9/11 Media Articles
Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on 9/11 from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.
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New charges have been filed alleging that a former top CIA official pushed a proposed $100 million government contract for his best friend in return for lavish vacations, private jet flights and a lucrative job offer. The indictment [brings] charges ... against Kyle Dusty Foggo, who resigned from the spy agency a year ago, and ... defense contractor Brent Wilkes. The charges grew from the bribery scandal that landed former U.S. Rep. Randy Duke Cunningham in prison. The pair now face 30 wide-ranging counts of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering [including that] Foggo provided Wilkes with sensitive, internal information related to ... national security, including classified information, to help him prepare proposals for providing undercover flights for the CIA under the guise of a civil aviation company and armored vehicles for agency operations. Then, he pushed his CIA colleagues to hire Wilkes companies without disclosing their friendship, prosecutors allege. In a June 2005 e-mail to the head of CIA air operations quoted in the indictment, Foggo offered to use some EXDIR grease on Wilkes behalf. Foggo was the agencys executive director at the time. In return, Wilkes offered to hire Foggo after he retired from government service. [An] initial indictment in February charged the pair with 11 counts of the same charges in connection with a $1.7 million water-supply contract Foggo allegedly helped win for one of Wilkes companies while he was working as a logistics coordinator at a CIA supply hub overseas. Foggo, the former No. 3 official at the CIA, resigned from the spy agency after his house and office were raided by federal agents.
Note: Until just a few years ago, there was a virtual blackout in the media on any negative coverage of the CIA. The prosecution of the #3 man in the CIA is an external manifestation of huge shake-ups going on behind the scenes. Buzzy Krongard, the previous #3 at the CIA has been linked to the millions of dollars in suspicious stock option trades made just prior to 9/11 that were never claimed, though this received little media coverage.
Senior government and military officials and other experts, organized by a joint Stanford-Harvard program called the Preventive Defense Project, met behind closed doors in Washington for a day-long workshop called "The Day After." The organizers of the nonpartisan project, Stanford's William Perry, a secretary of defense in the Clinton administration, and Harvard's Ashton Carter, a senior Defense Department official during the Clinton years, assumed the detonation of a bomb similar in size to the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima in World War II. A paper [they] are writing ... urges local governments and individuals to build underground bomb shelters; encourages authorities who survive to prevent evacuation of at least some of the areas attacked for three days ... and proposes suspending regulations on radiation exposure so that first responders would be able to act, even if that caused higher cancer rates. "The public at large will expect that their government had thought through this possibility and to have planned for it," Carter said in an interview. "This kind of an event would be unprecedented. We have had glimpses of something like this with Hiroshima, and glimpses with 9/11 and with Katrina. But those are only glimpses. If one bomb goes off, there are likely to be more to follow," Carter said. "This fact, that nuclear terrorism will appear as a syndrome rather than a single episode, has major consequences." It would, he added, require powerful government intervention to force people to do something many may resist -- staying put.
Note: Ashton Carter was co-author, with Philip Zelikow (later Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission) and John Deutch (former CIA Director), of a 1998 Foreign Affairs article, "Catastrophic Terrorism: Tackling the New Danger," which warned of a possible catastrophic attack on the World Trade Center and accurately described the governmental aftermath of 9/11.
President Bush issued a formal national security directive yesterday ordering agencies to prepare contingency plans for a surprise, "decapitating" attack on the federal government, and assigned responsibility for coordinating such plans to the White House. The prospect of a nuclear bomb being detonated in Washington without warning ... has been cited by many security analysts as a rising concern since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The order makes explicit that the focus of federal worst-case planning involves a covert nuclear attack against the nation's capital. "Adequate warning of potential emergencies that could pose a significant risk to the homeland might not be available, and therefore all continuity planning shall be based on the assumption that no such warning will be received," states the 72-paragraph order. The statement added, "Emphasis will be placed upon geographic dispersion of leadership, staff, and infrastructure in order to increase survivability and maintain uninterrupted Government Functions." After the 2001 attacks, Bush assigned about 100 senior civilian managers to rotate secretly to locations outside of Washington for weeks or months at a time [forming] a shadow government that evolved based on long-standing "continuity of operations plans." Since then, other agencies including the Pentagon, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA have taken steps to relocate facilities or key functions outside of Washington for their own reasons, citing factors such as economics or the importance of avoiding Beltway "group-think."
