On 9/11 2001 three steel-framed high-rise buildings collapsed completely at near free-fall speed allegedly due to fires – which, if true, makes them the only steel-framed high-rises in construction history to have ever done this. Only two of these buildings had been struck by planes.
The official explanation for this event is that Moslem terrorists somehow confounded all the usual security procedures and ‘attacked America’ because they ‘hated our freedoms.’
This version of the meaning behind 9/11 was the catalyst for the perpetual war currently being waged, the ultimate fail-safe irrefutable argument to silence criticism of the Patriot Act, Guantanamo and the creeping emergence of fascism in the Western world.
A narrative as crucial as that needs to be closely examined, but the mainstream media has not only failed to perform this function, it has successfully persuaded many intelligent people that it doesn’t need to be done, and that only lunatics would bother subjecting the official story to any examination.
Eighteen years ago the idea of large scale false flags or government deceptions may have seemed absurd to most of us. But the unraveling of so many official narratives in recent years; the lies over WMDs, the lies over Ghouta, the lies over Libya and Ukraine, the repeat evidence for wholesale manipulation, if not fabrication, of events to promote war, means it ought to be impossible for any thinking person to simply take the events of 9/11 on trust any more.
How can any of us continue to question everything 9/11 has brought us, but not question 9/11 itself?
It all comes down to some very basic questions:
Has the government sufficiently explained its version of events?
Does this version fit the observed facts better than any other?
The fact this is still considered by so many intelligent people to be an “out there” thing to ask speaks volumes about how much even the most savvy of us are currently brainwashed.
But beyond the media silence, complicity and ridicule things are changing.
The phrase “conspiracy theorist” is an empty meme invented to deter enquiry. We don’t think this is a good thing and we don’t intend to be controlled by it. We believe facts really should be sacred – however unpopular they may be and whatever label someone may have attached to them.
A planned Washington DC protest in support of Hong Kong activists and promoting the ‘Chinazi’ flag is being sponsored by at least six organizations backed by the notoriously shady, US-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
Posters for the event circulated online contain an image of the so-called ‘Chinazi’ flag – an altered version of the Chinese national flag with the yellow stars arranged to form a swastika and with a hammer and sickle placed in the center.
Protesters plan to form a human chain encircling the Chinese Embassy in Washington to protest the “Chinazi regime” and call for an independent Hong Kong. The #Chinazi hashtag has also become popular with activists on Twitter.
The list of event sponsors proves that the anti-China movement in Hong Kong is backed not only by American politicians, but also by American money – through US government-funded groups.
A DC-based organization called Citizen Power Initiatives For China, which describes itself as a “grassroots movement” dedicated to promoting democracy in China through “non-violent struggle” and “overseas assistance” to “influence” Beijing’s policies, appears to be the chief event organizer.
Information on the group’s funding is not easily found on its website, but a search of the NED database shows it received $206,500 from the US-funded organization between 2015 and 2016.
The NED, founded in 1983, claims to promote democracy abroad by offering government grants to civil society groups around the world. In reality, it has been used mainly as a soft-power vehicle to advance the US foreign policy and military agenda through sowing chaos in countries targeted for ‘regime change.’
The NED is “explicitly dedicated to meddling in other countries’ affairs, interfering in elections, toppling democratically elected leaders, and spreading public relations campaigns to sow chaos against countries that resist Washington’s agenda,” award-winning journalist Max Blumenthal told RT last year. Indeed, even one of the NED’s former presidents, Carl Gershman, has admitted it was created in order to continue the work of the CIA without the stigma of being attached to the spy agency.
Six more of the ‘Chinazi’ rally’s sponsors have also partnered with or received significant funding from the NED in recent years. Those include the Princeton China Initiative (received $323,811 between 2015-2017), Students for a Free Tibet (received $270,810 between 2015-2018), International Campaign for Tibet (received $35,558 in 2015), the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center (received $104,496 in 2015), and the Uyghur American Association (received $295,000 in 2015). ChinaAid lists the NED and the US-funded Freedom House as partners.
Other sponsors of the event are also US-based, including Dialogue China (Maryland), The China Organ Harvest Research Center (New York) and The East Turkestan National Awakening Movement (Washington DC) – but information on their funding is not clear.
While Initiatives For China claims to support “non-violent struggle,” protests raging in recent weeks in Hong Kong have turned increasingly violent. Video footage has documented activists wielding bats and metal rods, attacking public property and throwing bricks and Molotov cocktails at police. “Using force is one of our methods to protect ourselves and to protest,” one masked protester told Ruptly video agency.
