9/11 Conspiracies

[John Simkin]

Jim Marrs is an award-winning veteran Texas journalist whose books Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (Carroll & Graf) and Rule by Secrecy (Harper Collins: 2002) have cause quite a stir. His latest book is Inside Job: Unmasking the 9/11 Conspiracies.

According to Jim Marrs:

The official story about 9/11 is discredited. That is the sobering conclusion reached by millions of Americans, all across the political spectrum, who have sifted through the evidence uncovered by hundreds of independent researchers. Many honest citizens are now forced, with sadness and reluctance, to make an almost unthinkable inference: Powerful US officials must have had foreknowledge of the planned attacks, and then acted from the inside to: thwart efforts to prevent 9/11, remove or cover up criminal evidence, and hamper inquiries into what happened.

Were the horrific events of September 11, 2001 truly an inside job? This book will help you decide for yourself. In this work, world-renowned conspiracy theorist Jim Marrs makes a compelling case that 9/11 marks the intersection of several conspiracies at once, each based on overlapping political agendas. Support for his thesis comes from this sampling of the many disturbing anomalies, cited by Marrs:

• Standard air defense mechanisms systematically failed, simultaneously.

• Interceptor jets were scrambled too late, too slowly, and from the wrong locations.

• President Bush proceeded with a "photo op" long after he knew we were under attack.

• Fires could not have caused the free-fall collapse of the World Trade Center towers.

• The collapse of Building 7 in the complex was later admitted to be a demolition.

• Vital physical evidence was either removed or has never been released to investigators.

• Key officials claimed warnings never came, despite massive evidence to the contrary.

Inside Job is the definitive journalistic account of the hidden role of the Bush administration in failing to prevent the 9/11 attacks. The author provides heavy documentation of his findings, plus extensive appendices that include perspectives from families of 9/11 victims, and excerpts from the RICO Act lawsuit filed by 9/11 widow Ellen Mariani.

http://www.insidejob-911.com

[Guest]

What of course one has to consider in this conspiracy theory is motive. I recently caused a bit of a stir in my College by making my Year 11 students consider the similarities between 9/11 and the Reichstag Fire

[John Simkin]

What of course one has to consider in this conspiracy theory is motive. I recently caused a bit of a stir in my College by making my Year 11 students consider the similarities between 9/11 and the Reichstag Fire

Exactly. Once motive has been established you can start looking for the evidence. Your reference to the Reichstag Fire is an interesting one. Historians largely agree that the fire was indeed a Nazi conspiracy. However, this one has been fairly easy to solve as Hitler lost the Second World War. The powers to be had the motivation to make available all the evidence that existed.

The exposing and solving of conspiracies when they involve political systems that are still in control, are much more difficult. What is more, I believe that conspiracies involving the protection of the capitalist system, are all indirectly linked together.

Let us for example look at the following: the Zinoviev Letter (1924), the Kennedy Assassination (1963), Harold Wilson: KBG Agent (1964-1976), 9/11 (2001) and WMD in Iraq (2002-2004).

I believe that all these are directly connected and date back to Tom Paine’s book, The Rights of Man (1791). There were immediate attempts to silence Paine but his book was published and his ideas helped to influence revolutions in America and France. The basic idea that our rulers should be accountable to the people spread to every country and fuelled the idea of the establishment of democracies throughout the world.

Men and women who advocated the idea of universal suffrage were smeared, imprisoned and sometimes murdered. The idea of universal suffrage was so powerful it refused to die and it resulted in limited democracies being set-up in all advanced capitalist societies. The powers that be have remained very nervous about the possibility of full democracies being established. It has been clear that once all adults had equal political power, the majority would favour policies that redistribute wealth and resources. They would also insist that society was organized in a way that would allow all citizens to reach their full potential. These policies would have resulted in a decline in the power, wealth and status of those holding power.

Therefore, those in power had to find ways of maintaining their political privileges. One important act was to keep control of mass communication. In this way the people could be constantly told that the redistribution of wealth was a bad idea.

