The point I was trying to make about the video, though, was not only did they not present a unified counter-theory of the 9/11 event...I didn't even see a single factoid that didn't immediately bring to mind an alternate explaination that would better suit Occam's razor.

The closest thing to that I saw, and I said so in my original post in so many words, was the collapse of building 7. The underlying mechanism for the collapse of that building is less obvious than the collapse of the towers.

If I decide it's worth my time to look into this any further, and so far I've seen few incentives, that's where I would start.

Meanwhile I'd suggest those who would favor an alternate conspiracy theory look into the logistics involved in bringing down a building via timed charges. It's a tremendous amount of noisy dirty work to prepare, and all manner of walls and internal finish would have had to be stripped away and drilled into to properly place charges on the internal support structures...and then replaced to hide the charges and so on. And fuses would have to be strung from floor to floor. How could such a thing could be prepared without anyone noticing?

To be one of two people on here right now, I really should have the patience to read the above.

BUT DO I FUCK!

The most interesting dilemma is, I think, trying to classify this as an act of crime versus an act of war. The truth is that assymetric warfare being waged by stateless terrorists is a new paradigm. Our current language is not up to the task because our old paradigms are not up to the task.

The closest "old" language might be the phrase "war crime". The notion being that even in war, civilized nations must follow certain ethical codes enshrined in international law lest they lose their moral ground.

I could live with calling 9/11 a war crime.

If I was with you now i would like to make you phone 911 and tell them that a crime was taking place and when they asked you what was going on you would say "911".

IV: AL QAEDA: THE CIA’S ARAB LEGION

“I thought these guys [Atta & Co] were double
agents.” – former executive, Huffman Aviation,
Venice FL (Hopsicker 150)

Al Qaeda and its best-known leader Bin Laden would not exist without the help of the
United States, which created them for use against the USSR in Afghanistan, and which
continues to support them until this day. At various times, the US Special Forces have
been Bin Laden’s valets; the State Department has acted as his defense counsel and his
travel bureau, and the CIA has furnished his public relations advisors and his preferred
health plan; the British government has acted as his Human Resources department to
recruit new personnel.

Osama Bin Laden is a rich recluse who speaks to the world by means of video tapes and
audio tapes, the validity of which cannot be determined. Bin Laden may be dead, or he
may be one of the CIA’s several hundred ghost prisoners, who are being held in secret
prisons around the world in violation of the Geneva Convention. There is no way of
determining the authenticity of any of Bin Laden’s tapes, and the statements that are
made in them by the figure representing Bin Laden are contradictory. For example, in the
weeks after 9/11, a Pakistani newspaper published an interview with “Osama Bin Laden”
in which we find the following denial of any role in 9/11:

I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in
the United States. As a Moslem, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had
no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent
women, children and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly
forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people. Such
a practice is forbidden even in the course of a battle. It is the United
States, which is perpetrating every maltreatment on women, children and
common people of other faiths, particularly the followers of Islam. All that
is going on in Palestine for the last 11 months is sufficient to call the wrath
of God upon the United States and Israel. There is also a warning for those
Moslem countries, which witnessed all these as a silent spectator. What
had earlier been done to the innocent people of Iraq, Chechnya and
Bosnia? Only one conclusion could be derived from the indifference of the
United States and the West to these acts of terror and the patronage of the
tyrants by these powers: that America is an anti-Islamic power and it is
patronizing the anti-Islamic forces. Its friendship with the Moslem
countries is just a show, rather deceit. By enticing or intimidating these
countries, the United States is forcing them to play a role of its choice. Put
a glance all around and you will see that the slaves of the United States are
either rulers or enemies of Moslems.

The countries which do not agree to become the U.S. slaves are China,
Iran, Libya, Cuba, Syria [Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iraq, Sudan,
Indonesia, Malaysia] and Russia. Whoever committed the act of 11
September are not the friends of the American people. I have already said
that we are against the American system, not against its people, whereas in
these attacks, the common American people have been killed. According
to my information, the death toll is much higher than what the U.S.
Government has stated. But the Bush Administration does not want the
panic to spread. The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of
these attacks within itself; the people who are a part of the U.S. system,
but are dissenting against it. Or those who are working for some other
system; persons who want to make the present century as a century of
conflict between Islam and Christianity so that their own civilization,
nation, country, or ideology could survive. They can be anyone, from
Russia to Israel and from India to Serbia. In the U.S. itself, there are
dozens of well-organized and well-equipped groups, which are capable of
causing a large-scale destruction. Then you cannot forget the American-
Jews, who are annoyed with President Bush ever since the elections in
Florida and want to avenge him.

