"9/11, 22 Years Later: Will We Ever Get the Truth?"
by Kevin Barrett
"On June 6, Tucker Carlson, America’s most-watched TV pundit, launched a new show on Twitter. No longer reined in by Fox News executives, Carlson was free to ask a big, explosive question: “What exactly happened on 9/11?” He answered himself: “Well, it’s still classified.” A few months earlier, Carlson had appeared on Clayton Morris’s podcast and brought up World Trade Center Building 7, widely viewed as the Achilles heel of the official story of 9/11:
“If you say, like, ‘What actually happened with building 7? Like that is weird, right? It doesn’t - like, what is that? If you were to say something like that on television, they’d flip out. You’d, like, lose your job over that. It’s an attack on my country. Can I ask? I don’t really understand. Do buildings actually collapse? No, they - maybe they do. I don’t know. But, like, why can’t I ask questions about that?”
Carlson’s words betray his cognitive dissonance. “Do buildings actually collapse (like that)? No, they - maybe they do.” He almost blurts out the obvious truth - “no, they don’t” - before correcting himself with the (possibly sarcastic) “maybe they do. I don’t know.” Carlson built his career by cultivating a reputation for straight talk, unfazed by political correctness. But as he suggests, straight talk about 9/11 in general, and WTC-7 in particular, is unwelcome in today’s USA. In mainstream media, even asking questions in unacceptable.
Why can’t we ask questions about Building 7? Because the answers are all-too-obvious - and all-too-embarrassing to the rulers of the intertwined American and Israeli empires.
World Trade Center Building 7, a 47-story high-rise, collapsed into its own footprint at 5:21 pm on September 11, 2001, seven hours after the Twin Towers were destroyed. Numerous witnesses reported police and emergency personnel announcing that WTC-7 was about to come down. Seconds before it fell, witnesses overheard a countdown to demolition (“five-four-three-two-one”) on police radio, followed by the massive explosion that precipitated the “collapse.”
The building fell at absolute free-fall for the first two-and-a-half seconds, and near-free-fall thereafter. That means that all of WTC-7’s vertical supports had somehow been simultaneously and completely removed. The only known mechanism that can do that is professionally-prepared-and-timed explosives.
The obvious controlled demolition of Building 7 threw a monkey wrench into the US government’s official 9/11 narrative. WTC-7 had been one of the most important buildings in America. It housed the CIA’s second-largest headquarters after Langley, Virginia, as well as the Secret Service, the Securities and Exchange Commission with its Enron files, the Internal Revenue Service, and many of America’s biggest corporate heavy hitters. What’s more, WTC-7’s 23rd floor was the home of New York’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM), where the local and federal governments would manage their joint response to any major disaster—like 9/11.
The OEM response to 9/11 should have been run from the 23rd floor of WTC-7. But it wasn’t. Why not? In an ABC-TV interview with Peter Jennings conducted on the morning of 9/11, then-NYC-mayor Rudy Giuliani provided the answer: “We were told the World Trade Center was going to collapse,” so they moved to an alternate site. Giuliani’s confession of foreknowledge of the unprecedented and vanishingly improbable “collapse” of the Twin Towers raises the question of why the 343 firefighters who died on 9/11 didn’t get the same warning.
Giuliani wasn’t the only one with foreknowledge of a “building collapse” on 9/11. Both the BBC and CNN reported WTC-7’s “collapse” before it happened.
Though Building 7 was an obvious controlled implosion, it couldn’t be acknowledged. Obviously the none-too-competent alleged hijackers blamed for 9/11 were not plausible suspects in the highly professional implosion of one of the most secure buildings in America.
For seven years, the feds stalled and obfuscated. A 2002 FEMA report sidestepped WTC-7, admitting that any hypothesis the authors could imagine (not including the unthinkable one, demolition) had “only a low probability of occurrence.” The 9/11 Commission Report, issued in 2004, did not even mention the destruction of the WTC-7. Network TV imposed a blackout on footage of its “collapse.”
Finally, in 2008, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released its long-overdue report on WTC-7. According to the authors, a hitherto-unknown physical phenomenon, “thermal expansion,” had caused a beam to unseat itself, magically removing all of the building’s vertical support and setting off 2.5 seconds of absolute free-fall followed by about five seconds of near-free-fall.
The NIST report, of course, is ludicrous. For details, watch the film Seven featuring University of Alaska professor Leroy Hulsey, who led a detailed computer simulation of the building’s destruction.
But we didn’t really need to wait for Hulsey’s report. Just listen to Larry Silverstein, the close friend of Benjamin Netanyahu who bought the World Trade Center two months before 9/11, doubled the insurance, and fortuitously skipped his usual breakfast at the top of the North Tower that morning. In the PBS documentary America Rebuilds, broadcast in 2002, Silverstein confesses to “pulling” (i.e. demolishing) Building 7. He later collected roughly three-quarters of a billion dollars in insurance money on that very building, along with four billion for the rest of the World Trade Center - the fruits of his bizarre double indemnity claim that he had suffered two completely separate and unrelated terrorist attacks from the two planes.
