September 10, 2002 (Tuesday),
Key West (Florida)

Arrived back at Key West at 10:33 p.m. last night. I have driven 4,765 miles in the three weeks.

TOMORROW IS September 11. I have thought a lot about the events of that day since switching on the television in Iowa on that morning last year, and seeing the horrific, fascinating events unfold: the Pentagon crash-bombed, huge skyscraper towers collapsing like concertinas, the second one with an almost beautiful symmetry as the air compressed by each descending floor puffed plumes of debris, dust, and wreckage out to every side.

Even as I listened to the television that day, and took down staccato notes of each bulletin released to us by an as yet uncensored media, I became conscious of a mounting skepticism about the events.

That skepticism has only increased as the weeks and months passed. Being the webmaster of a site which ranks among the top 44,000 of the world, I have had the advantage of being the focal point of the unbelievers, infidels in their own way, who have deluged me with their own viewpoints, or links to articles and investigative news stories in little-known local newspapers (the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is one shining example). And thereby hangs the point of what I am now writing.

Let nobody impugn the courage of the officers and men who, as the word now has it, ran into the Twin Towers when everybody else was rushing out: the firemen, and the officers of the New York police department. A Hundsfott who suggests that that is the purpose of the words that follow!

AS GREAT as were the professionalism and sacrifice of those officers, so great is the cowardice of the American journalists of both print and broadcast media in failing to follow up the leads which have glared at them from all around.

I have always been a great admirer of American journalism. Articles in The Los Angeles Times or the newspapers of the Knight Ridder Group, for example, far outclass any of the writing that I can find in their European counterparts.

One of the pleasures of getting off the plane in Miami, apart from being hit in the face by the hot wet flannel that Florida calls a climate, is picking up for 35 cents a copy of The Miami Herald: and occasionally even the Herald has not failed us -- as when it reported, many months ago, on Oct. 31, that six men driving three sedans had been picked up by police in the mid-West and found to be carrying maps of Florida nuclear power plants and other installations, and Israeli passports; but that they were released soon after, when Immigration & Naturalization Service headquarters confirmed that the papers were genuine; and that the F.B.I was furious upon hearing this, and demanded their rearrest, only to hear they had probably escaped into Canada. And that the next day John Ashcroft, the attorney general, said that the whole story was untrue…

The story has not just disappeared from the newspapers, like those Israelis caught cheering and videotaping the collapsing buildings from the top of a truck in New Jersey (they were imprisoned for a while, then quietly deported, and the truck's owners meanwhile did a bunk for, presumably, Israel, having been working all along for The Mossad).

It never happened. Or rather, it has unhappened.

ALL of these strange events are the stuff of which a Franz Kafka or George Orwell novel might be made, but they belong in a loftier realm than the items which have continued to puzzle me all year long. Of which, more below.

What has disturbed me is the readiness of the journalists to gobble up every strand of propaganda spaghetti that their fear-crazed government has fed to them. Are they frightened of being accused of a lack of patriotism?

See how that word has now been abused and exploited by the government, like all the other derogatory p-words from pedophilia and pornography to now, well, president. (I predicted to friends at Cincinnati over a week ago that President George W Bush would soon declare Sept.11 a national day, and call it "Patriot Day," and events have not proved me wrong.)

The fundamental and perhaps fateful step that Washington has taken has been to hide from public view, and even deny, the punitive nature of the attack (with the obvious corollary that it was a one-off spectacular: and there will be no more).

The character-building British public school education, with all the beatings that went with it in the 1950s, taught me at least that an essential part of being an adult was to take punishment like a man, without yelping.

Tomorrow, Sept. 11, 2002, is going to be one day-long Washington and media yelp, all over again -- an act of national denial.

The self-evident truth is that the Muslims, allegedly under the leadship of one Mohammed Atta (left) carried out this fearsomely intrepid attack on the Twin Towers -- eight men bringing down all seven buildings of the World Trade Center -- and on the Pentagon because of the blind United States support of Israel despite the latter's criminal and repressive policies in the Middle East; or because of the presence of the American infidels on hallowed Muslim ground in Saudi Arabia, a presence motivated purely by greed for the region's oil treasures; or both.

Even Abraham Foxman, the unlovable director of the Anti-Defamation League, admits that he shuddered at the prospect of the increased anti-Semitic feelings that the attacks were sure to generate.

