The Washington Post on ‘lunatic’ 9/11 ‘conspiracy theorists’

by Jeremy R. Hammond

March 9, 2010

An editorial in the Washington Post yesterday slammed Japanese member of parliament Yukihisa Fujita because he “seems to think that America’s rendering of the events of Sept. 11, 2001, is a gigantic hoax.” His “ideas” about the terrorist attacks “are too bizarre, half-baked and intellectually bogus to merit serious discussion.”

Fujita, the editorial added, is a member of “the lunatic fringe” who “have spawned a thriving subculture of conspiracy theorists at home and abroad”, and “his views, rooted as they are in profound distrust of the United States, seem to reflect a strain of anti-American thought”. The piece closes by suggesting that the “fact-averse” Fujita should be removed from office.

Among Fujita’s “bizarre” views are “that shadowy forces with advance knowledge of the plot played the stock market to profit from it”, “the fantastic idea that eight of the 19 hijackers are alive and well”, and “that controlled demolition rather than fire or debris may be a more likely explanation for at least the collapse of the building at 7 World Trade Center”.

Yet while serving out a hit piece against the global “9/11 Truth” movement, it is in fact the editors of the Washington Post who are demonstrably “fact-averse”.

It happens to be an uncontroversial fact that in the days just prior to the attacks, there was a dramatic increase in trade on put options, and what made this unusual spike even more mysterious was that it was observed only in relation to companies directly affected by the attacks, including United Airlines, American Airlines, and Morgan Stanely Dean Witter & Co. (which occupied 22 floors of 2 World Trade Center).

That this occurred was in fact mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report, which reported that the federal investigations into the suspicious trading concluded that it was all “innocuous”. Many of the trades on the airline companies, for instance, were traced to a “single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda”.

In other words, the report acknowledges that the suspicious trades did in fact occur, but dismisses this as evidence of foreknowledge because the investigation didn’t lead to the proper predetermined culprits. This is illustrative of the kind of standard the 9/11 Commission employed throughout its so-called “investigation”.

The “fantastic” idea that the identity of the hijackers named by the FBI is in question is an interesting case. At the time, the Washington Post had also subscribed to this “half-baked” notion. On September 20, 2001, under the headline “Some Hijackers’ Identities Uncertain”, the Post reported, “FBI officials said yesterday that some of the 19 terrorists who carried out last week’s assault on New York and Washington may have stolen the identities of other people, and their real names may remain unknown.”

Among the evidence for this, the Post cited “Saudi government officials” as having determined “that at least two of the terrorists used the names of living, law-abiding Saudi citizens”. The man in the picture of one of the alleged hijackers, the Post reported, was Salem Al-Hazmi, who was actually alive and well, according to Gaafar Allagany, the chief of the Saudi Embassy’s information office in Washington. The real Al-Hazmi’s “passport was stolen by a pickpocket on a trip to Cairo three years” before. Another of the alleged hijackers was Abdulaziz Al-Omari, who, Allagany said, was also alive and “an electrical engineer in Saudi Arabia.”

“The uncertainty”, the Post continued, “highlights how difficult it may be to ever identify some of the hijackers who participated in the deadliest act of violence on American soil. Most of the hijackers’ bodies were obliterated in the fiery crashes.”

The Washington Post was not the only mainstream media outlet to report on the uncertainty over the hijacker’s identities. It was widely reported elsewhere, both in the U.S. and international media.

The U.K.’s Guardian, for instance, reported on September 21 under the headline “False identities mislead FBI” that “The FBI acknowledged yesterday that some of the terrorists involved in the attacks last week were using false identities”, with regard to Al-Hazmi and Al-Omari.

FBI acknowledgment of this was also reported by the BBC the same day under the headline “FBI probes hijackers’ identities”. The BBC also reported on September 22 under the headline “Hijack ‘suspect’ alive in Morocco” that Waleed Al-Shehri, another alleged hijacker, the “same Mr Al-Shahri” whose photo the FBI had released as being among the terrorists, “has turned up in Morocco, proving clearly that he was not a member of the suicide attack.”

On September 23, under the headline “Hijack ‘suspects’ alive and well”, the BBC reported that yet “Another of the men named by the FBI as a hijacker … has turned up alive and well” and that “The identities of four of the 19 suspects … are now in doubt.” FBI Director Robert Mueller also “acknowledged … that the identity of several of the suicide hijackers is in doubt.”

The London Telegraph similarly ran a story on September 23 entitled “Revealed: the men with stolen identities”.

The Washington Post itself ran a follow-up article on September 25 entitled “Some Light Shed On Saudi Suspects”, reporting that “U.S. investigators believe they have positively identified 15 of the 19 hijackers”, but that the identities of the other four were still in question.

On September 27, even while releasing the official list of hijackers along with their photos, the FBI confirmed that uncertainty remained over some of the identities. Mueller acknowledged that the FBI was still “determining whether when these individuals came to the United States these were their real names, or they changed their names for use with false identification in the United States; that false identification being used up to and on the day of September 11th, and that false identification used to purchase the tickets, and thereby being the name on the manifests of the planes that went down.”

