Rethinking 9/11

By Seth Sandronsky

Can time heal a democracy wounded by the September 11 attacks? Many Americans now distrust the Bush administration’s story of its need to invade Iraq for that nation’s ties to Arab terrorists who hijacked four planes to kill thousands of innocents.

A new volume of scholarly essays on 9/11, The Hidden History of 9-11-2001: Research in Political Economy, Volume 23, addresses what authors think is a deep government cover-up. “Let’s examine objective evidence,” writes Paul Zarembka, the volume’s editor and an economics professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Bryan Sacks, a professor of English at Philadelphia’s Drexel University, exposes the 9/11 Commission’s failure to gather crucial evidence. This was due to a lack of independence from the Bush I and Bush II White Houses. Philip Zelikow, the commission’s executive director, “was part of the Bush II transition team,” notes Sacks. Further, “Zelikow was instrumental in creating and maintaining an information vacuum regarding key evidence at the center of the 9-11 Commission.” The commission, for example, did not issue subpoenas for presidential daily briefings on Al Qaeda before 9/11.

In his essay, Jay Kolar, an Arizona-based researcher, analyzes a video of the alleged 9/11 hijackers from the security screening area in Dulles International Airport. There is no camera number, date or ongoing digital clock. The FBI submitted the video to the commission as evidence against the suspected hijackers; a court of law would have rejected it.

Zarembka examines the stock market and 9/11 by using a peer-reviewed academic study. What he finds suggests that insiders with knowledge of 9/11 likely did bet on the prices of airline stocks to fall. The big volume of such stock-market activity for a carrier involved in two of the hijacked flights had “only one percent probability of occurring randomly,” Zarembka states.

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed of the Institute for Policy Research & Development in London tracks the growth of Al Qaeda, which began as U.S.-backed mercenaries (mujahedeen) funded and trained to fell the former USSR in Afghanistan. Later, mainstream sources such as Newsweek reported that the U.S. military trained five of the suspected 9/11 hijackers in the 1990s.

Ahmed contends that forces in the U.S. government, operating almost clandestinely, have been using Al Qaeda to destabilize societies--including ours--with terror strikes. For him, this bloody violence is part of a corporate-government strategy to take over energy-rich regions.

David MacGregor of the University of Western Ontario criticizes those who see the 9/11 attacks as an instance of a Third World revolt against U.S. imperialism. Instead, he posits the crime of 9/11 as an example of state-directed terror against its own populace in the tradition of the supposed lone gunman who killed Martin Luther King Jr. King’s murder stopped a growing nonviolent movement of people across class, gender and skin-color lines.

There is no question that racism has spiked in democratic societies since 9/11. Diana Ralph of Canada’s Carleton University critiques “Islamophobia,” or the hatred of Muslims, and claims that the agenda of such bigotry is to justify an endless war for power and wealth as the government shreds the Constitution.

David Ray Griffin of the Claremont School of Theology considers the shocking collapses of the World Trade Center twin towers and Building 7 (not hit by a hijacked plane). The official story of 9/11 holds that fire caused all three high-rise steel-frame structures to collapse.

But wait! “Fire has never caused large steel-frame buildings to collapse--never, whether before 9/11, or after 9/11, or anywhere in the world on 9/11 except in New York City--never,” writes Griffin. He argues, compellingly, that controlled demolitions caused the three buildings to topple at free-fall speed. Griffin cites more than 500 recorded observations from the New York Fire Department’s 9/11 oral histories, recently released. Firefighters, paramedics and police officers spoke of multiple “booms,” “pops” and multicolor flashes shooting out from inside the WTC towers.

The essays in A Hidden History weaken the validity of the official 9/11 story. A democracy in recovery needs such help for citizens to begin to regain their power being lost in the war on terror.

(Here's my longer review: http://www.gnn.tv/B16240 - reprehensor.)