9/11 News Articles

Excerpts of key news articles on

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Berger, now an international business consultant, said in a statement last month that he "decided to voluntarily relinquish my license" as a result of pleading guilty to unauthorized removal and retention of classified material, a misdemeanor. "I realized then that my law license would be affected," Berger said in the statement obtained Thursday. In April 2005, Berger admitted destroying some of the documents and then lying about it. He called his actions a lapse of judgment that came while he was preparing to testify before the Sept. 11 commission. The documents he took contained information on terror threats in the United States during the 2000 millennium celebration. Berger had only copies of documents; all the originals remain in the government's possession. A report by the archives inspector general said that Berger acknowledged hiding some of them at a construction site near the archives building in Washington.

Note: For a more in-depth analysis of Berger's admitted crime, which tries to answer the question "What information was worth risking his reputation, his career, and his freedom to keep hidden?", click here.

Mohammed al-Qahtani, detainee No. 063, was forced to wear a bra. He had a thong placed on his head. He was massaged by a female interrogator who straddled him like a lap dancer. He was told that his mother and sisters were whores. He was told that other detainees knew he was gay. He was forced to dance with a male interrogator. He was strip-searched in front of women. He was led on a leash and forced to perform dog tricks. That much is known. These details were among the findings of the U.S. Army’s investigation of al-Qahtani's aggressive interrogation at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But only now is a picture emerging of how the interrogation policy developed, and the battle that law enforcement agents waged, inside Guantanamo and in the offices of the Pentagon, against harsh treatment of al-Qahtani and other detainees by military intelligence interrogators. In interviews with MSNBC.com — the first time they have spoken publicly — former senior law enforcement agents described their attempts to stop the abusive interrogations. The agents of the Pentagon's Criminal Investigation Task Force, working to build legal cases against suspected terrorists, said they objected to coercive tactics used...after Guantanamo's prison camp opened in early 2002. They ultimately carried their battle up to the office of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who approved the more aggressive techniques. And they described their disappointment when military prosecutors told them not to worry about making a criminal case against al-Qahtani, the suspected "20th hijacker" of Sept. 11, because what had been done to him would prevent him from ever being put on trial.

Five years after the most reported and recorded cataclysmic event in world history, one would expect the conspiracy theorists to have been pushed to society's margins. Think again. As time passes, more and more Americans are convinced the most bizarre theory is that 19 guys with box cutters, directed by a bearded man in a cave in Afghanistan, pulled off the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. An inside job? Those who believe that are not crackpots, says Mark Fenster, a University of Florida law professor and author of Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture. Fenster says the John F. Kennedy assassination and the 9/11 attacks are huge events that have been officially explained by tiny scenarios, something people find unsatisfying. Kevin Ryan, a leading figure in the conspiracy movement, [will] tell you what started him down the conspiracy path. "I first began to be suspicious ... after it was clear the Bush administration had lied to us about the reasons for going to war in Iraq," says Ryan, who was lab director at an Underwriters Laboratory subsidiary in South Bend, Ind., until he was fired after questioning official reports on the collapse of the twin towers. "Since then, I've wondered when the lying began." In Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11: A Call to Reflection and Action, David Ray Griffin, a professor emeritus of philosophy and theology at California's Claremont School of Theology, accuses the Bush administration of orchestrating the attacks. Some of the leading conspiracy theorists are scientists, engineers, theologians and university professors, 75 of whom formed Scholars For 9/11 Truth.

After listening to former translator Sibel Edmonds complain about her treatment at the hands of the Justice Department and the FBI, Reps. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., and Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., said their staffs would debrief Edmonds and confront Justice Department officials with the information. Edmonds commented on the issue while testifying at a House Government Reform subcommittee hearing on the government's designation of information as classified. She told lawmakers the people she accused were still working at the FBI. The Justice Department's inspector general said last month that the FBI never adequately investigated Edmonds' complaints, even though evidence and witnesses supported her. Edmonds filed a lawsuit seeking to keep her job, but last summer a judge threw out her case after Attorney General John Ashcroft said her claims might harm national security by exposing government secrets.

Note: This article fails to mention Ms. Edmonds claims that top individuals in government concealed critical information about 9/11 suggesting complicity by compromised politicians. For more, click here.