It was also important to maintain control of the educational system. This would enable young people to be indoctrinated into the idea that this unequal distribution of power and wealth was a good idea. An important aspect of this is to teach our young people that if they work hard enough that they will also reach positions that will give them wealth, power and status. If any teacher attempts to question this system they are immediately described as trying to indoctrinate their students. This usually keeps them quiet but on rare occasions they need to be removed from the profession.

By controlling the mass media and the education system in this way full democracy has been denied all our citizens. Despite this, there are times in history when people begin to see what is happening and give their support to political figures that promise to change the system. When this happens, the third aspect of the conspiracy comes into play. This is the use of the intelligence services. These are very useful in undermining the move towards democracy. As they have been set-up to protect a country from foreign powers, the government can argue that their actions have to remain secret. This is very useful when you use them to smear and undermine popular political figures who are promising the redistribution of wealth. In other cases they have used their power to “turn” these political leaders (Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Atlee, Harold Wilson, Tony Blair).

I have spent sometime studying the activities of the secret services in the United States and the UK. It is clear to me that they have been playing this role since they were established. I suspect the same has been happening in other countries.

Since the end of the Second World War governments have used the threat of communism to prevent full democracies to be established. This has been done in three main ways. (1) Radical political leaders are smeared as communists. (2) The external threat justifies the secret actions of our governments. (3) The fear of communist attack enables governments to spend a large percentage of its resources on armaments.

One of the major clues of this conspiracy against democracy came from the last speech made by Dwight Eisenhower as president of the United States.

This evening I come to you with a message of leave-taking and farewell, and to share a few final thoughts with you, my countrymen...

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defence; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defence establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence - economic, political, even spiritual - is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defence with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Eisenhower was of course in a good position to know what was going on. Soon after retiring Eisenhower had a couple of meetings with John F. Kennedy. I suspect he passed this message onto him. It was only after the Cuban Missile Crisis that Kennedy realised the truth of what Eisenhower had said. He then began secret negotiations in order to bring the Cold War to an end. He even attempted to keep these negotiation secret from the CIA and the FBI. However, they discovered what he was up to and the result was the assassination of Kennedy.

Any attempt by any president to negotiate an end to the Cold War has resulted in them become involved in a scandal: Nixon (Watergate) and Reagan (Iran-Contra). I daresay that the CIA were intimately involved in allowing this information to enter the public domain.

The arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev and the end of the Cold War posed a serious threat to what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex. Without this threat, people would start demanding a severe reduction in arms spending (money that could be spent on what the majority of people wanted improving, such as the education and health).

The other problem was that it was going to be more difficult in future to smear radical political figures as communists.

The military-industrial complex needed a new enemy. Of course there were plenty of candidates. The problem with these countries was that they did not pose a serious threat to the safety of people living in the United States and Europe. Therefore, they had to manipulate events to illustrate a threat.

I do not believe that the CIA planned 9/11 (nor do I believe the CIA planned the assassination of John F. Kennedy). However, I do believe that in both cases that they became aware of the plot at a very early stage. In both cases they decided not to intervene. The assassination of JFK led to the continuance of the Cold War. The events of 9/11 led to a military campaign against Muslim fundamentalists in Afghanistan (but not Saudi Arabia). The discovery of WMD led to war in Iraq. Of course there were no WMD in Iraq but by the time we all discovered this the military-industrial complex had their war. What is more, the action would guarantee further attacks by Muslim fundamentalists on industrialised countries, therefore further justifying increased spending on defence.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRpaine.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/TUzinoviev.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/SSwright.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKindex.htm

[Wim Dankbaar]

On this topic, one should know about the investigative work of Daniel Hopsicker.

http://www.madcowprod.com/

Wim

[Guest]

There is something Orwellian about the vision John summons up of a military/economic elite requiring a permanent state of war with a semi mythical enemy in order to preserve their own power and leadership.

In the work I did with my class I asked them to think in terms of the similarities between 9/11 and the Reichstag Fire in the way the ruling political elite manipulated the "event" and then shaped future events.

Both Hitler and George Bush were not seen as fully "legitimately" elected leaders before the RF and 9/11. The "events" in both cases conveniently did much to consolidate their positions. Both Hitler and Bush used the "event" to summon in a particularly nasty right wing agenda against civil liberties and opposition groups. In both the RF and 9/11 there was more than a hint of security force involvement.

