Making A Case For 9/11 Skepticism
John A. McCurdy - 02.12.2003 22:35
Most should by now be familiar with the proposition that the administration of President George W. Bush in the United States had prior knowledge of, or was complicit in carrying out, the attacks of September 11, 2001 ... A diverse community ... has emerged ... to advance a range of alternative understandings of how and why America was attacked on 9/11 ... They call themselves 9/11 Skeptics ...
MAKING A CASE FOR 9/11 SKEPTICISM
An exposition on the nature and rise of Sept. 11th Complicity-Counter Narratives.
By: John A. McCurdy
November 19, 2003
Most should by now be familiar with the proposition that the administration of President George W. Bush in the United States had prior knowledge of, or was complicit in carrying out, the attacks of September 11, 2001. The proposition clearly points to the existence of a sinister and seemingly preposterous - even paranoid - conspiracy conjecture: that the basis for two years of "War on Terror," which have held the globe hostage to fear and threats of U.S. retaliation, may be a half-truth at best, or a complete fabrication at worst. The idea has appeared on the Internet to date in a thousand guises, some clearly more credible than others (why this phenomenon of virtual proliferation should surprise anyone, in a culture that now generates a 30 percent increase in information internationally and annually, begs consideration).
A diverse community of researchers, authors, activists, and believers has emerged over the last two years to advance a range of alternative understandings of how and why America was attacked on 9/11 that revolve around this core thesis. They call themselves 9/11 Skeptics and use Internet websites, e-mail, videos, books and magazines to scrutinize, advance and disseminate empirically grounded, vociferously documented, and increasingly sophisticated ideas about the real meaning of Sept. 11. For over two years now I have counted myself among their number.
Most Skeptics acknowledge that immediately something about the attacks did not sit right, defied rules of logic and credibility. Both their execution and success, as well as their immediate fallout, were suspicious in the extreme. There was the certainty, within only hours of the collapse of the Twin Towers, of the guilt of Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. There was the extensive data on the alleged hijackers, churned out by the FBI for the media only days after the attacks. There was the righteous call for a "War on Terror," one that - it turns out - had been in the works at least one year, if not four.
To date, the leading official narrative, put forward by the U.S. Government to account for the unprecedented series of airline hjiackings carried out that morning, consists in claiming American intelligence services experienced a collosal "intelligence failure," prior to the attacks, that essentially assured their success. Blame it all on intelligence "turf wars" and the conscientious constraints imposed on intelligence gathering activity and capability in the United States, explained officials in the days and weeks after the attacks.
By July 2002, official accounts of the "intelligence failure" theory had reached a level of disclosure which admitted the U.S. Government had had foreknowledge of the method of attack, along with their probable targets, their approximate timing, as well as their likely perpetrators, most of whom - Osama bin Laden included - had been under intermittent surveillance, or, as the story goes, went about their business literally under the intimate and watchful nose of FBI Informants without detection in at least two states.
The openwire publishing network of the Independent Media Center (IMC) ( www.indymedia.org ), an international web of grassroots alternative media sites authored by the very same activists marching against corporate-led globalization in the streets of Seattle, Washington, Quebec City and Genoa, was filled the morning of Sept. 11 with insights and conjectures that, two years later, either continue to resonate or appear to describe the facts as 9/11 Skeptics have managed to reconstruct them.
Only hours before Flight 11 collided with the North Tower of the World Trade Center, Italian journalist Francisco Monico was full of praise for the IMC. Activists were successfully using the Internet as a form of "'collective intelligence,'" he wrote, breaking the media monopoly. "[F]or anyone interested in news on the G-8" summit in Genoa, Monico explained, "the virtual news world is more concrete and complete than the real one."
By 9:17 a.m. Sept. 11, fifteen minutes after Flight 175 collided with the South Tower, exploding into a ball of flame, an American had posted the following observation to the IMC newswire: "We are spoon-fed soap-opera news that is highly ... filtered ... anything that points to underlying causes dies on the cutting room floor ... Whatever comes out in the immediate future regarding today's attacks, you can be sure there's much more to the story that we won't hear."
