Where Fisk Goes Wrong About 9/11

Controversial journalist Robert Fisk, despised everywhere good books are sold, wrote a column for yesterday's issue of The Independent in which he says he is

increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11.

Judging from the reaction in some parts of the blogosphere, he's gone quite mad!

Here's the column in full:

Robert Fisk: Even I question the 'truth' about 9/11

Each time I lecture abroad on the Middle East, there is always someone in the audience – just one – whom I call the "raver". Apologies here to all the men and women who come to my talks with bright and pertinent questions – often quite humbling ones for me as a journalist – and which show that they understand the Middle East tragedy a lot better than the journalists who report it. But the "raver" is real. He has turned up in corporeal form in Stockholm and in Oxford, in Sao Paulo and in Yerevan, in Cairo, in Los Angeles and, in female form, in Barcelona. No matter the country, there will always be a "raver".

His – or her – question goes like this. Why, if you believe you're a free journalist, don't you report what you really know about 9/11? Why don't you tell the truth – that the Bush administration (or the CIA or Mossad, you name it) blew up the twin towers? Why don't you reveal the secrets behind 9/11? The assumption in each case is that Fisk knows – that Fisk has an absolute concrete, copper-bottomed fact-filled desk containing final proof of what "all the world knows" (that usually is the phrase) – who destroyed the twin towers. Sometimes the "raver" is clearly distressed. One man in Cork screamed his question at me, and then – the moment I suggested that his version of the plot was a bit odd – left the hall, shouting abuse and kicking over chairs.

Usually, I have tried to tell the "truth"; that while there are unanswered questions about 9/11, I am the Middle East correspondent of The Independent, not the conspiracy correspondent; that I have quite enough real plots on my hands in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran, the Gulf, etc, to worry about imaginary ones in Manhattan. My final argument – a clincher, in my view – is that the Bush administration has screwed up everything – militarily, politically diplomatically – it has tried to do in the Middle East; so how on earth could it successfully bring off the international crimes against humanity in the United States on 11 September 2001?

Well, I still hold to that view. Any military which can claim – as the Americans did two days ago – that al-Qa'ida is on the run is not capable of carrying out anything on the scale of 9/11. "We disrupted al-Qa'ida, causing them to run," Colonel David Sutherland said of the preposterously code-named "Operation Lightning Hammer" in Iraq's Diyala province. "Their fear of facing our forces proves the terrorists know there is no safe haven for them." And more of the same, all of it untrue.

Within hours, al-Qa'ida attacked Baquba in battalion strength and slaughtered all the local sheikhs who had thrown in their hand with the Americans. It reminds me of Vietnam, the war which George Bush watched from the skies over Texas – which may account for why he this week mixed up the end of the Vietnam war with the genocide in a different country called Cambodia, whose population was eventually rescued by the same Vietnamese whom Mr Bush's more courageous colleagues had been fighting all along.

But – here we go. I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11. It's not just the obvious non sequiturs: where are the aircraft parts (engines, etc) from the attack on the Pentagon? Why have the officials involved in the United 93 flight (which crashed in Pennsylvania) been muzzled? Why did flight 93's debris spread over miles when it was supposed to have crashed in one piece in a field? Again, I'm not talking about the crazed "research" of David Icke's Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster – which should send any sane man back to reading the telephone directory.

I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example, that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twin towers – whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C – would snap through at the same time? (They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower – the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon Brothers Building) – which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7. Two prominent American professors of mechanical engineering – very definitely not in the "raver" bracket – are now legally challenging the terms of reference of this final report on the grounds that it could be "fraudulent or deceptive".

Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11. Initial reports of reporters that they heard "explosions" in the towers – which could well have been the beams cracking – are easy to dismiss. Less so the report that the body of a female air crew member was found in a Manhattan street with her hands bound. OK, so let's claim that was just hearsay reporting at the time, just as the CIA's list of Arab suicide-hijackers, which included three men who were – and still are – very much alive and living in the Middle East, was an initial intelligence error.

But what about the weird letter allegedly written by Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian hijacker-murderer with the spooky face, whose "Islamic" advice to his gruesome comrades – released by the CIA – mystified every Muslim friend I know in the Middle East? Atta mentioned his family – which no Muslim, however ill-taught, would be likely to include in such a prayer. He reminds his comrades-in-murder to say the first Muslim prayer of the day and then goes on to quote from it. But no Muslim would need such a reminder – let alone expect the text of the "Fajr" prayer to be included in Atta's letter.

Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the ravers. Spare me the plots. But like everyone else, I would like to know the full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic, meretricious "war on terror" which has led us to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East. Bush's happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that "we're an empire now – we create our own reality". True? At least tell us. It would stop people kicking over chairs.

Now for the reactions:

USS Neverdock has this to say:

Fisk is free to spout out far left wing conspiracy theories and the Independent is free to print them, but given Fisk's previous lies, one has to wonder why the Independent continues to embarass themselves. Oh, that's right, they're not embarassed. Silly me.

At Screw Loose Change, Pat Curley, semi-official protector of the official semi-truth, wrote:

Robert Fisk Goes Nutter

Of course, he denies being a crackpot while recycling all of the crackpot questions.

Unfortunately, Curley doesn't make any attempt to explain what's "crackpot" about the questions Fisk asks, or why asking these questions makes him a "crackpot".

