A Good Investment … A Powerful Proof Statement

We want to show in September 2002 just how far we've come…. We want to have a powerful proof statement in September 2002.

Anne Tatlock, Chief Executive Officer, Fiduciary Trust, San Francisco Business Times, 2/1/02

Larry Silverstein made a sweet deal for himself prior to the fall of the Twin Towers and WTC 7.

Of the promised $3.2 billion for the 99-year lease that was estimated to be worth $8 billion, Larry Silverstein committed only $15 million of his Properties' money - that is, less than half of .01 % of the total financing.

He and his partners (mall-builder Westfield America and a group headed by Lloyd Goldman) immediately took out insurance polices worth more than $3.2 billion for their dream-come-true new holding.

On November 5, 2001 the Real Estate Journal reported on the progress that Larry Silverstein, Lloyd Goldman, and their partners had made toward rebuilding on the Twin Towers' site. The REJ article stated that Silverstein had the support of New York senators Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton (Larry Silverstein had hosted parties for both politicians on his yacht the Silver Shalis) as well as Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott ,and House Speaker Dennis Hastert. REJ reported that the mogul had hired Brad Card, brother of White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, to "work" politicians in New York. He was lobbying for caps on liability from the WTC carnage and pursuing lawsuits against insurers. He talked of building four 50-story buildings and a memorial on the site.

The 11/5/01 REJ article concluded: "It also may end up being a good investment. In the end, Mr. Silverstein may wind up controlling 11 million square feet of attractive, lower-rise modem space instead of 11 million square feet of 30-year-old space in New York's tallest and most conspicuous buildings.

"'It should prove to justify the time, energy and the psychic impact of what we've been through,' Mr. Silverstein says."

In February 2002 Silverstein Properties won $861 million from Industrial Risk Insurers to rebuild on the site of WTC Building 7.

Regarding the Twin Towers, Larry Silverstein and his partners are locked in lawsuits with Swiss Reinsurance, the Towers' main insurer, over whether the 9/11 attacks were one "occurrence" or two. The lease-holders would receive $3.55 billion as a settlement if the attacks are considered one occurrence. They would receive $7.1 billion - that is, more than twice their investment, an investment that was itself only 20% paid for (and in the case of Silverstein Properties less than half of .01 % paid for) if the attacks are determined to be two occurrences.

Whatever the result of the dispute with Swiss Reinsurance, Silverstein Properties will receive billions in insurance moneys and possibly more in state and federal funds to rebuild on the WTC site.

At the time of their collapse the Twin Towers and WTC 7 needed extensive work to stay competitive as office-space in Manhattan. As early as 1993 - the year of the basement-garage bombing by '"Muslim terrorists"' that the FBI had anticipated from at least 1985 onward - the WTC "was already passing its prime as office space, overtaken by a generation of more recent, cybernetic ally 'smart' buildings with higher ceilings and greater built-in electrical capacity," according to Eric Darton's Divided We Stand.

Darton continues: "To maintain the trade center as class-A office space commanding top rents, the PA" (the Port Authority, then the WTC's owner) "would have had to spend $800 million rebuilding the electrical, electronic communications, and cooling systems."

The new Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, created by Governor George Pataki in November 2001, is to decide on uses of the Twin Towers' site. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation is chaired by John Whitehead, he the former Chief Executive Officer of the Goldman Sachs investment-banking firm and former Deputy Secretary of State in the George Herbert Walker Bush Administration and he another close associate of the Rockefeller family's.

---------------

Now I feel obliged to look at who died and who did not in the World Trade Center attacks last September 11.

2,952 people is the current total of dead from there on that day (we'll never know how many undocumented workers remain uncounted beyond the official dead). 129 were passengers or crew aboard the airliners. 479 were public-service personnel such as firefighters and New York City Police. The remaining 2,344 were office-workers.

We can be thankful that the current total is times less than the numbers that were broadcast on the day of "'9/11'" and in the several weeks afterward.

Only one Chief Executive Office is among the total. David Alger of Fred Alger Management headed a firm with offices on the North Tower's 93rd floor, a firm that lost 34 others on 9/11.

The largest employer of workers in the Twin Towers was Morgan Stanley Dean Witter.

The Wall Street Journal of 9/12/01 quoted Phil Purcell, Chairman and CEO of MSDW, a brokerage and investment-banking firm: '"Some 3,500 people working for Morgan Stanley's individual-investor businesses were based in the World Trade Center complex, and we are working diligently with local authorities to determine the facts regarding their safety."'

We can be thankful that only ten Morgan Stanley Dean Witter employees were killed last September 11.

We can also be thankful that only one Israeli died in the World Trade Center on that day.

Early reports led to fears that dozens or even hundreds of Israelis might have died on "'9/11.'"

On September 12, 2001 the Jerusalem Post wrote that according to Israel's Foreign Ministry and its Consular offices about 4,000 Israelis had been employed in the World Trade Center Towers. Four days later, September 16, addressing Congress, President George W. Bush linked Israel's tragedy to the United States' by saying that 130 Israelis had died in the attacks on the WTC.

On September 22, 2001, however, the New York Times ran a piece that corrected President GWB. "There were, in fact," the Times wrote about fatalities from 9/11, "only three Israelis who had been confirmed as dead: two on the planes and another who had been visiting the towers on business and who was identified and buried."

That is, there was only one death out of one nationality's initial, supposed pool of 4,000 in the Towers.

That's a statistical anomaly of huge proportions. Two other facts help to explain this anomaly.

In August of 2001 Israel's intelligence service, the Mossad, repeatedly warned the United States that attacks such as those of "'9/11'" were imminent. The Mossad sent agents to the CIA in Washington with this alarm.

Further, on the morning of 9/11 an Israel-based instant-messaging company, Odigo, e-mailed employees in its South Tower offices that they should not go to work because their building was likely to be attacked.

The investment-banking firm of Goldman Sachs may also have warned its WTC workers. The 9/14/01 edition of CounterPunch reported: "CounterPunch has also learned that an internal memo was sent around Goldman Sachs in Tokyo on September 10 advising all employees of a possible terrorist attack. It recommended all employees to avoid any American government buildings."

