The Continuing Lies and Crimes of 9/11
If You Don't Know You Are Still Being Lied To, You Must Not Be Paying Attention. With an Original Contribution of Emanuel Pastreich.
On September 7 of 2008, I delivered my first public presentation on 9/11, an event that had happened 7 years earlier. I had been invited to share a podium with Dr. Kevin Barrett, a witty and erudite Muslim convert with whom I would collaborate often in the years ahead. Kevin had lost his academic job in 2006 at the University of Wisconsin. He was sacked from the faculty for incorporating into his curriculum material branded as heresy especially by his most zealous detractors at Fox News.
When I mounted the stage of the Stanley Milner Public Library in downtown Edmonton Alberta, the copy ink still smelled fresh on the xeroxed manuscript I was carrying in my hand. My presentation was entitled, “The Lies and Crimes of 9/11.”
The following day that text was published by the University of Ottawa Economist, Michel Chossudovsky. Michel remains to this day at the helm of Global Research.ca where my 2008 essay remains the first article archived on my author’s page.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-lies-and-crimes-of-911/10117
https://www.globalresearch.ca/author/anthony-j-hall
Much of the essay was composed of excerpts that I had added into a reworked draft of a very large manuscript. This manuscript was subsequently published as Earth into Property: Colonization, Decolonization and Capitalism (Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press, 2010). When it became clear to me that the official narrative of what had happened on 9/11 was not supported by the evidence, I incorporated this understanding into the volume.
https://www.mqup.ca/earth-into-property-products-9780773531222.php#!prettyPhoto
Earth into Property can be seen as a survey of the history of globalization since 1492. It depicts the geopolitical strategy adopted on the basis of the specious interpretation of 9/11 as the purposeful outgrowth of a historical trajectory rooted in the Indian wars of North America. Many episodes of imperial expansion, including the transcontinental spread of the United States, have been justified based on variations of the ideal of civilization’s real or imaginary ascent over savagery.
The old imagery of imperialism as civilization’s conquest over savagery, deeply permeated many symbolic aspects of the US-led Global War on Terror. This supposed War on Terror was used to explain many US invasions of Muslim-majority countries. In retrospect we can now clearly see that these invasions were meant primarily to serve Likudnik Israel’s— Greater Israel’s— expansionary agenda in the Middle East.
The people who attended the Edmonton event to hear Kevin and I speak were in my view quite distinctive. There was almost a full auditorium holding about 300 people. Each one of them had paid $15 to be there. That is the one and only time I ever held forth at a presentation where average people paid to see me hold forth.
As far as I could see, except for Kevin and me, there were no faculty types in the audience. By then it seemed that lines had been drawn. Those academics with aspirations to get jobs, promotions, contracts, awards, media gigs and such should not be seen in the company of “9/11 truthers,” or “troofers” as we were sometimes contemptuously labelled.
Those who had paid to be there were in my estimation largely intelligent and independent-minded workers with good jobs building pipelines, handling oil rigs and such throughout resource-rich Alberta. Some had travelled long distances to be there. It was the first time I had seen a sampling of the intensity of interest shared by many practical people when it came to getting to the bottom of what had really happened on 9/11.
When Earth into Property did come out, it was sometimes described as one of only three peer-reviewed academic books that incorporated what was known at the time as 9/11 skepticism. The book was chosen in a year-end event as one of the best of 2010 by a reviewer assigned to make this judgment by the UK newspaper The Independent. I was able to visit the Oxford University-based reviewer and discuss with him Earth into Property at some length.
As I see it, the 9/11 skeptics have won the argument many times over. They have repeatedly proven that beyond a shadow of a doubt, the official narrative of September 11, 2001, is not supported by the existing evidence in the public domain. The 11 books by Prof. David Ray Griffen have been integral to a very large body of literature as well as of many hundreds of Internet documentaries devoted to showing the gross problems with the mainstream interpretation.
All that work, however, ran into a heavy wall of media and government stonewalling to protect the major vested interests that had much to lose if the bin Laden/al-Qaeda fairytale would have been dislodged to explain the identity and motivations of those really behind the events of 9/11. In 2006 a preppy young journalist named Tucker Carlson demonstrated the biases of the media establishment with his rude and dismissive treatment of Professor Griffin.
https://rumble.com/v2kf78k-tucker-carlson-interviews-david-ray-griffin-about-911-august-9-2006.html
A colleague of mine, Emanuel Pastreich, has lamented the continuation of the lies and crimes of 9/11 twenty-three years after the debacle. He reflects on the debilitating effect of the ongoing cover-up that so many go along with just to avoid the responsibility of facing up to the truth.
It is impossible to write any sound interpretation of global geopolitics in the twenty-first century while evading some reckoning with the lies and crimes of 9/11.
You’re up now Emanuel.
