• Introduction

• I. Automatic Dismissal of a Legitimate Line of Inquiry

• II. The “Incompetence Theory” of the 9/11 Intelligence Failure

• III. David Corn and the Magic All-Explanatory “Incompetence Theory”

• IV. Michael Albert Knows What Bush Knew

• V. Misconstruing the Anthrax Case

• VI. The Institutional Pattern of Provocation for War

• VII. The Irrationality of Attempts to Delegitimise 9/11 Inquiry

• VIII. Whitewashing the Israeli Mossad

• IX. Whitewashing Pearl Harbour

• X. Whitewashing the 9/11 Intelligence Failure

• XI. Missing the Point

• Conclusions

• Notes

Introduction

In reviewing the work of these commentators on 9/11, I analyse in detail the failure of the U.S. intelligence community in preventing the Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks; the casual repression and/or misrepresentation of facts related to 9/11; the failure of U.S. defence measures on 9/11; the historic and institutional basis for skepticism about the official narrative; and some salient facts which illustrate the need for proper research into the linkages between U.S. government, military, intelligence, and corporate policy, and the ease with which the September 11 terrorist attacks went ahead.

I. Automatic Dismissal of a Legitimate Line of Inquiry

Numerous respected commentators on both the left and right of the political spectrum have ardently criticised widespread speculation that the Bush administration had advanced warning of the September 11^th terrorist attacks, sufficient to prevent them from occurring. When Democrat Party U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney called for a full investigation into the events surrounding September 11 – and particularly into the warnings received by the U.S. intelligence community suggesting that the administration may have known more than it is letting on – she was publicly derided.  “We deserve to know what went wrong on September 11 and why”, stated McKinney.

“After all, we hold thorough public inquiries into rail disasters, plane crashes, and even natural disasters in order to understand what happened and to prevent them from happening again or minimizing the tragic effects when they do. Why then does the Administration remain steadfast in its opposition to an investigation into the biggest terrorism attack upon our nation?

And on and on. The right-wing chorus of automatic denunciation appears to be based on the implicit assumption that the Bush administration is entirely guilt-free of any sort of role in implementing policies that may have facilitated the September 11 attacks, knowingly or unknowingly (McKinney specifies neither). Unfortunately, leading commentators on the left-end of the political spectrum appear to have joined in the obligatory chorus of derision. They are supported in this by the mainstream assumption that the reason the U.S. intelligence community failed to prevent the attacks is simply because of bureaucratic incompetence.

II. The “Incompetence Theory” of the 9/11 Intelligence Failure

That assumption has been adopted even by the private U.S. intelligence firm Stratfor, which produces independent intelligence on worldwide affairs. On September 16^th 2002, Stratfor commented:

On 20^th May, commenting on the outbreak of controversy in Washington DC over “what Bush knew and when”, Stratfor elaborated on this perspective in some detail, arguing that the colossal 9/11 intelligence failure was a consequence of the structural fragmentation of the U.S. intelligence community:

While it is clear that a generally “fragmented picture of the world” is a likely consequence of a “bureaucratically fragmented intelligence community”, in itself this does not demonstrate that the capabilities of that community in developing specific intelligence on various aspects of the world is completely dysfunctional. Rather it suggests that the U.S. intelligence community will find it hard to develop an integrated, coherent understanding of world affairs and their interrelationships.

What is likely to be developed instead, are somewhat uncorrelated and/or disconnected pockets of intelligence on various aspects of world affairs. This, however, obviously does not entail in itself that the intelligence produced will be inaccurate with respect to those aspects. On the contrary, it simply indicates that while the U.S. intelligence community is capable of developing accurate intelligence on specific disparate aspects of world affairs, due to the structural fragmentation among the various agencies that constitute the intelligence community, a coherent overall intelligence picture of the world based on comprehension of the complex influences and interconnections between these disparate aspects will be extremely hard to form. Indeed, Stratfor itself grasps this implication:

“It is unclear whether any of these agencies completely understand their own internal vision, let alone that they are able to transmit a comprehensive picture to the CIA (which is supposed to integrate all this into a coherent world view and serve it up to the president and other senior officials for action).”

Clearly, the problem here does not necessarily relate to the task of focusing and gathering intelligence on a particular threat to U.S. national security – rather it relates to the integration of disparate intelligence into “a coherent worldview”. Structural stumbling blocks thus principally affect the coordination of the U.S. intelligence community in this respect. Attempting to account for a U.S. intelligence failure with respect to the specific issue of developing intelligence on a particular aspect of world affairs - such as a particular threat to U.S. national security – on the basis of such structural stumbling blocks, is therefore theoretically unwarranted.

In other words, while it is certainly possible that such structural stumbling blocks may have had some sort of role in any such intelligence failure, to suppose that they wholly account for the failure without an in-depth factual analysis of the failure itself (based on inspecting the collection and analysis of the related data) is nothing but gratuitous speculation. Indeed, given that such structural fragmentation principally affects the integration of intelligence into a “coherent worldview” (“a single, integrated, coherent picture of what is happening in the world”) it is highly unlikely that this fragmentation alone would be sufficient to result in a wholesale intelligence failure on any isolated specific aspect of world affairs, i.e. a specific threat to U.S. national security.

Stratfor, however, makes the mistake of extending the scope of the implications of the structural fragmentation of the U.S. intelligence community to the community’s failure to act with respect to the terrorist attacks of September 11^th – which of course was a specific threat to U.S. national security. Yet clearly this is unfounded based on Stratfor’s own assessment. Stratfor does go on to provide a useful examination of the specific ways in which the relative fragmentation of the U.S. intelligence community can, and has, affected the integration of analysis of information, thus preventing the development of a coherent intelligence product on world affairs.

Without, however, factually assessing the information on the September 11 terrorist attacks collected and analysed by the U.S. intelligence community, it is impossible to know whether this problem of emphasising collection over and above analysis, was the principal reason for the intelligence failure. It is further unlikely that the institutional compartmentalisation of the U.S. intelligence community contributed to its failure to develop a coherent perspective on the specific threat to U.S. national security of Al-Qaeda, because that compartmentalisation primarily affects the development of “a coherent worldview” – not a specific aspect thereof. It is the connection and coordination of intelligence on different aspects of world affairs into an integrated whole that is institutionally problematic as a consequence of the intelligence community’s compartmentalisation. Intelligence on specific issues is not implicated here.