The NED’s focus on Hong Kong fits with the typical US approach to anti-government protest activity abroad. A government memo, leaked in 2017, confirmed that it is US policy to “emphasize” pro-democracy movements in adversary nations, while playing them down or ignoring them in friendly nations – Beijing has accused the US of orchestrating the movement and analysts have argued that encouraging unrest in Hong Kong is seen to be beneficial for Washington as US President Donald Trump wages a trade and tech war with China.
Indeed, protesters have been seen waving US flags and key figureheads of the movement visited Washington to meet with high-ranking officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, at the height of the chaos.
The links between US officials, anti-China activists and shady US government-funded organizations is reminiscent of countless US regime-change or ‘color revolution’ efforts seen around the world, from Ukraine to Syria, Libya and Venezuela.
Now, more evidence is stacking up to prove that the US is playing an active role in fueling turmoil in Hong Kong.
A solid majority of Americans who watch the Sept. 11, 2001, collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 on video don’t buy the government’s story that fires brought it down, according to a new survey conducted by YouGov on behalf of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth (AE911Truth).
After viewing video footage of the controversial building collapse from four different angles, 52% of Americans who participated in the survey are either sure or suspect it was caused by a controlled demolition, compared to 21% who are sure or suspect it was caused by ordinary fires. A sizable 27% say they don’t know.
By a similar margin, 51% who see the collapse say they are more inclined to believe the critics who argue that only the use of explosives in a controlled demolition can account for Building 7’s collapse, versus 20% who say they are more inclined to believe the government’s conclusion that fires caused the collapse. (To define “critics,” the survey references a group of 3,000 architects and engineers who have disputed the government’s report as well as researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who performed computer modeling of Building 7’s collapse and also concluded that fires could not have caused the collapse).
By a substantial 3-to-1 margin, 48% say they would support a new investigation into Building 7’s collapse (24% strongly support, 24% support) compared with just 15% who say they would oppose a new investigation (6% strongly oppose, 9% oppose). Meanwhile, 28% say they neither support nor oppose a new investigation, and 9% say they don’t know.
“The lopsided margin between those who suspect it was explosives and those who suspect it was fires really begs the question as to how and why this issue has been marginalized for so long,” said Ted Walter, who is director of strategy for AE911Truth. “Clearly, if the media were to do its job and provide the most basic information about 9/11 to the American people — or if a few elected officials started talking seriously about Building 7 — the public would be up in arms demanding a new investigation.”
Underscoring the absence of media coverage of Building 7, only 64% of participants said they were aware of a third skyscraper collapsing on 9/11 — and just 14% could name the building.
Last week, AE911Truth, along with researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, released the draft report of a four-year computer modeling study of the tower’s collapse. “The report confirms what most Americans suspect when they see the collapse,” said Walter. “Building 7 did not come down from fires.”
JTA calls itself “the definitive, trusted global source of news and analysis on issues of Jewish interest and concern.” Yet, it has failed to inform its readers fully and accurately about the controversy surrounding my upcoming talk at Clovis Community College in Fresno, California.
The event is entitled: “Uncovered, Israel’s Occupation of Palestine.” I have been researching and writing about Israel-Palestine for 18 years.
JTA’s recent article on the situation reports extravagant, unsourced claims made against me by five powerful Israel advocacy organizations: the ADL, American Jewish Committee, Simon Wiesenthal Center, StandWithUs and Progressive Zionists of California. (The groups have combined assets of over a quarter of a billion dollars.)
However, JTA fails to include information we had published (see below) addressing the groups’ claims. And although the writer of the JTA article, Associate Editor for Breaking News Marcy Oster,* quotes a number of individuals in her report, she failed to contact me for an interview.
While JTA’s article strongly suggests that I am “antisemitic,” the fact is that I have a life history of opposing all racism and bigotry, including antisemitism.
Our website specifically announces our principles: “We believe all people are endowed with inalienable human rights regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, or nationality. We believe in justice, fairness, and compassion and in treating all human beings with respect, empathy, and in the manner in which we would wish to be treated.”
I have attempted to phone and email JTA with the facts they omitted, but JTA has not returned my emails or phone calls. Their article has now also been published by the Times of Israel.
While I realize that JTA editors may consider me an adversary, their readers should be trusted to make up their own minds based on a full disclosure of the facts.
I’ve just learned that Marcy Oster, who wrote the article, lives in an Israeli settlement. (These are illegal under international law). Mondoweiss reports that Oster “is a settler and an advocate for settlers, living in an illegal community north of Ariel, deep in the West Bank.” The settlement Oster lives in is Karnei Shomron, which was established in 1977 on land confiscated from four nearby Palestinian villages.
