THE REAL 9-11 DIVISION

On the ninth anniversary of 9-11 all the talk was about the huge row over the planned Muslim community Center around the corner from Ground Zero. The issue, as with just about every area of politics, whether it be health care, taxation, immigration or how to deal with the deficit, has riven this country in two. Anger, rage, irrationality, violence and vitriol abound, consensus and common ground are nowhere to be seen.

 But at least there is a debate to be had on all of these issues, however acrimonious it may become. And yet, there is one notable exception, namely the question of who was responsible for the 9-11 attacks. How extraordinary it is that ostensibly well-educated, rational, discourse-loving people totally shut down when the question as to whether 9-11 was an inside job is raised. ‘This conversation has to end now’ or ‘you are a conspiracy theory freak’ are common refrains.

Even more inexplicable is the fact that those who have vented their spleen most vocally at the so-called conspiracy theorists are Leftists. They hate Bush and firmly believe that the Iraq war was predicated on the lie that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But they cannot bring themselves to entertain the possibility that the same regime that started a war that has caused anything from half a million to a million deaths could have been evil enough to kill three thousand of its’ own people.

Bear in mind that, a week after 9-11, the Bush administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declared that the air in Manhattan was ‘safe to breathe’ and did not contain ‘excessive levels of asbestos.’ Thousands of World Trade Center (WTC) responders have been diagnosed with acute respiratory illness and hundreds have already died. Experts predict that many more people will die from these illnesses than died on 9-11.

Of course, the reasons for their state of denial are complex and require careful psychological analysis. A powerful explanation, in my opinion, is the motivational drive to avoid ‘cognitive dissonance’, the uncomfortable feelings brought on by addressing ideas or propositions that conflict with our long held preconceptions and hypotheses. In other words, no amount of evidence, however good it may be, is ever going to convince the true-believer, the person who is wedded to a certain mindset, to change his/her position.

I arrived in Tucson, Arizona, from London, four years ago and quickly discovered the 9-11 truth movement. I have studied the subject ad infinitum and am convinced that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al were entirely complicit in the atrocities that took place on September 11^th 2001. There is a cornucopia of compelling evidence – here is a link to my previous blog post on this issue:

http://www.bleedingheartburgess.com/blog/page/8

-  but the nub of the matter is that three buildings at the World Trade Center, the Twin Towers and (several hours later) Building 7 (47 stories tall) collapsed at free fall speed, in the manner of controlled demolitions, on their own footprints. In 2009, nine internationally renowned Scientists published a paper in The Open Chemical Physics Journal

http://www.bollyn.com/public/Active_Thermite_at_WTC.pdf

which provided proof that remnants of the explosive, Thermite, were present in the dust produced by the destruction of the World Trade Center.

On September 11^th 2010, I and some fifteen other 9-11 Truthers gathered on the corner of Speedway Boulevard and Park Avenue in Tucson, Arizona. In the sweltering heat, we held up our banners declaring that 9-11 was an inside job and handed out literature to passers-by. As expected, the full gamut of responses were on show, obscenities and middle fingers juxtaposed with car horns expressing approval. A few aggressive pedestrians and others in cars shouted at us from the other side of the road. None felt inclined to cross over and engage in intelligent conversation.

Putting one’s head above the parapet is not all that easy in today’s United States but it is comforting to know that the 9-11 Truth Movement is broad based and growing both in terms of numbers and exposure. It contains many mainstream, heavyweight individuals, not least Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth which has over a thousand members. Opinion polls have found that between 30% and 40% of Americans consider it either ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ likely that that the Government either carried out the 9-11 attacks themselves or allowed them to be carried out. That means that millions of people find it just as hard as I do to believe the official line that nineteen Saudi Arabians were able to highjack and fly four planes for almost two hours, unchallenged, through the most heavily protected airspace of the most powerful military force in the world. The U.S government’s conspiracy theory is the most outlandish one in existence.

So-called ‘false-flag’ operations are covert operations carried out by a government against its’ own interests but made to appear as though they are perpetrated by foreign entities, in order to create a false pretext for aggressive action against an enemy. Historically, there are many examples, three of which are: The Reichstag Fire

 http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007657

Operation Northwoods:  http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/

and The Gulf of Tonkin incident:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_Incident

If you are interested in investigating 9-11, I recommend a movie called  “September 11 Revisited” which you can find at http://www.metacafe.com/watch/yt-PWgSaBT9hNU/9_11_revisited_were_explosives_used/ and a book called “Debunking 9-11 Debunking   http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_2_23?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=debunking+911+debunking&sprefix=debunking+911+debunking

It is so easy for skeptics who have not done their homework to denigrate 9-11 Truthers as whackos and to offer up the usual glib objections such as ‘there would have been a whistleblower by now’ or ‘it was a just a case of incompetence and cock-up’. The few people that are willing to discuss 9-11 always bombard you with ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions and if your reply does not immediately satisfy them they summarily write you off. The fact is that the 9-11 Truth Movement does not need to have an overriding or unifying theory to justify its’ opinions. Massive events like 9-11 will always leave many questions unanswered.

Doubtless we will all continue to lose friends over 9-11 – I am sure that some of the people who receive this piece will respond angrily and wish to be removed from my mailing list- but the fight to expose the egregious crimes of Bush and the neo-cons will continue unabated, as will the struggle to persuade enlightened elements in the media to stop being so dishonest in their treatment of this subject.