It is, therefore, both theoretically and empirically incorrect for Stratfor to claim that: “Given this incredible tangle of capabilities, jurisdictions and competencies, it is a marvel that a finished intelligence product is ever delivered to decision makers.” This extreme conclusion is contradicted by the fact that the U.S. intelligence community has a demonstrable record of success. U.S. military intelligence expert Richard K. Betts, Director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, and former member of the National Commission on Terrorism, observes in Foreign Affairs: “Paradoxically, the news is worse than the angriest critics think, because the intelligence community has worked much better than they assume…

In this context, to prematurely presume in the absence of facts that an intelligence failure on a specific national security threat is because of incompetence induced by the institutional compartmentalisation of the intelligence community, is unwarranted. On the contrary, as documented by Johnson, most often such failures are not related to the quality of the intelligence product itself, but rather because the political bureaucracy does not act on accurate intelligence received.

Stratfor, at least, admits that: “We remain certain that if we searched all of the databases and memos we would find that the U.S. government had collected much of the information that would have been necessary to prevent Sept. 11. It was there.” Yet the organisation then makes a logical leap in assuming, without having actually examined the data itself and what was done with it, that this information “wasn’t collated, integrated, or analyzed and therefore could not be disseminated.” But in light of the above analysis, there is simply no good reason at all to assume that this is the case, particularly when we understand that the institutional compartmentalisation of the intelligence community only makes it unlikely that the CIA will be capable of developing “a single, integrated, coherent picture of what is happening in the world”, rather than any coherent specific threat assessment. Indeed, this position is supported by the fact that there has been a string of U.S. intelligence successes in the last decade, in comparison to which there have been relatively few – though of course tragic - failures.

III. David Corn and the Magic All-Explanatory “Incompetence Theory”

Cruder renditions of the “incompetence theory” of the surprising lack of action on the part of U.S. intelligence in relation to September 11 have come from partisans of the left. These renditions are articulated in a much less sophisticated, and even more badly argued, manner than the position of groups such as Stratfor.

IV. Michael Albert Knows What Bush Knew

Albert does not supply any evidence for why this is the case. Instead, having acknowledged the existence of a question “about Bush’s foreknowledge of 9/11”, he supplies a vague and ready-made answer that “at most”, the U.S. intelligence community “lacks competence.” But clearly Albert has no meaningful grasp of the structural discontinuities between various agencies in the U.S. intelligence community and what specific problems they create – instead he assumes the existence of a blanket wholesale “incompetence”, and decides without any factual basis that this is the only plausible explanation of why the U.S. government failed to foil the September 11 attack. For instance, he also flies in the face of the fact noted above, that on the specific issue of counter-terrorism U.S. intelligence agencies were very closely coordinating their operations and information, on a regular basis, in the months leading up to 9/11.

In other words, Albert gives the impression that he already has the answer to the question, and thus since the answer “at most” will be “incompetence”, then there is no need to pursue further inquiry. Unfortunately however, it appears that Albert arrives at this conclusion without any factual analysis or inquiry at all: “Of course these agencies lack competence. Moreover, what good does demonstrating the incompetence of U.S. intelligence agencies do peace and justice? Should bolstering surveillance budget allotments be a new progressive program plank?” Having decided from the outset that U.S. intelligence agencies “lack competence” – although like Corn, Albert fails to provide any specific factual insight into what exactly is implied by this blanket description – Albert assumes that this undefined “incompetence” undoubtedly explains the Bush administration’s failure to prevent the September 11 attacks. The way in which this undefined theory of “incompetence” magically explains all and every anomaly in the official mainstream 9/11 narrative is disconcerting.

But as discussed above, a proper understanding of the specific implications of the U.S. intelligence community’s institutional compartmentalisation does not lead one to the undefined blanket conclusion that the community suffers from a general “incompetence”, but rather that this compartmentalisation has very precise connotations for the integration of intelligence information into “a coherent worldview”. In other words, as already discussed, on both a theoretical level based on analysis of the structure of the intelligence community as well as on an empirical level based in part on comparative analysis of the record of U.S. intelligence successes and failures, the conclusion that the Bush administration’s failure to prevent the September 11 attacks was simply due to “incompetence” is premature.

Albert’s essential argument for why “the left” should stop asking “what Bush knew and when” is circular, and thus self-defeating. He assumes from the outset that the intelligence community failed to prevent the 9/11 attacks simply because of some vague and undefined “incompetence”. He then argues that since that it is the case, anybody calling for more understanding of “what Bush knew and when” is falling into the right-wing agenda of saying that since U.S. intelligence is incompetent, more U.S. dollars should be thrown at the CIA. He then argues that “the left” should not become party to a programme to mindlessly increase the U.S. intelligence and defense budget which will then be used for more wars and acts of terror worldwide.

But Albert’s entire argument rests on the assumption that he already knows (somehow) the generalities of “what Bush knew and when” – i.e. that he knows that Bush did not know. In other words, Albert begins his argument by assuming that he already knows that Bush failed to foil the attacks due to intelligence “incompetence”, and that since this is the case, there is no need to ask “what Bush knew and when”. This boils down to an elementary contradiction: We do not need to ask the question “what Bush knew and when” because we already know the answer, even though in fact we do not know the answer at all as evidenced by Albert’s total failure to prove his “incompetence” assumption. As such, Albert’s attempt to convince “the left” that they should not even bother asking the question “what Bush knew and when” is based on baldly (and falsely) assuming that he knows the fundamental essence of the answer, and that since the answer is “incompetence”, it is not worth pursuing. This, of course, is incoherent.

V. Misconstruing the Anthrax Case

Ironically, the only piece of “evidence” offered by Albert to support his thesis of the overarching “incompetence” of the U.S. intelligence community is that: “… these are the U.S. same [sic] intelligence agencies that can’t find the perpetrator of the recent anthrax attacks, even though the anthrax came from Fort Detrick, Maryland, and even though, given the skills required, the number of possible culprits is a handful.” Unfortunately, this particularly factoid is of Albert’s own construction. Anybody who has been following the anthrax case would be aware of credible evidence that U.S. intelligence does, in fact, know pretty much who the perpetrator of the attacks is, but has been prevented from arresting the individual under high-level government pressure.

