“It was like watching a movie,” President Trump said after witnessing the elimination of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Caliph, Daesh’s leader, transmitted in the White House Situation Room. It was there that in 2011 President Obama witnessed the elimination of the then enemy number one, Osama Bin Laden, leader of Al Qaeda.
The same staging: the US secret services had long since located the enemy; he was not captured but eliminated: Bin Laden was killed, al-Baghdadi committed suicide or was “suicided”; the body disappeared: that of Bin Laden buried in the sea, the remains of al Baghdadi disintegrated by his explosive belt were also dispersed at sea.
The same company that produced the film: the Intelligence Community, made up of 17 federal organizations. In addition to the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) there is the DIA (Defence Intelligence Agency), but each sector of the Armed Forces, as well as the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, has its own secret service.
For military actions, the Intelligence Community uses the Command of Special Forces, deployed in at least 75 countries, whose official mission includes, in addition to the “direct action to eliminate or capture enemies”, the “non-conventional war conducted by external forces, trained and organized by the Command”.
This is exactly what took place in Syria in 2011, the same year that the US and NATO wars demolished Libya. This is demonstrated by documented evidence, already published. For example:
In March 2013, the New York Times published a detailed survey on the CIA network through which rivers of arms for Islamist militants trained by the US Special Forces Command arrive in Turkey and Jordan, with funding from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies [1].
In May 2013, a month after founding Daesh, al-Baghdadi met with a delegation from the United States Senate in Syria headed by John McCain, as revealed in photographic documentation [2].
In May 2015, Judicial Watch revealed a document by General Michael Flynn, dated August 12, 2012, in which it was stated that there was “the possibility of establishing a Salafist principality in Eastern Syria, and[that] this is exactly what the Western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey that support the opposition want” [3].
In July 2016, Wikileaks revealed a 2012 email from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in which she wrote that, given the Iran-Syria relationship, “the overthrow of Assad would be an immense benefit for Israel, reducing its fear of losing the nuclear monopoly” [4].
This explains why, although the US and its allies are launching the military campaign against Daesh in 2014, Daesh’s forces can advance undisturbed in open spaces with long columns of armed vehicles.
The Russian military intervention in 2015, in support of the Damascus forces, reversed the fate of the conflict. Moscow’s strategic objective is to prevent the demolition of the Syrian state, which would cause chaos as in Libya, exploitable by the USA and NATO to attack Iran and surround Russia.
The United States, short-circuited, continues to play the card of Syria’s fragmentation, supporting the Kurdish independence fighters, and then abandoning them in order not to lose Turkey, NATO’s outpost in the region.
Against such a backdrop, it is understandable why al-Baghdadi, like Bin Laden (formerly a US ally against Russia in the Afghan war, then in Bosnia and Herzegovina), could not be captured for public trial, but had to physically disappear to make evidence of his real role in the US strategy disappear. That’s why Trump loved so much the movie with a happy ending.
* Award winning author Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
The spokesman of the Government of Iran wrote in a short article that the death of Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi is the end of the icon of destructive terrorism aiming to induce the thought of death and ruining the image of Islam before the international public opinion.
But, as the death of Osama bin Laden didn’t eradicate terrorism, the death of al-Baghdadi will not put an end to Daeshism (ISISism), Ali Rabiei wrote.
The death of neither bin Laden nor al-Baghdadi is the end of fighting Daesh terrorism; it is just the end to one chapter of that.
Terrorism is still growing and has a manifestation. Its growth is through the US policies, as well as Petrodollars of the region, and its manifestation is through the Takfiri ideology.
The quagmire of terrorism cannot be dried unless these three sources are dried out.
The US is trying to monopolize civilization and reflects its oppressive deployment of forces all over the world as fighting terrorism. This is while the terrorism in Western Asian and Northern Africa is the fruit of intelligence-military policies, oil thirst, and support for Arrogance.
Rabiei added that killing al-Baghdadi will not downplay the illegal intervention of the US that has been done through "al-Baghdadis and bin Ladens" in the past decades.
