Twenty More questions on 9/11

THE ROVING EYE
More questions on 9/11
By Pepe Escobar

Osama "dead or alive" bin Laden would rather lose his kidney than pass up the opportunity to celebrate the eighth anniversary of September 11, 2001, on the United States. And like clockwork, he resurfaced in an 11-minute, al-Sahab-produced audiotape last week (sorry, no video, just a still picture), where he states how a series of grievances had "pushed us to undertake the events of [September 11]".

But there may be no mobile dialysis machine operating in a mysterious cave somewhere in one of the Waziristan tribal areas of Pakistan after all. According to David Ray Griffin's new book, Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive? and based on a Taliban leader's remarks at the time, the mellifluous Saudi jihadi died of kidney failure in Tora Bora on December 13, 2001. Problem is, by that time, according to local mujahideen, Bin Laden had already escaped across the mountains with a bunch of al-Qaeda diehards to Parachinar, in Pakistan, and then to a shadowy underworld.

A decoy? A ghost? The devil himself? Who cares? Bin Laden, the brand, is still very good for ("war on terror") business. All this with the Barack Obama administration insisting the US is fighting the elusive, seemingly eternal Taliban leader Mullah Omar and the Taliban plus al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, while General Stanley McChrystal - General David Petraeus' former top death squad operator in Iraq - insists there is no al-Qaeda in Afghanistan (but he wants up to 40,000 extra troops anyway).

Last week, Asia Times Online published Fifty Question on 9/11. The article stressed the questions were only a taste of the immense, mysterious 9/11 riddle. (Arguably the best 9/11 timeline on the net may be seen here.

Due to overwhelming reader response, here's a follow-up with 20 more questions - with a hat-tip to all who joined the debate.

1. In the first months of 2001, three years after Bin Laden's 1998 fatwa against the US, Mullah Omar wanted to "resolve or dissolve" the Osama-Taliban nexus in exchange for Washington maneuvering to lift United Nations sanctions. Would anyone from the first George W Bush administration confirm a solid Taliban offer? Kabir Mohabbat, a Houston-based, Paktia (Afghanistan)-born businessman also involved in the (failed) 1990s negotiation for the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan pipeline, and then named by Bush's National Security Council as a key Taliban contact, has sustained that was the case.

2. Eight names on the "original" Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) list of 19 Muslim hijackers happened to be found alive and living in different countries; the FBI has always sustained that the identity of the hijackers was established from DNA collected at all four sites - the World Trade Center (WTC), the Pentagon and the Shanksville, Pennsylvania, crash site. Would the FBI explain how is that remotely possible?

3. All four planes referenced in the official narrative have thousands of parts with a serial number, plus tail numbers. Any one of these would have been enough to identify the plane(s). How come all of these parts disintegrated or vaporized? Why was not a single one of them recovered and/or matched up with all the mass of data about these four flights?

4. How come cell phones miraculously find a signal and work properly at 10,000 meters?

5. How to explain the enormous surge in "option puts" on both United Airlines and American Airlines on September 10?

6. How come the passport of alleged hijacker Satam al Suqami (and not Mohammed Atta, as reported) was miraculously found amid massive World Trade Center debris - either by "police and FBI" or by "a passerby who gave it to the NYPD", according to different versions?

7.Why was a military grade of thermite - a super-explosive - found at all sample sites surrounding Ground Zero? A peer-reviewed, scientific journal analysis is here.

8. How come Barry Jennings, who worked for New York City's Housing Department, reported on 9/11 to ABC News how he heard an explosion on the 8th floor of WTC 7? Jennings happened to die just a few days before the release of the NIST report on the WTC 7 collapse. A great number of actual 9/11 witnesses also heard and saw explosions going off inside the Twin Towers long before their collapse. A montage of news reports about these explosions can be seen here.

9. Why did the BBC confirm live on air the collapse of the WTC 7 building - which was not even hit by any plane - no less than 23 minutes before it actually collapsed? In the BBC live report, the WTC7 building is shot still standing.