Then there are intelligence agencies in the U.S., which require billions of
dollars worth of funds from the Congress and the government every year.
This [funding issue] was not a big problem till the existence of the former
Soviet Union but after that the budget of these agencies has been in
danger. They needed an enemy. So, they first started propaganda against
Osama and Taliban and then this incident happened. You see, the Bush
Administration approved a budget of 40 billion dollars. Where will this
huge amount go? It will be provided to the same agencies, which need
huge funds and want to exert their importance. Now they will spend the
money for their expansion and for increasing their importance. I will give
you an example. Drug smugglers from all over the world are in contact
with the U.S. secret agencies. These agencies do not want to eradicate
narcotics cultivation and trafficking because their importance will be
diminished. The people in the U.S. Drug Enforcement Department are
encouraging drug trade so that they could show performance and get
millions of dollars worth of budget. General Noriega was made a drug
baron by the CIA and, in need, he was made a scapegoat. In the same way,
whether it is President Bush or any other U.S. President, they cannot bring
Israel to justice for its human rights abuses or to hold it accountable for
such crimes. What is this? Is it not that there exists a government within
the government in the United Sates? That secret government must be
asked as to who carried out the attacks. (Ummat, Karachi, September 28,
2001)

This may be the voice of one of several Bin Ladens, or it may be the Pakistani voice of
one Bin Laden. Several weeks after this interview a tape surfaced in which a rather
different Bin Laden seemed to acknowledge, at least obliquely, that he was involved in
9/11. This Bin Laden comments that
The brothers, who conducted the operation, all they knew was that they have a
martyrdom operation and we asked each of them to go to America but they didn’t
know anything about the operation, not even one letter. But they were trained and
we did not reveal the operation to them until they are there and just before they
boarded the planes.(Meyssan 2002 196)

Which, if either, is the real Bin laden? There is no way of knowing, so every assertion
made about the mysterious, mercurial, and erratic Saudi millionaire is an exercise in
speculation.

AL QAEDA, BIN LADEN: THE ACCUSED

Osama Bin Laden appears as a rich misfit, certainly a sociopath, and doubtless obsessed
with his own fanatical ideological vision of what the world should be. His main goal
would appear to be the restoration of the caliphate, the combined emperor and pope of the
Islamic world, an institution which was until about 1924 embodied in the figure of the
Ottoman Turkish Sultan. Of course, this utopian Pan-Arab program means that Bin Laden
is automatically the enemy of any existing state in the Arab or Islamic world, and thus
allows him to conduct what amount to Anglo-American destabilization operations against
these states under a cloak of radical Islamic historical legitimacy which certain rulers are
clearly hard put to answer.

But Bin Laden is not the greatest political genius of today’s world, as the anonymous
author of Imperial Hubris attempts to convince us. Bin Laden is a dilettante who could
not survive very long without powerful protectors and a comprehensive support network,
including kidney dialysis. Rather than a political genius, we evidently see in Bin Laden a
clueless dupe, a patsy who cannot comprehend the forces around him which make his day
to day activity and above all his universal notoriety possible. According to one of Bin
Laden’s handlers by the name of Beardman, during the Afghan years Bin Laden was not
aware of the role he was playing on behalf of Washington. In the words of Bin Laden
(quoted by Beardman): “neither I, nor my brothers saw evidence of American help.”
(Meyssan 2002 7)

In an interview with Frontline, Prince Bandar, the Saudi Ambassador
to the United States, said that when he first met bin Laden, in the nineteen-eighties, “I
thought he couldn’t lead eight ducks across the street.”

Osama Bin Laden was one of dozens of children in the Bin Laden harem, which was presided
over by the patriarch of the Saudi Bin Laden construction company fortune. Osama’s mother was
not the number one wife or valide sultan in this seraglio; she was instead one of the least favored
and least important of the numerous spouses. This peculiarity made Osama what we would call
in the language of European feudal aristocracy a cadet or younger son, and cadet sons are by
definition expendable. The Bin Laden family was one of the wealthiest in Saudi Arabia, and
functioned as compradors of the British and the US, including the dirty operations of MI-6 and
CIA; Osama was for example a relative by marriage of the Iran-contra businessman Adnan
Kashoggi. Since he was a cadet son and not one of the Saudi royals, Osama was doubly
expendable. He was allegedly asked in 1979 by Prince Turki of Saudi intelligence to mobilize
money and volunteers for operations against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Prince Turki
wanted a Pan-Arab force to go and fight the Red Army and the Kabul regime. Part of Osama’s
role was simply to be a bagman for Saudi government funds being sent to the Afghan fighters. In
these efforts, Bin Laden worked closely with the Pakistani Interservice Intelligence, and thus
also with the CIA and MI6. The CIA had teams in Afghanistan in early 1979, well before the
Soviet invasion which Brzezinski provoked. According to former CIA Director Robert Gates, the
big expansion of the US covert operation in Afghanistan began in 1984. During this year, “the
size of the CIA’s covert program to help the Mujaheddin increased several times over,” reaching
a level of about $500 million in US and Saudi payments funneled through the Zia regime in
Pakistan. As Gates recalled, “it was during this period [1985] that we began to learn of a
significant increase in the number of Arab nationals from other countries who had traveled to
Afghanistan to fight in the Holy War against the Soviets. They came from Syria, Iraq, Algeria,
and elsewhere, and most fought with the Islamic fundamentalist Muj groups, particularly that
headed by Abdul Resaul Sayyaf. We examined ways to increase their participation, perhaps in
the form of some sort of ‘international brigade,’ but nothing came of it.