A short time later, a direct conjecture appeared: "I REALLY THINK that this has been committed by ANGLO-SAXON interests." Later still, another:
"What will be the consequence if [remember IF ... this is entirely conjecture] we find US citizens responsible for the WTC/Pentagon attack? We all know of the economy's instability and continued downturn, and of Congress' pleas yesterday to find some way to give [it] a shot in the arm. What else has proved more historically helpful to the US economy than full-scale war? Just a little conspiracy theory for you to ponder. I realize it's unlikely, but I believe there is a small part of George W. that is enjoying this."
"That was one of my initial reactions -- CIA," another wrote in response.
Then, around 12 p.m., a piece titled "Burning of the Reichstag" appeared. "The critical historical analogy for people to bear in mind at this present time is not the 'bombing of Pearl Harbor'," the piece began, "but the Burning of the Reichstag." Adolf Hitler blamed the fire set in the Reichstag on the night of February 27, 1933 (in the parliament of the German Republic) on a Communist plot against the state, historian John Merriman writes. Today, most historians agree, a member of the Prussian ministry of the interior - most likely a member of the Nazi Party - torched the Reichstag. At Hitler's insistence an emergency decree was soon passed, Merriman continues, "suspending virtually all individual rights and giving the government authority to maintain order as it saw fit."
By the 3rd of October in the United States, less than a month after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the PATRIOT Act assault on basic civil liberties had been passed, over a thousand persons had been disappeared without charges or trial, and tens of billions of government revenues had been redistributed to corporations and arms contractors. Four days later American forces were bombing Afghanistan. The morning of Sept. 11th Newt Gingrich had declared on FOX News: "You're either for the United States or for the terrorists. There is no middle ground!" Seven days later President George W. Bush repeated the same in a nationally televised address. A year later, in September 2002, the United States unveiled its new National Security Strategy. It would enshrine the unliteral American right to wage preemptive war against any nation in the name of fighting terrorism. Martial Law may not have ensued in the United States, but the basis for international law had been formally discarded.
Michael Meacher, a minister in the Blair government for six years until this past summer, proposed a Skeptic view of the attacks in The Guardian on September 6th in his landmark article "This war on terror is bogus." Meacher’s summary of aspects of the Skeptic position on 9/11 offers a useful segway for constructing a brief overview of what I call the 9/11 Complicity Counter-Narrative.
U.S. authorities "did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11," Meacher wrote. "Instructive leads prior to 9/11 were not followed up." Why was there "such a slow reaction on September 11" to the unprecented hijacking of four civilan airliners, he also asked. "It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate." Noting that "no serious attempt had ever been made to catch bin Laden," Meacher asserts that "the so-called ‘war on terrorism’ is being used largely as a bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Sept. 11, he concluded, "offered an extremely convenient pretext to put the ‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses’ Project For A New American Century [PNAC] plan, "a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana," into action, "securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project." Indeed, the PNAC plan was personally drawn up for none other than Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Jeb Bush (President Bush’s brother, Republican Governor of Florida), and Lewis Libby - the heads of the Bush 2000 team and now firmly installed in the driver’s seat at the White House.
Were such a nightmare vision of recent history empirically and rationally varifiable - and I have personally confirmed that it is - the collapse of the "War on Terror" would presumably create a domino effect - to borrow a Cold War Eisenhower analogy - bringing down not just the Bush Administration, but more generally American credibility. The international community would turn against and isolate the United States, perhaps even expel its military forces, economic advisers, spies and apologists the world over. The trajectory of recent history and of a future which the United States openly intends to dominate would be decisively opened to fresh approaches to international relations for perhaps the first time since 1945 or earlier.
I submit that the nightmare is indeed a reality.
Many have read the "Rebuilding America’s Defenses" document in its entirely: it was, after all, posted to the Internet in September 2000 for anyone to read. "The history of the 20th century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire," the PNAC statement of principles reads. "Global leadership is not something to be exercised at our leisure, when the mood strikes us or when our core national security interests are directly threatened; then it is already too late."
In "Rebulding America’s Defenses" the authors turn to the issue of military transformation for the 21st-century, a process U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recently agonized over in an internal Pentagon memo leaked to the press. "[T]he process of [military] transformation," the document reads, "even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor" (emphasis added). That the Sept. 11 attacks were incessantly compared to Pearl Harbor by U.S. Senators and Congressmen in the aftermath of the attacks most will vividly recall.
A "two-stage process of change" would be required to effect the transformation, however, one of "transition" and one of "transformation," the former process depending on the latter. The "two-stage process of transforming the U.S. armed forces is sufficiently important," the document continues:
"to consider it a separate mission for the military services and for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The need for both the near-term and long-term transformation requires that a separate organization within these institutions act as the advocate and agent of revolutionary change" (emphasis added).
