Conspiracies: The Facts * the Theories * the Evidence (31 page)

to report that the block had come down
23 minutes before its

actual fall
, making it likely that a prepared media statement had already been issued – but a little too early. These clues point

strikingly to a scheduled taking-down of WTC 7.

WTC owner Larry Silverstein’s infamous remark about Build-

ing Seven in a subsequent TV interview, that the authorities

had decided to ‘pull it’, appeared to speak of a direct demolition (‘pull it’ being a recognized demolition term), but this was later somewhat unconvincingly rescinded to explain that he was just

referring to ‘pulling’ the firemen out. Perhaps there had been a

brief consideration of admitting to demolishing WTC 7, albeit on

safety grounds, before someone realized the implications of this.

After al , professionals usual y take days or weeks to lace buildings with charges, so how could it have been neatly set to blow within hours, and in the immediate vicinity of the biggest disaster ever seen in New York? This might have suggested that WTC 7 was

pre-charged, therefore – an unheard of and insane policy – and

would have thrown an interesting light on the explosives claims

concerning the twin towers.

Once again, reports of blasts taking place within WTC 7 in the

hours before its col apse are rife, with especial y strong testimony coming from city housing authority worker Barry Jennings,

who claimed that he and another colleague were present in the

building early in the day when a huge explosion took out the stairs 190

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below them. Official channels have tried to imply this was due to the fall of one of the twin towers nearby, but Jennings stated it happened well before this; the timing of TV news interviews with

him, filmed shortly after he escaped from the building, support

his chronology. Indeed, Jennings said that when they arrived for

duty at the Emergency Management Command Center in WTC 7,

at around 9.03am, it was already deserted – yet official records say the office was not abandoned until 9.30am, providing yet more

contradictory oddness.

Barry Jennings might have had more to say, and was beginning

to become vocal with his claims that bombs were present within

WTC 7, but he died from unknown causes in 2008 aged only 53

– just as the NIST report negating his claims was issued. As ever, there have been a number of other mysterious deaths associated

with important 9/11 eyewitnesses, taking us back into familiar

conspiracy territory.6

Who Were the Perpetrators?

It can be seen even from this very brief précis of the issues

surrounding 9/11 that there are many important questions

still to be answered by official channels. Of all the most widely subscribed-to conspiracy theories, 9/11 as an inside job is

incontestably the one supported by the most observable anomalies.

This does not mean that every proposed alternative permutation is true, but then most of the points promoted to support the official story are equal y uncertain. What is clear is that the full picture of what real y happened on 11 September 2001 has not yet been told.

The ‘omissions and distortions’ (as Griffin accurately describes

them) present in the final 9/11 Commission report published in

2004 make it, in most truthseekers’ eyes, about as reliable as the much-derided Warren Commission verdict on JFK. The fact that

the 9/11 Commission was headed by people with close ties to the

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Bush administration, and that it avoided even mentioning glaring

issues such as the fall of WTC 7 in its final analysis, virtual y guaranteed conspiracy speculation from the start.

But if al-Qaeda did not act alone – or acted at all – then

who did help stage 9/11 so successful y? We have already seen

that, rightly or wrongly, many fingers have been pointed at

Vice-President Dick Cheney. He and several other prominent

‘neoconservatives’ on the US political right, including Donald

Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, were all names associated with

the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a think tank

that produced a telling document almost exactly one year before

9/11. Entitled ‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses’, it was a blueprint for a more powerful and imperialistic USA, setting out the

conditions that would need to be created to enable the country

to maintain its status as a leading world power. Its now most

famous line stands out:

The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary
change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic

and catalysing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.

Just a year later, many of those who compiled the PNAC document

were running the country, following the controversial election

which saw George W Bush only just winning after bitter rows over

voting irregularities, and the US had its ‘new Pearl Harbor’, a term specifical y referred to by the President in the wake of 9/11. Given many of the conspiracy accusations directed towards the 1941

Pearl Harbor incident (
see
chapter 3), maybe this was not such a wise al usion to make. But it might have been an accurate one.

From the enormous focus often placed on the PNAC document,

observers might presume that most challengers of the official

story hold neoconservatives to have been entirely responsible for 9/11, but some think this may in itself may be a sideshow. Perhaps inevitably, one pool of doubters implicates Israel as being another 192

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major player, accused of aiding the plot to help generate the very backlash against the Muslim world that followed. Dealing with

supposedly unbiased claims of ‘dancing Israelis’ seen celebrating the burning towers, and assertions that Mossad agents were

operating in and around the events of 9/11, is a difficult balancing act for conspiracy theorists, risking giving fuel to the knee-jerk reactionism of anti-Zionist camps. The fact that some have strayed into this territory at all has allowed journalists such as David

Aaronovitch (
see
p. 13) to slam the entire truth movement as being an anti-Semitic exercise, but this is both untrue and unfair.

In the absence of definitive answers, all possibilities are bound to be considered. Overal , however, no matter which faction may

have played a part in what, 9/11 is primarily seen as the keystone in the New World Order plans for global domination – something

explored more ful y in chapter 8.