Years later, these
fundamentalist fighters trained by the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan would begin to show up
around the world, from the Middle East to New York City, still fighting their Holy War – only
now including the United States among their enemies. Our mission was to push the Soviets out
of Afghanistan. We expected a post-Soviet Afghanistan to be ugly, but never considered that it
would become a haven for terrorists operating worldwide.” (Gates 349) But the international
brigade Gates talked about was in fact created – as the group now known as al Qaeda.

The story is then that Bin Laden was shocked and alienated by the arrival of US forces in
Saudi Arabia for operation Desert Shield, after Saddam Hussein’s takeover of Kuwait.
The FBI and CIA have accused Bin Laden of having been behind the World Trade Center
bombing in 1993 that killed six people, two bombings in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996
in which 24 American servicemen died, and the bombings of two American embassies in
east Africa in 1998 that killed 224 people, as well as the attack on the 2000 USS Cole
which killed 19 sailors. (New York Times, September 9, 2001)

FBI Director Robert Mueller confessed to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco on
April 19, 2002 that, after six months in Afghanistan, the US forces had found absolutely
no documentary evidence there relating to 9/11. This was a huge scandal, just as big as
the later failure to discover the phantomatic weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Mueller
admitted: “The hijackers also left no paper trail. In our investigation, we have not
uncovered a single piece of paper – either here in the U.S. or in the treasure trove of
information that has turned up in Afghanistan and elsewhere – that mentioned any aspect
of the September 11th plot. The hijackers had no computers, no laptops, no storage media
of any kind. They used hundreds of different pay phones and cell phones, often with
prepaid calling cards that are extremely difficult to trace. And they made sure that all the
money sent to them to fund their attacks was wired in small amounts to avoid detection.”

Clearly the US would now rather not see Bin Laden, if he still exists, be taken alive, for
fear of what his testimony might be. On November 21, 2001, Rumsfeld was quite explicit
on this point, saying on the CBS “60 Minutes II” program he would prefer that Osama
bin Laden be killed rather than taken alive. “You bet your life,” he said.

It became known shortly after 9/11 that Osama Bin Laden’s half-brother Salem was an investor
in Arbusto Petroleum in the late 1970s, and thus can be counted as a former business partner of
George W, Bush. Two weeks after 9/11, the London tabloid Daily Mail carried the banner
headline: “Bin Laden’s Amazing Business Link with President Bush.”

George W. Bush and
Salem Bin Laden were both present at the creation of Arbusto Energy, an oil company in Texas.
Salem Bin Laden had very close business ties to a friend of George W. Bush, a certain James
Bath. According to researchers, it is likely that the $50,000 that Bath invested in Arbusto in 1978
actually came from Salem Bin Laden. Salem Bin Laden died in a plane crash in Texas in 1983.

This Daily Mail story was singled out on BBC’s “European Press Roundup” the following
morning, but these facts have never been given adequate coverage by the US media. The Bath
angle was, however, stressed by Michael Moore in his Fahrenheit 911. (Daily Mail, September
24, 2001)

The Bin Ladens were benefactors of Harvard University, where there were fellowships offered
bearing their name. This fact attracted the attention of the media, but the willingness of Harvard
students to accept the Bin Laden money appeared undiminished after 9/11. Andy Tiedemann, a
spokesperson in the Harvard University development office, said no Harvard students had called
to object to the bin Laden fellowships. The Bin Laden family’s endowed fellowships totaled $2
million, for use at Harvard’s law and design schools. (Harvard Crimson, October 5, 2001)

OK. I've now read this entire thread. I'm still not convinced there is any "there" there. But I'll nose around some other threads here.