The FBI, as we know, blocked all manner of investigations into the [9/11] plot in the run up to its execution, whether these involved highly specific warnings from its own agents or from government sources in Afghanistan, Argentina, Britain, the Cayman Islands, Egypt, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Morocco and Russia. Meanwhile, I worry why the nearest military aircraft weren't scrambled to intercept any of the hijacked flights when this is standard procedure and why, when more distant jets were finally aloft, they flew at less than half speed, thus failing to prevent the impacts at the twin towers.

The emergency phone calls made by people trapped inside the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, need not be released to the public, a New York court ruled Thursday. The families sought release of the 9-1-1 calls possessed by the Fire Department of New York, along with department dispatcher calls and interviews with firefighters who participated in the September 11 rescue effort. The FDNY had resisted the disclosures, citing privacy concerns. The FDNY also sought to block the release of six unidentified tapes and transcripts selected by federal prosecutors as evidence in the prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person facing trial in the United States for the September 11 attacks.

A federal judge on Friday dismissed a libel lawsuit filed against The New York Times by a former Army scientist once identified as a person of interest in the 2001 anthrax attacks. U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton in Alexandria dismissed the case a week after lawyers for the Times argued that Steven Hatfill should be considered a public figure under libel law, which makes it much more difficult for a public figure to win a judgment than a private citizen. The judge did not explain his ruling in the order issued Friday. Hatfill had claimed that a series of columns falsely implicated him as the culprit in the anthrax attacks. Kristof said all along that he never intended to accuse Hatfill but simply wanted to prod a dawdling FBI investigation. He initially referred to Hatfill in his columns only as “Mr. X,” and identified him by name only after Hatfill held a news conference to denounce rumors that had been swirling around him. Hatfill argued that the columns contained enough information about him that people could deduce his identity. Five people were killed and 17 sickened by anthrax that had been mailed to lawmakers on Capitol Hill and members of the news media in New York and Florida just weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The case remains unsolved.

Note: There is much more here than meets the eye. This article fails to mention some key facts. As reported by the highly respected Federation of American Scientists, "the New York Times invoked the 'state secrets' doctrine last month in a motion to dismiss the libel suit brought against it by Steven J. Hatfill." What secrets would be divulged? Could this have anything to do with the many microbiologists who were murdered or died under mysterious circumstances within months of the anthrax scares? For more, click here.

It's the conundrum that faces all television personalities broadcasting live: how to deal with hecklers trying to disrupt the show. Do you ignore the perpetrators? Do you try to reason with them? Or do you do what the American comic and talk show host Bill Maher did - jump into the audience, threaten the hecklers with an "ass kicking" and scream "Get the fuck out of my building!" In one of the more unconventional displays of audience interaction on US television in recent years, that is now doing hot trade as a clip on YouTube, Maher reacted to the interruptions of hecklers in his studio audience with the memorable words: "Do we have some fucking security in this building?" He then tore off his lapel microphone and stormed off the stage and up to some protesters wielding "expose the 9/11 cover-up" banners. It was at that point during a panel discussion on his HBO show, Real Time With Bill Maher, that the nature of the comic's difficulties with an element of his audience became clear. Maher is a darling of the US liberal intelligentsia for his brand of Bush-bashing and anti-religious pedantry. But the one point over which he will not bash the Bush administration is the events of September 11 2001. He does not agree with 9/11 conspiracy theorists, or Truthers as they call themselves, that the Bush administration brought down the Twin Towers in a controlled explosion. The trouble started a few weeks ago when Maher launched a verbal assault on air against the Truthers, calling them "crazy people". He advised the conspiracy theorists, who had been demonstrating outside his studio, to visit their doctor to ask whether the antidepressant Paxil was right for them. In 2002 ABC ended its relationship with him over comments he made in his former show, Politically Incorrect, about the 9/11 hijackers.

Note: To watch Bill Maher's performance on YouTube, click here. For a concise summary of reliable reports from major media sources which raise many unanswered questions about what really happened on 9/11, click here.

