Robert Fisk: Even I question the 'truth' about 9/11
Published: 25 August 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2893860.ece
Each time I lecture abroad on the Middle East, there is always someone in
the audience - just one - whom I call the "raver". Apologies here to all
the
men and women who come to my talks with bright and pertinent questions -
often quite humbling ones for me as a journalist - and which show that
they
understand the Middle East tragedy a lot better than the journalists who
re****t it. But the "raver" is real. He has turned up in cor****eal form in
Stockholm and in Oxford, in Sao Paulo and in Yerevan, in Cairo, in Los
Angeles and, in female form, in Barcelona. No matter the country, there
will
always be a "raver".
His - or her - question goes like this. Why, if you believe you're a free
journalist, don't you re****t what you really know about 9/11? Why don't
you
tell the truth - that the Bush administration (or the CIA or Mossad, you
name it) blew up the twin towers? Why don't you reveal the secrets behind
9/11? The assumption in each case is that Fisk knows - that Fisk has an
absolute concrete, copper-bottomed fact-filled desk containing final proof
of what "all the world knows" (that usually is the phrase) - who destroyed
the twin towers. Sometimes the "raver" is clearly distressed. One man in
Cork screamed his question at me, and then - the moment I suggested that
his
version of the plot was a bit odd - left the hall, shouting abuse and
kicking over chairs.
Usually, I have tried to tell the "truth"; that while there are unanswered
questions about 9/11, I am the Middle East correspondent of The
Independent,
not the conspiracy correspondent; that I have quite enough real plots on
my
hands in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran, the Gulf, etc, to worry about
imaginary
ones in Manhattan. My final argument - a clincher, in my view - is that
the
Bush administration has screwed up everything - militarily, politically
diplomatically - it has tried to do in the Middle East; so how on earth
could it successfully bring off the international crimes against humanity
in
the United States on 11 September 2001?
Well, I still hold to that view. Any military which can claim - as the
Americans did two days ago - that al-Qa'ida is on the run is not capable
of
carrying out anything on the scale of 9/11. "We disrupted al-Qa'ida,
causing
them to run," Colonel David Sutherland said of the preposterously
code-named
"Operation Lightning Hammer" in Iraq's Diyala province. "Their fear of
facing our forces proves the terrorists know there is no safe haven for
them." And more of the same, all of it untrue.
Within hours, al-Qa'ida attacked Baquba in battalion strength and
slaughtered all the local sheikhs who had thrown in their hand with the
Americans. It reminds me of Vietnam, the war which George Bush watched
from
the skies over Texas - which may account for why he this week mixed up the
end of the Vietnam war with the genocide in a different country called
Cambodia, whose population was eventually rescued by the same Vietnamese
whom Mr Bush's more courageous colleagues had been fighting all along.
But - here we go. I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the
official narrative of 9/11. It's not just the obvious non sequiturs: where
are the aircraft parts (engines, etc) from the attack on the Pentagon? Why
have the officials involved in the United 93 flight (which crashed in
Pennsylvania) been muzzled? Why did flight 93's debris spread over miles
when it was supposed to have crashed in one piece in a field? Again, I'm
not
talking about the crazed "research" of David Icke's Alice in Wonderland
and
the World Trade Center Disaster - which should send any sane man back to
reading the telephone directory.
I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example, that
kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams
of
the twin towers - whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C -
would
snap through at the same time? (They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.)
What
about the third tower - the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or
the
Salmon Brothers Building) - which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own
footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the
ground
when no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards
and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of
all
three buildings. They have not yet re****ted on WTC 7. Two prominent
American
professors of mechanical engineering - very definitely not in the "raver"
bracket - are now legally challenging the terms of reference of this final
re****t on the grounds that it could be "fraudulent or deceptive".
Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11. Initial re****ts
of
re****ters that they heard "explosions" in the towers - which could well
have
been the beams cracking - are easy to dismiss. Less so the re****t that the
body of a female air crew member was found in a Manhattan street with her
hands bound. OK, so let's claim that was just hearsay re****ting at the
time,
just as the CIA's list of Arab suicide-hijackers, which included three men
who were - and still are - very much alive and living in the Middle East,
was an initial intelligence error.
But what about the weird letter allegedly written by Mohamed Atta, the
Egyptian hijacker-murderer with the spooky face, whose "Islamic" advice to
his gruesome comrades - released by the CIA - mystified every Muslim
friend
I know in the Middle East? Atta mentioned his family - which no Muslim,
however ill-taught, would be likely to include in such a prayer. He
reminds
his comrades-in-murder to say the first Muslim prayer of the day and then
goes on to quote from it. But no Muslim would need such a reminder - let
alone expect the text of the "Fajr" prayer to be included in Atta's
letter.
Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the ravers. Spare
me
the plots. But like everyone else, I would like to know the full story of
9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic,
meretricious "war on terror" which has led us to disaster in Iraq and
Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East. Bush's happily departed
adviser
Karl Rove once said that "we're an empire now - we create our own
reality".
True? At least tell us. It would stop people kicking over chairs.
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