The charge was made in a February 18^th address at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Citing sources she described as “government insiders” with whom she has been in contact, she testified that the FBI had known since last October the identity of the person who mailed lethal quantities of anthrax in letters to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, Senator Patrick Leahy, and several media outlets. Her sources further informed her that although the individual in question had been interrogated several times, he had not been arrested. “We know that the FBI is looking at this person, and it’s likely that he participated in the past in secret activities that the government would not like to see disclosed,” Rosenberg said.

“And this raises the question of whether the FBI may be dragging its feet somewhat and may not be so anxious to bring to public light the person who did this.

“I know that there are insiders, working for the government, who know this person and who are worried that it could happen that some kind of quiet deal is made so that he just disappears from view.

U.S. investigative journalist and former National Security Agency official Wayne Madsen, who has also testified in hearings before U.S. Congress as an expert on U.S. covert foreign policies, has written a particularly insightful and comprehensive analysis of the available data on the anthrax attacks for Counterpunch, described as “America’s best political newsletter” by Out of Bounds Magazine. Madsen’s conclusions are worth noting:

It should be noted that in this case, again, the evidence suggests that the failure of U.S. intelligence lies not with the accuracy of the intelligence product, but with the refusal of the higher political echelon to act upon it. This is not the place to undertake a detailed analysis of the anthrax issue, but it suffices to conclude that Albert clearly has no basic grasp of this subject. Nevertheless, he comments on it in support of his argument. Unfortunately, this is representative of Albert’s entire approach to 9/11. He appears to have no understanding, nor any interest in evaluating the actual data around 9/11 and related issues such as anthrax, but still feels ready to comment on them anyway. The simple problem that this creates is that ultimately, Albert’s commentary on 9/11 ceases to retain credibility.

VI. The Institutional Pattern of Provocation for War

Given that a proper analysis of the structure, capabilities, recent coordination and record of success of the U.S. intelligence community provides little – if any - support for the “incompetence theory” of a counterterrorist intelligence failure, it is likely that the 9/11 intelligence failure was a consequence of the higher political bureaucracy refraining from acting on intelligence. In this context, it is perfectly legitimate to investigate the 9/11 intelligence failure with due consideration given to both the admittedly unlikely “incompetence theory”, as well as what might be termed “the political inaction” theory, of which the “foreknowledge hypothesis” is one variation.

Either way, the likelihood of political inaction being behind the administration’s failure to foil the Al-Qaeda plot, in itself implicates the existence of a web of strategic and economic influences acting upon the political establishment, which resulted in such political inaction. And given that this is a far more tenable and probable possibility than mere “incompetence”, then it is essential to investigate the matter more thoroughly - including specifically an evaluation of the information (and what was done with it) about the 9/11 attacks available to the U.S. intelligence community.

But there are, in fact, very pertinent reasons not to blindly accept the official “incompetence theory” adopted by so many in the mainstream, tolerated barely by elements of the right-wing to save face, and uncritically parroted by naïve commentators on the left. In a reply to Michael Albert’s ZNet commentary, Canadian social philosopher Professor John McMurtry at the University of Guelph refers to these reasons in detail:

“Shocking attacks on symbols of American power as a pretext for aggressive war is, in fact, an old and familiar pattern of the American corporate state. Even the sacrifice of thousands of ordinary Americans is not new, although so many people have never died so very fast... The basic point is that the U.S. ‘secret government’ (Bill Moyers’ phrase) has a very long record of contriving attacks on its symbols of power as a pretext for the declaration of wars, with an attendant corporate media frenzy focussing all public attention on the Enemy to justify the next transnational mass murder. This pattern is as old as the U.S. corporate state - from the sinking of the battleship Maine to start the Spanish-American War in 1898, through the fabricated attack on the U.S. battleship Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964 along with the fabricated attack by Egypt on the client-state Israel in 1967, to a reiteration of the same general pattern in setting up the War Against Iraq from 1991 on - a war that has murdered by bombing and embargo intent an average of 5000 Iraqui children every month since. This executive branch war is still in motion. It started and it continues by the same overall pattern as 9-11. In the case of Iraq, the war was precipitated by the green light given by the U.S. Ambassador, April Glaspie, who said that the U.S. was ‘neutral’ regarding the climaxing dispute over oilfields between Iraq and Kuwait just before Saddam ordered troops into Kuwait. ‘Saddam fell into the trap’ were the insider words of Jordan’s foreign minister after the event. 

“Throughout there is one constant to this long record of hoodwinking the American public into bankrolling ever rising military expenditures and periodic wars for corporate treasure. This decision structure ruled before and through 9-11, and has escalated after it - to fabricate or construct shocking attacks on U.S. symbols of power to provide the pretext and the public rage to launch wars of aggression against convenient and weaker enemies by which very major and many-levelled gains are achieved for the U.S. corporate-military complex.

Here, the essential implications of McMurtry’s point is the following: The possibility that the Bush administration had ample warning of the September 11 attacks but deliberately refused to act in order to generate a pretext for the consolidation of the U.S. corporate-military complex should not be discounted, in light of the well-documented historical record, which illustrates that such a policy is nothing new. On the contrary, McMurtry rightly notes that it is rather systematic. Given that the same essential decision-making structure responsible for that history continues to exist today, it is hardly reasonable to dismiss the need to discern whether the latest terrorist atrocity against the U.S. was not merely another element of the same underlying pattern. But that is exactly what Albert does, by refusing to even seriously consider whether that is the case – instead he only assumes the opposite without substantial basis.

“Conspiracy theorists begin their quest for understanding events by looking for groups acting secretly, either outside usual institutional norms in a rogue fashion, or, at the very least to manipulate public impressions, to cast guilt on other parties, and so on. Conspiracy theorists focus on conspirators’ methods, motives, and effects. Personalities, personal timetables, secret meetings, and conspirators’ joint actions claim priority attention. Institutional relations largely drop from view.

“... An institutional theory emphasizes roles, incentives, and other institutional dynamics that promote or compel important events and, most important, have similar effects over and over. Institutional theorists of course notice individual actions, but don't elevate them to prime causes. The point of an institutional explanation is to move beyond proximate personal factors to more basic institutional factors. The aim is to learn something about society or history, as compared to learning about particular culpable actors. If the particular people hadn't been there to do the events, most likely someone else would have.

“To the institutional theorist, the behavior of rogue elements is far less important than the ways in which the defining political, social, and economic forms lead to particular behaviors. An institutional theory of the U.S. missile attacks on Sudan or the Iran-Contra affair focuses on how and why these activities arose due to the basic institutions of U.S. society, not on the personal quirks of a womanizing Clinton or a loose-cannon Ollie North.”

