9/11 – A Cheap Magic Trick

There are many links between Israeli operatives and 9/11. One of the most important is that of an Israeli-owned company called International Consultants on Targeted Security (ICTS) International N.V.

ICTS is a Netherlands-based aviation and transportation security firm headed by former Israeli military commanding officers and veterans of government intelligence and security agencies.

ICTS was responsible for airport security at three of the four airports that the hijacked airlines departed from on 9/11.

UAL Flight 175 and AA 11, which struck the twin towers in New York, both originated at Logan International Airport in Boston, while UAL 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, departed from Newark International airport.

(The plane that purportedly hit the Pentagon left from Dulles International airport. Their security was handled by Securacom. The same company in charge of electronic security at the World Trade Center towers and the same company with Marvin Bush on its board of directors.)

Click here to read more.

No videos were ever released showing the hijackers boarding the planes in Boston or Newark. Nor did any of the passenger lists on the hijacked planes include any Arab names. Further, after the FBI released the names of the supposed hijackers, several of them showed up alive and well. Click here for article. Yet the government has never changed its story about who was on those planes.

The dastardly shoe bomber Richard Reid.

The underwear bomber

Since 9/11, ICTS has been involved in other incidents involving ‘terrorists’. Richard Reid, the ’shoe bomber’, was allowed by ICTS to board a plane at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris and fly to Miami in December 2001. More recently, America was subject to the underwear bomber who boarded a plane in the Netherlands and flew to the US on Christmas day. ICTS was again in charge of security at the airport and failed to detect any explosives.

So this is what is has come to. In an effort to terrorize the American public and set up a police state, mentally ill, drugged up patsies get flown in to threaten Americans with the equivalent of firecrackers.

Booo.

America has a history of going to war. Often the incidents that triggered these wars were staged events designed to mobilize public opinion and whip up the bloodlust needed to fight them. This short video offers examples of how many times Americans have been tricked into fighting a war on behalf of America’s ruling class.

By Pepe Escobar
Sep 11, 2009

It’s September 11 all over again – eight years on. The George W Bush administration is out. The “global war on terror” is still on, renamed “overseas contingency operations” by the Barack Obama administration. Obama’s “new strategy” – a war escalation – is in play in AfPak. Osama bin Laden may be dead or not. “Al-Qaeda” remains a catch-all ghost entity. September 11 – the neo-cons’ “new Pearl Harbor” – remains the darkest jigsaw puzzle of the young 21st century.

It’s useless to expect US corporate media and the ruling elites’ political operatives to call for a true, in-depth investigation into the attacks on the US on September 11, 2001. Whitewash has been the norm. But even establishment highlight Dr Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski, a former national security advisor, has admitted to the US Senate that the post-9/11 “war on terror” is a “mythical historical narrative”.

The following questions, some multi-part – and most totally ignored by the 9/11 Commission – are just the tip of the immense 9/11 iceberg. A hat tip goes to the indefatigable work of 911truth.org; whatreallyhappened.com; architects and engineers for 9/11 truth; the Italian documentary Zero: an investigation into 9/11; and Asia Times Online readers’ e-mails.

None of these questions has been convincingly answered – according to the official narrative. It’s up to US civil society to keep up the pressure. Eight years after the fact, one fundamental conclusion is imperative. The official narrative edifice of 9/11 is simply not acceptable.

Fifty questions

1) How come dead or not dead Osama bin Laden has not been formally indicted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as responsible for 9/11? Is it because the US government – as acknowledged by the FBI itself – has not produced a single conclusive piece of evidence?

2) How could all the alleged 19 razor-blade box cutter-equipped Muslim perpetrators have been identified in less than 72 hours – without even a crime scene investigation?

3) How come none of the 19’s names appeared on the passenger lists released the same day by both United Airlines and American Airlines?

4) How come eight names on the “original” FBI list happened to be found alive and living in different countries?

5) Why would pious jihadi Mohammed Atta leave a how-to-fly video manual, a uniform and his last will inside his bag knowing he was on a suicide mission?

Click here for the rest of the 50 questions.
Click here for another 20 questions.