JTA does not divulge this information about Oster.
*Update:
JTA has now added two paragraphs with some information from me at the end of its article. This addition comes from a piece by Jewish Journalthat had been widely syndicated a few days ago. While JTA had quoted from the Journal article, originally it had omitted this particular information.
While this small addition is an improvement, the articles by both JTA and Jewish Journal remain profoundly slanted and leave out much relevant information.
(To see the information we had sent to Jewish Journal go here.)
The talk is on Wednesday. Sept. 18, 6pm, at Clovis Community College, CA 10309 N Willow Ave, Fresno, California 93730). It is free and open to the public.
The company that publishes JTA is 70 Faces Media, which says it is the ‘largest Jewish media organization in North America.’
US media has claimed a spy placed high in the Kremlin had to be rushed out of Moscow in 2017 after US President Donald Trump endangered him by discussing intel he revealed. However, the man wasn’t who US intel claimed he was, and the information he supplied, which formed the foundation of the Russiagate investigation, was just as fake.
News emerged Monday that a key CIA source, reportedly in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, had both supplied key information backing the Russiagate narrative and later had his cover endangered by Trump, and that the agency had to evacuate him from Moscow. However, the Kremlin revealed Tuesday that the man was a mid-ranking official who never had close contact with Putin and that he wasn’t extracted from the country – he was fired by the Kremlin.
Aaron Maté, a journalist with the Grayzone Project and The Nation, told Radio Sputnik’s Loud and Clear Tuesday that the leak was likely a concocted attempt to boost the CIA’s public image ahead of damning information expected to be published soon, and that it only further undermines the Russiagate investigation that former CIA Director John Brennan set in motion.
“For all the talk that there was in this CNN piece that came out yesterday of Trump being the reason why they pulled this source out of Russia, it turns out that they’ve been trying to extract the source since late 2016, before Trump even took office. And it seems as if, for all the concern about Trump revealing the source’s existence, it’s in fact intelligence officials who’ve revealed the source’s existence, to the point now that we learned yesterday that the source has been living openly in the suburbs of DC,” Maté said.
The story, first published by CNN, did not name Oleg Smolenkov, but referred to him as “the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official. According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”
The New York Times soon picked up the story, expanding it to include a claim that “the Moscow informant was instrumental to the CIA’s most explosive conclusion about Russia’s interference campaign: that President Vladimir V. Putin ordered and orchestrated it himself. As the American government’s best insight into the thinking of and orders from Mr. Putin, the source was also key to the CIA’s assessment that he affirmatively favored Donald J. Trump’s election and personally ordered the hacking of the Democratic National Committee.”
NBC’s Ken Delanian, who in 2014 was exposed by The Intercept as having had a “closely collaborative relationship with the CIA” that included submitting articles to the agency for editing prior to publication while working for the Tribune, went to work beating the Russiagate drums on Monday, trying to pin the agent’s fate on Trump – and in the process blew Smolenkov’s cover.
However, the supposedly high-up source wasn’t nearly so highly placed, Russian officials revealed.
“[Smolenkov] was fired several years ago under an internal directive,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters Tuesday. “He didn’t hold any high-ranking posts, so called [presidentially]-appointed posts.”
Brennan, former US President Barack Obama’s CIA director, touted the validity of this source to Obama and to the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, the latter of whom now works as a national security analyst at CNN. Brennan reportedly hand-delivered reports from Smolenkov to Obama, bypassing key agency intelligence vetting functions – an action he claimed was to protect the identity of its source.
In turn, Obama increasingly demanded Brennan bring him information from Smolenkov about Putin’s intentions with regards to various questions, including the election – information Smolenkov didn’t have.
“He wanted to please John Brennan, so he just made it up,” Kiriakou, a former CIA agent-turned-whistleblower, noted. “That happens all the time, and this is a problem with a lack of vetting of high-ranking sources at the CIA. They never polygraphed the guy, they never engaged him in what’s called ‘operational testing,’ they just took his word for it – the same way they took the word of the source known as ‘Curveball’ during the second Iraq war.”
In turn, Clapper’s January 6, 2017, report to Obama that the president soon declassified for the public made specific claim to being privy to Putin’s private deliberations – something that by itself exposed the possibility of a mole in Putin’s inner circle to the world, endangering Smolenkov far more than anything Trump did or did not say in subsequent meetings with Russian officials as president, all the more so since Smolenkov was not the highly-placed man Obama or Trump believed him to be.
“Nobody revealed any state secrets during that conversation or even non-state ones,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov noted Tuesday. “This, by the way, was confirmed by then-national security adviser Herbert McMaster, who was present at the meeting. Other people who are at least a little familiar with what was discussed then can also confirm this.”