He did not shudder for long. It has not happened. Instead the Americans now surely believe that a weird Middle Eastern mystic called Osama bin Laden, of whom they had not hitherto been told, had plotted to destroy their cherished freedoms. Never has a lie been so swiftly crafted and so blatantly and often retold. The propaganda management of the post-Sept.11 epoch has been magnificent, and I hope we are one day allowed to learn the name of this new American Dr Joseph Goebbels.

American journalists are however not the American public. It is their sacred national duty to investigate what really happened and why. In this they have -- with a very few honorable exceptions -- failed. Discretion has got the better of what little valour they might have succumbed to.

Let me make plain here that I do not for a moment subscribe to the more lunatic theories vapored around the Internet. Carol Valentine has suggested that there were no humans aboard the planes, and that they were steered by remote control into the buildings no doubt by Mossad agents. Other messages sent to me try to persuade me that powerful explosives were used to pre-detonate the buildings just before each plane hit. Another ingenious theory has it that there was no plane at all that hit the Pentagon -- it was a missile.

I am not pleased that correspondents have sent me such items as these. Assuming that they are not agents provocateurs inserted into the entire 9/11 debate in order to discredit it entirely, it implies that they think my brain is completely addled, and it is not.

During my five thousand mile drive around the country these last three weeks, my weary braincells have however pondered a number of evident flaws in these strands of propaganda-spaghetti.

WE ARE told that the passengers made calls on their cellphones to their next of kin (indeed, we learn that the hijackers on United Airlines 93 actually invited passengers to do so, a fact which tests my credulity to the extreme). Question: Do commercial cellphones work at that altitude, inside the metal box of airplanes? I don't know, I am merely asking. Driving across Tennessee, I found my Sprint phone went dead several times at ground level. Or were the passengers using the seatback payphones?

Perhaps that does not matter. This does: According both to my own Arab experts and to a detailed analysis by the main German television channel ARD, the F.B.I. or the Pentagon doctored the translation of the Osama bin Laden television videos before transmission, to insert words and passages indicating that he had prior knowledge of the attacks and masterminded them. (I myself have a suspicion that Mohammed Atta, wherever he is, or the real hijackers' leader, is scratching his head and saying: "Osama bin Who? Who is this guy?") The US journalists have made no mention whatever of this outrageous fakery.

While we are on Arabic documents, consider the Arabic letters which the F.B.I. claimed to have found shortly after the attack. The Washington Post initially described them as consisting of five pages, allegedly written by Mohammed Atta himself: oops, only four have been released by the F.B.I. Internal evidence also shows that one page is missing.

What was on the fifth? The actual reasons for the Muslims' grim punitive expedition? Or errors so blatant that the page had to be scrapped?

Just how authentic are the other four pages? Their actual content makes any Arabic expert wince: under Islamic law, women cannot be killed in war, yet the handwritten "manual" makes no attempt to work around this problem for the hijackers. It even talks of "taking prisoners" and disposing of "loot" (permitted under Islamic law).

Walking the junior team members through the take-off procedure, the letter's author says the plane will "hesitate" before take off, and he uses other language that may seem strange for the trained pilot that Atta had become. The letter also tells the men to make sure their "suits" are in order before boarding the plane. The Arabic word is definitely formal, "suits", but airport closed circuit TV shows the hijackers wearing open neck shirts and slacks as they pass through the boarding gates. The list is too full to go into here, but Eric Mueller went over all the ingredients at his lecture at Cincinnati last week.

Mohammed Atta himself, the alleged ringleader, is an enigma: his father insists his son would never have become involved; his tutor and professor at the university in Hamburg where he studied for many years were shocked, stating that such an act was totally out of character.

We have been shown no handwriting reports by experts comparing the letters found with known samples of his handwriting -- letters to girlfriends and the like. The Hamburg university and police authorities must have obtained many samples of Atta's handwriting in both Arabic and western handwriting. We are told that the C.I.A. had him under surveillance there for a year before he transferred to the USA. Perhaps one conclusion is that the letter or letters were not written by Atta at all, but subsequently foisted onto the F.B.I.

One thing is certain: given the precision with which the four-plane operation was planned, each four-man team would have been identically equipped and would have been following identical plans of operation. Failure was not an option.

We know from an air-to-ground call by one flight attendant that one hijacker aboard one plane had "shot" the Israeli passenger seated directly in front of him (she gave the seat numbers). So there was a gun. If one team had a gun, it follows that each team had a gun.