SEC SECRET PROBE OF STOCK DEALINGS BEFORE 9/11

Between August 26 and September 11, 2001, a group of speculators, identified by the American Securities and Exchange Commission as Israeli citizens, sold “short” a list of 38 stocks that could reasonably be expected to fall in value as a result of the pending attacks. These speculators operated out of the Toronto, Canada and Frankfurt, Germany, stock exchanges and their profits were specifically stated to be “in the millions of dollars.”

Short selling of stocks involves the opportunity to gain large profits by passing shares to a friendly third party, then buying them back when the price falls. Historically, if this precedes a traumatic event, it is an indication of foreknowledge. It is widely known that the CIA uses the Promis software to routinely monitor stock trades as a possible warning sign of a terrorist attack or suspicious economic behavior. A week after the Sept.11 attacks, the London Times reported that the CIA had asked regulators for the Financial Services Authority in London to investigate the suspicious sales of millions of shares of stock just prior to the terrorist acts. It was hoped the business paper trail might lead to the terrorists.

Investigators from numerous government agencies are part of a clandestine but official effort to resolve the market manipulations There has been a great deal of talk about insider trading of American stocks by certain Israeli groups both in Canada and Germany between August 26 and the Sept.11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Lynne Howard, a spokeswoman for the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), stated that information about who made the trades was available immediately. “We would have been aware of any unusual activity right away. It would have been triggered by any unusual volume. There is an automated system called ‘blue sheeting,’ or the CBOE Market Surveillance System, that everyone in the business knows about. It provides information on the trades – the name and even the Social Security number on an account – and these surveillance systems are set up specifically to look into insider trading. The system would look at the volume, and then a real person would take over and review it, going back in time and looking at other unusual activity.”

Howard continued, “The system is so smart that even if there is a news event that triggers a market event it can go back in time, and even the parameters can be changed depending on what is being looked at. It’s a very clever system and it is instantaneous. Even with the system, though, we have very experienced and savvy staff in our market-regulations area who are always looking for things that might be unusual. They’re trained to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Even if it’s offshore, it might take a little longer, but all offshore accounts have to go through U.S. member firms – members of the CBOE – and it is easily and quickly identifiable who made the trades. The member firm who made the trades has to have identifiable information about the client under the ‘Know Your Customer’ regulations (and we share all information with the Securities and Exchange Commission.)”

Click here to read the rest of the article.

Click here for a different article on this subject.

A security company, formerly named Securacom and now named Stratesec, provided electronic security for the World Trade Center, Dulles International Airport, and United Airlines on 9/11.

George W. Bush’s brother, Marvin Bush, sat on the board of directors of the company.

The company was backed by an investment firm, the Kuwait-American Corp., also linked for years to the Bush family.

Its CEO, Barry McDaniel, said the company had a “completion contract” to handle some of the security at the World Trade Center “up to the day the buildings fell down.” Click here to read more.

Prior to the destruction of the WTC on 9/11, there were many ‘modernization projects’ going on in the buildings. This included fireproofing and working on the steel columns inside the elevator shafts of the two buildings struck by planes.

One survivor of the the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers was Scott Forbes, an IT Specialist.

In the video clip below he describes the odd noises, dust, and renovations that occurred in the months prior to the destruction of the WTC towers. He also discusses the unprecedented power down the weekend before the 9/11 attacks.

When he later tried to report all this to the government, they were uninterested in his testimony.

On 9/11 we were led to believe that American Airlines Flight 77 was hijacked by terrorists and flown into the Pentagon. This was said to have occurred at approximately 9:43 am.

What makes this story impossible to believe are the following facts:

The Department of Defense was aware that there had been multiple hijackings that morning and that two planes had already been flown into the World Trade Center Towers – one at 8:45 am and the other at 9:03 am. Yet the DOD took no measures to protect the Pentagon or Washington DC from attack.

The Pentagon also has its own defenses, including its own anti-aircraft batteries, but none of them was activated that morning.

Andrews Air Force Base is only 10 minutes from the Pentagon with fighter jets at the ready 24/7, but none of them was scrambled to protect the Pentagon or any part of Washington DC.

According to testimony given to Congress by Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, Dick Cheney was monitoring the plane headed for the Pentagon yet he gave no orders to intercept it.