Maté noted that, if Smolenkov had the high-level access Brennan claimed, he should have been able to warn the Obama administration about several events that caught them completely off-guard, such as the Russian annexation of Crimea or its entry into the Syrian Civil War on Damascus’ side.
“We have seen a pattern where, to get ahead of stories that can be damning towards the intelligence officials who gave us this Russiagate disaster, we’ve seen leaks come out beforehand in an attempt to sort of mitigate the impact, and, you know, that very much fits the pattern here,” Maté told Sputnik, noting the CNN and NYT stories contradicted each other at several points. “That looked to me like an attempt to pin something on Trump, an attempt to make the CIA look good in advance of what could be more damaging information.”
“We are expecting the Justice Department Inspector General’s report coming out soon, so this could be coming out in advance of that,” Maté noted.
“It’s important to stress a few things: first of all, this story raises new questions about the intelligence that was used to justify this whole Russiagate thing, because by all accounts, this source in the Kremlin was critical for the assessment by the intelligence community – basically a process controlled by John Brennan – that Russia launched this massive interference campaign to elect Donald Trump. Well, if this source was so critical, then that’s new reason to doubt John Brennan’s assessment – all the more so since the source, apparently, didn’t have the high-level contacts that [Brennan] claimed,” Maté said.
“And also, we know already that when the House Republicans looked at this, when they did a review of the intelligence process, they found that on this question of Putin’s intentions to elect Trump, that the CIA’s analysis suffered from ‘significant [intelligence] tradecraft failings,’” Maté noted. “We haven’t known up until this point exactly why they said that; I’m guessing here that they were looking at the credentials and the merits of this source that we now know about.”
“The US government story is Achilles’ heel in the official version of” the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, says Dr. Kevin Barrett, an American academic who has been studying the events of 9/11 since late 2003.
Dr. Barrett, a founding member of the Scientific Panel for the Investigation of 9/11, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Tuesday following the release of a comprehensive study conducted by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) in association with Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth which found that fire was not the cause of the collapse of the Building 7 of the World Trade Center (WTC).
The US official story established that the 47-story building collapsed on its base after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, at 5:20 p.m., when it was affected by the fire coming from the Twin Towers—Buildings 1 and 2 of the World Trade Center. The building was completely destroyed in just seven seconds.
However, after investing four years in computer simulations, the UAF scientists published a draft report that concludes that the collapse of the third WTC skyscraper on Sept.11, 2001 was not due to any fire, but “the almost simultaneous failure of every column in the building.”
Dr. Barrett said, “A new study from the University of Alaska led by Dr. Leroy Hulsey has determined with total precision that the destruction of the World Trade Center Building 7 on September 11, 2001 could not have happened the way the government tells us which is due to moderate office fire, that’s actually very minor office fire.”
“The US government story is Achilles’ heel in the official version of 9/11 which is ridiculous in many, many respects. Every single aspect of the official story collapses upon critical examination. The Building 7 is the most obviously false aspect of this,” he stated.
“So the new study takes on the NIST report; the official government body has worked up a bizarre claim that this very modest office fire…has caused the 47-story building to come down at absolute freefall for two and hand a half seconds and then close to freefall for the rest of the way down straight into its own footprints,” he noted.
The September, 11, 2001 attacks, also known as the 9/11 attacks, were a series of strikes in the US which killed nearly 3,000 people and caused about $10 billion worth of property and infrastructure damage.
US officials assert that the attacks were carried out by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists but many experts have raised questions about the official account.
They believe that rogue elements within the US government, such as former Vice President Dick Cheney, orchestrated or at least encouraged the 9/11 attacks in order to accelerate the US war machine and advance the Zionist agenda.
As a janitor holding a master key to the North Tower of the World Trade Center on the morning of 9/11, William Rodriguez risked his life till the very moment of the building’s destruction helping those trapped inside the Towers to escape. But carefully curated from most mainstream reports on Rodriguez’ remarkarble story is an equally remarkable fact: This 9/11 hero is in fact a 9/11 whistleblower, someone who has contradicted the official story of the September 11th attacks from day one. This is his story.
To watch the full 9/11 Whistleblowers series, please CLICK HERE.
TRANSCRIPT
When people talk of the bravery exhibited by ordinary men and women during the traumatic hours of the 9/11 attacks, they are talking about people like William Rodriguez. Indeed, of the many stories of selflessness and courage to have emerged from that fateful day, it would be difficult to find one more heroic than that of William Rodriguez, dubbed the “last man out” because, as a janitor holding a master key to the buildings, he risked his life till the very moment of the Tower’s destruction helping those trapped inside the Towers to escape.