Yet, despite these facts, neither the Washington Post nor any other mainstream media outlet has ever offered any follow-up reports explaining whether and how this uncertainty was finally resolved. The FBI has never clarified this matter to the public. The 9/11 Commission didn’t so much as even address the question, even to attempt to clear up the matter.

And so, it remains an uncontroversial fact, as far as the public is concerned, that the identify of at least several of the hijackers remains in question. Why the government has refused to clarify this issue, and why the media now report anyone who doesn’t have a short memory about 9/11 as being part of a “lunatic fringe” are also open questions that warrant some kind of explanation.

Finally, there is the matter of the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings. Many people might be surprised to learn that not only two towers fell on September 11. In fact, a third skyscraper also collapsed that day neatly into its own footprint. It is also an uncontroversial fact that proper investigative procedures for such disasters, particularly in cases where a crime has been committed, were contemptuously ignored in the case of the WTC.

For starters, the evidence from the crime scene in the form of the remains of the three buildings was removed and immediately destroyed. Destruction of evidence is itself a crime, and yet that is what happened. Other standard procedures were also ignored, such as testing for any kinds of accelerants that may have been responsible for the building failures.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released what is supposed to be the conclusive report on the building collapses. Yet, the explanation it provides, too, is inadequate, to say the least. The computer models NIST offers for the collapse of WTC 7, for instance, look just like one would expect them to, for the kind of collapse NIST says occurred there. You first see one load-bearing column fail, leading to the progressive failure of other columns until the entire structure has eventually crumbled.

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About the Author

Jeremy R. Hammond

Jeremy R. Hammond is an independent political analyst and a recipient of the Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism. He is the founding editor of Foreign Policy Journal (www.foreignpolicyjournal.com) and can also be found on the web at JeremyRHammond.com. He is the author of "Ron Paul vs. Paul Krugman: Austrian vs. Keynesian economics in the financial crisis" and "The Rejection of Palestinian Self-Determination: The Struggle for Palestine and the Roots of the Israeli-Arab Conflict", both available in paperback or Kindle versions from Amazon.com. More...

41 Responses to The Washington Post on ‘lunatic’ 9/11 ‘conspiracy theorists’

Steve

March 10, 2010 at 9:21 am

My favorite quote (Stephen Hawking):
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance. The greatest enemy of knowledge is the illusion of knowledge.”

The author of the editorial didn’t check his facts because he has been convinced he already knows the answers. Witness the great power of the media. Why else would advertising and PR companies spend billions? Because it works.
Dr. Kiss Injure

March 10, 2010 at 8:23 pm

Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame exposed the CIA infiltration of WaPo 33 years ago. (Operation Mockingbird). The myth of “American Exceptionalism” needs to go.

The CIA and the Media by Carl Bernstein Rolling Stone, Oct. 20, 1977

http://danwismar.com/uploads/Bernstein%20-%20CIA%20and%20Media.htm
r e m o

March 11, 2010 at 3:59 am

deconstructing the construct. The commission report is a construct. by zelikow and waterboard. So is the NIST report, by sham science. Thats how you get the magic building failure. Thats how you get 47 stories to come down in 6.5 cold seconds. Make it up on a computer model. Control the inputs..
abc, washpost. the mutt media. Its like they are all on the beach wondering why the tide has gone got sucked way way way out. Past the dead ball line. They gone on down to play frisbee on the beach with the jerUSAlem art students. With the Kroll execs.and Xe., with the ghost of Peter Jennings: clapping themselves on their backs for doing such a good job. For hanging so many of us out to dry. But, that ominous black line on the horizon? getting bigger?
There is a Japanese word for that, too.
T s u n a m i spelled t. r. u. t .h .
The one hundredth monkey is all of us.
gmathol

March 16, 2010 at 10:29 pm

To be a loon or not, what about this question?

How can a plan trace less disappear in the Pentagon?
Why was the video material confiscated and never being published?

If the debris of the WTC contained somewhat the bodies of 3000 human beings, why was the debris shipped out to different countries and not seen as “burial” material?

Conspiracy theories look different.
AK

April 6, 2010 at 6:02 am

All the arguments in this article notwithstanding, it is fantastic to suppose that the US government (or elements within it) would knowingly destroy a major hub of American business, send the airline industry into a months-long tail dive, incur billions of dollars of loss to the US industry, and all this in the name of what exactly? It just does not add up.
- Jeremy R. Hammond
  
  April 6, 2010 at 7:59 am
  
  It’s not “fantastic” that people could drive a business right into the ground in order for a few people to profit from it. If you need examples, look at Enron or the recent financial crisis.
  
  9/11 served as the pretext for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and for implementing policies sought prior to 9/11 for which public consent would not have been possible, such as the “transformation” of the military into a force for global hegemony, warrantless surveillance of Americans, and so on.
  