Odigo's message and the reported Goldman Sachs' warning somehow weren't conveyed to the tens of thousands who did come to work at the World Trade Center last September 11. Nor were those thousands warned by U. S. Government Agencies and officials.

---------------

Fiduciary Trust is yet another investment-banking firm. Like J.P. Morgan and Lazard Freres before it, Fiduciary Trust wants to serve big money or an exclusive elite. It's "for institutions and wealthy clients." Five months prior to 9/11/01, Fiduciary Trust was bought by Franklin Resources of San Mateo, California for $825 million.

Fiduciary Trust employed 645 people on five floors on or above the 90th in the WTC's South Tower. 87 of those employees were killed due to the "'9/11'" destruction.

Fiduciary Trust's Chairman and CEO, Anne Tatlock, 62, was gone from her headquarters on "'9/11.'"

The February 1, 2002 San Francisco Business Times reported: "On the morning of Sept. 11, Tatlock herself had just arrived with a small group of business leaders at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha for a charity event hosted by Warren Buffett. She then heard the news of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center's north tower."

H'mm! Or: H'mm?

We should pause here to note other, curious, and coincidental facts.

Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska is home to the United States' Strategic Air Command Center.

The SACC is a two-level, 14,000 square-foot underground structure that links directly with the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon.

The SAAC may be imagined as a vaster, 21st-century model of the bunker in which Peter Seller's Dr. Strangelove wanted to wage nuclear war in Stanley Kubrick's 1963 movie.

The press release for the SAAC states: "Within seconds, vital operational data can be displayed on the large wall display screens or individual computer monitors…. The Senior Controller also has a direct line to the National Military Command Center in Washington, D.C., and to the other major command headquarters. This system, called the Joint Chiefs of Staff Alerting Network, allows CINCSTRAT (the Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command) prompt contact with the President, the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other unified commanders…. Through satellites and radio networks (VLF, LF, UHF, and HF), the Command Center can communicate with aircraft in flight over any part of the world. A principal purpose of these networks is to pass National Command Authority orders to the alert forces…. Although CINCSTRAT can launch aircraft for survival, only the President can order nuclear strikes."

From the above paragraph, you may gather that the SAAC should have helped to track and intercept the four off-course airliners last September 11.

You may know, too, that Warren Buffet is one of the world's leading financiers. His fortune of more than $50 billion makes him widely listed as one of the five richest men in the U. S.

H'mm! Or: H'mm?

You also may now be exclaiming at certain coincidences. How was it that "a small group of business leaders" were flown to Nebraska and this particular Air Force Base - the AFB that's the "nerve-center" of U.S. air defenses - and flown there for a "charity event" hosted by Warren Buffet - very early on the morning of 9/11/01?

Who other than Anne Tatlock were among the "small group of business leaders" is yet another question.

And these questions are but a few among the deeper details of "'9/11'" that have yet to be answered.

President George W. Bush went to Offutt AFB later in the 9/11/01 day. President GWB left Barksdale AFB in Shreveport, Louisiana at 1:48 Central Daylight Time, arriving at Offutt AFB in the next hour.

From there he consulted by phone with his National Security Council.

In March of 2002 financial speculator Warren Buffett predicted that the use of nuclear weapons by terrorists was '"inevitable."'

In August of 2002 we in the U.S. have become familiar with the charges by Strangelove-like Cabinet officers such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld that Saddam Hussein of Iraq wants to wield nuclear weapons against us.

---------------

Fiduciary Trust appears to have also profited from the destruction on"'9/11.'"

The 2/1/02 San Francisco Business Times reported: "Through the first two weeks after the attacks, Franklin had paid out $16.46 million in benefits payments to victims' families," but the firm could "write off $19.8 million in lease, property, and equipment leases," and that it could also "recover an estimated $27.2 million from insurance."

The difference between $47 million and $16.46 million is about $30 million. Fiduciary Trust's payments to victims' families' average about $200,000 per family.

Further, Fiduciary Trust's "integration" with Franklin Resources has been enhanced after September 11, the 2/1/02 San Francisco Business Times reported.

"With most of Fiduciary's physical assets destroyed, the firm's back-office integration with Franklin - an ever-risky blending of culture and technology - also was bumped up.

"We are now a year or more ahead on integration plans," Tatlock said.

Plus, Franklin and Fiduciary launched FTI Institutional, its global sales effort aimed at institutional investors.

Given the overarching tragedy, however, Franklin and Fiduciary officials, as well as Wall Street analysts, resist calling the changes a silver lining.

"We want to show in September 2002 just how far we've come," Tatlock said. "We want to have a powerful proof statement in September 2002."

First Looks ...  Last Looks

Let's look back at the WTC Buildings' collapse.

On September 14 a relatively obscure newspaper, the Albuquerque Journal, ran a story that was headed "'Explosives Planted In Towers,' New Mexico Tech Expert Says."

Van Romero, Vice President for Research at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, told the Albuquerque Journal on 9/14/02: "'My opinion is, based on the videotapes, that after the airplanes hit the World Trade Center there were some explosive devices inside the buildings that caused the towers to collapse.'"

Van Romero is "a former director of the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center at Tech, which studies explosive materials and the effects of explosions on buildings, aircraft and other structures," the newspaper in New Mexico wrote.

"Romero said the collapse of the structures resembled those of controlled implosions used to demolish old structures... .

"'It could have been a relatively small amount of explosives placed in strategic points,' Romero said. The explosives likely would have been put in more than two points in each of the towers, he said.

"The detonation of bombs within the towers is consistent with a common terrorist strategy, Romero said.

"'One of the things terrorist events are noted for is a diversionary attack and secondary device,' Romero said.

"Romero said that if his scenario is correct, the diversionary attack would have been the collision of the planes into the towers."

On the afternoon of September 11 another engineer, David Rostchek, reviewed TV coverage of that morning's catastrophe in lower Manhattan. He posted his observations on the Internet.

David Rostchek remarked on how smoke from the fires in the North and then the South Tower turned from white to black, a change that showed the fires were cooling due to lack of oxygen, a change we've also noted.

