Surveys conducted across the US show that the
majority of Americans, including senior citizens old enough to remember
the US entry into World War II, regard the September, 11, 2001 drama as
exceeding in historical importance the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack.
Speaking of the latter, these days it is an open secret that the US
Administration was aware of the coming Japanese offensive and, instead
of taking adequate measures beforehand, knowingly sacrificed around
1,500 lives to have the country drawn into a war as planned in
Washington. US Secretary of War Henry Stimson rote in his diary
following the November 25, 1941 government meeting: “The question was
how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing
the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves. It was a
difficult proposition”.
It is widely held that the US borrowed the tactic based on provocations
from the Nazi, who, for example, bombed Germany's Freyburg to blame the
civilian death toll on France when Berlin needed a pretext for invading
the country. The view is fairly unconvincing, considering that much
earlier, back on February 15, 1898, the US blew up the Maine, the
country's own battleship, in Havana Harbor, killing hundreds of crew
members, with a goal of justifying a war against Spain. The US
government attributed the explosion to a Spanish naval mine and
Washington cited the sinking to drive the nation into what essentially
constituted the first military campaign for the US world hegemony, but,
as it transpired upon the raising of the battleship in 1911, its armor
was ripped apart by a blast from the inside. In another case, documents
put on display on October 12, 2001 in Executive Intelligence Review
made it clear that in the early 1960ies, as James Bamford wrote in his
“Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency”,
the US Joint Chiefs of Staff “proposed launching a secret and bloody
war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the
American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to
launch against Cuba”. The plan, titled Operation Northwoods, was
canceled after the Bay of Pigs debacle which prompted President Kennedy
to pass control over the handling of the Cuban web of issues from the
CIA to the Pentagon. According to the accounts, “The first proposal is
for "a series of well-coordinated incidents" to take place in and around
the US Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; these were to include having
friendly Cubans dress in Cuban military uniforms to start riots at the
base, blow up ammunition inside the base, to start fires, to burn
aircraft on the air base, to sabotage a ship in the harbor, and to sink a
ship near the harbor entrance... The next proposal elaborated: "A
'Remember the Maine' incident could be arranged.... We could blow up a
U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," or blow up a drone ship in
Cuban waters. The memorandum coldly predicted: "Casualty lists in U.S.
newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation... We
could develop a Communist Cuba terror campaign in the Miami area, in
other Florida cities and even in Washington. The terror campaign could
be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. We
could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated).
We could foster attempts on the lives of Cuban refugees in the United
States....»
A decade since the September 11 tragedy, a series of questions remain
unanswered. Attempts to solve the conundrum were made by former German
government minister Andreas von Bülow, US intellectual prose author Gore
Vidal, French journalist Thierry Meyssan who wrote “9/11: The Big Lie”
and many others, and all of them reject the storyline popped by the US
Administration… Gore Vidal said in a February 23, 2003 interview to
Journalist Kenneth Hubbard published in Spain's La Vanguardia
that the US media were concealing from the audience a part of the truth
and, among other things, told that a connection might have existed
between the CIA, the Pakistani intelligence service, and one of the
September 11 perpetrators. Gore Vidal and others marshal an impressive
array of facts that were impossible to overlook but were never explained
away by the official investigation.
First, it is unclear how groups of 3-4 people armed with utility knives
were able to hijack airplanes with so many passengers and staff on
board. Even if it could happen once that the pilots capitulated
momentarily before sending out an alarm signal and the terrorists
managed to momentarily switch off the transcoder, the same occurring in
all of the hijacked planes is too unlikely a coincidence. It should be
further taken into account that the US — as the USSR in its glory days —
operates a surveillance system covering its entire territory, and the
information is supplied continuously to the National Security Agency
which is clearly immune to hacker attacks.
The reports that 10 or even 14 planes were seized sound even more
suspicious. Anyhow, the hijacked planes were in the air for 40-60
minutes after the plot began to unfold, and over the time reports that
something extreme was going on had to reach the US President. An
explanation why they did not is still missing, but answers to the
questions listed below could help to fill in the gap.
How could the planes suddenly turn invisible to civilian Air traffic
controllers and military radars? Even if they did, the services had to
react to their not being on the trajectories they were supposed to be
on. Why were the information in the black boxes meant to survive any
type of disaster and the recordings of the pilots' conversations
completely illegible? Curiously, the passport of a terrorist who
allegedly flew the plane was found unharmed.
Who was picturing the upper parts of the northern tower of the World
Trade Center before and at the moment when Boeing 767 of the American
Airlines slammed into it? How did several uncorrelated cameras in New
York city happen to be focused on the collision spot? Why did the US
Administration and personally President Bush take to preaching around
the world right on September 11 that the attack could be traced back to
Al Qaeda, with a probe just waiting to be opened?
