By Pepe Escobar – Posted with permission
After years of reporting on the Great War on Terror, many questions behind the US attacks remain unresolved
Afghanistan was bombed and invaded because of 9/11. I was there from the start, even before 9/11. On August 20, 2001, I interviewed commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, the “Lion of the Panjshir,” who told me about an “unholy alliance” of the Taliban, al-Qaeda and the ISI (Pakistani intel).
Back in Peshawar, I learned that something really big was coming: my article was published by Asia Times on August 30. Commander Massoud was killed on September 9: I received a terse email from a Panjshir source, only stating, “the commander has been shot.” Two days later, 9/11 happened.
And yet, the day before, none other than Osama bin Laden, in person, was in a Pakistani hospital in Rawalpindi, receiving treatment, as CBS reported. Bin Laden was proclaimed the perpetrator already at 11am on 9/11 – with no investigation whatsoever. It should have been not exactly hard to locate him in Pakistan and “bring him to justice.”
In December 2001 I was in Tora Bora tracking bin Laden – under B-52 bombers and side by side with Pashtun mujahideen. Later, in 2011, I would revisit the day bin Laden vanished forever.
One year after 9/11, I was back in Afghanistan for an in-depth investigation of the killing of Massoud. By then it was possible to establish a Saudi connection: the letter of introduction for Massoud’s killers, who posed as journalists, was facilitated by commander Sayyaf, a Saudi asset.
For three years my life revolved around the Global War on Terror; most of the time I lived literally on the road, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, the Persian Gulf and Brussels. At the start of ‘Shock and Awe’ on Iraq, in March 2003, Asia Times published my in-depth investigation of which neo-cons concocted the war on Iraq.
In 2004, roving across the US, I re-traced the Taliban’s trip to Texas, and how a top priority, since the Clinton years all the way to the neo-cons, was about what I had baptized as “Pipelineistan” – in this case how to build the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline, bypassing Iran and Russia, and extending US control of Central and South Asia.
Later on, I delved into the hard questions the 9/11 Commission never asked, and how Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign was totally conditioned by and dependent on 9/11.
Michael Ruppert, a CIA whistleblower, who may – or may not – have committed suicide in 2014, was a top 9/11 analyst. We exchanged a lot of information, and always emphasized the same points: Afghanistan was all about (existent) heroin and (non-existent) pipelines.
In 2011, the late, great Bob Parry would debunk more Afghanistan lies. And in 2017, I would detail a top reason why the US will never leave Afghanistan: the heroin rat line.
Now, President Trump may have identified a possible Afghan deal – which the Taliban, who control two-thirds of the country, are bound to refuse, as it allows withdrawal of only 5,000 out of 13,000 US troops. Moreover, the US ‘Deep State’ is absolutely against any deal, as well as India and the rickety government in Kabul.
But Pakistan and China are in favor, especially because Beijing plans to incorporate Kabul into the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and have Afghanistan admitted as a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, thus attaching the Hindu Kush and the Khyber Pass to the ongoing Eurasia integration process.
Praying for a Pearl
Eighteen years after the game-changing fact, we all remain hostages of 9/11. US neocons, gathered at the Project for the New American Century, had been praying for a “Pearl Harbor” to reorient US foreign policy since 1997. Their prayers were answered beyond their wildest dreams.
Already in The Grand Chessboard, also published in 1997, former National Security Adviser and Trilateral Commission co-founder Zbigniew Brzezinski, nominally not a neocon, had pointed out that the American public “supported America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.”
So, Brzezinski added, America “may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.”
As an attack on the homeland, 9/11 generated the Global War on Terror, launched at 11pm on the same day, initially christened “The Long War” by the Pentagon, later sanitized as Overseas Contingency Operations by the Obama administration. This cost trillions of dollars, killed over half a million people and branched out into illegal wars against seven Muslim nations – all justified on “humanitarian grounds” and allegedly supported by the “international community.”
