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 report, 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 shill, 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 documents 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 documents 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 documentation, 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 documentation, numbers that positively link the FDR's to the aircraft they came out of. Without this documentation 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 assess the risks before sending their men into the towers. They sent their men into the towers because they had assessed 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 f*ck told you that?"
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 report.
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.
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 supporting 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 support a new investigation.