Chillingly both Hitler and Bush went on to believe they had the right to attack other countries without seemingly any provocation.

[Ron Ecker]

To me the clearest evidence of foreknowledge of 9/11 can be seen in the inexplicable behavior during the attacks of all four men who would be most likely among high government officials to have such knowledge: the president, vice president (in this administration anyway), secretary of defense, and chairman of the joint chiefs.

When told the first WTC tower was hit, Bush reportedly assumed it was some pilot’s error. But when told the second tower was hit and America was under attack, he did nothing but continue to sit in a reading lesson with schoolchildren. Why didn’t he get up within at least a reasonable time, excuse himself, and go act like a commander in chief? For a full seven minutes (all excruciating seven of them are recorded in Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11), Bush just sat there, when it was conceivable that lives could have been saved through quick presidential decisions.

When VP Cheney in the White House heard about the first tower being hit, he sat in his office and watched the tower burn on TV. We are supposed to believe that it never occurred to either Cheney or Bush that it could have been a terrorist incident, despite their familiarity as part of their jobs with terrorist threats and potentialities. When the second tower was hit, and it finally dawned upon Cheney that this must be terrorists attacking, we have been led to believe that the Secret Service grabbed Cheney up and hustled him into an underground shelter. But that apparently is not the case. The second tower was hit just after 9 a.m., and Cheney did not get to the shelter, as best the 9/11 commission has been able to determine, until just before 10 am. We know that he stopped in the tunnel along the way to call Bush, who authorized shoot-downs of any more hijacked planes, though of course the Pentagon had been hit by then and the attacks were already over. Aside from that call, what did Cheney do for a whole hour that is completely unaccounted for? Watch CNN?

Rumsfeld, after learning that both towers had been hit, went right on with ordinary business, talking with a daily CIA briefer in his Pentagon office, until the Pentagon itself was hit. I don’t know what comment needs to be added to such inexplicable, and still unexplained, behavior. Doesn't it speak for itself? Rumsfeld glossed over it in his 9/11 commission testimony, and no one on the commission asked him a single question about it, nor has anyone from the media. Thus another of the many unanswered questions asked by the frustrated 9/11 Family Steering Committee will likely remain unanswered, like most of the others: “Why did Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who was in the Pentagon when it was struck, remain in his office despite knowing the country was under attack?”

Almost equally inexplicable is the story told by General Myers, then Acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. In a November 2001 interview he stated that he was on Capitol Hill that morning for a meeting with Senator Max Cleland. They knew the first WTC tower had been hit before the meeting, but they "thought it was a small airplane or something like that,” so they went ahead with their meeting. When the second tower was hit, Myers shamelessly told the interviewer, "Nobody informed us of that." The Pentagon was hit just as Myers came out of his meeting with Cleland, and someone stuck a phone into Myers’s hand, in case he wanted to get up to speed on the war in progress.

Are we supposed to believe that the inexplicable behavior of not one, not two, not three, but all four of these men at the top of the military chain of command during the 9/11 attacks, is just some coincidence? (All you JFK researchers should be familiar with coincidences and their great explanatory power.) Or is it not more likely an indication that they knew what was happening, that the absence of action on the part of all four of these men was willful, studied behavior?

But why, one might ask, if they had foreknowledge, would they not at least act like the responsible leaders they are supposed to be? Why would they not get off their butts and do something, instead of acting, well, guilty? And the most likely answer is that they did not want to put themselves into a position of having to do something, before the events played out. For example, one of the big controversies about the blanket “incompetence” exhibited by the government on 9/11 was the delay in getting jet fighters launched till it was too late. In that regard there is a very significant comment in Myers’s prepared statement to the 9/11 commission. He says that as soon as he reached the smoking Pentagon from Capitol Hill, “I asked questions,” such as “the status of fighters” to intercept hijacked aircraft. There’s the rub. Had Myers simply been told about the second tower strike, that these were terrorist attacks, one of the first things he would have been expected to do as JC Chairman would be to ask about the status of fighters. Thus fighters conceivably could have been launched from Andrews or elsewhere to protect Washington many minutes before the Pentagon was hit. It was important, therefore, if this was a conspiracy, that Myers not be informed, so that he would not be in a position to ask about fighters. Ditto Rumsfeld, who even when he was told about the second tower being hit, went and virtually hid in his office with his daily briefer, lest he be expected to ask the National Military Command Center, right there in the Pentagon, about things like the possibility of fighters being launched.

