
That’s one ‘lucky’ dude…




On September 11th, 22 years later, what are we to make of it all? Who even remembers that, as the Pentagon burned, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld picked up a scrap of hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 from the smoking ruins of that building. Soon after, he would tell his aides (as one of them scribbled down): “Near term target needs – go massive – sweep it all up, things related and not.” That “and not” meant, among other matters, Saddam Hussein, the autocratic ruler of Iraq who had been a Rumsfeld target before 9/11 ever happened.
Of course, the invasion of Afghanistan came first, but that “or not” arrived in the spring of 2003 and the rest is the worst and saddest sort of history imaginable. In a sense, so much should have been so obvious so fast. After all, within days of those suicide attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney was already swearing that al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden would face the “full wrath” of American military might and Rumsfeld was making it clear that such wrath could involve “a large multi-headed effort that probably spans 60 countries.”
“I have chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived — yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace . . .”— PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY, JUNE 10, 1963
Sixty years later it behooves us more than ever to penetrate the tenacious ignorance of which Kennedy spoke. To honor my friend and colleague, TRANSCEND member Prof. Graeme MacQueen, who passed away in April, this editorial addresses topics he was passionate about, namely peace, justice and truth, in particular 9/11 truth.
If we’re not willing to open our minds to the abundant evidence refuting the narrative, fed to us mere minutes after the heinous crimes of 9/11 unfolded before our eyes, that a band of foreign militants from the Middle East was solely responsible for those crimes, then we risk continuing to fall prey to propaganda leading to unending wars and suffering.
Johan Galtung introduced me to Graeme at a 2011 TRANSCEND symposium in North Carolina. 9/11 was not on the formal agenda, but came up in side conversations as the 10-year anniversary approached. Galtung has always promoted open dialog on challenging topics, bucking the penchant of academic institutions and major media platforms to ignore dissenting views on 9/11 and dismiss them as crazy conspiracy theories. He thus proposed adding a session on 9/11 to the symposium and opening it to the general public. Three of us presented our views, followed by Q and A.
Galtung accepted the official narrative that 9/11 was perpetrated by foreign Muslim extremists, viewing it as blow-back from the many injustices the US had inflicted on the Middle East. He called it a public execution of 3 buildings (World Trade Center 1 and 2, and the Pentagon) that symbolized the US military-financial complex.
Graeme and I enumerated unexplained anomalies pointing to complicity of key agents within the US Government and cast doubt on the culpability of Al-Qaeda operatives. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of 9/11, confessed involvement only after being subjected to prolonged torture via waterboarding, while videos of Osama bin Laden claiming credit for the attacks look suspiciously fake.
We all agreed, however, along with most peace activists, that the US response to the events of 9/11 was reprehensible: declaring the unending war on terror, fomenting widespread Islamophobia, curtailing civil liberties, decades-long military incursions in Afghanistan and Iraq that ruined both countries and cost countless lives. The US leadership justified its violent response by the fear, outrage and desire for revenge that swept across much of the nation, horrified at the shock and awe it had witnessed that fateful day. How could that have been prevented?
Imagine what our world might look like if the propaganda machine set in motion the morning of 9/11 had failed. What if most journalists, commentators, engineers, pilots, firefighters, police, and politicians on mainstream media had pressed for answers to valid questions, like:
How could damage and fires on the upper floors have caused both twin towers to explode and disappear into their footprints? How could World Trade Center 7, a third skyscraper not hit by a plane, have imploded symmetrically at free fall speed? How could an alleged hijacker who flunked flight school on small planes have executed a harrowing maneuver to ram a passenger jet into the Pentagon going 500 mph at ground level? How did the US, with its hundreds of billions in defense spending, fail to defend the nerve center of its military headquarters in the nation’s capital?
Once it was announced hijacked planes were crashing into buildings, why did Secret Service agents allow President Bush to remain in a Florida classroom with children, leaving them vulnerable to attack? Who made money on a significant increase in stock market betting right before 9/11 that prices of American and United Airline stocks would drop?
What if honest eye-witness journalists, who in the morning had reported explosions both before and during the destruction of the towers, had continued to develop that thread and ask deeper questions throughout the day and following days, rather than being diverted by select experts and pundits who silenced the “explosion” theme, supplanting it with unproven assertions that Osama bin Laden did it.
Had these questions — many raised also by 9/11 victims’ family members — been relentlessly pursued, the flimsy tale of Muslim extremists from remote parts of the world with no ties to any government being the lone perpetrators of this apocalyptic theatrical display would have soon disintegrated.
Weeks before 9/11, an angry New York FBI agent nearly “came over the table” at CIA officials who were blocking him from obtaining intelligence about two al Qaeda terrorists who would soon take part in hijacking an American Airlines passenger jet and crashing it into the Pentagon.
“Someone is going to die,” the counterterrorism agent wrote in a bitter email shortly after the 2001 encounter.
That astonishing account, and many others, are contained in a sworn declaration by Donald Canestraro, an investigator for the Office of Military Commissions, part of the Department of Defense’s Military Commissions Defense Organization. It is dated July 20, 2021.
Canestraro said in a brief interview with Florida Bulldog that he is part of the defense team for Guantanamo detainee Ammar al-Baluchi, a Pakistani citizen who is awaiting trial with four other men accused of planning the 9/11 attacks. His declaration includes the results of his interviews with 11 ex-FBI agents, 2 ex-CIA agents, a CNN investigative journalist, former deputy National Security Advisor Richard Clarke and former Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL), co-chair of Congress’s Joint Inquiry into 9/11.
