by Thomas Hargrove,
Scripps Howard News Service
Aug. 4, 2006
More than a third of the American public suspects that federal officials assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East, according to a new Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll.
The national survey of 1,010 adults also found that anger against the federal government is at record levels, with 54 percent saying they "personally are more angry" at the government than they used to be.
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Here's the poll's
pertinent question:
There are also accusations being made following the 9/11 terrorist attack. One of these is:
People in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted to United States to go to war in the Middle East.
Very likely
Somewhat likely
Not likely
Don't know
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16%
20%
59%
5%
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Widespread resentment and alienation toward the national government appears to be fueling a growing acceptance of conspiracy theories about the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Suspicions that the 9/11 attacks were "an inside job" — the common phrase used by conspiracy theorists on the Internet — quickly have become nearly as popular as decades-old conspiracy theories that the federal government was responsible for President John F. Kennedy's assassination and that it has covered up proof of space aliens.
Seventy percent of people who give credence to these theories also say they've become angrier with the federal government than they used to be.
Thirty-six percent of respondents overall said it is "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that federal officials either participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or took no action to stop them "because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East."
"One out of three sounds high, but that may very well be right," said Lee Hamilton, former vice chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also called the 9/11 commission.) His congressionally appointed investigation concluded that federal officials bungled their attempts to prevent, but did not participate in, the attacks by al Qaeda five years ago.
"A lot of people I've encountered believe the U.S. government was involved," Hamilton said. "Many say the government planned the whole thing. Of course, we don't think the evidence leads that way at all."
The poll also found that 16 percent of Americans speculate that secretly planted explosives, not burning passenger jets, were the real reason the massive twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed.
Conspiracy groups for at least two years have also questioned why the World Trade Center collapsed when fires that heavily damaged similar skyscrapers around the world did not cause such destruction. Sixteen percent said it's "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that "the collapse of the twin towers in New York was aided by explosives secretly planted in the two buildings."
Twelve percent suspect the Pentagon was struck by a military cruise missile in 2001 rather than by an airliner captured by terrorists.
That lower percentage may result from an effort by the conservative Washington-based Judicial Watch advocacy group to debunk the claim. The group filed claims under the Freedom of Information Act and got two film loops released from Pentagon security cameras.
"Some people claim they can't see anything, but I see a plane hitting the Pentagon at incredibly high speed," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. "I see the nose of the plane clearly entering the frame of one video and the tail of the plane entering the Pentagon in the other video."
Many conspiracy Web sites have posted the video loops and report the films are inconclusive or were manipulated by the government.
"Some folks will never be convinced," Fitton said. "But I'm hoping that these videos will dissuade reasonable people from falling into a trap with these conspiracy theories."
University of Florida law professor Mark Fenster, author of the book "Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture," said the poll's findings reflect public anger at the unpopular Iraq war, realization that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction and growing doubts of the veracity of the Bush administration.
"What has amazed me is not that there are conspiracy theories, but that they didn't seem to be getting any purchase among the American public until the last year or so," Fenster said. "Although the Iraq war was not directly related to the 9/11 attacks, people are now looking back at 9/11 with much more skepticism than they used to."
Conspiracy-believing participants in the poll agree their suspicions are recent.
"I certainly didn't think of conspiracies when 9/11 first happened," said Elaine Tripp, 62, of Tabernacle, N.J. "I don't know if President Bush was aware of the exact time it was going to happen. But he certainly didn't do enough to stop it. Bush was so intent on having his own little war."
Garrett Johnson, 19, of Manassas, Va., said it was "well after the fact" before he started questioning the official explanation of the attacks. "But then people I know started talking about it. And the Internet had a lot to do with this. After reading all of the different articles there, I started to think we weren't being told the truth."
The Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University has tracked the level of resentment people feel toward the federal government since 1995, starting shortly after Timothy McVeigh bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City. Forty-seven percent then said they, personally, feel "more angry at the federal government" than they used to. That percentage dropped to 42 percent in 1997, 34 percent in 1998 and only 12 percent shortly after 9/11 during the groundswell of patriotism and support for the government after the attacks.
But the new survey found that 77 percent say their friends and acquaintances have become angrier with government recently and 54 percent say they, themselves, have become angrier — both record levels.
