9-11, The Big Lie / Pentagate
Thierry Meyssan
Carnot Publishing Ltd.
Where’s the plane?
“pentagate”
Your reaction to the above question is insightful as to how you view the events of 9.11 and the subsequent year. If you are presented with the images showing the destruction of the Pentagon and listen to the explanations given (almost entirely by our military) and you accept them as gospel, then it can be said that most likely you believe and trust what our government has told us about the events of that horrible day. You dismiss as a “conspiracy theory” any questioning of the official version of the events. In the most media and information saturated society in the history of the world, any attempts at debate on this subject is trivialized, and the questioner is branded as traitorous for even asking the question.
This is the same reaction that occurred after the publication of the Warren Commission’s report on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. At that time the world was supposed to accept without question that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone (with his “magic bullet”) shot and killed the president of the United States. The only person who could have shed light on this, Oswald himself, was murdered while in police protection, and 27 volumes later, the world was given the “documentation” that answered the question that seemingly had been already answered on the day of his arrest. People after that point have made a career of challenging the Warren Report, and they too were branded as loonies or traitors for suggesting that perhaps the government, in its report, was lying to us. Some amount of vindication was achieved in 1975 when the House Committee on Assassinations found cause, via the evidence, to call the death of a sitting president a conspiracy, by finding that Oswald did not fire all the shots that day. They did not, however, attempt to name who else was involved, and we as a nation may never know. The majority of the public, 40 years or so past the event, doesn’t care who killed Kennedy. It is old news. No matter that the murder of a president is a rather singular event in our history, no matter that his death may well have signaled a shift in America’s policy toward Vietnam, and allowed the war to grow to the point that Nixon and Kissinger gave serious thought to using nuclear weapons on the citizens of Laos. No matter. It’s old news, and who cares?
Speaking of “old news”, it is generally accepted that Franklin Roosevelt knew of the pending attack on Pearl Harbor and allowed it to occur. While on the one hand swearing to an American public that the war in Europe was none of our concern, he on the other hand was working in lockstep with Churchill to aid the side of the Allies against Hitler and Japan. When the world looks at the aftermath of the Second World War, they generally see it as a horrible, but necessary, chain of events, events that led to the downfall of Hitler, Stalin and a threatening Japan. So what if FDR knew of, and perhaps stage-managed, the attack on Pearl Harbor? In the end, peace and democracy triumphed, and the world is a better place for it. The ends justify the means.
Let’s look ahead 50 or 60 years from the events of 9/11/2001. Let us imagine a time without “terrorism”, or at least our government’s definition of the term. No bin-Laden, no Hussein, no more living under the threat of random acts of violence against the greatest nation on earth. Our “way of life” (which in this case means the reliance on Middle Eastern oil) is preserved, by the simple fact that a long, expensive war has left Arab nations unable to survive without our assistance (and domination), much like Germany after the war. So what if in the years that have passed we have learned that George Bush knew of the attacks beforehand, that he was acting primarily out of a fiduciary interest to his friends in the energy industry? We licked terrorism, didn’t we? The world is a safer place, and thus all is well.
Thierry Meyssan, a French journalist, finds this notion disquieting. And in two books he has given those of us with an open mind the beginnings of a movement, a movement to unravel the official “sweater” that our benevolent government has attempted (and in large part, succeeded) in wrapping a terrified population in. By examining one aspect of the events of 9/11, the supposed crash of a jet into the Pentagon, he has pointed up that the story we as a world have been given by our “leaders” is most likely a lie. The evidence simply does not support the idea of a large passenger jet striking the heart of the American defense establishment. We are to believe that the plane, upon impact, ignited and burned to the extent that all traces of it were vaporized, but that this intense heat somehow managed to not engulf the rest of the Pentagon in flames. We are to believe that this plane slammed into the outer wall of the Pentagon, traveled through three of the five wings of the structure, leaving a perfectly round exit hole- but no debris of itself at all. No bodies recovered, no small scraps of metal from the plane, nothing. Only the black boxes, found days later, that yielded no important information.
This, of course, is preposterous. Putting aside for a moment that any examination of the pictures and statements from that day don’t make sense, we are supposed to believe that something – a plane, a missile, whatever, was able to penetrate military airspace and strike its target without anything being launched in its way. Modern aircraft such as the type we are supposed to believe hit the Pentagon are equipped with a device known as a “transponder” that constantly signals air control as to the type and location of the plane. The instant a planes signal is lost, a defined procedure is in place to deal with it, which includes scrambling of fighter jets to visually locate the plane, attempt to make contact, and if no response is received, shoot it down, since the loss of transponder signal cannot occur without the deliberate action of the pilot. The plane in question turned off its transponder signal somewhere in Ohio, turned around, and flew over 500 miles unimpeded by anyone, and crashed into the Pentagon. The official statement? “We lost the plane”. Either our air defense system is substandard, or someone is lying. As these books document, the only way anything could get that close to the Pentagon without “tripping” the alarms is if the plane was considered by the computers to be a “friendly”. Planes are equipped with devices that send a signal designating them as “friendly”, so that they won’t be shot down in a wartime battle. Whatever hit the Pentagon was allowed to do so in some way because the system thought it was friendly.
We, as a nation, have allowed the killers of JFK to grow old and possibly die without being identified. A president is murdered, on film, and all our intelligence community can tell us is that one lone nutcase pulled the trigger and changed our government forever. Is the reason we have accepted this for so long that we don’t care? Perhaps. That is a sad statement. Or is the reason the official version has held up for so long because that to admit that something else occurred perhaps means that elements of our government might have been involved, and if so, that we are being led by a group of out of control tyrants? We have accepted the notion of FDR’s involvement in Pearl Harbor over the years, because the world was a better place for it. Are we now doing the same thing, allowing any discussion of the events of 9/11 to be shrouded in the burial flags of the slain? Is our nation, in our names, attempting to remake the world in a radically different way, and using a terrorist attack as the basis for doing so? A terrorist attack that any scrutiny of invites derision and worse? People are being investigated and jailed for jeering Bush. American citizens are being held without charges or consul in military prisons. We are mobilizing for a war against a man and his nation based on the statements of our government that he has “weapons of mass destruction”, although we can’t – or won’t – produce the evidence to back this assertion up.
In the end, it comes down to a simple question: Where’s the plane? Does examination of the attack on the Pentagon gives you reasonable doubt as to the veracity of the government’s statements? Then you are compelled to question everything else they would have us believe. Terrorism is defined as The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons. This definition does not include the footnote of “unless you are in the right”. Our action against other nations, by our hand or our allies, is terrorism. The fact that you might believe that we are in “the right,” or that terrorists are only those who attack us, and our way of life, is immaterial. We are the largest terrorist nation on earth. We overthrow governments, disrupt elections and generally only attack those who cannot respond in kind. For what? Cheap oil? “Democracy” and the threat of communism? Or in the case of Central America, bananas?
We are a nation at war. Have been for many years. If you can read these books, and allow yourself to ponder the “what-if’s” they raise, then you must question the official statements, and in doing so, question the actions that have resulted from 9/11. Ask yourself who benefits from our actions. Ask yourself who benefited from Pearl Harbor, from killing JFK. From bombing the Pentagon. Ask yourself what nation could do such things•in your name.
Or, dismiss as fringe hysteria any dissent from mainstream thought. Look at those of us who feel lied to as akin to people who watch for UFO’s and crop circles. But in doing so, remember these words, spoken during the Second World War:
First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me. –Pastor Martin Niemööller
Are we a nation at war? And if so, who is the enemy?