Note: Why isn't Congress making these absolutely vital decisions? What gives these organizations authority to determine what will happen in the case of a major attack?
[ABC's talk show] "The View," by accident or design, has an almost eerie calibration to the public at large. For example, only one of the four co-hosts ... is a supporter of President Bush. In other words, 25% of the cast has a favorable opinion of Bush, pretty much in line with Bush's approval ratings nationally. Likewise, last year a Scripps Howard poll found that 36% of the U.S. public believes the government was somehow complicit in the 9/11 attacks. I estimate Rosie [O'Donnell] constitutes 36% of the cast. Why does pop culture matter? Because it reveals ... what is really on our minds. And what's on our minds lately is reasonable doubt. Actor Charlie Sheen [is] onboard to narrate a new version of the online 9/11 conspiracy documentary "Loose Change," with distribution by billionaire Mark Cuban's Magnolia Pictures. We're not talking about a couple of flaky moonbats in an Oakland basement. Cuban owns the Dallas Mavericks. And just about everywhere you look, official narratives are coming unglued: Pat Tillman, for example, or the firing of eight federal prosecutors. The abduction of British sailors in what Prime Minister Tony Blair claimed was indisputably Iraqi territorial waters has proved to be quite disputable. [An] ex-British ambassador claims the map used by the Ministry of Defence to support its case is a fake. I am not a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. At the same time, I'm certain we don't know all there is to know about those events. The data stream has been so thoroughly corrupted. Weapons of mass destruction. Abu Ghraib. The silencing of climate scientists. It's hard for the ministries of Washington to make an appeal to authority when they have been proven so unreliable.
Note: For an abundance of reliable, verifiable information suggesting a 9/11 cover-up, click here.
There's a movie called "Loose Change" that asserts hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans colluded to kill their fellow citizens on 9/11. That Al Qaeda didn't attack us, we essentially attacked ourselves. Billionaire Mark Cuban is going to distribute the film so people all over the world can see it. We reported the situation last night and I talked with Mr. Cuban today on "The Radio Factor": [BILL] O'REILLY: The people in my town, Mr. Cuban, do now want "Loose Change" playing in the theater or Charlie Sheen narrating it. They believe that this is dishonest. They believe it diverts attention away from the real villains. MARK CUBAN, OWNER OF THE DALLAS MAVERICKS: Well, let's qualify here. First of all, it's already been on the Internet. O'REILLY: Rationalization, sir. CUBAN: It's not rationalization. This is just fact. When you have things that are in the shadows that people can't find and take on mythic proportions, that's what they can take. And they can take innuendo. Once you can see something, you can refute it.
Note: To understand how one of the richest people in the world (Mark Cuban) and a famous actor (Charlie Sheen) came to believe in a major cover-up of 9/11, see our 9/11 Information Center. Mr. Cuban is financing a new version of the Internet blockbuster which opened the eyes of millions to the cover-up. The new version will be narrated by Charlie Sheen. To see the earlier version of this powerful documentary, click here.
A controversial new film about 9/11 is raising eyebrows, not only for its content, but also for the people involved in the project: Rosie O'Donnell and Charlie Sheen. The sitcom actor and talk show hostess have both become spokespeople for the 9/11 conspiracy movement. The video "Loose Change" ... has been floating around the Internet for years, but now Sheen is in talks with Magnolia Pictures to narrate a new version of the video and redistribute it. Sheen believes the government may have been behind the attacks. O'Donnell has been using her Web site to reprint excerpts from the 9/11 conspiracy site, Whatreallyhappened.com. Magnolia Films founder Mark Cuban, who also owns the Dallas Mavericks, said they're also looking for a film telling the other side of the story, saying "we like controversial subjects."