"Then, later," Rostchek wrote, "the second building suddenly crumbles into dust, in a smooth wave running from the top of the building (above the burned part) down through all the stories at an equal speed. The debris falls primarily inward. The tower does not break off intact and collapse into other buildings.… The crumbling comes from the top (above the damage). It moves at a uniform rate. All of the structural members are destroyed in a smooth pattern, so there is no remaining skeleton. The damage is uniform, symmetric, and total.

"In summary, it looks exactly like a demolition - because that's what it is."

Last September, too, on the ABC News Website for 9/11 a bystander on the ground below the Towers described what she saw and heard: "'Lots of smoke and then the next thing I heard was an explosion in the building from the top, the south building just crumbled, just completely went down, I saw it,' said witness Joan Fleischer."

In July of 2002 the Public Broadcasting Corporation (PBS) - sponsored by many of the financial institutions and oil companies that had or have offices in the World Trade Center - presented a documentary titled "Why the Towers Fell."

Over the course of this documentary's hour several professors and engineers elaborated on the depiction/explanation that the 767s' impact and the subsequent fire had caused the Towers' beams to deform, snap loose, and collapse.

Not once, however, was any substance in either Tower identified as able to burn hot enough to deform steel. One of the North Tower's two above-the-impact-zone survivors, Brian Clark, in fact, said that he'd seen nothing like "an inferno" as he passed downstairs through the impact zone.

In August of 2002 the New York Times corroborated this eyewitness with the piece that I've already quoted - that about the two New York City firemen, Battalion Chief Orio J. Palmer and Fire Marshal Ronald P. Bucca, who reached the 78th floor, the Sky Lobby, of the South Tower, about 45 minutes after United Airlines 175's impact.

Here's more of what the New York Times wrote: "Once they got there, they had a coherent plan for putting out the fires they could see and helping victims who survived…. At that point, the building would be standing for just a few more minutes, as the fire was weakening the structure on the floors above him. Even so, Chief Palmer could see only two pockets of fire, and called for a pair of engine companies to fight them."

 

-----------------------

 

 

 

September 11, 2003 will mark the second anniversary of the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings that killed thousands of New Yorkers. Like MIT Professor Noam Chomsky, you've written a book about what happened on 9/11. Would the New Yorkers who read MIT Professor Chomsky's book on 9/11 learn anything new about why 9/11 happened, by reading your book?

Don Paul: My views as to the why of the 9/11 attacks differ radically from Noam Chomsky's. His view accords with the U.S. Government's line that "Arab terrorists" (i.e., al-Qaeda) committed those attacks. Chomsky's explanation as to why differs from George W. Bush's only in that he attributes the reason for the attacks to "blowback" from nefarious U.S. Government operations and policies in the Middle East and Afghanistan over the past several decades, while our current selected President attributes the attacks to envy at freedom and prosperity in the U.S. by fanatical followers of a fundamentalist kind of Islam.

Chomsky also limits his explanation to the confines of what's widely known as "structural analysis." That is, he and his followers reject the importance of individual perpetrators of crimes such as the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq--just as they reject the importance of which Government politician ordered which crime in the more distant past--such as Suharto "in" East Timor, Kissinger and Nixon "in" Cambodia, Brzezinski "in" Afghanistan, Reagan and George H.W. Bush "in" Afghanistan, Nicaragua, El Salvador, et cetera. They say that structural realities, structural inequities, are really determinative, not the villains who come and go as heads of State.

So far as such analysis goes, I agree with it. The U.S. Presidency has passed from a Bush to a Clinton and back to a Bush with very little variance in the direction that material realities and an elite's drive for profits and power have compelled "U.S. foreign policy." Oil remains the U.S. elite's prime concern and opium from Afghanistan remains a main mover in the world's illegal and legal economies, just as both commodities were 15 years ago.

The failing of analysis such as Chomsky's, I think, is that it stays short of identifying and examining the structures that are really most powerful and determinative in the world. And so it stays short of naming those structures' most consequential criminals. So it doesn't name, of course, the institutions and Foundations that fund and promote the limits of "structural analysis:; I mean institutions funded by Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Pews, et cetera. George Soros and his Open Society Institutes and Human Rights Watch, particularly, maintains illusions of democracy and investigation that misleads millions of people.

I think these structures and forces and their operators are far above elected Governments. They far outstrip Governments in their reach and power. At the heart of their structure and operation is, I think, the international financial system--a cruel, abstract system that depends upon more and more exploitation of people and resources--a profoundly irrational system whose failings can only be disguised and whose operations that can only be sustained by the kind of "endless war" and Patriot Acts brought to the U.S. public after September 11, 2001.

In my view, a secret team within the U.S. Government primarily carried out the 9/11 attacks. The attacks could not have happened without the participation of such a team. In particular this team was responsible for the unprecedented failure to intercept hijacked airliners on the 9/11 morning--one hour and 28 minutes elapsed between 8:15 EDT, the time of the first off-course deviation by American Airlines Flight 11, the airliner that hit World Trade Center Building 1, the North Tower, at 8:48--and the crash into the Pentagon at 9:43.

Noam Chomsky disdains to consider such a conspiracy ("I think such speculations lead us away from issues of prime significance, not towards them...Personally, I don't think it's worth the effort."). But I find such a conspiracy from the inside of the U.S. Government far more likely than the absurd cartoon which is the official story--made up of physical impossibilities, incapable pilots, hard-drinking Muslims, indestructible passports, et cetera--a cartoon that both Corporate and supposedly "Left" media continue to parrot and thereby promote.

Why were the attacks carried out? Why was such mass murder and horror and suffering visited on New York City in particular? The superelites' exploitative, irrational economy needed a pretext to avoid the consequences of its failings--over 1.1 million jobs had been lost in the U.S. between January and August 2001--and needed a pretext to grab control of oil and gas reserves from Central Asia and to regain control of the opium potential in Afghanistan--the Taliban had cut the opium crop there from 4600 metric tons to 173 over the year before 9/11/01, removing $150-200 billion from the world's illegal economy in one year and an amount 20 times greater than $150-200 billion from Banks and Stock Markets and other legal institutions through laundering of profits from the narcotic. Economic vulnerability and the grab for reserves of oil and gas are also leading the U.S. to invasion and occupation of the Middle East--Iraq first--mass murder on top of mass murder--and all these invasions are based on the cartoon-like lies about 9/11 that Corporate and "Left" media refuse to examine and expose.

