Tag: 9/11

Syracuse professor is accused of defending 9/11 with claim it was ‘an attack on heteropatriarchal capitalistic systems’ that ‘many white Americans fight to protect’

A professor at Syracuse University has drawn strong reactions for a tweet calling the attacks on September 11, 2001 a strike against ‘heteropatriarchal capitalistic systems’.

Jenn M. Jackson, an assistant professor of political science, made the remarks in a series of tweets on Friday, a day before the 20th anniversary of the attacks that killed 2,977 people. 

‘We have to be more honest about what 9/11 was and what it wasn’t. It was an attack on the heteropatriarchal capitalistic systems that America relies upon to wrangle other countries into passivity,’ wrote Jackson, who uses they/them pronouns.

‘It was an attack on the systems many white Americans fight to protect,’ they added.

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9/11 and the Politics of Fear and Self-Preservation

The 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001 is a particularly somber one, not just because of the horrific nature of events of that day reaching its second-decade milestone, but because of how little we seem to have learned in that amount of time.

The fear and trauma generated by the events of 9/11 were used by the U.S. national security state and its civilian allies to great effect to divide the American population, to attack independent reporting as well as independent thought, to gut the anti-war movement, and to normalize the U.S. government’s overt and persistent degradation of the country’s Constitution. This, of course, is in addition to the illegal U.S. occupations and drone wars in the Middle East and elsewhere that were also born out of this event.

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How much did Saudi Arabia know? FBI release first secret 9/11 files showing anonymous Saudi embassy staffer ‘helped two hijackers in LA and let them stay at his apartment before the attack’

The FBI has released its first declassified 9/11 document exactly 20 years after the deadly terror attack which claimed the lives of 2,996 people.  

The document was published Saturday evening, a week after President Biden signed an executive order directing the agency to make the secret files available to the public for the first time. 

The order to release the documents came amid significant pressure from the families of 9/11 victims, who are eager to probe potential Saudi government links to the attack.

The FBI file that is significantly redacted details a 2015 interview with an official who worked at the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles. 

He admitted that he allowed two hijackers to use his apartment and helped them travel around LA. He was found to be an al-Qaeda ‘facilitator’ by the FBI and the Saudi Consul General wanted to fire him for distributing extremist Muslim literature. 

He was also a close associate of two other Saudis, Omar al-Bayoumi and Fahad al-Thumairy, who the helped the hijackers.  

The new FBI file reveals that al-Bayoumi, who has admitted befriending them, worked as a ‘ghost employee’ at a Saudi aviation firm in the US.  

And it details how al-Thumairy gave the hijackers money, travel assistance and lodging.  

The Saudi official, who is only referred to as PII and who applied for US citizenship in 2015, is thought to be Mussaed Ahmed al-Jarrah who worked at the Saudi Consulate in Washington, DC. 

Al-Jarrah’s name was accidently left unredacted in separate court papers penned by an FBI official. However, he has vigorously denied any involvement and insists he did not know any of the hijackers.  

Of the 19 hijackers on board the four doomed 9/11 planes, 15 were Saudi nationals. 

Last Wednesday, Saudi Arabia released a statement maintaining its innocence, saying ‘it is lamentable that such false and malicious claims persist’.  

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Robert Mueller helped Saudi Arabia cover up its role in 9/11 attacks

After a lengthy investigation, special counsel Robert Mueller charged Russia made “multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election” and said the incursion “deserves the attention of every American.”

But former FBI investigators say their old boss didn’t feel the same concern when they uncovered multiple, systemic efforts by the Saudi government to assist the hijackers in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks — a far more consequential, to say nothing of deadly, foreign influence operation on America.

As the head of the FBI at the time, they say Mueller was not nearly as interested in investigating that espionage conspiracy, which also involved foreign intelligence officers. Far from it, the record shows he covered up evidence pointing back to the Saudi Embassy and Riyadh — and may have even misled Congress about what he knew.

9/11 victims agree. “He was the master when it came to covering up the kingdom’s role in 9/11,” said survivor Sharon Premoli, who was pulled from the rubble of the World Trade Center 18 years ago.

“In October of 2001, Mueller shut down the government’s investigation after only three weeks, and then took part in the Bush [administration’s] campaign to block, obfuscate and generally stop anything about Saudi Arabia from being released,” added Premoli, now a plaintiff in the 9/11 lawsuit against Saudi Arabia.

In fact, Mueller threw up roadblocks in the path of his own investigators working the 9/11 case, while making it easier for Saudi suspects to escape questioning, multiple case agents told me. Then he deep-sixed what evidence his agents did manage to uncover, according to the 9/11 lawsuit against the Saudis.

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Twenty Years Of Phony Tears About 9/11

The mass media are churning out articles and news segments commemorating the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, many of them featuring adoring retrospectives of their celebrity president’s actions as a US senator that day. Biden’s ceremonial PR tour to New York City, Pennsylvania and the Pentagon can be expected to receive a great deal of coverage as outrage swells over the president’s controversial new nationwide vaccine mandate.

And it’s all just so very, very stupid. This nation which has spent twenty years weeping about its victimization with Bambi-eyed innocence reacted to 9/11 with wars which killed millions and displaced tens of millions and ushered in an unprecedented new era of military expansionism which has funneled trillions of dollars to some of the worst people in the world.

