{"id":266639,"date":"2016-09-10T01:30:37","date_gmt":"2016-09-10T01:30:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=266639"},"modified":"2016-09-10T01:30:37","modified_gmt":"2016-09-10T01:30:37","slug":"great-911-cover","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/great-911-cover\/","title":{"rendered":"The Great 9\/11 Cover-Up"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, as originally published in Off-Guardian<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Did you happen to notice that after more than a decade of the \u2018news\u2019 media\u2019s demanding publication of \u201cthe missing 28 pages\u201d (which turned out actually to have been 29 pages) from the U.S. Congress\u2019s investigation into 9\/11, the document\u2019s press-coverage, finally, on 15 July 2016, turned out to have been little-to-none<\/b>? And did you notice that the little there was, said it contained nothing important? Perhaps you didn\u2019t get to know even this much about the press-coverage of it, because the U.S. Congress, which had been hiding the document ever since 2003, dumped it on a Friday night, in order for it to receive as little press-coverage as possible.<\/span><\/p>\n

Well, what that document actually showed, and proved (and cited FBI investigators who could then have testified in public, if requested), was the opposite of unimportant: that the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud (who was known in Washington as \u201cBandar Bush,\u201d because of his closeness to the Bush family), had secretly been paying the Saudi handlers of at least two of the 15 Saudis among the 19 9\/11 hijackers, and that Bandar\u2019s wife and other relatives were also paying those hijackers-to-be, and their families<\/span><\/a> \u2014 thus enabling the future hijackers to obtain the necessary pilot-training etc., for the 9\/11 attacks.<\/span><\/p>\n

How much news-coverage of this was there in the U.S.\u2019democracy\u2019 that is supposed to be informing the public about such things, instead of continuing the cover-ups of them?<\/span><\/p>\n

Why do U.S. \u2018news\u2019 media hide it \u2014 after having demanded for more than ten years that the \u2018missing 28 pages\u2019 become published?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

But that\u2019s not all there is to the cover-up: As I mentioned and documented in my July 20th news-report on\u00a0\u201c9\/11: Bush\u2019s Guilt and the \u201928 Pages\u2019,\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0 U.S. President George W. Bush was also involved in the 9\/11 operation: He had instructed his National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice<\/span><\/a> to block his obtaining from U.S. government sources any specific information about what the attacks would entail, or about the date on which they would occur. (Presumably, he already knew, via his private communications with Prince Bandar or someone else who was in on the event\u2019s planning, all that he had wanted to know about the coming event.) When CIA Director George Tenet, on 10 July 2001, was practically screaming to Rice to allow him into the Oval Office, to meet privately with the President to inform him of how urgent the situation had become to take action on it, she said: \u201cWe\u2019re not quite ready to consider\u00a0this. We don\u2019t want the clock to\u00a0start ticking.\u201d Tenet was shocked, and dismayed. That encounter with Rice was intended to urge the President to establish a hit-team to take out bin Laden, so as to avert the operation \u2014 whatever it was, or would turn out to be. The way that Chris Whipple put this, in his terrific report in Politico<\/i> magazine, on 12 November 2015, titled \u201cThe Attacks Will Be Spectacular\u201d<\/span><\/a>, was that, \u201cthey did not want a paper trail to show that they\u2019d been warned.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Apparently, \u201cBandar Bush\u201d knew the details, but his friend George W. Bush did not \u2014 Bush needed\u00a0\u201cdeniability\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0\u2014 it\u2019s not for nothing that he was able to say, after the event,\u00a0as Condoleezza Rice was to put it when speaking to reporters on 16 May 2002<\/span><\/a>, “This government did everything that it could in a period in which the information\u00a0was very generalized, in which there was nothing specific to react to \u2026\u00a0Had this president known of something\u00a0more specific, or known that a plane was going to be used as a missile, he would\u00a0have acted on it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

How does she now square that statement with her having told Tenet, on 10 July 2001, \u201cWe\u2019re not quite ready to consider\u00a0this. We don\u2019t want the clock to\u00a0start ticking.\u201d? What \u2018clock\u2019? Why not? No one asks her \u2014 especially not under oath<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Is that the way things happen in a democracy, even 15 years after the event?<\/span><\/p>\n

On 10 September 2012, Kurt Eichenwald, who had reported for The New York Times<\/i>, was then issuing his new book on the aftermath of the 9\/11 attacks, 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror\u00a0Wars<\/i>, and he headlined an op-ed then in his former newspaper (which thus could hardly have declined to accept it), \u201cThe Deafness Before\u00a0the Storm\u201d<\/span><\/a>, describing the most puzzling aspect of the lead-up to 9\/11:<\/span><\/p>\n

It was perhaps the most famous presidential briefing in history.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

On Aug. 6, 2001, President George W. Bush\u00a0received a classified review\u00a0of\u00a0the threats posed by Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, Al Qaeda.\u00a0That morning\u2019s \u201cpresidential daily brief\u201d \u2014 the top-secret document\u00a0prepared by America\u2019s intelligence agencies \u2014 featured the now-infamous\u00a0heading: \u201cBin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.\u201d A few weeks later, on\u00a09\/11, Al Qaeda accomplished that goal.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

