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23 October 2006  |     mail this article   |     print   |   
9/11 five years later
Part 1 - Speech given by Daan de Wit from DeepJournal - Utrecht conference
By Daan de Wit
This article is based on the speech I gave on September 16th during the 9/11 conference in
Utrecht. I look back on the five years since September 11th and try to present an answer to the question of how to proceed from here.
Listen to the speech, download MP3, 21 Mb, Dutch spoken. See the speech at the bottom of this article.

The Dutch in the original article has been translated into English by Ben Kearney.
The transcript from the speech was provided to me by
Frank ter Marsch.
Five years later, 9/11 remains a crucial issue. The Dutch mission in Uruzgan, which the Ministry of Defense links to 9/11; internationally restrictive legislation; the view of Muslim society; the Dutch databank containing DNA profiles of persons 12 years and older who've had a run-in with the law; preemptive searches; the increase in the number of security cameras (see this remarkable example); the increase in the powers of the AIVD; the biometric passport [PDF] and the strict guidelines for passport photos [PDF]; the British 'control orders'; the Homeland Security Department, the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act in the U.S.
 
Any number of mundane issues are based on September 11th. Recently I saw a cartoon by Doonesbury in which Bush invariably answered every question that he was asked with "9/11". That's also the answer we get from our Ministry of Justice when asked about legislation that is getting more extreme or the anti-terror campaigns, such as The Netherlands against terrorism (devised by the Ara.Groep, who also gave us the commercials on desserts). Previously there was the All Eyes Can Help [PDF] campaign, part of A Safe Amsterdam, an initiative by the city of Amsterdam. And meanwhile there's also the website crisis.nl, with the campaign slogan Think Ahead. All of this cultivated fear is based on 9/11. Nevertheless I had a seasoned politician say to me: "I get a lot of mail from people about September 11th, and I look through it with interest. But in The Netherlands I find it too indiscrete to be talking about this or that theory on my night off in a discussion with people that I see during the day anyway. You have to understand how many problems we have with domestic issues already." To which I said: "Many of those problems - Uruzgan, the increasingly harsh legislation from the Minister of Justice - can be traced back to 9/11." To which the politician answered: "Okay, but then I think it's going much too far out of the way to try to approach these issues by way of what happened on September 11th." The politician in question is Harry van Bommel, Dutch MP with the Socialist Party.
Femke Halsema of the GreenLeft Party also wants nothing to do with 9/11 theories that stray from what her Minister-President has to say. How could it be (she wondered during a broadcast of Pauw and Witteman in which I talked about 9/11) that a secret operation could be carried out by the U.S. on September 11th and stay secret? This question is just as naive as another question that she posed during the broadcast: Who benefited from the attacks? Max Westerman, the incomparable reporter from RTL who was also in attendance, came up with the answer right away: Bush, of course. The question is so obvious that I asked it on September 11th of 2001. As a critical member of the opposition, Halsema would have to have known everything about secret operations and secret services, and should not have to had to ask herself whether or not secret operations can stay secret - for some people, carrying out secret operations is their daily bread. How else could a secret service function? And who is going to go around telling stories about their involvement in 9/11 without the fear of being lynched by the poplulation or being liquidated by co-conspirators? There are a number of examples to be had of secret operations that remained secret for decades, and there are probably any number of operations that we have no knowledge of because they remain secret to this day. And sometimes it doesn't matter if an operation eventually comes to light because by then the facts are already part of history. There's no one losing sleep over the fact that it's now known that the CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953. Bush: "History. We don't know. We'll all be dead."
 

9/11 is on the map
The alternatieve view of September 11th, 2001 was put on the map by the 9/11 tours of Jimmy Walter in the U.S. and Europe, by the long reach and perserverance of Alex Jones, by the documentary Loose Change, by the scientists who carried out research, by the (ex)-employees of the CIA and the Bush administration who spoke out, by Charlie Sheen and by all those 'regular' folks who formed the critical masses... What I hoped would happen from the beginning has happened - that more attention would be given to this crucial subject matter. The fifth anniversary of 9/11 brought a lot of attention to this subject, and that's unlikely to change. The issue isn 't going away, the population at large is now familiar with it. Considering the importance of the issue, it's up to everyone to pursue this. That doesn't mean that it should be a question of faith. It means that it's a question of being informed. Be informed, but inform yourself likewise with the facts that question the alternative view of 9/11 in a serious way. Compare it to a trial - a trial with only one lawyer is useless. You need two lawyers, and people who don't see it that way are taking an undemocratic view. They get angry at the notion of a criminal being defended, but they don't realize that it has been democratically determined that a balanced judgement be achieved by weighing the facts against comprehensive legislation in a democratic manner. The guideline is the body of facts, not the whimsy of the day. It's in this way that you attain a ruling that's as close as possible to the truth, and after that it's up to the judge. Hopefully a judge will eventually be able to issue a ruling on 9/11. But the point is that together we all need to spread the facts we already know about as widely as possible, and we also need to look into the details of how 9/11 was planned.