Compared to the horrors the United States unleashed upon the world under the justification of 9/11, 9/11 itself was a family trip to Disneyland. The death and destruction visited upon Iraq alone dwarfs the 2,977 people killed on 9/11 by orders of magnitude; hell, this was true of the death and destruction the US had been inflicting on Iraq even before 9/11.

In a saner, more emotionally intelligent world, it is those deaths that Americans would be focused on this September the 11th.

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The censorship of Spike Lee’s NYC Epicenters is a tragically fitting end to the last 20 years

Even the respected and dauntless filmmaker Spike Lee could not overcome the awesome wrath of the mainstream media that comes down upon any person of influence who dares challenge the official story of 9/11.

In a span of three days, from August 23rd to 26th, Lee went from staunchly defending his decision to include so-called “9/11 conspiracy theorists” in his eight-hour HBO docuseries, NYC Epicenters 9/11 → 2021½, to removing the entire 30 minutes he had devoted to questioning how the Twin Towers and Building 7 fell. The half-hour was part of the final two-hour episode set to air on the night of the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

Unbeknownst to most people — because only members of the media got to view the episode and declare it unfit for the public to see — the 30 minutes of excised material included far more than just interviews with so-called “fringe architects.” (Actually, there were upwards of 10 architects and engineers, ranging from a San Francisco high-rise architect to a fellow of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers.) There were also interviews with 9/11 family members who believe they have not been told the truth about the murder of their loved ones and with first responders and survivors who witnessed explosions. Along with all those interviews was a wealth of archival footage and radio dispatches from that morning, in which rescuer after rescuer can be heard reporting explosions. (Full disclosure: I was also interviewed for the film.)

Instead of painting a full and accurate picture of the now-excised section, the media seized upon the inclusion of “conspiracy group” Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth and our founder Richard Gage — who, in the words of Slate editor Jeremy Stahl, “is responsible for peddling some of the most pernicious and long-running lies about the 9/11 attacks.”

Stahl’s choice of words was clearly intended to imply, falsely, that Gage does not actually believe the view he is presenting but is, rather, knowingly perpetuating a lie for some nefarious purpose. Any person practicing real journalism who has interviewed Gage “multiple times” could not plausibly claim that Gage is lying. What Stahl was practicing was propaganda, the express goal of which was to stop millions of viewers from seeing the half-hour of documentary film that Lee made.

The death blow to Lee’s attempt to shine a light on the Twin Towers’ and Building 7’s controlled demolition appears to have been Stahl’s reporting of statements that Gage made in the past year in which he called the coronavirus pandemic a “hoax” and aired other related views about vaccines and Bill Gates. Stahl also loosely accused Gage of being anti-Semitic — or of condoning anti-Semitism — for having tolerated suggestions, made by an audience member in 2012 and by a podcast host more recently, that Israel’s Mossad was involved in the 9/11 attacks.

Less than 24 hours after Stahl’s Slate article was published, news broke that Lee was “back in the editing room” reexamining the final chapter of the series. One day later, HBO announced that the entire half-hour had been cut.

If Lee had any say in the decision, I suspect he did what he did because he felt he could not defend keeping Gage, nor did he care to, and he didn’t have time for the massive edit that would have been required to remove Gage, who was central to the section. It may be that all of the other attacks did not faze him at all. However, the current narrative is that Lee capitulated to the totality of the media’s condemnation over featuring so-called “conspiracy theorists.”

At the height of the controversy and since, countless articles have been published referring to the controlled demolition theory as “debunked.” These articles either have no links to any sources, or they have links to Popular Mechanics articles from 10 years ago or more, or they have links to the very reports and FAQs issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology that are disputed by thousands of architects, engineers, and scientists. (By the way, Lee and others make the point that fire isn’t hot enough to melt steel because there was molten metal at Ground Zero, not because the steel needed to melt for the buildings to collapse. This fact, as with all of the evidence of controlled demolition, has not been debunked.)

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9/11 Was Bad, But It Wasn’t QAnoners Wandering Around The Capitol For A Few Hours Bad

Okay, okay, let’s all cool our jets here for a minute. I know we’re all worked up about the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and that’s all well and good. But let’s not let our emotions cloud our vision and let today’s commemorations cause us to forget the real horror we must all remain focused on: the Capitol riot this past January.

It is true that losing nearly 3,000 American lives to weaponized passenger jets was pretty bad, but I think we can all agree that this pales in comparison to the earth-shattering terror we all experienced when watching footage of wingnuts wander aimlessly around the Capitol Building for a few hours.

Serious experts agree.

In a July appearance on MSNBC’s ReidOut with Joy Reid, former Bush strategist Matthew Dowd said he felt the Capitol riot was “much worse” than 9/11 and that this is the “most perilous point in time” since the beginning of the American Civil War.

“To me, though there was less loss of life on January 6, January 6 was worse than 9/11, because it’s continued to rip our country apart and get permission for people to pursue autocratic means, and so I think we’re in a much worse place than we’ve been,” Dowd said. “I think we’re in the most perilous point in time since 1861 in the advent of the Civil War.”

“I do too,” Reid replied.

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