Shalom and Albert, however, take issue with the citation of ‘Operation Northwoods’ as an example of this institutional dynamic:

“Conspiracy theorists have pointed to the Operation Northwoods document as proving that U.S. leaders were capable of 9-11. The document is a recently released top secret 1962 memorandum from the Joint Chiefs of Staff proposing the staging of attacks on U.S. targets that would appear to be coming from Cuba, as a way to justify a U.S. attack on the island.”

Whether or not Northwoods is taken as an example of this institutional dynamic, previous instances of contriving attacks on U.S. symbols of power as a pretext for the declaration of wars are systematic enough to demonstrate that this is a method employed by U.S. decision-making structures when elite military, political, strategic and economic considerations converge on making such a method appear favourable, in terms of meeting elite institutional interests. Nevertheless, Shalom and Albert argue that Northwoods is not a relevant example here:

“But… the Joint Chiefs didn’t call for killing U.S. citizens. They did propose sinking a boatload of Cuban refugees (though we don’t know whether the Joint Chiefs would have arranged for a U.S. vessel to fortuitously be on hand to pick up the refugees in the water), but with regard to the shoot down of a plane filled with U.S. college students, the plan was to switch an actual planeload of students with an ‘unmanned’ drone that would be shot down, supposedly by Cuba. Elsewhere, Operation Northwoods proposes blowing up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay in a ‘Remember the Maine’ replay, but explicitly refers to a ‘non-existent crew’. The document also suggests attacks on Cuban refugees in the United States ‘even to the extent of wounding.’ So if this document is supposed to show us what U.S. officials are morally capable of, it seems to suggest that they are capable of lying, deceit, conspiring to wage a war of aggression - but not killing U.S. citizens. Moreover, as far as we can tell, the plan proposed by the Joint Chiefs was rejected by the U.S. civilian leadership.”

As George Washington University’s National Security Archive records, Operation Northwoods “describes U.S. plans to covertly engineer various pretexts that would justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba…

Indeed, there are enough other examples from the historical record such as Pearl Harbour (discussed below), some mentioned by McMurtry, proving decisively that the U.S. decision-making structure at the helm of the U.S. military intelligence community is morally capable of allowing U.S. citizens to be killed to serve geostrategic interests.

Furthermore, simply because something did not happen in the past, certainly does not prove the lack of propensity for such an event to occur in the future, given the necessary conditions. As Shalom and Albert themselves admit, “it makes sense to develop institutional theories because they uncover lasting features with ubiquitous recurring implications. On the other hand, if an event arises from a unique conjuncture of particular people who seize extra-systemic opportunities, then even though institutions undoubtedly play some role, that role may not be generalizable and an institutional theory may be impossible to construct.”

In that context, it is perfectly reasonable to consider the possibility that the September 11 terrorist attacks were the outcome of the same sort of considerations – rooted in long-standing political, social and economic forms - that gave rise to the Operation Northwoods plan, and other previous U.S. operations along similar lines.

VII. The Irrationality of Attempts to Delegitimise 9/11 Inquiry

Shalom and Albert, however, appear intent on labeling any such inquiry as a plunge into irrationalism. Discussing the irrational element of “conspiracy theory”, they attempt to show that in general most “conspiracy theories” are unscientific:

“… it is a basic requirement of scientific beliefs that they be in principle falsifiable, that there be the possibility of disconfirming evidence. If a scientific hypothesis predicts X, and instead not-X occurs (and recurs repeatedly with no off-setting explanations for the discrepancy), then the hypothesis ought to be doubted. If the hypothesis flouts prior knowledge as well as current evidence, and is accepted nonetheless, then the behavior is often no longer scientific, nor even rational…

“Where God’s mysterious ways salvage the religious believers’ failed predictions, added layers of conspiracy salvage disconfirmed conspiracy theories. To the conspiratorial mind, if evidence emerges contradicting a claimed conspiracy, it was planted. If further evidence shows that the first evidence was authentic, then that further evidence too was planted.”

This description of such irrational, unscientific “conspiracy theory” is then applied to September 11. All those who argue the legitimacy of investigating whether the Bush administration may have deliberately facilitated the 9/11 attacks are lumped into one contrived category of “conspiracy theorists”, and subsequently dismissed for proposing absurd uninteresting ideas without foundation. This is achieved essentially by listing a large number of “conspiracy theories” - many of which are arguably untenable, a few of which are plausible - and then simply discarding them all as intrinsically absurd without even attempting to address the matter with a factual analysis:

“Here are some of the leading 9-11 conspiracy theories:

1.        The World Trade Center was destroyed not by planes but by explosives.

2. The planes were not hijacked at all, but commandeered by remote control by NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command).

3. The planes were hijacked, but the hijackers were double-crossed and the planes were taken over by remote control by NORAD.

4. The hijackers were actually working for the U.S. government.

5. U.S. intelligence knew about the plot, but intentionally did nothing so as to cause massive deaths that would mobilize public support for a war on terrorism that would benefit the government.

6. The plot was actually organized by the Mossad.

7. The Mossad knew about the plot, but did nothing, hoping that the massive deaths would mobilize public support for Israel’s war on the Palestinians.

8. Tower 2 of the World Trade Center was hit by a missile.

9. There was a joint plot by rogue elements in the CIA, the Mossad, other U.S. government agencies, Mobil (being investigated in a criminal case, all of the evidence against whom was in FBI offices in the World Trade Center), and Russian organized crime (which profited especially from Afghan heroin with which the Taliban was interfering).

We should be forthright here. None of the above strike us as remotely interesting much less plausible.”

The entire approach here, however, is misleading. ZNet began its crusade against 9/11 “conspiracy theories” by criticising the idea of Bush foreknowledge of the attacks. Shalom and Albert, however, extend this criticism without warrant by lumping virtually all angles of analysis of the U.S. role which contradict the official narrative of 9/11 together, dismissing them all. In doing so, they also dismiss the distinctly plausible possibility already noted above that the Bush administration did receive sufficient warning of the attacks to prevent them, but failed to act. Crucially, at no point in their analysis do Shalom and Albert undertake a meaningful analysis of the relevant facts, which are widely available on the public record. They give no argument as to why this possibility is inherently implausible – nor for that matter do they give any good reason as to why any of the above theories are inherently implausible, other than asserting “forthrightly” that this is the case, and qualifying the assertion by noting that none of these theories happen to fit in with their personal understanding of “how the world works”. It is only because of this sleight-of-hand that their discussion appears to take the form of rationality. In fact, they are merely doing what they themselves criticise to be unscientific: theorising about 9/11 based on shoddy long-held but untenable assumptions, without any proper analysis of the available data.