  What doesn’t add up is the official conspiracy theory. We know the CIA knew Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hamzi were al Qaeda associates (al-Midhar suspected of involvement in the USS Cole bombing) and that one or both had obtained a visa to enter the U.S. at a time when “the system was blinking red”. And yet the CIA withheld this information from the FBI, State Department, and INS. This is all admitted and non-controversial.
  
  There is a precedent in that the Blind Sheikh, the spiritual leader of the terrorist cell that bombed the WTC in ’93, had multiple visas (at least 6) approved not by the State Department, but by CIA officers working at the consulate in Jeddah. This is also admitted and non-controversial, and squares with testimony from former consulate officer Michael Springman, who said that the CIA would bring terrorists into the U.S. for training during the Soviet-Afghan war, in which the CIA operated alongside Osama bin Laden in his organization that evolved into al-Qaeda. That same organization had an alias of Al-Khifa, which was a recruitment center associated with the Blind Sheikh and his terrorist cell.
  
  Moreover, the FBI had foreknowledge of the ’93 plot, and at least two informants in the cell. One of those informants was the Sheikh’s bodyguard, who recorded his debriefs with his FBI handlers. Those recordings, presented in court, showed that a plan to replace an ingredient in the bomb with an inert substitute, thus allowing the FBI to make the bomb a dud and perform a sting operation, was killed by a senior FBI official. The cell was allowed to go forward with building a real bomb, which was then used to bomb the WTC.
  
  Set conspiracy theories aside. None of this is controversial information. It’s all on the record, all documented, all admitted. There are reasonable questions that many people have about 9/11. What is clear is that the government, rather than providing answers to those questions, has deliberately sought to cover up and hide information about what really happened from the public.
  
  Why?
Jim

April 21, 2010 at 6:15 am

Another excellent, well-researched & constructed piece, Mr. Hammond.

Yes, the Facts should matter.
The word ‘Fact’ seem preferable to ‘Truth’ since Truth implies something more nebulous.

Am working to compile a brief list of significant, but little-known, 9/11 Facts.
Something that can be given/sent to reporters, editors, publishers, govt officials, as well as workaday Americans especially (not to exclude non-Americans, just that Americans need to know the facts & take responsibility). Hope to coordinate with you at some point.
- Jeremy R. Hammond
  
  April 21, 2010 at 11:18 am
  
  Sure thing, Jim.
Gel

May 15, 2010 at 3:04 am

How can a government tell too many lies? The man in the moon … it´s a joke !
The murder of JFK … is a joke! The terrorist attack at the WTC … it´s a joke. Here in my country, Brasil, we also have a government that just lies, lies and lies too!!!
chet austin

September 20, 2010 at 8:45 pm

The only lunatic’s I see and hear are the apologist’s who will continue to drown out voices of reason such as the Washington Post and all such like ilk on the right and the left who try and demonize people who don’t buy into the crap they feed us. 9/11 was well planned both by the Bush Administration and those who would profit by an attack on the ‘Twin Towers’. No one has been able to convince me that me that the people in power at the time; that is Condy Rice, Dick Chaney, Don Rumsfield, and the national idiot know as ‘W’, did not all know that this event on 09/11/2001 would take place. They all knew it and let it happen. They needed a ‘Pearl Harbor’ and they got their it. They let it happen and the apologist’s can “HOWL” all they want. I don’t care what ‘Snake News” says, or the “false prophet Beck’ says. Bush and Chaney and Rice and Rumsfield are to blame for 9/11. And I call on President Obama to investigate the whole Bush administration for ‘Criminal Malfeasance’. The American public needs to know the truth and not ‘Apology’s’. And if my assumption is right which I believe it is, then “Let justice be served”.
MIKE SPENCER

October 13, 2010 at 3:27 am

I GET SICK EVERYTIME I HEAR THIS BULLSHIT ABOUT AN INSIDE JOB. WHY DON’T YOU PEOPLE GROW UP. OSAMA AND HIS HENCHMEN PULLED THIS OFF BECAUSE THEY ARE GOOD AT IT, AND KNOW HOW TO KEEP A SECRET.
A MISSLE DID NOT HIT THE PENTAGON, IT WAS A COMMERCIAL JET WITH INNOCENT PEOPLE IN IT.
THEY CUT THE THROATS OF THE FLIGHT ATTENDENTS AND THE PILOTS, AND IT’S SICKENING TO HEAR YOU LUNATICS DISCUSS THIS AS IF IT’S A HOBBY.
- Jeremy R. Hammond
  
  October 13, 2010 at 9:41 am
  
  Yes, a commercial jet with innocent people in it hit the Pentagon. The question is, who was piloting that plane? It’s next to an impossibility that the man known as Hani Hanjour could have pulled that off:
  
  http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2010/04/17/al-qaedas-top-gun/
  
  And you’re welcome to explain to everyone how fire could have caused, following the collapse of the core of WTC 7, all the perimeter columns to fail simultaneously resulting in a near free-fall collapse, and an achieved actual-free-fall acceleration for nearly 2.5 seconds.
  
  Once you eliminate the impossible, what remains, however unlikely, must be the truth.
Chan Bolder

December 31, 2010 at 9:33 pm

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Stephaine Cockerill

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