This is a wider perspective on 9-11, starting with the widespead belief that the event was not brought about by Al Qaeda but Americans. The responsibility for the event, therefore, extends across the nation, not with a small coterie.

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September 1, 2011

9-11 WAS A NATIONAL JOB

By Philip Kraske

http://www.philipkraske.com

Ten years on, let's dispense with the gnarled arguments, the nitpicking, the straw men raised and wrecked. Let's bypass the dreary crazies, nod at the outraged, and shrug off the naive who state with the simplicity of a theorem that Our Government Would Never Do a Thing Like That. Enough of them.

After ten years of investigations, let's invoke the commonest of common sense and say what is clear: the destruction of the Twin Towers resulted from the acutely-timed detonations of pre-placed explosives. Nothing else explains the instant and utter pulverizing of 220 floors of foot-thick concrete. Nothing else explains the searing heat of the dust clouds that gushed through Manhattan. Nothing else explains the near free-fall speed of the towers' plunges, each of a thousand steel beams shearing and snapping on cue with no more resistance than air offers to a falling stone. If the Twin Towers were rigged beforehand, then so was the entire attack. Let's begin there.

The culprits are unknown; they always are in these cases. Mohammed Atta and his colleagues, who by every account had more in common with the Keystone Kops than James Bond, may be safely disqualified: they barely had the skills to fly jetliners, much less pull off a demolition operation. Their role, as they sneaked around to meetings and flight-training classes, thinking themselves secret and clever, was to serve as scapegoats.

Who then? Michael Ruppert, in a complicated argument, accuses Vice President Cheney of being at the helm that day. Alan Sabrosky points at the swift, infallible Israelis. The diligent young men who produced Loose Change say it was the neocons. The rabble's chant has it that "9-11 was an inside job," as if the fighter pilots around Washington had been called together a week in advance and advised that, come next Tuesday, table tennis in the lounge would really be the better part of valor.

Yet we only need to look the packaging of the event and its gargantuan aims to discover the guilty. Terror, as John le Carré reminds us, is theater. It wasn't enough to ram the buildings with jetliners, counting on the quick reflexes of cameramen who might or might not catch the moment, and even then out of focus and poorly framed. And smoking skyscrapers, secretaries waving hankies from the windows -- what is that but the merest police-beat story? And afterwards, the fires put out, the buildings would have been repaired and businesses re-started.

No, airliners hitting buildings was not enough. For the aim was to give the tectonic plates of history a good old country shove and move America into a new era of fear at home and conquest abroad. Even at the terrible risk of detection, the buildings had to be destroyed, come crashing down live and in color, with fifty cameras rolling. That's theater. That's shoving history.

So if we want to look for culprits, let's ask: Who could combine such Hollywood showmanship with such Shakespearean ambition? Only the high mandarins of American foreign policy, many of them bitterly impatient in the late 90s with Bill Clinton's reluctance to take superpowerdom out of the garage and onto the open road. Who could recruit the right people, open the right doors, and quietly distribute the millions necessary? Only the most well-connected folks in the land. Who had the means, the organization, the local knowledge? The military and the security services. And that, sad to say, is as close as we'll ever get to naming 9-11's "intellectual authors."

But in a certain sense, it doesn't matter much. The guilt of 9-11 spreads across the entire nation, though certainly thicker in some places than others. As Vaclav Havel said at his inauguration as president of Czechoslovakia, "When I talk about the contaminated moral atmosphere...I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all - though naturally to differing extents - responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators...We have to accept this legacy as a sin we committed against ourselves."

Yes, the weasels of 9-11 -- a fitting name; let's use it -- have retired by now, protected by steel and electronics and, most important of all, the silence of their enablers. Some of the latter stay mum out of a dire patriotism -- "The nation needs to heal, sir." -- but surely most of them out of fear. I'm talking first about the guys who quietly wired the buildings, the guys who let them in and then went back to the sports report, the other guys who equipped them, and the accountants who noticed the missing stock and figured it must have been mice who ate it. Everyone kept their head down.

I'm also talking about diplomats who noticed odd meetings, forensic specialists who fudged reports, air-traffic controllers who knuckled under to gag orders, airline officials who quietly rescheduled a few assignments, the government employees warned off flights, intelligence officials who made sure that local agents stayed off the trail of the hijackers -- the list is long. And nobody talked. 9-11 was not an inside job -- not in the least. It was a home-grown, true-blue national effort.