What actually caused the collapse of the Twin Towers in Manhattan on September 11, 2001?

DON PAUL: To tell the truth, I'm not sure. My book states: "Neither jet fuel's fire nor anything else that was in the Towers that morning burns hot enough (1022 degrees Fahrenheit)...to deform steel." And that: "to not topple sideways, but to instead fall straight-down within their foundations, the 110-story Towers had to be imploded by explosives set off against their load-bearing columns and beams."

I remain sure of those statements. I'm also sure that the Twin Tower's central columns must have been severed at their bases, 7 stories underground, by explosives comparable to nuclear devices. The largest seismic spikes that Columbia University's Laboratory record on the 9/11/01 morning, 2.3 and 2.1 on the Richter scale, came within the first five seconds of each Tower's fall, not at the moment of the collapses' impact with ground. Also, temperatures 7 stories underground of the Towers' sites remained above 2000 degrees F. three weeks after 9/11/01, suggesting that something very hot and independent of the need for oxygen must have continued to burn there. Recent analyses on the internet, however, suppose that the volume of dust in the Towers' in-air collapse--3 to 5 times each Tower's diameter--points to other, explosive causes in the Towers' collapse.

I can say for sure, too, that the U.S. Government's explanations for the collapse of both the Towers' and WTC Building 7 are grossly inadequate. In May of 2002 the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) issued its "World Trade Center Building Performance Study." FEMA's group of professorial experts had a budget of only $600,000 to investigate the collapses that killed almost 3000--compared with the $40 million that was spent for investigation of Bill Clinton's activities with Monica Lewinsky in 1998-99. FEMA's Study states: "With the information and time available, the sequence of events leading to the collapse of each tower could not be definitively determined."

FEMA's Study is even more waffling in regard to WTC Building 7, the 47-story Building 7 that fell straight-down in classic controlled-demolition fashion at 5:25 on 9/11 afternoon. FEMA's Study states: "The specifics of the fires in WTC 7 and how they caused the building to collapse remain unknown at this time."

WTC 7 and the Twin Towers were owned and heavily insured by Silverstein Properties.

What actually caused the initial fires at the World Trade Center buildings to start on September 11, 2001?

DON PAUL: So far as I know, collisions by airliners started the first fires in the Twin Towers on 9/11. Regarding WTC-7, the origin of its intern fires appears more mysterious.

FEMA's Study says that fires burned in WTC 7 for 7 hours before its collapse. That puts their start in the same hour as the North Tower, WTC 1, which fell at 10:29.

There's no evidence I know, however, that debris from 1 ignited anything inside 7. Video and photographs show that 7 remains wholly upright and scarcely marred at mid-afternoon of 9/11, only small fires visible on the 7th and 12th floors. Its upper floors begin to fall straight-down from its base at 5:25.

Before 9/11, no buildings of structural steel had ever collapsed due to fire. In February of 1991 a fire burned for 19 hours in the 38-story building at One Meridian Plaza in Philadelphia, spreading to 8 floors and causing the death of three firefighters. But this building stood.

WTC 7 contained offices of the FBI and CIA and then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's Command Center. Many people speculate that WTC 7 served as the base for executing operations that took down the Twin Towers. It offers a wide, open view to both Buildings 1 and 2. Evidence of the operations would be largely destroyed with Building 7's demolition.

We're not likely to know for sure what happened to the three collapsed WTC Buildings and their thousands of victims, however, till courageous witnesses offer testimony. Evidence from the Buildings' sites--where more people lost their lives than at Pearl Harbor--was removed and destroyed with unprecedented speed.in the weeks after 9/11.

The company responsible for this removal, Controlled Demolition of Maryland, also took care of the wreckage left after bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City killed 168 people (none of them the personnel of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms who were the attack's supposed target) on April 19, 1995, prompting passage of the federal Anti-Terrorism Act.

Was there any connection between what happened at the World Trace Center on 9/11/01 and a previous 1990s alleged "terrorist" attempt to destroy the World Trade Center?

DON PAUL: Again, you'll have to draw your own conclusions.

For one fact, bolstering supposition that a secret team within the U.S. Government primarily carried out the 9/11 attacks, the FBI is directly connected to the bombing of the World Trade Center Twin Towers on February 26, 1993, a blast that killed 6 people and injured more than 1000. Israel's counterpart to the CIA, the Mossad, is also connected to this bombing.

The FBI is on record that an Egyptian, Emid Ali Salem, was its informant within this admitted conspiracy. According to a New York Times piece of October 28, 1993, Emid Ali Salem secretly recorded talks between himself and his FBI supervisor, John Anticev. Salem's tapes reveal that the FBI's Anticev stopped a plan to substitute harmless powder for the nitrate that eventually exploded the huge bomb under the Twin Towers.

Remember that 6 people were killed and more than 1000 were injured by this bomb. Salem's statement is that he built the bomb and received $1,000,000 from the FBI for his work. We also know that the rental agreement for the truck that carried the 1993 WTC bomb gives the phone number and address of a Mossad agent, Josie Hadas.

There are parallels with the official story for 9/11. The supposed "spiritual leader" of 1993's group of "Arab Terrorists" and "Muslim extremists," their name the Gamaa Al-Islamya, was Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman. Sheikh Abdel-Rahman resembles both "al-Qaeda mastermind" Osama bin Laden and 9/11's supposed "terrorist ringleader" Mohamed Atta in his history.

Like Osama bin Laden, Sheikh Abdel-Rahman was a CIA asset in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Like Mohamed Atta, Sheikh Abdel-Rahman recieved U.S. Government assistance in entering this nation. In 1996 Sheikh Omar was sentenced to life-imprisonment for his part in planning the first World Trade Center attack.