Let us take, for example, their “conspiracy theory” number 4:

4. The hijackers were actually working for the U.S. government.

At face value, without bothering to look at relevant credible reports on this subject, it is easy to dismiss this as “implausible.” But a cursory analysis of relevant facts certainly strongly suggests that the hijackers had some sort of high-level U.S. military connection. According to reports in Newsweek, the Washington Post and the New York Times, after September 11, U.S. military officials gave the FBI information “suggesting that five of the alleged hijackers received training in the 1990s at secure U.S. military installations.”^[30] Newsweek has further elaborated that U.S. military training of foreign students occurs as a matter of routine, with the authorisation - and payment - of respective governments, clarifying in particular that with respect to training of Saudi pilots, “Training is paid for by Saudi Arabia.” The hijackers, we should note, were almost exclusively Saudi; 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, mostly from wealthy families:

Which leads us to wonder: What on earth has the U.S. military been up to in relation to Al-Qaeda? Is it not reasonable to consider whether these hijackers were working for the U.S. government in some way in light of these reports (especially given that it has happened before in relation to the U.S. embassy bombings in 1998, the perpetrator of which was a former U.S. Army Sergeant)? And given the non-response of the FBI to specific questions on the matter, does this not suggest that they are hiding something? There is not yet a clear-cut answer to these questions, but that is exactly why this issues need to be researched in greater depth. Clearly, this anomaly in the official narrative, which has broad implications in terms of the ramifications of U.S. military intelligence policy toward its Middle East allies, is worth exploring further. In their arbitrary wholesale rejection of so-called “conspiracy theories”, Shalom and Albert are clearly also debunking legitimate lines of inquiry that have basis in fact.

VIII. Whitewashing the Israeli Mossad

There are other examples of this. Let us take, for instance, their two Mossad-related “conspiracy theories”:

6. The plot was actually organized by the Mossad.

7. The Mossad knew about the plot, but did nothing, hoping that the massive deaths would mobilize public support for Israel’s war on the Palestinians.

By bluntly stating two variations of the possibility that the Israeli Mossad had some sort of connection/involvement in the September 11 terrorist attacks, and then dismissing them wholesale, Shalom and Albert seem to be suggesting that as far as “the left” is concerned, any attempt to investigate the evidence of an Israeli connection to 9/11 is inherently illegitimate. But by assuming from the outset, without basis, that the idea of an Israeli connection is implausible, they actually demonstrate only their ignorance of history.

Does this, in itself, prove that the Israeli military intelligence infrastructure was in some way involved in 9/11? Of course not. But it proves propensity, since this infrastructure has a long record of conducting terrorist attacks – not only against U.S. and British targets but also against Jews (not to mention Palestinians). What brings this propensity into the limelight of a proper contemporary analysis of 9/11 are a number of facts, documented by Leonard in The War on Freedom, proving beyond doubt the reality of some sort of dubious Israeli involvement. Among the pertinent facts he plucks from the public record, are the following.

In the first of a four-part investigative documentary TV series on the Israeli connection to 9/11, FOX News correspondent Carl Cameron reported on how U.S. authorities had detained active members of an Israeli spy ring operating in the U.S., believed by authorities to be linked to the 9/11 attacks:

The detained Israelis, in other words, had been part of an intelligence operation that had very possibly been tracking the hijackers, and had both the means and the opportunity to discover the terrorist plot. Indeed, somewhat ominously, the U.S. government has refused to disclose already existing “evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11,” ensuring instead that it remains “classified” (unlike direct evidence of an Al-Qaeda involvement). Most crucially, if U.S. authorities recognise the existence of an Israeli connection to 9/11, including the distinct possibility of foreknowledge (not to mention as yet undisclosed “tie-ins”), why are Shalom and Albert arbitrarily dismissing the same? There is no need to comment on this further – it is clear that the facts speak for themselves in warranting a further inquiry into an Israeli linkage to the September 11 attacks. Such an inquiry is clearly legitimate based on the facts. We do not need to delve into specific “conspiracy theories”, or a discussion of them, to understand the legitimacy – and necessity – of such an inquiry, which obviously has broad implications for the nature of the relationship between the United States and Israel, as well as the current direction of Israeli intelligence policy.

Ironically then, the “incompetence theory” of the 9/11 intelligence failure and other issues related to September 11 adopted by Shalom and Albert, fits nicely into their own description of an irrational and unscientific hypothesis: “If the hypothesis flouts prior knowledge as well as current evidence, and is accepted nonetheless, then the behavior is often no longer scientific, nor even rational.” It is noteworthy that their hypothesis not only flouts “prior knowledge” on the historic pattern of provocation for wars noted by McMurtry, Leonard, and others, but also completely ignores “current evidence” available on the 9/11 attacks. As such, their hypothesis is not only unscientific, it is irrational.

IX. Whitewashing Pearl Harbour

A particularly stark example of this is their answer to their self-posed question “Do all the ignored warnings about 9-11 prove conspiracy or just incompetence?”:

“Actually, ignored warnings prove neither. It is possible, for example, that there were many warnings but that these warnings were not readily distinguishable from the thousands of other intelligence reports being received at the same time. Despite the conspiracy theories claiming FDR knew in advance about Pearl Harbor, it remains the case that the most compelling explanation for the missed warnings in 1941 was the inability to detect the significant information from the noise. (This is the argument of Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, 1962.)”

Many things are possible. What we are interested in, however, is not what was or was not “possible” in relation to September 11^th, but what actually happened. Speculation on what could or could not have been the case is not always helpful in decisively discerning the reality of the matter. It is, of course, very easy for both “conspiracy theorists” and “institutional theorists” to continue sitting in their respective bubbles of irrelevant “theory” with respect to 9/11, Pearl Harbour, and any other event. None of them, however, will in reality have the slightest clue what they are talking about unless they leave the bubble of “theory” and enter into the domain of factual analysis. Shalom and Albert, however, like the extreme “conspiracy theorists” they criticise, completely fail to do this in a meaningful way. Their dismissal of the “conspiracy theories claiming FDR knew in advance about Pearl Harbor” is a particularly illustrative example of this. Instead of discussing the matter by referral to the documented facts, they cite the stale hypothetical argument of Roberta Wohlstetter put forth in 1962.