The Pentagon had been rehearsing just such a scenario for at least a year prior to 9/11, but no defensive measures were taken once they were aware that hijackings had taken place.

The purported hijacker of Flight 77, Hani Hanjour, was a terrible pilot who could barely fly a single engine Cessna. Yet he is credited with being able to do amazing acrobatics with a Boeing jet before hitting the Pentagon at ground level without so much as scraping the lawn.

Aside from all these impossibilities, there are more definitive problems that cannot be explained away by the government. Pilots for 9/11 Truth obtained the black box data for Flight 77 and did their own analysis. Their findings were that:

a. The NTSB Flight Path Animation approach path and altitude did not support official events.

b. All Altitude data showed the aircraft at least 300 feet too high to have struck the light poles.

c. The rate of descent data was in direct conflict with the aircraft being able to impact the light poles and be captured in the Dept of Defense “5 Frames” video of an object traveling nearly parallel with the Pentagon lawn.

d. The record of data stops at least one second prior to official impact time.

e. If data trends were continued, the aircraft altitude would have been at least 100 feet too high to have hit the Pentagon.

Click here to read their report.

So what really caused the damage at the Pentagon? Were explosives placed inside the Pentagon that went off a few seconds before the plane approached the Pentagon? Did the plane then fly into the smoke and over the building thus creating the illusion that the plane had hit the building? At the same time was a missile or a drone used to create the desired external damage to the building?

We still don’t know definitively what hit the Pentagon but we do know that the official story is bunk.

Size of a real jet engine

Engine parts at the Pentagon

The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was an American think tank based in Washington, D.C. that lasted from early 1997 to 2006.

It was co-founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan.

In September 2000, they published a controversial 90-page report entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For a New Century.

Signatories to the document included : Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Bill Bennett, Elliott Abrams, Gary Bauer, Eliot Cohen, Steve Forbes, Lewis Libby, Norman Podhoretz, Dan Quayle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Charles Krauthammer, Rich Lowry, Ellen Bork, Linda Chavez, Frank Gaffney, John McCain, Richard Perle, and Dov Zakheim among others.

The report laid out four core principles to turn America into an empire. An empire that would exercise “full spectrum dominance” primarily through the use of its military. The four core principles were:

To significantly increase defense spending,

To strengthen ties to democratic allies and challenge regimes hostile to American interests and values,

To promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad; and

To accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to its security, prosperity, and principles.

One section of the report was particularly prescient. Section V of the report includes the following sentence:

“Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor”.

Luckily for them, one year later Bush and his PNAC cronies had their new Pearl Harbor on September 11, 2001.

Another one of the mysteries of 9/11 is the missing black boxes from the airplanes that hit the World Trade Center towers. (The boxes are actually orange.)

Normally these are always recovered from plane crashes and are used to help determine what caused the accident.

In the case of 9/11, however, the FBI maintains that they were never recovered.

But Mike Bellone and Nicholas DeMasi, two volunteers who helped with the rescue efforts at the World Trade Center, tell a different story. They assisted in finding three of the four flight and data cockpit recorders. Later they were told to keep quiet about their finds by the FBI.

According to an article in the American Free Press.

Those close to the 9-11 investigation said the recovery of the “black boxes” is important because they may hold vital clues about what really happened on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

The cockpit voice recorder uses a pair of microphones to capture all cockpit sounds for the last 30 minutes of a doomed flight. The flight data recorder is also significant since it records altitude, heading and airspeed.

Both recorders are designed to withstand enormous impact and heat. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) officials said they should have withstood the conditions at the WTC.

Books written about the rescue efforts repeat the testimony of DeMasi that the black boxes were found and those who helped find them were silenced.

Since the data recorders have a story to tell, the only reason they are being hidden is because they contain a different version of events than what we have been told by the government. You can read more here.

Aside from Osama Bin Laden, our ever present yet elusive enemy is a group called Al Qaeda (variously spelled Al Queda or Al Qaida). They, under the direction of Bin Laden, are blamed for the 9/11 attacks.

