JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE INDEPENDENT

This isn’t an attack.

Gore Vidal is a crackpot, a rather delightful and entertaining one.

Christopher Hitchens, however, has become something much more unpleasant, and far more dangerous, than a crackpot.

Hitchens is now a relentless defender of the establishment, eloquent and wordy certainly, but serving interests a genuine writer should never serve.

Graham Greene said it so superbly:

“You remember Thomas Paine’s great apothegm, ‘we must take care to guard even our enemies against injustice,’ and it is there – in the establishment of justice – that the writer has greater opportunities and therefore greater obligations than, say, the chemist or the estate agent.”

No matter what you believe about 9/11, it is simply a fact that there are many unanswered questions.

I do not think that that fact means the government was involved, but it could not be clearer that the government is hiding things.

Just the simple facts that structural steel used there required twice the temperature that aviation fuel burns at (3000 versus 1500 degrees), that most of the force of the impact and explosion was depleted by blowing out the other side, and that we have pictures of survivors standing by the entrance hole tell us clearly there was not enough energy to cause those collapses.

The recorded images of the collapse are, almost to a certainty, images of a controlled demolition, not a “pancaking” down of floors. Indeed, the central core was so immensely strong – overbuilt from an engineering point of view – that even if the floors could have “pancaked” down, the core would have been left standing.

And there are so many other questions.

Most of the perpetrators were Saudis, and, crucially important, had legitimate visas for the US. Who issued those? The Israelis knew about them and were curious, following them around with a large gang of agents who were arrested and deported afterward.

What was going on? A CIA training operation gone sour? A much larger plot than the men in the planes, including others who planted explosives at the building bases? Who knows, but we do know we have not been told the truth.

And as for the fourth airliner, there is absolutely no question but it was shot down by an American fighter plane. The debris field was vast and could not possibly have resulted from the official fantasy story of “let’s roll,” a story concocted to save the government from a monstrous set of lawsuits.

Yes, Christopher Hitchens is not a writer in the truest sense of the word, he is the kind of talented scribbler who has always served those with power.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

The government of the United States has only itself to blame for the beliefs of Charlie Sheen and, indeed, millions of other Americans if sites on the Internet are any indication.

For whatever reasons, the American government has withheld important information, and many understand that much. When a government chooses withholding information in such a dramatic event, it literally is inviting speculation and superstition to flare up.

The official version of 9/11 is certainly incomplete, and I say this without believing that government was involved in plots.

There are the clearest bits of evidence.

The towers‘ collapse is a completely unexplained matter: it resembled precisely the kind of controlled explosion and collapse used in tall-building demolition.

A number of engineers have also pointed out the melting point of the kind of steel used in construction: it is twice the temperature (3000 degrees versus 1500) at which aviation diesel fuel (aviation fuel is a refined diesel) burns.

There is a well known picture of a woman standing in the wreckage of the building façade a short time after a plane crashed. She shows no signs of heat discomfort, and stands right next to the building’s crumpled metal.

It is likely then that the scheme was larger than just the 19 or 20 on the four planes. After all, there had been a previous attempt to bring down the Trade Center with controlled demolition.

The authorities do not want to acknowledge the size and success of the scheme. It is a confession of the utter incompetence of intelligence and police services.

Little noted by the mainstream press is the fact that the skyjackers had valid American visas. One senior American diplomat, after 9/11, complained in the press about an inordinate number of visas issued abroad under pressure from the CIA for rapid issue.

It is virtually certain that there was some kind of CIA operation under way, training people from the Middle East for God knows what purposes. Mossad was aware of this, thus the involvement of a group of its agents (below) in following some of the skyjackers in the U.S. Also, former American intelligence agents use the term “blowback” to describe the entire set of events.

The fourth plane over Pennsylvania was certainly shot down – just the extensive nature of the wreckage field (spread about three miles) says this to a certainty.

Cheney undoubtedly ordered it shot down – he is a totally ruthless man – and naturally they do not want to tell the world this ugly fact and be deluged with law suits. So we get mythical nonsense about “Let’s roll.”

There is also the documented matter of a group of Mossad agents, under cover of a moving (removal) firm, who were aware of these plotters and were following them around inside the U.S. They were arrested, questioned, and deported a short time later.

Just the fact that there was a sizeable group of an ally’s agents operating inside the U.S. and that this group was on to the plotters further emphasizes the complete incompetence of an American intelligence establishment chewing its way through tens of billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money every year.

Of course, the entire thing could not have happened had the simplest precautions been taken in aviation security, such as cockpit doors that lock securely from inside and the upgrading of boarding procedures, too.

There had been years of skyjackings – many like that of D. B. Cooper still unsolved – and the U.S. Congress continued to refuse to spend this small amount of money on real security. It is only generous when it comes to bombing people in the colonies.

So now we suffer from a ridiculous degree of over-kill in American security. We all are paying a price for the incompetence of American government, and no government wants to be thought incompetent.