Note: To view this film which has awoken tens of millions to the 9/11 cover-up, click here.
The FBI man in charge of collecting evidence from the government building destroyed by the Oklahoma bomb has called for the case to be reopened. Former deputy assistant director Danny Coulson ... said a federal grand jury is now needed to find out what really happened. He argues this is the only way to prove whether other people were involved in the bombing in a wider conspiracy beyond Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. Mr Coulson spent 31 years in the FBI. Between 1991 and 1997 he was the deputy assistant director of the Criminal Division of the FBI in Washington, responsible for all violent crime cases in the United States. Mr Coulson said there were some "very strong indicators" that other people were involved with Timothy McVeigh. The FBI interviewed 24 people who claimed to have seen McVeigh in Oklahoma City with someone else on the morning of the attack, yet the only known accomplice of McVeigh, Terry Nichols, was at home in Kansas over 200 miles away on that day. The FBI's investigation concluded that the eyewitnesses were unreliable. However, Danny Coulson says they were "extremely credible" and had no reason to make it up. "If only one person had seen it, or two of three, but 24?" he said. "I know FBI headquarters told [agents] to close down the investigation in Elohim City which has some very significant connections to Mr McVeigh. "Never in my career did I have FBI headquarters tell me not to investigate something." Last December a US Congressional report found no conclusive evidence of a wider conspiracy, but the report concluded that "questions remain unanswered and mysteries remain unsolved."
Note: Don't miss a highly revealing four-minute video-clip showing live media coverage of the Oklahoma City bomb available here. The official story is that one truck with a huge bomb was parked in front of the Oklahoma City federal building and only Timothy McVeigh and his partner were involved. The news footage proves that others must have been involved, as multiple unexploded bombs were recovered from points inside the building. Yet none of this was questioned in later testimony.
Literally dozens of people including journalists, police officers, WTC employees, emergency medical workers, and firefighters reported hearing explosions in the Twin Towers, with some of them explicitly saying that the collapses appeared to be instances of controlled demolition. One fire captain said: "I hear an explosion and I look up. It is as if the building is being imploded, from the top floor down, one after another, boom, boom, boom." [A] paramedic said: "It was [like a] professional demolition where they set the charges on certain floors." One firefighter said: "It seemed like on television [when] they blow up these buildings." Given all the features that indicate controlled demolition, it is not surprising that when a controlled demolition expert in Holland was shown videos of the collapse of WTC 7, without being told what the building was ... he said: "They have simply blown away columns. A team of experts did this. This is controlled demolition." Two emeritus professors of structural analysis and construction at Zurich's prestigious ETH Institute of Technology say that WTC 7 was "with the highest probability brought down by explosives." FEMA, the first agency given the task of explaining the collapse of the WTC, said that its best explanation for the collapse of WTC 7 had "only a low probability of occurrence." The 9/11 Commission avoided the problem by simply not finding room to mention this collapse in its 571-page report. This behavior is no surprise given the fact that the Commission was run by its executive director, Philip Zelikow, who was virtually a member of the Bush-Cheney administration.
Note: This article in Tikkun by renowned theologian David Ray Griffin is the first in any major U.S. national magazine to contain a detailed argument that the attacks of 9/11 were planned and carried out by rogue elements within the U.S. government. For additional reliable information on the 9/11 coverup, click here.
9/11 was the first global event in the age of the internet. And now the world wide web is being used as a platform for a wide range of conspiracy theories ... which allege that the US government was somehow involved in the attacks. Those who question the official account of 9/11 form a broad coalition. Loose Change has been viewed tens of millions of times and pulls no punches. [Creator Dylan Avery claims] "our government will willingly kill its own citizens for whatever gain it deems necessary ... and then lie as much as they need to cover it up." At the other extreme [Professor Jim] Fetzer is a former US Marine officer and retired professor of philosophy. Puzzled by the apparent discrepancies in the official account of 9/11, he founded a coalition of like-minded academics called Scholars For 9/11 Truth. Its purpose is to research exactly what happened that day, using the principles of scientific research. Alex Jones, a nationally syndicated radio talk show host ... believes 9/11 was "an inside job." "It's a self inflicted wound, it's a false-flag terror operation," he claims. After the attacks, government officials were summoned to give evidence before a Congressional Inquiry set up to investigate the intelligence failure before 9/11. Co-chairman Senator Bob Graham told ... of his frustration at the lack of co-operation from the FBI in that inquiry, and by the government's decision to censor over 30 pages of his report which related to Saudi Arabia. "Within 9/11 there are too many secrets," he said, "withholding of those secrets has eroded public confidence in their government."