Attorney Ron Kuby represented one of the 1993 defendants. In response to the New York Times article of October 28, 1993, Ron Kuby said in the Atlantic Monthly: "The article on the FBI being involved in the World Trade Center bombing actually understated the evidence, believe it or not. The informer, Emid Salem, is actually on tape saying that he built the bomb that ultimately blew up the World Trade Center...The mastermind is the government of the United States. It was a phony, government-engineered conspiracy to begin with. It would never have amounted to anything had the government not planned it."

To what degree was the U.S. Government responsible for the deaths of so many New Yorkers on September 11, 2001?

DON PAUL: In my view, 100% responsible, whether by neglect or participation.

Do you see any similarities between what happened on September 11, 2001 in New York City and what happened on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas?

DON PAUL: I see a skein of conspiracies that have benefited a tiny superelite within the U.S. over at least the past 40 years--from "Dallas" to "9/11" and beyond. They've caused numberless atrocities--assassinations, wars started with false pretexts, invasions, massacres, entire countries and generations devastated by imported violence, oppression and addictions. These conspiracies' endgame, I believe, is a "New World Order" that will rob everyday people of their rights and powers to resist the superelites' accelerating degradation of once natural environments. By degradation I mean, in part, the plagues and disasters that are arising now.

The conspiracies follow a pattern. Lee Harvey Oswald called himself "a patsy" before he was somehow shot by Mafia nightclub-owner Jack Ruby in the basement of police headquarters.

In the assassinations of JFK, MLK and RFK a patsy was used, I believe, to distract attention from the real killers. With Oswald, an elaborate history was developed over years, connecting him with Communism and especially with sympathy for the Cuban Revolution. With Atta, in particular, of those blamed for 9/11, a similarly elaborate history is shown. But with Atta the fiction is much cruder. Mohamed Atta goes from being an abstinent recluse in Hamburg, averse to touching women, to a coke-snorting habituÈ of strip-clubs in Florida.

The whole story of the 19 "hijackers" seems to me a crude fiction. At least 5 of the 19 who were indicted in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in December of 2001, these 19 named by an FBI attachment in the case against Zacarias Moussaoui, had vigorously declared themselves alive, after all, in Saudi Arabia or Morocco, in the few weeks immediately following 9/11.

The killing of JFK and the attacks on 9/11 both served objectives that the superelites deemed urgent. JFK was threatening to pull troops out of Vietnam and to dismantle the Federal Reserve Bank and to further arms-reduction treaties with the Soviet Union. He'd already yanked former Wall Street attorney Allen Dulles as Director of the CIA. He threatened financial and militarist superlites' profits and plans. So they took him out.

9/11 is more complicated. 9/11 was planned for many years, as pages in Brzezinski's 1997 The Grand Chessboard and the 2000 Project for a New American Century study (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Zalmay Khalizad among its authors) suggest when they imagine that "a new Pearl Harbor" might be necessary to arouse public support for more military spending and U.S. wars in Central Asia and the Middle East.

The colossal, crude crime of 9/11 is also a far more desperate move than the murder of JFK. By August of 2001 the U.S. economy was foundering even for superelites. 9/11 and its subsequent transfusions of Federal capital gave several months of respite. By July of 2002, however, material vulnerabilities threatened to sink even the biggest capitalists. Through their holdings in "derivatives", the JP Morgan Chase Bank, Citigroup, and the Bank of America are at risk for a combined amount of over $40 trillion--an amount of liability many, many times greater than their combined amount of assets. On July 23, 2002--on a single day of trading--JP Morgan Chase lost 18.1% of its total value. July of 2002 was also when Government and media drums began to beat for U.S. military action in Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

What I see more comprehensively is a skein of conspiracies and pretexts by which the U.S. superelites have ruthlessly killed people and launched wars and grabbed territories and multiplied their profits since the late 19th century. The sinking of the Maine, the sinking of the Lusitania, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the fraudulent "Gulf of Tonkin incident" are a few of the conspiracies and pretexts we know. Why Noam Chomsky and other ostensibly moral critics don't call out these conspiracies is a question they'll have to answer. It may be that examination of these conspiracies would reveal the real structures and criminals behind them.

All that said, let me end with hope. Only one force on Earth can directly confront and defeat the U.S. Corporate State and its criminal Government. That force is us, the overwhelming majority of the people in this country. Despite the horrors of 9/11, the overwhelming majority in New York City are with that same majority around the world, I think, in opposing any American Empire.

Have the mainstream or alternative radio show producers in New York City been eager to invite you onto their shows to discuss before a New York City audience the issues you raise in your book on the 9/11 events?

DON PAUL: I've gotten no contact from either mainstream or alternative radio producers in New York City about the book. Although it lacks a distributor and exposure of it has not been widespread, it has been up on the www.onlinejournal.com and www.questionsquestions.net sites and orders for it are coming from across the country and around the world. I should also add: Neither has anyone from KPFA or any Pacifica station contacted me about the book, though I gave it last December to Dennis Bernstein and Davey D and others with whom I was allied in "the fight for Free Speech Radio" four years ago. There's an interview with the warm and wonderful Sue Supriano up at www.suesupriano.com and I understand that more stuff through other outlets is upcoming.

How can readers in New York City go about obtaining a copy of your book?

DON PAUL: The easiest way online to access purchase of it is through the www.onlinejournal.com site. Front cover of book can be clicked at the top of books and tapes in the right-hand column at www.onlinejournal.com There is a direct url to the book's page on my www.wireonfire.com/donpaul/911.html site. But going through www.onlinejournal.com will get people to some good pieces posted there.

