10/02/2010

9/11 conspiracy theories rife in Muslim world

Part 2
ISTANBUL (AP) — About a week ago, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared to the United Nations that most people in the world believe the United States was behind the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
To many people in the West, the statement was ludicrous, almost laughable if it weren't so incendiary. And surveys show that a majority of the world does not in fact believe that the U.S. orchestrated the attacks.
However, the belief persists strongly among a minority, even with U.S. allies like Turkey or in the U.S. itself. And it cannot be dismissed because it reflects a gulf in politics and perception, especially between the West and many Muslims.

"That theory might be true," said Ugur Tezer, a 48-year-old businessman who sells floor tiles in the Turkish capital, Ankara. "When I first heard about the attack I thought, 'Osama,' but then I thought the U.S. might have done it to suppress the rise of Muslims."
Compassion for the United States swept the globe right after the attacks, but conspiracy theories were circulating even then. It wasn't al-Qaida, they said, but the United States or Israel that downed the towers. Weeks after the strikes, at the United Nations, President George W. Bush urged the world not to tolerate "outrageous conspiracy theories" that deflected blame from the culprits.

However, the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan provided fodder for the damning claim that the U.S. killed its own citizens, supposedly to justify military action in the Middle East and to protect Israel. A 2006 survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that significant majorities in Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan and Turkey — all among the most moderate nations in the Islamic world — said they did not believe Arabs carried out the attacks.
Two years later, a poll of 17 nations by WorldPublicOpinion.org, an international research project, found majorities in nine of them believed al-Qaida was behind the attacks. However, the U.S. government was blamed by 36 percent of Turks and 27 percent of Palestinians.

Such beliefs have currency even in the United States. In 2006, a Scripps Howard poll of 1,010 Americans found 36 percent thought it somewhat or very likely that U.S. officials either participated in the attacks or took no action to stop them.
Those who say the attacks might have been an "inside job" usually share antipathy toward the U.S. government, and often a maverick sensibility. Besides Ahmadinejad, high-profile doubters include Cuba's Fidel Castro and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Former Minnesota governor and pro wrestler Jesse Ventura has questioned the official account. Conspiracy theorists have heckled former President Bill Clinton and other prominent Americans during speeches.

Controversy over U.S. actions and policies, including the widely discredited assertions that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, reinforced the perceptions of conspiracy theorists. Iranians dug deeper into history, recalling the U.S.-backed coup in their country in 1953.
"Initially, I was doubtful about the conspiracy theories. But after seeing the events in later years, I don't have any doubt that it was their own operation to find a pretext to hit Muslim countries," said Shaikh Mushtaq Ahmed, a 58-year-old operations manager in a bank in Pakistan. "It's not a strange thing that they staged something like this in their own country to achieve a big objective."
In March, an editorial in The Washington Post harshly criticized Yukihisa Fujita, a lawmaker with the ruling Democratic Party of Japan, for saying in an interview that some of the Sept. 11 hijackers were alive and that shadowy forces with advance information about the plot played the stock market for profit. Fujita said the article contained factual errors.

The record shows that al-Qaida agents on a suicide mission hijacked four American passenger planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people. The evidence is immense: witness accounts, audio recordings, video and photographic documentation, exhaustive investigations and claims of responsibility by al-Qaida.

Yet every fact and official assertion only feeds into alternative views that become amplified on the Internet, some tinged with anti-Semitism because of the close U.S.-Israeli alliance. They theorize that a knowing U.S. government stood by as the plot unfolded, or that controlled demolitions destroyed the Twin Towers, and the Pentagon was hit by a missile.
"All this, of course, would require hundreds if not thousands of people to be in on the plot. It speaks volumes for the determination to believe something," said David Aaronovitch, the British author of "Voodoo Histories: the role of Conspiracy Theory in Modern History."
"This kind of theory really does have a big impact in the Middle East," he said. "It gets in the way of thinking seriously about the problems in the area and what should be done."
A U.S. State Department website devotes space to debunking conspiracy theories about Sept. 11, in the apparent belief that the allegations must be addressed forcefully rather than dismissed out of hand as the ruminations of a fringe group.

"Conspiracy theories exist in the realm of myth, where imaginations run wild, fears trump facts, and evidence is ignored. As a superpower, the United States is often cast as a villain in these dramas," the site says.
Tod Fletcher of Petaluma, California, has worked as an assistant to David Ray Griffin, a retired theology professor, on books that question the Sept. 11 record. He was cautious about the Iranian president's comments about conspiracy theories, suggesting Ahmadinejad may have been politically motivated by his enmity with the U.S. government.
"It seems like it's the sort of thing that could lead to further vilification of people who criticize the official account here in the United States," Fletcher said.
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Torchia reported from Istanbul. Associated Press Writers Gulden Alp in Ankara, Turkey, and Zarar Khan in Islamabad contributed to this report.
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Another massive piece of evidence omitted from all mention by the Kean Commission, was the third building that collapsed on 9/11 - WTC 7. This 47-story building housed offices of the CIA, DOD, IRS, and the Secret Service, as well as Rudy Giuliani’s emergency bunker, and a large SEC database of over 3000 files on pending Wall Street investigations. At 5:20pm, building 7 symmetrically collapsed into its own footprint in 6 seconds flat. This building was not hit by a plane, suffered only minor structural damage, and had isolated fires on a few floors. Also, Demolitions experts have identified building 7’s characteristic “kink” just before it was brought down. A kink is where the building begins to fold inwards after the central support beams are blown. Standard procedure for implosions, they pull the middle infrastructure first and let the floors fold into one another, instead of dangerously blowing debris outwards.
Added to this, in September 2002, WTC complex owner Larry Silverstein accidentally admitted in an interview, “I remember getting a call from the Fire Department commander, telling me they were not sure they were going to be able to contain the fire. I said, ‘We’ve had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it’. And they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse.” Since letting this slip in the interview Silverstein has tried to explain away his statement saying he meant “pull the firefighters out,” not “pull the building down.” But the fact of the matter is he said “pull it” a common demolitions term, not “pull (them) out” referring to firefighters. Later on in the same documentary, preceding the controlled demolition of WTC building 6, a cleanup worker even says, “we’re getting ready to pull building six.” It is typical jargon when imploding a building.
In another interesting twist, the British BBC news actually reported on the collapse of building 7 at 4:57pm – 23 minutes before it happened! As the journalist is talking about building 7’s demise, it can be seen still standing over her left shoulder. CNN also had a similar report an hour before WTC 7 came down saying “we are getting information now that one of the other buildings; building 7 … has either collapsed or is collapsing.” Anyone else curious where CNN and the BBC are getting their information?



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