Global Research

Global Research Editor’s Note

As September approaches, we are reminded that the anniversary of the tragic events of 9/11 will soon be upon us once again. 11 years laters, are we any closer to the truth about what really happened on that fateful day?

The following text by Thierry Meyssan originally published on Global Research in April 2002 focusses on the attack on the Pentagon.

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, August 16, 2001

Who was behind the September 11 attacks?

by Thierry Meyssan 

Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG),  globalresearch.ca , 19 April 2002

Translation of the transcript of the presentation by Thierry Meyssan on 8 April 2002 at the Zayed Center in Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates), at a gathering organized under the auspices Arab League.For the original French text click here . Read also in French, the transcript of Meyssan’s Interview with TV5. 

Your Highness, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,

In the first minutes following the first attack on the World Trade Center, officials suggested to the media that the person behind the attacks was Osama bn Laden, the epitome of Muslim fanaticism. Not long after, the recently appointed director of the FBI, Robert Mueller III, designated nineteen kamikazes by name and mobilized all the means at the disposal of his agency to track down their accomplices. The FBI thus never undertook any investigation but, instead, organized a man hunt, which, in the eyes much of the United States public, quickly took on the appearance of an Arab hunt. This reached such a pitch that people were incited to attack – even kill – Arabs whom they naively considered collectively responsible for the attacks.

There was no investigation by Congress, which, at the request of the White House, renounced exercising its constitutional role, supposedly in order not to adversely affect national security. Nor was there investigation by any media representatives, who had been summoned to the White House and prevailed upon to abstain from following up any leads lest such inquiries also adversely affect national security.

If we analyze the attacks of September the eleventh, we notice first off that there was much more to them than the official version acknowledges.

1.We know about only four planes, whereas at one point it was a question of eleven planes. Further, an examination of the insider-trading conducted in relation to the attacks shows put-option speculative trading in the stock of three airline companies: American Airlines, United Airlines and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. 2.The official version does not include the attack on the White House annex, the Old Executive Office Building (called the “Eisenhower Building”). Yet, on the morning of the eleventh, ABC television broadcast, live, pictures of a fire ravaging the presidential services building. 3.Neither does the official version take into account the collapse of a third building in Manhattan World Trade Center complex, independently of the twin towers. This third building was not hit by a plane. However, it, too, was ravaged by a fire before collapsing for an unknown reason. This building contained the world’s biggest secret CIA operations base, where the Agency engaged in economic intelligence gathering that the military-industrial lobby considered a waste of resources that should have been devoted to strategic intelligence gathering.

If we look closely at the attack against the Pentagon, we notice that the official version amounts to an enormous lie.

According to the Defense Department, a Boeing 757, all trace of which had been lost somewhere over Ohio, flew some 500 kilometers (300 miles) without being noticed. It supposedly entered Pentagon air space and descended on to the lawn surrounding the heliport, bounced off the lawn, broke a wing in collision with an electric transformer station, hit the façade at the level of the ground floor and first story, and was totally consumed by fire, leaving no other traces than two dysfunctional black boxes and pieces of passengers’ bodies.

It is obviously impossible that a Boeing 757 could, for some 500 kilometers, escape detection by civil and military radar, by fighter-bomber planes sent in pursuit of it and by observation satellites that had just been activated.

It is also obviously impossible that a Boeing 757 could enter the Pentagon’s air space without being destroyed by one or more of the five missile batteries protecting the building.

When one examines the photographs of the façade, taken in the minutes following the attack (even before the Arlington civilian fire fighters had time to deploy), one sees no trace of the right wing on fire in front of the façade, nor any hole in the façade into which the plane could have been swallowed up.

Apparently without the least fear of laying itself open to ridicule, the Defense Department declared that the jet engines, made out of tempered steel, had disintegrated under the shock of the impact – without damaging the façade. The aluminum of the fuselage is claimed to have combusted at more than 2,500° Celsius within the building and to have been transformed into gas, but the bodies of the passengers which it contained were so little burned that they were later identified from their finger prints.

Responding to journalists during a press conference at the Pentagon, the fire chief claimed that “no voluminous debris from the aircraft” had remained, “nor any piece of the fuselage, nor anything of that sort”. He declared that neither he nor his men knew what had become of the aircraft.

Close examination of the official photographs of the scene of the attack, taken and published by the Defense Department, shows that no part of the Pentagon bears any mark of an impact that could be attributed to the crash of a Boeing 757.

One must acknowledged the evidence: it is impossible that the attack against the Pentagon on September 11, killing 125 persons, was carried out by a jet airliner.

The scene of the attack was thoroughly disturbed on the following day by the immediate launch of new construction work, with the result that many of the elements necessary to reconstruct what had happened are missing. The elements that do remain, however, converge in a single hypothesis that it is not possible to prove with certainty.

An air traffic controller from Washington has testified seeing on radar an object flying at about 800 kilometers per hour, moving initially toward the White House, then turning sharply toward the Pentagon, where it seemed to crash. The air traffic controller has testified that the characteristics of the flight were such that it could only have been a military projectile.

Several hundred witnesses have claimed that they head “a shrill noise like the noise of a fighter-bomber”, but nothing like the noise of a civilian aircraft.

Eye-witnesses have said that they saw “something like a cruise missile with wings” or a small flying object “like a plane carrying eight or twelve persons”.

The flying object penetrated the building without causing major damage to the façade. It crossed several of the building rings of the Pentagon, creating in each wall it pierced a progressively bigger hole. The final hole, perfectly circular, measured about one meter eighty in diameter. When traversing the first ring of the Pentagon, the object set off a fire, as gigantic as it was sudden. Huge flames burst from the building licking the façades, then they shrank back just as fast, leaving behind a cloud of black soot. The fire spread through a part of the first ring and along two perpendicular corridors. It was so sudden that the fire protection system could not react.

