(Partridge: Bought a copy of the Big Issue today and to my surprise there was a three page article dealing with 9-11 truth, with coments from the likes of Griffin, Ahmed, Bowman, Meacher and Henshall - as well as two conspiracy 'experts' who dismiss the whole thing.

I think its quite good, as the Big Issue is a homeless magazine, thats sold by homeless people - so a lot of people will probably have bought and read it. And its been printed in both the Scottish and Irish version of the magazine, don't know about the English or Welsh ones though).

Buried Truths
by Peter John Meiklem
The Big Issue
PDF Version - 1mb (Maybe Jon or Dz can host it permanently?)

 "The most unbelievable of all the possible conspiracy theories about 9/11 is the official one about Osama bin Laden and 19 fanatic Muslim hijackers taking the government of the United States completely by surprise and getting 'lucky'."

Robert M Bowman doesn't mince his words. The retired American, like millions of people across the globe, refuses to believe what his government has told him about the terrorist attacks of 9/11. But unlike millions of others, Bowman
is a retired US Airforce lieutenant colonel and a former director of the 'Star Wars' missile defence system that was designed to 'safeguard' his country during the Cold War.

Bowman is not the only one doubting the official version of what happened on September 11, 2001. Senior academics, politicians and writers - in the US and the UK - are taking the debate, up until now conducted mainly on the internet, into the open. Several books on the topic have been recently published and there are more in the pipeline.

The Bush administration says they were taken completely by surprise on the day of the attacks. They claim 19 Al Qaeda terrorists, working independently of any governmental intelligence service, hijacked four passenger jets, flying two of them into the World Trade Centre and one into the Pentagon. They say the fourth plane was forced down over Pennsylvania, on its way to Washington, after its passengers stormed the cockpit. However, this story is beginning to crack under the weight of the unanswered questions surrounding it.

The main figures in the debate say this narrative - as corroborated by the official 9/11 commission in July 2004 - is "impossible". Several high profile whistleblowers and hundreds of reports gleaned from 'mainstream' media sources support them.

Some writers are content to present the problems with the account, others to suggest the complicity of the American government. Some even claim 9/11 was an "inside job".
Collectively, they are calling for independent investigation into what really happened. George W. Bush has been keen to dismiss them as conspiracy theorists but the label doesn't fit with the stature of the people involved.

Dr David Ray Griffin is a senior American theologian who has published more than 25 books on a variety of topics. In his texts on 9/11, The New Pearl Harbour and The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, he catalogues the inconsistencies and "outright lies" contained in the official account. He believes the Bush administration fabricated the attacks to provide a context for pursuing global ambitions that would have been impossible otherwise.

In the foreword to Griffin's book, ex-New Labour Environment Minister Michael Meacher writes, "Never in modern history has an event of such cataclysmic significance been shrouded in such mystery. So many of the key facts remain unexplained on any plausible basis, and so many of the key actors have put forward contradictory accounts, only to be forced to retract or cover-up later."

Questions, unspeakable during the 'patriotic' backlash after the atrocities, are being increasingly put to those in power. Yet nobody in officialdom seems to be listening. It sounds like the archetypal conspiracy theory and would be easy to ignore if
it wasn't for the avalanche of details and reports - meticulously footnoted and researched - in a number of books by respected figures.

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, director of British think-tank the Institute for Policy Research and Development, has written furiously against the "fundamentally wrong" official narrative in his book The War On Truth. He provides evidence to show the ways that western governments are currently manipulating Al Qaeda "for strategic aims" in different parts of the world, thus
compromising any notion of the war on terror. According to Ahmed, this casts serious doubt on the official explanation of 9/11.

David Shayler, the former spy who revealed a British intelligence service plot to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi by funding a terrorist organisation with strong links to Al Qaeda, even though Gaddafi was no longer funding terrorism, echoes Ahmed's concerns. Basing his opinion on personal experience he says those who continue to believe in the official 9/11 story "need their heads examined".

"Increasingly like a fairytale," is how Ian Henshall, author of 9/11 Revealed: Challenging the Facts Behind the War on Terror describes Bush's version of events.

In 2004 Zogby - a respected US pollster - revealed that almost half of all New York citizens believed the Bush administration knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around 9/11 and that they consciously failed to act.

Ahmed says the Bush administration had detailed intelligence about Islamic hijackers who planned to fly planes into 'symbols of American culture' well before the atrocities actually took place.

After 9/11, Condoleezza Rice said the attacks were so preposterous that they couldn't have been guarded against. Her remarks were widely discredited later but even now Ahmed says people don't fully understand the extent to which the Pentagon understood the terrorist threat facing them.

In 1993, they commissioned a report on the possibilities of planes being used as weapons. It was distributed to all the agencies in the domestic intelligence community. Ahmed also says that an FBI investigation into one of the eventual hijackers - who it was revealed later had details of the 9/11 plot on his laptop - was blocked by a senior officer in the FBI who was later promoted.

Henshall, meanwhile, records the Newsweek report that claimed senior Pentagon officials cancelled flights they had scheduled for the morning of 9/11.

Griffin gives details of the "incompetent" air authorities and defence forces who - contrary to normal procedures - failed to scramble fighter jets to intercept the hijacked planes though they had strayed hundreds of miles off their designated flight paths.

Of course, all of this is circumstantial evidence, there is no smoking gun, and it could be swept away by a proper, rigorous investigation. But that investigation hasn't taken place. The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States - the 9/11 Commission which reported in July last year - has been branded a "white wash" by experts.

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