according to speakers and panelists at a recent conference held in New York City.
The once dominant conspiracy theory contends that a babbling fanatic coordinated, from a cave in an impoverished country, highly skilled hijackings of airplanes by a small group of suicidal men armed with no more than box-cutters. It is an assertion championed by individuals whose ambitions and avarice depend on acceptance of this version of events. It is untested, unproven, and based on extremely superficial inquiry, though supported by an official 9/11 Commission highly compromised by the corporate and political connections of its members.
The competing perspective, attested by experts and researchers, and supported by a growing number of whistleblowers and former insiders ‑ who have nothing to gain and everything to lose from their efforts – starts with what is now a fairly widely held view: that the Bush administration was not only warned about the impending terrorist attacks in the Spring and Summer of 2001, it was completely deluged with highly specific alerts that it suppressed.
But the investigations go far deeper than that. We also hear that financing for 9/11 included U.S. sources, that the World Trade Center fires were nowhere near the sustained 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit needed to account for molten steel later found at the site, and that the collapses of World Trade Centers 1, 2 and 7 could only be the result of controlled demolitions.
A picture of "Synthetic Terrorism," also described as "False-flag terrorism," emerges, in which certain U.S. interests desperately needed a rationale to invade Afghanistan and gain access thereby to $12 trillion-worth of oil in the Caspian region, as well as an excuse to defile Iraq in fulfillment of a 12-year-old dream. George W. Bush, the thinking goes, went along with the real movers and shakers of the world.
I had heard some of these views before and, while accepting, along with about half of New Yorkers (according to a recent poll) that the Bush administration colluded in the events of 9/11, I had dismissed some of the more far-flung claims. But on Sept. 11, 2004, at an event in New York City entitled 'Confronting the Evidence: 9/11 and the Search for Truth,' I realized these were not the opinions of crackpots, lunatic lefties, wackos, anarchists, or any of those other epithets the mainstream media likes to hurl at anyone who questions officialdom, but the outcome of dogged and painstaking research, deeply delved, carefully constructed, and powerfully presented. The advocates were clearly in command of their subject, intelligent, articulate, knowledgeable, and qualified.
I particularly enjoyed hearing David Von Kleist, director of the documentary 'In Plane Site,' who delivered the fruits of his research with sparkling wit and rhetoric, infused with humor, character voices, and a dead-on impersonation of George W. Bush. His main theme was that the rather trivial damage incurred at the Pentagon site on Sept. 11 could not possibly have been caused by a Boeing 757, as the Cheney-led establishment would have us believe. His documentary also shows original footage of a vast cloud of dense smoke, cauliflower-shaped and at least 50 storeys high, to the northwest of the World Trade Center, just prior to the first collapse of the towers. This further supports the argument that controlled demolitions took place using very powerful explosives.
I recently sent a letter to friends admonishing them for their ignorance and indifference to the evils underlying the anaesthesia-coated propaganda that masquerades as news in the U.S. "Wake up!" I cried, but now I find myself humbled by the recognition that I don't know the tenth of it, that what I took for wakefulness was merely a lesser degree of sleepwalking!
Now we are compelled to take a journey into the unthinkable, in which key officials and politicians, working with and trading positions with senior executives of corporations, routinely sacrifice thousands of lives merely to enrich themselves, and in which Christian lives are valued little higher than Moslem ones. But then again, as pointed out by the first presenter of the evening, Jenna Orkin of the World Trade Center Environmental Organization, such a conclusion is no great stretch of the imagination, when those same interests sent us back to work in downtown Manhattan with assurances of air safety, though they knew the environment was lethally toxic.
"Hundreds of tons of asbestos were pulverized into unusually small particles which the plume carried for miles to Brooklyn and beyond," Orkin told the awed assembly. "The towers also contained approximately 50,000 computers, each made with four to eight pounds of lead. Each of the tens of thousands of fluorescent light bulbs contained enough mercury to contaminate a quarter of a city block...The smoke detectors contained radioactive americium 241...Months after the disaster, the EPA recorded hitherto unseen levels of dioxin." There's your "dirty bomb" right there!
Those of us who also live in Brooklyn suffered the compounded poisoning of sleeping downwind of this lingering and cancerous cloud that blanketed the area for months afterward. I doubt, even now, that the air is truly safe, having walked through the area last night (Sept. 14, 2004) to find my nostrils assailed by foul and unnatural fumes seeping from underground sources that far outstench the barrage of bad odors common to a New York City Summer.
Unhappily, in addition to expert testimony, the conference also attracted a lunatic fringe among the audience, who came out of the woodwork during questions from the floor. Almost every person at the microphone used the opportunity to make long and incoherent speeches, voice complaints, exchange insults, or harangue the panel. With all the bickering, jeering, jostling, heckling, sabotaging, shouting, and time-wasting that went on, I never got to ask my own question ‑ but more of that later ‑ and I wondered how such people could ever survive and make a living in New York City.
Nevertheless, I came away with a profound sense of admiration for the organizers of this free event and for the courageous speakers that dared to voice their heretical challenges to the entrenched dogmas of this age. No wonder we are exhorted to "not be like others, who are asleep, but let us be alert and self-controlled." No wonder we are counseled to "Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you."
The Christ described here is, of course, the Lord of Mercy the scriptures reveal ‑ He who gave his life to restore our eternal destiny ‑ not the warmongering tyrant, butcher, rapist, torturer, schemer, and Moslem-hater depicted in the Republican neocon blasphemies now writ large in our deluded nation.
My own question was to be the following. "Given that a number of panelists point to preparations now underway to invade Iran – a country with three times the population and four times the area of Iraq ‑ and given that U.S. money and military are already stretched to breaking point with the conflicts already in process, is it conceivable U.S. interests will try to recruit European allies for its so-called War on Terror by instigating false-flag terrorist acts on European soil?"
(For more information about the presenters, go to http://www.summeroftruth.org/. See also http://www.911truth.org/.)
