9/11

The “War on Terror” is said to have begun on September 11, 2001. But is it possible that the war began before this date? Some people point to U.S. government complicity in the events of 9/11, either by not doing enough to prevent it, or—more ominously—by actively planning for it. Whatever the truth may be, there is plenty of conjecture that what happened on that day doesn’t add up to the popular version of the events.

What is not in dispute is that public support for the War on Terror was far greater after these attacks than it would have been on September 10, 2001. Could it be that the attacks were allowed to happen to create public clamor for a war that would otherwise have been inconceivable? Many people have pointed to the possibility that 9/11 was a clone of Pearl Harbor, an attack on the U.S. that was deliberately allowed to take place in order to further the war aims of a president. But a more sinister comparison has been made by those skeptical of the motives of the Bush administration. They claim that what happened was more akin to Adolf Hitler’s burning of the Reichstag, the German Republic’s parliament, on February 27, 1933. Hitler blamed the fire on Communists plotting against the state. But historians widely accept the view that a member of the Prussian interior ministry set fire to the building deliberately, on Hitler’s orders.

Immediately after the fire Hitler announced an emergency decree which suspended the normal civilian rights and liberties of citizens and gave the government enormous authority to impose order. This was the beginning of the end for democratic values and the rise of Nazi dictatorship. On October 3, 2001 Congress approved Bush’s Patriot Act, a similar bill which reduced the civil liberties of Americans and allowed the detention without trial of anyone the government deemed a potential “security threat.”  Furthermore, the public and political pressure for retaliation for the attacks was intense, and neatly tied into the agenda of the “Project for a New American Century.” This was a strategic document put forward by a group of neoconservatives in September 2000 outlining a new strategy for American global dominance in the twenty-first century. This think tank included Dick Cheney, the vice president; Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of defense; Paul Wolfowitz, his deputy; Jeb Bush, brother of George and governor of Florida; and Lewis Libby, the leader of Bush’s 2000 election campaign team now working in the White House.

The most intriguing part of the document concerns the readjustment of American forces across the globe. The report states that only an incremental approach can be taken to this radical restructuring owing to political and public constraints, unless there was “some catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor.” Despite all this, however, there is still the question of how such an elaborate attack could have been prepared and executed by the government and its agencies without the media becoming deeply suspicious. The most likely explanation is that the attacks were planned by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda but that U.S. intelligence agencies did not act upon the information they received to adequately

prevent them. Evidence of their failure, whether deliberate or through incompetence, has been widespread following Congressional investigations but without any smoking gun. Furthermore, the CIA and New York City counterterrorism offices were based in Building 7 of the World Trade Center and were therefore destroyed, along with any potentially incriminating evidence.

The suspicions about intelligence are just part of the growing mistrust about the events that day, which reverberated right around the world. On the day of the attacks geological surveys in NewYork recorded the greatest amount of seismic activity as occurring immediately before the Twin Towers collapsed, and not when they hit the ground. This has led many people to the conclusion that the towers were blown up with explosives underneath the building and not by the enormous volume of fuel that ignited after the two airliners exploded; a belief reinforced by the way the towers imploded inwards instead of collapsing sideways. The evidence at the Pentagon also raises profound questions. Why was the Pentagon hit on the one side of the building that happened to be empty on the day of the attacks owing to refurbishment? Why was there no visible evidence of a destroyed airliner among the debris? Why were no fighter jets scrambled to intercept the hijacked aircraft until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon, despite it being a legal requirement in the U.S. for fighter jets to be scrambled whenever a commercial airliner veers significantly off its flight path? How was so much information known about the hijackers and released to the media by the FBI so soon after the attacks, including details on a passport miraculously found among the rubble of the Twin Towers?

These question marks raise serious doubts about the official version of what happened on September 11. Many are cynical of the report published only a year prior to that date; a report which would revolutionize America’s role in the world toward ultimate military, political and social hegemony, but one which would require a catastrophic event. These cynics cannot accept that the occurrence of just such an event can be no more than coincidence. Can it also be mere coincidence that those who authored the report are responsible for failing to prevent the attack and for coordinating their desired global response?