Al Qaeda is always portrayed in the media as a worldwide network of Muslim fanatics who attack us because ‘they hate our freedom’. Oddly enough, their attacks always seem to get linked back to oil rich countries that we have to invade.

For example, shortly after George Bush became President, negotiations began between US officials and the Taliban to construct an oil pipeline across Central Asia. The pipeline was to bring oil from Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. However negotiations broke down and according to one witness:

”At one moment during the negotiations, the U.S. representatives told the Taliban, ‘either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs’. ”

You can read the complete article here.

Five weeks before 9/11 occurred, negotiations with the Taliban came to a standstill. After 9/11, blame was placed on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda who were said to be holed up in Afghanistan. On October 7, 2001 the US invaded Afghanistan although Bin Laden was nowhere to be found. Right after 9/11 Bush promised to get Bin Laden, dead or alive. But at a March 13, 2002 press conference, Bush said, “I am truly not that concerned about him.”

Following the Afghanistan invasion, the American public was on the receiving end of yet another media blitz – this time demonizing Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, who was said to have weapons of mass destruction. While no weapons of mass destruction were ever found, that wasn’t enough to save him from a death warrant after he threatened to start trading oil in euros instead of dollars.

In March of 2003, the US and its ‘coalition of the willing’ pulverized Iraq. The occupying forces then divided up the country’s oil reserves and in the process murdered up to a million Iraqis. Saddam Hussein, who had been placed in power by the CIA, was hunted down, given a show trial, and then hung.

In 2008 Bush turned his attention to Pakistan by sending troops to that country. In 2009 Obama continued what Bush had started by expanding the number of troops in Pakistan because of the presence of the dreaded “Al Qaeda”.

So what is Al Queda and where did the come from? According to a TV special aired by the BBC, they don’t exist and never did. Instead what is called Al Queda is nothing more than a ragtag group of dissidents who, in all probability, are in the pay of the CIA and other foreign intelligence groups linked to the CIA.

Even the former Former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook denied the existence of Al Queda. In a statement he commented:

“The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the ‘devil’ only in order to drive the TV watcher to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US . . .”

Idealized Cell Phone Coverage for a Typical Cellular Tower

However there are several problems with these alleged calls. One is that cells phones don’t work at high altitudes and many of the hijacked airliners didn’t have seatback phones.

So the question arises as to how the calls were made or if they were made at all.

There is also an oddity in that most of the reported callers in the hijacked jets were calm and collect and people on the other end of the line heard little or no background noise. During most of the calls, they didn’t hear other passengers talking or crying or screaming even though they were in the middle of an extremely stressful event. (Read more by clicking here.)

On Flight 11, for example, calls were purportedly made by two flight attendants. Those receiving the calls reported both flight attendants as being very calm. One flight attendant said Mace spray had been used and complained of not being able to breathe. According to a report in The New York Times, she “could not have sounded much calmer.”

On Flight 175 three people reportedly made phone calls. One flight attendant made a call but his composure was unremarked upon. The other callers either talked to someone directly or left a message. In both cases the caller was calm and composed.

Two people were supposed to have made calls from Flight 77: a flight attendant and Barbara Olson. Olson was the wife of Ted Olson, then US solicitor general. He stated that she made two phone calls to him.

According to Olson, his wife “sounded very, very calm. … In retrospect, enormously, remarkably, incredibly calm.” However at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui in 2006, the FBI admitted that no completed calls were made by Barbara Olson to her husband. So either Olson was duped or he lied about the calls.

On flight 93, 12 passengers were said to have made phone calls. Most of the callers were described as being calm and there was little or no background noise in the majority of the calls which is remarkable considering what the government later told us was taking place aboard the hijacked airliner.

In this video clip, David Ray Griffin discusses the problems with the purported cell phone calls on 9/11.

So how to account for these seemingly phantom cell phone calls? One suggestion is that the Department of Defense used voice morphing technology to simulate the voices of people on the planes. To do so they would have needed a voice sample of some of those aboard the planes and contact phone numbers.

This voice morphing technology was actually demonstrated in 1999 and was discussed in an article published in the Washington Post. Click here to read it.

Is this how family members and co-workers were fooled?

You can read a detailed accounting of these phone calls in this recent article by David Ray Griffin.