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Robert Scheer: Gaping Holes in the 9/11 Narrative
Five years out from the attacks, why do we still know so little about what really happened that day?
A Dig led by Robert Scheer
What we still don't know about 9/11 could kill us. By "we" I mean the public that has been kept in the dark for five
years by a president who may know the truth but has chosen to ignore it. Instead of grappling with the thorny origins of
that disaster, George Bush willfully turned the nation's attention and resources to a totally unrelated and disastrous
imperial adventure in Iraq.
Just how unrelated was definitively established last Friday with the belated release of the Senate Intelligence
Committee's second report, which concluded that there not only was zero connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda,
but that Iraq was the one country in the region where Osama bin Laden could not operate.
Unfortunately, that was not true of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the two countries that had recognized and otherwise
supported the Taliban government that hosted bin Laden during the run-up to 9/11. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were from
Saudi Arabia, and yet there has been no serious investigation of the extended Royal family's roll in the recruitment of
bin Laden's "soldiers" and the ease with which they secured legal visas to enter the United States.
While funds for Al Qaeda emanated from the Saudi kingdom, the essential logistical support for Al Qaeda came from
Pakistan. Now, five years later, bin Laden and the remnants of his organization are assumed by the United States to have
found refuge in Pakistan's unruly tribal region, where the Pakistan government recently has reduced its forces,
conceding that it could not defeat local tribesmen sympathetic to the Taliban.
Nor has there been any credible accounting of the role of Pakistan's intelligence community, then and now, in support of
Islamic terrorists on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghan border. Or in the passage of Pakistan's nuclear secrets to what
Bush refers to as "rogue nations."
Recall that the predominant excuse for invading Iraq was the claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction
and would be willing to pass them on to rogue regimes and terrorists. Not only were such weapons not found, but the
evidence from the accounts of former Administration insiders and the Senate Intelligence Committee makes clear that the
Administration was consciously cherry picking the evidence to shore up its fraudulent case.
There were weapons of mass destruction being shipped to "rogue nations," but they were coming from Pakistan in an
extensive program headed by Abdul Qadeer (A.Q.) Khan, the father of the "Islamic bomb." The Pakistan government has
admitted that Khan passed on to North Korea, Libya and Iran technical know-how and vital materials for the creation of
nuclear weapons. But Khan was pardoned of any crimes by Pakistan's dictator general, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf.
Khan is restricted only by a loose form of house arrest and has never been made available to U.S. investigators. Yet the
Bush Administration dropped the sanctions originally imposed on Pakistan in reprisal for its development of nuclear
weapons in return for Pakistan's support in the "war on terror."
As for Afghanistan, the Taliban is on the rise. NATO commanders last week urgently requested more troops, and the
country is now torn by the anarchy of a narco-state that is supplying 92% of the world's heroin market and generating
massive profits for gangsters and terrorists alike. The country is now as dangerous for American soldiers as is Iraq.
Despite this sorry record of neglect in Southwest Asia and the creation of a quagmire and recruiting poster for
terrorism in Iraq, Bush once again arrogantly asserts that his policies have made us safer, even as he has undermined
our domestic freedoms and mocked the U.S. commitment to international law, particularly concerning the treatment of
prisoners.
Last week, Bush conceded that there were indeed secret CIA prisons, when finally announcing that the group of "key
witnesses" to the 9/11 disaster would be moved to Guantanamo and for once afforded visits form the Red Cross and minimal
legal representation. Some of them have been interrogated in secret for up to five years, with the Bush Administration
left as the sole interpreter of what they revealed.
After five years of official deceit, it is not too difficult to believe that the isolation of those prisoners was done
less for reasons of learning the truth about 9/11 and more in an effort to politically manage the narrative released to
the public.
There is glaring evidence that the latter was the case. The 9/11 Commission report contains a disclaimer box on page
146, in which it is stated that the report's account of what happened on 9/11 was in considerable measure based on what
those key witnesses allegedly told interrogators, and that the commissioners were not allowed to meet the witnesses or
their interrogators.
"We submitted questions for use in the interrogations, but had no control over whether, when or how questions of
particular interest would be asked. Nor were we allowed to talk to the interrogators so that we could better judge the
credibility of the detainees and clarify ambiguities in the reporting."
In short, the most cited source that we have on what happened on 9/11, the much celebrated 9/11 Commission Report, was
stage-managed by the Bush administration, just as it has controlled and distorted so much other information.
In light of that sorry record of the propagandistic exploitation of the 9/11 tragedy for partisan political purpose, is
it any wonder that large numbers of Americans have doubts about all of it and that a considerable industry of
documentaries and investigative reports has sprung up with alternative theories ranging from the plausible to the
absurd?
In the sidebar below, we offer some examples of the better of those efforts, not by way of endorsing them but rather
because there is so much reason to doubt the "truth" as the Bush Administration has packaged it.
SIDEBAR
Related Links
• Robert Scheer discusses this essay (video podcast) 9/11 Video Tribute
Check out a collection of the most memorable and compelling footage related to that day— from images of the airliners
crashing into the towers to Jon Stewart’s first show after the attacks.
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“9/11: Press for the Truth” –- a movie about the efforts of the “Jersey Girls,” women who lost husbands in the World Trade Center attacks, and who
almost single-handedly goaded Republican lawmakers into holding hearings into the attacks.
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9/11 Conspiracy Theory Links
• Washington Post article on the theorists
• Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s conspiracy roundup
• Wikipedia’s 9/11 Conspiracy Wiki
• 911truth.org’s top 40 reasons to doubt the official September 11th story
• National Institute of Standards and Technology’s response to conspiracy theories
(a relatively compact conspiracy site)
(the most popular conspiracy theory movie in circulation)
• 911Research.com (a multi-dimensional collection of conspiracy articles)
(conspiracy blog)
• Defective Yeti's satirical conspiracy theories
(very funny)
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Robert Scheer is editor in chief of Truthdig. He is a nationally syndicated columnist, author of seven books and a
co-host of the political radio program "Left, Right and Center."
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