Other elements of the case have also been put well by Daryl S. Borgquist, a U.S. Naval Reserve Public Affairs Officer and a Media Affairs Officer for the Community Relations Service Headquarters at the U.S. Department of Justice: “President Franklin D. Roosevelt requested the national office of the American Red Cross to send medical supplies secretly to Pearl Harbor in advance of the 7 December 1941 Japanese attack…

“Don C. Smith, who directed the War Service for the Red Cross before World War II and was deputy administrator of services to the armed forces from 1942 to 1946, when he became administrator, apparently knew about the timing of the Pearl Harbor attack in advance. Unfortunately, Smith died in 1990 at age 98. But when his daughter, Helen E. Hamman, saw news coverage of efforts by the families of Husband Kimmel and Walter Short to restore the two Pearl Harbor commanders posthumously to what the families contend to be their deserved ranks, she wrote a letter to President Bill Clinton on 5 September 1995. Recalling a conversation with her father, Hamman wrote:

‘… Shortly before the attack in 1941 President Roosevelt called him [Smith] to the White House for a meeting concerning a Top Secret matter. At this meeting the President advised my father that his intelligence staff had informed him of a pending attack on Pearl Harbor, by the Japanese. He anticipated many casualties and much loss, he instructed my father to send workers and supplies to a holding area at a P.O.E. [port of entry] on the West Coast where they would await further orders to ship out, no destination was to be revealed. He left no doubt in my father’s mind that none of the Naval and Military officials in Hawaii were to be informed and he was not to advise the Red Cross officers who were already stationed in the area. When he protested to the President, President Roosevelt told him that the American people would never agree to enter the war in Europe unless they were attack [sic] within their own borders…

‘He [Smith] was privy to Top Secret operations and worked directly with all of our outstanding leaders. He followed the orders of his President and spent many later years contemplating this action which he considered ethically and morally wrong. I do not know the Kimmel family, therefore would gain nothing by fabricating this situation, however, I do feel the time has come for this conspiracy to be exposed and Admiral Kimmel be vindicated of all charges. In this manner perhaps both he and my father may rest in peace.’”

Thus, we see how compelling evidence of the U.S. government’s role in both provoking and permitting the attack on Pearl Harbour is simply ignored by Shalom and Albert. As a result, their commentary on these matters fails to retain any credibility. Thus, they ignore a key example of how the U.S. government and military intelligence infrastructure has in the past deliberately provoked acts of terrorism against U.S. targets, anticipating U.S. casualties, in order to justify military action.

X. Whitewashing the 9/11 Intelligence Failure

Unsurprisingly then, their attempt to support the case for an “incompetence theory” of the 9/11 intelligence failure follows the same method of ignoring the most compelling facts:

“One of the main arguments for foreknowledge of 9-11 is that any rational person looking at the warnings and evidence accumulated by U.S. officials before 9-11 would have concluded that an attack was going to occur. To not have put in motion measures to stop it therefore proves complicity.

“Consider two clues:

“The FAA has a “Red Team” whose job it is to try to smuggle explosives and weapons past airport checkpoints to test airport security. According to Bogdan Dzakovic, a member of the team, airport security failed 90 percent of the tests, but the FAA did nothing about it, essentially blocking further tests.

“A report by the Library of Congress to the National Intelligence Council stated: ‘Suicide bomber belonging to Al Qaeda’s Martyrdom Battalion could crash land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the C.I.A. or the White House.’ 

“These clues would lead some to conclude that the president ‘must have known’: But the ‘president’ who must have known in these cases was Bill Clinton. Dzakovic had his tests squelched in 1998 (Blake Morrison, USA Today, 25 Feb. 2002, pp. A1, A4) and the Library of Congress study was written during the Clinton administration (quoted in William Safire, ‘The Williams Memo,’ New York Times, 20 May 2002, p. A19). So either Clinton too was in on the plot (and his top aides, Gore, Cohen, Albright?) or else it’s possible to have received such reports and still not done anything even though one wasn’t a conspirator.”

It is worth noting that this presentation of the “evidence” is nothing but a laughable straw man. Shalom and Albert thus achieve their objective of construing any consideration of “what Bush knew and when” to be absurd, by presenting as extremely weak a case as possible, and then observing that, of course, the case is extremely weak. But this is simply another vacuous circular argument.

We will here cite just a few documented facts from my more extensive study, The War on Freedom, which demonstrate that the U.S. intelligence community had developed very precise information on the September 11 terrorist attacks prior to those attacks, information which was widely known among U.S. agencies.

So it is clear that the U.S. intelligence community was anxiously anticipating an imminent Al-Qaeda attack in the next few weeks. But that is not all. The specific method of the attacks – using planes as missiles or bombs – was also known by U.S. intelligence. The U.S. intelligence community received warnings six months before 11^th September, warnings which were repeated again three months before that date, that “Middle Eastern terrorists” planned to hijack planes to use as missiles against prominent American buildings. These warnings were not ignored or dismissed. On the contrary, they were taken very seriously by the U.S. intelligence community. Newsbytes, an online division of the Washington Post, reported in mid-September that:

“U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies received warning signals at least three months ago that Middle Eastern terrorists were planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture, according to a story in Germany’s daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ).

The last comment - “Within the American intelligence community, the warnings were taken seriously and surveillance intensified” - is crucial. It clearly indicates that in response to the ECHELON warnings, the entire U.S. intelligence community - all U.S. intelligence agencies - were on alert for a hijacking attempt that would attempt to hurl planes into “symbols of American” culture. So the U.S. intelligence community knew both that an Al-Qaeda attack was imminent, and also that the attack would attempt to use civilian planes as bombs to hit prominent U.S. targets.

John McMurtry cites another revealing piece of evidence indicating specifically that U.S. intelligence had been aware that these targets were located in lower Manhattan – the World Trade Center is of course the most prominent terrorist target in that district, particularly since it had already been targeted in the past by terrorists linked to bin Laden in 1993:

At the same time, U.S. intelligence was aware that suspected terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden were training at U.S. flight schools. The Washington Post reported, for instance, that the FBI had in fact known this for several years - yet, absolutely nothing had been done about it:

“Federal authorities have been aware for years that suspected terrorists with ties to Osama bin Laden were receiving flight training at schools in the United States and abroad, according to interviews and court testimony… A senior government official yesterday acknowledged law enforcement officials were aware that fewer than a dozen people with links to bin Laden had attended U.S. flight schools.”^[49]

All this information was widely known in the U.S. intelligence community. U.S. intelligence operatives were fully aware of their dire implications. But they were forced into a state of inaction by the studious passivity of Washington. One active FBI counter-terrorism investigator, for instance, testifies that it was widely known “all over the Bureau, how these [warnings] were ignored by Washington...