Year after year, 9/11 is essentially a You Have The Right to Accept Only The Official Version ritual ceremony, even as widespread evidence suggests the US government knew 9/11 would happen and did not stop it.
Three days after 9/11, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that in June 2001, German intelligence warned the CIA that Middle East terrorists were “planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture.”
In August 2001, President Putin ordered Russian intel to tell the US government “in the strongest possible terms” of imminent attacks on airports and government buildings, MSNBC revealed in an interview with Putin that was broadcast on September 15 that year.
No US government agency has released any information on who used foreknowledge of 9/11 in the financial markets. The US Congress did not even raise the issue. In Germany, investigative financial journalist Lars Schall has been working for years on a massive study detailing to a great extent insider trading before 9/11.
While NORAD sleeps
Discrediting the official, immutable 9/11 narrative remains the ultimate taboo. Hundreds of architects and engineers engaged in meticulous technical debunking of all aspects of 9/11’s official story are summarily dismissed as “conspiracy theorists.”
In contrast, skepticism rooted in Greek and Latin tradition came up with arguably the best documentary on 9/11: Zero, an Italian production. Just as arguably the most stimulating book on 9/11 is also Italian: The Myth of September 11, by Roberto Quaglia, which offers a delicately nuanced narrative of 9/11 as a myth structured as a movie. The book became a huge hit in Eastern Europe.
Serious questions suggest quite plausible suspects to be investigated regarding 9/11, far more than 19 Arabs with box cutters. Ten years ago, in Asia Times, I asked 50 questions, some of them extremely detailed, about 9/11. After reader demand and suggestions, I added 20 more. None of these questions were convincingly addressed – not to mention answered – by the official narrative.
World public opinion is directed to believe that on the morning of 9/11 four airliners, presumably hijacked by 19 Arabs with box cutters, traveled undisturbed – for two hours – across the most controlled airspace on the planet, which is supervised by the most devastating military apparatus ever.
American Airlines Flight 11 deviated from its path at 8.13am and crashed into the first World Trade Center tower at 8.57am. Only at 8.46am did NORAD – the North American Aerospace Defense Command – order that two intercepting F-15s take off from Otis military base.
By a curious coincidence a Pentagon war game was in effect on the morning of 9/11 – so air-controllers’ radars may have registered only ‘ghost signals’ of nonexistent aircraft simulating an air attack. Well, it was much more complicated than that, as demonstrated by professional pilots.
‘Angel was next’
World public opinion is also directed to believe that a Boeing 757 – with a wingspan of 38 meters – managed to penetrate the Pentagon through a six-meter-wide hole and at the height of the first floor. A Boeing 757 with landing gear is 13 meters high. Airliners electronically refuse to crash – so it’s quite a feat to convince one to fly five to 10 meters above the ground, landing gear on, at a lightning speed of 800 kilometers an hour.
According to the official narrative, the Boeing 757 literally pulverized itself. Yet even after pulverization, it managed to perforate six walls of three rings of the Pentagon, leaving a two-meter wide hole in the last wall but only slightly damaging the second and third rings. The official narrative is that the hole was caused by the plane’s nose – still quite hard even after pulverization. Yet the rest of the plane – a mass of 100 tons traveling at 800 kilometers an hour – miraculously stopped at the first ring.
All that happened under the stewardship of one Hani Hanjour, who three weeks before had been judged by his flight instructors to be incapable of piloting a Cessna. Hanjour, nonetheless, managed to accomplish an ultra-fast spiral descent at 270 degrees, aligning at a maximum 10 meters above ground, minutely calibrating the trajectory, and keeping a cruise speed of roughly 800 kilometers an hour.
At 9.37am, Hanjour hit precisely the Pentagon’s budget analysts’ office, where everyone was busy working on the mysterious disappearance of no less than $2.3 trillion that Defense Secretary Donald “Known Unknowns” Rumsfeld, in a press conference the day before, said could not be tracked. So, it’s not only Boeings that get pulverized inside the Pentagon.
