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Between 2016 and 2018 my take on 9/11 changed. On the fifteenth anniversary I had derided the ‘truther’ idea of 9/11 being a false flag operation, by or on behalf of the US ‘deep state’, but the seventeenth saw me eating my words. Too many holes and howlers – too many questions left not so much unanswered as unacknowledged – in the official narrative meant I could no longer dismiss the false flag thesis.
Since then I have moved from 9/11 agnosticism to acknowledgement that, of available accounts of what happened that day, the false flag thesis is the least problematic.
I repeat: “least problematic”. No Truther 1 has explained to my satisfaction how parties to mass murder and cover up – how many is anyone’s guess – have held their tongues for so long with no breaking of ranks or deathbed confession. As I said in a caveat to my 2018 recantation:
The only safe number for a conspiracy is one. Since that’s an oxymoron, let’s move to two. At least you’ll know, if you didn’t blab, who did. But when we move to three, boy, that’s when the problems really kick in. But here? Here we’re talking hundreds if not thousands of conspirators …
I don’t see this as insurmountable though. For one thing, some participants – and certainly the “Islamist” patsies sent to their deaths that day – would have been kept in the dark as to the full extent of any false flag op. (Indeed, most would have had no inkling of what was afoot.) What if those fully in the know were a tiny fraction of my “hundreds if not thousands” ?
(A tiny fraction bound, by an unforgivingly omerta culture, to perpetual silence.)
For another, my caveat is one of plausibility. As such it is outweighed by a wealth of evidence devastating – if not singly then cumulatively – to the official narrative but consistent with a false flag thesis. 2
This evidence includes but is by no means confined to the facts that:
- The alleged hijackers were neither devout Muslims nor pilots capable of executing the lethal moves witnessed in New York City, far less the one described at the Pentagon.
- We now know the USAF contracted Raytheon to develop the technology to override cockpit controls and send a plane on a pre-programmed flight path. 3
- Official accounts, of why the military jets on permanent standby were not scrambled the instant it was known a transcontinental plane had been hijacked, were changed no fewer than four times in the face of contradictions both extrinsic and intrinsic. 4
- Accounts of how WTC 7, which no plane struck, collapsed several hours after WTC 1 and 2 fell have been threadbare, unconvincing and circular. 5
- 9/11 legitimised – at least in the eyes of the uncritical whose name, especially in times of moral panic, is legion – both arms of the “War on Terror”. At home it allowed repressive laws and mass surveillance to be implemented with barely a murmur of protest. In the middle east it green-lighted carnage and a trail of chaos which, according to a study by one of America’s most prestigious universities, cost $8tn and 4.5 million deaths. That’s a weighty cui bono? given that a truth not easily seen in 2001 is now better appreciated. Here’s David Morrison (abridged) in a Labour and Trade Union Review piece of 2003:
In September 2000, the Wolfowitz vision 6 of 1992 saw light of day again in the PNAC [Project for a New American Century] report, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century. Its conclusions begin:
“… America should extend its global leadership by military force. Today, the USA has an unprecedented strategic opportunity. It faces no great-power challenge; has wealthy, powerful and democratic allies in every part of the world … its political and economic principles are almost universally embraced. At no time has the international security order been as conducive to American interests and ideals …
Yet unless the USA maintains military strength, this opportunity will be lost. Failure to establish a security strategy responsive to new realities has placed the American peace at growing risk.”
… The report proposed a revolution in US military capabilities “to provide a secure basis for U.S. power projection around the world” and create a new service, US Space Forces, with the mission of space control. This “process of transformation … is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor”. [Emphasis added.]
It’s hard to envisage any event more “catastrophic and catalyzing” than what the world saw on its screens, both in real time and in the days after 9/11. As with Biden’s and Nuland’s promise to “stop Nord Stream“, advance notice had been served – and promptly buried.
That’s my input done. Thanks are due for the second time in as many days to a steel city reader; this time for alerting me to a crisply authoritative presenting of the ‘truther’ case by Kevin Ryan. It too is a video podcast but, as with my offering yesterday, is in the main a talking heads affair. You can do other stuff while you listen, though you’ll miss a few non essential visuals.
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- My use of ‘truther’ is not derogatory. I’ve been told it is regarded as such by those on the receiving end but for me it is simply short hand for “false flag theorist”.