It has to be said, of course, that a few brave people, such as Susan Lindauer, have tried to get the word out about the irregularities they witnessed. But compared to the hundreds of individuals who must hold greater or lesser pieces of the jigsaw, they are a tiny fraction.

So let's give the weasels their due: they've won. They pulled off a huge and complex secret operation in plain view, and ten years on, the official legend of 9-11 is intact: Bin Laden, suicide pilots, box cutters, weakened beams, dust clouds, Ground Zero. The weasels have kept the whole 9-11 controversy out of the public mind and on the Internet, where it has faded into a curiosity, like Area 51 or sightings of Elvis.

Of course, the weasels got their usual helping hand from the mainstream media. They nurtured the legend and neglected any contradictions. The discovery -- before the year 2001 was over -- that six of the famous nineteen hijackers were alive and well sent ripples through the British media. In America, however, not a line, not a word, not a syllable was uttered. In 2009, a team of scientists, after two years of work, published a paper demonstrating that traces of an exotic high explosive permeated the WTC dust blown all over Manhattan: prima facie evidence of controlled demolition. Big news in Denmark, with TV interviews of the Danish scientist, Neils Harrit, who had participated; not even a news brief in the United States.

Surely not all reporters took the gag order lying down. Imagine the dismissals, the silencing, the spiking of stories, the burned sources, the newsroom wars between reporters who saw Pulitzers for the taking and lame-faced editors who rubbed their necks and repeated the orders handed down from above. The years passed, the revelations mounted. Nobody dared touch the legend. Sweetened with a couple of Hollywood puddings, it has now dried and hardened and turned into history, like Washington crossing the Delaware.

Nobody dared. Not The Times, not the Post, the Journal, the Monitor, Newsweek, Time, nor even those knights in shining armor on 60 Minutes. There were no ten-part series, no teams of scrappy reporters, no Jack Andersons, no Murrows, no Deep Throats, Woodwards or Bernsteins. The media as one took the government at its word. At most, an occasional doubting article buried on page six below the fold was offered as a sop to fairness. But the writer who wished to "explain," "debunk," "shred" the doubts -- and in the most sneering terms possible -- found a receptive market for his work.

Once more with feeling: 9-11 was anything but an inside job. It was a national effort.

The true touch of genius, it seems to me, was The Word -- the one selected to ensure the success of the legend, the one flung to every corner of the earth even as the buildings burned. This aspect has gone largely unnoticed by the 9-11 truth movement. What word? Let me quote from my novel Mockery. Here is a conversation between the narrator -- Sam Walker -- who is investigating a gamed presidential election, and the director of a public relations firm, whose name is Laura Prestini.

"The press needs us more than we need them. Surprised? It's true. They need"--Laura's perfect fingernails popped up from the armrests and scratched quotation marks in the air--"the story. That's how they pay their mortgages. Like I always say: the goal of PR is to put the frame."

"The frame?"

"Just the key word or phrase. PR puts the frame and the reporters paint in it."

I shrugged. "That's a bit condescending, if you ask me."

"Look, I did my thesis on this. There are loads of historical examples." She drank and put down her glass with a smart clack on the agate coaster. "The Kennedy assassination, for example. Kennedy slumped against Jackie. Bullshit. He didn't slump, he jerked back--probably from a bullet hitting him, but we'll never know for sure. But 'slumped' is the word everyone remembers. You can even find 'slumped' in history textbooks. And then there's the classic: 9-11. C'mon, Sam: what's the frame there?"

I was still trying to take all this in. "No" no idea."

"Yes, you do. C'mon: when you think of the Twin Towers and 9-11, what's the first word that comes to mind?"

"I don't know" "Collapse'?"

"Of course! Collapse. Which says what? That the buildings couldn't take the impacts or the fires or whatever. Or at least that the basic problem was the buildings. And that's that. It doesn't matter now if ten thousand scientists sign on to the towers falling as a result of demolition explosives. It doesn't matter a bit. Until they make a full-scale, frontal attack to refute the word 'collapse,' forget it: they're not going to move public opinion one inch."

Charles Colson  was wrong.  You don't need to grab people by the balls. Just get the words right; hearts and minds will quickly follow.

Thanks goodness for the Internet.                 