Regardless of whoever did instigate the attacks, or at the very

least allow them, what is beyond question is that 9/11 brought

with it many useful tools for those who believe in rule by force, and without a doubt the neocons got their ‘catalysing event’ to

bring about the desired transformation of America. The ‘War on

Terror’, launched in response to the attacks, snatched away many

essential freedoms previously taken for granted in the West, and

hugely accelerated the rise of the surveil ance society, all in the name of our protection. The introduction of worryingly flexible

anti-terror legislation across the world, including the US Bill of Rights-violating ‘Patriot Act’, opened dangerous windows for

those who might develop totalitarian tendencies. The hunt for

Osama bin Laden, meanwhile, named as the primary culprit even

before any loosely assembled evidence was presented, provided

the mandate to invade Afghanistan and carry out all that followed, while that same mandate was extended far beyond its brief to

encompass action in Iraq and other nations, as we have seen.

The captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other claimed

‘masterminds’ behind 9/11 may have been involved, but there is

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a pervading feeling that copious waterboarding, combined with

plea-bargaining and a desire for martyrdom, might have led them

to say anything. As for bin Laden, whether the man final y shot

down in his underwear in a Pakistani residential compound in

2011 was real y him is almost irrelevant. Many doubt it. Numerous reports suggest he had actual y died some years before, either

from natural causes or quiet assassination, and much cynicism

has been expressed over the very poor-quality video and audio

recordings purporting to come from him in the decade after

9/11. In a 2007 television interview, Benazir Bhutto, leader of the Pakistani People’s Party, appeared to al ude directly to the fact that bin Laden was already dead. Sceptics claim that she simply

‘misspoke’ and was referring to someone else, but just weeks later she was dead herself, killed by a suicide bomber.7

Any useful information that interrogating bin Laden might have

gleaned for the world was thrown away by his apparently senseless killing, and conclusive proof that the man executed in Pakistan
was
bin Laden was apparently dispensed with when the US Navy compassionately threw his body into the sea on the way home. Curiously, some 22 Navy SEALs from the same unit that assassinated the

al-Qaeda leader never made it home themselves, dying when their

helicopter was shot down less than three months later.

It is perhaps the case that too many patterns can sometimes be

drawn by too many researchers with time on their hands, but it

is not hard to see why conspiracy theories arise so easily in the face of such circumstances, especial y in a world where lies are

told so often. As one of the masters of lies, the Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, once famously remarked:

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people wil
eventual y come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for
such time as the state can shield the people from the political,
economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus

becomes vital y important for the state to use all of its powers to
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repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and
thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

ii) oTher MoDern false-flag

evenTs?

The Oklahoma Bombing

While, for the conspiracy world, 9/11 has become the most

archetypal of all probable false-flag atrocities, it is far from being the only major candidate. We have already seen how, just over the last century or so, there appear to have been a number of events which follow the pattern (the
Lusitania
and
Liberty
incidents stand out in particular). There may even have been a direct US precedent to what happened on 11 September with the deadly truck bomb that

took out the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building at Oklahoma City

on 19 April 1995, killing 168 people and injuring hundreds more.

Although a single bomber, Timothy McVeigh, was convicted

and executed for the crime – supposedly a revenge attack for the

77 people who died at the hands of the FBI in the Waco siege at

David Koresh’s religious cult compound in 1993 – the evidence

strongly suggests that more than one blast must have taken place to have caused such damage and that, again, perhaps explosives had

been pre-placed in the building by hands unknown. The anti-terror legislation that followed this attack seems to have helped pave the way for the more sweeping measures that 9/11 would consolidate.

Russian Manipulations?

Modern false-flag contenders are not constrained to American

shores, with Russian intelligence services having been accused of 195

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perpetrating a number of such incidents, most strikingly the huge explosions which took out a number of apartment blocks in the

cities of Moscow, Buynaksk and Volgodonsk in September 1999,

killing 293 residents and injuring over a thousand. The blasts were blamed by the authorities on Chechen terrorists, but others soon

turned their suspicions towards the Russian Federal Security Service (or FSB, a direct descendant of the KGB), which was alleged to have carried out the bombings itself in an attempt to provide a reason for a full-scale incursion into Chechnya. It also helped elevate

the reputation of the FSB’s former director, one Vladimir Putin –

who went on to lead the country in one guise or another for many

years. Although this theory was predictably given great publicity by Chechen politicians, it did also gain support in the Western media, especial y by journalist John Sweeney in the
Observer
newspaper.

The allegations have been forceful y denied by Russian

authorities, but odd notes were nevertheless struck by the

circumstances and timing of the apartment attacks. Three months

before the explosions, the Swedish journalist Jan Blomgren had

already published a piece claiming that the Kremlin was planning

‘a series of terror bombings in Moscow that could be blamed on

the Chechens’, suggesting that advance information was seeping

through from somewhere.8 Then, on 13 September 1999, following

the Moscow blasts, a speaker in the Russian Duma, Gennadiy

Seleznyov, announced this:

I have just received a report. According to information