September 14, 2019
A large number of Americans still don’t believe the official version of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. I am one of them.
The government and tame media version – that crazed Muslims directed by Osama bin Laden attacked New York’s twin towers and the Pentagon because they hated ‘our freedoms’ and our religions – is wearing very thin as contrary evidence piles up.
Ever since the attacks, I’ve held the belief that neither bin Laden nor Afghanistan’s Taliban were involved, though bin Laden did applaud the attacks after the fact and remains a key suspect. Unfortunately, he was murdered by a US hit squad instead of being brought to the US to stand trial. Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, was adamant that bin Laden was not behind the attacks.
So who did it? In my view, the attacks were financed by private citizens in Saudi Arabia and organized from Germany and possibly Spain. All the hijackers came from states nominally allied to the US or its protectorates.
Fifteen of the 19 were Saudis. Two came from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and one each from Egypt and Lebanon. Amazingly, during the national uproar after the attacks, little attention was focused on Saudi Arabia, a key US ally (or protectorate) even though most of the hijackers were Saudi citizens, and a planeload of important Saudis were quietly ushered out of the US by the CIA soon after the attacks.
Saudi Arabia was too important to US domination of the Mideast to point any fingers at the Saudis. The Saudi royal regime in Riyadh did not appear to have been involved – why would it since their survival and gravy train depended on US protection?
But the royal regime does not represent all Saudis, as many people believe. Saudi Arabia is a collection of tribes played off against one another by Riyadh and kept in line by the US Air Force from its bases in Saudi and a tribal force, ‘the white army,’ led by American ‘advisors.’ Saudi Arabia has little in the way of a regular army because its rulers fear coups by the armed forces such as occurred in Egypt, Iraq and Syria.
In addition, over 40,000 Americans live and work in Saudi. Another 5,000 US military personnel are stationed there. Much of the kingdom’s technology – banking, telecommunications, airports and flights, trains, military affairs, TV and radio – are supervised by foreigners. This process began in the 1920’s when the British moved into Arabia and helped promote the Saudi tribe to prominence.
A sizeable Yemeni community lives in Saudi. The bin Laden family originally hailed from Yemen. Saudi also has an important Shia Muslim minority, about 20% of the population, with smaller numbers of other Muslim sects. Most important, the reactionary, ultra rigid Wahabi religious sect still dominates the nation and royal family. The Wahabis hate Shia, calling them apostates and heretics. A similar dim view is taken of the nine million foreign workers, principally Indians, Pakistanis and other South Asians, who do all of the Kingdom’s dirty work.
Within the complexities of Saudi Society lie bitterly anti-western groups who see the nation as being militarily occupied by the US and exploited – even pillaged – by foreigners. Arabia was originally the holy land of Islam. Today, it has been westernized, occupied by US military power, and given marching orders by Washington.
While covering the Afghan War in the 1980’s, I met Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, a fiery nationalist leader and anti-communist who was bin Laden’s teacher and spiritual mentor.
“When we succeed in kicking the Russians out of Afghanistan,” Azzam told me, “we will go on and kick the Americans out of Saudi Arabia.” I was shocked, never having heard of Americans called ‘occupiers’. Azzam was murdered by a bomb soon after, but his words kept ringing in my ears. He thought of the Americans as much colonialists as the Soviets.
Private nationalist groups in Saudi who bitterly opposed foreign domination of their country could very well have financed and organized 9/11. But, of course, Washington could not admit this. That would have brought into question the US occupation of Saudi.
What’s also pretty clear is that Israel – at minimum – knew the attack was coming yet failed to warn its American ‘allies.’ Israel was the chief beneficiary of the 9/11 attacks – yet its bumbling Arab foes and bin Laden were blamed for this crime.
Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2019
This post is in: 9/11
I’ve waited a long time to see Eric Margolis put these words in print. I guess it is pretty safe now that even the firefighters are saying that there were incendiary devices through all of the buildings. 18 years for the poor people that lost loved ones to be believed. Some knew the story was not right.
Were the guilty parties responsible for 9/11 also responsible for the collapse of WTC Building 7 at 5:20pm on 9/11/2001?
The 47 story, 610 foot high skyscraper WTC 7 was not his by a plane, had some minor damage on one corner of the building caused by falling debris from the WTC towers, and had some office fires burning in the building during the course of the day on 9/11. At 5:20pm it collapsed symmetrically, straight down (with the rubble falling almost entirely into into its own footprint) in a 7 second fall that reached absolute free-fall acceleration for 2.5 seconds of the fall.
The official investigation into the collapse was assigned to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) which was also charged with determining the cause of the collapses of the twin towers WTC 1 & 2.
After a prolonged investigation, NIST released a report in 2007 pining the blame for WTC 7’s collapse on a structural failure caused by an office fire around floors 12 & 13. NIST claims a horizontal girder in the North East section of the building at floor 13 was pushed off of its seat (due to heat induced thermal expansion of the structural steel) where it attached to a vertical column. This event NIST says started a chain event of further rapid structural failures such that the entire building dramatically collapsed shortly afterwards as described above.
Many were skeptical that NIST’s explanation was able to account for the rapid, symmetrical and total collapse of WTC 7. When viewed in multiple videos of the event taken from different viewpoints, WTC 7’s collapse bears an uncanny likeness to the controlled demolition of an obsolete office tower or other high rise building.