World public opinion is also directed to believe that Newtonian physics was suspended as a special bonus for WTC 1 and 2 on 9/11 (not to mention WTC 7, which was not even hit by any plane). The slower WTC tower took 10 seconds to fall 411 meters, starting from immobility. So it fell at 148 kilometers an hour. Considering the initial acceleration time, it was a free fall, not the least impeded by 47 massive, vertical steel beams that composed the tower’s structural heart.
World public opinion is also directed to believe that United Airlines Flight 93 – 150 tons of aircraft with 45 people, 200 seats, luggage, a wingspan of 38 meters – crashed in a field in Pennsylvania and also literally pulverized itself, totally disappearing inside a hole six meters by three meters wide and only two meters deep.
Suddenly, Air Force One was “the only plane in the sky.” Colonel Mark Tillman, who was on board, recalled: “We get this report that there’s a call saying ‘Angel’ was next. No one really knows now where the comment came from – it got mistranslated or garbled amid the White House, the Situation Room, the radio operators. ‘Angel’ was our code name. The fact that they knew about ‘Angel,’ well, you had to be in the inner circle.”
This means that 19 Arabs with box cutters, and most of all their handlers, surely must have been “in the inner circle.” Inevitably, this was never fully investigated.
Already in 1997, Brzezinski had warned, “it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America.”
In the end, much to the despair of US neocons, all the combined sound and fury of 9/11 and the Global War on Terror/Overseas Contingency Operations, in less than two decades, ended up metastasized into not only a challenger but a Russia-China strategic partnership. This is the real “enemy” – not al-Qaeda, a flimsy figment of the CIA’s imagination, rehabilitated and sanitized as “moderate rebels” in Syria.
Oh dear, oh dear. No mention of Dr Judy Wood and her meticulous examination of what took place at the WTC complex on 9/11 and presented in her excellent and readable book ‘Where Did The Towers Go?’. Too bad, Pepe.
Anon, perhaps in your next comment you could do us the service of supplying what you say is missing from this piece?
On his Facebook page Escobar mentions that he cut this from 5,000 words to 2,000 to make a tighter piece. He cut a lot of detail out, so maybe your lamented omission is there.
Sad to see the first comment here be a clucking tongue disapproving of one of best journalists around. This piece doesn’t go deep into the story – which would take much more than 5,000 words – but instead it surely supplies some fascinating pieces form the meta-story.
Greatly appreciated from Escobar and Saker.
Dear Anon, irrelevant details in no way undercut thrust of article. How the job was done is not really the question. Why it was done is the question.
Why is the bigger question – and PNAC’s “New American Century” needing “a new Pearl Harbour” in conjunction with Maj. Gen. Wesley Clark blowing the whistle on the “take out 7 countries in 5 years” ready to go plan released within a fortnight of 9/11 answers most of the why.
How is interesting. It seems multiple methods employed for redundancy of making the false flag work. Also multiple methods allegedly by some former spooks is a way of muddying the waters and pitting researchers against each other with differing theories – all of which are probably partly correct.
So its not necessarily either/or directed energy weapons, nukes in the basements and classical nanothermite controlled demolitions – it could well be all three of them were employed on Sep 11, 2001.
Additionally reinforced military remote-controlled drones and either a smaller plane or a missile for the Pentagon were probably used as ‘Pilots for 9/11 Truth’ have shown that normal airliners could not have flown the steep spiral descents without their wings flying off and the AE911Truth architects and engineers indicate that the reinforced steel casing of the towers was unlikely to let normal planes slice through them like hot knife into soft butter.
http://pilotsfor911truth.org
The possibility of CGI holographic animation cannot be excluded when you see trivial exhibitions of such technology such as this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC7Hbji2ZpI
Keep the plebs arguing with each other and laugh all the way to perhaps the next ‘elite’ Satanic child sacrifice ritual get-together…
Nukes and directed energy beam weapons are red herrings designed to take the spotlight off the plain evidence for a classic controlled demolition, and, by their ludicrousness, to denigrate all alternatives to the laughable ‘official version’ through guilt by association.