Zembla documentary on 9/11
And as far as that goes, I'm also critical of Zembla. Zembla was quite explicit in their 9/11 broadcast. As far as Zembla is concerned, it's been proven that a Boeing flew into the Pentagon. As far as I'm concerned, that hasn't been proven at all. Another element of it for Zembla was that Hani Hanjour really was able to execute the dive into the Pentagon. If that's the case, then that's great. But then let's check this out with veteran pilots as well, like De Grand Pre , Wittenberg and perhaps PilotsFor911Truth, which claims that Hanjour couldn't have performed that flight; these people formed the starting point for the experiment that Zembla conducted. It would also have been a good thing if all of the technical data from the experiment had been made public.
Even if Hanjour could have made that turn, the question remains as to what happened to the Boeing's engines. Weighing thousands of pounds and made from material such as titanium. At 500mph these two formidable projectiles would have left their mark. In earlier days, Major General Albert Stubblebine (ret.) had to establish the size of objects by looking at photos. He has looked at photos of the Pentagon taken before the walls collapsed and has determined that it was not a Boeing that disappeared into the building.
By way of TU-Delft Professor Coen Vermeeren, Zembla asserts that an airplane can quickly go up in smoke due to the light materials that it's made of. Images were shown of a fighter plane flying into a concrete block. But that's comparing apples to oranges, especially if you include the situation surroundi ng the Pentagon - it makes sense that this sort of fighter aircraft would go up in smoke after a confrontation with this type of wall, but with the Pentagon we're talking about a Boeing 757 with two huge jet engines, and at the same time, despite the fuselage being made out of light materials, there was a round hole about head-high three walls deep into the Pentagon. These facts don't add up, and they weren't all represented in the Zembla piece either. Zembla also showed Vermeeren photos of airplane fragments. These are photos that circulated on the internet for a while, but if you look closely, you can see that the photos have been very tightly cropped, which raises the question of where the photos have been taken.

During shooting for the Zembla program, controlled-demolition expert Danny Jowenko was confronted with some news, seeing as he was not up to speed on WTC7 and its collapse on 9/11. But he wasn't furnished wit h all of the relevant facts, such as the fact that thermite was found on the WTC's beams, or the fact that white-hot molten steel was found in the basement of the WTC six weeks later, described by one of the workers assigned to clean up the rubble as 'underground fires, like the fires of hell'.
Jowenko says that in the case of WTC7 there is talk of controlled demolition because the building was taken down from underneath, and he says that for that same reason controlled demolition had nothing to do with towers 1 and 2. But who can say that it's not possible to blow up those two towers from either above and below? Because if you take down a 1300 ft. tower from underneath (with an explosion that apparently leaves behind molten steel that is still smoldering), then there's a chance that it might fall over, and you can't have that in Manhattan because of all of the damage it would cause - perhaps the hijackers thought about this. It's already been established that the hijackers were so civic-minded as to fly right over a nuclear power plant, instead of directly into it, on their way to WTC1. And instead of simply flying st raight ahead to the Pentagon - into the part of the building in which the military leadership was located (among them Donald Rumsfeld, who was there that day) - they took the trouble to fly all the way around the buidling into a section that had just been renovated, where alongside a couple of construction workers there were just a few staff members present.
On the WTC towers: 'If they fell over side ways, can you imagine the damage in lower Manhattan [...] You couldn't have paid a demolition company to take 'm down straighter', according to someone assigned to the clean-up at Ground Zero. A tower standing 1300 ft. high that falls over is going to be a problem in densely-concentrated Manhattan. That could be a reason to burn it up from the top down. Thanks to a so-called unexplainable kinetic energy, the tower disappeared into dust from above during a free fall. Another member of the clean-up team says: 'Maybe now and then you found a fragment of something, but basically everything was just pulvarized'. But according to Jowenko it still wasn't a controlled demolition, because it would require 'a year's worth of work' [video 36'00"] to prepare the buildings for the collapse. What Jowenko was not told is that in Professor David Ray Griffin's book The New Pearl Harbor [p. 216, Dutch translation] it states that the company handling security for the WTC between 1996 and 2000 was in the hands of Marvin Bush and Wirt D. Walker III, the brother and the nephew of President George W. Bush respectively. Marvin left the company in 2000, but Walker stayed on. So these men had not one year, but several years to prepare the buildings for a controlled demolition. See also the article Power-downs in WTC prior to attack, in which I write: 'There were power-downs in the WTC following the completion of a several years long project led by the brother and the nephew of George W. Bush to remodel the security system of the towers. Professor David Ray Gr iffin [...] says in an interview: '[...] this company Securacom, that was in charge of security for the World Trade Center, one of its principals in the preceding years, when the new security system was put in, was Marvin Bush, the president's brother. And then Wirt Walker III, perhaps even more important, was the CEO, and his tenure existed up through 9/11. So there's no mystery how people could have gotten access. [...] Read more about Stratesec, formerly known as Securacom, in this Dutch article by DaanSpeak from September 11th 2004. There it is said that Stratesec also provided security for two other companies that had a vital role that day: Dulles airport (flight 77) and United Airlines (flights 93 and 175).' Shortly before September 11th the bomb-sniffing dogs were removed, there were evacuation drills, and entire portions of the security system had been switched off. What would Jowenko have said if he had been presented with these facts, and not just the couple of facts that were offered by Zembla?

Anyone who takes the time to search for the truth surrounding 9/11 is doing important work. The truth is arrived at once all questions and conjecture have been refuted by the facts. Until that happens, you're obliged to investigate. So kudos to Zembla. They investigate the facts in their search for the truth. It's one of the few mainstream media programs in which uncovering the truth is a priority: what actually happened on that 11th of September? The broadcast by Zembla was commendable because it may well have been the first regular TV show to do its own research. Zembla posed crucial questions, got the answers, and in some cases was definitive - namely that in some ways the official theory does in fact make sense. There's always the chance that a genuine exploration of the facts will result in answers that corroborate the official theory of 9/11. But in the case of Zembla, there are still serious questions to pose and facts to point out alongside that certainty.

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