I do see that my "first impressions" post duplicates things others said. But not entirely. But to the extent it did and making redundant posts is considered bad ettiqute, I apologize.

Also, my expression that "nobody" thought of the 9/11 site as a crime scene...well that was clearly hyperbole on my part. Sorry for having mixed scientific talk and political rhetoric in one post. (As if I've been the only one...)

But I will forever resist the slippery slope that leads one to interpret Islamofascist terrorism as a species of cops-and-robbers-style criminality. It is something entirely different than that.

ALBRIGHT SABOTAGES EXTRADITION OF BIN LADEN BY SUDAN

During the mid-1990s, Bin Laden established himself in Sudan. By 1996, he had become an
embarrassment to the rulers of that country, General Bashir and Hassan Turabi. Sudan had
shown in 1994 that it had nothing to do with terrorism when it turned the legendary terrorist
Carlos the Jackal over to French authorities, who put him away for good. Early in 1996, the
Sudanese government offered to deliver Bin Laden to the Saudis, who declined on the grounds
that any prosecution of the fanatical sheikh in his home country might cause a split in the ruling
elite, to say nothing of public disorder. In March 1996, Sudan offered to deliver Bin Laden to the
US government. Instead of gratefully accepting the extradition of the man who was already one
of the world’s top terrorists, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright chose this moment to provoke
a new wave of tensions with Sudan, even contriving – no doubt as a clever diversion – to shut
down the US Embassy in Khartoum because of alleged terrorist threats. The Sudanese offer
remained on the table until May 19, 1996, when Bin Laden departed Sudan for Afghanistan, but
Albright invented pretext after pretext to say no. Here we have a crucial experiment that proves
the duplicity and hypocrisy of the US regime: they could have had Bin Laden’s head on a platter,
and they turned it down. Bin Laden, after all, had a great career ahead of him – he was destined
to become the great false-flag countergang leader of Islamic opposition to the US empire.

CIA Director George Tenet told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on October
17, 2002 that the CIA officially knew nothing about a Sudanese offer to give Bin Laden
to the US: “Mr. Chairman, CIA has no knowledge of such an offer,” said Tenet. The 9/11
Commission announced in one of their staff reports that they found no evidence that
Sudan had offered to deliver Bin Laden directly to the US, but they did establish that
Sudan was willing to extradite him to Saudi Arabia. (9/11 commission staff report, March
24, 2004)

The 9/11 commission final report, ever true to form, simply ignores the
Sudanese offer and with it the key issue of why the Albright State Department refused to
accept Bin Laden’s extradition or rendition. (9/11 commission 61-62)

These findings simply ignore the public record as documented by Barton Gellman in the
Washington Post soon after 9/11 – a specialty of the 9/11 commission. According to
Gellman, in 1999, Sudanese President Omar Hassan Bashir referred elliptically to his
government’s 1996 willingness to send bin Laden to Saudi Arabia. What remained to be
added was the role of the U.S. government and a secret channel from Khartoum to
Washington. Gellman wrote:

The government of Sudan, employing a back channel direct from its
president to the Central Intelligence Agency, offered in the early spring of
1996 to arrest Osama bin Laden and place him in Saudi custody,
according to officials and former officials in all three countries.
Clinton administration struggled to find a way to accept the offer in secret
contacts that stretched from a meeting at a Rosslyn hotel on March 3,
1996, to a fax that closed the door on the effort 10 weeks later. Unable to
persuade the Saudis to accept bin Laden, and lacking a case to indict him
in U.S. courts at the time, the Clinton administration finally gave up on the
capture. (Washington Post, Wednesday, October 3, 2001)

The Sudanese envoy to the US in this attempted rendition was Sudan’s 2001 UN ambassador,
major general Elfatih Erwa, who, as Sudan’s minister of state for defense in 1996, flew from
Khartoum to Washington for secret negotiations with the CIA.
Anthony Lake, then U.S. national security adviser, says Washington was skeptical of Sudan's
offer – meaning that there was an offer. Lake told the Village Voice that Sudan brought up the
story after 9/11 because it feared U.S. bombing attacks during the war on terrorism. Apart from
the hindsight, why did the US not test the sincerity of the Sudanese offer by demanding the
rendition of Bin Laden? The Sudanese offer of Bin Laden was also obliquely confirmed by
Susan Rice, a former assistant secretary of state for African affairs who was then senior director
for Africa on the NSC. Rice’s variation is the claim that Sudan made the offer knowing the U.S.
couldn’t accept it. “They calculated that we didn't have the means to successfully prosecute Bin
Laden. That's why I question the sincerity of the offer.” Again, rather than indulge in such
hairsplitting, why not test Sudanese sincerity by demanding Bin Laden’s extradition? One US
intelligence source in the region seemed to be close to an answer when he called the lost
opportunity a disgrace. “We kidnap minor drug czars and bring them back in burlap bags.
Somebody didn't want this to happen.” (Village Voice, October 31, 2001) Indeed: a most
valuable patsy had to be protected.