David Schippers himself told me in an interview that according to his contacts in the intelligence community, who had approached him in May 2001 about an impending Al-Qaeda attack from the air on lower Manhattan, “there are others all over the country who are frustrated, and just waiting to come out.” The frustration of these intelligence officers, Schippers explained, was because of the obstructions of a “bureaucratic elite in Washington short-stopping information,” with the consequence that they have granted “terrorism a free reign in the United States.”

All this data, and much more, is extensively discussed in The War on Freedom. What is clear from this data is that it is wrong to assume that one agency had one bit of information, another agency had another, and due to incompetence either the information was not taken seriously or it was not connected, or both. On the contrary, the entire U.S. intelligence community was alerted to the relevant information, and took it seriously. Given that the White House Counterterrorism Security Group, coordinating the findings of all federal agencies, was working incessantly on the Al-Qaeda plot prior to 9/11, this is not surprising.

A few weeks prior to September 11^th 2001, the intelligence community thus anticipated: an imminent Al-Qaeda terrorist attack on U.S. soil; the hijacking of civilian planes to be used as missiles to target iconic structures symbolic of American power; the targeting of buildings in lower Manhattan. But preventive action in response to this precise information – such as apprehending Al-Qaeda operatives at U.S. flight schools - was blocked from Washington.

Unfortunately, Shalom and Albert are only able to argue their case by refusing to conduct a meaningful analysis of the relevant facts. By keeping their “analysis” within a bubble of theory rooted in false assumptions, they attempt to justify why “the left” should remain within the same bubble and not bother looking at the facts and their implications. Once again, this only shows that as commentators on the September 11 attacks, they retain no credibility, since they have no significant grasp of the related data. While they rightly criticise the automatic “Obviously the World Trade Center attack was a U.S. government hoax”-conspiracy-bandwagon, they fall into the opposite extreme of uncritically buying into the official 9/11 narrative of ‘Obviously the World Trade Center attack was not foiled because of U.S. incompetence.’ The reality is far more complex. Picking and choosing one’s facts according to what conveniently fits into the pre-established framework of one’s pre-determined “conspiracy theory” or “institutional theory”, is simply a recipe for being alienated from the real world.

XI. Missing the Point

The rest of Shalom and Albert’s analysis continues to studiously miss the point, as usual by ignoring facts in an effort to justify why “the left” should also not bother to investigate the facts. They attempt to take on, for example, 9/11 “conspiracy theories” about President Bush allowing the attacks to go ahead by ensuring that the U.S. Air Force failed to respond on time. But they do not even attempt to assess the principal anomalies surrounding this whole issue, which have led many commentators to conclude that the official, magical, all-explanatory, undefined, catch-phrase “incompetence” is not sufficient to explain the scale of the breakdown of U.S. defence measures on September 11. The principal anomaly has, once again, been aptly and concisely articulated by Professor McMurtry:

Veteran journalist George Szamuely – former editorial writer for The Times, The Spectator, and the Times Literary Supplement; as well as an associate at the Manhattan Institute, editor at Freedom House, research consultant at the Hudson Institute, and a contributor to Commentary, American Spectator, National Review, the Wall Street Journal, National Interest, American Scholar among many others – pinpoints the fundamental problem in the official narrative with further elaboration:

In this context, the official “incompetence theory” of this inexplicable lack of adherence to mandatory standard operating procedures on the part of the National Military Command Center begins to fall apart. Award-winning Canadian journalist and media analyst Barry Zwicker - former correspondent for the Toronto Sun and the Globe and Mail, and currently a media critic on CBC-TV, CTV’s News1, and Vision TV - observes:

“Throughout the northeastern United States are many air bases. But that morning no interceptors respond in a timely fashion to the highest alert situation. This includes the Andrews squadrons which have the longest lead time and are 12 miles from the White house.

Similar concerns apply to the official version of Osama bin Laden’s relationship to the United States. Instead of taking note of anomalies suggesting that the U.S. relationship to Osama is far more complex than the conventional wisdom would have us believe, Shalom and Albert ridicule simplistic straw man fallacies such as that bin Laden’s “former ties to the U.S… reveal the secret roots of a conspiracy.”

“The intercepts depict a regime increasingly corrupt, alienated from the country’s religious rank and file, and so weakened and frightened that it has brokered its future by channelling hundreds of millions of dollars in what amounts to protection money to fundamentalist groups that wish to overthrow it.”

President George W. Bush had, for example, blocked intelligence investigations into Saudi terror connections prior to September 11. Here are just two credible press reports on this matter. BBC Newsnight reported high-level blocks on U.S. investigations into bin Laden-related terror connections, based on what appear to be attempts to protect U.S. corporate interests - including the fact that President Bush Jnr.’s fortune was built on doing business with the Saudi bin Laden family:

Bush Jr.’s order to “back off” the bin Laden family and Saudi royals followed previous orders dating back to 1996 – the year when Saudi funding of Al-Qaeda was uncovered - frustrating efforts to investigate the latter. The London Guardian has elaborated that: “FBI and military intelligence officials in Washington say they were prevented for political reasons from carrying out full investigations into members of the Bin Laden family in the U.S. before the terrorist attacks of September 11…

There is little doubt then that the Bush administration is effectively conniving with the Saudi support of Al-Qaeda terrorism, by allowing it to continue and even worse, actively protecting it from investigation by repeatedly obstructing U.S. intelligence inquiries. There are dire implications here that need to be investigated, perhaps in terms of the role international terrorism might play in providing a pretext for foreign and domestic policies, where otherwise a pretext could not be found. Is that why successive U.S. administrations tolerate the financial support of Al-Qaeda by their key clients? To what extent does the web of strategic and economic interests behind the decision-making structure responsible for U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East lead successive administrations to form and protect regional alliances which are intrinsically unstable, despite knowing the domestic consequences and dangers in terms of international terrorism? Again, even a cursory inspection of a few relevant facts clarifies the legitimacy and necessity of this line of inquiry, and demonstrates that questioning the official narrative about the relationship between bin Laden and the U.S. is perfectly reasonable.

