The real 9/11 conspiracy Phillip AdamsFollow @phillipadams_1

When the first of the towers collapsed, the streets were choked with choking people who, coated with dust and ash, resembled the asphyxiated of Pompeii, the victims of Vesuvius. Whereas the volcano erupting in Manhattan was man-made.

But which men made it? There are so many conspiracy theories about events that, whilst unimaginable, had been imagined already in a dozen disaster movies. Mutually exclusive theories, each madder than the other. The most baroque? That no aircraft hit the towers. There were no hijacks. No planes. No doomed passengers. The towers were hit by missiles “enclosed in 3-D holograms of commercial jets”. Mind you, the “Truthers” who hold this view – and many do to this day – disagree on who fired the missiles.

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Which takes us back to the blurred beliefs of the Truthers. Let me summarise: 1) It was a false flag operation and the greatest act of treason in human history – perpetrated by the Bush administration as a sort of Pearl Harbor that could be used to justify both the imposition of unprecedented surveillance on the population and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. 2) The administration knew an attack was planned and let it happen. 3) It was an Israeli plot carried out by Mossad. 4) The towers collapsed because of “controlled demolitions” perpetrated by a person or persons unknown but probably by the CIA. 5) The motive was to profit from “insider trading” and manipulation of the stock values of United Airlines and American Airlines. 6, 7, 8) Variations on the above.

People had good cause to be suspicious. The great escalation of the Vietnam War was justified by something that never happened – the fake news of the “Gulf of Tonkin Incident” – just as the subsequent invasion of Iraq would be justified by the non-existent “weapons of mass destruction”. And there can be no argument that the official enquiry involved a vast cover-up that remains in place, indicated by the redacted pages in the 9/11 Commission Report. Pages about the US’s close friends in Saudi Arabia. Not only was bin Laden Saudi Arabian – and a member of a vastly wealthy dynasty described to me on Late Night Live by a family friend as “our Rockefellers” – but 15 of the 9/11 terrorists, most of the team, were Saudi nationals.

This was hushed up and blame for the attack deliberately misdirected to Iraq while high-ranking Saudis were secretly smuggled out of the US, despite the grounding of all other international flights. Then and now Saudi Arabia remains untouchable, as Trump’s response to the butchering of a US-based journalist in a Saudi consulate shamefully dramatised. Blood is thicker than water and oil is thicker than both. The Saudis remain Washington’s besties, next to Israel its most powerful Middle Eastern ally.

As a direct consequence of the 3000 or so deaths on 9/11, hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East would be killed, maimed, maddened or displaced in the never-ending conflicts triggered by Bush/Cheney’s “Shock and Awe” war. Those consequences of 9/11 involve conspiracies and untruths beyond anything in the Truthers’ wildest imaginings.

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*** This article has been archived for your research. The original version from The Australian can be found here ***