ROBERT FISK: EVEN I QUESTION THE ‘TRUTH’ ABOUT 9/11

Belfast Telegraph
Published: Aug 27, 2007

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.