The survey also found that people who regularly use the Internet but who do not regularly use so-called "mainstream" media are significantly more likely to believe in 9/11 conspiracies. People who regularly read daily newspapers or listen to radio newscasts were especially unlikely to believe in the conspiracies.
"We know that there are a lot of people now asking questions," said Janice Matthews, executive director of 911Truth.org, one of the most sophisticated Internet sites raising doubts about official explanations of the attacks. "We didn't have the Internet after Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin or the Kennedy assassination. But we live in different times now."
Matthews' Web site averaged 4,000 "hits" a day last year, but currently has at least 12,000 visits every 24 hours. The site, according to its online policy statement, is dedicated to showing the public that "elements within the U.S. government must have orchestrated or participated in the execution of the attacks for these to have happened the way in which they did."
Participants in the poll were asked to respond to "several serious accusations that some people have made against the federal government in recent years." Five conspiracy theories were described and participants were asked if each was "very likely, somewhat likely or unlikely."
The level of suspicion of U.S. official involvement in a 9/11 conspiracy was only slightly behind the 40 percent who suspect "officials in the federal government were directly responsible for the assassination of President Kennedy" and the 38 percent who believe "the federal government is withholding proof of the existence of intelligent life from other planets."
The poll found that a majority of young adults give at least some credence to a 9/11 conspiracy compared to less than a fourth of people 65 or older. Members of racial and ethnic minorities, people with only a high school education and Democrats were especially likely to suspect federal involvement in 9/11.
The survey was conducted by telephone from July 6-24 at the Scripps Survey Research Center at the University of Ohio under a grant from the Scripps Howard Foundation. The poll has a margin of error of 4 percentage points.
As originally published
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Commentary by Kathy Fisher:
One in three Americans? That's all?
Kathy
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Commentary by Helen & Harry Highwater:
According to this poll, 36% of Americans believe it's "'very likely' or 'somewhat likely' that federal officials either participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or took no action to stop them "because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East."
Thirty-six percent of Americans are skeptical about the official story of 9/11, while easily 99% of the mainstream news coverage offers no questions about the official story. Occasionally we see slanted coverage seemingly written to dismiss any skepticism at all, like this article itself, which uses the pejorative "conspiracy" a dozen times, plus a 13th time in the headline, and turns for quotes to a former vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission.
Gee, I wonder what his opinion will be?
The article, and the poll behind it, also asks weary questions about a missile, not a jet, hitting the Pentagon, or controlled explosives at the World Trade Centers, but it seems to me there are far more interesting and plausible questions, much, much closer to the surface — questions the poll and the media never ask. Questions like...
Why did all American national defense systems fail to defend America in any way on that day?
Why did Bush tarry so long at the grade school, while Cheney was whisked away from the White House by Secret Service agents seeking to protect him?
How did feds come up with a roster of 19 hijackers, complete with photos and biographies, so quickly after the catastrophe?
And how many of the 19 have now been found alive and well? (Six, I believe).
Were the planes' black boxes recovered?
Why did WTC Building #7 collapse, when it hadn't been hit by anything but debris from the larger buildings?
Why did the FAA destroy controllers' tape recorded recollections of that day?
Why did President Bush try to block any investigation at all, and offer next-to-no cooperation, refusing to turn over requested materials?
Why was the investigation so woefully underfunded, with about 1/29th the funding spent figuring out what went wrong in the 2003 shuttle disaster?
Why was President Bush allowed to testify without being under oath?
Why did the 9/11 Commission, charged with investigating what happened, say nothing when they knew they were being lied to?
Bear in mind, these are questions I'm typing at about 60 words per minute, without referencing anything but my own memory. I have no idea how many questions, how many hundreds of answered questions we'd end up with if we tried to prepare a comprehensive list of un-answered questions about 9/11.
What I know with absolute certainty is that President George Bush, VP Dick Cheney, and the official 9/11 investigation shared a common goal of turning their backs on these questions, and so many more questions.
Do we suspect foul play? You bet 2,976 lives we do.
Anyone who spends an hour even casually skimming the oddities of September 11 and doesn't suspect something's wrong with the official story is a completely witless dupe. Anyone who isn't asking questions betrays the smoldering memory of those 2,976 murdered men, women, and children.