The obvious fact that the authorities lied and are still lying about Building 7 raises the question of what else are they lying about - and points to the only slightly less-obvious demolitions of the Twin Towers. Like Building 7, the Twin Towers disappeared at near-free-fall acceleration into the path of most resistance, indicating that they too had had all of their vertical supports taken out with synchronic precision. Just as the sudden demise of Building 7 cannot be plausibly blamed on a few minor office fires of undetermined origin, the likewise sudden, symmetrical, and complete destructions of Towers 1 and 2 cannot possibly have been the result of random damage caused by relatively modest office fires kindled by kerosene (jet fuel).
But the Towers were “overkilled” in unconventional explosive demolitions quite unlike the implosion of Building 7. Indeed, so much explosive force was used to pulverize the Towers that most of the contents of the buildings, including more than 1100 human bodies, were apparently vaporized into nothingness. And of the 1,640-odd victims who did leave at least a sliver of fingernail or a splinter of bone to be recovered by the most meticulous sifting-and-bucketing operation in history, many were blasted to smithereens, leaving only a few bone fragments to be recovered years later from the rooftops of neighboring buildings: “For example, a search in 2010 found 76 more fragments of remains on the roof of the 40-story Deutsche Bank building 250 feet from the South Tower. Previously, over 750 human bone fragments, each less than a half-inch long, were collected from this roof.”* How the massively explosive destruction of the two Towers, and the vaporization of its occupants and their office equipment, could ever have been mistaken for a natural gravity-driven collapse is one of those mysteries that will leave future historians scratching their heads.
The explosive destruction of the World Trade Center, conducted in such a way that it could be (quasi-)plausibly blamed on plane crashes and fires, required immense amounts of money and expertise, as well as insider access to the buildings. One often-overlooked requirement was that the perpetrators, who had invested so much in their elaborate demolition plans, would have needed to be 100% certain that planes would hit the buildings to provide a pretext for the demolitions. So they could not have simply allowed radical hijackers to attempt to seize control of planes and try to fly them into the Towers. The odds of successful plane-into-building hits, given that there had been no successful hijackings in the US for decades, would have been near zero. So, the perpetrators must have controlled the aviation aspect of 9/11, presumably by flying planes into targets by remote control. That would explain why there is no evidence that any alleged hijackers were even on board the alleged attack planes, and abundant evidence to the contrary.
Obviously powerful insiders were responsible. The question is, which insiders?** The short answer, to which most students of the issue would agree, is “the neoconservatives.” Fanatically loyal to Israel, and desperate to turn the US military against their Muslim enemies, the authors of Rebuilding America’s Defenses (September 2000) famously announced that their yearned-for “process of transformation is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”
9/11 was the neocons’ new Pearl Harbor. 9/11’s shocking imagery and 2000+ casualties closely resembled the original 1941 Pearl Harbor attack, whose psychological impact transformed an 80%-antiwar opinion into an angry hornets’ nest of warmongers. But 9/11 was not merely designed to launch the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, or even the destruction of “seven countries in five years.” Its less-obvious but more important purpose was to implant Islamophobia deeply and permanently into the western subconscious mind. By equating Islam with terrorism, 9/11 hoodwinked the west into viewing Israel’s enemies as its own. The 9/11-triggered Islamophobia epidemic will probably continue to fester and spread for decades to come. Indeed, it will likely outlast the zionist entity itself.
But despite PNAC’s prognostications, 9/11 failed to contribute to the establishment of a “new American century.” Though the US military was successfully hijacked and turned against Israel’s enemies, the cost to the empire itself was astronomical, not only in terms of dollars but also in reputation and soft power.
While the US was bogged down in West Asia, fighting countries it should have befriended, peer competitors Russia and China arose to challenge America’s imperial dominance, and the BRICS alliance emerged heralding a multipolar world. When the dust settles, it is likely that 9/11 will be seen to have hastened the demise of the US empire by two or three decades. And the zionist entity, too, will soon be relegated to the proverbial dustbin of history, 9/11 or no 9/11.
So, the whole murderous hoax—a vivid display of the evil men are capable of—will turn out to be futile. As the Qur’an tells us, “They plot and Allah plans; and Allah is the best of planners.”
o
Down the rabbit hole, indeed...
"9/11"
"We work in the dark. We do what we can to battle the evil that would otherwise destroy us. But if a man's character is his fate, it's not a choice but a calling. Sometimes the weight of this burden causes us to falter from the fragile fortress of our mind, allowing the monster without to turn within. We are left alone staring into the abyss, into the laughing face of madness."
- Fox Mulder, "X-Files"