Taken together, these passages show the authors describing not only the chief means for initiating near-term revolutionary military transformation - "a new Pearl Harbor" - but the chief "agent" - or author - of "a new Pearl Harbor" - a "separate organization" composed of members of the "military services" (the Pentagon et al.) and "the Joint Chiefs of Staff" (the Bush Administration).
Bush’s neo-conservative clique regarded an attack like that of Sept. 11 as a perfect opportunity to affect a revolutionary transformation in U.S. defenses. Allowing such an attack to proceed unhindered - even to proceed under the protection of key authorities, positioned and working together within the different intelligence communities - might prove immensely useful for quelling domestic dissent and advancing U.S. corporate and miliitary interests abroad, provided the conspirators were detected and placed under surveillance and/or covertly infiltrated by State intelligence, and provided the plot was understood in its precise details and arrangements were made to manage, or even preempt, potential damage to persons and property, within a certain range of probability.
In the aftermath of the attacks measures could immediately be taken to construct a centralized and impenetrable defense and intelligence appartus to either preempt, or enhance, potential management of future terrorist activity, as well as the activity of potentially troublesome political opponents (the Department of Homeland Security, for example). Potentially troublesome individuals involved in the conspiracy could be abducted, disappeared, silenced, even executed in complete secrecy by Military Tribunals, under the pretense of rounding up other terrorist cells and enemies of the state (Guantanamo Bay).
Any paper evidence tracing governmental or extra-governmental conspirators to the conspiracy could be immediately shredded or destroyed (the CIA and New York City counter-terrorism offices appear to have been housed in Building 7 of the World Trade Center), or hidden from open scrutiny by wielding the quasi-sacred defense of "executive privilege" or "national security," or by pointing to the loose principles of the National Security Act of 1947, which effectively protects the identities and anonymity of intelligence operatives.
Once the deed was done who could possibly be expected to break allegiance and blow a whistle on his or her co-conspirators, given all the radical changes implemented by the United States post-Sept. 11 would be undermined. Far merely from seeking power and personal gain from fallout of the attacks, such a radically-minded cabal would also certainly be convinced of the inherent rightness of its actions.
Those killed or injured in the attacks, those losing loves ones and personal property, and great sums of money in the attacks would, though a means to an end, be sacrificed in the national interest and for the ultimate good of the international system, dominated by or modelled on the newly emergent U.S. social, economic, and political model.
Empirical evidence collected and collated by more than competent independent researchers contradicts, or better explains than Government reports and studies do, the nature of key phenomena unfolding the morning of the attacks. The collapse of Building 7 of the World Trade Center, for example, which the Federal Emergency Response Agency (FEMA) has declined to offer an account, can only be explained in terms of a controlled demolition, while the same explanation may also account for the identifical collapse of the North and South Towers.
Official reports note that the engineering of the World Trade Center was unique in the history of American architecture. Toward the centre in both towers supports were concentrated and physical stress directed. The burning jet fuel melted the steel girders at the centre of each tower, officials claim, so that all it took was for one floor close to the point of impact to collapse onto the floor below it, in order to set off a chain reaction of smooth and methodical implosion.
But even if the heat caused by the fires were in fact capable of melting the steel supports in the World Trade Center - and if so it would be the first time in history that fire has ever caused the collapse of a steel building - the theory fails to account for at least four other major phenomena connected with the collapse. The first is that Flight 175 hit the South Tower at a sharp angle that caused most of the plane’s fuel to exit and ignite outside the building, yet the South and the North Tower collapsed in precisely the same fashion. Second, if jet fuel caused both buildings to collapse, how was it possible for the South Tower to collapse thirty minutes ahead of the North Tower, given that the North Tower was struck first and fully twenty minutes before the South Tower?
Third, why, if the collapse of the towers were caused ultimately by burning jet fuel and a long series of floor-by-floor implosions, did scientific laboratories in the New York City area record the greatest amount of seismic activity moments before collapse, rather than at the point at which debris reached the earth? Fourth, why did a fire continue to burn at a constant three thousand degree temperature below the debris of the World Trade Center for a little over three weeks, when the lower levels were composed mostly of concrete and, being smothered, lacked oxygen to keep the fires alive?
