Secrets Behind September 11

Surveys conducted across the US show thatthe majority of Americans, including senior citizens old enough to remember the US entry into World War II, regard the September, 11, 2001 drama as exceeding in historical importance the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack. Speaking of the latter, these days it is an open secret that the US Administration was aware of the coming Japanese offensive and, instead of taking adequate measures beforehand, knowingly sacrificed around 1,500 lives to have the country drawn into a war as planned in Washington. US Secretary of War Henry Stimson rote in his diary following the November 25, 1941 government meeting: “The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves. It was a difficult proposition”. 

It is widely held that the US borrowed the tactic based on provocations from the Nazi, who, for example, bombed Germany's Freyburg to blame the civilian death toll on France when Berlin needed a pretext for invading the country. The view is fairly unconvincing, considering that much earlier, back on February 15, 1898, the US blew up the Maine, the country's own battleship, in Havana Harbor, killing hundreds of crew members, with a goal of justifying a war against Spain. The US government attributed the explosion to a Spanish naval mine and Washington cited the sinking to drive the nation into what essentially constituted the first military campaign for the US world hegemony, but, as it transpired upon the raising of the battleship in 1911, its armor was ripped apart by a blast from the inside. In another case, documents put on display on October 12, 2001 in Executive Intelligence Review made it clear that in the early 1960ies, as James Bamford wrote in his “Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency”, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff “proposed launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba”. The plan, titled Operation Northwoods, was canceled after the Bay of Pigs debacle which prompted President Kennedy to pass control over the handling of the Cuban web of issues from the CIA to the Pentagon. According to the accounts, “The first proposal is for "a series of well-coordinated incidents" to take place in and around the US Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; these were to include having friendly Cubans dress in Cuban military uniforms to start riots at the base, blow up ammunition inside the base, to start fires, to burn aircraft on the air base, to sabotage a ship in the harbor, and to sink a ship near the harbor entrance... The next proposal elaborated: "A 'Remember the Maine' incident could be arranged.... We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," or blow up a drone ship in Cuban waters. The memorandum coldly predicted: "Casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation... We could develop a Communist Cuba terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington. The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on the lives of Cuban refugees in the United States....»

A decade since the September 11 tragedy, a series of questions remain unanswered. Attempts to solve the conundrum were made by former German government minister Andreas von Bülow, US intellectual prose author Gore Vidal, French journalist Thierry Meyssan who wrote “9/11: The Big Lie” and many others, and all of them reject the storyline popped by the US Administration… Gore Vidal said in a February 23, 2003 interview to Journalist Kenneth Hubbard published in Spain's La Vanguardia that the US media were concealing from the audience a part of the truth and, among other things, told that a connection might have existed between the CIA, the Pakistani intelligence service, and one of the September 11 perpetrators. Gore Vidal and others marshal an impressive array of facts that were impossible to overlook but were never explained away by the official investigation. 

First, it is unclear how groups of 3-4 people armed with utility knives were able to hijack airplanes with so many passengers and staff on board. Even if it could happen once that the pilots capitulated momentarily before sending out an alarm signal and the terrorists managed to momentarily switch off the transcoder, the same occurring in all of the hijacked planes is too unlikely a coincidence. It should be further taken into account that the US — as the USSR in its glory days — operates a surveillance system covering its entire territory, and the information is supplied continuously to the National Security Agency which is clearly immune to hacker attacks. 

The reports that 10 or even 14 planes were seized sound even more suspicious. Anyhow, the hijacked planes were in the air for 40-60 minutes after the plot began to unfold, and over the time reports that something extreme was going on had to reach the US President. An explanation why they did not is still missing, but answers to the questions listed below could help to fill in the gap. 

How could the planes suddenly turn invisible to civilian Air traffic controllers and military radars? Even if they did, the services had to react to their not being on the trajectories they were supposed to be on. Why were the information in the black boxes meant to survive any type of disaster and the recordings of the pilots' conversations completely illegible? Curiously, the passport of a terrorist who allegedly flew the plane was found unharmed.

Who was picturing the upper parts of the northern tower of the World Trade Center before and at the moment when Boeing 767 of the American Airlines slammed into it? How did several uncorrelated cameras in New York city happen to be focused on the collision spot? Why did the US Administration and personally President Bush take to preaching around the world right on September 11 that the attack could be traced back to Al Qaeda, with a probe just waiting to be opened?