A poll conducted for Canwest News Service indicates that 53 per cent of Canadians believe the attacks were "a very specific violent reaction to foreign policies of the U.S. government." The results show that Canadians are more firm in their blame since the first anniversary of Sept. 11, in 2002, when only 15 per cent said that U.S. foreign policy was responsible. Only 36 per cent reported that the terrorist bombings signalled an attack against "all western-style, affluent democracies because they hate their ideas and values, symbolized most by the United States." In a bizarre finding, the polling firm reported that 22 per cent of Canadians believe in a conspiracy theory in which the terrorist attacks were orchestrated by a "group of highly influential Americans and others" rather than by supporters of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida terrorist network. The theory that the U.S. pulled off an inside job to ultimately justify going to war for Iraqi oil persists in Canada and in the United States, fuelled by a few books and a compelling Internet documentary called Loose Change, created by two young Americans, which has been viewed by millions and is particularly popular on university campuses and in Internet chat rooms. The poll shows young adults aged 18 to 34 are most likely to believe in the conspiracy theory (26 per cent).

Note: For our reliable, verifiable 9/11 Information Center: http://www.WantToKnow.info/911information

A Russian investigator has said grenades fired by surrounding Russian forces could have triggered the Beslan school bloodbath in September 2004. Yuri Savelyev's conclusions contradict the official view that bombs planted by the hostage-takers in the school gym went off just before the gun battle. Mr Savelyev is a member of the Russian parliamentary commission investigating the siege, in which 331 people died. Mr Savelyev, a weapons and explosives expert, said that during the investigation, he "discovered that the consequences of those blasts could not at all be explained by the explosions of the home-made devices installed by the rebels". The head of the commission, Stanislav Kesayev, said he had confidence in Mr Savelyev's conclusions. "He had more resources than our commission. He relied on his own knowledge as a weapons specialist and mathematician," Mr Kesayev told the radio. For weeks after the siege Russian officials had denied the use of flamethrowers.

Note: The Russian school bombing is very likely one of many examples of a false-flag operation -- a terrorist act staged secretly by a government and blamed on another group or government in order to achieve a certain agenda. To understand more about that agenda, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/brighterfuture. To see Terrorstorm, an excellent, free documentary on false flag operations, click here.

Last Saturday, former Bush administration official Morgan Reynolds drew an enthusiastic capacity crowd to the Wisconsin Historical Society auditorium. Reynolds, the ex-top economist for George W. Bush's Labor Department, charged the Bush administration with gross malfeasance, and proposed the prosecution of top administration officials. Normally, if a prestigious UW alumnus and ex-Bush administration official were to come to the Wisconsin Historical Society to spill the beans about a Bush administration scandal, it would make the news. The local TV stations would cover it, and it would merit front page headlines in The Capital Times and Wisconsin State Journal. When a former Bush administration insider makes such charges, how can the media ignore them? Is Reynolds a lone crank? Hardly. A long list of prominent Americans have spoken out for 9/11 truth: Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Sen. Barbara Boxer, former head of the Star Wars program Col. Robert Bowman, ex-Reagan administration economics guru Paul Craig Roberts, progressive Jewish author-activist Rabbi Michael Lerner, former CIA official Ray McGovern, author-essayist Gore Vidal, and many other respected names from across the political spectrum have gone on the record for 9/11 truth. It is time to break the 9/11 truth blackout. Please put pressure on your local media through letters to the editor, call-ins to talk radio, and phone calls to local and national journalists.

Loose Change...is being downloaded from the Internet and shown in small screenings here and overseas. The film appears especially popular among young people immersed in a Web culture brimming with sites that question the credibility of government. They see 9/11 as the defining moment of their lives. Professors and researchers of film and politics say the Internet is making it far easier to spread such theories because the traditional media are losing their hold on the news. Internet chat rooms are full of promos for screenings of Loose Change. Most of what the film alleges is refuted by the evidence at hand. Anything not answered definitively by the government is interpreted by the film as proof of a coverup. Some college students who saw Loose Change and are promoting it say it's good to raise questions. The film "at the very least suggests that we don't know the whole truth" says Matt Latham, a freshman at the University of California, Santa Cruz. People believe in conspiracy theories because the truth "is either too simple or too remote," says sociologist Clifton Bryant of Virginia Tech University. "We're always ready to believe something about which we know nothing."