The US' operation scheduled at the time when the Syrian Army was on the verge of mopping the Idlib Province cannot downplay the bravery of the Syrian people, alongside their Iranian and Russian allies, trying to take back the areas that had been occupied by Daesh with direct and indirect support from the US.
In the meantime, Iran has always been among the firsts to fight terrorism through the plan of the world free of violence and countering extremism and giving military advice.
Iran is also among the supporters of fighting Daeshism through diplomatic and ideological approach.
No one should forget that the people of the region know that killing one dangerous terrorist will not wash the hands of his supporters of the blood of tens of thousands of people of the region. Nor will it soothe the pains of hundreds of thousands of people that have been deprived of honorable living.
Total annihilation of terrorism will be materialized through complete restoration of Syrian territory, re-establishment of Syria's national sovereignty all over the country, the annihilation of all the Daesh centers, and unconditional retreat of all the US and other foreign forces.
While the US is praising itself with a highly-exaggerated show, it is high time that the international community set its goal to push the US forces out of Syria, to put an end to the Syrian sedition against the country, and paved the way for Damascus to return to the international community, and to make up for the financial and psychological damages to the country.
Alongside its partners and countries with the most sense of responsibility, Iran will continue to try to reduce the pains of the Syrians through diplomatic methods and its commitments in the Astana Talks in order to make sure that terrorism, violence, and extremism and foreign intervention have no place in Syria and that Syrian governments be able to decide for their own fate.
On Saturday, the US officials announced that they had killed the commander of Daesh, Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi, in Idlib.
"Despite the backlash directed at the kingdom, the Saudis haven't faced serious consequences for the slaying of Khashoggi or its slaughter of civilians in Yemen."
The late Jamal Khashoggi, pictured speaking during POMED's "Mohammed bin Salman's Saudi Arabia: A Deeper Look." (Photo: April Brady/Project on Middle East Democracy via flickr/cc)
Saudi Arabian rights activists joined with advocacy groups to mark the one-year anniversary of journalist Jamal Khashoggi's death Wednesday with actions and calls for accountability.
"Any talk of assuming responsibility for Jamal Khashoggi's killing is meaningless if not met with the immediate and unconditional release of dozens of individuals who continue to languish in prison, and who continue to be at risk of torture and other ill-treatment, solely for having expressed their opinion in a peaceful manner," said Amnesty International's Middle East research director Lynn Maalouf.
Khashoggi was murdered on October 2, 2018 in the Saudi consulate in Turkey. Common Dreamsreported Wednesday that an official complaint was filed with the International Criminal Court over the incident.
In the year since the killing, Saudi Arabia has dumped funding into public relations to improve the kingdom's standing in the U.S., according to Open Secrets.
Saudi Arabian interests reported spending just over $16 million on foreign influence operations from October 2, 2017, until October 2, 2018, according to OpenSecrets' analysis. In the year since Khashoggi's death, Saudi interests have poured more than $27 million into influence operations disclosed in Foreign Agent Registration Act filings in OpenSecrets’ Foreign Lobby Watch database.
CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin, in an opinion piece for Common Dreams Tuesday, wrote that those who buy the explanation from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is known as MBS, are complicit in the kingdom's rewriting of the facts of the murder.
"Who is more evil," said Benjamin, "the maniacal Saudi crown prince responsible for Khashoggi's murder and the murder of tens of thousands of Yemenis, or the mendacious world leaders and businesspeople who continue to embrace what should be a pariah state?"
The prince's acknowledgement over the weekend that he bore general responsibility for the murder—a statement that left out any direct admission of responsibility or apology—spurred Human Rights Watch's Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson to call the comments "insufficient."
"If he's serious, the crown prince and his government should provide transparency into the ongoing trial and reveal everything they know about the planning, execution, and aftermath of Khashoggi's murder," said Whitson. "Instead, Saudi authorities are doubling down on repression and continuing to silence independent Saudi voices that Khashoggi sought to defend."
In a statement, Amnesty said it is supporting the launch of a podcast for Saudi expats fighting for free expression in the kingdom. Saudi scholar Hala al-Dosari said that the podcast "will present a powerful platform for Saudi journalists, scholars, and activists to counter the state-led propaganda and misinformation campaign."