The weasels who did the JFK assassination had their one slip: somehow a spectator got footage of the crucial moment; without it the alternative theories of the crime would never have prospered. The weasels who did 9-11 had theirs: the Internet, which in 2001 was nothing compared to the phenomenon that it is now. And here again we can make a guess about their identity. They must have all been over fifty, from conservative backgrounds, none from technology or telecommunications, people who still treated computers as advanced typewriters and had no vision of the rising technology.

Internet allowed truthers around the world to hook up through webpages, blogs, and YouTube. And it allowed them to spread word of their investigations to a global audience. It's pleasant to think that, for a while at least, this must have ruined an evening brandy or two amongst the weasels. They had known that the burning towers would be filmed from every angle; that anyone who worked in controlled demolition would immediately see something very different from other people; that architects would scratch their heads and engineers consult their computer models.

But the weasels were still thinking in terms of the JFK assassination. They figured the second-guessers and conspiracy freaks would take years to document their suspicions and longer to rouse the public; and by then Afghanistan and Iraq would have been taken and tamed, Iran would have capitulated before the prospect of a two-front invasion from those countries, and the American-ordered abundance of oil on the market would have brought gasoline to where it belonged: rivers of it in the West, trickles in the East, and all at 1960s prices. Anyone who muttered about 9-11 would be silenced with the retort that it was the best thing that had happened to America since the GI Bill.

That, I would bet, was the line used to sell the operation to The Highest in the Land; who, as long as we're near the subject, replied, "Okay, do it, but with a minimal of loss of life." Hence the first airplane hit the North Tower well before 9 a.m., before most people had arrived at work. Hence all four airplanes took off loaded to between a quarter and a half their capacity (well below the national average of 70-75 percent). Hence the aircraft that hit the Pentagon made a 330-degree sweep around the building to hit the side that was largely deserted due to construction work. Yes, three thousand people died on 9-11, but if Carlos the Jackal had been in charge, that number would have been ten times greater.

But though the Internet gave the weasels a start, they knew they would ultimately win out. Americans, more than most peoples, never question their government in matters of national security. They question lobbyists and influence and politicians lining their pockets. But where matters of state are concerned, suspicion does not form part of our political culture. The armed forces, despite a history of cover-ups and stupendous blunders, enjoy an almost religious veneration. Unless the operation hit a snag -- and the weasels had contingency legends galore, like "Let's roll!" on Flight 93 -- they knew that Americans would dismiss any talk that their own people were behind the attacks.

And the weasels were right: their countrymen swallowed hook, line and Osama, squirmed away from doubters like a child from the doctor's needle, and especially, classically, effortlessly, thoughtlessly, "moved on" -- that quintessential American phrase that once connoted pioneer stoicism and now refers only to the national flight from reality, patent in both our burning obsession with celebrities and our sleepy indifference to war. So the truth of 9-11 stayed on the Internet, "e-cheek by e-jowl with on-line blackjack and Mayberry R.F.D. hobbyists," to quote my novel one last time.

And America has reaped the fruits of this "sin we committed against ourselves": hopeless debt, cureless recession, endless military conflicts of every shade between war and warry. It is impossible to discuss terrorism in anything approaching realistic terms. Just try mentioning to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta that Al Qaeda is now a shadow of its past form; it makes no difference to him. Military and security services comprise one of the fastest-growing sectors of the economy, and those people, to whom the legend of 9-11 is a great comfort in these hard economic times, will not be denied their paychecks.

Just think what America would be today if, say, The Times and The Post had stood up to the weasels and had gone after 9-11 tooth and nail. Democracy might have made a comeback against our venal plutocracy. Our reputation for fair play and the rule of law might have flourished, rather than our reputation for casual waterboarding and wiretaps. At the end, we have passed, as both the great political commentator William Pfaff and former Times reporter Chris Hedges have noted, into an Orwellian society, a society controlled by lies and threat and force, where electronic surveillance of normal citizens is the order of the day. 9-11 was that fatal shove down the slippery slope. 

But let's not blame our political class too much, for 9-11 was no inside job. Everyone who was tapped to help, did -- and then kept silent; everyone else closed their eyes. 9-11 was a coast-to-coast national effort. That approaching thunderstorm is history's judgment.

Authors Website: http://www.philipkraske.com

Authors Bio:

For recitations of my poems, go to my website: http://www.philipkraske.com/kraske-fiction/