Note: A big thank you to USA Today for carrying this article, even though overall it is trying to debunk the film. Loose Change ranked in the top 10 most viewed videos on Google for many months, and even reached the #1 position for a number of days. Don't miss this incredibly eye-opening film which is waking up caring citizens around the world. Click here.

A Brigham Young University physicist said he now believes an incendiary substance called thermite, bolstered by sulfur, was used to generate exceptionally hot fires at the World Trade Center on 9/11, causing the structural steel to fail and the buildings to collapse. "It looks like thermite with sulfur added," Steven Jones, professor of physics at BYU, told a meeting of the Utah Academy of Science, Arts and Letters. Jones is co-chairman, with James H. Fetzer, a distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, a group of college faculty members who believe conspirators other than pilots of the planes were directly involved in bringing down New York's Trade Towers. The group, which Jones said has 200 members, maintains a Web site at www.st911.org. A 40-page paper by Jones, along with other peer-reviewed and non-reviewed academic papers, are posted on the site. Last year, Jones presented various arguments for his theory that explosives or incendiary devices were planted in the Trade Towers, and in WTC 7, a smaller building in the Trade Center complex, and that those materials, not planes crashing into the buildings, caused the buildings to collapse. Jones said his studies are confined to physical causes of the collapses, and he doesn't like to speculate about who might have entered the buildings and placed thermite and sulfur.

Note: For lots more reliable, verifiable information suggesting a 9/11 cover-up:
http://www.WantToKnow.info/9-11cover-up

When David Ray Griffin, noted theologian and professor emeritus at the Claremont School of Theology, first heard someone say that Sept. 11 was an inside job, he scoffed. [But later] Griffin began to delve into 9/11 conspiracy theories after looking at a time line of the events of Sept. 11, 2001...on the Internet. He found himself swayed by the catalog of inconsistencies and strange coincidences. Griffin points to historical evidence that the U.S. government would be capable of such a thing. Operation Northwoods, a plan concocted by the Pentagon in the '60s as a way of taking Castro from power, included ideas about how a terrorist attack on U.S. soil could provide a pretext for military action. While many conspiracy theories have been passed around, it's been very easy to dismiss many of the theorists as...crazy. But Griffin comes to his controversial conclusions with lucidity and calm. He even sees a connection between his long-standing work as a theologian and his new position as a political writer. "In both cases, the concern is for the good of the world as a whole."

The details of what happened to the four hijacked jetliners on Sept. 11, 2001, have been known for years, but when a prosecutor read a simple minute-by-minute account of the attacks, the jury deciding the fate of confessed al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui hung on every word. In a similar vein, the missed opportunities of the FBI and other agencies to prevent Sept. 11 have been known for years, but when FBI agents are forced to admit them on cross-examination, they seem fresh to the jury. FBI agents have been forced to admit under cross-examination that the FBI knew years before Sept. 11 that al-Qaida had plans to use planes as missiles to destroy prominent buildings. They also had to acknowledge numerous missed opportunities in the months before Sept. 11 to catch two of the hijackers with terror links known to the government, even though the pair frequently used their own names in this country to rent cars, purchase plane tickets and even, once, to file a police report after getting mugged.

Note: What all of the media articles on this important case fail to mention is the laptop computer of Moussaoui was confiscated weeks before 9/11, yet FBI headquarters systematically undermined requests by Minneapolis FBI agents to search the computer. See http://www.WantToKnow.info/9-11cover-up10pg#moussaouilaptop. And a full two weeks before 9/11 an FBI Minnesota supervisor said he was trying keep Moussaoui from “taking control of a plane and fly it into the WTC," yet his investigation was repeatedly blocked by top officials. See http://www.WantToKnow.info/9-11cover-up10pg#moussaoui

A Moroccan convicted of belonging to a terrorist cell that included three Sept. 11 hijackers was freed from prison Tuesday after a federal court ruled he shouldn't be jailed with appeals still pending. A statement by Germany's Federal Constitutional Court said the lower court had been wrong to order el Motassadeq returned to custody because appeals by both the defense and prosecutors were still pending. Mounir el Motassadeq, 31, was sentenced to seven years in prison in August by a court in Hamburg. In 2003, he became the first person anywhere to be convicted in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks when he was found guilty of membership in a terrorist organization. The Moroccan acknowledges he was close to the hijackers but insists he knew nothing of their plans. Defense lawyers criticized the lack of direct testimony from witnesses such as Ramzi Binalshibh, a key Sept. 11 suspect held by the U.S.