RAMON TAYLOR: William Rodriguez was working as a janitor at the World Trade Center when the towers were attacked. Using a master key, he ran to open as many doors as he could before exiting and becoming buried alive.
WILLIAM RODRIGUEZ: So they started looking under the rubble, and once I got pulled from under the rubble I was—After, I was in shock. Why? Because I couldn’t find any of those buildings.
WILLIAM RODRIGUEZ: We went up by the stairs with the Port Authority police to start rescuing people. A lot of people were coming out, but there was a lot of people that stayed there. And we brought a lot of people on wheelchairs and a lot of people on gurneys, all [the] people that couldn’t make it because there was no elevator service. The elevator went out.
REPORTER: The World Trade Center towers were built as a class “A” building. That means that, in the case of a fire, every third floor in both towers is closed to prevent a backdraft. It is the reason that Rodriguez’ master key was so crucial to getting people out.
RODRIGUEZ: It was hard. The amount of heat that was generated because of the fire was coming down. The smoke . . . It was an acrid smoke because you could feel it on your throat.
REPORTER: He saw firefighters carrying a hundred pounds’ worth of equipment on their backs waiting for a freight elevator that would never come. That elevator was demolished. So Rodriguez led them up another way, using a back pathway that only he knew. After the sky lobby collapsed he finally listened to police who told him to get out. He was not prepared for what he was about to see.
RODRIGUEZ: When I look around I find all the bodies of the people that jump out of the building. They came out of the building and they say “I saved myself!” And a piece of debris came in and killed them.
As one of the heroes of that day, a man whose story encapsulates all the tragedy and drama of 9/11, William Rodriguez is no stranger to the glare of the media spotlight. Not only has he been interviewed for dozens of news programs and reports on the events of September 11, 2001, and been featured as a spokesman for the survivors at multiple events and on many reports, he has also been awarded for his courage that day and even invited to a White House dinner where he was honored by President Bush for his bravery.
But carefully curated from most mainstream reports on Rodriguez’ remarkarble story is an equally remarkable fact: This 9/11 hero is in fact a 9/11 whistleblower, someone who has contradicted the official story of the September 11th attacks from day one. According to Rodriguez, the first explosion that he felt that day was not the impact of the plane nearly 100 stories above him, but an explosion below him, from one of the sub-basement levels.
RODRIGUEZ: That morning I was supposed to be there at 8 o’clock in the morning every day. I called my supervisor because I was not going to work I was gonna take a sick day. Made it there at 8:30 in the morning, go straight to the lobby, down to the basement.
The building has six sub-levels of basement: B1, B2 . . . all the way down to b6. Basement six, basement five, all the way up to basement one were all Port Authority areas. Some of them have parking for tenants, some of them have storage. B1 office . . . B1 level is where they have the support office for my company, the cleaning company, American Building Maintenance.
So I was talking to the supervisor, and at 8:46 we hear “BOOM!” An explosion so hard that pushed us upwards in the air. Upwards. And it came out from below us. From the mechanical room that was right below us. And it was so loud and so powerful that all the walls cracked, the false ceiling fell on top of us, the sprinkler system got activated, and everybody started screaming so loud because they didn’t know what was going on.
And the first thing I’m going to say is that a generator just blew up on the B2 level—the level below me. And everybody’s screaming. And when I’m going to verbalize it, six to seven seconds after, we hear “BAH!” The impact all the way on the top of the building of the plane.
Two different events separated by almost seven seconds. Separated by time. And now, I work in the building for 20 years. I know the difference of the sound coming from the top and one from the bottom.
So when everybody started—”What the heck is going on?”—a person comes running into the office saying “Explosion! Explosion!” His hands extended, all the skin pulled from under his armpits on both arms. Hanging! And we thought it was clothing—it was part of his clothes—until he gets closer. He was coming like this, like a zombie. “Explosion! Explosion!” And when I looked at him, I realized it was his skin. Like when you take off a glove and you let it hang. And when I get to see his face, all this part was hanging off his face and everybody started screaming in horror. And I say “Don’t move!” The guy was a black guy named Felipe David. Worked for a company called Aramark.
Rodriguez’ story provides startling and credible eyewitness testimony that undermines the official myth that there were no explosives in the Twin Towers that morning. Rodriguez is insistent on a number of points: That there was a loud and distinct noise at 8:46 AM, that it came from beneath them in the sub-basement level and blew them upwards, and that it noticeably preceded the sound of the plane impact above them. This has led Rodriguez to conclude that there was an explosion in the sub-basement before the plane impacted the North Tower, something which the 9/11 Commission and other official government investigations into the attacks denies.