Moreover, the crash of a commercial airliner could not possibly have created the damage evidenced at the Pentagon that morning. Instead, it appears that a missile or a small military plane collided with the buidling’s west wing. Evidence also clearly shows the U.S. Air Force shot down Flight 93 where it crashed into fields near Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, for how else can eyewitness accounts of U.S. military aircraft circling wreckage of the plane moments after the crash, or the presence of sizeable parts of the plane three to four miles from the site of impact, be explained?
David McGowan writes the witty, lucid and indispensible Center for an Informed America Newsletter, and is the author of Derailing Democracy: The America the Media Don’t Want You To See (Common Courage Press, 2000) and Understanding the F-Word: American Fascism and the Politics of Illusion (iUniverse.com, July 2001). In "Newsletter #27, January 12, 2003: Special ‘Conspiracy Theory’ Edition," McGowan made a sweeping and exceedingly accurate assessment of the 9/11 Skeptic Literature.
After debunking the notion that "conspiracy theories," exist and can be identified as such - "There are no conspiracy theories," he explained, "there are only theories," and not "all theories are created equal" - he outlines six categories of Skeptic literature - 1) "’Incompetence’ theories," 2) "‘Let It Happen, But Didn’t Realize What the Extent of the Damage Would Be’ theories," 3) "’Did Know and Still Let It Happen’ theories," 4) "‘Aided and Abetted’ theories," 5) "‘Made It Happen’ theories," and 6) "‘Other Actors’ theories." The Complicity Counter-Narrative outlined above, for example, supports aspects of McGowan’s 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th theories. Increasingly, most advanced 9/11 Skeptic narratives do so, as advances are made in research, scholarship, and dissemination.
An argument for U.S. complicity in the September 11th attacks is rarely at the same time an argument against the involvement of Osama bin Laden or members of Al-Qaeda in imagining, planning, and orchestrating aspects of the attacks on their own initiative - even under the (mistaken) assumption that the attacks had evaded detection and would succeed. To my surprise I discovered some time ago that Brian M. Jenkins, author of Aviation Terrorism and Security and Senior Adviser to the President of the RAND Corporation - a leading conservative U.S. think tank - had had the seeming temerity to confront a version of the conspiracy proposition in print. "The hijackers seem connected to ... Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants," he wrote in the Fall of 2001. "For this not to be the case," he explained:
"the United States, the nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and other allies, and the world’s skeptical and aggressive news media would all have to have signed on to a massive disinformation campaign. Ingenious and elaborate conspiracy theories will always be on offer, but a propaganda conspiracy of that magnitude stretches credulity."
Setting aside the absurd suggestion that major American media are "skeptical and aggressive" - they most certainly are not - the fact that there is indeed a place for Al-Qaeda / bin Laden agency, within the narratives of 9/11 Skeptics, renders Jenkin’s point irrelevant.
Some months ago The National Post ran an editorial attacking a relatively open and favourable article on Canadian Skeptic Barrie Zwicker’s VisionTV documentary The Great Deception - The War on Terrorism - An Alternative View, by Michelle Landsburg, which appeared in The Toronto Star. Pursuing Jenkin’s logic, The Post cited in a general way confessions of direct planning and responsibility for the 9/11 attacks documented in interviews, freely conducted with alleged terrorist masterminds Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, by Al-Jazeera investigative reporter Yosri Fouda and London Sunday Times senior reporter Nick Fielding.
Snipets of Mohammed’s ongoing confessions published in major media since his alleged capture in Pakistan last March also likely formed the basis for The Post’s accusation that Zwicker’s early pioneering 9/11 Skeptic study could now be dismissed, since the authorship of the attacks could be attributed to Al-Qaeda, and not potentially to a cabal within the the U.S. governmental, corporate and military establishment. Zwicker rightly defended the ongoing legitimacy of The Great Deception narrative, for neither his narrative nor the one I've constructed above excludes the possibility of bin Laden and Al-Qaeda obliviously acting out a plot of their own invention - perhaps as patsies - within the seemingly innocuous belly of a wider elite U.S. conspiracy.