Note: See http://www.WantToKnow.info/9-11cover-up10pg#hijackersmilitary to read news articles by CBS, New York Times, and Los Angeles times describing how the FBI identified 50 individuals involved in orchestrating 9/11 and had 40 of them in custody. Yet not one of these people was ever tried. Is it logically possible that the 19 hijackers could have pulled off 9/11 without any support? Why have only two people worldwide ever been officially accused on involvement in 9/11 planning? And one of those two is now freed?

The twin towers did not fall because aircraft hit them. Demolition explosive charges made them collapse. If you look at close-up video you see puffs of explosives coming out the sides of the buildings as they topple. An advertisement that makes this allegation has been airing in New York for months. It ends with a voice saying: "Reopen the investigation and address the unanswered questions of 9/11." If you go to the website reopen911.org you find a series of even more startling claims. Did a plane actually hit the Pentagon? Photos taken on September 11, 2001, show no cabin, no tail and no engines. What about the phone calls by passengers from the hijacked planes? "You can't make calls from aircraft."

Note: Though this article pokes fun at people who challenge the 9/11 story, yet it also raises serious questions. We are thankful for any media attention, even that which refutes the 9/11 movement, as any press brings the subject more fully into public awareness. See our 9/11 Information Center for more.

After they left Texas for Washington following the 2000 presidential election, Miers assumed such an insider role that in 2001 it was she who handed Bush the crucial "presidential daily briefing" hinting at terrorist plots against America just a month before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Note: No other major media reported this significant fact on the topic of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers. The respected Editor and Publisher had this to say: "On its front page Tuesday, The New York Times published a photo of new U.S. Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers going over a briefing paper with President George W. Bush at his Crawford ranch 'in August 2001,' the caption reads. USA Today and the Boston Globe carried the photo labeled simply '2001,' but many other newspapers ran the picture in print or on the Web with a more precise date: Aug. 6, 2001. The PDB [Presidential Daily Briefing] was headed 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,' and notes, among other things, FBI information indicating 'patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks.' " For the entire article, click here.

The American Civil Liberties Union is urging the U.S. Supreme Court to review a lower court's dismissal of the case of Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator who was fired in retaliation for reporting security breaches and possible espionage within the Bureau. Lower courts dismissed the case when former Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the rarely used "state secrets" privilege. An unclassified summary of a report by the DOJ's Inspector General, released in January 2005, corroborates Edmonds' allegations. The IG report concludes that the FBI had retaliated against Edmonds for reporting serious security breaches, stating that “...her allegations were, in fact, the most significant factor in the FBI's decision to terminate her services.” Fourteen 9/11 family member advocacy groups and public interest organizations filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of Edmonds case before the District Court. Edmonds' ordeal is highlighted in a 10-page article in the September 2005 issue of Vanity Fair titled “An Inconvenient Patriot.” The article, which chronicles FBI wrongdoing and possible corruption charges involving a high-level member of Congress, further undercuts the government's claim that the case can't be litigated because certain information is secret.

The congressman who first made public claims that a secret Pentagon data mining project linked the Sept. 11 attacks ringleader to al-Qaida more than a year before the attacks took place says he does not believe the military's account of how the results of the project's work came to be destroyed. "I seriously have my doubts that it was routine," Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Penn., told United Press International. Weldon said he had asked the Pentagon for the certificates of destruction that military officials must complete when classified data is destroyed. He said that there had been "a second elimination of data in 2003," in addition to the destruction acknowledged last week. "For some reason, the bureaucracy in the Pentagon -- I mean the civilian bureaucracy -- didn't want this to get out," he said.

Note: The New York Times reported that the 9/11 Commission was informed of Able Danger and of lead hijacker Mohamed Atta being identified as a threat and an al Qaeda member more than a year before 9/11. Why was this crucial fact not even mentioned in the 9/11 Commission report?

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.