10. Why there has been no investigation of Dov Zakheim? He was a prominent member of the Project for the New American Century group, and chief executive officer of SPC - a company making systems for remote control of airplanes - for four years prior to 9/11. Six months before 9/11, he became supervisor of a group of Pentagon comptrollers responsible for tracking no less than $2.3 trillion missing from the Pentagon books; many of these comptrollers died on 9/11.

11. The "five dancing Israelis" question. How come Oded Ellner, Omer Marmari, Paul Kurzberg, Sivan Kurzberg and Yaron Shmuel had set up a video camera on top of their white van pointing at the Twin Towers even before they were hit? Later they were seen celebrating. The FBI established that two were Mossad agents and that their employer, Urban Moving Systems, was a front operation. The investigation about them was killed by the White House. After being deported from the US, they admitted on Israeli TV that they had been sent to New York to "document" the attacks. How about other reports of vans packed with tons of explosives intercepted on New York bridges?

12. How come two US employees of Odigo, an Israeli instant messaging company based in Herzliya, the headquarters of Mossad, received an SMS about an attack on the WTC two hours before the fact?

13. How come there was no investigation of ICTS International, owned by Ezra Harel and Menachem Atzmon, and crammed with former Israeli Shin Bet agents? This was the company responsible for airport security at Dulles, Logan and Newark airports on 9/11.

14. Why was there no full investigation of the circumstances related to how Larry Silverstein leased the WTC only seven weeks before 9/11 - as facilitated by New York Port Authority chairman Lewis Eisenberg? Silverstein over-insured the WTC against terrorism and made an astonishing profit.

15. Why were anthrax packages mailed to the only two US senators who voted against the Patriot Act?

16. Why did situation room director Deborah Loewer follow Bush to Florida on 9/11 - considering that's not part of her job description?

17. Where are the full tapes from the Pentagon's security cameras? The hole in the Pentagon may be the most glaring hole in the official narrative - as the destruction caused by a Boeing 757 was simply not compatible with the size of the hole. Why were no significant plane debris and remains of passengers ever found?

18. Why did the 9/11 Commission not consult reputed engineers and architects to show that in the real world, steel and concrete skyscrapers simply cannot dissolve into molten metal and fine powder in only 10 seconds after very localized and relatively low-temperature fires? Kerosene simply cannot melt steel.

19. Why did the 9/11 Commission not consult airline specialists who insist trainee pilots who had practiced on very light aircraft for a few weeks simply cannot land a jet on the ground floor of the Pentagon after allegedly slicing through half a dozen light poles and evading a series of trees, cars and overpasses?

20. How come no one investigated claims by the two co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, who wrote in the New York Times on January 2008 that the Central Intelligence Agency "failed to respond to our lawful requests for information about the 9/11 plot [and] obstructed our investigation?"

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

9/11 Commission "played with fire"

Lebanese student pilot Ziad Jarrah, according to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also known as the "911 Commission," was said to have been the pilot of the United Airlines Boeing 757-200 that crashed into the ground near Shanksville, Pennsylvania on the morning of September 11, 2001.

WMR has previously reported that based on numerous sources within the National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, and the U.S. Air Force, United 93 was shot down by the Air Force over Pennsylvania by two F-16s. A Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle was also in the vicinity of the doomed Boeing 757 and crashed where the large passenger plane was reported to have crashed.

In a compendium to the 9/11 Commission report titled, "Terrorist Travel," which contains travel documents allegedly used by the hijackers, a photograph of the U.S. visa of Ziad Jarreh is shown. The visa is said to have survived the crash of the Boeing 757 but miraculously, the fireball from the exploding aircraft managed to save that part of the visa that shows Jarrah's head shot photograph and part of his visa number.

Jarrah was born in Lebanon to Sunni Muslim parents but volunteered much of his time working with disabled and orphaned children at a Catholic school and church. There has been much speculation about whether Jarrah was ever a member of Mohamed Atta's "Hamburg cell" and whether he even boarded United flight 93 on 9/11. His background was remarkably secular.