A final note, though I could go on and write a book. If Rumsfeld had foreknowledge, one may ask, why was he even in the Pentagon that day? That brings into play the strange behavior of Flight 77, which once again calls into play the mystical god of coincidence, which seems ever to hover around what may seem at first blush to be conspiracies. Why did Flight 77, instead of crashing straight into the Pentagon’s middle to inflict as many casualties as possible, circle around in a steep bank in order to hit the one section of the Pentagon, called Wedge One, that had just been reinforced, and was thus the one section most resistant to damage, and because of the renovation still had less than a full complement of workers to suffer death or injury? (And while on the subject of minimal casualties, why such an unusually low number of passengers on Flight 77 that morning? And also aboard Flight 11, and aboard Flight 93, and aboard Flight 175? Well, how about coincidence, coincidence, coincidence, and coincidence?)

The Washington Post called Flight 77's circling around to hit Wedge One “a weird quirk of fate.” Maybe so. But there were a lot of weird quirks during the attacks of 9/11, which no one has had to explain.

[Tony Frank]

Renegade CIA operatives built the Al Qaeda hierarchy. I know this for a fact. I exposed KGB infiltration of the CIA in 1984 and it was never made public. The CIA was rife with renegade operatives by 1984 and the United States government was very corrupted.

After the KGB officers went to prison, they personally told me that they had killed the thirteen Members of Congress, including Senator Robert F. Kennedy. They had manipulated an Islamic extremist named Sirhan Sirhan to assassinate Senator Kennedy on June 5, 1968, [although it's possible that since they had a double agent in the room to assist in the killing, Sirhan may not have even been the actual assassin] and Sirhan made no secret of why he intended to kill Senator Kennedy on that day.

Senator Kennedy had spoken out in favor of Israel and Sirhan Sirhan was vehemently anti-Israeli. The Jordanian-born Sirhan Sirhan had at one time lived in Jerusalem, and June 5, 1968, was the anniversary of the 1967 six-day war in which Israel defeated Jordan and took over the rest of Jerusalem and the West Bank. A book about this assassination, “RFK Must Die!” has as its cover a photocopy of Sirhan’s diary writings, in which he repeatedly writes over and over, “RFK Must Die! June 5, 1968!”

This was not the only manipulation of an Islamic extremist in an assassination.

“Tony Chavez,” a KGB officer who had been the CIA’s head of domestic operations from the late 1960s until 1984, said that they had used Islamic extremists to assassinate Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Renegade CIA officers took over handling the Islamic extremists in 1984, and eventually linked them up with Osama bin Laden.

On September 24, 2001, the New York Times reported that Ayman al-Zawahiri led the Islamic extremists that killed Anwar Sadat. It said that Zawahiri had “assumed the helm of the Jihad group by the late 1970s.”

Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Islamic terrorist that renegade CIA officers took over handling in 1984, is Osama bin Laden’s second in command.

Renegade CIA officers were amused by the fact that I was futilely trying to put an end to the CIA operations targeting me by publicizing my knowledge of the KGB infiltration that had been exposed, and my knowledge of the massive corruption in the CIA. At one point in 1984, they taunted me by bringing Zawahiri to see me in Chicago.

On October 4, 2001, the New York Times reported that Mohammed Atef, another top lieutenant to Osama bin Laden, led “the Egyptian Islamic Jihad” along with Zawahiri, that the movement was reorganized in 1992, and that he and Zawahiri brought their “loyal followers” to Al Qaeda.

MSNBC reports that, “according to US intelligence officials and allied intelligence,” Thirwat Salah Shihata is one of the “most wanted members of Al Qaeda,” and that he had been “second-in-command, after Ayman al-Zawahiri, of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad.”

The New York Times also stated on October 4, 2001, that “the leadership of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad . . . now forms the backbone for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.”