Very recently further fuel has been added to the debate about the cause of WTC 7’s collapse. Professor Leroy Hulsey, Chair of the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks (UAF) and a recognized and experienced forensic engineer as well, released on Sep 3rd 2019 a draft report of a 4 year study he completed into the collapse of WTC 7. Professor Hulsey rubishes the NIST report and their computer simulation of the WTC 7 failures as error filled and not fit for purpose, and the NIST theory of a “thermal expansion” caused structural failure at one column/girder connection leading to the entire building’s collapse as an absolute impossibility.
Professor Hulsey claims that he and his team of two PhD students could only induce their computer models of the WTC 7 to collapse as the videos show WTC 7 collapsing on 9/11 was to simulate a near-simultaneous failure over 8 stories of every column in the entire building.
Professor Hulsey in an hour long speech at UAF on Sep 3rd,2019 officially presented his report and gave some highlights of the errors and omissions in NIST’s report and explained the different methods he and his team used to complete their own study. The video of his presentation is now posted at the UAF website and the links to view the video or download the report can easily be found with a search engine for any interested parties looking for more information.
Professor Hulsey is also making available on the internet all the assumptions, data, calculations etc that he used in making his report and the associated computer models. He will allow any interested parties 8 weeks to review his findings and submit any comments or suggestion to him before he writes his final report.
It is notable that Professor Hulsey is being much more open than NIST was. After presenting their report in 2007, NIST declined the many request by engineers and scientist for all their input data to see if the NIST results would be reproducible. NIST claimed that to release the data would “jeopardize public saftey”.
Personally, if NIST can be proved to have thoroughly botched their investigation into WTC 7, I would tend to view the reliability of their conclusions re. the collapses of WTC 1 & 2 with a suspicious eye as well.
There has been a lot of counter arguments concerning the official version of the 9/11 tragedy (I am not going to call it “attack”). Many of those (academics and scientists) who disagreed with the government’s version have been demonizes and some have even been terminated from employment — as in the case of university professors.
There is, however, one enigmatic news item which has puzzled me for ever since I heard it on the media in the dying days of the Clinton administration. It went like this: “The State Department is at odds with the CIA, because the CIA has been issuing visas to young Saudi men, bypassing the embassy in Riyadh”. This should raise a lot of eyebrows and re-examine the whole 9/11 issue from a different angle.
The above piece of news was heard only once and had been suppressed.
Thank you, Toole – that is extremely valuable information. Something I certainly had not heard before.
The dancing Israeli Mossad Agents recording the Towers disintegrating to dust from N.J. are suspect as much as the Saudis.
Having read how so many terrorist patsy were groomed and guided by FBI Informants to commit the dirty deed, I can easily imagine Israel’s Mossad are even more experienced infiltrating Islamic terrorist groups and capable of manipulating them to pull off 9/11.
In December 1998, Former US Defense Secretary Ash Carter, US Undersecretary of Defense John Deutch and Philip Zelikow, Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, colluded to write this in Foreign Affairs Journal,
A successful attack with weapons of mass destruction could certainly take thousands, or tens of thousands, of lives. If the device that exploded in 1993 under the World Trade Center had been nuclear, or had effectively dispersed a deadly pathogen, the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it.
Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America’s fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949.
Like Pearl Harbor, this event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures, scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and use of deadly force. More violence could follow, either further terrorist attacks or U.S. counterattacks.
I find it curious it happened just like that 3 years later, and one of the Authors was Jewish and able to control what information the 9/11 Commission was able to see?
The link to the December 1998 Foreign Affairs Journal
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/1998-11-01/catastrophic-terrorism-tackling-new-danger
Excellent article, Eric. Could you sometime expand on what, when, and how Israel obtained foreknowledge re: 9/11? That would make extremely interesting reading.
A couple of things…
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I don’t think Bin Laden had anything to do with it. For a while after the attack, the FBI did not consider him as a suspect; I don’t know if that’s changed.
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“Israel was the chief beneficiary of the 9/11 attacks…”, is likely the reason for their silence.
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“Azzam told me, “we will go on and kick the Americans out of Saudi Arabia.”… I’m not at all surprised. I worked with a Muslim engineer about 2 decades back, and the Americans had just ‘done something’; I don’t recall what it was. He changed from him mild mannered friendly attitude to one of anger in a ‘split second’… I was truly surprised.
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One of the engineering web sites I used to frequent, had a thread on 9/11 building collapses. When I saw the initial ‘crash’… it never dawned on me that they would collapse, but when they did, I had a pretty good reason why, and was familiar the the construction of the towers. I hadn’t considered the ‘fuel energy’ being expended. I don’t know if the terrorists were aware of this either, but, it’s possible. The thread had some excellent discussions, and, not conspiracy… One day it disappeared never to return, without an explanation.
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Dik
I’m certainly inclined to believe Eric Margolis’ theory of who was behind the 9/11 attacks. The party line repeated in Washington and in the American press sounds good, but the truth is a lot more complicated than that. Osama bin Laden was obviously a convenient scapegoat, but killing him could not and did not solve America’s problems in its dealings with people throughout the Arab world and the hatred that many of them feel towards the US. If anything, the resentment of so many Saudi nationals, in particular, against the US is probably stronger today than it was back in 2001.
America was behind 9-11, they created Al Qaeda and trained Bin Laden. They then set up the attack as an excuse to attack Iraq because Hussein was moving his economy away from the dollar and was wanting Iraq’s oil paid in Euros. To say nothing about how Vice President Dick Cheney turned the wars into a money pipeline for his own company.
Afghanistan was attacked because the Taliban destroyed the opium trade.
Proof 9-11 was staged is the fact the towers came straight down in a supposedly uncontrolled collapse which is nearly impossible. Add the fact the third building came down even though it wasn’t hit.