In fact that is obvious: no four-man team equipped just with the proverbial boxcutters could have guaranteed to seize control a wide body jet laden with up to 250 passengers and crew (the planners had to assume as a worst-case scenario a full load on each plane) unless each team had at least one firearm.

There is no other way that such a small team could have simultaneously neutralized both the passenger cabins and the flight crew on the flight deck. Remember: They could not countenance failure.

So why is the public fed the boxcutter story? The answer may be purely commercial: If the two airlines involved had negligently let guns get onto all four planes, they would be liable in law for damage claims, including the direct loss of the seven buildings, that would bring down the entire U.S. airline industry. (The swiftness with which the government later moved to set a cap on any such claims supports this theory).

We have heard rumours that one member of the team that seized United Airlines flight 93 over Pennsylvania was wearing a bogus American Airlines uniform, and was allowed a seat on the flight deck as a courtesy. If this is true, the same damages considerations would apply. [See reader's letter]

CAPTIVATING theories circulate about the role of The Mossad before and after the catastrophe. Despite the overwhelmingly financial character of the World Trade Center, it is startling but true that only one Israeli was killed that morning (originally the figure was thought to be as much as three); there may be a statistical explanation -- e.g. that they held dual citizenship, and are listed under their alternative citizenship. But the cowardly U.S. media have drawn a discreet veil over this anomaly as well.

A tip-off seems an unlikely explanation: Like all conspiracy theories, it trips up at the consideration that too many people would have had to be in the know.

There are however major isolated anomalies that still seek an explanation, e.g. that the half Israeli-government owned shipping firm Zim quit its premises high up in one of the Twin Towers, expensively breaking its lease, just a week before the disaster and refuses to explain why.

Another Israeli tenant-firm in the building admitted openly in the media the next day that it had received warning emails from Israel an hour or two before the attack; it passed them on to The Mossad, their own Intelligence service, before the attack, but did not inform the FBI until afterwards. So much for patriotism.

I AM not going to pause for even a moment on American Airlines Flight 587, which mysteriously came down in a New York suburb a few days after Sept. 11. Fearful that another terrorist success would ruin the airline industry, the government swiftly moved to crush all speculation.

Eye-witnesses, fifty of them including police officers, who saw a "car-sized" explosion on the fuselage were discounted. As the tail-plane (left) had become detached and landed in the bay some distance away, a female National Transportation Safety Board spokesman at 10:53 p.m. that same evening ended the debate by saying that it was the cockpit voice recorder they have recovered. "Everything tells us that we are proceeding appropriately -- considering it to be an accident."

I wrote down those convoluted and improbable words as she spoke them. The F.A.A.'s own subsequent action disproved that version: Any catastrophic structural failure of an airplane, in this case an Airbus, would have led to a grounding of the entire worldwide fleet of that airplane type until the defect had been diagnosed and remedied. No such recall was issued, so the F.A.A. did not believe its own version.

Far more bothersome is the crash of (Todd Beamer: "Let's roll!") United Airlines 93. The evidence is sad: It suggests that Beamer's little crew probably succeeded in recapturing the airliner from the hijackers, only to be shot out of the sky by a US fighter plane acting on presidential orders.

The government's version is, ahem, different: No missile fired, but the plane diving vertically into the ground at Shanksville, intact, with the heroes still battling the hijackers in the cockpit, determined to save the White House and Bush's staff if not his exalted skin. (The evidence now provided by al-Jazeera, if it can be believed, is that this plane's target for punishment was the U.S. Capitol, as I suspected all along: the White House would be a difficult, if not impossible target to identify and destroy with certainty.)

The evidence for a shoot-down is formidable: One engine was found 2,000 yards away from the crash site; letters over ten miles away, some of them charred with burn holes; eye witnesses saw a fighter plane or planes at the same time; a seismic station nearby recorded a supersonic boom at a time when the government has not admitted, or has actively denied, that warplanes were in the area.

Evidence for a cover up is no less concrete: A passenger made, we are told, the last call from the toilet of United Airlines 93, to a dispatcher on the ground. The caller said first that the plane had been hijacked, repeated that it had been hijacked -- this was not a hoax; and then, that there had been an explosion on the plane and it was full of white smoke. That is what the news media announced an hour later -- I typed it down as they said it.