Note: Don't miss the BBC's impressive 9/11 Timeline available here which is related to the above article. And for lots more reliable, verifiable information suggesting a 9/11 cover-up, click here. If the above link to the BBC article does not function, click on The 9/11 Conspiracy Movement.
Lots of questions have been raised about 9/11: Why does it look like there is no plane at the crash site in Pennsylvania where flight United 93 came down? Why did a building called World Trade Centre Building 7 collapse even though it was never hit by an aircraft? And why was America so unprepared when terror attack warnings had been received? Through the internet and the media generally, allegations of complicity by the US government in the 9/11 attacks are intensifying. We found that simple requests, such as asking to see the plane wreckage of flight United 93 at Shanksville, or flight American Airlines 77 at the Pentagon, were refused after months of delay by the authorities. Yet if we had been able to film the wreckage from flight AA77 we would have had extremely strong evidence that a Boeing 757 hit the Pentagon. Trying to prove or disprove these alternative theories is not easy. Officials are loathe to engage, thinking that any response will only fan the flames of popular conspiracy theories, and yet no response seems to be worse still. Senator Bob Graham ... co-chaired the Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 which detailed the failure of the CIA and FBI to use intelligence it had received about Al Qaeda before the attacks. Senator Graham told us there was a collaboration of efforts among agencies and the administration to keep information out of the publics hands.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing 9/11 news articles from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our 9/11 Information Center.
A recent poll by the respected New York Times revealed that three out of four Americans now suspect the U.S. government of not telling the truth about 9/11. This proportion has shot up from a year ago, when half the population said they did not believe the official story. [The] accepted version of what happened on 9/11 is being challenged by a 90-minute internet movie, [Loose Change, which is] so popular that up to 100 million viewers have watched [it]. Why were no military aircraft scrambled in time to head off the attacks? How could a rookie pilot - as one of the terrorists was - fly a Boeing 757 aircraft so precisely into the Pentagon? The movie's assertions are being explored by a number of commentators in America and Britain. Former Labour Cabinet Minister Michael Meacher ... has said of 9/11: "Never in modern history has an event of such cataclysmic significance been shrouded in such mystery." These words were written in a foreword for Professor David Ray Griffin's bestselling book, The New Pearl Harbour. Griffin ... is emeritus professor at the Claremont School of Theology in California and a respected philosopher. Together, the book and the movie have raised the question: could the attack be a carbon copy of Operation Northwoods, an aborted plan by President Kennedy to stage terror attacks in America and blame them on Communist Cuba as a pretext for a U.S. invasion to overthrow Fidel Castro? Initially ... Professor Griffin dismissed claims the attacks could have been an inside job. It was only a year later ... that the professor was sent a 'timeline' on the day's events based entirely on newspaper and television accounts. It was then that he changed his mind.
Note: The timeline which opened Prof. Griffin's eyes was the two-page 9/11 timeline from WantToKnow.info available at http://www.WantToKnow.info/9-11cover-up. This is the most supportive article yet by the mainstream media. The word is spreading. For lots more reliable, verifiable information on 9/11, click here.
