"What the 9/11 Families are Saying"

Friday, September 15, 2006

One of the things that really bothers me is the marginalization of the 9/11 families, the people who lost their loved ones in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Not only have the families, and their call for an investigation even now, been marginalized by the Bush administration; they have also been marginalized by the 9/11 "truth" movement which has largely shown little interest in what the families have been saying.

More than anyone, it's been the 9/11 families who have been at the forefront of the ongoing campaign for an independent public inquiry into the attacks that might truly hold the authorities to account, and result in full disclosure of what happened, how and why. Indeed, one of the most powerful resources demonstrating how little we really know about 9/11 comes in the form of the huge list of 9/11 Unanswered Questions on the website of the 9/11 Family Steering Committee for the 9/11 Independent Commission. In all, there are, I believe, several hundred questions pertaining to virtually every single dimension of the terrorist attacks. (NOTE: by the way, when I cited 9/11 widow Lauri van Auken in my article below "Interrogating 9/11", although she spoke on behalf of many 9/11 families, she did not speak on behalf of the 9/11 Families Steering Committee as the latter had been disbanded in January 2005 already)

Readers familiar with my work on 9/11 in The War on Freedom and The War on Truth will note the numerous parallels between the lines of inquiry set out in those books, and the questions and anomalies raised by the 9/11 Families Steering Committee. Last year at the McKinney hearing* in the House of Representatives, two of the Jersey widows, Mindy Kleinberg and Lauri van Auken, told me that The War on Freedom was quite literally the first book they had read offering a deeply critical perspective of the 9/11 official narrative. Very early on, my colleague Kyle F. Hence of 9/11 Citizens Watch had ensured that copies of the book were passed on to family members as well as Congressional representatives.

While the 9/11 Families Steering Committee website offers a litany of pounding questions that the 9/11 Commission ignored, those who want a no-nonsense factual reference point for understanding the extent to which the 9/11 official narrative is riddled with holes, would be well-advised to check out the work of Paul Thompson at the Centre for Cooperative Research, whose 9/11 Timeline inspired the Jersey widows and fed heavily into their new documentary film, 9/11 Press for Truth, for which Thompson was story adviser. I'm pleased to note that my research in The War on Truth is cited in a Cooperative Research Timeline project on "The use of Islamist militants by American and Israeli militarists - The War in Afghanistan to September 11 and beyond". Thompson's work is pivotal precisely because of its nature -- it's not theoretical, it's not hypothetical and its not speculation: it's purely and simply a chronological collection of continually updated raw historical and empirical data. My method of analysis is somewhat similar in that I avoid theoretical speculation as far as possible, and instead insist on discerning breaks, shifts, and interconnections in the data itself by which one can observe clear patterns and their implications.

One reason I bring all this up is to flag-up Thompson's data on the WTC investigations, in particular in relation to the burning question of the huge deposits of molten metal noticed by dozens of eyewitness -- fire fighters, scientists, and other experts -- for up to five weeks after the 9/11 attacks (appended below with this post) ...

Continued...

* I subbed in a hyperlink to my transcripts of the hearing in place of Ahmed's link to a summary. -r.