Why neither of the alleged terrorists was on the planes' boarding lists? Why was it that they left so many footsteps behind while preparing for an attack? They paid bills with real credit cards, registered under real names at the pilots' school, and, on the last day, had their farewell letters on them, mailing the envelopes to a wrong address so that the FBI was able to intercept the stuff. Isn't it odd that the terrorists' car was quickly located on the airport parking lot where thousands of vehicles were anchored? In a blockbuster style, the findings included Arab-language copies of The Quran, Boeing manuals, and – to erase any  doubts that the nominees were indeed those responsible – personal videos showing how they exercise at the pilots' school. 

For some reason, the US Administration declined the assistance offers from Russia's ministry for emergencies, other countries' similar institutions, and individuals. Why didn't the constituency and the US Congress representing them demand the displacement of the chiefs of agencies in charge of the national security? Why was it that Gen. Ralph Eberhart who, on the day of the attack, supervised the US airspace control was promoted rather than reprimanded? Why were the CIA director allowed to retain his post and “the company” - given a 42% budget boost? Why did the US defense budget which had been shrinking since the collapse of the USSR start to climb after the September 11 attack to currently attain the $396b mark? For comparison, the defense spendings of Russia, China, Great Britain, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, India, Spain, etc. altogether weight $382b.

Even if bin Laden or other leaders of Muslim groups branded terrorist hoped to really hurt the US, logically, they would have ordered the strikes a couple of weeks later when the US Congress was to convene, with the US President, key Administration members, and intelligence community heads attending. A blow on the Congress building at the time would have thrown the US into deep chaos, while what the terrorists actually achieved was essentially limited to a psychological shock.

How could the twin towers, on which 500,000 tons of top-quality concrete had been spent, implode so miserably? Where did the energy which ground up the material and sustained the temperature of 3,000C – higher than in a volcano - come from? What could keep burning on the disaster site till December 19 and why extinguishing the fire, despite the firefighters' continuous work, proved so difficult?

Quite a few US and European watchers alike hold that the twin towers collapsed due to being blown up from within, not as a result of being hit by the planes. As stated in the “Loose Change 9/11” documentary, US experts who, on September 11, 2009, supplied to the US Congress a report of their independent inquiry maintained that the twin towers were loaded with explosives. The group, moreover, hinted at the US government's complicity.“FBI Blows America”, asserted a group of dozens of US construction engineers and architects. Besides, their point was that much later there had to be the same causes behind the implosion of the 47-floor Salomon Brothers building located nearby. The skyscraper did not come under a terrorist attack but still turned into ruins 8 hours after the World Trade Center. All the people from the Salomon Brothers premises had been evacuated by the time, but, on the other hand, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, preoccupied with the twin towers, provided no clues about what might have triggered this part of the disaster. French commentator Thierry Meyssan believes that transmitters were installed in the Salomon Brothers building to guide the hijacked planes and, accordingly, that it was destroyed to get rid of the implicating evidence. 

In my view, the economic repercussions of the September 11 tragedy should be taken into account along with the fact that it gave the US a license for military campaigns worldwide, if we are to disclose the drivers behind the epic development. The suspension of stock-market transactions in New York and elsewhere in the US presented Washington with an opportunity to   subject to an overhaul the financial and securities markets and to redirect the evolution of the brewing economic crisis. It is worth noting in the context that, after years of exerting pressure on a number of national economies and ignoring continuous criticisms over the corrosive impact of its policies, by September 2011 the IMF managed to shove most of them to the brink of big troubles. Downward trends – with assets shedding 10-20% of their values - persisted across most stock markets for some 30 days in a row in the run-up to the September 11 attack, and the problem confronting the US economy could not be written off as a fleeting recession. The situation was best described as a structural crisis manifest in a frightening gap between the real and financial sectors correspondingly measuring 15% and 85% of the US GDP, with the available goods and services capable to absorb only 4-6% of the total US dollar mass. The US currency owed the remaining nominal value to its global status but, again, the amount was mostly balanced by various derivatives. The bubble was expected to go bust, likely in September, 2011, and it took a war-like shock to put the slide on hold. The World Trade Center demolition accomplished more than that – it served to unlock the potential for an unprecedented dollar emission which reinforced the US currency vs. the rising Euro. US Federal Reserve President A. Greenspan voiced a timely reaction when he promised adequate currency volumes to the banks worldwide, ostensibly to soften the consequences of the terrorist attack. 

Moreover, the day after the attack the pledge was upheld by the trio comprising the US Federal Reserve, Europe's Central Bank, and the Bank of Japan. The US financial authorities lifted restrictions on the types of players in short-time financial deals and set up a commission run jointly by the Department of Treasury and the CIA to monitor the market. As a result, the switching of the global economy to the emergency mode and to the anticipation of a large-scale war helped reinstate the US dollar, and the game of terrorist attacks and retaliation strikes began to recur worldwide. 

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