9/11: the political

By now you all know about "The Path to 9/11," the propaganda movie being disseminated by the Disney and Scholastic corporations. The people behind the movie are an evangelical group called Youth With A Mission.

Now, ABC claims to be editing those false sequences to satisfy critics so the show can go on -- even if it still remains a gross distortion of history. And as it does so, ABC advances the illusion that the deceptive nature of "The Path to 9/11" is an honest mistake committed by a hardworking but admittedly fumbling team of well-intentioned Hollywood professionals who wanted nothing less than to entertain America. But this is another Big Lie.

In fact, "The Path to 9/11" is produced and promoted by a well-honed propaganda operation consisting of a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly liberal bias. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather is far right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, he is working with a secretive evangelical religious right group founded by The Path to 9/11's director David Cunningham that proclaims its goal to "transform Hollywood" in line with its messianic vision.

Media Matters has a good summary of the issue, plus links and phone numbers through which you can voice your disapproval.

We know that September 11th has been used to justify, well, nearly anything. War without end, torture, concentration camps, spying on civilians, imprisonment with charges or trial, unchecked governmental powers, censorship... it's a long list. People who control vast resources have a lot invested in perpetuating the lies and the propaganda. A lot depends on it.

But what is the truth?

We don't know.

Most of what passes for common knowledge about 9/11 is fiction. The official story -- or, as Allan often corrects me, the official stories, there have been so many -- is also fiction. Those people trying to uncover and expose the truth are routinely smeared as wackos, given the derisive label "conspiracy theorists," as if the very idea of conspiracy is in itself ridiculous. (Yet isn't even the Official Story one of conspiracy? Didn't someone conspire to perpetrate 9/11?)

The US Government went to a lot of trouble to try to prevent an investigation into the events of September 11th. Only the activism of 9/11 widows prevented them from getting away with it. Now, when I think of the time, money and effort that is spent trying to disgrace the 9/11 Truth Movement, I can only conclude that there are many things to hide.

It's easy to deride. It's harder to keep an open mind. Let's all work on keeping our minds open.

Today we have a guest post from my esteemed partner, Allan, a/k/a Redsock. Allan is part of the 9/11 Truth Movement. Here's what he has to say.

As the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks arrives, the 9/11 Truth Movement has made incredible strides. Numerous videos and scores of articles from dozens of researchers circulate on the internet. Without the web, what has been accomplished in the last five years might have taken more than two decades.

For the mainstream media, ignoring the Movement is no longer an option. Over the last six months, magazines and newspapers have been forced to say something about the many groups that are asking questions about what we've been told happened that day. The media's usual reaction? Ridicule -- often by highlighting a silly obscure theory and using that to smear the entire Movement.

Yet there are clear signs that many Americans have serious doubts about the official story. ... When I say "official story", I'm referring to the broad outline of what supposedly happened on 9/11. There is no "official story". Nearly every aspect of the actual attacks, the warnings and government response, the hijackers and their backgrounds can be seriously questioned, either because no evidence has been presented or because there are two, three, sometimes four different versions of what happened.

Some poll results:

August 2006: 36% of respondents say it's "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that federal officials either participated in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop them.

May 2006: A Zogby poll finds 42% of Americans believe there is a 9/11 coverup.

August 2004: This Zogby poll found that 49.3% of New York City residents believe some US leaders "knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act". And of those people, nearly 30% are registered Republicans and over 38% described themselves as "very conservative".

(On the flip side, according to an August 2006 Washington Post poll, 30% of Americans did not know in what year the 9/11 attacks took place. And 5% of respondents could not remember the month and date of the attacks.)

The 9/11 Commission has been exposed as a sham and there is next-to-nothing in its much-hyped Final Report that hasn't been discredited or had serious questions raised about its authenticity. (The Report has recently been released, appropriately, as a comic book.)

The Commission failed to address hundreds of serious questions, glossing over the many warnings from nearly a dozen foreign governments during the summer of 2001 -- the Bush administration insisted for nine months after 9/11 that there had been no warnings whatsoever -- and ignoring most of the 300+ questions submitted by the members of the 9/11 Family Steering Committee. Those questions and the Committee's rating of each "answer" can be found here.

In addition, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the chairmen of the Commission, admitted in recent weeks that officials from the Pentagon, NORAD and the FAA all lied to the Commission in their testimony. The Commission considered referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, but in the end, they did nothing.

Kean and Hamilton also admitted that they consciously avoided asking tough questions of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani: "It proved difficult, if not impossible, to raise hard questions about 9/11 in New York without it being perceived as criticism of the individual police and firefighters or [the Mayor]."

More importantly, when recounting the response of the US military to the hijacked planes, the Commission invented a brand-new chronology that contradicted every single news report since 9/12, as well as the Commission's earlier reports. There is no mention or explanation of the numerous discrepancies in the Final Report.