"It will engage the Saudi people in a rare and free discussion on issues such as public participation, rule of law, feminism and other issues related to human rights," said al-Dosari.
There are a number of people in Saudi prisons who need solidarity, Amnesty said:
To date, Amnesty International has documented the cases of at least 30 prisoners of conscience who are behind bars serving prison sentences of between five and 30 years solely for peacefully exercising their rights to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly. Amongst those currently detained are Mohammad al-Qahtani, a founding member of the Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association who called for the protection and promotion of human rights and provided legal support to families of detainees, and Waleed Abu al-Khair, a lawyer who defended human rights defenders before his imprisonment. Mohammad al-Qahtani and Waleed Abu al-Khair were tried and sentenced before the counter-terror court to 10 and 15 years in prison, respectively, for their peaceful human rights work.
Critics of President Donald Trump pointed to a pattern of coddling MBS from the White House as a reason that, a year after the murder, next to nothing has been done.
"Despite the backlash directed at the kingdom, the Saudis haven't faced serious consequences for the slaying of Khashoggi or its slaughter of civilians in Yemen," the Center for International Policy's Ben Freeman and William D. Hartung wrote Wednesday. "That is thanks in large part to one man—President Trump. He has loudly and emphatically defended Saudi Arabia at every opportunity."
In a tweet, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called for action.
"A year has passed, but Donald Trump and his administration have done nothing to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). "He and his family deserve justice."
The 18th anniversary of the attacks on 11 September 2001 (9/11) will be commemorated in the US and worldwide by the corporate media to keep the legend about 9/11alive. The official 9/11 narrative, however, is not only riddled with contradictions and outright lies, but any deviation from this fairy tale will cost any detractor his existence. “Conspiracy theorists” works like a weapon of mass destruction, meaning, nobody of the ruling class and their moral mainstream media enforcer will deviate one inch from the official story.
After 13 minutes, Osama bin Laden surfaced as the guy responsible for the attacks. President George W. Bush declared shortly after America is under attack”. The official account emerged within days and goes the following:
“On the morning of 11 September 2001 four civilian airlines with dozens of passengers and crew, designated as flights AA11, UA175, AA77 and UA93, were hijacked by teams of four or five Muslim fanatics. Each team included one trained pilot. The hijackers took control of the airliners and flew a Boeing 767 assigned to flight AA11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York, another Boeing 767 assigned to flight UA175 into the South Tower and a Boeing 757 assigned to flight AA77 into the Pentagon. The fourth airliner, a Boeing 757 assigned to flight UA93, presumed to have been destined to crash on the White House, did not reach its target. It crashed in an empty field in Pennsylvania after the passengers rose up and tried to seize control of the aircraft. As a result of the impact of the aircraft on the Twin Towers and the ensuing fires, both towers collapsed soon afterwards onto their own footprint, causing massive deaths. Almost 3,000 people died in the attacks. Osama bin Laden and his al-Qa’eda network were shortly thereafter blamed for conceiving, planning, financing and coordinating the attacks.”
The swiftness of the fabricated account is remarkable; such is everything surrounding the context of 9/11. One can state with confidence that the story the peoples are made to believe is false from start to finish.
To start with the alleged hijackers for whom there is not a shred of evidence that they did it. The collapse of the Twin Towers caused by fire has been repudiated a thousand times. The Towers were brought down by controlled demolition, which pulverized the two 110 stories high-rises. Also, WTC 7 that wasn’t hit by a plane came down in free fall. Another airplane crashed into the Pentagon. This aerial maneuver couldn’t even be undertaken by the well-experienced pilot not to speak of amateurs who could hardly navigate a Cessna. Even more implausible was the disappearance of the United-Airlines flight 93 on a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. There was just a whole, no debris, only nothing.