==============

9/11 Guilt: An Interview with DVD Producer Don Paul

Written by Bob Feldman

Wednesday, 18 October 2006

Toward Freedom interviewed Don Paul, the author of 9/11: Facing The Fascist State and the 2005 book To Prevent Another 9/11, about his recently produced DVD, 9/11 Guilt: The Proof Is In Your Hands.  TOWARD FREEDOM [TF]: Five years after the September 11, 2001 collapse of the World Trade Center buildings, there have been a lot of DVDs and movies about the 9/11 events produced. How is the DVD that you and Jim Hoffman produced similar to or different from the other 9/11-related DVDs and movies? DON PAUL [DP]: Well, the only DVDs that I've seen are the second edition of Loose Change, one of David Ray Griffin's talks, and one of Steven Jones' and Kevin Jones' recent talks about some of the physical evidence which shows that three World Trade Center buildings were brought down by controlled demolition. I've seen only those three DVDs about 9/11. I would say that Jim's and my DVD, 9/11 Guilt: The Proof Is In Your Hands, is distinguished by the concision of the physical evidence that Jim presents. His part of the DVD is titled 'Proving Controlled Demolition of World Trade Center Building 7 and the Twin Towers.' In the last ten or so minutes of his presentation Jim offers more than five "features" and then five "proofs" of demolition--along with some very pointed graphics. He shows beyond question, I think, that all three Buildings were taken down by different methods of controlled demolition. The Twin Towers were exploded as no buildings have been before or since and about seven hours later World Trade Center Building 7 was imploded in a classic, conventional demolition. Another distinction of our DVD, I think, is that we get into the who and why of the crimes. Both our presentations were recorded to be played at the second convening of the Los Angeles Citizens' Grand Jury on the Crimes of September 11, 2001. My presentation is called "Indicting the Financiers Behind the Crimes of September 11, 2001." I name five individuals as deserving of further investigation by a Grand Jury: Larry Silverstein, Peter G. Peterson, David Rockefeller, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. Larry Silverstein is the developer of World Trade Center Building 7, completed in 1986, and the head of a group that took over the lease to the Twin Towers and much other World Trade Center property from the New York Port Authority just seven weeks before September 11, 2001. Why should a Grand Jury indict Larry Silverstein? One reason would be to find out exactly why he said on PBS, on national TV, in September of 2002 that he and a New York City Fire Department chief had decided in the late afternoon of 9/11/01 about WTC 7 that they should "pull it"--"pull it" meaning that this 47-story skyscraper should be demolished--though WTC had not been hit by either aircraft or much debris and showed only small fires in that late afternoon, seven hours after the second Twin Tower went down. WTC 7, 590 feet tall, fell is less than seven seconds, imploding straight-down into its own footprint. Jim's website, www.wtc.net, has excellent footage of this implosion. In February 2002 Silverstein and WTC 7's lease-holders (the Blackstone Group, Banc of America Securities, and the General Motors Acceptance Corporation) were awarded an insurance pay-out of $861 million, about $475 million more than the total investment in WTC 7 before the building's demolition. My presentation reports from the website of Controlled Demolition, Inc. about the amount of time that preparations for implosion of a building the size of WTC 7 would require. It took 24 days to simply place the charges that took down the 35-story J. L. Hudson building in Detroit in 1998. So weeks of planning and placement must have preceded the obvious demolition of WTC 7 on September 11, 2001. On 9/11 Peter G. Peterson was Chairman of the Blackstone Group, an investment-banking firm that was one of WTC 7's leaseholders along with Banc of American Securities and the General Motors Acceptance Corporation. I say in 9/11 Guilt that Peter G.Peterson should be indicted because leaseholders of a property as valuable of WTC 7 should be responsible for foreknowledge of the lengthy preparations to demolish it. I say also that Peterson and David Rockefeller should be investigated for their larger roles in a financial establishment whose irrational, destructive, debt-driven needs make crimes such as 9/11 inevitable. On September 11, 2001 Peter G. Peterson was also Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Toward Freedom's readers should check out, if they haven't already, what the C F R and the Federal Reserve System are truly doing to the possibilities for liberty in our country and the world. David Rockefeller, a former Chairman of the Chase Bank and the Chairman for 15 years of the C F R, was the individual most responsible for construction of the World Trade Center and especially the Twin Towers. He and his brother controlled the New York Port Authority in the 1960s and 1970s and allies of the Rockefeller family controlled the New York Port Authority at the time in 2001 of the N Y P A's transfer to Larry Silverstein and his partners of a 99-year-lease for the Twin Towers and other WTC properties. 9/11 Guilt also notes that the Twin Towers were obsolescent "white elephants", laden with asbestos and needing hundreds of millions of dollars in modernization, worth more in insurance pay-outs if demolished than if they'd stood. In sum, I think it would be very healthy and useful to our society for David Rockefeller and Peter G. Peterson to be questioned by a Grand Jury. Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, whose roles in our economy and society are perhaps less consequential, already are subject to some scrutiny by the public in this society. Another part of 9/11 Guilt examines how much the invasion of Afghanistan that followed the crimes of September 11, 2001 increased the opium crop there--a 2000% increase in 2002--and how much this Afghan opium crop means to the world's illegal economy (about $180 billion when 3500 metric tons of opium are turned into street-corner heroin) and the world's legal economy (about $3.6 trillion when that $180 billion is laundered into Stock Markets and processed through institutions such as the Chase Bank). The DVD's other main creator, Celestine Star, did an excellent job with graphics in this part. These are some of the elements in "9/11 Guilt" that I think may be special to it. TF: Now, if there was an economic motivation on the part of Silverstein and Rockefeller to bring down the "white elephants", why didn't they just bring it down at night, when there weren't any people involved? Why turn it into a mass-casualty thing? DP: Because another large part of the intention of the acts committed in Lower Manhattan on 9/11/01 was to traumatize the world's populace and especially the U. S. public. The populace was meant to receive a series of blows and that delivery of psychological trauma couldn't have been accomplished if the crashes and Twin Tower demolitions happened at night. If you look at the amount of casualties from the Twin Towers, it's remarkably low, given what they might have been. I know when I watched the collapse, I was thinking that thirty thousand--fifty thousand--people had perished. Because TV commentary was saying over and over that was the normal workday population of the Twin Towers. Fatalities were minimized not for any humane reason, I think, but to reduce the number of victims' intimates