In May 2002, the U.S. Senate and House Select Committee on Intelligence was well on its way to analyzing and collating selective intelligence documents numbering - by some estimates - at the hundreds of thousands of pages. By late July The Washington Post and other media were reporting that the Inquiry had produced "no smoking guns" in relation to the attacks - that is, that no single piece of evidence had been uncovered that would have provided U.S. intelligence with precise knowledge of the nature, timing, and targets. The 858 page report, authored by the Joint Inquiry, released this year on July 24th, reiterated the same conclusion, that there had been no "smoking gun," blaming the success of the attacks on a massive and systemic "intelligence failure."
Nevertheless, the House and the Senate in the United States established an independent bipartisan commission in early November 2002 to ostensibly conduct a further and more thorough investigation of the attacks. Led by Thomas H. Kean (Rep.) and Lee H. Hamilton (Dem.) and known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, the commission recently issued a subpoena to gain access to Pentagon and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) documents relevant to the attacks, but has refused to subpoena the White House to obtain unfettered access to the so-called CIA-compiled "Presidential Daily Briefs." The commission secured "restricted access" to the Briefs on Nov. 12th.
Despite the fact that neither the White House nor the Commission have agreed to make the nature of the agreement public, Kean and Hamilton insisted in a Nov. 15th Washington Post article that the commission "will be able to state authoritatively what information and threat warnings were provided to presidents Clinton and Bush" before Sept. 11. The White House argues that free release to the commission of the Presidential Daily Briefs will compromise "national security" and "executive privilege," while, Kean and Hamilton argue, the same would set "a damaging precedent" that would forever threaten the keeping of vital "state secrets." While the public is left to speculate as to the full contents of the Clinton-Bush Briefs (do they hold further keys to allegations of Bush Administration foreknowledge and complicity in 9/11?) - a number of disparate influential voices are currently rising up to suggest that the secrets of Sept. 11 lie in Saudi Arabia.
This hypothesis has, in fact, been an aspect of the 9/11 Skeptic position since at least the fall of 2001 when Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie published Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt For Bin Laden (Thunder’s Mouth Press). The blacking-out of 28 pages that most believe describe Saudi complicity in the attacks from the Congressional Joint Inquiry report of July 24th has recently focused attention on the "ailing" House of Saud. In fact, the Saudi hypothesis is fast overtaking the revised "intelligence failure" official narrative of Sept. 11, promising a hungry public seemingly definitive answers to the 9/11 riddle. Here we encounter David McGowan’s "Other Actor" Skeptic theory at work.
Former CIA officer Robert Baer’s Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul For Saudi Crude (Crown Publishing Group, July 2003) is being billed as authoritative contemporary statement on the matter of Saudi complicity. CBC’s The Fifth Estate features a lengthly interview with Baer in its Oct. 29th, 2003, premiere, "Conspiracy Theories: Uncovering the Facts Behind the Myths of September 11, 2001. Rejecting the revised "intelligence failure" narrative, they argue that "America’s enormous dependence on Saudi Arabia for oil" caused U.S. intelligence to turn "a blind eye" to Saudi Al-Qaeda payoffs, and Saudi financial transfers and support to Osama bin Laden.
Even Left analyst and documentary filmmaker Michael Moore is endorsing Baer’s take on terror. "[W]hat if September 11 was not a ‘terrorist’ attack but, rather, a military attack against the United States," writes Moore in Dude, Where’s My Country? - his most recent book. "What if these weren’t wacko terrorists, but military pilots who signed on to a suicide mission ... at the behest of either the Saudi government or certain disgruntled members of the Saudi royal family?"
Closer to the mark is Gerald Posner’s Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11 (Random House, Sept. 2003) which, according to Asia Times, constructs a history of the so-called "terrorism triangle" of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the Taliban-Osama bin Laden. While both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia had funded bin Laden and the Taliban, the former did so to keep the Taliban on side while the latter aimed to "keep the jihad away from the precious royal kingdom." But, 9/11 Skeptics would argue, closer to the mark is still far from straight on target.
With each passing month 9/11 Skeptics continue to expand the Skeptic literature, from the North American Skeptic triangle of San Francisco-New York City-Toronto, to the European Skeptic triangle of France-Italy-Germany - via the United Kingdom. In the UK, Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed’s study The War on Freedom: How and Why America Was Attacked, September 11, 2001 - recommended by Gore Vidal in October 2002 as the best work on the subject - leads the pack. Ahmed’s is the now classic rendering of McGowan’s "Did Know and Let It Happen" Skeptic theory.
