2012: A Breakthrough Year for the 9/11 Truth Movement

2012 was the year that doubts over the official story of the 9/11 attacks finally became firmly established in the corporate media in the US. Sceptics in the Muslim world gained a new voice at governmental level with the call by President Morsi of Egypt for a new independent 9/11 investigation. In Italy Supreme Court President Francesco Imposimato said he would be petitioning the International Criminal Court to pursue an investigation into the possible involvement of rogue elements in Washington in the attacks.

RICHARD CLARKE'S BOMBSHELL

9/11 sceptics cite two smoking guns, one forensic the other based on the paper trail. The belated 2008 admission from government experts that WTC 7 (the third building to collapse in the 9/11 attacks) fell not only symmetrically but at free fall speed strongly suggests the use of pre-planned demolition charges, they say.

In 2011 came the bombshell confirmation by Richard Clarke, White House anti-terror co-ordinator at the time of the attacks, that, based on his unrivalled vantage point at the top of the intelligence pyramid, the CIA must have made what Clarke calls a "decision" to allow the alleged 9/11 hijackers to operate freely in the US and hidden the decision from him.

Clarke's assessment should have unleashed a tidal wave of horror worldwide, but it didn't. Let's say it again: the man best placed to judge is now clear that 9/11 took place as a result of a "decision" at the CIA. Having told the public for ten years that 9/11 was entirely explicable as the result of a conspiracy by skilled and cunning Islamic fanatics, few in the media had the time or the stomach to check these new fact, corroborated by FBI's Al Qaeda expert Ali Soufan. This is the same media cartel that failed to challenge the deceitful weapons of mass destruction story used by Bush and Blair to justify the second post 9/11 war, the invasion of Iraq.

Still, Clarke's bombshell seems to have started journalists and editors thinking and perhaps paying less attention to the shills that infest mainstream media offices using the "conspiracy theory" slur to block unwelcome lines of investigation.

ED ASNER QUESTIONS 911 ON CBS, VENTURA ON CNN

In March 2012 Hollywood legend Ed Asner appeared on the CBS Sunday Morning programme questioning the official 9/11 story and persuading CBS to screen the "smoking gun" video of the collapse of WTC7, an extremely rare event in the corporate media. Viewers saw this massive building collapse symmetrically and for a period at free fall speed. This event, say Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth (AE911), could only occur with the aid of carefully positioned explosives. What else, they ask, could remove all support for the building, not just in one place but evenly across it?

Over the 9/11 anniversary last September the film Experts Speak Out, produced by AE911, was the most downloaded film on PBS, America's publicly funded network. A week later leading US 9/11 sceptic Jesse Ventura was on CNN with Piers Morgan. While Morgan presented the official view, Ventura, maverick ex-Governor of Minnesota, put the alternative view: "every war starts with a false flag operation". A straw poll of the CNN studio audience yielded strong support for Ventura.

Another initiative, the 9/11 Consensus panel has been looking at the common ground of the 9/11 Truth Movement and supplying scientific assessments to the mainstream media, disseminated by Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and as a result by many other corporate outlets.

MEDIA: THE DOG THAT FAILED TO BARK

When they are not cosying up to their "sources" in government, media people spend much of their time consuming other mainstream media, so the significance of these three breakthroughs is not only that the public is better informed, but the media are too.

Libertarian commentators on Fox News and Jesse Ventura on his TV show had already given sympathetic hearings to 9/11 sceptics, but both are easily smeared in Washington's divide and rule political game. But with CBS and CNN at last validating 9/11 doubters it's a lot harder for the shills.

The official 9/11 conspiracy theory has bewitched much of the "alternative" media too. When in 2006, the five year anniversary, the Washington Post and other mainstream outlets aired 9/11 doubts in an even handed way it should have been an open goal for anyone opposed to the wars and civil liberty outrages of the new era. This was the opportunity for the alternative media to lead the way and turn the spotlight on the key 9/11 questions. Even then it was already clear that the collapse of the Twin Towers had not been satisfactorily explained and multiple FBI officers had complained that their investigations into the alleged hijackers had been intentionally stymied by superiors.

Instead there was a wave of attacks on the 9/11 truth movement. With discreet support from superguru Noam Chomsky, who only in 2010 began to change his attitude, a string of "alternative" media people led by David Corn, of Mother Jones and The Nation, penned divisive and ill-informed hit pieces attacking 9/11 truthers.

CIA TENTACLES IN MEDIA

How could the mainstream and "alternative" media have got it so horribly wrong? One starting point might be a revealing CIA memo from the late 60s. It bemoans the spread of "conspiracy theories" surrounding the Kennedy assassination, admitting the allegations are undermining US foreign policy. The memo then advocates the CIA's preferred method of dealing with the problem: using its contacts in the media to plant feature stories attacking sceptics. So it is disturbing to find that David Corn, who penned his first attack on 9/11 sceptics within weeks of the event, seems to have links with the CIA. It is also disquieting that so many alternative media operations have financial links with the mainstream Washington foundations.

Quite apart from 9/11 there are of course many other outrages which demand draconian reforms to cut the power of media owners, dissolve Washington and NATO's permanent shadow government and subject its operatives to the rule of law. The bankster heist, the austerity con, the continuing torture and rendition, the Iraq war lies, the all but declared war on Iran and Syria, were all made politically possible by 9/11. Many sceptics say that the "success" of 9/11 emboldened the shadow government. Certainly the campaign to achieve radical long term reforms can only be helped by the growing doubts over how 9/11 really happened, why it was never properly investigated, and anger towards a media that failed to do its job.

