Donald Rumsfeld and his chums made "Shock and Awe" a household term when he used it to describe the 2003 US-led military campaign against Iraq, but it had been in use as a euphemism for the doctrine of rapid dominance for several years before that time. Whether or not the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the US were intended to shock and awe the general public, they certainly had that effect, and in my opinion this had at least as much to do with the mass media coverage and reaction than with the nature of the attacks themselves, shocking and awful though they undoubtedly were.
A year before 9/11, in September 2000, the neoconservative think tank Project for a New American Century published a report entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources for a New Century which contains the sentence that launched a thousand conspiracy theories: "Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor". The PNAC sought to influence the thinking and policy making of the G.W. Bush administration, and influence it they did in several ways. While we cannot know if the President's dairy entry for the night of September 11, 2001 bore witness to such influence, it is intriguing that he dictated: "The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today.... We think it's Osama bin Laden."
Eight years on, and we have a lot more answers concerning 9/11 but a lot more unanswered questions too. We also have three presidents, Clinton Bush and Obama, on record as telling us Al Qaeda did 9/11—which when you think about it, isn't an answer at all—and an army of paid media shills and propagandists ridiculing anyone who wants to establish the facts and bring the perpetrators of the atrocity to justice as a "moonbat", a "truther", a "conspiracy theorist", or an "America hater". So on the anniversary of that terrible day, the least those of us who are still tormented by the refusal of those in authority and leadership positions to join the dots and complete the jigsaw puzzle can do is to go down to the kitchen, make a hat from a square of baking foil and become a truther for a day. After all, it's only once a year and there really is so much to ponder. When confronted with the scale of the atrocity, the accompanying web of lies and deceit, and the sheer gob-smacking chutzpah of whoever it was that masterminded the operation, wearing a tinfoil hat for a day begins to look like a rational response as well as an appropriate fashion statement.
For those who are interested, the links below lead to a few of the many thousands of 9/11 "loose ends" that have yet to be tied and trimmed. For those without the time or inclination to spend on that sort of thing, I'd like to leave you with just one loose end of my own. It concerns the state of the WTC site after the collapses of the Twin Towers. According to the official account, these two structures each underwent a gravitationally-driven total collapse due to structural failure when a weakness close to the point of impact and fire caused all the supporting columns on one or more floors to give way simultaneously, causing a pile-driver style process in which the momentum of the section above the point of initial failure was sufficient to trigger a progressive collapse of the entire structure all the way dow to the basement.
The loose end I'd like to point out here is that in the picture above (click for an expanded version), which is an official FEMA shot, although the massive steel columns of the buildings'central cores have disappeared, we can clearly see large portions of the exterior walls still standing. In fact they are the remains of the perimiter steel columns that constituted the load-bearing "mosquito net" grid around each tower. The mass of each Twin Tower has been estimated at between 288,100 and about 500,000 metric tons here, which is an awful lot of building. We are expected to believe that this enormous amount of mass fell all the way down to ground level, smashing the core, which was by far the strongest part of the structure, and yet it left these perimeter columns standing up to a height of four stories in places. The idea of steel-framed skyscrapers undergoing gravity-driven total collapses stretches the credulity of anyone who has ever played around with Young's modulus or Meccano, but the idea that they can do so while leaving substantial sections of their outer walls standing takes us well beyond empirical science and into the realm of faith-based magical thinking.
Call me a cantankerous old cretin if it makes you feel any better, but I can't work out how those walls could have been left standing unless the buildings had been explosively demolished in such a way as to progressively throw or blow their contents, including floors and cores, upwards and outwards in a manner that brings back childhood memories of fireworks such as the Roman candle. And it is fascinating to note that when we look at video recordings of the collapses of the twin towers, they do indeed resemble exploding Roman candles more than they do fire-induced collapses or conventional explosive demolitions.
When Pandora's Box is finally fully opened on the deceptions and abuses of power by the Cheney/Bush administration ~ the 9/11 conspiracy and cover up will stand alone as the most treasonous act in American history. Here are 40 experts, including Commission members, who share their misgivings about the 9/11 Commission and the questions left unanswered....
It was Carl Sagan who wrote of the Bamboozle Effect which seems to have effected many Americans ~ " One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge , even to ourselves, that we’ve been so credulous." — Allen L Roland
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....
Although the president and vice president told Daschle they were worried a wide-reaching inquiry could distract from the government's war on terrorism, privately Democrats questioned why the White House feared a broader investigation to determine possible culpability.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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