THE ROVING EYE More questions on 9/11
By Pepe Escobar
Osama "dead or alive" bin Laden would rather lose his kidney than pass up the
opportunity to celebrate the eighth anniversary of September 11, 2001, on the
United States. And like clockwork, he resurfaced in an 11-minute,
al-Sahab-produced audiotape last week (sorry, no video, just a still picture),
where he states how a series of grievances had "pushed us to undertake the
events of [September 11]".
But there may be no mobile dialysis machine operating in a mysterious cave
somewhere in one of the Waziristan tribal areas of Pakistan after all.
According to David Ray Griffin's new book, Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive?
and based on a Taliban leader's remarks at the time, the mellifluous Saudi
jihadi died of kidney failure in Tora Bora on December 13, 2001. Problem is, by
that time, according to local mujahideen, Bin Laden had already escaped across
the mountains with a bunch of al-Qaeda diehards
to Parachinar, in Pakistan, and then to a shadowy underworld.
A decoy? A ghost? The devil himself? Who cares? Bin Laden, the brand, is still
very good for ("war on terror") business. All this with the Barack Obama
administration insisting the US is fighting the elusive, seemingly eternal
Taliban leader Mullah Omar and the Taliban plus al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, while
General Stanley McChrystal - General David Petraeus' former top death squad
operator in Iraq - insists there is no al-Qaeda in Afghanistan (but he wants up
to 40,000 extra troops anyway).
Last week, Asia Times Online published
Fifty Question on 9/11. The article stressed the questions were only a
taste of the immense, mysterious 9/11 riddle. (Arguably the best 9/11 timeline
on the net may be seen
here.
Due to overwhelming reader response, here's a follow-up with 20 more questions
- with a hat-tip to all who joined the debate.
1. In the first months of 2001, three years after Bin Laden's 1998 fatwa
against the US, Mullah Omar wanted to "resolve or dissolve" the Osama-Taliban
nexus in exchange for Washington maneuvering to lift United Nations sanctions.
Would anyone from the first George W Bush administration confirm a solid
Taliban offer? Kabir Mohabbat, a Houston-based, Paktia (Afghanistan)-born
businessman also involved in the (failed) 1990s negotiation for the
Turkmenistan-Afghanistan pipeline, and then named by Bush's National Security
Council as a key Taliban contact, has sustained that was the case.
2. Eight names on the "original" Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
list of 19 Muslim hijackers happened to be found alive and living in different
countries; the FBI has always sustained that the identity of the hijackers was
established from DNA collected at all four sites - the World Trade Center
(WTC), the Pentagon and the Shanksville, Pennsylvania, crash site. Would the
FBI explain how is that remotely possible?
3. All four planes referenced in the official narrative have thousands
of parts with a serial number, plus tail numbers. Any one of these would have
been enough to identify the plane(s). How come all of these parts disintegrated
or vaporized? Why was not a single one of them recovered and/or matched up with
all the mass of data about these four flights?
4. How come cell phones miraculously find a signal and work properly at
10,000 meters?
5. How to explain the enormous surge in "option puts" on both United
Airlines and American Airlines on September 10?
6. How come the passport of alleged hijacker Satam al Suqami (and not
Mohammed Atta, as reported) was miraculously found amid massive World Trade
Center debris - either by "police and FBI" or by "a passerby who gave it to the
NYPD", according to different versions?
7.Why was a military grade of thermite - a super-explosive - found at
all sample sites surrounding Ground Zero? A peer-reviewed, scientific journal
analysis is
here.
8. How come Barry Jennings, who worked for New York City's Housing
Department, reported on 9/11 to ABC News how he heard an explosion on the 8th
floor of WTC 7? Jennings happened to die just a few days before the release of
the NIST report on the WTC 7 collapse. A great number of actual 9/11 witnesses
also heard and saw explosions going off inside the Twin Towers long before
their collapse. A montage of news reports about these explosions can be seen
here.
9. Why did the BBC confirm live on air the collapse of the WTC 7
building - which was not even hit by any plane - no less than 23 minutes before
it actually collapsed? In the BBC live report, the WTC7 building is shot still
standing.
10. Why there has been no investigation of Dov Zakheim? He was a
prominent member of the Project for the New American Century group, and chief
executive officer of SPC - a company making systems for remote control of
airplanes - for four years prior to 9/11. Six months before 9/11, he became
supervisor of a group of Pentagon comptrollers responsible for tracking no less
than $2.3 trillion missing from the Pentagon books; many of these comptrollers
died on 9/11.
11. The "five dancing Israelis" question. How come Oded Ellner, Omer
Marmari, Paul Kurzberg, Sivan Kurzberg and Yaron Shmuel had set up a video
camera on top of their white van pointing at the Twin Towers even before they
were hit? Later they were seen celebrating. The FBI established that two were
Mossad agents and that their employer, Urban Moving Systems, was a front
operation. The investigation about them was killed by the White House. After
being deported from the US, they admitted on Israeli TV that they had been sent
to New York to "document" the attacks. How about other reports of vans packed
with tons of explosives intercepted on New York bridges?
12. How come two US employees of Odigo, an Israeli instant messaging
company based in Herzliya, the headquarters of Mossad, received an SMS about an
attack on the WTC two hours before the fact?
13. How come there was no investigation of ICTS International, owned by
Ezra Harel and Menachem Atzmon, and crammed with former Israeli Shin Bet
agents? This was the company responsible for airport security at Dulles, Logan
and Newark airports on 9/11.
14. Why was there no full investigation of the circumstances related to
how Larry Silverstein leased the WTC only seven weeks before 9/11 - as
facilitated by New York Port Authority chairman Lewis Eisenberg? Silverstein
over-insured the WTC against terrorism and made an astonishing profit.
15. Why were anthrax packages mailed to the only two US senators who
voted against the Patriot Act?
16. Why did situation room director Deborah Loewer follow Bush to
Florida on 9/11 - considering that's not part of her job description?
17. Where are the full tapes from the Pentagon's security cameras? The
hole in the Pentagon may be the most glaring hole in the official narrative -
as the destruction caused by a Boeing 757 was simply not compatible with the
size of the hole. Why were no significant plane debris and remains of
passengers ever found?
18. Why did the 9/11 Commission not consult reputed engineers and
architects to show that in the real world, steel and concrete skyscrapers
simply cannot dissolve into molten metal and fine powder in only 10 seconds
after very localized and relatively low-temperature fires? Kerosene simply
cannot melt steel.
19. Why did the 9/11 Commission not consult airline specialists who
insist trainee pilots who had practiced on very light aircraft for a few weeks
simply cannot land a jet on the ground floor of the Pentagon after allegedly
slicing through half a dozen light poles and evading a series of trees, cars
and overpasses?
20. How come no one investigated claims by the two co-chairs of the 9/11
Commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, who wrote in the New York Times on
January 2008 that the Central Intelligence Agency "failed to respond to our
lawful requests for information about the 9/11 plot [and] obstructed our
investigation?"
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