The largest government contractor youve never heard of [is] a company known simply by the nondescript initials SAIC (for Science Applications International Corporation). It is larger than the departments of Labor, Energy, and Housing and Urban Development combined. No contractor seems to exploit conflicts of interest in Washington with more zeal. And no contractor cloaks its operations in greater secrecy. SAIC has displayed an uncanny ability to thrive in every conceivable political climate. It is the invisible hand behind a huge portion of the national-security statethe one sector of the government whose funds are limitless. SAIC represents, in other words, a private business that has become a form of permanent government. Civilians at SAIC used to joke that the company had so many admirals and generals in its ranks it could start its own war. Some might argue that, in the case of Iraq, it did. 9/11 ... was very, very good for SAIC. In the aftermath of the attacks ... SAIC was ready. SAIC executives have been involved at every stage of the life cycle of the war in Iraq. SAIC personnel were instrumental in pressing the case that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq ... and that war was the only way to get rid of them. Then ... SAIC secured contracts for a broad range of operations in soon-to-be-occupied Iraq. When no weapons of mass destruction were found, SAIC personnel staffed the commission that was set up to investigate how American intelligence could have been so disastrously wrong.
Note: SAIC changed its name to Leidos in 2013. Lockheed Martin, which already ran a breathtakingly big part of the United States, and was reported in 2015 to be engaged in deep and systemic corruption" including paying off a Congresswoman, merged with Leidos in 2016. The hidden war machine is consolidating. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about corruption in government and in the corporate world.
Senators are renewing calls for the declassification of a CIA report documenting the agencys mistakes in preventing the 2001 attacks. The Senate Intelligence Committee and the CIA may be headed for a new confrontation over an old issue: why an internal report documenting the agencys failures in the run up to the September 11 terror attacks is still being withheld from the public. The report, prepared by the CIAs inspector general, is the only major 9/11 government review that has still not been made publicly available. While Bush administration officials are hardly eager for a public rehash of the 9/11 intelligence failures, the issue is an especially sensitive one at CIA headquarters. The report provides the CIAs own internal account of what some believe was the most spectacular of the pre-9/11 failures: the agencys failure to alert the FBI and other U.S. government agencies to information showing that two of the hijackers had entered the United States as early as January 2000.
Five years later, it's the violent rattling of the ground moments before the World Trade Center's South Tower fell ... that keeps Gary Welz raising questions about just what he survived on Sept. 11, 2001. "I felt what was like an earthquake ... just before the South Tower fell," recalls Welz, an adjunct math lecturer at John Jay Criminal College and Fordham University. "The official explanation that I've heard doesn't make sense because it doesn't explain why I heard and felt an explosion before the South Tower fell." Welz is among the growing ranks of conspiracy theorists who question the official explanation of ... the Sept. 11 attacks. The actions of U.S. administrations in recent American history have done nothing to dissuade conspiracy theorists. The details of the 1980s Iran-Contra affair, after all, read like an implausible conspiracy theorist's dream. The Watergate scandal provides fodder too. The Bush administration, it can be argued, has encouraged a new generation of theorists after implying there was a link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks ... and insisting Iraq was riddled with weapons of mass destruction. Although he is doubtful of the official 9/11 story, Welz ... does not consider himself a conspiracy theorist. Welz' own skepticism toward 9/11, while based on personal experience, has been reinforced by broadcast quality, highly-polished films on the Internet such as "9/11 Mysteries." There are hundreds of others out there. One such film is "Loose Change" ... a polished, albeit journalistically flawed, attempt to poke holes in the U.S. government's explanation and response to the Sept. 11 attacks. "Loose Change" has been downloaded over 30 million times in 50 countries.
Note: For free viewing of "Loose Change," click here. To view "9/11 Mysteries," click here. For an abundance of reliable, verifiable information suggesting a major cover-up of 9/11, click here.