And, importantly, Rodriguez has been telling this same story—including the same detail about Felipe David—since the day of 9/11 itself.
AARON BROWN: William Rodriguez is a maintenance worker at the Trade Center, I believe. In any case, he’s on the phone with us now. Mr. Rodriguez, can you hear me?
RODRIGUEZ: Yes, I can hear you clearly.
BROWN: Tell me where you were when—well, which of the two buildings were you in?
RODRIGUEZ: I work on the Building One. The one that got hit the first time.
BROWN: Tell me what happened.
RODRIGUEZ: I was on the basement, which is a support floor for the maintenance company. And we hear like a big rumble—not like an impact, like a rumble—like something . . . like moving furniture on a massive way. And all of a sudden we hear another rumble and a guy comes running—running—into our office, and all his skin was off his body. All his skin. We went crazy. We started screaming. We told him to get out. We took everybody out of the office, outside to the loading dock area. And then I went back in. And when I went back in I saw people—I heard people that were stuck on an elevator—on a freight elevator, because all the elevators went down. And water was going in and they were probably getting drowned. And we get a couple of pipes and open the elevator and we got the people out.
If it were only William Rodriguez who heard, saw and experienced explosions inside the Twin Towers that morning, then such testimony would be easy enough to rationalize away. Maybe Rodriguez had become confused in the chaos of that morning. Maybe he had interpreted the sound and explosion incorrectly. Maybe he was lying to gain attention.
But William Rodriguez is not the only person who heard, saw and experienced explosions inside the Twin Towers that morning. In fact, hundreds of people, including office workers, police, firefighters and others have reported explosions all throughout the morning, from before the moment of plane impact all the way up to the explosive demolition of the towers themselves.
FEMALE BYSTANDER: What was it like?
TYRONE JOHNSON (FDNY LADDER 24): Horrible. The whole building just collapsed on us. Inside the lobby.
MALE BYSTANDER: Was that a secondary explosion?
JOHNSON: Yes, it was. Definitely a secondary explosion. We was inside waiting to go upstairs and on our way upstairs the whole fucking thing blew. And it just collapsed on everybody inside of the lobby.
MALE BYSTANDER: That must be the first tower coming down—
JOHNSON: I don’t know about the first one, but the second one . . . It was terrible. Then there was a third one, too, after that one.
MALE BYSTANDER: There was an explosion after that?
JOHNSON: Yes, there was. Everybody was just inside the building, waiting to go upstairs and it just let loose. Everything just let loose inside the building.
MALE BYSTANDER: So what you’re telling me is that there was the plane or whatever hit the building, then a secondary explosion—
JOHNSON: There was like three explosions after that. We came in after the fire—We came when the fire was going on already. We was in the staging area inside the building, waiting to go upstairs. And then an explosion. The whole lobby collapsed on the lobby inside.
KENNY JOHANNEMAN: Yes, I was right there. I was in the B—I was down in the basement. Came down. All of a sudden the elevator blew up. Smoke. I dragged a guy out. His skin was hanging off and I dragged him out. And I helped him out to the ambulance.
REPORTER: Arthur Del Bianco is one of the lucky few, able to tell a tale of survival from a hospital bed.
ARTHUR DEL BIANCO: All of a sudden there was, like, “BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!” Like bullet shots. And then, all of a sudden, three tremendous explosions and everything started coming down.
EYEWITNESS: I think a bomb went off in the lobby first, then a plane hit the building. Then another plane hit the other building. But when I was coming through the doors on the other side of the Trade Center, something—either they blew the lobby up, or something. Because it blew the glass out of the doors and knocked us all down and I got a—smoke and everything on me.
These stories, collected haphazardly by reporters at the scene that day, paint a very different picture of 9/11 than that portrayed by NIST and the 9/11 Commission. Rather than a progressive collapse due to fire and burning jet fuel, these stories suggest that what was happening inside the Twin Towers that morning was in fact a series of explosive events. Explosive events that were powerful enough to cause internal collapses within the building well below the point of the plane impact and fires, and even, according to multiple witnesses, events that preceded the impact of the plane.
But is there more systematic and rigorously collected evidence of these explosions? Is there a repository of such testimony that would confirm what Rodriguez and many others have affirmed since the day of 9/11 itself: Namely, that there were explosions taking place inside the buildings that morning?
In fact, there is such a repository. In the wake of 9/11, New York Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen ordered the collection of oral testimony from firefighters, paramedics and emergency medical technicians who responded to the attacks that morning. That collection, amounting to more than 12,000 pages of testimony from 503 people, was then promptly sealed. It took a lawsuit and four years of court battle for the collection to be finally released to the public.