9.11 X Twenty-Three = speechlessness
Emanuel Pastreich
Candidate for President
I am left without words on the twenty-third anniversary of the 9.11 incident. I have already written so many speeches on this day over the last decade, and articles before then, that I have come to loath this loathsome day. But this day of reckoning still comes around anyway, as the Earth circles the Sun, and does so without respect for our fantasies and delusions, so as to remind us that we live in a dream, surrounded by zombified friends and family, coworkers and classmates. We who prefer truth must work constantly with those who would rather cling to pleasant sounding fictions than face the truth.
On September 11, 2001, I honestly did not believe the fraud could drag on this long. And still, for all the burdens we drag, we still crawl forward (or is it backward?) as a nation, as a civilization.
But there is a terrible price to be paid for allowing a parasite class of criminals to remain in power, for looking the other way as those who stood for justice and truth are punished and those who stood for hypocrisy and treason are lauded and promoted.
The culture of the United States was permanently poisoned by the ashes left from the twin towers. Our best universities are but brand names today used to cover up criminality. Our justice department has become a weapon for rent to the highest bidder, and our military is a tool for money laundering and a weapon for mercenary actions to pursue profits for multinational banks.
Of course, the nightmare did not start with 9.11, but the system came apart at the core on that fateful date. Whereas the United States was followed around by a dark shadow for the last seventy years, and the shadow started to cover over our faces from the time of the Vietnam War, now literally every person in Congress, every person in the Executive, every person on TV, is in on one of the greatest crimes in history. No wonder it was so easy to pull off COVID.
Yes, there are some signs that we are moving a bit closer to truth. At the same time, we must admit that once the truth is out, nothing can be seen in the same light again. That is because 9.11 is not unlike incest. It is a terrible thing that we feel compelled to cover up because to allow this truth out will compromise everyone—many feel that there is no winner in such a culture of shame. So it is better to lie so one can at least enjoy a dinner out, or a vacation in Italy.
And yet, we can see the substantial consequences of 9.11 from the speech of Benjamin Netanyahu to the US Congress on July 25, 2024. Netanyahu was free to give the most fascistic, most militaristic, speech delivered in the history of Congress to over 50 rounds of applause. He could not have given such a speech in Israel, or in any other country. Only the United States is so morally and spiritually crippled as to allow his rampage—no! to sing hymns for his blasphemy.
That weird relationship between the elites in Israel and the United States speaks volumes about the invisible scars of 9.11 in the United States—the all-powerful nation that has lost its soul and become a complete slave at precisely the moment of its absolute domination.
That is precisely what John Quincy Adams wrote about the United States’ possible future if she were embroiled in foreign wars,
“She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”
That sums up the sad state of the United States, limping with ever greater normalcy toward the apocalypse.
Thanks Tony.
It’s one fifty seven o’clock in the morning here in Wisconsin, and I doubt I’ll sleep again until nightfall.
I remember when I first got to a tee-vee twenty three years ago today.
At the university of Wisconsin campus where I was employed, activity slowly ground to a halt, as the community became transfixed by the boob tube show that day.
When the big fall(s) occurred that day, I thought about the controlled collapses of casinos in Vegas.
I felt that something was off.
But, being an accounting and finance person, I had no expertise to draw upon.
Later, when I became acquainted with Architects and Engineers For Nine Eleven Truth, at of all places-Fighting Bob Fest In Madison, Wisconsin, the scales fell from my eyes, at all of the obvious government and media lies.
I didn’t know the truth, but I knew what it wasn’t.
And, being the unfiltered, unafraid, bigmouth that I am, I quickly became the conspiracy kook/nutjob.
Even amongst family, as i distributed the text and video materials made available by the “truthers”.
Imagine, the word “truther” being used as a slur???
It appears, and I fear, that we have permanently lost our collective fucking minds.
I became aware of you through my acquaintance with Paul Haeder, and I am glad for the introduction.
Same holds true as it pertains to my fellow, also former, University of Wisconsin staff member Kevin Barrett.
I appreciate not feeling quite so alone out here in the land of the walking dead, or at least asleep.
It’s funny, but it’s not, how I hear people asking how Americans cannot be out in the streets, screaming about the Jewish State of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
I more shocked, and awed, and distraught that no one will even talk about the false flag terror attack(s) that took place on September eleventh, two thousand and one.
Well, for several weeks now I knew that my health care provider(s) (plural) will have deal with this inconvenient truth (again) today, as I have multiple appointments scheduled.
I doubt that I’ll end up in a rubber room, or the county lockup (or is it lockdown?), because I believe that the truth has been effectively marginalized for what remains of my dwindling lifetime, and that’s a god damn shame, and a god damn crime.
But, I wanted to clear my head, since I ain’t goin’ back to bed, and say thanks to you and Kevin, for being courageous, and telling the truth, and taking the slings and arrows (Snakes and Arrows if you’re a fellow fan of those Canadian artists named RUSH), and trying to inspire your audience.
Too many of your peers, like Hedges and Chomsky, don’t have the intestinal fortitude of you two.
You deserve your due.
Thank you.
Eloquently expressed and poignant as usual, thank you Prof. Hall.