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September 11 is my generation's
November 22
Infowars.com
April 11, 2006
If you were alive and old enough to remember November 22, 1963, you'll
know exactly where you were and what you were doing when President John
F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas. If, like me, you weren't yet born, you
might remember seeing, for the first time, Oliver Stone's 1991 film
JFK, a controversial work that, in Mr. Stone's words, was created to
offer a “counter-myth” to the Warren Commission
report that pinned the Kennedy assassination on ex-Marine and former
Soviet defector Lee Harvey Oswald.
If you're old enough to be reading this column you'll certainly
remember where you were and what you were doing when you learned jet
airliners had been deliberately flown into the twin towers of the World
Trade Center.
While Mr. Oswald was plucked from his seat and arrested at a Dallas
movie theatre exactly eighty minutes after the president was murdered,
Mr. Bin Laden was fingered as the grand architect of the WTC attacks
before Tower 1 collapsed, 102 minutes after impact.
Speaking of the building's collapse, actor Charlie Sheen, who was born
in New York City and has appeared in two Oliver Stone films, was a
recent guest (March 20) on The Alex Jones Show―a nationally syndicated
talk radio program devoted mainly to conspiracy theories.
“It seems to me,” said Mr. Sheen, “like
19 amateurs with box cutters taking over four commercial airliners and
hitting 75% of their targets―that feels like a conspiracy theory. It
raises a lot of questions.... When the buildings came down later on
that day I said to my brother, 'Call me insane, but did it sorta look
like those buildings came down in a controlled demolition?'”
Conspiracy theory and wild speculation has thrived since the day of the
attacks, but the Sheen interview marks a turning point, a paradigm
shift, in the popular consciousness―much like the 1969 New Orleans
trial of Clay Shaw, where prosecutor Jim Garrison, played in Mr.
Stone's JFK by Kevin Costner, showed to the jury Abraham Zapruder's
home movie of JFK's head being blown “back, and to the
left,” supposedly indicating a second gunman on the grassy
knoll. After the 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations report,
which concluded that, “Scientific acoustical evidence
establishes a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John
F. Kennedy,” American opinion was already inured to the
notion that the government might've killed their own chief executive.
Mr. Sheen was particularly intrigued by a comment made by Larry
Sliverstein, owner of WTC 7, the 47-storey Salomon Smith Barney tower
that collapsed at 5:20 p.m.
“I remember,” said Mr. Silverstein in the 2002 PBS
documentary, America Rebuilds, “getting a call from the, er,
fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were
gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, 'We've had such terrible
loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.' And they made
that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse.”
“Pull,” in the demolition industry, is slang for
“demolish.”
Were Alex Jones and Charlie Sheen the most prominent or credible
doubters of the 9/11 Commission Report's explanation of the three
skyscrapers' collapsing, it wouldn't be much of a debate. But some of
the Commission's doubters carry credentials too legitimate to ignore.
Steven E. Jones, a physics professor at Brigham Young University in
Provo, UT, has published a paper, Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings
Collapse, suggesting that “WTC 7 and the Twin Towers were
brought down, not just by impact damage and fires, but through the use
of pre-positioned cutter-charges.”
Morgan Reynolds, former chief economist for the Department of Labor
during George W. Bush's first term and now professor emeritus at Texas
A&M University has offered his opinion that, "If demolition
destroyed three steel skyscrapers at the World Trade Center on 9/11,
then the case for an 'inside job' and a government attack on America
would be compelling."
Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan
administration, a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal,
and author of Supply-Side Revolution: An Insider's Account of
Policymaking in Washington, and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy,
among other books, pointed out, in a February 6 essay published at
counterpunch.org, “We know the government lied about Iraqi
WMD, but we believe the government told the truth about 9/11.”
According to Dr. Robert M. Bowman Lt. Col., USAF, ret. who holds a
Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Nuclear Engineering from Caltech, the NORAD
exercises―a mock drill which simulated planes crashing into buildings
on the east coast―conducted on the morning of September 11 were a
deliberate cover to confuse NORAD personnel.
"The exercises that went on that morning,” said Mr. Bowman on
Alex Jones's show, “simulating the exact kind of thing that
was happening so confused the people in the FAA and NORAD....that they
didn't they didn't know what was real and what was part of the
exercise.”
So, if not Mr. Bin Laden, who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks?
"If I had to narrow it down to one person,” said Mr. Bowman,
“I think my prime suspect would be Dick Cheney."
With―according to an August, 2004 Zogby poll―half of New Yorkers
suspecting government leaders "knew in advance that attacks were
planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously
failed to act," and an informal CNN Showbiz Tonight poll showing that
83 per cent of respondents agree with Charlie Sheen that “the
US government covered up the real events of the 9/11
attacks,” it seems this debate will likely outlive us all.
“September 11,” said Mr. Sheen, “wasn't
the Zapruder film. It was the Zapruder film festival.”
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