[R-G] Fisk: Even I question the 'truth' about 9/11

[Anthony Fenton]

  Even I question the 'truth' about 9/11

By Robert Fisk

08/25/07 "The Independent" -- - Each time I lecture abroad on the  
Middle East, there is always someone in the audience – just one –  
whom I call the "raver". Apologies here to all the men and women who  
come to my talks with bright and pertinent questions – often quite  
humbling ones for me as a journalist – and which show that they  
understand the Middle East tragedy a lot better than the journalists  
who report it. But the "raver" is real. He has turned up in corporeal  
form in Stockholm and in Oxford, in Sao Paulo and in Yerevan, in  
Cairo, in Los Angeles and, in female form, in Barcelona. No matter  
the country, there will always be a "raver".

His – or her – question goes like this. Why, if you believe you're a  
free journalist, don't you report what you really know about 9/11?  
Why don't you tell the truth – that the Bush administration (or the  
CIA or Mossad, you name it) blew up the twin towers? Why don't you  
reveal the secrets behind 9/11? The assumption in each case is that  
Fisk knows – that Fisk has an absolute concrete, copper-bottomed fact- 
filled desk containing final proof of what "all the world  
knows" (that usually is the phrase) – who destroyed the twin towers.  
Sometimes the "raver" is clearly distressed. One man in Cork screamed  
his question at me, and then – the moment I suggested that his  
version of the plot was a bit odd – left the hall, shouting abuse and  
kicking over chairs.

Usually, I have tried to tell the "truth"; that while there are  
unanswered questions about 9/11, I am the Middle East correspondent  
of The Independent, not the conspiracy correspondent; that I have  
quite enough real plots on my hands in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran,  
the Gulf, etc, to worry about imaginary ones in Manhattan. My final  
argument – a clincher, in my view – is that the Bush administration  
has screwed up everything – militarily, politically diplomatically –  
it has tried to do in the Middle East; so how on earth could it  
successfully bring off the international crimes against humanity in  
the United States on 11 September 2001?

Well, I still hold to that view. Any military which can claim – as  
the Americans did two days ago – that al-Qa'ida is on the run is not  
capable of carrying out anything on the scale of 9/11. "We disrupted  
al-Qa'ida, causing them to run," Colonel David Sutherland said of the  
preposterously code-named "Operation Lightning Hammer" in Iraq's  
Diyala province. "Their fear of facing our forces proves the  
terrorists know there is no safe haven for them." And more of the  
same, all of it untrue.

Within hours, al-Qa'ida attacked Baquba in battalion strength and  
slaughtered all the local sheikhs who had thrown in their hand with  
the Americans. It reminds me of Vietnam, the war which George Bush  
watched from the skies over Texas – which may account for why he this  
week mixed up the end of the Vietnam war with the genocide in a  
different country called Cambodia, whose population was eventually  
rescued by the same Vietnamese whom Mr Bush's more courageous  
colleagues had been fighting all along.

But – here we go. I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies  
in the official narrative of 9/11. It's not just the obvious non  
sequiturs: where are the aircraft parts (engines, etc) from the  
attack on the Pentagon? Why have the officials involved in the United  
93 flight (which crashed in Pennsylvania) been muzzled? Why did  
flight 93's debris spread over miles when it was supposed to have  
crashed in one piece in a field? Again, I'm not talking about the  
crazed "research" of David Icke's Alice in Wonderland and the World  
Trade Center Disaster – which should send any sane man back to  
reading the telephone directory.

I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example,  
that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the  
steel beams of the twin towers – whose melting point is supposed to  
be about 1,480C – would snap through at the same time? (They  
collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower – the so- 
called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon Brothers  
Building) – which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at  
5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when  
no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards  
and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction  
of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7. Two  
prominent American professors of mechanical engineering – very  
definitely not in the "raver" bracket – are now legally challenging  
the terms of reference of this final report on the grounds that it  
could be "fraudulent or deceptive".

Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11. Initial  
reports of reporters that they heard "explosions" in the towers –  
which could well have been the beams cracking – are easy to dismiss.  
Less so the report that the body of a female air crew member was  
found in a Manhattan street with her hands bound. OK, so let's claim  
that was just hearsay reporting at the time, just as the CIA's list  
of Arab suicide-hijackers, which included three men who were – and  
still are – very much alive and living in the Middle East, was an  
initial intelligence error.

But what about the weird letter allegedly written by Mohamed Atta,  
the Egyptian hijacker-murderer with the spooky face, whose "Islamic"  
advice to his gruesome comrades – released by the CIA – mystified  
every Muslim friend I know in the Middle East? Atta mentioned his  
family – which no Muslim, however ill-taught, would be likely to  
include in such a prayer. He reminds his comrades-in-murder to say  
the first Muslim prayer of the day and then goes on to quote from it.  
But no Muslim would need such a reminder – let alone expect the text  
of the "Fajr" prayer to be included in Atta's letter.

Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the ravers.  
Spare me the plots. But like everyone else, I would like to know the  
full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the  
whole lunatic, meretricious "war on terror" which has led us to  
disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East.  
Bush's happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that "we're an  
empire now – we create our own reality". True? At least tell us. It  
would stop people kicking over chairs.

© 2007 Independent News and Media Limited