who might be suspicious afterward. At the same time, the suddenness and violence and scale of the Twin Towers' collapses (more explosions and disintegrations, really, than collapses) had to be overwhelming so that we, the public, would be more or less incapable of considering what we were seeing. As others have observed, 9/11 was the biggest psychological operation, or "psy-op", in history. The number of fatalities in New York City on 9/11/01 is close to the number of deaths at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, another instance of a U. S. administration facilitating an attack that killed thousands. The spectacular attack on "9/11" was the 'new Pearl Harbor' wanted by Zbignew Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard, 1997, and by the "neo-cons" of the Project for a New American Century in their year 2000 paper to outrage the U. S. public into backing invasions of Central Asia and the Middle East. TF: Now, could you recap what your current explanation is for the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings on 9/11/01? The Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the 9/11 Commission Report, and the U. S. State Department have all issued explanations that say the Twin Towers came down due to airliners' impacts and the subsequent fires (though they say little or nothing about WTC 7). DP: I think three kinds of explosives were used to bring down the Twin Towers. I think that RDX-shaped charges, more conventional explosives, were used to cut some beams due to the predictable precision of these charges. I think that more powerful, thermite-laced charges were used to cut through each Tower's 47 central steel columns at crucial junctures--Steven Jones' has an excellent lecture about this likelihood in print, online and on DVD. I think that by far the greatest destruction of each Tower was accomplished through thermobaric weapons placed in the buildings' freight-elevator shafts. A thermobaric weapon shoots an aerosol spray that's then ignited by a charge so its explosiveness is multiplied in outward waves--a lot more powerful than conventional, commercial explosives. If you look at footage of the fall of each Tower--footage that's available on many sites online-you can see several phenomena that can't be explained by the building's potential gravitational energy. The acronym of E. P. V. S. S. helps to break down the phenomena that you can see. E for Explosiveness--the instantaneous, violent, horizontal thrust of matter at the very start of each Tower's destruction. P for Pulverization--90,000 tons of concrete slabs in each Tower blown to 100-micron particles instantaneously. V for Velocity--steel beams shot sideways as far as 500 feet at 100-feet-per-second early in each Tower's fall. One S for Speed--the rate at which the Towers fell, a rate close to free-fall, a rate identical for both matter falling through the footprint area of those 47 central steel columns and falling through the air outside each Tower's footprint area. And the last S for Symmetry--each Tower plummeting straight-down like a disintegrating elevator instead of toppling as dozens of other skyscrapers have in earthquakes. These obvious phenomena--and several more that Jim details in his presentation--are there for anyone to see if look objectively. The Towers were demolished. Mass murder in a series of psychological shocks was executed on 9/11/01. And the demolition of WTC 7 is even more obvious for anyone who cares to study footage of that building's inward fall. TF: O.K. Now what about the Pentagon? Based on your investigation, what caused that destruction of that side of the Pentagon? DP: Well, it was certainly not an aircraft that could have been flown by the Official Story's purported pilot of it, Hani Hanjour. Nor, I think, could whatever aircraft that struck the Pentagon's west wedge have been flown by any human pilot aboard it, based on what I hear from commercial airline pilots and former military pilots, given this aircraft's maneuvers of descending 7,000 feet in 2 1/2 minutes and executing a 270-degree turn in that span of space and time. We that there's a lot of dispute and furor over whether or not a Boeing 757-200--that is American Airlines Flight 77--was the aircraft that hit the Pentagon. To me, this uncertainty--an uncertainty that's been enhanced by more or less self-incriminating evidence released by the U. S. Government from its load of confiscated video-tape--doesn't matter. It doesn't matter as to the culpability of the perpetrators. We know from other indisputable facts there that there had to be a U. S. military stand-down which allowed the Pentagon to be struck by an aircraft 34 minutes after the second Tower was hit and that this aircraft must had computerized and/or remote piloting in order to execute the maneuvers to brought it to impact with the Pentagon. Neither the stand-down nor the computerized and/or remote piloting could have been done by Al Queda. TF: What about the fourth plane that went down in Pennsylvania or it disappeared in Western Pennsylvania? What happened there? What's your sense of what happened? DP: I'm certain that this aircraft was United Airlines Flight 93 and that it was shot down by U.S. military, shot down because passengers aboard it were on the verge of gaining control of the aircraft. The aircraft left an 8-mile range of debris and a one-ton piece of one engine was found 2000 yards away from the aircraft's main impact-zone--signs that it was shot apart in mid-air. Jim's 911research.wtc7.net  site has an excellent summary and good aerial photos. TF: Why do you think the Kean Commission's official story of what happened on September 11, 2001 is not accepted by most people in the United States and around the globe these days? DP: Well, because we still can see straight. Because we're still a people capable of recognizing that explosions are not collapses and that emperors--or more precisely would-be dictators, per George W. Bush's wish in December 2000 that he could be dictator of the U. S.--are not wearing clothes--or more precisely that certain un-elected officials are not fit to wear the gear they sometimes put on. The 9/11 Commission Report is another great lie or complex or interdependent but ill-fitting lies, and more and more people are seeing through it. By "most people" I think you mean the polls last Spring which showed, you know, that 83% of us believe along with Charley Sheen that there has been a cover-up of the crimes of 9/11/01. And another poll, run by the Washington Post just after it published a lengthy piece by Michael Powell around September 8 of this year. That poll asked: 'Do you believe any of the conspiracy theories suggesting the U. S. government was somehow involved in 9/11?' Out of 64,000-some respondents, 59% answered: 'Yes. The government has left many questions unanswered about that day.' The public's avowed doubts are proof that the Corporate Government's "psy-op" is not working, five years on. Now we have the courage to carry our astute perceptions into action. TF: Who are the individuals who should be held accountable for the collapse of the World Trade Center? DP: Well, I've named the five for whom indictments are sought in the 9/11 Guilt presentation--Rockefeller, Peterson, Silverstein, Cheney and Bush. Indubitable criminals all, acting against our society's well-being long before 9/11/01, I think. In the past year more has come to light about individuals who might be questioned on the operational level about the World Trade Center demolitions--individuals who were far inside planning