The folks at Daily Kos read this:

Robert Fisk is perhaps one the best known foreign correspondents covering the Middle East. He has covered everything from the Iranian Revolution to Lebanon to the current war in Iraq and has won multiple awards and honorary degrees for his coverage. He has even interviewed the head-lopping islamo-fascist devil Osama bin Laden on multiple occasions. He has apparently lost his marbles in his latest ravings questioning the official story on 9/11. Descend with me below the fold into the madness.
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[quote snipped]
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What a stark-raving lunatic! Madness! Madness! Madness!
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I am glad that we in the reality-based community do not associate ourselves with fringe journamalists like Robert Fisk. All those people who gave him degrees and awards must be feeling pretty foolish now.

Ad hominem, ad hominem, ad nauseam. But again, no attempt to answer any of the questions.

Does Allahpundit at Hot Air give us any answers?

Nope. Just a big quote, as if Fisk's words disproved themselves!

Proof at Say Anything weighs in with this:

Robert Fisk - Moonbat At Large!

No, seriously! This moonbat is at large! Wandering around, bumping into things, drooling on his keyboard and possibly crapping his nappies!
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[quote snipped]
Lunatic?? Islamic terrorists kill three thousand of our citizens in an unproved attack on us for who we are, and Robert Fisk thinks that it’s “lunatic” to defend ourselves or strike back against those who attacked us and would gladly attack us again. Two guesses who the “lunatic” is in this scenario!
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[another quote snipped]
He says, I am not a conspiracy theorist, then regurgitates the same old conspiratorial crap the rest of the moonbats do.

Proof hits the jackpot here for Freudian Slip of the year so far, with the phrase "an unproved attack". Presumably he meant to type "unprovoked". But that's a side issue: the sad fact is that you could read all these blogs again and again and again but you would never know:

Where has Fisk gone wrong?

Aside from the fact that Fisk himself is a nutter, a moonbat, wandering around, bumping into things, drooling on his keyboard and possibly crapping his nappies, what has any of this taught us? Nothing.

Where did Fisk go wrong?

I could quibble over minor issues but instead I will focus on the three points that seem most significant to me.

1] Fisk says the towers "collapsed". But they didn't. The towers disintegrated. If they had collapsed we would have seen huge slabs of concrete and long twisted steel columns. Instead we saw a huge cloud of dust -- and the structural steel was all broken apart. The central columns weren't left standing, nor did they fall over. "Collapse" means to fall down, or fall apart. The towers didn't fall apart except in the molecular sense of the word. Knowing what happened to the towers may be the key to the entire mystery; the first step on the path to this knowledge is the realization that the towers didn't collapse at all.

2] His next basic mistake is the failure to contemplate the possibility that the American military might be capable of lying. Thus he writes:

Any military which can claim – as the Americans did two days ago – that al-Qa'ida is on the run is not capable of carrying out anything on the scale of 9/11.

The absence of logic here is overwhelming: because the American military tells little lies, that means it's not capable of telling a big one!

Surely the ability to lie with a straight face is never a reliable indicator of innocence.

3] His third and far more disturbing mistake is the failure to contemplate the possibility that the Bush administration might be capable of lying:

My final argument – a clincher, in my view – is that the Bush administration has screwed up everything – militarily, politically diplomatically – it has tried to do in the Middle East; so how on earth could it successfully bring off the international crimes against humanity in the United States on 11 September 2001?

Here Fisk shows a fundamental lack of understanding. He mistakes the difference between Bush administration's words and deeds as incompetence. Unfortunately for him -- unfortunately for all of us -- the Bush administration has been running two different agendas ever since it took office: there's a public agenda (they say they're trying to make America safer while bringing democracy and stability to the Middle East) and there's a private agenda (seeking to control key parts of the Middle East, build bases there and exploit the natural resources, while sacrificing America's safety in the process). This may be Fisk's final argument, but it's by no means a clincher.

The evidence of the difference between the two agendas is everywhere: it amazes me that so few people -- including seasoned journalists -- can see it. As I wrote just yesterday:

If the United States truly wanted to provide security to Iraq, they wouldn't be fomenting "sectarian violence" and arming all sides. This is what you do if you're trying to accelerate a civil war.

The realities on the ground in Iraq are entirely out of synch with all the alleged justifications for this war, and the war now stands exposed as exactly what its opponents have always said it was -- mass murder and grand theft, a premeditated war crime of unimaginable scope and ferocity.

There' s truth, and there's politics, and never the twain shall meet, as they say. In all American administrations there have been significant differences between what they've said and what they've done. The remarkable thing about this administration is that their public pronouncements are so completely at odds with their actions. Quite often what they say is not only different from the truth, it's the exact opposite!

But of course! Of course they have to lie about what they're doing: their agenda is so evil that if they spoke of it openly, nobody -- not even the fools I have quoted above -- would support them.

I don't expect Robert Fisk to understand any of this, because he despises the internet, which just happens to be the only place such a frank analysis can be found. On the other hand, many other journalists who use the internet quite well are several steps behind Fisk on this issue.

In any case, if he can ever bring himself to think clearly about these three crucial points, Robert Fisk might someday begin to understand what happened on 9/11. And that would be a very good thing, because at the moment he sounds like a nutter.

[related reading]

Truth By Inversion

9/11 Op/Eds: One Great Big Stupid Lie After Another

Still In Denial: Bob Woodward's Modified Limited Hangout

Bush Hates America: US Troops Face 'A Circular Firing Squad' In Iraq

Bush Hates America: Iraqi Weapons Caches Are Still Open!