 By Robert Fisk
Each time I lecture abroad on the Middle East, there is always someone in the audience – just one – whom I call the "raver".
| A 'troofer'? Cindy Sheehan? Medea Benjamin? Oh, no, he's going elsewhere with this ... |
Apologies here to all the men and women who come to my talks with bright and pertinent questions – often quite humbling ones for me as a journalist – and which show that they understand the Middle East tragedy a lot better than the journalists who report it.
| And especially you, Bob, especially you. |
But the "raver" is real. He has turned up in corporeal form in Stockholm and in Oxford, in Sao Paulo and in Yerevan, in Cairo, in Los Angeles and, in female form, in Barcelona. No matter the country, there will always be a "raver".
His – or her – question goes like this. Why, if you believe you're a free journalist, don't you report what you really know about 9/11? Why don't you tell the truth – that the Bush administration (or the CIA or Mossad, you name it) blew up the twin towers? Why don't you reveal the secrets behind 9/11? The assumption in each case is that Fisk knows – that Fisk has an absolute concrete, copper-bottomed fact-filled desk containing final proof of what "all the world knows" (that usually is the phrase) – who destroyed the twin towers. Sometimes the "raver" is clearly distressed.
| Fisk is so important that he refers to himself in the third person. |
One man in Cork screamed his question at me, and then – the moment I suggested that his version of the plot was a bit odd – left the hall, shouting abuse and kicking over chairs.
Usually, I have tried to tell the "truth"; that while there are unanswered questions about 9/11, ...
| What questions are those Bob? Any question about who did it? Any question as to why? |
... I am the Middle East correspondent of The Independent, not the conspiracy correspondent; that I have quite enough real plots on my hands in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran, the Gulf, etc, to worry about imaginary ones in Manhattan.
| Does this mean we'll get an article from you about Syrian plots in Lebanon? |
My final argument – a clincher, in my view – is that the Bush administration has screwed up everything – militarily, politically diplomatically – it has tried to do in the Middle East; so how on earth could it successfully bring off the international crimes against humanity in the United States on 11 September 2001?
| There's a back-handed compliment. Does anyone think the Clinton or Reagan administration could be more 'competent', or is it just that no sane American political official of either party would do such a thing? |
Well, I still hold to that view. Any military which can claim – as the Americans did two days ago – that al-Qa'ida is on the run is not capable of carrying out anything on the scale of 9/11. "We disrupted al-Qa'ida, causing them to run," Colonel David Sutherland said of the preposterously code-named "Operation Lightning Hammer" in Iraq's Diyala province. "Their fear of facing our forces proves the terrorists know there is no safe haven for them." And more of the same, all of it untrue.
| In what way, Bob? al-Q has a battalion of shock troops? al-Q is standing tall and tough in Fallujah? Anbar? Baghdad? About the only place we know of where al-Q is supreme is Wazoo. Care to venture why? |
Within hours, al-Qa'ida attacked Baquba in battalion strength and slaughtered all the local sheikhs who had thrown in their hand with the Americans.
| No word from Bob whether that's a good thing, assuming it happened. |
It reminds me of Vietnam, the war which George Bush watched from the skies over Texas – which may account for why he this week mixed up the end of the Vietnam war with the genocide in a different country called Cambodia, whose population was eventually rescued by the same Vietnamese whom Mr Bush's more courageous colleagues had been fighting all along.
| Perhaps if we'd just delivered the ammo we promised the South Vietnamese it wouldn't have happened. |
But – here we go. I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11.
| Oh dear, Bob is, deep down inside, a troofer allright. He just knows better than to admit it. |
It's not just the obvious non sequiturs: where are the aircraft parts (engines, etc) from the attack on the Pentagon?
| Because you don't punch a neat, airplane-outline hole in a stone and steel structure, Bob. Per the Popular Mechanics review, the hole was 75 feet wide at impact on ring E (the plane, with wings, was 124 feet wide). The wings were sheared off and didn't punch through. You've been watching too many cartoons. |
Why have the officials involved in the United 93 flight (which crashed in Pennsylvania) been muzzled?
| Who exactly has been muzzled? How about a name, Bob? |
Why did flight 93's debris spread over miles when it was supposed to have crashed in one piece in a field?
| Because that's what airplanes do when they hit the ground violently, Bob. Slam a plane into the ground at 500 mph and parts fly everywhere. |
Again, I'm not talking about the crazed "research" of David Icke's Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster – which should send any sane man back to reading the telephone directory.
| Perhaps you could generate random names for our visitors? |
I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example, that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twin towers – whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C – would snap through at the same time?
| Because the steel weakened from the heat causing a loss of tensile strength. Once the weight of the building above them was greater than the weight the weakened beams could bear, they failed, and all it took was the beams from a single floor to fail for the whole structure to pancake down. Steel heated to ~ 900C loses a considerable amount of tensile strength according to the experts quoted by Popular Mechanics: at 1100F, about 50%. And it wasn't just jet fuel burning, it was also the contents of the WTC floors hit by the plane, including lots of paper, furniture, rugs, etc. You might want to try a little research, Bob. |
(They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower – the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon Brothers Building) – which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft had hit it?
| Because it had taken substantial damage, especially to its south face, along with a long-burning fire that wasn't put out, according to the experts quoted in PM, Bob. |
The American National Institute of Standards and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7. Two prominent American professors of mechanical engineering – very definitely not in the "raver" bracket – are now legally challenging the terms of reference of this final report on the grounds that it could be "fraudulent or deceptive".
| Actually they have reported, Bob. Care to guess in how many ways they disagree with you and the troofers? |
Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11.
| For example, just how many journalists put up with all the troofer nonsense. |
Initial reports of reporters that they heard "explosions" in the towers – which could well have been the beams cracking – are easy to dismiss. Less so the report that the body of a female air crew member was found in a Manhattan street with her hands bound.
| Guess we all missed that one, since the bodies were all incinerated in the initial collision with the jet fuel. |
OK, so let's claim that was just hearsay reporting at the time, just as the CIA's list of Arab suicide-hijackers, which included three men who were – and still are – very much alive and living in the Middle East, was an initial intelligence error.
| Or a press error, or a dim-witted troofer error. |
But what about the weird letter allegedly written by Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian hijacker-murderer with the spooky face, whose "Islamic" advice to his gruesome comrades – released by the CIA – mystified every Muslim friend I know in the Middle East? Atta mentioned his family – which no Muslim, however ill-taught, would be likely to include in such a prayer. He reminds his comrades-in-murder to say the first Muslim prayer of the day and then goes on to quote from it. But no Muslim would need such a reminder – let alone expect the text of the "Fajr" prayer to be included in Atta's letter.
| Atta was a little nuts. Diabolical genius to figure out how to make 9/11 work, but also nuts. Does his letter have to make sense? |
Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist.
| You just like shoving a sharp stick at us Americans whenever you get the chance. |
Spare me the ravers. Spare me the plots. But like everyone else, I would like to know the full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic, meretricious "war on terror" which has led us to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East.
| Afghanistan is and has been no disaster -- we rid ourselves of an evil regime and a base of operations for al-Qaeda. Iraq is and has been no disaster -- with all the faults one could point out, we rid the world of an evil, genocidal thug and his evil spawn, and we've given the Iraqis a chance to grad hold of their own country. And we either make war on terrorists or we suffer the consequences, amply demonstrated by 9/11. And 7/7. And 3/11. And Bali ... |
Bush's happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that "we're an empire now – we create our own reality". True? At least tell us. It would stop people kicking over chairs.
| You might do well to let Karl create a reality for you, Bob. Beats the one you have. |
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