Within a month, the contaminated wreckage was sold abroad to prevent an investigation. From the beginning, the Bush/Cheney administration sabotaged any inquiry and curtailed its authorities. The cover-up, however, overseen by then FBI Director Robert Mueller, the infamous guy responsible for the solution of the Russian hoax against President Donald Trump. Bush was pressured by Congress and the public to appoint a commission of inquiry. He came up with the most dubious figure in US politics; Henry Kissinger. The outrage was long in the coming and Kissinger had to resign. On 17 December 2002, appointed former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean as chairman of the commission. The Democrats nominated Lee H. Hamilton. The executive director of the 9/11 Commission was Philip Zelikow, the most untrustworthy figure Bush could find. He was involved in Bush’s preemptive war strategy. Accordingly, the 9/11 Commission Report is not worth the paper it’s written on. This storybook didn’t waste a single word on the collapse of WTC 7.
Neither the witnesses who reported explosions during the collapse of the Twin Towers nor the witnesses who didn’t see any debris in Shanksville were heart. Instead Zelikow ramp his premeditated report down the throat of the commission members. Finally, the commission was set up to fail and to cover up what really happened on 9/11. This report is just a joke but the world has no other choice than to believe in it.
9/11 was a propaganda-coup, unprecedented in history. „When the sun rose on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, the official legend of 9/11 lay ready to be promoted worldwide. It was conceived before the events and confirmed by the U.S. Congress – give or take minor details – within 24 hours of the deadly incidents.“ Within hours, the entire world was led astray into believing what can be labeled an absurd tale. The author can’t understand that the Western world swallowed “ this legend hook, line, and sinker.“
The main suspects of the heinous crime committed on 9/11 are not found in the caves of Afghanistan but in government offices in Washington. Elias Davidsson writes in his book “The Betrayal of America”: “Had the crime of 9/11 been carried out by rogue elements of the U.S. government or by a foreign state against the real interests of the ruling class of the United States and its allies, the plotters and perpetrators would have been exposed and punished long ago.“
The disgusting spectacle designed as a horror show lasted 90 minutes just like an ordinary movie. The incident was intended to rally the Americans behind the flag and their President. And the media promoted the official account day in, day out. And even the leftists capitulated before this brainwashing. No one of the so-called left asked for evidence that Afghanistan or the Taliban had anything to do with 9/11. Even when counter-evidence surmounted against the legend of 9/11, the left kept mum and stuck to Bush’s fairy tale. They also slandered respectable critics.
Instead of celebrating the myth about 9/11, the American public and peoples around the world should demand an independent investigation into 9/11. The curtain of lies about this organized crime, which plunged the world into an endless war on terror aimed at the peoples of the so-called Third World, must be lifted.
As long as military, intelligence and law enforcement officials worldwide cooperate with the rulers of the murderous U.S. regime or its stooges in other countries the physical security of ordinary citizens is in danger.
After years of reporting on the Global War on Terror, many questions behind the US attacks remain unresolved
ByPEPE ESCOBAR
A week back as the U.S. marked the 18th anniversary of the highly suspicious incident of the collapse of New York’s landmark 110-storey high twin-tower World Trade Center, it was once again the repetition of preposterous lies by American politicians and the mainstream western media, which think they can fool the world by continuing to hide the truth.
The following is an interesting article in this regard for the ‘Asia Times’ by investigative Brazilian journalist, Pepe Escobar, titled: “We are all hostages of 9/11”.
Afghanistan was bombed and invaded because of 9/11. I was there from the start, even before 9/11. On August 20, 2001, I interviewed commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, the “Lion of the Panjshir,” who told me about an “unholy alliance” of the Taliban, al-Qaeda and the ISI (Pakistani intel).
Back in Peshawar, I learned that something really big was coming: my article was published by Asia Times on August 30. Commander Massoud was killed on September 9: I received a terse email from a Panjshir source, only stating, “the commander has been shot.” Two days later, 9/11 happened.
And yet, the day before, none other than Osama bin Laden, in person, was in a Pakistani hospital in Rawalpindi, receiving treatment, as CBS reported. Bin Laden was proclaimed the perpetrator already at 11am on 9/11 – with no investigation whatsoever. It should have been not exactly hard to locate him in Pakistan and “bring him to justice.”