Shalom and Albert move on from this to tackle the question of “looking at who benefits to see who must be responsible – doesn’t that imply conspiracy?…

“First of all, we know from mystery writers that there is often more than one suspect with a motive. Does the U.S. government gain from 9-11? Yes. Does Israel? Yes. But what about Russia (which now has a freer hand in Chechnya)? Yes also. How about China? Yes, also, with its free hand in Xinjiang, and the far lower likelihood that the United States will try to isolate it. If one goes through history and uncritically and mechanically applies the ‘who benefits?’ principle, one finds it a poor guide to understanding.”

Their attempt here to equate “looking at who benefits to see who must be responsible” with a penchant held by “mystery writers” is disingenuous. As they themselves admit, looking at who benefits is “often useful, but hardly definitive”. But if we are at all mildly interested in understanding 9/11, then we will have to therefore admit the usefulness of asking the question “who benefits?”, and therefore the usefulness of analysing specific evidence for whether the prime beneficiaries contributed to the crime from they benefited. But Shalom and Albert sidestep that implication by equating the “who benefits?” principle with conspiratorial mystery writing. Indeed, no one is claiming that “who benefits?” as an isolated principle is automatically an all-explanatory catchphrase for all historical phenomena! Again, as usual Shalom and Albert fail to deal with the essentials of the argument and hence only refute another pathetic straw man.

In fact, “who benefits?” is a standard forensic question that is used by law enforcement officials when investigating a crime, in the attempt to isolate the main suspects. Of course, this forensic principle is not used to solve the crime, and therefore not definitive! But it is used as at least one basic criterion of gathering a legitimate/likely list of suspects to be investigated. There is nothing irrational, conspiratorial, or mysterious about this entirely normal method of initial forensic inquiry. Based on that method, it is reasonable to investigate the role of the Bush administration and the U.S. military-corporate complex, if any, in the September 11 attacks, with an open and impartial attitude – since they are the most direct, primary beneficiaries.

Shalom and Albert also fail to acknowledge that the issue of who benefits from 9/11 does provide a plausible explanation of why the Bush administration would refuse to act on accurate intelligence of an impending Al-Qaeda attack (an issue which they refuse to analyse in any meaningful manner). It is of course possible that they did not anticipate the extent of the destruction the 9/11 attacks would cause, as McMurtry notes:

Rather, Shalom and Albert present the forensic principle of “who benefits?” as if it is offered as the only piece of evidence that “implies conspiracy”. In fact, this standard forensic principle gives us a good reason to ask the question of whether the most immediate and direct beneficiaries – the Bush administration and the U.S. military-industrial complex – of the 9/11 attacks were in some way involved in those attacks.

In other words, it gives us good reason to begin an investigation into the subject, rather than fanatically dismiss the issue without any serious consideration, as Shalom and Albert do, and ask “the left” to do. Most crucially, the key point that they ignore is that the “who benefits?” principle, connected to the available data indicating that the Washington political echelon refused to act on accurate intelligence on the impending Al-Qaeda attack, provides a plausible explanation of that studious inaction, both prior to 9/11 and on the very day of the attacks.

That indeed is the assessment of leading U.S. intelligence expert Tyrone Powers, a former FBI Special Agent specialising in counterterrorism - now Professor of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice at Anne Arundel County Community College and Director of the Institute for Criminal Justice, Legal Studies and Public Service. I corresponded with Powers about the 9/11 intelligence failure in the aftermath of the recent controversy on Capitol Hill about “what Bush knew, when”. He told me that in his view, based on the facts that have recently surfaced on the public record, there was “credible information from the FBI, CIA and foreign intelligence services that an attack was imminent”. The information indicated that an Al-Qaeda hijacking attempt was probable. But no measures were enforced by the Bush administration – such as increasing security measures at airports in accordance with long-standing recommendations – to prevent such hijackings.

Powers puts this in context with what he describes as the “consequentialism” inherent to the decision making process of leaders, which he has witnessed firsthand in his intelligence and counter-intelligence background: “... on occasion, [damaging] acts are allowed if in the minds of the decision-makers, they will lead to ‘greater good’,” and as long as the damage is contained within certain limits. Powers further refers to a variety of combined institutional influences and issues: pressure on intelligence agencies to vastly reduce their powers; concern over the “blowback” from the controversies of the Presidential election; the desire on the part of elements of the intelligence community to “reconstitute the CIA” after its perceived “emasculation by the Clinton administration”; the belief among these elements that such a reconstitution required “a need, a demand and a free hand that would be given by a democratic Congress [only] if there was a National outcry”. He then told me that: “My experience tells me that these incidents would have reached the level at which the ‘consequentialism’ thought process would have been made a real option” - in other words, that elements of the intelligence community and the administration may have deliberately failed to act in the belief that the resultant damage would contribute to a “greater good”, providing a pretext for such policies as the reconstitution of the CIA. However, Powers emphasises that this policy would have been the result of a “miscalculation” - a failure to anticipate the extent of this damage: “But the amount of destruction wrought on a civilian population shocked even the advocates of this policy.” 

If a U.S. intelligence expert of Powers’ standing believes that this is a more plausible explanation of the available facts than the “incompetence theory”, how can Shalom and Albert dismiss it as not “remotely interesting, much less plausible”? Their stance is simply irrational.

Conclusions

The rest of the comments made by Shalom and Albert in their ‘ZNet Instructional’ are rooted in the body of fallacies, mistaken assumptions, vacuous analysis, and avoidance of facts that they amass in their previous observations. The fundamental problem with their work, and with the work of others who adopt the same frame of ideas, is that they do not appear to have any sort of handle on the facts – nor do they appear to have any “interest” in analysing them, basically due to their fundamental faith in the accuracy of the official 9/11 narrative.

Starting from the effective assumption that they know that Bush did not know, they attempt to convince “the left” that therefore we should not bother investigating the matter. The same circular principle is applied wholesale to every other gaping hole in the official 9/11 narrative. This, of course, does not do ZNet – an otherwise brilliant social justice resource – nor anyone else for that matter, any justice. As we have seen above, even a cursory inspection of the facts suffices to show that investigating the U.S. government role in relation to the September 11 terrorist attacks is a legitimate line of inquiry.