Why neither of the alleged terrorists was on the planes' boarding
lists? Why was it that they left so many footsteps behind while
preparing for an attack? They paid bills with real credit cards,
registered under real names at the pilots' school, and, on the last day,
had their farewell letters on them, mailing the envelopes to a wrong
address so that the FBI was able to intercept the stuff. Isn't it odd
that the terrorists' car was quickly located on the airport parking lot
where thousands of vehicles were anchored? In a blockbuster style, the
findings included Arab-language copies of The Quran, Boeing manuals, and
– to erase any doubts that the nominees were indeed those responsible –
personal videos showing how they exercise at the pilots' school.
For some reason, the US Administration declined the assistance offers
from Russia's ministry for emergencies, other countries' similar
institutions, and individuals. Why didn't the constituency and the US
Congress representing them demand the displacement of the chiefs of
agencies in charge of the national security? Why was it that Gen. Ralph
Eberhart who, on the day of the attack, supervised the US airspace
control was promoted rather than reprimanded? Why were the CIA director
allowed to retain his post and “the company” - given a 42% budget boost?
Why did the US defense budget which had been shrinking since the
collapse of the USSR start to climb after the September 11 attack to
currently attain the $396b mark? For comparison, the defense spendings
of Russia, China, Great Britain, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, India,
Spain, etc. altogether weight $382b.
Even if bin Laden or other leaders of Muslim groups branded terrorist
hoped to really hurt the US, logically, they would have ordered the
strikes a couple of weeks later when the US Congress was to convene,
with the US President, key Administration members, and intelligence
community heads attending. A blow on the Congress building at the time
would have thrown the US into deep chaos, while what the terrorists
actually achieved was essentially limited to a psychological shock.
How could the twin towers, on which 500,000 tons of top-quality
concrete had been spent, implode so miserably? Where did the energy
which ground up the material and sustained the temperature of 3,000C –
higher than in a volcano - come from? What could keep burning on the
disaster site till December 19 and why extinguishing the fire, despite
the firefighters' continuous work, proved so difficult?
Quite a few US and European watchers alike hold that the twin towers collapsed due to being blown up from within,
not as a result of being hit by the planes. As stated in the “Loose
Change 9/11” documentary, US experts who, on September 11, 2009,
supplied to the US Congress a report of their independent inquiry
maintained that the twin towers were loaded with explosives. The group,
moreover, hinted at the US government's complicity. “FBI Blows America”,
asserted a group of dozens of US construction engineers and architects.
Besides, their point was that much later there had to be the same
causes behind the implosion of the 47-floor Salomon Brothers building
located nearby. The skyscraper did not come under a terrorist attack but
still turned into ruins 8 hours after the World Trade Center. All the
people from the Salomon Brothers premises had been evacuated by the
time, but, on the other hand, the Federal Emergency Management Agency,
preoccupied with the twin towers, provided no clues about what might
have triggered this part of the disaster. French commentator Thierry
Meyssan believes that transmitters were installed in the Salomon
Brothers building to guide the hijacked planes and, accordingly, that it
was destroyed to get rid of the implicating evidence.
In my view, the economic repercussions of the September 11 tragedy
should be taken into account along with the fact that it gave the US a
license for military campaigns worldwide, if we are to disclose the
drivers behind the epic development. The suspension of stock-market
transactions in New York and elsewhere in the US presented Washington
with an opportunity to subject to an overhaul the financial and
securities markets and to redirect the evolution of the brewing economic
crisis. It is worth noting in the context that, after years of exerting
pressure on a number of national economies and ignoring continuous
criticisms over the corrosive impact of its policies, by September 2011
the IMF managed to shove most of them to the brink of big troubles.
Downward trends – with assets shedding 10-20% of their values -
persisted across most stock markets for some 30 days in a row in the
run-up to the September 11 attack, and the problem confronting the US
economy could not be written off as a fleeting recession. The situation
was best described as a structural crisis manifest in a frightening gap
between the real and financial sectors correspondingly measuring 15% and
85% of the US GDP, with the available goods and services capable to
absorb only 4-6% of the total US dollar mass. The US currency owed the
remaining nominal value to its global status but, again, the amount was
mostly balanced by various derivatives. The bubble was expected to go
bust, likely in September, 2011, and it took a war-like shock to put the
slide on hold. The World Trade Center demolition accomplished more than
that – it served to unlock the potential for an unprecedented dollar
emission which reinforced the US currency vs. the rising Euro. US
Federal Reserve President A. Greenspan voiced a timely reaction when he
promised adequate currency volumes to the banks worldwide, ostensibly to
soften the consequences of the terrorist attack.
Moreover, the day after the attack the pledge was upheld by the trio
comprising the US Federal Reserve, Europe's Central Bank, and the Bank
of Japan. The US financial authorities lifted restrictions on the types
of players in short-time financial deals and set up a commission run
jointly by the Department of Treasury and the CIA to monitor the market.
As a result, the switching of the global economy to the
emergency mode and to the anticipation of a large-scale war helped
reinstate the US dollar, and the game of terrorist attacks and
retaliation strikes began to recur worldwide.
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