by Jon E. Lewis
It is quite possible that a certain percentage of these conscripts may be caught by the interest of what they are doing; the asylum attendant may decide to specialise in psychotherapeutic work; the hospital nurse succumb to that curiosity which underlies the great physiologist; the Arctic worker may fall in love with his snowy wilderness....
One other leading probability of a collectivist world order has to be noted here, and that is an enormous increase in the pace and amount of research and discovery. I write research, but by that I mean that double-barrelled attack upon ignorance, the biological attack and the physical attack, that is generally known as “Science”. “Science” comes to us from those academic Dark Ages when men had to console themselves for their ignorance by pretending that there was a limited amount of knowledge in the world, and little chaps in caps and gowns strutted about, bachelors who knew a passable lot, masters who knew a tremendous lot and doctors in crimson gowns who knew all that there was to be known. Now it is manifest that none of us know very much, and the more we look into what we think we know, the more hitherto undetected things we shall find lurking in our assumptions.
Hitherto this business of research, which we call the “scientific world”, has been in the hands of very few workers indeed. I throw out the suggestion that in our present-day world, of all the brains capable of great and masterful contributions to “scientific” thought and achievement, brains of the quality of Lord Rutherford’s, or Darwin’s or Mendel’s or Freud’s or Leonardo’s or Galileo’s, not one in a thousand, not one in a score of thousands, ever gets born into such conditions as to realise its opportunities. The rest never learn a civilised language, never get near a library, never have the faintest chance of self-realisation, never hear the call. They are undernourished , they die young, they are misused. And of the millions who would make good, useful, eager secondary research workers and explorers, not one in a million is utilised.
But now consider how things will be if we had a stirring education ventilating the whole world, and if we had a systematic and continually more competent search for exceptional mental quality and a continually more extensive net of opportunity for it. Suppose a quickening public mind implies an atmosphere of increasing respect for intellectual achievement and a livelier criticism of imposture. What we call scientific progress today would seem a poor, hesitating, uncertain advance in comparison with what would be happening under these happier conditions.
The progress of research and discovery has produced such brilliant and startling results in the past century and a half that few of us are aware of the small number of outstanding men who have been concerned in it, and how the minor figures behind these leaders trail off into a following of timid and ill-provided specialists who dare scarcely stand up to a public official on their own ground. This little army, this “scientific world” of today, numbering I suppose from head to tail, down to the last bottle-washer, not a couple of hundred thousand men, will certainly be represented in the new world order by a force of millions, better equipped, amply coordinated, free to question, able to demand opportunity. Its best will be no better than our best, who could not be better, but they will be far more numerous, and its rank and file, explorers, prospectors, experimental team workers and an encyclopædic host of classifiers and coordinators and interpreters, will have a vigour, a pride and confidence that will make the laboratories of today seem half-way back to the alchemist’s den.
Can one doubt that the “scientific world” will break out in this way when the revolution is achieved, and that the development of man’s power over nature and over his own nature and over this still unexplored planet, will undergo a continual acceleration as the years pass? No man can guess beforehand what doors will open then nor upon what wonderlands.
These are some fragmentary intimations of the quality of that wider life a new world order can open to mankind. I will not speculate further about them because I would not have it said that this book is Utopian or “Imaginative” or anything of that sort. I have set down nothing that is not strictly reasonable and practicable. It is the soberest of books and the least original of books. I think I have written enough to show that it is impossible for world affairs to remain at their present level. Either mankind collapses or our species struggles up by the hard yet fairly obvious routes I have collated in this book, to reach a new level of social organisation. There can be little question of the abundance, excitement and vigour of living that awaits our children upon that upland. If it is attained. There is no doubting their degradation and misery if it is not.
There is nothing really novel about this book. But there has been a certain temerity in bringing together facts that many people have avoided bringing together for fear they might form an explosive mixture. Maybe they will. They may blast through some obstinate mental barriers. In spite of that explosive possibility, that explosive necessity, it may be, this remains essentially an assemblage, digest and encouragement of now prevalent but still hesitating ideas. It is a plain statement of the revolution to which reason points an increasing number of minds, but which they still lack resolution to undertake. In The Fate of Homo sapiens I have stressed the urgency of the case. Here I have assembled the things they can and need to do. They had better summon up their resolution.
9/11
Tuesday 11 September 2001. A day of infamy. At 8.35 a.m., a hijacked passenger plane crashed into the north tower of New York City’s World Trade Center. Thirty minutes later, a second plane hit the south tower. Over in Washington DC, a third airliner crashed into the Pentagon.
Nearly 3,000 people died as a result of these attacks. The US had just suffered its worst terrorist incident in history. Kjalid Sheikh Mohammed, the head of the military committee of Islamic terrorist organization al-Qaeda, accepted responsibility: “Yes, we did it,” he told al-Jazeera TV. According to intelligence received, the White House of George W. Bush agreed that al-Qaeda had committed the attack.
Case closed? Not quite.