On November 21st, it stated that Al Qaeda merged with the Egyptian Islamic Jihad in 1998, and it described them as “the terror group whose members became foot soldiers for Osama bin Laden.”

The Al Qaeda hierarchy was built with terrorists that renegade CIA officers began handling in 1984. The renegade CIA officers linked up Zawahiri, Atef, Shihata, and their “loyal followers” with Osama bin Laden, and eventually used them to facilitate the September 11th terrorist attacks.

Even though Zawahiri and his “Jihad group” were not identified in news reports as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad in the 1980s, the exact phrase that Tony Chavez used to identify who had killed Egyptian President Anwar Sadat on behalf of the KGB officers was “the Egyptian Islamic Jihad.”

The hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania while en route to Washington DC was meant to kill a multitude of Congressmen and Senators. (President Bush was in Florida at the time.) The terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and in New York would have easily provided cover for what may have been the main purpose of the terrorist attacks, killing Members of Congress.

The KGB officers and renegade CIA officers had been responsible for a total of eleven Members of Congress perishing in airplane “accidents.” Using airplanes to slaughter Members of Congress was a tried and proven method on September 11, 2001.

Just how many Members of Congress would have died when a vehicle that they were not on board became the instrument for their death is not known, but what is known is that, ten years before the September 11th attacks, renegade CIA officers killed a United States Senator by crashing a helicopter crashed into his plane. There had also been three other incidents when vehicles that they were not on board killed Members of Congress.

[Lee Forman]

Question for Mr Jim Marrs.

Hello Jim!

Both towers allegedly had CIA offices. I don't know how well this is known. I happen to have known an employee of the NY Port Authority who barely survived the attack on 9/11. In the course of one of our conversations, he informed me that the attack could not have been perceived as exclusively a civilian attack - due to the presence of the Intelligence community, but that also a large majority of individuals sought refuge and rescue in seeking access to the rooftop, which was unfortunately highly secured and locked since '93, as there was quite a bit of highly proprietary, hi-tech gear, owned by the CIA, in these locations.

Following a rapid search, I was unable to detemine as to whether or not there in fact were any individuals rescued from the rooftop during the 1993 bombing incident. It appears to have been anecdotal, but the myth may have had the unfortunate side effect of leading quite a few individuals to believe that there may be a safe haven in the rooftop, and I believe its established fact that there were a large number of people that unsuccessfully attempted to gain access.

Here's the questions: Did you come across any validation in your research concerning the presence of CIA offices in the towers? If so, in researching survivors and victims, is it known what floor these offices were located on, in which tower or both, and how many individuals of the CIA offices survived?

[Ron Ecker]

Lee,

I'm not Jim Marrs but can direct you to info relevant to your question about CIA offices at the WTC. I'm not aware of any CIA offices in the towers, but the NY Times reported the fact that the CIA's undercover New York station was in WTC Building 7 (a 47-story building that collapsed even though it wasn't hit by any airplane), and the CIA station was of course destroyed when WTC7 collapsed.

All the CIA employees were safely evacuated before WTC7 fell (in the same symmetrical fashion as the towers fell), which leaseholder Larry Silverstein has indicated was the result of controlled demolition. Silverstein stated on a PBS program about 9/11 that the decision was made "to pull" WTC7 because of the damage, "to pull" being an established term in the profession for controlled demolition. The FEMA investigation of the collapse concluded that the cause is undetermined. That remains unchanged, so I guess FEMA didn't watch the PBS program or else just hasn't gotten around to talking to Silverstein. As for the 9/11 commission, it couldn't care less.

Here's a link to the NY Times article:

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/1104-04.htm

[John Simkin]

It was my birthday on Friday. My daughter sent me a card with a quotation on. I think it is relevant to this debate:

“It will be a great day when the schools have all the money they need and the air force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.”

[Ron Ecker]

The 12/14/01 "confession" videotape of Usama bin Laden was faked, presumably by U.S. intelligence. Details are in the link below. Here are frames from the tape:

Here are photos of bin Laden, compared with the man in the tape (E):

Does anyone here believe that these pictures are of the same man?

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/osamatape.html