In December 2001 I was in Tora Bora tracking bin Laden – under B-52 bombers and side by side with Pashtun mujahideen. Later, in 2011, I would revisit the day bin Laden vanished forever.
One year after 9/11, I was back in Afghanistan for an in-depth investigation of the killing of Massoud. By then it was possible to establish a Saudi connection: the letter of introduction for Massoud’s killers, who posed as journalists, was facilitated by commander Sayyaf, a Saudi asset.
Saudi-born alleged terror mastermind Osama bin Laden is seen in a video taken at a secret site in Afghanistan. This was aired by Al-Jazeera on Oct. 7, 2001, the day the US launched bombing of terrorist camps, airbases and air defense installations in its campaign against the Taliban for sheltering bin Laden. Photo: AFP
For three years my life revolved around the Global War on Terror; most of the time I lived literally on the road, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, the Persian Gulf and Brussels. At the start of ‘Shock and Awe’ on Iraq, in March 2003, Asia Times published my in-depth investigation of which neo-cons concocted the war on Iraq.
In 2004, roving across the US, I re-traced the Taliban’s trip to Texas, and how a top priority, since the Clinton years all the way to the neo-cons, was about what I had baptized as “Pipelineistan” – in this case how to build the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline, bypassing Iran and Russia, and extending US control of Central and South Asia.
Later on, I delved into the hard questions the 9/11 Commission never asked, and how Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign was totally conditioned by and dependent on 9/11.
Michael Ruppert, a CIA whistleblower, who may – or may not – have committed suicide in 2014, was a top 9/11 analyst. We exchanged a lot of information, and always emphasized the same points: Afghanistan was all about (existent) heroin and (non-existent) pipelines.
Now, President Trump may have identified a possible Afghan deal – which the Taliban, who control two-thirds of the country, are bound to refuse, as it allows withdrawal of only 5,000 out of 13,000 US troops. Moreover, the US ‘Deep State’ is absolutely against any deal, as well as India and the rickety government in Kabul.
But Pakistan and China are in favor, especially because Beijing plans to incorporate Kabul into the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and have Afghanistan admitted as a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, thus attaching the Hindu Kush and the Khyber Pass to the ongoing Eurasia integration process.
Praying for a Pearl
Eighteen years after the game-changing fact, we all remain hostages of 9/11. US neocons, gathered at the Project for the New American Century, had been praying for a “Pearl Harbor” to reorient US foreign policy since 1997. Their prayers were answered beyond their wildest dreams.
Already in The Grand Chessboard, also published in 1997, former National Security Adviser and Trilateral Commission co-founder Zbigniew Brzezinski, nominally not a neocon, had pointed out that the American public “supported America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.”
So, Brzezinski added, America “may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.”
As an attack on the homeland, 9/11 generated the Global War on Terror, launched at 11pm on the same day, initially christened “The Long War” by the Pentagon, later sanitized as Overseas Contingency Operations by the Obama administration. This cost trillions of dollars, killedover half a million people and branched out into illegal wars against seven Muslim nations – all justified on “humanitarian grounds” and allegedly supported by the “international community.”
Year after year, 9/11 is essentially a You Have The Right to Accept Only The Official Version ritual ceremony, even as widespread evidence suggests the US government knew 9/11 would happen and did not stop it.
Three days after 9/11, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that in June 2001, German intelligence warned the CIA that Middle East terrorists were “planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture.”
In August 2001, President Putin ordered Russian intel to tell the US government “in the strongest possible terms” of imminent attacks on airports and government buildings, MSNBC revealed in an interview with Putin that was broadcast on September 15 that year.
No US government agency has released any information on who used foreknowledge of 9/11 in the financial markets. The US Congress did not even raise the issue. In Germany, investigative financial journalist Lars Schall has been working for years on a massive study detailing to a great extent insider trading before 9/11.
Mr Mueller, I presume
Robert Mueller was the Director of the FBI from 2001 to 2003. He was appointed by President Bush only one week before 9/11. Three days after 9/11, Mueller said, “there were no warning signs that I’m aware of” pointing to the possibility of airplanes crashing into buildings.