In the United States Skeptics patiently await publication of Michael C. Ruppert’s book length study of 9/11, while the video of his historic Portland State University lecture, The Truth & Lies of 9/11, delivered November 28, 2001, continues to sell well and circulate worldwide. Ruppert, the unofficial godfather of respectable 9/11 Skepticism, constructs in the Portland lecture a thoroughly convincing reconstruction of the Sept. 11 phenomenona that leaves virtually no doubt as to precise U.S. government foreknowledge of the attacks, while pointing simultaneously to a series of highly plausible motives for allowing the attacks to happen.
Other exceptional 9/11 Skeptics working in the U.S. include: Don Paul, author of 9/11: Facing Our Fascist State (a striking example of McGowan’s "Made It Happen" Skeptic theory); Nico Haupt, editor of the online Global Free Press and author of the 9/11 Encyclopedia; Paul Thompson, author of the online Complete 9/11 Timeline; and Nicholas Levis, editor of the 9/11 Skeptic review website, Osama’s Kidneys.
In Italy, France, and especially Germany (where in August, according to CNN, 20 percent of the population believed the U.S. government could have ordered the September 11 attacks), Michael Moore and 9/11 Skeptic books top bestseller lists, among them Andreas von Buelow’s The CIA and September 11 (Piper Verlag, 2003), Matthias Broecker’s Conspiracies, Conspiracy Theories and the Secrets of September 11 (Zweitausendeins), Gerhard Wisnewski’s Operation 9/11: Attack on the Globe (Droemer/Knaur, Aug. 2003), and Thierry Meyssan’s 9/11: The Big Lie and Pentagate (Carnot USA Books, Aug. 2002). German Skeptic works pursue McGowan’s "Aided and Abetted" and "Made It Happen" theories, arguing that the burning of jet fuel from Flights 11 and 175 could not possibly have caused the collapse of the North and South towers of the World Trade Center, for example.
Here in Canada, meanwhile, the 9/11 Skeptic movement is most vital in the Greater Toronto Area where a circle of Skeptics - myself among them - stage regular public forums to disseminate Skeptic information and arguments. Currently we aim to organize an international public inquiry into Sept. 11, to be held in Toronto hopefully within a year’s time, one modelled in part on Bertrand Russell’s 1968 public international tribunal on the Vietnam War.
Leading Canadian Skeptics include Professor Michel Chossudovsky of the University of Ottawa, editor of the exceptional website Centre for Research on Globalization, and author of the international bestsellers The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order and War and Globalization: The Truth Behind September 11, the latter of which offers a decidely uncompromising sketch of the Saudi-Pakistani-bin Laden/Taliban triangle of terror, placing the United States firmly at the centre of the 9/11 enigma. Aforementioned VisionTV media critic and long time journalist Barrie Zwicker, along with Global Outlook magazine editor Ian Woods, also stand as key figures in the Canadian movement and within the Toronto group. Notable, as well, are the exceptional Internet presentations 9/11Review.org, edited by Michael Elliot et al., a work designed specifically to introduce newcomers to 9/11 Skepticism, and Kee Dewdney et al.’s 9/11Physics.org.
While 9/11 Skeptics await the results of the 9/11 commission with an open mind, we are also firmly convinced that the U.S. government is incapable of conducting a truly independent and unhindered investigation into the Sept. 11 phenomena. We view our work as an international citizen’s or people’s investigation of the same, one in which many active minds have long since come together in a fruitful and increasingly international dialogue. While all focus on disseminating quality research in the public interest, some have lobbied the 9/11 commission and taken their concerns directly to relatives of the victims of Sept. 11. While some have called for the impeachment of George W. Bush, others continue to focus on building a solid virtual presence, as Internet publication permits Skeptics to bypass the narrow confines of the mainstream media to reach individuals directly.
Our ultimate goal, of course, is to have an effect on history, and not merely to revise it, particularly prior to the 2004 American Presidential election. As Professor Walter E. Davis of Kent State University writes in "September 11th and The Bush Administration: Compelling Evidence for Complicity," published August 31st:
"the most plausible explanation of events is that the Bush Administration was complicit in the terrorist attacks. This should be a national and international scandal. What is being discovered will shock people, which is one of the reasons for deliberate corporate media coverup. Nevertheless, the degree to which this Administration is pursuing a course of world domination at any cost is unprecedented. One of the ways of putting a halt to this destructive course is to expose the Bush Administration and insist on their accountability to the American people."