- My list of “evidence devastating to the official narrative but consistent with the false flag thesis” excludes the much touted short-selling spike. Yes, “put-option” bets on American and United Airlines share prices falling did rise prior to 9/11 but insider trading is not the only credible explanation. This doesn’t rule it out – it’s a mistake to assume our elites too smart to leave so glaring a trail – but it’s no smoking gun either.
- Here’s an Air & Space Forces Magazine story on the USAF-Raytheon contract. It’s dated October 2003, but I see no insuperable anachronism here, given State powers to delay the release of such information.
- Shifts in the official narrative – to accommodate not new evidence but holes too gaping to be sustained – have been a recurring feature of 9/11 ‘explanations’.
- As with this ‘debunking’ piece from Sky History, dismissals tend to be shrill – as mine had been – in their derision of conspiracy theorists and “rigidly-held beliefs”.
- The Wolfowitz vision (or Wolfowitz Doctrine) has to be seen in the context of American Exceptionalism. As such it belongs in the same conceptual family as demands that the USA have full spectrum dominance. In a splendid articulation featured in my previous post, Columbia University’s Jeffrey Sachs adds to moral objections to these concepts the historic truth that every aspiring global hegemon has failed in such endeavours. So it has proved with a post-USSR America which, having rained death and destruction on inferior powers in the middle east, now faces – so far by proxy conflict and economic warfare – peer adversaries for the first time since 1945. This, and not fanciful and evidence-free notions of ‘Russian aggression’ and ‘Chinese imperialism’, is why the world is now at so perilous a point.
Hi Phil,
Have been following the “conspiracy theorists” investigation since I first saw the clip of video showing the planes hitting the towers and knew in my own mind that what I was seeing was just not possible.
I did not believe the narrative then for several reasons because it was obvious that thermite was present. Aviation fuel from the 767 which burns at 800C, whereas construction steel of the I beams melts at 1400+C, and given that the fuel itself would have been incinerated right after the supposed impacts and could, therefore, not have continued to burn for several weeks. Nano thermite was found in the dust at ground zero & the carbon nanotubes were found to be present in the lungs of the first responders.
The 9/11 Commission Report barred testimonies from 503 first responders and thousands of witness testimonies were ignored.
The NTSB could not explain how a Boeing Jet could cause the damage from such a jet which would be like a pencil puncturing screen netting. (I watch Air Crash Investigations which is very insightful).
The dancing Israelis? Why were they waiting there to document an event that had not even occurred.
WTC7. Why were no staff present in WTC7 when the towers were hit. The Israeli security for the towers had their HO there and their staff were not present at all?
How did the Hazmet teams arrive in such a timely fashion when the city was gridlocked immediately after the explosions but somehow managed to get teams on site even as the Fire fighters were setting up?
The Hazmet teams kept the fire crews away from ground zero where the I beams, which were registering high levels on the Geiger counters(how this was possible was never proven or even investigated)were then shipped very rapidly to China -why?
There is so much contradictory information regarding the false flag attack on the strange collapse of the towers(which should have taken out all the buildings near them for half a block in the direction they would have fallen like a tree being chopped down) that the truth is elusive with regard to the real nature of the incident and who was guilty.
Many people do not even know about the Israeli sinking of the USS Liberty and LBJ’s attempt to murder the surviving sailors 70 years ago, despite various attempts to have the incident acknowledged, so we are in for a long wait before the truth is ever revealed.
Reading the PNAC, the Kissinger appointed draftees of that foul project showed themselves willing to sacrifice a million or so American lives in order to ensure US hegemony and I believe the Towers were an excuse to justify the terrorist activities the US has embarked on in the last twenty years in the War OF Terror.
There are far more relevant facts that are dismissed without scrutiny or mention which in itself is a testimony of this monstrous event. Having said that, other countries have suffered far more monstrous attacks on civilians at the hands of the crazies in the basement now running the USA. Americans don’t know how much better off they are than those who fall victim to American “exceptionalism” far worse than the twin tower collapses.
I am so angry at the US/CIA paying for the Madrasses to teach fundamentalism and encourage extremism which is responsible for the terrorist groups inflicting so much carnage in so many parts of the world that I wish that the Americans were on the receiving end of the devastation being wrought on those innocent peoples instead.
