May 13, 2008 at 15:57:33
A Call to the Peace and Justice Movement
by Stephen Demetriou
Cindy Sheehan lost her son to a Bush war, and has demanded answers for her
loss ever since. The
family member groups comprised of 9/11 victim's families and friends, led
by the activism of
the "Jersey Girls," among others, successfully lobbied Congress to enact
legislation which
created the commission to investigate the September 11 attacks.
http://911pressfortruth.com/
After many months of effort, and 18 months of watching the train wreck of
that investigation
move forward, the family members, though greatly disappointed by the
commission's final re****t,
have not backed down and are still calling for an honest, independent
investigation to answer
the questions about the deaths of their loved ones.
Senator Max Cleland called the initial 9/11 investigation "compromised,"
which led
commissioners Kean and Hamilton to agree it was ineffective, under-funded,
and stonewalled.
Its executive director was a man in continual contact with Karl Rove and
the White House
throughout the investigation, and who brought forward right-wing ****ll,
Laurie Mylroie, to
testify before the commission as to her theories of Iraqi-al Qeada
connections.
In so many ways, family and friends of the 9/11 victims are no different
than Ms. Sheehan in a
quest for answers.
What is significant now, after the failure of the Commission to address
the family's concerns,
is that many in this group, knit together by little else than their mutual
losses, see as their
natural allies those of us who consider the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
as the "9/11 Wars."
These wars were planned in advance but undertaken as a direct result of
the September 11
attacks. I invite all members of the Peace and Justice movement to
consider the power of the
families' claims to answers. Those answers are directly connected to how
and why we are at war
today. And they are essentially the same answers Cindy Sheehan seeks.
We have an administration that has flagrantly abused the civil liberties
of all Americans
through the loss of habeas corpus rights, through the power they assume in
their concept of
"unitary executive," through unprecedented secrecy of their actions. The
wars and the domestic
assault on our liberties all stem from events of which we in fact know
very little, and what we
do know simply doesn't square with we have been told.
Consider: through a Freedom of Information Act request by a private
citizen to the FAA for all
do***ents relating to the positive identification of the aircraft used in
the attack - publicly
cited and referred to in at least one major movie, in news accounts, in
fictional accounts, in
kitchens and living rooms across the country – the records requested have
been denied by the
FBI and FAA, and the request is now working its way through the courts on
appeal. The court
continually agrees with the private citizen that the identities of the
aircraft are common
knowledge, and the do***ents and imagery relating to the technical
identification of the
aircraft (through serial number correlation with FAA records) would not
hamper any current
investigation or lawsuit, and is a reasonable request in the public
interest.
The FBI refuses to release any do***entation, saying instead, at one
point, that they have no
records that positively identify the aircraft to release. While United
Fight 93, American
Airlines Flight 77, American Airlines Flight 11, and United Flight 175 are
very nearly
household words, the FBI is saying they do not have records, or will not
release the records,
that positively identify the aircraft by the identifying serial numbers of
components and
parts. Without positively identifying the parts recovered from the
Pentagon, or the Shanksville
field, we can only trust the government's account of what was involved in
those incidents. The
Flight Data Recorders (FDR's) said to be recovered from both the Pentagon
and the Shanksville
field are HIGHLY unusual in that they do not have serial numbers
associated with them in the
official do***entation, numbers that positively link the FDR's to the
aircraft they came out
of. Without this do***entation linkage we cannot know with certainty where
these FDR's came
from, or that the information they hold is valid. And if the aircraft have
been positively
identified, it is in the public's interest to have that information
available. Why the secrecy
about what is supposed to be common knowledge? Why no criminal
investigation prior to this?
Consider: through a separate FOIA request the Oral Histories collected by
the New York City
Fire Department in Oct 2001 through Jan 2002 were released to the New York
Times in 2005. Found
in the Oral Histories are accounts of firefighters, emergency medical
technicians, fire chiefs
and a wealth of information on what they encountered during the crisis. At
least 118 of them
spoke about seeing, hearing, or experiencing explosions destroying
sub-basement floors, the
lobbies, and upper floors, all the way to the top, in most cases long
before the buildings
collapsed.And if you tend to believe that excess jet fuel was the likely
cause of these
secondary explosions, a volume of enhanced kerosene (jet fuel) equivalent
to an 18' diameter
above-ground swimming pool, or a 17' Uhaul moving truck, is what would be
your cause for
explosions through out the buildings for an hour after the strike up until
the moment of
collapse. The likelihood of this is nil.
In another case, within an hour after the first tower was hit, "an
engineering type" person
from the Guiliani administration advised fire officials that the buildings
were in imminent
danger of collapsing. This opinion from an unnamed "engineering type"
directly contradicted the
expertise and experience of the fire chiefs, who relied on their past
experience and knowledge
to *****s the risks before sending their men into the towers. They sent
their men into the
towers because they had *****sed the risk to be sufficiently low. The
experience they drew
upon? A severe fire on the 11th floor in the North Tower in 1975, and the
1993 bombing. One
chief who died in the collapse said, when being told so early in the day –
again, within an
hour after the first plane strike – "Who the **** told you that?"
http://journalof911studies.com/volume/200701/MacQueenWaitingforSeven.pdf
A total collapse was the last thing on the minds of any of the fire chiefs
– a partial collapse
of a few floors, possibly; but not total collapse, and especially not
three complete collapses
at near the speed of gravity. The third building, we are told, collapsed
after suffering modest
fire damage seven hours earlier; a first in the history of steel framed
construction. All three
buildings collapsed, as if suddenly coming apart at the joints. All three
collapsed with the
same speed, in spite of each suffering damage in three distinct and unique
ways. And the last,
WTC 7, has not been explained, nor did its collapse appear in the 9/11
Commission final re****t.
Please consider the facts presented in the peer-reviewed scientific papers
found at the Journal
of 9/11 Studies, and the information found at Architects and Engineers for
9/11 Truth. Also,
please consider what the government, law enforcement, military, and
intelligence officials,
academics and educators, engineers and other notable people have said at
the website Patriots
Question 9/11 about the need for a new investigation.
http://journalof911studies.com/
http://www.ae911truth.org/
http://www.patriotsquestion911.com/
The "official" investigations, even the science-based investigations
conducted by the National
Institute of Standards and Technology and FEMA, either claimed their
conclusions were of low
probability and further investigation was necessary, or were so narrow in
their scope as to
leave enormous questions completely unexamined. NIST has admitted, due to
the narrow mandate to
study ONLY what initiated collapse, "we are unable to provide a full
explanation of the total
collapse." To date, there has been NO official explanation as to why these
buildings completely
collapsed at the speed and in the manner they did.
The wars we are currently engaged in, and the war this administration has
lobbied for against
Iran, all used the September 11 attacks as a primary catalyst. To help
stop the 9/11 Wars, join
with the many educated, principled people who are calling for a new
investigation into the
government's role in the September 11 attacks. We can all work for peace,
strengthening one
another's efforts, to make a more peaceful world by finding out more
clearly what happened on
September 11, 2001. Peace will come through a repudiation of the
military/industrial complex,
its self-enriching agenda of resource wars under a pretense of a "global
war on terror."
Help expose the cover up of the event that catalyzed this agenda. It
really is as simple as
sup****ting the call for a new, honest, independent, criminal investigation
into the attacks
that occurred on September 11, 2001. For peace and justice sake, join us
in this call. Ask your
Congress Member to sup****t a new investigation.
Freelance photographer and writer living in Maine.
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