Like it or loathe it, you can't ignore Loose Change ... the most successful movie to emerge from what followers call the 9/11 Truth Movement. They believe ... that the attacks in New York and Washington on September 11 2001 were [the work of] of elements within the US government. Recent polls suggest more than a third of Americans believe that either the official version of events never happened, or that US officials knew the attacks were imminent, but did nothing to stop them. Google Video acts as a portal for the movie. The running tally of the number of times it has been viewed since last August ... stands at 4,048,990. On top of that, the movie was shown on television to up to 50 million people in 12 countries on September 11 last year; 100,000 DVDs have been sold and 50,000 more given away free. The film gained airplay on old media platforms such as Air America and Pacifica radio stations, local Fox TV outlets and on stations around the world, including state outlets in Belgium, Ireland and Portugal. The power of the film is that it lays down layer upon layer of seemingly rational analysis to end up with a conclusion many would find incredible. It is compiled from original footage from numerous news sources. Yet to come [is] Loose Change: the Final Cut, [which] filmed original interviews with Washington players, employed lawyers to iron out copyright issues with borrowed footage, [and] commissioned 3D graphics from Germany. The end result ... will be seen at Cannes and have a cinema release in America and across the world on the sixth anniversary of 9/11.
Note: To view this highly revealing 9/11 documentary, click here. For an abundance of reliable, verifiable information suggesting a 9/11 cover-up, click here.
A federal judge on Friday dismissed a libel lawsuit filed against The New York Times by a former Army scientist once identified as a person of interest in the 2001 anthrax attacks. U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton in Alexandria dismissed the case a week after lawyers for the Times argued that Steven Hatfill should be considered a public figure under libel law, which makes it much more difficult for a public figure to win a judgment than a private citizen. The judge did not explain his ruling in the order issued Friday. Hatfill had claimed that a series of columns falsely implicated him as the culprit in the anthrax attacks. Kristof said all along that he never intended to accuse Hatfill but simply wanted to prod a dawdling FBI investigation. He initially referred to Hatfill in his columns only as Mr. X, and identified him by name only after Hatfill held a news conference to denounce rumors that had been swirling around him. Hatfill argued that the columns contained enough information about him that people could deduce his identity. Five people were killed and 17 sickened by anthrax that had been mailed to lawmakers on Capitol Hill and members of the news media in New York and Florida just weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The case remains unsolved.
Note: There is much more here than meets the eye. This article fails to mention some key facts. As reported by the highly respected Federation of American Scientists, "the New York Times invoked the 'state secrets' doctrine last month in a motion to dismiss the libel suit brought against it by Steven J. Hatfill." What secrets would be divulged? Could this have anything to do with the many microbiologists who were murdered or died under mysterious circumstances within months of the anthrax scares? For more, click here.
The Taliban ... briefly banned poppy cultivation in 2000 in an effort to gain U.S. diplomatic recognition and aid. When the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, poppies were grown on only 7,600 hectares. Under the American occupation ... poppy cultivation spread to every province, and overall production has increased exponentially ever since -- this year by 60 percent. Within Afghanistan, where perhaps 3 million people draw direct income from poppy, profits may reach $3 billion this year. In-country profit adds up to an estimated 60 percent of Afghanistan's gross domestic product, or more than half the country's annual income. Afghanistan provides 92 percent of the world's heroin. Through many administrations, the U.S. government has been implicated in the Afghan drug trade. Before the American and Pakistani-sponsored mujahedeen took on the Soviets in 1979, Afghanistan produced a very small amount of opium for regional markets, and no heroin at all. By the end of the jihad against the Soviet army, it was the world's top producer of both drugs. The CIA made it all possible by providing legal cover for these operations. The United States [encouraged] Islamist extremists (then "our" soldiers) and ... set the stage for the Taliban. [Currently,] President Hamid Karzai['s] strategy is to avoid confrontation, befriend potential adversaries and give them offices, often in his Cabinet. The trade penetrates even the elected Parliament. Among the 249 members of the Wolesi Jirga (lower house) are at least 17 known drug traffickers, in addition to 40 commanders of armed militias, 24 members of criminal gangs, and 19 men facing serious allegations of war crimes.
Note: Could it be that some U.S. officials are turning a blind eye, or even supporting this drug trade? For some very strong evidence of this from a former award-winning DEA agent turned journalist and author, click here.