of mock terrorist incidents or far inside 'security' for the WTC and for crucial Airports. Readers of Toward Freedom might want to do Internet seaches on L. Paul Bremer, Jerome Hauer, Marvin Bush, Wirt Walker and Michael Cherkasy. But the real culprit behind the crimes of 9/11 and the pretexts that these terrible crimes provided is the economic system that holds us in thrall and that makes such crimes (there like repeated in Madrid on 2/11/04, in London on 7/7/05, and elsewhere on other dates since 9/11/01 to perpetuate the " 'War on Terrorism' " and increase State repression) inevitable. In Jim's and my 2004 book Waking Up from Our Nightmare I use another acronym, G. O. D. D., to sum up the four main working-parts of this system that holds us in literal bondage. G for Guns--armaments and all the business of wars. O for Oil--obvious in Central Asia and the Middle East. D for Drugs--also obvious, once you know the billions unto trillions of dollars that are reaped annually from Afghan opium and Andean coca. And D for Debt--the greatest instrument, I think, of bondage and fear that Banks' and other financial institutions' amazing global empire wields. It's Banks' own colossal debts that leave them no alternative to "their destructive, irrational system" but acts of terror and subsequent wars to keep their more and more abstract machinery going. They're combining 'derivatives' now. It's their pride or hypocrisy that lets them justify their catastrophe-making exploitativeness under guises such as 'Strategic Adjustment Programs'. It's the hubris behind concepts such as a 'New World Order.' And I have to say that we ourselves are accomplices as well as victims of this G. O. D. D. system. It's up to us to show what we know and a force a turn from this system before we lose the "hundreds of thousands of lives" that Dick Cheney promises us could be lost "as the result of a single attack, or a set of coordinated attacks." TF: Some people might say "Well, just like after WWII, you had the Nuremburg Trials. Put the officials of the U.S. government in the docket for 9/11." It sounds like you're saying it's deeper than that: "It's the System." And you wouldn't necessarily think it would be a valid option to go after the individual officeholders? DP: Well, Nuremburg itself was a show trial because it didn't reveal the thoroughgoing involvement of U.S. and British corporations in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. You know there could not have been a rise of Adolf Hitler without the support of George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, a Republican who later became Senator from Connecticut, and Prescott Bush's partner in the Brown Brothers Harriman investment-banking firm, W. Averell Harriman, a Democrat who later became Governor of New York. These bankers, brothers in Yale University's secret-society of Skull and Bones (George W. Bush and John Kerry are brothers in the same secret-society) co-owned a mine in Poland that employed labor from Auschwitz into 1942. Nazi Germany's Wehrmacht could not have fought into 1944 without parts from Ford, General Motors and I.T.T. and oil from Standard Oil. Charles Higham's Trading with the Enemy is a good reference on these dealings. So I think that putting Dick Cheney on trial won't really get us out of the deeper crises we're in. Certainly we need to expose more to public scrutiny. Certainly the public needs to register what a predicament the Western world and our entire species is in. We need to feel how ravaged and threatened freedoms are in the United States since 9/11. The last little book I did, To Prevent the Next " '9/11' " / Abandoning the 'New World Order' of Financiers' Corporate State, notes that three officials from the Soviet Union's KGB,, Yevgeny Primakov, Alexander Karpov and Oleg Kalugin, are now executives in the U. S. Department of Homeland Security and Markus Wolf, former head of East Germany's STASI, now heads surveillance for Homeland Security. The To Prevent ... book also notes particulars of repressive legislation that has passed in the U. S. since 9/11--particulars in the Homeland Security Bill and the Patriot Act of 2001 and the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of late 2004. It quotes the speech by Dick Cheney to the World Affairs Council in January 2004 that I cited a little earlier, the one in which the former Halliburton CEO warns about the potential use of biological, chemical and "even nuclear weapons" by terrorists: "Instead of losing thousands of lives, we might lose tens or even hundreds of thousands of lives as the result of a single attack, or a set of coordinated attacks." And it notes that--according to the New York Post--on the night after Cheney's speech in Los Angeles a meeting was held in the New York City apartment of media-advisor Steven Brill between the then head of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, and the heads of the News departments of CBS, ABC, FOX CNN, and Network anchors Aaron Brown, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings, 'to discuss how to handle the next terrorist attack.' Now, this very week in early October 2006, a few factors point to much broader U. S./British/Canadian war in the Middle East and further State repression. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 recently sailed through the House and Senate of the U. S. This Act lets the U. S. President declare anyone an 'unlawful enemy combatant' and imprison that person--perhaps imprison him or her in one of the huge detention-centers that Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root is building with the $385 million awarded it last January. Readers can check out Marjorie Cohn's recent article for more information. At the same time naval and land forces are massing near the borders of Syria and Iran. A pretty detailed overview of this build-up is up on the www.globalresearch.ca site that Michel Chossudovsky edits. This site will also show readers that the 2006 Afghan opium crop has increased about 50% above recent years' crops--and about 3000% above the last year, 2001, that the Taliban governed Afghanistan. So we, the majority of the U.S. and Western world who now suspect that the crimes of 9/11/01 were an inside-job, that these crimes were mass murder meant to provoke endless war, crimes that could have been accomplished only by those with approved access to the Twin Towers' central steel columns, need to make our knowledge visible. We need to choose a day for a mass demonstration--or nationwide teach-ins.  Basically we need to show the mass-murderers that their standard-operating-procedure of false-flag terror won't work anymore. We've gained a lot in terms of a skeptical, aware public in the three years. We have a lot more to win. TF: How can people obtain a copy of your new DVD? DP: Well, the easiest way for most Internet-empowered folks is through www.wireonfire.com/donpaul . Jim's www.wtc.net  also offers 9/11 Guilt and other material for sale. And I'd like to make this new offer to better spread the word. Students or anyone who considers himself or herself a low-income person can have the DVD for $12, shipping included, by writing to me at POB 74-1365, New Orleans, LA 70114. The DVD can be had from us at $10 per copy for purchases of 20 or more, $8 per copy for 50 or more, and $6 per copy for 100 or more. Jim and/or I are happy to travel for public showings. Please visit his sites for more extensive information. Let's do all we can to spread the word, as said, and prevent that next "attack."

 

 

• Go Back

Related in this Category