There is an eight minute gap in the records so far released between that call and the plane hitting the ground at 10:06 a.m., twenty minutes before the North Tower collapsed in New York bringing the attacks to a spectacular finale.

Whether a US fighter plane had first made a pass, as normal shoot-down procedure would require, to establish contact with the flight deck and order it to land immediately, we don't know: Because that part of the tape has been withheld or destroyed.

The F.B.I. has also confiscated the tape of the conversation with the dispatcher, and forbidden her to talk. Could it be because of the caller's remark about an explosion? Had the hijackers carried a bomb on board? Hardly, although that is what Washington at once hinted. None of the other teams carried bombs, and since the objective was to use the planes as manned missiles, to have carried a bomb aboard would have been ridiculous.

The evidence against United 93 having been shot down is more spare, though not entirely inconsiderable. The president has not admitted it. The air force has denied it. Many more people than the pilot would shortly afterward have learned of his deed: Ground crew would have loaded live ammunition into the plane, and would have detected that it had been used when it landed.

But just as the captain of the USS Liberty was rewarded for his silence after his ship was attacked on the high seas with heavy loss of life by the Israelis, and threatened with fierce punishment if he talked, so too these officers and men can have been shown both the carrot and the stick. Told of the Shanksville crash, Bush himself asked Vice President Dick Cheney whether it was a result of the order just given. Cheney's answer was evasive at best.

It remains a mystery to me why Bush did not admit to the action at once, and gain the entire world's sympathy, just as Winston Churchill admitted to attacking the French fleet in July 1940, and derived much strategic capital from the episode. Instead, just like his father, Bush has in my view tangled himself and his closest henchmen in a web of deceit.

His cronies later readily admitted to telling other lies -- the little white lie that they also had evidence that Air Force One, the presidential airplane, was a terrorist target, hence its erratic all-day scamper across country to anywhere but Washington.

The Big Shanksville Lie, if lie it is, is more serious. Son of a famous president who once memorably sneered "read my lips" as a promise not to increase taxation, George W Bush has evidently decided he cannot afford to be caught lying.

The Big Lie remains just that. The techniques are just more subtle. The tapes of the last call from United 93 and of the airliner's cockpit voice recorder are not all that have vanished from public view. No mention of the Twin Towers catastrophe has been made in any television sitcom for the last fifty-two weeks. Unless I am mistaken, the towers have themselves vanished from the background of many a sitcom's title-sequence, e.g. Friends, airbrushed out as craftily as a blemish from a Penthouse model's belly.

Seeing them back in the New York skyline would just anger the Americans, or remind them of this disastrous punishment administered by a grim handful of hellbent men.

There is much other than the propaganda techniques being used that reminds us historians of WW2: The obfuscations, for example, and the comfortable knowledge that the public memory is short.

Even the appointment of Hamid Karzai as a puppet prime minister of the new pro-American Afghanistan smacks of WW2 and the satraps appointed by Adolf Hitler to rule his expanding empire. Karzai's own peoples have seen through him, as the several assassination attempts already testify. In any other scenario he would be called a Quisling. But not by the brave American press.

These are all superficial wonders. The deeper mysteries prevail: Why is George Bush going after the Taliban, since evidence -- real evidence -- linking them with the Sept. 11 attacks is non-existent? And why is that other Quisling, our own prime minister Tony Blair, so frivolously leading my own country to perdition, frolicking along on the U.S. president's shirttails?

There is a possible answer, though an ugly one. I have long suspected, and history may bear me out on this, that both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party in Britain have been simultaneously receiving secret funding from America's Central Intelligence Agency through some suitable front organisation, perhaps an educational trust.

In the real world of politics this is, alas, the way that what Sir Oswald Mosley called "the Old Gang" has always done things. (Mosley himself of course solicited money from both Hitler and Benito Mussolini).

The Conservatives never explained how they suddenly liquidated their £19m bank overdraft a few years back, while still in power; and the Labour party also seems to have solved its financial troubles in a jiffy.

Buy the blind support of an entire country for one tenth the price of a Boeing 767? Cheap at the price. We have seen how venal the British are.

Previous Radical's Diary

The Atlanticist Tendency o the British labour movement (outlink supplied to us after posting of the above)

Robin Ramsay: The influence of Intelligence Services on the British Left (outlink supplied to us after posting of the above)