All these testimonies and observations correspond to the effects of an AGM[air to ground missile]-86C of the third (most recent) generation of CALCM [conventional air launched cruise missile — see picture at http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/smart/agm-86c.htm], equipped with depleted uranium warheads and guided by GPS [global positioning system]. This type of missile, seen from the side, would easily remind one of a small civilian airplane, but it is not a plane. It produces a shrill whistle comparable to that of a fighter-bomber, can be guided with enough accuracy to be directed through a window, can pierce the most resistant armor and can set off a fire – independent of its piercing effect – that will generate heat of over 2,000° Celsius.

This type of missile was developed jointly by the Navy and the Air Force and is fired from a plane. The missile used against the Pentagon destroyed the part of the building where the new Supreme Naval Command Center was being installed. Following the attack, the Navy Chief of Staff, Admiral Vernon Walters, failed to show up in the crisis room of the National Military Joint Intelligence Center when the other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff reported there. Instead, he abruptly left the Pentagon.

Who, then, could have fired such a missile on the Pentagon? The answer was given by the off-the-record revelations of Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, and by Karl Rove, senior advisor to the president, to journalists from the New York Times and the Washington Post. Eighteen days later, these men discounted the veracity of the information they had given the journalists, claiming that they had been speaking under the stress of great emotion.

According to those close to George W. Bush, in the course of the morning, the Secret Service received a telephone call from those behind the attacks, apparently in order to make demands. To give credence to their demands, the masterminds revealed the secret codes giving access to the secure telephone lines available to the president for secure communication with the various intelligence agencies and services as well as for access to the nuclear arsenal. In fact, only a very few persons with the highest security clearances, in the top ranks of the government, could have had these codes. It follows that at least one of the persons behind the attacks of September 11 has a top government post, either civilian or military.

To give credence to the fable of Islamic terrorists, the United States authorities invented kamikazes.

Although it would have been possible for a well organized group of persons to bring fire arms into commercial air liners, the kamikazes apparently used cardboard cutters as their only weapons. They are said to have learned to pilot Boeing 757s and 767s in the space of several hours of simulator training, becoming better pilots than professionals. This mastery allowed them to carry out complex in-flight approach maneuvers.

The Justice Department has never explained how it established the list of the kamikazes. The airline companies have furnished the exact number of passengers in each plane, and the passenger lists, incomplete, do not mention the persons who boarded at the last minute. In checking the these lists, one notices that names of the kamikazes are not on them and that only three passengers are not identified for flight 11 and only two for flight 93. It is thus impossible that 19 kamikazes boarded. Further, several of those listed as kamikazes have turned up, alive. The FBI nonetheless maintains that the high-jackers have all been definitively identified and that complementary information such as birth dates makes it improbable that they could be confused with persons of the same name. For those who might doubt this, the FBI has a ridiculous proof: whereas the planes burned and the twin towers collapsed, the passport of Mohammed Atta was miraculously found intact on the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center.

The existence of high-jackers, whether these or others, is confirmed by telephone calls made by several passengers to members of their families. Unfortunately, these conversations are known to us only by hearsay and have not been published, even in the case of those that were recorded. Thus, it has been impossible to verify that they were actually made from a particular cell phone of from a telephone on board. Here, too, we are asked to take the FBI at its word.

Further, it was not indispensable to have high-jackers to carry out the attacks. The Global Hawk technology, developed by the Air Force, makes it possible to take control of a commercial airliner regardless of the intentions of its pilot(s) and to direct it by remote control.

There remains the case of Osama bn Laden. If it is generally admitted that he was a CIA agent or collaborator during the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the current version of events claims that he turned coat and became public enemy number one of the United States. This story does not bear up under scrutiny either. The French daily le Figaro revealed that last July, Osmam bn Laden was a patient at the American hospital in Dubai, where he was visited by the head of CIA regional office. CBS television in the United States has revealed that, on September 10, Osama bn Laden was undergoing dialysis at the Rawalpindi military hospital, under the protection of the Pakistani army. And the renown French journalist Michel Peyrard, who was a prisoner of the Taliban, has recounted how, last November, Osama bn Laden was living openly in Jalalabad while the United States was bombing other regions of the country. It is difficult to believe that the greatest army in the world, come to Afghanistan to arrest him, was unable to do so, while the mollah Omar was able to escape from United States military force on a moped.

In view of the elements that I have just presented, it appears that the attacks of September can not be attributed to foreign terrorists from the Arab-Muslim world – even if some of those involved might have been Muslim – but to United States terrorists.

The day after the attacks of September 11, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1368 acknowledged “the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense in accordance with the Charter”, calling on “all States to work together urgently to bring to justice the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of these terrorist attacks and stresses that those responsible for aiding, supporting or harboring the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of these acts will be held accountable”.

If one wishes to heed the call of the Security Council, to enforce Resolution 1368 and to punish those who really are guilty, the only way to accurately identify the guilty parties is to set up a commission of inquiry whose independence and objectivity are guaranteed by the United Nations. This would also be the only way to preserve international peace. In the meantime, Your Highness, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, the foreign military interventions of the United States of America are devoid of any basis in international law, whether it be their recent intervention in Afghanistan or their announced interventions in Iran, Iraq and in numerous other countries.

Thierry Meyssan is the author of the book 11 septembre 2001: l’Effroyable imposture, Paris: Editions Carnot, 2002, Copyright © T Meyssan  2002.

The original URL of this article is:
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MEY204C.html