Helen & Harry
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In response to inquiries from CBS News over why Ashcroft was traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines, the Justice Department cited what it called a "threat assessment" by the FBI, and said Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term.
"There was a threat assessment and there are guidelines. He is acting under the guidelines," an FBI spokesman said. Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department, however, would identify what the threat was, when it was detected or who made it.
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Is it luck that aberrant stock trades were not monitored? Is it luck when 15 visas are awarded based on incomplete forms? Is it luck when Airline Security screenings allow hijackers to board planes with box cutters and pepper spray? Is it luck when Emergency FAA and NORAD protocols are not followed? Is it luck when a national emergency is not reported to top government officials on a timely basis?
To me luck is something that happens once. When you have this repeated pattern of broken protocols, broken laws, broken communication, one cannot still call it luck.
If at some point we don't look to hold the individuals accountable for not doing their jobs properly then how can we ever expect for terrorists not to get lucky again?
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Amazingly, Air Force One took off [from Florida after the attacks of September 11] with no military protection. It remained unprotected in the sky for more than an hour, though Florida is filled with Air Force bases just minutes away with planes that are supposed to be on twenty-four-hour alert.
Bush's aides later offered, and retracted, the excuse that he spent the day flying around the country because of threats to Air Force One believed to have been received at the White House. What nobody has ever explained is this: If you think Air Force One is to be attacked, why go up in Air Force One?
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The fact that top officials, at a time of extraordinary crisis and public anxiety, lied to protect the president's image has immense implications. If, within 24 hours of the terror attacks, the White House was giving out disinformation to deceive the American public and world opinion, then none of the claims made by the government from September 11 to the present can be taken for good coin.
If Bush lied about his activities on the day of the attacks, why should anyone assume he has not lied about the government's investigation, the identity of the perpetrators, the motives and aims of US war preparations, and the intent and scope of expanded police powers demanded by his administration to wiretap, search and seize, and detain suspects?
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The 9/11 investigation was originally given a budget of $3-million, later increased to $12-million. Some reports say the budget is now $14-million.
By comparison, when the shuttle Columbia disintegrated during its descent in February 2003, $50-million was budgeted for an investigation, which began about an hour and a half after the disaster.
Another $305-million was spent by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), searching for shuttle debris.
The investigation into the shuttle accident began publicly releasing its findings within several weeks, and concluded its work with an exhaustive report about six months later.
Even the Warren Commission, the U.S. government's widely-disbelieved investigation of Pres. Kennedy's 1963 assassination, was budgeted at $5.5-million -- in 1963 funds.
Adjusted for inflation, that's more than $32-million in 2003 dollars.
You might think it would cost substantially more to thoroughly investigate a complicated event -- nineteen foreign hijackers commandeering four passenger jets and obliterating the World Trade Center, damaging the Pentagon, and killing thousands of Americans -- than to investigate the shooting of the president in a parade.
The Bush Administration seems to disagree. They think it should cost substantially less.
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CBS News has learned that barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq -- even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks.
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"We've been fighting for nearly 21 months -- fighting the administration, the White House," says Monica Gabrielle.
Her husband, Richard, an insurance broker who worked for Aon Corp. on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center's Tower 2, died during the attacks. "As soon as we started looking for answers we were blocked, put off and ignored at every stop of the way. We were shocked. The White House is just blocking everything."
Another 9/11 family advocate -- a former Bush supporter who requested anonymity -- was more blunt: "Bush has done everything in his power to squelch this [9/11] commission and prevent it from happening."
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President Bush personally asked Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle Tuesday to limit the congressional investigation into the events of September 11, congressional and White House sources told CNN.
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Why did the US military, with the most powerful arsenal in world history, fail to prevent or at least try to stop a series of hijackings and crashes that went on for nearly two hours?
Where was the Air Force?
If President Bush and his cabinet were not, at this very moment, still trying to censor, suppress and delay the publication of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11, if there had been honest disclosure and straight stories from the beginning, perhaps all these "dark questions," as the Post puts it, would never have arisen.
The great majority of people, sickened and overwhelmed by the horror of the attacks, unquestioningly accepts the White House version.
Many thousands, however, are patiently stitching together the documented evidence and noting the huge holes in the fabric of that official story.
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On Sept. 10, Newsweek has learned, a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns.