Tens of millions of Americans really believe their government was complicit in the murder of 3,000 of their fellow citizens. The government these Americans suspect of complicity in 9/11 has acquired a justified reputation for deception: weapons of mass destruction, secret prisons, illegal wiretapping. The Truth Movement's recent growth can be largely attributed to the Internet-distributed documentary "Loose Change." It's been viewed over the Internet millions of times. Complementing "Loose Change" are the more highbrow offerings of a handful of writers and scholars, many of whom are associated with Scholars for 9/11 Truth. Two of these academics, retired theologian David Ray Griffin and retired Brigham Young University physics professor Steven Jones, have written books and articles that serve as the movement's canon. The Truth Movement's relationship to the truth may be tenuous, but that it is a movement is no longer in doubt. For the Administration, "conspiracy" is a tremendously useful term, and can be applied even in the most seemingly bizarre conditions to declare an inquiry or criticism out of bounds. Of course, the ommission report was something of a whitewash Bush would only be interviewed in the presence of Dick Cheney, the commission was denied access to other key witnesses, and ... a meeting convened by George Tenet the summer before the attacks to warn Condoleezza Rice about al Qaeda's plotting ... was nowhere mentioned in the report. It's hard to blame people for thinking we're not getting the whole story. For six years, the government has prevaricated and the press has largely failed to point out this simple truth.
Note: Though this article belittles the 9/11 movement, there is abundant evidence to support the claim that the 9/11 Commission was a whitewash and the attacks may have been orchestrated. For more, click here.
In an age of overflowing information and proliferating media, kids need to rapidly process what's coming at them and distinguish between what's reliable and what isn't. The juniors in Bill Stroud's class are riveted by a documentary called Loose Change unspooling on a small TV screen at the Baccalaureate School for Global Education, in urban Astoria, N.Y. The film uses 9/11 footage and interviews with building engineers and Twin Towers survivors to make an oddly compelling if paranoid case that interior explosions unrelated to the impact of the airplanes brought down the World Trade Center on that fateful day. Afterward, the students--an ethnic mix of New Yorkers with their own 9/11 memories--dive into a discussion about the elusive nature of truth. Raya Harris finds the video more convincing than the official version of the facts. Marisa Reichel objects. "Because of a movie, you are going to change your beliefs?" she demands. "Just because people heard explosions doesn't mean there were explosions." Stroud has posed this question to his class on the blackboard: "If truth is difficult to prove in history, does it follow that all versions are equally acceptable?" Throughout the year, the class will examine news reports, websites, propaganda, history books, blogs, even pop songs. The goal is to teach kids to be discerning consumers of information and to research, formulate and defend their own views, says Stroud, who is founder and principal of [the] school.
Note: To view the highly engaging documentary Loose Change, click here. For more on 9/11, click here.
The Pentagon ... has resisted entreaties from U.S. anti-narcotics officials to play an aggressive role in the faltering campaign to curb the country's opium trade. Military units in Afghanistan largely overlook drug bazaars, rebuff some requests to take U.S. drug agents on raids and do little to counter the organized crime syndicates shipping the drug to Europe, Asia and, increasingly, the United States. Poppy cultivation has exploded, increasing by more than half this year. Afghanistan supplies about 92% of the world's opium. "It is surprising to me that we have allowed things to get to the point that they have," said ... a former top State Department counter-narcotics official. Outgoing Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said that Afghanistan's flourishing opium trade is a law enforcement problem, not a military one. The opium trade is one-third of the country's economy. Several dozen kingpins ... have become more brazen, richer and powerful. [They] openly run huge opium bazaars and labs that turn opium into heroin. [The] head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said ... that the location of major drug operations were "well-known to us and to the authorities." The Pentagon has balked at drug interdiction efforts even when it had the resources, said a former senior U.S. anti-drug official. "There were [drug] convoys where military people looked the other way," the former official said. "DEA would identify a lab to go hit or a storage facility and [the Pentagon] would find a reason to ground the helicopters." A recent congressional report said the DEA asked the Pentagon for airlifts on 26 occasions in 2005, and the requests were denied in all but three cases.
Note: Some observers and insiders believe the reason Afghanistan was attacked is because the Taliban had virtually stopped the opium trade in 2001. For reliable evidence supporting these allegations, click here.
Important Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.