On April 10, 2004, the Bush White House declassified that daily brief \u2014 and\u00a0only that daily brief\u00a0\u2014\u00a0in response to pressure from the 9\/11 Commission,\u00a0which was investigating the events leading to the attack. Administration\u00a0officials dismissed the document\u2019s significance, saying that, despite the jaw-dropping headline, it was only an assessment of Al Qaeda\u2019s history, not a\u00a0warning of the impending attack. While some critics considered that claim\u00a0absurd, a close reading of the brief showed that the argument had some\u00a0validity.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

That is, unless it was read in conjunction with the daily briefs preceding\u00a0Aug. 6, the ones the Bush administration would not release. While those\u00a0documents are still not public, I have read excerpts from many of them,\u00a0along with other recently declassified records, and come to an inescapable\u00a0conclusion: the administration\u2019s reaction to what Mr. Bush was told in the\u00a0weeks before that infamous briefing reflected significantly more negligence\u00a0than has been disclosed. In other words, the Aug. 6 document, for all of the\u00a0controversy it provoked, is not nearly as shocking as the briefs that came\u00a0before it.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Those \u201cbriefs\u201d still<\/i> are not published. And now, after the revelation, by Chris Whipple, that Condoleezza Rice was under instruction from her boss not to allow him to be informed too early for \u201cthe clock to start ticking,\u201d we can understand why there is still so much that hasn\u2019t yet been released to the public, in our \u2018democracy\u2019, about who was really behind 9\/11.<\/span><\/p>\n

On 17 April 2016, Paul Sperry in the New York Post<\/i> headlined \u201cHow US\u00a0covered up\u00a0Saudi role in\u00a09\/11\u201d<\/span><\/a>, and he reported that his own investigation showed: \u201cActually, the kingdom\u2019s involvement was\u00a0deliberately covered up at the highest levels\u00a0of our government. And the coverup goes\u00a0beyond locking up 28 pages of the Saudi\u00a0report in a vault in the US Capitol basement.\u00a0Investigations were throttled. Co-conspirators were let off the hook.\u201d But isn\u2019t it time, now, to demand that Bush\u2019s role also be explored \u2014 not only that the Saud family\u2019s (especially Bandar\u2019s) role in it be prosecuted? After all, Bush was the one who took a Presidential oath.<\/span><\/p>\n

Or: Is the U.S. not enough of a democracy, for that to happen \u2014 for the Constitution to be enforced, by the U.S. President after Bush (the President who will not prosecute his intended successor<\/span><\/a>)? How total must the non<\/i>-accountability at the top be, before we call the country a \u201cdictatorship\u201d \u2014 only a fake \u2018democracy\u2019<\/span><\/a>?<\/span><\/p>\n

Regarding the actions that brought down the three World Trade Center Buildings, WTC1, WTC2, and WTC7, there also is good reason to distrust the official \u2018history\u2019. Witness accounts both by firefighters<\/span><\/a> and by the general public<\/span><\/a> were videoed at the time saying that they heard multiple explosions, which indicated controlled demolitions after the two plane-crashes into WTC1 and WTC2. Other witnesses of the WTC7 collapse also heard explosions<\/span><\/a>. Regarding WTC7, there was testimony from the owner of the WTC, Larry Silverstein, saying that he instructed the Fire Department not to go into WTC7 but simply to \u201cpull it.\u201d<\/span><\/a> (And his subsequent statement saying he didn\u2019t really mean that and he meant only to \u201cpull\u201d the firefighters from that building, which actually had none<\/span><\/a>, was debunked<\/span><\/a>.) Even the government\u2019s \u201cFinal Report on the Collapse of World Trade Center Building 7\u201d<\/span><\/a> acknowledged (p. 48) that there had been \u201c(2) a freefall descent over approximately eight stories of gravitational acceleration for approximately 2.25 s[econds]\u201d meaning that that 8-story segment had been blasted so that, throughout those 8 stories, there was zero resistance to the collapsed portion falling through it from above. This alone constitutes solid and conclusive physical proof of the official lie, though itself published in the official source. And yet on the very next page in that official document is stated, \u201cBlast events did not play a role in the collapse of WTC 7. \u2026 There were no witness reports of such a loud noise.\u201d But there were such witness reports<\/span><\/a>; and, anyway, the very admission (on the prior page) that there was free-fall over an 8-story segment of the building, constitutes acknowledgement of physical proof that there had been controlled demolition on WTC7. Further, there has even been expert testimony that nano-thermite was used to bring down each of these buildings<\/span><\/a>. But clearly, whatever the truth of the matter is, the U.S. Government has been lying, and continues to lie, about 9\/11. For at least the past 16 years, we\u2019ve been living in a dictatorship<\/span><\/a>. And the evidence suggests that this has been the case ever since at least 1981<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of<\/span> \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, as originally published in Off-Guardian Did you happen to notice that after more than a decade of the \u2018news\u2019 media\u2019s demanding publication of \u201cthe missing 28 pages\u201d (which turned out actually to have been 29 pages) from the U.S. Congress\u2019s investigation into 9\/11, the document\u2019s press-coverage, finally, on 15 July 2016, turned out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":266574,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[1022,22419,115,30,27,32,535,38,907,59,22418,8748,49,76,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-266639","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"tag-1022","9":"tag-bandar","10":"tag-barack-obama","11":"tag-big-brother","12":"tag-bush","13":"tag-cia","14":"tag-global-news","15":"tag-iraq","16":"tag-isis","17":"tag-military","18":"tag-prince-bandar","19":"tag-saud","20":"tag-usa-news","21":"tag-warfare","22":"tag-white-house"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266639\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}