Impeachment, 9/11, Overcoming Fear, Showing Courage

A year ago today, Janette MacKinlay, a 9/11 survivor, who lived directly across the street from the World Trade Center, organized an event in this Theater entitled Question 9/11- A Call to Activism. The Bay Area has been called “Ground Zero” for “the 9/11 Truth Movement.” We have held numerous events here including David Ray Griffin speaking on 9/11 The Myth and the Reality. The first Citizen’s International Inquiry into 9/11 took place in San Francisco and now those who say that they believe the official narrative of 9/11 is down to 16% of the population. Tomorrow, hundreds of people will converge in Arizona for the 9/11 Accountability- Strategies and Solutions Conference.
We know that this Administration has committed terrible crimes against our country, the world, our Constitution, the Bill of Rights. We passionately believe that they must be stopped and impeached.
It is possible that Congress might “Impeach him” for a minor charge, and merrily carry on with the worst of the Bush/Cheney’ policies, the bogus war on terrorism, beefing up Homeland Security, ceding the destruction of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the institutionalization of torture, the Military Commissions Act, the imposition of a national identification card, the militarization of space, global hegemony. For this reason, 9/11 should be included in the articles of impeachment. However since the current Congress has embraced the bad recommendations of the 9/11 Cover-up Commission this may be politically unfeasible, without a massive effort on the part of the public. We need to create the wave which will give courage to those in Congress to impeach the Administration and reverse their policies.
The real terrorists have hijacked our country and are occupying the White House. They have stolen at least two presidential elections, and have no legitimacy.
They lied and covered up the truth about 9/11 and Katrina. Those lies cost the lives of thousands of people. The worst conspiracy theory about 9/11 is the one that Cheney and Bush used to sell the war on Iraq which has cost over one hundred thousand innocent lives. They spent billions of dollars on propaganda to sell that lie and 85% of the soldiers in Iraq were tricked into believing that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. This could not have been accomplished without the complicity of Congress and the press. They supported the lies, they failed to ask the hard questions, and they deserve much of the blame for the enormous suffering and loss of life of these past five years.
Fear and lies are the tools of a criminal regime. Courage and truth are the tools and hope of those who cherish and respect life. We who seek justice, peace, freedom, a future for our children and future generations must have the courage to seek and speak the truth about the foundational lie of the current regime..
Resistance to 9/11 Truth comes mainly from fear. People can’t believe that important facts could be true and unreported by the mainstream press or absent from the official investigations. People do not want to believe that their government or the press could deceive them on such an important matter.
However we have abundant evidence that the official 9/11 report is a 571 page lie with at least 115 significant omissions and distortions. Additionally, on the day after 9/11 the White House pressured the Environmental Protection Agency to say that the air and water at Ground Zero were safe, dooming first responders to extremely toxic health hazards which have ruined the health and killed not only first responders, but those who were exposed to the deadly dust created by the disintegration of the twin towers and Building 7.
While many agree that the official narrative of 9/11 is false and that there is strong evidence of “government incompetence, foreknowledge, criminal negligence, destruction of evidence, a cover-up;” there is also evidence of complicity, means, motive, opportunity. Clearly the attacks benefited the White House, military contractors, oil companies, the surveillance industry and others. In his chapter on the Global Dominance Group in the book 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out, Peter Phillips and his fellow researchers identify 236 suspects, who wanted to expand the American Empire, their power, and profits.
The 9/11 Commission was directed by Dr. Philip Zelikow, author of Bush’s “pre-emptive war doctrine,” who was a member of the Bush National Security transition team and had to appear as a witness before the Commission. The 9/11 Family Steering Committee demanded his resignation, to no avail. Zelikow's area of expertise is the creation and maintenance of, in his words, “public myths,” which he defined as “beliefs… thought to be true (although not necessarily known to be true with certainty),” and in what he called “‘searing’ or ‘molding’ events [that] take on ‘transcendent’ importance and retain their power” across generations. Here are some facts that were omitted from the official report:
The Project for the New American Century, whose members became key figures in the Bush administration wrote "Creating Tomorrow's Dominant Force," which stated the need for the Department of Defense to "move more aggressively to experiment with new technologies and operational concepts,” and that "further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor.”
Vice President Richard Cheney was placed in charge of anti-terrorism training and military preparedness exercises by Bush on May 8, 2001. This gave him command authority during the 9/11 attacks, because as many as nine war game exercises involving military and intelligence agencies were occurring simultaneously.
The military's "Air Piracy" regulations were rewritten on June 1st 2001 to require the "Secretary of Defense" to give "approval" for military escort aircraft in the event of a hijacking. Donald Rumsfeld gave no "approval" that day.
