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9/11 Explains the Impotence of the Anti-war Movement
By Paul Craig Roberts
09/14/07 "ICH" -- - -The anti-war movement has proven impotent
to stop the war in Iraq despite the fact that the war was
initiated on the basis of lies and deception. The anti-war
movement stands helpless to prevent President Bush from
attacking Iran or any other country that he might demonize for
harboring a future 9/11 threat.
September 11 enabled Bush to take America to war and to keep
America at war even though the government’s explanation of the
events of September 11 is mired in controversy and disbelieved
by a large percentage of the population.
Although the news media’s investigative arm has withered, other
entities and individuals continue to struggle with unanswered
questions. In the six years since 9/11, numerous distinguished
scientists, engineers, architects, intelligence officers,
pilots, military officers, air traffic controllers, and foreign
dignitaries have raised serious and unanswered questions about
the official story line.
Recognition of the inadequacy of the official account of the
collapse of the twin towers is widespread in the scientific and
technical community. One of the most glaring failures in the
official account is the lack of an explanation of the near
free-fall speed at which the buildings failed once the process
began. Some scientists and engineers have attempted to bolster
the official account with explanations of how this might happen
in the absence of explosives used in controlled demolitions.
One recent example is the work of Cambridge University engineer,
Dr. Keith Seffen, published in the Journal of Engineering
Mechanics and reported by the BBC on September 11, 2007. Dr.
Seffen constructed a mathematical model that concludes that once
initiation of failure had begun, progressive collapse of the
structures would be rapid.
Another example is the work of retired government scientist Dr.
Manuel Garcia, commissioned by CounterPunch to fill the gaping
void in the official report. Garcia concludes, as does Seffen,
that explosives are not necessary to explain the near free-fall
speed at which the WTC buildings collapsed.
Seffen and Garcia each offer a speculative hypothesis about what
could have happened. Their accounts are not definitive
explanations based on evidence of what did happen. Thus, Seffen
and Garcia bring us to the crux of the matter: To understand the
buildings’ failures, we must rely on theoretical speculative
models, because the forensic evidence was not examined. Their
explanations thus have no more validity than a speculative
hypothesis that explains the failure of the buildings as a
result of explosives.
To rationally choose between the hypotheses, we would need to
see how well each fits with the evidence, but most of the
evidence was quickly dispersed and destroyed by federal
authorities. Most of the evidence that remains consists largely
of human testimony: the hundred witnesses who were inside the
two towers and who report hearing and experiencing explosions
and the televised statement of Larry Silverstein, the
leaseholder of the WTC properties, who clearly said that the
decision was made “to pull” WTC 7.
Today, six years after 9/11, money, ideologies, accumulated
resentments, and political careers are all allied with the
official story line on 9/11. Anyone on a Republican mailing list
or a conservative activist list, such as Young Americans for
Freedom, knows that fundraising appeals seldom fail to evoke the
9/11 attack on America. The 9/11 attacks gave neoconservatives
their “new Pearl Harbor” that enabled them to implement their
hegemonic agenda in the Middle East. The 9/11 attacks gave
Americans boiling with accumulated frustrations a foe upon whom
to vent their rage. Politicians, even Democrats, could show that
they stood tall for America. George W. Bush has invested two
presidential terms in “fighting terror” by invading countries in
the Middle East.
September 11 doubters are a threat to the legitimacy of these
massive material and emotional interests. That is why they are
shouted down as “conspiracy theorists.” But if the government’s
story has to be improved by outside experts in order to be
plausible, then it is not irrational or kooky to doubt the
official explanation.
Elements of the American left-wing are also frustrated by 9/11
doubters. CounterPunch, for example, views 9/11 as blowback from
an immoral US foreign policy and as retribution for America’s
past sins in the Middle East. Manuel Garcia shares this
viewpoint. In the September 12, 2007, CounterPunch, Garcia
writes that “rationalists and realists” are people who see 9/11
“as blowback from decades of inhuman US foreign policy.” Viewing
9/11 as a government conspiracy lets US foreign policy off the
hook.
This is a legitimate point of view. But it has a downside.
September 11 was the excuse for committing yet more inhuman
deeds by initiating open-ended wars on both Muslims and US civil
liberties. Defending the government’s account, instead of
pressing the government for accountability, was liberating for
the Bush administration.
Even in the official account, the story is one of massive
failures: the failures of US intelligence services, the failures
of airport security, the failures to intercept the hijacked
airliners, the failures to preserve evidence. If a common front
had taken the Bush administration to task both for failing to
prevent the 9/11 attacks and for an explanation of 9/11 so
inadequate that its plausibility depends on outside experts,
Bush could not have so easily shifted the blame to Afghanistan
and Iraq. Most 9/11 doubters do not insist on the US
government’s complicity in the deed. Failure to protect, or
incompetence, is a sufficient charge to deter an administration
from war by turning it against itself with demands for
accountability.
But no one was held accountable for 9/11 except Muslim
countries. This is the reason the anti-war movement is impotent.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in
the Reagan Administration. He is the author of Supply-Side
Revolution : An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington;
Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the
Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton
of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and
Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of
Justice.
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