One of the researchers who spent time poring over that testimony was Graeme Macqueen, a retired associate professor at McMaster University and the Former Director of that university’s Peace Studies Center. What he found in that repository of oral history, and presented in a scholarly article for The Journal of 9/11 Studies, was an unmistakable pattern: Time after time, these first responders reported experiencing explosions in the Twin Towers. Explosions that cannot be accounted for in NIST’s official explanation of the towers’ destruction.
GRAME MACQUEEN: There is other eyewitness explosion evidence that corroborates Rodriguez, at least in a general way. Meaning that there were people talking about explosions in the basement. There were lots of people talking about tremendous explosions and fire in some of the elevators—blowing the doors off elevators.
And some of this testimony can be found on the internet. I found some of it in the FDNY oral histories. You know, firefighters talking about the doors being blown off elevators.
And so there was some kind of very destructive event. Also the windows in the lobby, which were very strong windows, were blown out by the time most of the firefighters got there. And as one of them said it looked like a plane hit the lobby.
There were other explosions that went off over the next hour or so, before the buildings started to come down. And when they came down, there were patterns of explosion from around the point of plane impact all the way down. Apparently we were supposed to believe that the building was coming down because of structural failure. But again, these were timed very well to go off in a particular way.
This is one of the reasons we know that these were explosions and that this was a controlled demolition. There were patterns. And they were explosions that were extremely strong, taking out these massive buildings and pulverizing them in less than 20 seconds. This was not structural failure.
Rodriguez’ story was not some fanciful invention that he spun during the most dramatic and horrific hours of his life; it is a story that fits into a pattern of explosive testimony related by many other witnesses that day. It is also a story that is deeply uncomfortable for those in the government and the media who were eager to celebrate the acts of bravery New Yorkers committed that day, but who will never report the explosive truth about the events at the World Trade Center that demolish the official government conspiracy theory of 9/11.
It is remarkable that Rodriguez, immediately recognized and celebrated for his heroism on that day, would continue to insist on his story even as the official story—the one that insisted there were no explosives used that day—began to take shape. But he did. For years, Rodriguez used his speaking opportunities on mainstream media and at memorials and commemoration events to inform the public about explosions in the Twin Towers that morning.
Unsurprisingly, despite the attention and accolades he received for his remarkable story in the early days of 9/11, he soon found himself becoming persona non grata in the mainstream media because he refused to go along with the official lies about what happened that morning.
RODRIGUEZ: It says, “Safety Fire Department of New York.”
ANASTASIA CHURKINA: A rescue jacket he wore over his torn shirt. A lantern from the rubble.
RODRIGUEZ: It doesn’t work, but another memory from 9/11.
CHURKINA: And a piece of marble from high up on the 44th floor. This saved for a decade.
RODRIGUEZ: I put it in my pocket because it was just such a shocking realization.
CHURKINA: As well as memories that he relives every single day.
RODRIGUEZ: And I was pulled on the rubble and I started looking for all the people and I only found pieces of human beings.
CHURKINA: William Rodriguez, a janitor in the twin towers for almost 20 years and 9/11 survivor who saved hundreds of lives on September 11th by unlocking door after door for firefighters and dragging out at least a dozen people with his own bare hands. Known as the “last man out” before the World Trade Center collapsed, his unlikely story had the media glued to him like bees to honey. Becoming a voice for the victims, Rodriguez was honored as an American hero only to be left homeless in the aftermath of the tragedy.
RODRIGUEZ: Funny thing: I will give the 800 number on camera, and when I called the 800 number they denied me the help.
CHURKINA: And shunned by the mainstream media soon after.
RODRIGUEZ: Censorship. I believe that censorship started from the very beginning, because when I was telling my story they told me, “Oh, cut this out. Cut this out.”
CHURKINA: No longer sweetheart of American broadcasts, William now talks mostly to foreign outlets. The reason: His version of 9/11 differed from the official scenario.
NEWS REPORT: It was the first hijacked plane that hit the—
RODRIGUEZ: “It was the first hijacked plane.” No, hello! That was an explosion before the plane hit the tower.
Even more remarkably, Rodriguez went beyond simply telling the truth about what he witnessed that day.
Little known even to those who are familiar with his story is that Rodriguez has used his notoriety and media opportunities to advocate for 9/11 survivors who are suffering from the health effects incurred in the aftermath of the towers’ destruction. He has even taken the fight for 9/11 truth to the political arena, forcing the government’s hand in convening a public commission to investigate the attacks, something that the Bush administration fought tooth and nail to prevent.