It might sound cruel, but who should be the victims? The Iraqi’s? Libyans? Syrians? Afghanis? Africans? Indonesians? Why should they pay so much in blood for the deeds of the “ghouls”, who suffer now because the US wants to maintain it’s crumbling empire? So much so, that I want to be rid of the greatest terrorist nation on the planet and for it’s continued downward spiral into insignificance and the multipolar Law Based International Order to succeed in the hope that the other 7.7 billion of people on this planet have some chance at a more peaceful future. That’s never going to happen while the US deludes itself into believing it can bully, murder and plunder at will to maintain it’s “exceptionalism” and right to do as it pleases, regardless of the suffering it inflicts all over the planet…..Rant over.
Glad you put this article on your blog.
Regards,
Susan 🙂
Hi Susan. I wrote a multi-para reply to your comment, and for a while it featured on my site. But ongoing issues now being resolved I think sent it to the planet of lost comments.
Sorry – but thanks as ever for your detailed and informed words. One thing I did say in my lost reply is that near the end of his interview, Kevin Ryan, who’s devoted 17 years of his life to this matter, is asked if he’s been warned off or threatened. “That’s not how things usually work”, he replies. “As with Black Power in the 70s …”
(… today we could add eco and animal rights activists …)
“… the deep state MO of preference is to infiltrate movements seen as threatening to power, in order to embarrass and discredit them.”
A few years ago a tireless OffGuardian below-the-liner, going by the name of “Flax Girl”, insisted with stupendous tenacity that 9/11 never happened and was an elaborate video hoax. To their credit, her fellow commenters gave short shrift but she kept at it!
I remember “Flax girl”. I thought her to be an extremist and very dedicated promoter of anything & everything as a conspiracy and as such, did not lend her too much credence. Since then, many incidents promoted by TPTB have been proved to be conspiracies, so my dismissal of her CT’s was not only contemptible (hands up from me) but premature. Lesson learned.
Susan 🙂
Don’t beat yourself up too much over Flax girl. I don’t recall her ever producing evidence of her having contacted the bereaved relatives!
All of the above is credible and gives rise to serious doubts about the official story. However, I feel about ‘9/11’ the same way as I do about flying saucer reports. I.e there is very probably something in it, but whatever it is, it is not likely to be opened to objective scrutiny or proof. (The towers because of the huge vested interest by the mainstream media and the US government in not acknowledging any problem, and the UFOs because of the nature of the phenomena [psychical]). So it’s best ignored until further damning and incontrovertible evidence is securely and squarely in the public consciousness.
You’ll know when UFO’s are real because Washington, NATO and the collective West will classify the existence of their occupants as a security threat to ‘their way of life’ and declare war on them.
You can take that to the bank.
Not an option for me, Jams. What distinguishes this matter from UFOs is the trail of carnage and erosion of freedoms 9/11 legitimated.
As for my current stance, my claim is carefully worded and epistemologically sound:
I refer to three broad categories of competing theory. One is an “official narrative”. This takes several forms – NIST, 9/11 Commission and media popularisations (some of them contemporaneous) – but though the tone and level of detail vary, as do the howlers subsequently airbrushed out, the substance does not: 19 Islamists hijacked four planes to commit the mass murder the world saw on its screens. A second theory is the false flag op. Under its umbrella, several variants are posited, not all mutually exclusive. These include CIA rogue elements, Mossad, and a Team Bush not as perps of the attacks but given advanced warning they chose to ignore for the PNAC reasons I gave. A third broad category is that, yes, there’s been a cover up. But it’s a cover up of official incompetence and venality (like the fact, fatal to firefighters who unlike the cops did not get the order to evacuate because the deal Rudy Giuliani had cut with Motorola left them with radios incompatible with NYCPD’s). Not of mass murder.
Sure, it can seem a rabbit hole; that’s how I viewed it for years. But given the crucial importance of 9/11, it behoves us to get familiar with and weigh as best we can all three categories of explanation. At which point, I say, Occams Razor applies. The theory least flawed is indeed the false flag thesis.
As indicated in my reply to Susan’s comment, funny stuff has been happening with site comments. Aside from myself, the only victim has been John Booth, the man who alerted me to the Kevin Ryan podcast. For reasons I can’t fathom his comment disappeared too – it isn’t even in the Spam folder. Here’s what John writes:
Excellent. Many thanks.
You’re welcome Steve. Good to hear from you.