The 22-page declaration, first obtained by the national security website Spytalk, is not confidential, but rather it’s marked CUI – Controlled Unclassified Information. The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency defines CUI as “government created or owned information that requires safeguarding or dissemination controls consistent with applicable laws, regulations and government wide policies.”
The bombshell 911 news this past week, is that a freshly-published court filing from Jul 2021, has revealed at least two of the 19 alleged “hijackers” may have been recruited by the CIA.
Now this isn’t exactly “news”, after all it has long since been established that the CIA, FBI and/or any other US alphabet agencies simply must have been involved. It couldn’t have happened without their involvement.
Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, the new release doesn’t go that far. Instead, the testimony from Donald C Canestraro Declaration – former lead investigator for the Office of Military Commissions – discusses the “intelligence failures that led to 9/11”, while focusing mainly on the “hijackers” and their backgrounds.
According to a report in Grayzone, the court filing relies on anonymous testimony from “high-ranking CIA and FBIA officials”:
…the filing is a 21-page declaration by Don Canestraro, a lead investigator for the Office of Military Commissions, the legal body overseeing the cases of 9/11 defendants. It summarizes classified government discovery disclosures, and private interviews he conducted with anonymous high-ranking CIA and FBI officials.
That should be a red flag, right there. Rather like Sy Hersh’s recent “revelations” on Nord Stream 2, any use of “anonymous insider sources” should always set off your internal bullshit alarm. It’s more likely to be a limited hangout than anything else.
In fact, any discussion of the “hijackers” at all should engage your inner sceptic.
Reality check: The hijackers’ names were supplied by the FBI. Virtually everything we know about those men came from US intelligence sources or the 9/11 Commission Report.
An explosive court filing from the Guantanamo Military Commission – a court considering the cases of defendants accused of carrying out the “9/11” terrorist attacks on New York – has seemingly confirmed the unthinkable.
The document was originally published via a Guantanamo Bay court docket, but while public, it was completely redacted. Independent researchers obtained an unexpurgated copy. It is an account by the Commission’s lead investigator, DEA veteran Don Canestraro, of his personal probe of potential Saudi government involvement in the 9/11 attacks, conducted at the request of the defendants’ lawyers.
Two of the hijackers were being closely monitored by the CIA and may, wittingly or not, have been recruited by Langley long before they flew planes into the World Trade Center buildings.
FBI agents are accusing the CIA of allegedly covering up its association with two hijackers involved in the September 11 terrorist attacks, RadarOnline.com can reveal.
The bombshell revelation emerged in a 21-page top-secret report detailing how the CIA tried to recruit two Al Qaeda members in southern California in a failed attempt to penetrate Osama bin Laden’s bloodthirsty terror network.
The report was compiled by Don Canestraro, an investigator for the Office of Military Commissions who submitted the damning report in 2021 at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba where the 9-11 hijackers faced trials for murder and terrorism.
“During July of 2016, I began an investigation into the possible involvement of the Saudi Arabian Government and the Central Intelligence Agency in the events leading up to the 9/11 attacks,” states the report first obtained by the investigative website spytalk.co.
“I began a review of discovery provided by the Government to the Defense and open source materials available on Omar Al-Bayoumi, a suspected Saudi intelligence officer who had contact with 9/11 hijackers Nawaf Al-Hazmi and Khalid Al-Mihdhar.”
The duo was part of the five-man team that hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 which crashed into the Pentagon.
This new book by Graeme MacQueen (click here for a free e-copy) contains a collection of his articles and essays on the attacks of September 11, 2001, the subsequent anthrax attacks, and analyses of other false flag operations.
They are profoundly important and shatter the official versions of those events.
No one reading this book can come away from it not convinced that the U.S. government is a terrorist state. MacQueen’s conclusions are not based on rhetoric but on a deep empirical analyses, facts not propaganda.With this volume, Graeme MacQueen takes his place alongside David Ray Griffin as a prophet without honor in his own time. History will declare him a hero. To write the following introduction is a great honor, for my esteem for Graeme and his work is immense.
*
Graeme MacQueen’s work is a testament to a man devoted to the search for truth and the freedom and peace that ensue from its discovery. I think it is surely not an accident that he is a Buddhist scholar and a former professor of religious and peace studies.
In this regard, he reminds me of two other inspired theologians who carry the message of love and peace into the political realm where their extraordinary writing has given great hope to those yearning for truth and justice: James W. Douglass and David Ray Griffin, the former the great JFK scholar and the latter the author of a dozen or so groundbreaking books on the events of September 11, 2001.
In this book, which is a primer on government propaganda, Graeme continues to teach how illusions must be punctured and the veil of government secrecy parted, lessons gleaned from the core of the world’s religions. That the truth will set us free is the essence of these teachings. Yet truth is a hard taskmaster and requires great courage, fortitude, and determination, which Graeme possesses in abundance, both in his person and in his writing.
Exposing the lies of the official versions of September 11, 2001, the anthrax attacks, etc. takes guts, for it causes conflict with family, friends, and authorities. It brands one a ”conspiracy theorist” who has lost his reason. In Graeme’s case this is hilarious, for you will nowhere find a writer who is less doctrinaire and who sticks more closely to evidence. In fact, I, an impetuous type, have sometimes found his approach a bit too cautious, but I have always come around to see the value in it and to trust that his conclusions are based on rigorous logic and evidence.
You must be logged in to post a comment.