No More Mr. Nice Guy!

9/11 FUQ (Frequently Unanswered Questions)

I recently learned that I lean towards LIHOP rather than MIHOP. It has nothing to do with pancakes.

Despite suggestions that 9/11 was an inside job, I am not convinced. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the accounts of controlled demolition of the Twin Towers, and cruise missiles striking the Pentagon, seem to have been refuted by experts with no political axe to grind.

On the other hand, there is a great deal of disturbing evidence that certain elements, very high in the US power structure, knew about the 9/11 operation in advance - and decided to let it happen, perhaps even impeding FBI investigations which might have prevented it, in order to profit from it.

Consider the following points.

Follow the Money: First of all, in the days immediately after 9/11, the media was abuzz with stories about abnormal trading patterns on the stock and options exchanges just before the attacks. Then the stories suddenly disappeared from the media. They didn't just fade away - someone abruptly pulled the plug on them! Most likely because the paper trail leads straight to George Bush Senior cronies at the highest echelons of the CIA.

Party like it's 9/11: On the morning of 9/11, several eyewitnesses saw a white van pull up to the New Jersey waterfront opposite the WTC. A film crew of several men set up operations before the attacks started. Then as the planes hit the towers, the men cheered and high-fived each other while continuing to film. Responding to calls from witnesses, police arrested the men and discovered that they were Israeli agents.

Very probably, Mossad knew of the attacks in advance and allowed them to happen. The reason why can be discerned in the difference between European and Israeli news headlines after 9/11. While Europe commiserated and declared, "We are all Americans now" (and only a moronic and venal chimp like George Bush Junior could squander so much goodwill), the Israeli media reported with considerable smugness: "Today the Americans are all Israelis." They knew that the mighty but brainless American giant would blunder into the Mideast with all guns blazing, and figured that Likud's ultra-hawkish agenda would be the beneficiary.

Puff, the Magic Passport: one of the most incredible but unreported facets of the events of 9/11 is that, although Mohammed Atta's plane was vaporized when it struck the North Tower, his passport was found unsinged, sitting atop several tons of rubble in the street a few blocks away! Then there was the Arabic-language flight manual found mere hours after the attacks, in one of the thousands of cars parked at Boston's Logan Airport, and the mile-wide trail of credit card transactions left by a supposed team of highly-trained crack terrorists - in their own names. Anyone who has read a John Le Carré novel could do a better job of covering his tracks! Or was someone planting false evidence?

Sheiks on a Plane: Two days after 9/11, while all air traffic in the US was grounded - even for aircraft flying donated organs to hospitals - the Junior regime was busy chauffeuring hundreds of Saudi princes, including immediate relatives of Osama bin Laden, around the country and gathering them at a central point from which they could be shipped out of the US with unseemly haste, before the FBI had a chance to question them. What was the purpose of these phantom flights? Did Junior, who has made millions from his connections to the Saudi royal family, feel that his obligations to them outweighed his obligations to his country? Events at Tora Bora a few months later, when a catalogue of incompetence allowed bin Laden to escape from certain capture, only add to the urgency of this question.

I stress that I am not stating as a fact that certain insiders knew about 9/11 in advance. I'm just pointing out that there is evidence that needs to be addressed. I doubt that Junior himself was in on the secret - heck, if you were Dick Cheney, would you trust Macaca with that information?

It may be that there are innocent explanations for one or more, or even all, of the above points. If so, the administration must release those explanations into the public domain. When they instead react defensively and heavy-handedly against anyone who questions the official party line, and accuse them of Islamofascism and what not, they only weaken their own position.

One way or another, the full story has never been told, not by a hell of a long shot. Maybe if we take back one or both houses of Congress in November, and gain subpoena power, we have a chance of making progress towards the truth. A prospect which has the rethugs pissing their pants as never before, and guarantees that their campaign this election season will be dirtier and more frenzied than anyone can currently imagine.

But the truth - whether it involves incompetence or something far worse - has a way of coming out eventually. They can't hide the truth forever.