In fact FBI agents repeatedly accused HQ of blocking myriad investigations before 9/11 that could have prevented it.
In a devastating book, The FBI Accomplice of 9/11 (Documents), written in French and recently translated into English, Patrick Pasin painstakingly tracks all warnings on record: not only to the FBI, directly, but also including the by now notorious “August 6 memo,” which referred to planned attacks involving multiple airplane hijackings. Then National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice famously dismissed the memo as “very vague,” “very non-specific” and “nothing really new here.”
Pasin meticulously aims to prove that the FBI knew all there was to know about indications toward the possibility of a 9/11. But then the bureau silenced them; buried them; made them disappear; fell into a prolonged comma; and, in quite serious instances, may have even forged false evidence, as in arguably fabricating a list of Muslim hijackers, complete with the finding of indestructible passports, and forging impossible phone calls placed at 30,000 feet.
Trump knows buildings
Discrediting the official, immutable 9/11 narrative remains the ultimate taboo. Hundreds of architects and engineers engaged in meticulous technical debunking of all aspects of 9/11’s official story are summarily dismissed as “conspiracy theorists.”
In the afternoon of 9/11, Donald Trump the real estate developer (not yet President of the United States) was interviewed by phone by Channel 9 in New York.
Fasten your seat belts, because this is incandescent. The serial money quotes start rolling at 5:20:
Channel 9: “There is a great deal of questions about whether or not the damage and the ultimate destruction of the buildings was caused by the airplanes, by architectural defect or possibly by bombs, or after-shocks. Do you have any thoughts on that?”
Donald Trump: “It wasn’t architectural defect. The World Trade Center was always known as a very, very strong building. Don’t forget that it took a big bomb in the basement [in 1993]. Now the basement is the most vulnerable place, because that is your foundation and it withstood that. And I got to see that area about 3 or 4 days after it took place, because one of my structural engineers actually took me for a tour because he did the building. And I said ‘I can’t believe it’. The building was standing solid and half of the columns were blown out. This was an unbelievably powerful building if you know anything about structure. It was one of the first buildings that was built from the outside. The steel, the reason the WTC had such narrow windows is that in between all the windows you had steel on the outside of the building. That’s why when I first looked at it you had big, heavy I-beams. When I first looked at it I couldn’t believe it because there was a hole in the steel. And this was steel that was … you remember the width of the windows of the World Trade Center, folks, I think that you know, if you were ever up there, they were quite narrow and in between was this heavy steel. I said: How could a plane, even a 767 or 747 or whatever it might have been, how could it possibly go through the steel? I happen to think that they had not only a plane, but they had bombs that exploded almost simultaneously. [italics mine]. Because I just can’t imagine anything being able to go through that wall. Most buildings are built with the steel on the inside around the elevator shafts. This one was built from the outside, which is the strongest structure you can have. And it was almost just like a can of soup.”
Channel 9: “You know…we were looking at pictures all morning long of that plane coming into Building #2. And when you see that approach the far side, then all of a sudden within another millisecond the explosion pops out the other side.”
Donald Trump: “Right. I just think that there was a plane with more than jet fuel.” [italics mine]
Donald Trump may be extremely controversial – and all things for all people. But one thing the former real estate developer and current President of the United States does know about is building construction.
Serious questions
In contrast, skepticism rooted in Greek and Latin tradition came up with arguably the best documentary on 9/11: Zero, an Italian production. Just as arguably the most stimulating book on 9/11 is also Italian: The Myth of September 11, by Roberto Quaglia, which offers a delicately nuanced narrative of 9/11 as a myth structured as a movie. The book became a huge hit in Eastern Europe.
Serious questions suggest quite plausible suspects to be investigated regarding 9/11, far more than 19 Arabs with box cutters. Ten years ago, in Asia Times, I asked 50 questions, some of them extremely detailed, about 9/11. After reader demand and suggestions, I added 20 more. None of these questions were convincingly addressed – not to mention answered – by the official narrative.