GLOBAL SUPPORT FOR INQUIRY

Internationally the 9/11 issue presents another sign of the long expected shift of power away from the US and the NATO countries. With the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, the consensus in the Middle East (bar Israel of course) is that the official 9/11 story, the crown jewels of Washington's warmongering empire is, to say the least, unproven. Egypt's President Morsi has pronounced that there should be a genuinely independent inquiry, thus supporting the position of alleged pariah President Ahmedinajad in his 2011 UN speech.

Rebellions like this used to be dealt with in a summary way: a stern warning complete with explicit threats would be issued in the Washington Post. It would be taken up slavishly by the local media and the offending politician would be pressured by colleagues to retract. In this way questions have been suppressed in the UK, Sweden, Japan, and probably many other countries.

But this time, so far at least, Morsi has ignored the Washington Post's recent threat to starve Egypt of finance if he fails to retract his statements on 9/11. A majority vote in the UN General Assembly may now be within reach, authorising a new investigation with or without Washington's co-operation.

In Italy the eminent jurist Ferdinando Imposimato, President of the Supreme Court and renowned for his courage in prosecuting Mafia figures, has announced his intention to pursue the 9/11 issue through the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Many people in Italy still remember the "strategy of tension" bombings blamed on communists and anarchists in the 1970's. Based on the findings of a Parliamentary probe at the end of the Cold War many now believe the bombings were linked to NATO's Operation Gladio, designed to distract people from problems at home by creating an artificial terrorist threat and exaggerating the threat from foreign enemies. The possible parallels with 9/11 are of course glaring, with the terrifying enemy threat role switched from communists to the implausible Al Qaeda.

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION

In Washington, Freedom of Information and other mechanisms have led to the release of vast caches of US government documents that bear on the 9/11 issue, while unauthorised caches from Wikileaks present another opportunity but also a massive task for researchers. The experts at AE911 have meticulously examined and discredited the various official reports that claim to explain the bizarre and unprecedented collapse of three steel framed buildings on the same day, each supposedly by a different collapse mechanism.

In the same way researcher Kevin Fenton in his book "Disconnecting the Dots", uses a mass of evidence from the US government to come to the same conclusion as Richard Clarke: some of the alleged 9/11 hijackers had been identified as terrorists before 9/11 and were protected from arrest by a decision implemented by a cabal at the CIA.

Two more paper trail researchers stand out. Kevin Ryan an editor at the Journal of 9/11 Studies, has been digging into the neocon network that seems to pop up in so many parts of the 9/11 story in his personal blog, while the anonymous blogger at 911 Shoestring has been trawling through media reports and most recently highlighted the extraordinary, possibly systematic, failures of communication across multiple agencies and facilities on the morning of the 9/11 attacks. (See endnotes)

PILOTS' EVIDENCE

Pilots for 9/11 Truth have analysed flight data recorders and text messages between controllers and the 9/11 planes and have come up with records that seem to contradict the official story. A text message implies Flight 175 was over Pennsylvania after it had supposedly been crashed by a hijacker in New York, while the flight recorder from Flight 77, reportedly hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon, shows the cockpit door was never opened, they say.

Pilots for 9/11 Truth, echoing the 911 Consensus Group, have also shone a light on another issue at the heart of the official 9/11 story: how could the alleged hijackers have carried out such feats of navigation and control? Hani Hanjour, the man said to have carried out the extraordinary ground level, top speed strike on an empty wing of the Pentagon, was declared by at least two independent training schools to be dangerously incompetent on small planes, simpler to fly than massive passenger jets with their vast array of instruments.

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED?

So what really happened? Few 9/11 researchers have any doubt that the use of subpoena powers on certain individuals in the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon and air traffic control would get the answer pretty fast. One possible 9/11 scenario arose from a minor scandal when Washington's 9/11 Commission discovered that the Pentagon had tried to erase vital tape recordings from the day of the attacks. When the content was retrieved it emerged that amongst a plethora of other exercises they were running a live anti-hijack exercise at the time the apparent 9/11 hijacks took place.

This is a classic indication of a CIA type black operation with a possible "limited hangout" built in to it in case some of the truth starts to come out. A parallel hijack going ahead legitimately as an exercise can provide cover for a small group of plotters and serve to muddy the waters when the investigations start. Studies of the unlikely routes the planes took have led to speculation the apparently hijacked planes could have had doubles or been flown into the buildings by a remote control takeover scripted as part of the anti-hijack exercise.

The final irony of 9/11 might be that the evidence needed to turn the spotlight on Washington's black ops crowd at the heart of the permanent secret state has already been published by the US itself. But with the mountain of available data now in the terrabytes perhaps no-one has got round to reading it yet.



Author's note: a simple google search (eg "Corn CIA") will confirm most of the information in this article. Here are links which may be harder to find.

http://911blogger.com/news/2012-10-03/more-mass-media-breakthroughs

http://911blogger.com/news/2012-09-24/controversial-911-film-soars-1-pbs-breaks-local-records

The 9/11 Hijackers: Fraud in Official Video Exhibits Uncovered by Expert Panel
http://www.consensus911.org/news/

Why Were U.S. Intelligence Facilities in an 'Information Void' During the 9/11 Attacks?
http://shoestring911.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/why-were-us-intelligence-facilities-in.html

Kevin Ryan: Why Louis Freeh should be investigated for 9/11
http://digwithin.net/2012/11/21/louis-freeh/

CIA Memo
http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=3167&relPageId=2

http://pilotsfor911truth.org/MORE-ACARS-CONFIRMATION.html