9/11 was a tragedy for all except paranoid conspiracy theorists, to whom every cloud of explosive smoke has a silver lining. Within weeks of 9/11, the internet was humming with alternative versions of whodunnit and why. By mid-2007 the 9/11 internet conspiracy documentary Loose Change had been downloaded over four million times.
For all the multiplicity of post-9/11 conspiracy theories, they boil down to two main hypotheses: that George W. Bush either staged the 9/11 attacks or purposely allowed them to occur because the attacks would generate public support for an invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq and other fuel-rich countries. With American oil running out, such invasions were a strategic necessity.
Proponents of the theories – who include Hollywood luminaries Charlie Sheen and David Lynch – point accusingly at the Project for the New American Century, the right-wing think tank that campaigns for increased American global leadership. Former PNAC members include 9/11-era Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice-President Dick Cheney. An internal PNAC document, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, allegedly claims that “some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor” would be needed to move public opinion in their favour. Proponents of this theory also note the Bush–bin Laden Connection, the long ties between the two families, together with the administration’s initial opposition to an investigation into the attacks. Could the US Government willingly allow an attack on its own people?
Proponents answer “Pearl Harbor”. Even commit a false-flag attack on its own people? Answer: Operation Northwoods. This latter plan, proposed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962, proposed a stage-managed “terrorist” attack on US soil; Castro would get the blame, thus providing the justification for an invasion of Cuba.
So far as the false-flag case goes, theorists find quite a lot of evidence that the Government put its rampant political desires into practice.
First there’s the sheer amount of incriminating evidence the plotters left around. Oddly, amidst 1.6 million tons of debris, investigators
found the intact passport of Mohammed Atta, the man alleged to be the ringleader of the 9/11 attacks. So fortuitous was this find, conspiracy researchers suggest, that it must have been a plant. In fact, a number of other laminated passports were found in the debris. Atta also left flight-simulation manuals behind in a car, and apparently a will. However, he cannot have minded their discovery since he was intent on suicide. In fact, he may have wished them to be discovered to let the world know his martyrdom.
Second, what befell the towers of the World Trade Center bears examination. To most observers what happened to the WTC towers on 9/11 is straightforward: two planes hit the towers, then the towers fell down. This “reality” was soon challenged by conspiracy theorists, together with a covey of scientific experts.
Before 9/11 no steel-framed skyscraper had collapsed because of fire, yet WTC buildings 1, 2 and 7 collapsed like pancakes. Particularly unusual was the death of WTC 7, which was not hit by an aircraft. Additionally, according to at least one demolition expert, the billows of dust coming out of the towers were more indicative of explosion than fire. Steel wreckage recovered from the site shows that it became molten; fire is not usually able to effect this change in steel. But a bomb is.
The “controlled demolition hypothesis” is a central plank of 9/11 conspiracy theory, featuring heavily in David Ray Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor (2005), and most cogently argued by Steven Jones, a physicist at Brigham Young University. Jones asserts that without demolition charges a “gravity-driven collapse” of the sort that happened to the WTC buildings would defy the laws of physics.
By the laws of the “controlled demolition hypothesis” the WTC was rigged with explosive devices, probably containing thermite. The strange comment by Larry Silverstein, owner of WTC 7, on a PBS documentary that he told the fire department to “pull it” makes sense in this scenario: “pull it” is demolition industry slang for setting off demolition charges. (Silverstein’s spokesman said later that Silverstein meant “pull it” as in “pull outta there”.) The bottom-to-top style collapse of WTC buildings 1, 2 and 7 is said to be typical of controlled demolitions. Fuelling conspiracy theory is the fact that building 7 housed offices of the CIA and the FBI, plus New York City’s emergency command bunker.
In counterpoint to the controlled demolition hypothesis is the finding of the US Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) report into 9/11. According to this report the fireproofing on the Twin Towers’ steel infrastructures was blown off by the impact of the planes, thus opening them to fire damage. Fires weakened the trusses supporting the floors, which made the floors sag. Sagging floors pulled on the exterior steel columns, making them bow inwards. Buckled columns could not support the building. Thus the buildings collapsed. NIST’s findings are supported by a whole range of independent researchers.
What the controlled-demolition hypothesis fails to take into account is the aviation fuel carried by the planes. Skyscrapers were never made to withstand the effects of having thousands of gallons of ignited aviation fuel swilling around inside them.
Demolition experts have also weighed in on NIST’s side. To place enough lethal charges around three skyscrapers would require weeks of work and tons of explosive. Security at the WTC was among the tightest in the US, following a terrorist attack there in 1993. Wouldn’t somebody have noticed men carrying in bags of explosives for days on end or heard the drilling work needed to secure the devices to the steel frames?
Over to Washington DC. Like the WTC, the Pentagon was hit by a hijacked plane … well, no, the 9/11 “Truthers” say. Whereas in NY the dramatic extent of the damage done by the hijacked planes arouses suspicion, in Washington it is the limited extent of the damage done that incurs disbelief. In 2002, French writer Thierry Meyssan published 9/11: The Big Lie, which noted that the hole in the outer wall of the west wing was too small to have been caused by an incoming Boeing 747 and that the interior of the Pentagon was suspiciously undamaged.