World public opinion is directed to believe that on the morning of 9/11 four airliners, presumably hijacked by 19 Arabs with box cutters, traveled undisturbed – for two hours – across the most controlled airspace on the planet, which is supervised by the most devastating military apparatus ever.
American Airlines Flight 11 deviated from its path at 8.13am and crashed into the first World Trade Center tower at 8.57am. Only at 8.46am did NORAD – the North American Aerospace Defense Command – order that two intercepting F-15s take off from Otis military base.
By a curious coincidence a Pentagon war game was in effect on the morning of 9/11 – so air-controllers’ radars may have registered only ‘ghost signals’ of nonexistent aircraft simulating an air attack. Well, it was much more complicated than that, as demonstrated by professional pilots.
‘Angel was next’
World public opinion is also directed to believe that a Boeing 757 – with a wingspan of 38 meters – managed to penetrate the Pentagon through a six-meter-wide hole and at the height of the first floor. A Boeing 757 with landing gear is 13 meters high. Airliners electronically refuse to crash – so it’s quite a feat to convince one to fly five to 10 meters above the ground, landing gear on, at a lightning speed of 800 kilometers an hour.
According to the official narrative, the Boeing 757 literally pulverized itself. Yet even after pulverization, it managed to perforate six walls of three rings of the Pentagon, leaving a two-meter wide hole in the last wall but only slightly damaging the second and third rings. The official narrative is that the hole was caused by the plane’s nose – still quite hard even after pulverization. Yet the rest of the plane – a mass of 100 tons traveling at 800 kilometers an hour – miraculously stopped at the first ring.
All that happened under the stewardship of one Hani Hanjour, who three weeks before had been judged by his flight instructors to be incapable of piloting a Cessna. Hanjour, nonetheless, managed to accomplish an ultra-fast spiral descent at 270 degrees, aligning at a maximum 10 meters above ground, minutely calibrating the trajectory, and keeping a cruise speed of roughly 800 kilometers an hour.
Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers, left, and US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld brief reporters at the Pentagon on Oct. 8, 2001 following the US bombing raids on Afghanistan in response to 9/11 attacks. Photo: AFP / Luke Frazza
At 9.37am, Hanjour hit precisely the Pentagon’s budget analysts’ office, where everyone was busy working on the mysterious disappearance of no less than $2.3 trillion that Defense Secretary Donald “Known Unknowns” Rumsfeld, in a press conference the day before, said could not be tracked. So, it’s not only Boeings that get pulverized inside the Pentagon.
World public opinion is also directed to believe that Newtonian physics was suspended as a special bonus for WTC 1 and 2 on 9/11 (not to mention WTC 7, which was not even hit by any plane). The slower WTC tower took 10 seconds to fall 411 meters, starting from immobility. So it fell at 148 kilometers an hour. Considering the initial acceleration time, it was a free fall, not the least impeded by 47 massive, vertical steel beams that composed the tower’s structural heart.
World public opinion is also directed to believe that United Airlines Flight 93 – 150 tons of aircraft with 45 people, 200 seats, luggage, a wingspan of 38 meters – crashed in a field in Pennsylvania and also literally pulverized itself, totally disappearing inside a hole six meters by three meters wide and only two meters deep.
Suddenly, Air Force One was “the only plane in the sky.” Colonel Mark Tillman, who was on board, recalled: “We get this report that there’s a call saying ‘Angel’ was next. No one really knows now where the comment came from – it got mistranslated or garbled amid the White House, the Situation Room, the radio operators. ‘Angel’ was our code name. The fact that they knew about ‘Angel,’ well, you had to be in the inner circle.”
This means that 19 Arabs with box cutters, and most of all their handlers, surely must have been “in the inner circle.” Inevitably, this was never fully investigated.
Already in 1997, Brzezinski had warned, “it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America.”
In the end, much to the despair of US neocons, all the combined sound and fury of 9/11 and the Global War on Terror/Overseas Contingency Operations, in less than two decades, ended up metastasized into not only a challenger but a Russia-China strategic partnership. This is the real “enemy” – not al-Qaeda, a flimsy figment of the CIA’s imagination, rehabilitated and sanitized as “moderate rebels” in Syria.
