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September 09, 2006

Do We Really Want to Know?

Last week I watched "V for Vendetta" for the first time. The timing couldn't have been more apropos. The film asks the question that many are asking today: If your government facilitated and/or perpetrated actions against its own people that were subsequently blamed on domestic/foreign religious terrorists, "Would you want to know?"

Questioning the official account of 9/11 used to be the purview of conspiracy nuts. But over the past five years the "nuts" have been joined by easily a third of the American public, as well as a large number of very reliable academics, scientists, and government insiders. One of these is Bill Christison, former National Intelligence Officer and the Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis before his retirement in 1979.

Christison recently laid out the factors that have led him to question the official conspiracy theory of 9/11 and explained why we must know who was responsible:

Why is it important that we not let the so-called conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11 be drowned out? After spending the better part of the last five years treating these theories with utmost skepticism, I have devoted serious time to actually studying them in recent months, and have also carefully watched several videos that are available on the subject. I have come to believe that significant parts of the 9/11 theories are true, and that therefore significant parts of the “official story” put out by the U.S. government and the 9/11 Commission are false. I now think there is persuasive evidence that the events of September did not unfold as the Bush administration and the 9/11 Commission would have us believe.

The major questions that concern Christison are:

ONE: An airliner almost certainly did not hit The Pentagon. …

TWO: The North and South Towers of the World Trade Center almost certainly did not collapse and fall to earth because hijacked aircraft hit them. A plane did not hit Building 7 of the Center, which also collapsed. All three were most probably destroyed by controlled demolition charges placed in the buildings before 9/11.

He lists the other major questions, some of which he believes have credibility, and some of which he sincerely doubts. And he offers an astute observation:

If the government could prove this evidence false, and its own story on these points correct, all the other data and speculation supporting the conspiracy theories would be undermined. It has provided no such proof and no answers to growing questions.

He believes it is essential that a serious investigation occur to find the answers to the many legitimate questions that have been raised and to determine who is responsible. "Then, these people should be tried in an international court and, if possible, convicted and punished for causing so many deaths." In the mean time, he says, the American people need "to immediately set to work as hard as is humanly possible to defeat in this year’s congressional election any candidate who refuses to support a no-holds-barred investigation of 9/11 by the Congress or a high-level international court. No more evidence than is now available is needed in order to begin this process."

Another doubter of the official 9/11 explanation is David Ray Griffin, a well-known and respected liberal theologian and philosopher. Upon reading the 9/11 Commission report he became angry. "To me, the report read as a cartoon," Griffin said. "It's a much greater stretch to accept the official conspiracy story than to consider the alternatives." According to Griffin, "It is already possible to know beyond a reasonable doubt one very important thing: The destruction of the World Trade Center was an inside job, orchestrated by domestic terrorists. The welfare of our republic and perhaps even the survival of our civilization depend on getting the truth about 9/11 exposed."

Another doubter is Steven Jones, a tenured physics professor from Brigham Young University. He is convinced the three buildings that collapsed at the World Trade Center were brought down by pre-planned controlled demolition. He is currently on paid leave while his claims are investigated, and has just published the book "9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out."

Other doubters include former Reagan aide Barbara Honegger, who is now a senior military-affairs journalist at the Naval Postgraduate School in California, and Morgan O. Reynolds, appointed by George W. Bush as chief economist at the Labor Department, who believes 9/11 was perpetrated by "[e]lements of our government and M-16 and the Mossad."

As you go to the polls this November, just think about what the world would have been like had 9/11 never happened. No war in Afghanistan, no war in Iraq, no Patriot Act, no torture scandals, no dead and wounded American soldiers, no 100,000+ Iraqi civilians dead, no Iraq civil war, no cloud of fear hanging over us every day, no massive national debt to pay for war, no loss of American standing in the hearts of the rest of the world. If terrorists are, indeed, responsible for 9/11 as we have been told, then we should be concerned about the gross mismanagement of the required response to it all and oust the entire Administration and its sympathizers. But if these doubters are actually right, and this Administration and its sympathizers are the ones who inflicted the incredible pain of 9/11 and its aftermath on us and the rest of the world, then it is so heart-wrenching and so evil that it overwhelms the mind.

Do we really want to know?

Posted by Becky at September 9, 2006 11:47 AM