Three of the men who presided over the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks—-Secretary Rumsfeld, General Richard Myers, and General Ralph Eberhart---were three of the strongest advocates for the US Space Command. Donald Rumsfeld, used the attacks of 9/11 on that very evening to secure such funding.
Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta's testimony, given to the Commission itself, that Vice-President Cheney and others in the underground shelter were aware by 9:26 that an aircraft was approaching the Pentagon.
More than an hour and fifteen minutes after the first hijacking was reported by FAA, the US military headquarters at the Pentagon was struck without any defensive action taken to stop the attack. The Pentagon has an anti-missile defense system that would have brought down a commercial airliner. The impact was on the west side, for some reason the only side that had been "hardened" with blast-proof windows and specially reinforced walls. None of the highest ranking military leadership were located on that side.
The officials topping the chain of command for response to a domestic attack - George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Myers, Montague Winfield - all found reason to do something else during the actual attacks, other than assuming their duties as decision-makers.
The US air defense system failed to follow standard procedures for responding to diverted passenger flights. The various responsible agencies - NORAD, FAA, Pentagon, USAF, as well as the 9/11 Commission - gave radically different explanations for the failure (in some cases upheld for years), such that several officials must have lied; but none were held accountable.
General Mahmoud Ahmad, the head of Pakistan's intelligence agency (the ISI), was in Washington the week prior to 9/11, meeting with CIA chief George Tenet and other US officials. The evidence that Ahmad had ordered $100,000 to be sent to Mohamed Atta prior to 9/11.
Unocal had declared that the Taliban could not provide adequate security for it to go ahead with its oil-and-gas pipeline from the Caspian region through Afghanistan and Pakistan .
The report that at a meeting in July 2001, US representatives said that because the Taliban refused to agree to a US proposal that would allow the pipeline project to go forward, a war against them would begin by October.
The FBI's top Al Qaeda investigator, John O'Neill, "resigned in July of 2001 in protest over the obstruction of terrorist investigations."
Scott Forbes who worked in the South Tower described a "power down" on the weekend before 9/11, which was corroborated by WTC janitor William Rodriquez. The power down knocked out communications, computer systems, and security cameras.
William Rodriguez reported bombs in the basement levels and on various floors. After describing a series of explosions, Rodriguez heard that floor 65 had completely collapsed (nowhere near the plane impact zone).
Fire had never caused steel-frame high-rise buildings to collapse before or after 9/11. The fires in the Twin Towers were not very big, very hot, or long-lasting compared with fires in steel-frame buildings that did not collapse. The pulverization of the towers shared the distinctive features of controlled demolitions. The report mischaracterized the towers' core structure as “a hollow steel shaft,” ignoring the 47 massive steel support columns as large as 22 inches by 54 inches.
WTC 7 (which was not hit by an airplane and which had only small, localized fires) also collapsed---an occurrence that FEMA admitted it could not explain.
Larry Silverstein's statement on PBS that he and the fire department commander decided to "pull" Building 7.
Steel from the WTC buildings was quickly removed from the crime scene and shipped overseas before it could be analyzed for evidence of explosives.
Mayor Giuliani's statement that he had received word that the World Trade Center was going to collapse.
President Bush's brother Marvin and his cousin Wirt Walker III were both principals in the company in charge of security for the WTC.
Congress shoveled $15 Billion of taxpayer money to the airlines immediately after 9/11 as one of the first responses to the attacks.
President Bush personally asked Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to limit the congressional investigation into the events of September 11th.
The White House first sought to prevent the creation of a 9/11 Commission, then placed many obstacles in its path, including giving it extremely meager funding.
Ali Mohamed was involved with most of the major al Qaeda attacks against U.S. interests: ...the 1993 WTC bombing, the African Embassy bombings in 1998 and, even though he was arrested in late 1998, , Mohamed participated in these operations while also being a U.S. citizen, being enlisted in the U.S. military, and being an FBI informant in California. He also worked for the CIA.
The 9/11 Commission wrote: “To date, the US government has not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9/11 attacks...Ultimately the question of the origin of the funds is of little practical significance.”
Much of the evidence establishing who did the crime is dubious and miraculous: bags full of incriminating material that happened to miss the flight or were left in a van; the "magic passport" of an alleged hijacker, found at Ground Zero; documents found at motels where the alleged perpetrators had stayed days and weeks before 9/11.
In the past, many states, including the US government, have sponsored attacks on their own people, fabricated the "cause for war," created (and armed) their own enemies of convenience, and sacrificed their own citizens for "reasons of state." Was 9/11 an update of the Pentagon-approved "Project Northwoods" plan for conducting self-inflicted, false-flag terror attacks in the United States, and blaming them on a foreign enemy? We need a real investigation and should hold those within the US government responsible for their role in the attacks, their lies, the cover-up, their use of 9/11 as a pretext for endless war. Impeachment would be a good first move.