However, based on videos of questionable origin and the visa from the crash site in Pennsylvania, spared from total obliteration by what can only be described as an "intelligent fire," is all the FBI had to conclude that Jarrah was the hijack team pilot of Flight 93. German authorities never obtained any evidence linking Jarrah to the Hamburg cell of Atta and the other accused hijackers.

Atta's visa (above) and Ziad Jarrah (below). The fire from the explosion of United 93 apparently "stopped on a dime" and left Jarrah's photo and U.S. visa number largely intact, largely proving to the FBI that he was the pilot of the hijacked airliner. All that. of course, if the 9/11 Commission is to be believed. Six out of the nine members of the commission believe that they were lied to and sandbagged by the Bush administration and top government officials. Click here for enlargement.

The following is excerpted from the 9/11 Commission report on the hijackers' travel documents:

May 25 [2000] -- Ziad Jarrah, a native of Lebanon, applied for and received a five-year B-1/B-2 (tourist/business) visa in Berlin. The consular officer who issued the visa could not recall whether he interviewed Jarrah. However, our review of Berlin visa policy for third-country nationals suggests that Jarrah was a strong visa candidate, given his long residence in Germany (approximately four years), academic involvement in Germany (at two universities), and Lebanese nationality. Third-country nationals with more than two0 years of residency in Germany met a threshold for visa approval. The officer who adjudicated his visa has stated that wealthy Lebanese families often send their children to school in Germany as a way to keep them out of the Middle East turmoil, and that Jarrah looked like one of those wealthy expatriates."

Not only was Jarrah a model visa candidate in the eyes of the Berlin consular officer but the visa issued would have a charmed existence, surviving a fiery plane crash to reveal Jarrah's photo and visa number.

And not only did the Berlin consular officer have a faulty memory in his interview of Jarreh but the Lebanese national's visa application was destroyed by the State Department along with those of other hijackers. From page 45 of the 9/11 travel document compendium:

"Of the 23 hijacker visa applications, five were destroyed routinely along with other documents before 9/11 and before their significance was known. The visa applications of Nawaz al Hazmi, Kahlid al Mihdhar (in 1999), Mohamed Atta, Marwan al Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah were destroyed."

The report does not state what "other documents" were destroyed by the State Department prior to 9/11. Nor does the report explain why it was "routine" to destroy visa applications for visitors who were still in the United States.

The report does state that Jarrah's electronic record of Jarrah's visa application still existed at the State Department, along with his photo. Of course, electronic records are easily manipulated. The report states: "DOS record, NIV Applicant Detail of Ziad Jarrah, Nov. 8, 2001. Jarrah's original visa application was destroyed, but an electronic record, including his photograph, remains in the State Department's electronic records. A partly-burned copy of Jarrah's U.S. visa, recovered from the crash scene of Flight 93, is attached in Appendix A."

The report states that a "burned copy" of Jarrah's visa was found at the crash scene. However, such a visa would have been the original visa and attached to a page in Jarrah's Lebanese passport. The photo clearly shows what appears to be other passport pages behind the original visa.

There is an interesting footnote to the strange saga of Ziad Jarrah. Last year, two Lebanese brothers -- Ali Jarrah and Youssef Jarrah -- were arrested by Lebanese authorities who linked the pair to an espionage cell responsible for the car bombing assassination of Hezbollah military commander Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus in February 2008. The Jarrah's were found by the Lebanese Army in possession of "communication devices and other sophisticated equipment."

The Jarrahs arrested by the Lebanese had been recruited by the Mossad in the 1980s when Israel occupied a large section of Lebanon. And for a Paul Harvey-like "rest of the story," they are related to Ziad Jarreh, the man who was said to have been a close associate and fellow hijacking planner of Mohamed Atta and whose American visa was found with photo and visa number largely intact in a field in Pennsylvania on 9/11.