David Ray Griffin has written three books about 9/11, including "The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions". (Note: One chapter in his book "The New Pearl Harbor" draws heavily from an article I wrote in 2003.)

In his list of 115 omissions and distortions, Griffin finds that the Commission ignored:

- the FBI's admission that it "has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11";

- the existence of WTC 7, the collapse of which FEMA admitted it could not explain;

- David Schippers's (the House Judiciary Committee's chief investigator in the Clinton impeachment trial) claim that several FBI agents knew the targets and date of the attacks as much as six weeks before 9/11, and his futile attempts to interest anyone in Washington of these warnings;

- reports in Newsweek that, on the night of September 10, several top Pentagon officials received a "particularly urgent warning" and quickly cancelled travel plans for the next morning;

- the 3.5 hours of testimony by former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds that revealed 9/11-related cover-ups by FBI officials; and

- the fact that as many as 12 war games were being staged on the morning of 9/11, including simultaneous hijackings of passenger planes and the crashing of a plane into a government building. For some of the military games, false "blips" meant to impersonate hijacked planes were placed onto FAA radar screens.

The Commission also failed to tell us that two hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi -- two men the CIA knew had connections to the USS Cole bombing -- had a close relationship with Abdussattar Shaikh, an undercover informant who had worked closely with the FBI for years on terrorism cases. Alhazmi lived with Shaikh in San Diego for nearly a year -- and two other hijackers, Mohamed Atta and Hani Hanjour, may have also hung around Shaikh's house.

In his book "Intelligence Matters", Florida Senator Bob Graham, who co-chaired the Congressional Joint Inquiry into the attacks in late 2002, discloses how the FBI failed to tell the Inquiry about Shaikh, refused to allow him to testify, moved him to a secret location "for his own safety", and apparently set him up with "a well-known former Justice Department attorney [who had] a strong relationship with the FBI".

In the Commission's Final Report, Shaikh was referred to only once, as an anonymous "homeowner".

***

Griffin's "Omissions" deals extensively with the lies and half-truths given for the US military's response on 9/11. Paul Thompson, the editor of the Complete 9/11 Timeline (order the book version now!), has found seven different versions of the military's response:

1. September 13, 2001: Richard Myers (the acting head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 9/11) admitted twice under oath before the Senate that no planes were scrambled until after the Pentagon was hit (nearly 90 minutes after it was known the first plane had been hijacked); a top NORAD official agreed.

2. September 14: CBS News quoted unnamed sources that planes were scrambled, but arrived at each destination too late.

3. September 18: NORAD used some of the CBS information when it revised its own timeline.

4. May 2003: NORAD officials' testimony before the 9/11 Commission.

5. January 2004: Details from "Air War Over America", a book commissioned by the military.

6. July 2004: The 9/11 Commission's Final Report in July 2004, which rewrote the entire chronology, in a blatant attempt to shift blame from the military to the FAA.

7. September 2006: Details from the NORAD audio tapes featured in Vanity Fair.

Thompson: "There's been nothing but lies and contradictions all along. It's like they keep trying different stories until they find one that sticks."

911truth.org offers the Top 40 reasons to doubt the official story, but what should be the main focus? What someone believes should be the #1 item with which to educate the general public might be #7 or #28 to me.

There's so much verifiable evidence that members of the Bush administration were complicit in the attacks that I can't help but think those "researchers" who waste time arguing about outlandish theories are actually disinformation agents, intent on making everyone in the Truth Movement look like tinfoil-hat wearing kooks.

I'm much more receptive to people gathering information from government officials, media sources and books, and asking questions about what they have found, than someone linking to a grainy video and telling me "what really happened". Many of the videos are visually compelling -- I have a ton of them stored away on various discs -- but in my own research, I tend to focus on the written word.

In addition to the books by Thompson and Griffin, I would also recommend Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed's The War On Truth: 9/11, Disinformation And The Anatomy Of Terrorism. ... On the web, 911 Blogger is a great place for links to all kinds of 9/11 research. And check out Jeff Wells's Coincidence Theorist's Guide to 9/11.

One video released this week, 9/11: Press For Truth, is based on Thompson's research and was produced for the general viewer. I highly recommend it. Two 10-minute excerpts can be found here and here and Google Video has the whole thing here. (But if you watch it and like it, please buy a copy.)

In 2002, Bob Graham said (my emphasis):

was surprised at the evidence that there were foreign governments involved in facilitating the activities of at least some of the terrorists in the United States. ... Most of that information is classified, I think overly-classified... It will become public at some point when it's turned over to the National Archives, but that's 20 or 30 years from now.

The 9/11 Truth Movement is well ahead of schedule.