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Do we know the answers to these questions about September 11?
Of course not. Nobody will know the answers until there's an open and honest investigation.
But anyone courageous enough to think can see that the pertinent questions for any serious "investigation" were never asked, let alone answered.
--Helen & Harry, Unknown News
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You know, in a courtroom, when a witness is shown to be clearly lying about one detail, it calls that witness's entire testimony into doubt.
If it worked that way with presidents, we'd have ample grounds to doubt everything the Bush administration has told us about September 11, 2001.
After all; every newspaper and television account is directly or indirectly based in large part upon what the Bush administration has announced -- that they had no prior warning, that they knew immediately Osama bin Laden was to blame, that exactly 19 hijackers were aboard those four planes, that each hijacker has been posthumously identified, etc.
So our shared public perception of what happened on September 11, and why it happened, is really built on just one assumption, universally agreed: That the Bush administration is comprised of honest people, telling the truth.
But I don't see any evidence to support such an allegation.
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At his press conference yesterday, President Bush was asked about charges that he had received warnings prior to the September 11th attacks that a terrorist incident was imminent.
He answered that even asking such a question was "an absurd insinuation."
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The United States allowed members of Osama bin Laden's family to jet out of the US in the immediate aftermath of September 11, even as American airspace was closed.
Former White House counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke said the Bush administration sanctioned the repatriation of about 140 high-ranking Saudi Arabians, including relatives of the al-Qaida chief.
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A former translator for the FBI with top-secret security clearance says she has provided information to the panel investigating the 11 September attacks which proves senior officials knew of al-Qaida's plans to attack the US with aircraft months before the strikes happened.
She said the claim by the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that there was no such information was "an outrageous lie".
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Yet one week, one week after 9/11, in response to initial reports that the military failed to defend our domestic airspace during the hijacks NORAD issued an official chronology that stated that the FAA notified NORAD of the second hijacking at 8:43 -- wrong. FAA notified NORAD of the third hijacking at 9:24, according to your report, wrong, FAA notified NORAD of the fourth hijacking at an unspecified time and that prior to the crash in Pennsylvania Langley F-16 combat air patrol planes were in place, remaining in place, to protect Washington, D.C..
All untrue.
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At least six air traffic controllers who dealt with two of the hijacked airliners on Sept. 11, 2001, made a tape recording that same day describing the events, but the tape was destroyed by a supervisor without anyone making a transcript or even listening to it, the Transportation Department said in a report today.
That manager crushed the cassette in his hand, shredded the tape and dropped the pieces into different trash cans around the building, according to a report made public today by the inspector general of the Transportation Department.
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Although American and British officials say they have "no doubt" that Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda terrorist organization were behind the crimes of Sept. 11, so far no actual evidence has been made public.
... During the Cuban missile crisis, the United States publicly released photographs that made a convincing case that the Soviets were lying about the missiles in Cuba. This tangible evidence helped retain support from allies and isolated the Russians diplomatically. Our situation today calls for similar action. President Bush should not let a blanket concern about protecting intelligence sources dissuade him from releasing enough intelligence to make our case.
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"The report is incomplete at best," said Breitweiser.
"Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi. We have clear and convincing money trails linking the Saudi princes to the terrorists. Why that's not finding its way into the report, I don't know."
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One day before two American Airlines jets were hijacked and crashed, for example, 1,535 contracts changed hands on options that let investors profit if AMR stock falls below $30 per share before Oct. 20. That was almost five times the total number of those October $30 put options traded before Sept. 10, according to Bloomberg data. AMR shares fell $11.70 today to $18.
Those 1,535 contracts were worth $1.6 million at today's closing price compared with $337,700 at the end of trading on Sept. 10, according to Bloomberg data. A contract represents options for 100 shares.
Similarly, October $30 put options for UAL soared, with 2,000 contracts traded on Sept. 6, three trading days before the attack. A total of 27 contracts had traded previously.
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A Saudi citizen who provided help to two of the September 11 hijackers may have been an agent for the Riyadh government, a congressional report will highlight this week.
The explosive allegation in the report, which is understood to be highly critical of the FBI, is likely to reignite the controversy over Saudi Arabia's links with al-Qa'eda and has already led to accusations that the Bush administration is covering up for the House of Saud.
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There's much more than this at Unknown News.
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