I used to think that too Mulga. But delve into the evidence and it is compelling, if not as 110% convincing as is the controlled demolitions. It seems multiple methods kills two birds with one stone as far as the criminal Cabal perpetrators are concerned. Redundancy to make sure the buildings are effectively destroyed, enough evidence to set researchers of the various methods against each other so as to divide and conquer and as you say defame in the eyes of the sheeple.
I can come at mini-nukes at the base, to complement the nano-thermite throughout the structures. Simply because something other than bath-tub explosives ripped concrete off re-bar in Bali in 2002, and made victims simply disappear.
Use Salandria’s approach and it cannot be missed. Would a government interested in findind anything out ship the steel beams to melt in china asap? etc etc etc…
Bored in my hotel room I watched a movie called Witch Hunt, starring Dennis Hopper. Fun movie, turn brain off, watch, enjoy. What got my attention was how good the CGI was. Not a big movie, or CGI guy, but this was done in 1994, so I was impressed. Seven years later watching a plane majiclly disappear into a building, it never looked natural to me, seemed kind of staged. How hard to CGI parts of the event and feed it to the MSM. Is there precident for feeding same story to all news channels so it reads the same, rehitorical question, don’t answer.
The cgi of the Orca whale in the gym and the crowds reaction shows these holographic images can be done in real world and fool onlookers- not just on movies.
Research ‘Operation Bluebeam’
The YouTube video is not a hologram. It’s a faked “augmented reality” video effect.
If you want to claim “there were no planes”, you’ll need credible evidence. This is not.
Stop spreading misinformation with nonsense like Judy Wood, noplanes, holograms, space aliens etc. You are helping the official version of 911, and discrediting real 911-truth movement with these ridiculous statements.
Thanks for your article and for your courage. And thanks to The Saker for sharing similar doubts about the 911 narrative. I am not sure if the following ground breaking study has been mentioned yet on this site.
The University of Alaska – Fairbanks has just issued their long awaited report (draft) on the collapse of WTC7 (led by Professor Hulsey). The report concludes that fire cannot explain the observed collapse at 5:30 pm Sept. 11, 2001 – which disproves conclusively the official narrative (NIST report). Simulation has demonstrated that only near-simultaneous failure of all columns can explain the observed collapse, which includes a 2.5 second portion at free fall acceleration. The implications are extremely significant. At this time, there are no published rebuttals of this study. Very few mainstream media outlets have reported on this study, let alone attempted a rebuttal.
Comments are welcome, and of course should also be sent to the authors of the study.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAEHhDCTaBw
http://ine.uaf.edu/media/222439/uaf_wtc7_draft_report_09-03-2019.pdf
This, Sir, is an excellent article. Thank you kindly.
Not sure how well this is known: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PW9yep4u0SQ
“Chris Wallace: You were the one who gave the direct order to shoot down a plane that you were told, as it turns out incorrectly, was heading for Washington.
Cheney : Right. That’s correct.
…..
Cheney:….we had already seen 3 go into, the Pentagon and World Trade Centers in NewYork.
Dick Cheney admits to having flight 93 shot out of the sky. The only hijacked plane that had a chance of returning at least some of it’s passengers home and Dick destroys it. Why would he do that? The plane had been retaken by it’s passengers….remember Todd Beamer’s “Let’s Roll”?”
Nice one. The first I heard on the news about flight 93 was that it was shot down. Later the news was that the passengers stormed the cockpit and the hijackers crashed it.
Yes, but where did Flight 93 go? Down that little hole in Pennsylvania-along with Alice and the white rabbit, one assumes.
Look up its registration number at the FAA web-site. Possibly the A/C is still in service, just like the Pentagon one was (is?).
“Three days after 9/11, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that in June 2001, German intelligence warned the CIA that Middle East terrorists were “planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture.”
In the cafe, I posted a link to an interview today with John Manley. On Sept. 11, 2001, he was Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. He was a passenger on the last plane to land in North America. He was flying back to Ottawa from Frankfurt.