Specifically, the holes punched in the interior walls of the Pentagon were 16 feet in diameter, too small to be made by a 757. According to Meyssan, the hole was caused by a cruise missile. (A more realistic weapon, some commentators feel, than the HAARP-like energy beam nominated by Assistant Professor Judy Woods as the doomslayer-of-the-day on 9/11.) Why did the Pentagon fire a missile at itself? Conspiracist Jesse Ventura, sometime wrestler and Minnesota governor, posited on his TV show that the Pentagon was trying to bury bad news. Literally. The Defense Department had lost $2.3 trillion. As it happens, the portion of the building destroyed by “Flight 77” was the precise office that housed the computers recording the DoD’s accounting irregularity.
Something else about the Pentagon attack raises the Truthers’ doubts. There were about eighty-five security cameras trained on the Pentagon, but all the Pentagon would show (after five years of petitioning by Truthers) was five frames of CCTV footage which showed an indefinable blur and an explosion.
To release just five frames prompted an obvious question: what might the other frames reveal? The Pentagon “bomb” conspiracy theory grew wings, especially when it was discovered that the section of the Pentagon which the plane crashed into was nearly empty at the time.
All this is taken by the 9/11 Truth Campaign as definite evidence that 9/11 was stage-managed or known about.
The clincher for the Truthers is the footage of George W. Bush’s infamous response when his reading of a story to a Florida kindergarten was interrupted by an aide to tell him of the attacks. Bush continued reading. He could only have carried on being so calm, the theory goes, if he knew about the attacks in advance.
The fact is that the Pentagon was designed to withstand an air attack. The limestone layers shattered with the impact of the Boeing but the reinforced steel internal cage remained intact, hence the apparent lack of internal damage. Bush’s response can be explained in a multitude of ways: he wanted to give the appearance of calm, he was shocked into immobility, he was too unintelligent to grasp what had occurred. Of all the claims of the Truthers, the Pentagon “missile” is the most ludicrous. Hundreds of drivers stuck in the morning rush hour traffic saw a plane hit the side of the military administration building.
What about Flight 93? Flight 93 was the fourth airliner hijacked by terrorists that morning. Unlike the others, it failed to find its target, instead plummeting into a Pennsylvania field. It is commonly considered that Flight 93 came down because its passengers heroically fought back against the hijackers and, in the melee, the plane went out of control or perhaps a terrorist aboard pulled the pin on a bomb.
In 9/11 conspiracy theory, Flight 93 was shot down on the orders of the White House before it could reach its target – which was the White House. Welcome to the world of Alice in the Looking Glass, because conspiracists complain that it is suspicious that “Flight 77” plane/cruise missile was not shot down as it crossed US airspace.
Admittedly, on Flight 93 alone of the events of 9/11 the evidence is unclear. By 8.52 the White House had ordered fighters into the air to seek out any hijacked airliners. Around 10.00 a.m. CBS TV reported that F-16 fighters were tailing Flight 93. Several witnesses to the Flight 93 crash report seeing a white plane nearby. The wide spread of debris from the plane, it is alleged, points to a mid-air crash. In 2004, Donald Rumsfeld seemed to say that Flight 93 had been shot down, though the White House later maintained he’d made a slip of the tongue.
Whatever, shooting down a hijacked plane – if it did happen – to stop its potential use as dive-bomber is not in the same moral league as a false-flag operation. Or a terrorist attack.
The weight of evidence is that al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda alone, carried out the 9/11 attacks. Elements of the assault were planned and directed by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, but the donkey work was done by a self-supporting al-Qaeda cell in Hamburg, led by Mohammed Atta. After receiving training in Afghanistan, the cell moved to the US by summer 2000; in Florida Atta opened an account at the SunTrust ba
nk into which $109,000 was transferred from Dubai, seemingly to finance the upcoming operation. In the following year, al-Qaeda sent a number of Saudi volunteers to join Atta. On the morning of 9/11 a total of nineteen terrorists hijacked four aircraft from East Coast airports …
The rest is history, not conspiracy theory.
Oh, and the smallness of the hole in the interior wall of the Pentagon? Sixteen feet is the width of a 757 fuselage. The wings had been ripped off by the outside walls, where the plane had smashed in a 90-feet wide section.
The true problem with the 9/11 “Truth” campaign is that it is barking up the wrong tree. Bush did not deliberately plan 9/11 or allow it to happen, but it is pertinent to ask whether, when he was shown the CIA daily briefing paper headed “bin Laden determined to strike in US”, he failed to push for an adequate investigation because the bin Ladens were family friends and oil industry partners. (The Bushes and the bin Ladens go way back, to the 1970s, when George H. W. Bush’s Arbusto company received a $1 million investment from Salem bin Laden, Osama’s older brother.) The Bush White House consistently refused to release a copy of the briefing, even to the Congressional 9/11 inquiry.
As for the CIA, as far back as 1995, they were informed by the Phillipines police that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was planning to use planes as flying bombs. The French and Russian secret services warned of the attack, and the Egyptians passed on the crucial detail that twenty Al-Qaeda members had slipped into the US for flight training.