But the US refusal to take Bin Laden from the Sudan remains an important point, embarrassing
enough to engage Richard Clarke, the true high priest of the Bin Laden myth. Clarke writes in
his memoir:

Turabi and Bin Laden parted as friends, and pledged to continue the struggle and
to use Khartoum as a safe haven. In recent years Sudanese intelligence officials
and Americans friendly to the Sudan regime have invented a fable about Bin
Laden’s final days in Khartoum. In the fable the Sudanese government offers to
arrest Bin Laden and hand him over in chains to FBI agents, but Washington
rejects the offer because the Clinton administration does not see Bin Laden as
important or does and cannot find anywhere to put him on trial. The only slivers
of truth in this fable are that a) the Sudanese government was denying its support
for terrorism in the wake of the UN sanctions, and b) the CSG had initiated
informal inquiries with several nations about incarcerating Bin Laden, or putting
him on trial. There were no takers. Nonetheless, had we been able to put our
hands on him we would gladly have done so. US Attorney Mary Jo White in
Manhattan could, as the saying goes, “indict a ham sandwich.” She certainly
could have obtained an indictment for Bin Laden in 1996 had we needed it. In the
spring of 1998, she did so. The facts about the supposed Sudanese offer to give us
Bin Laden are that Turabi was not about to turn over his partner in terror to us and
no real attempt to do so ever occurred. (Clarke 142)

This cover story falls to the ground without any refutation because of its own internal
contradictions. Clarke is simply lying, and his statements about terrorism need to be read
with full awareness of the mendacity of which he is capable. In addition, if the US waited
until 1998 to indict Bin Laden, this confirms the story told in La verité interdite that the
US had failed to issue an Interpol warrant for Bin Laden after the Khobar Towers attack
of 1996. (Brisard and Dasquié 136)

It is enough to repeat that the reason Bin Laden was not taken into US custody was to
preserve a patsy of incalculable value. We should recall once again that Clarke was
reportedly ushered out of the James Baker State Department for covering up Israeli
violations of the US arms export laws involving the illegal Israeli sale of Patriot missile
systems to China. In August 1998, Clarke was reportedly one of the key figures who
planted false information about Sudan’s involvement in the East Africa U.S. Embassy
bombings, which led to U.S. cruise missile attacks on a Sudanese pharmaceutical
company in Khartoum which turned out to be producing nothing but aspirin. In this
incident, Clarke is said to have retailed disinformation from British-Israeli covert
operations stringer Yosef Bodansky that provided a pretext for the targeting of Sudan.
The Sudan extradition story was confirmed in “Targeted: Bin Laden,” broadcast by the
History Channel on September 15, 2004, with interviews by Anonymous, Steve Coll,
Saudi Prince Turki, Robert Baer, and others. In reality, Sudan cooperated before and after
9/11 in legitimate international anti-terrorism efforts. One such case came in late spring
2002, when Sudan arrested Abu Huzifa, a suspected Al Qaeda-linked terrorist, at the
request of the United States. Abu Huzifa detailed his infiltration of Saudi Arabia, to
profile vulnerability of U.S. troops to terrorist attack, and described how he had fired a
SAM missile at a U.S. warplane near the Prince Sultan Air Base, one of the headquarters
of the U.S. Afghan military operations. According to former Clinton-era ambassador to
Sudan Tim Carney, Sudan had been totally cooperative with the United States in the war
on terror. (Washington Post, June 14, 2002)

So let me guess. Tapes and so on of al Qaeda bragging that they, indeed, were behind the 9/11 attacks...those are all fakes created by western oil interests? And the Taliban were really Haliburton workers dressed up for Halloween? And the taped beheadings in Iraq were made by the same folks who faked the moon landing?


> I think you can concede that there was never any serious attempt to build

> a criminal case in a conventional manner.

I already said I will not go down this path with you. 9/11 was a battle in a war that had already started years before. When the V2's hit London Churchill didn't ring up the local constabulary to investigate. He set his sights on Normandy.

I'm willing to look at physical evidence that is said to tell a different story re: 9/11. But I'm not sure there is any point in our discussing the political aura around that event.

(Note: originally there was a typo "When the U2's hit London". Edited to change that to V2)

galanter wrote:When the U2's hit London

Say again?