That was where Udo Ulfkotte worked at that time. Perhaps this message regarding “ME terrorists” was passed to help establish the “official narrative”?
Of course it was. Three days AFTER the MOSSAD op-tells you all you need to know.
Ulfkotte wrote a book, Gekaufte Journalisten, in which he described how the CIA subverts journalists. An English language version of the book was written but never printed. Its publication was suppressed.
Was thinking that Ulfkotte himself might have been the one who wrote the article for the Allgemeine Zeitung.
My first reaction to 911 was to research any other high-rise buildings that collapsed due to fire. Needless to say, I found none. As a physicist, I find it is necessary to follow the evidence instead of forcing evidence to meet my personal bias. The first question to ask concerning an event is ‘Is it plausible?” Personally, I doubted the official explanation by the next day for one simple reason. The only buildings claimed to EVER collapse due to fire occurred on the same day in the same location. The odds of this occurring are equal or greater than winning three separate lotteries on the same day. Therefore, the rational conclusion is other unknown factors were in play to cause the collapse.
There’s a scene in that fine movie, ‘Klute’ where you can see the Twin Towers under construction through a window in another tower building. Each tower has four massive cranes, a gigantic concrete core, and forests of steel beams rising upwards. And a fire brought that down, in a short time, at more or less gravitational acceleration, while other such buildings, more flimsily erected, have burned for days without collapsing. Pull the other one, Bibi.
See this video on the recently released 4 year study by University of Alaska on WTC-7 collapse:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAjSL_ZXnvc&feature=player_embedded
Excellent description. At the end a good compilation of eye witness testimony from the day, the BBC reporting it 20 minutes beforehand and Lucky Larry Silverstein putting his foot in his mouth with what is effectively an admission of the massive big lie false flag.
You can only believe in the offical story if you are in denial or still brainwashed by the MSM. Physics won’t come to your defence.
In the end, stating the obvious truth about 9/11, will just get you vilified as an ‘antisemite’.
Watch this short video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt-ldMj9y9w&feature=youtu.be
Is Trump a hostage like everyone else? Or is the ‘Q-anon’ narrative of a fight back by a military-nationalist-patriot faction that is opposed to the globalist Empire – true?
Interesting, all facts long known and all repressed by the Free Press, but why no mention of Israel, MOSSAD, Netanyahu, ‘Lucky’ Larry Silverstein or the ‘five dancing Israelis’? The story is utterly incomplete without those actors.
9/11 is the litmus test. Pepe doesn’t pass it, but neither fails it. Instead he endears the bouncer at the door with fancyful tales of Tora Bora, the Lion of Panjshir, and the Pashtun mujahideen. “Step in already”, the bouncer says with a smile, pushing him on “I have work to do here…”
More than 9/11 truth, Pepe loves to be Pepe the roving reporter. And I am totally ok with that.
9-11 was the American Reichstag Fire in which the Americans (with help from Israeli and Saudi allies) staged a terror attack on their own citizens in order to launch the so-called War on Terrorism and attack multiple nations around the world–not to mention passing various Nazi-style Enabling Acts like the Patriot Act as part of domestic police state.
The Nazi Third Reich has got nothing on the American Fourth Reich.
The Russia-China strategic partnership is about to undergo its first test – courtesy of Vietnam. Vietnam is using Rosneft to drill for oil and gas in the South China Sea in waters claimed by both China and Vietnam.
Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov is reported to have declined China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s request to withdraw Rosneft from cooperating with Vietnam in drilling for oil and gas in China-claimed waters.
Now we shall see how strong the Russian-Chinese defacto alliance really is.
Many thanks to Pepe for summarizing a part of the evidence as to why the official 9/11 story is unbelievable by anyone who cares to do a little research. Here are two web pages which together contain hundreds of links to articles which collectively totally refute the official 9/11 story:
http://serendipity.li/wtc_other_sites.htm
http://serendipity.li/wtc_other_docs.htm
Denial is no longer possible except by a huge effort of self-delusion.