The 9/11 “Truth” Movement Lies

 The 9/11 “Truth” Movement Lies
By Cliff Kincaid
 
Originally published on May 21, 2014
 
The so-called 9/11 “truth” movement consists of the agitators and publicity-seekers who insist that Muslim terrorists flying planes were not responsible for the deaths of nearly 3000 people on September 11, 2001. 
 
Emily Bazelon of Slate was on Jake Tapper’s CNN show referring to the “fringe right wing” and “anti-government” forces allegedly behind these kooky claims. Tapper did not dispute her characterization of the movement being somehow on the conservative side.  He neglected to point out that Van Jones, the “former” communist who is now a co-host of the channel’s “Crossfire” show, had signed a 9/11 “truth” petition suggesting the Bush Administration has deliberately allowed the terrorist attacks to happen so the U.S. could go to war against Muslims in the Middle East. This, and stories about Jones’ communist background, forced him out of his White House job
 
David Corn of Mother Jones magazine had noted the 9/11 conspiracy theories “emerging on the left,” and how he had written several pieces decrying them. He added, “The 9/11 conspiracy theory was just too tempting for many Bush critics. Van Jones says he was not fully aware of what he was signing when he put his John Hancock on that 9/11 petition. This might be true. But I can see how Jones and others on the left -- without thinking too much -- might have easily said, sure, sign my name to any call for any investigation of Bush and Cheney. And that sloppiness -- if that's what it was -- has cost him his job.”
 
Tapper said on his show that people have a “capacity for believing crazy things,” but that the 9/11 “truth” movement demonstrates “insensitivity” to the families of the 9/11 victims.
 
What the families want are answers. The 9/11 attacks were entirely foreseeable and preventable, and legitimate questions remain. The record shows that the Bush Administration ignored warnings that an attack like 9/11 might occur. Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had already declared war on America, and the Able Danger military intelligence unit had identified al-Qaeda terrorist cells in America before the attacks. But this information wasn’t investigated thoroughly enough by appropriate officials in our intelligence agencies. It is truly mind-boggling that President Bush gave George Tenet, CIA director at the time of 9/11, a presidential Medal of Freedom.
 
To make matters worse, this intelligence failure was followed by another, when the post 9/11 anthrax attacks were falsely blamed on various U.S. scientists and not on members of al Qaeda, the likely culprits. One of those falsely blamed, Stephen Hatfill, collected millions of dollars in damages from the U.S. Government when the FBI tried to ruin his reputation and frame him.
 
But this intelligence debacle is another reason why the 9/11 “truth” movement has lost sight of the truth.
 
As we said in a 2006 column, “If the Bush Administration carried out 9/11, a monumental undertaking of planning and coordination, why couldn’t it have blamed the post-9/11 anthrax attacks on Muslim Arabs as well, thus giving greater impetus to the alleged desire to go to war in the Middle East? In fact, there was evidence of a foreign or al-Qaeda connection to the anthrax attacks but it was glossed over by the FBI, which came under pressure from liberal Senators Patrick Leahy and Thomas Daschle to find a right-wing culprit, based on the mistaken belief the anthrax could only have been manufactured in a U.S. military laboratory.”
 
Taking this one step further, if U.S. officials couldn’t even successfully plant evidence of weapons of mass destruction in 2003, in order to justify the war in Iraq, how could they have engineered and staged an elaborate 9/11 attack on America only eight months after Bush took office in January 2001?
 
If we are to believe the 9/11 “truth” movement, the Bush Administration put the plot together and finalized it in a short period of time, secretly using drones, missiles or explosives to attack the Twin Towers in New York City and the Pentagon in the Washington, D.C. area.
 
On top of the actual attacks, according to the theory, an elaborate cover-up was engineered after 9/11, with at least the connivance of top Bush officials, in order to keep the public in the dark, so that Muslims could be blamed and America would go to war against them, in such places as Afghanistan and Iraq. This part of the theory is what attracted fringe characters such as Van Jones, predisposed to believe the worst about Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.  The letter signed by Jones demanded an investigation into whether the Bush Administration “deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.”
 
What needs to be investigated is the 9/11 “truth” movement. Convicted con man Lyndon LaRouche, who has a history of far-left and even Russian and Arab connections, is considered the intellectual author of the movement because he started questioning whether Muslims had staged the attacks right after they occurred. LaRouche started out as a Marxist, organizing a unit of the Students for a Democratic Society at Columbia University, and in a 1976 lecture, titled, “What Only Communists Know,” declared his desire to bring into being “a new Marxist international…”
 
The LaRouche involvement serves to highlight the fact that the “inside job” theory of 9/11 is essentially a Marxist view holding that a rogue or “imperialist” U.S. administration run by secretive elites has covered up its own diabolical role in the events of that terrible day and unfairly blamed Muslim Arabs for the attacks. This view serves foreign interests determined to smear the reputation of the United States in international affairs. And who might they be?
 
Not surprisingly, as we have previously reported, Al Jazeera has been a reliable vehicle for the 9/11 “truth” movement, since blaming the U.S. Government for attacking its own people shifts the blame away from  the Arab/Muslim world and its Jihadist war against America.
 
Ironically, however, Al-Jazeera reporter Yosri Fouda interviewed the architects of 9/11 for his book, Masterminds of Terror: The Truth Behind the Most Devastating Terrorist Attack the World Has Ever Seen. These interviews have been described as the most detailed and indisputable confirmation of al Qaeda’s responsibility for 9/11.
 
Russia Today television has seized on the 9/11 “truth” movement in the past, even running a series by one its own “reporters” about the attacks being an “inside job” by unnamed officials.  
 
The Kremlin and Arab propagandists must be laughing out loud at the thought that some Americans actually believe the U.S. Government engineered an attack on itself on 9/11. The controversy distracts from the need to identify and defeat America’s real enemies.