Let it be so.
***
John A. McCurdy is an Undergraduate in Combined Honours English & History at McMaster University and the author and editor of the Hamilton Public Inquiry Into Sept. 11.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY
Accounts of the Official 9/11 Narrative:
Balz, Dan and Bob Woodward. "10 Days in September." The Washington Post, January-February, 2002:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/politics/news/postseries/tendaysinseptember/
Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA]. World Trade Center Performance Study. http://www.fema.gov/library/wtcstudy.shtm
Gertz, Bill. Breakdown: How America’s Intelligence Failures Led to September 11. Plume, May 2003.
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Against the United States: http://www.9-11commission.gov/
U.S. Government. 9-11 Congressional Report: Joint Inquiry Into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, The Full Report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Realized 2003, Plus Counter-Terrorism Material: http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2002_rpt/911rept.pdf
American Society of Civil Engineering. The Pentagon Building Performance Report. http://www.pubs.asce.org/BOOKdisplay.cgi?9991352
Emerging Accounts of the Saudi-9/11 Narrative:
Baer, Robert. Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul For Saudi Crude. Crown Publishing Group, July 2003.
Brisard, Jean-Charles et al. Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy: Saudi Arabia and the Failed Search for bin Laden. Thunder's Mouth Press, July 2002.
McKeown, Bob. "Conspiracy Theories: Uncovering the Facts Behind the Myths of September 11 2001. The Fifth Estate [CBC], October 29, 2003: http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/conspiracytheories/index.html
Moore, Michael. "Answers Please, Mr. Bush." The Guardian, October 6, 2003: http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4767931-101750,00.html
Posner, Gerald L.. Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11. Random House, September 2003.
A Selection of 9/11 Skeptic Narratives / Complicity Counter-Narratives:
Ahmed, Nafeez Mosaddeq. The War on Freedom: How and Why American Was Attacked, September 11, 2001. Tree of Life Publications, July 2002.
Bulow, Andreas von. The CIA and September 11: International Terror and the Role of the Secret Services. Piper Verlag ( http://www.piper.de/ ), 2003. Originally in German. [ISBN 3-492-04545-6]
Chossudovsky, Michel. War and Globalization: The Truth Behind September 11. Global Outlook, September 2002: http://globalresearch.ca/globaloutlook/SHOPCART.html. Note: For general 9/11 Skeptic research, see also the Centre for Research on Globalization: http://globalresearch.ca/
Levis, Nicholas. "9/11 Skeptics Unite!" Osama's Kidneys. 2002: http://www.osamaskidneys.com/main.html
McGowan, David. "Newsletter #27: Special "Conspiracy Theory" Edition," Center for an Informed America: http://davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr27.html
Meacher, Michael. "The war on terrorism is bogus." The Guardian, September 6, 2003: http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/comment/0,12956,1036687,00.html
Meyssan, Thiery. Pentagate. Carnot USA Books, August 2002.
Paul, Don. 911, Facing Our Fascist State. WireOnFire.com: http://www.wireonfire.com/donpaul/911.html
Ruppert, Michael C.. The Truth and Lies of 9/11. From the Wilderness Publications [Video]: www.fromthewilderness.com
Ruppert, Michael C.. "The Truth and Lies of 9/11: Six Month Update!" Terry Burrows’ Citizens’ Audio Report, June 14, 2002:  tburrows@idirect.ca.
Sanders, Richard (ed). "Going to War": The American Use of War Pretext Incidents," Centre for Research on Globalization: http://globalresearch.ca/globaloutlook/SHOPCART.html
Serendipity. The World Trade Center Demolition and the So-Called War on Terrorism: http://www.serendipity.li/wtc.html Note: While much of what is presented in this work is conjecture and cannot be proven, it remains one of the deepest and most thought-provoking analyses of 9/11.
Thompson, Paul. "Was 9/11 Allowed to Happen? Summary of 9/11 Timeline," Center for Cooperative Research: http://www.wanttoknow.info/9-11cover-up10pg
Vidal, Gore. Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta. Thunder's Mouth Press, December 2002.
Zwicker, Barrie. The Great Deception: http://www.visiontv.ca/Archive/Archive.html and http://www.karscot.com/sept11.html
See Also:
Project for a New American Century. Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For A New Century. September 2000: http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf
 E-Mail: atilan2001b@yahoo.com  Website: http://www.globalresearch.ca
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