RODRIGUEZ: The 9/11 Commission is a book of 576 pages . . . 576 pages of lies. Because the 9/11 Commission exists because I went with three other people to Congress to ask that we wanted a formal investigation of the events of 9/11. And you may remember that the president said “We don’t need an investigation. We know who did it.” That was the wrong thing to say to the families. We had the right and we wanted to know. So we pressed for an investigation. They didn’t want it.
So we used a technique that they have used against a lot of the people with the excuse of the war. We put widows, we put wives, we put fathers that love their loved ones on every television show and every news network to ask for an investigation. And they couldn’t handle the emotional toll that that will create on the American public. So we got the investigation.
I testified behind closed doors. They didn’t want me to do the testimony in an open hearing. Everything else—everybody else—open hearings. You saw the hearings. Mine was behind closed—I agreed because I did not know what was the process and I thought up to that point that they were going to do the right thing.
We created a family steering committee and we gave the Commission 168 questions to answer. We only have 22 of those questions answered. We wanted to have a family member to be part of the Commission and they say, “We don’t want to allow that because they will have access to national security papers” and a lot of flim-flam and baloney. We never got it. So we have to press for questions to be answered. We never get those answers.
Up to that point we thought that they were going to do the right thing. The final report shows up . . . What a surprise! My whole testimony was omitted. It doesn’t appear. 27 people that I gave them to interrogate, they didn’t call them. Not even one of them.
That the 9/11 Commission’s work was subverted and undermined by conflicts of interest and deliberate cover-up is perhaps to be expected. But the efforts of people like William Rodriguez have been instrumental in advocating for those left quite literally in the dust of 9/11. Those whose stories are too problematic for the official 9/11 narrative to be given any credence or attention.
As Graeme Macqueen points out, the story told by William Rodriguez and the other witnesses to explosions in the Twin Towers that day is not a peripheral issue or a minor footnote in the story of 9/11. On the contrary, it is of central importance. Either Rodriguez and the other witnesses to explosions independent of the planes and fires are wrong, or they are right. And if they are right, we are forced to the conclusion that the official story of 9/11 is not just mistaken, but that it is a deliberate fraud that has been perpetrated on the American public—and the broader public around the world—for nearly two decades.
MACQUEEN: Well, that would obviously indicate that somehow this building was wired for explosions and that there had been a plan made in advance of the plane attacks to destroy this building. And that means the official story about, you know, Mohammed Atta and the other 18 hijackers flying planes is an incorrect story.
That indicates that there was—to use the classic word—an inside job. Somehow, insiders—deep insiders—got in the building and readied it for annihilation on that day. And that also indicates that the story we’ve been told is false, and really knowingly false. Because, of course, Rodriguez and many other eyewitnesses to explosions were ignored, or silenced, or lied about by the official investigating agencies. Which means that the whole 9/11 story is a fraud.
Ultimately, the story of Rodriguez is important, not just for what it tells us about the official 9/11 narrative, or even for what it tells us about the way that power operates in society. It is important because it shows us what ordinary men and women are capable of in extreme situations. It reminds us that, in times of distress, we are still capable of coming together to help those around us. And it provides us with an example of someone who will not stop telling his truth, even when it becomes unpopular.
RODRIGUEZ: Our wounds are still open. We’re still hurting. We’re still going through the process of traumatic shock syndrome—PTSD.
You call me a hero, I call myself a survivor. For me, the heroes died on 9/11 in my opinion because they died helping others. I just had the only tool available for me at that time to do great things, so I was—I’m a survivor. I have that survival skill. Why did I survive and my friends didn’t?
And now 16 years after it hits me stronger because I see the families. I see new families that came out from people that I saved and I always wonder, you know, what would have happened if those people that I lost—those 200 friends—will be alive today. It hits you. It hits you hard. So 16 years after, we’re still dealing with the backlash of what happened on that day.
9/11 changed me. It changed the world. We all know that. But it changed me in more ways than I expected.
The US continues to deny any involvement in ongoing unrest in China’s special administrative region of Hong Kong. However, even a casual look at US headlines or comments made by US officials and policymakers – makes it clear the unrest not only suits US interests, but is spurred-on almost exclusively by them.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said it is “ludicrous” for China to claim the United States is behind the escalating protests in Hong Kong.
Pompeo rebuked Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying, who had claimed violent clashes in the city prompted by opposition to the Hong Kong government’s controversial extradition bill were “the work of the US”.
However, even US policymakers have all but admitted that the US is funneling millions of dollars into Hong Kong specifically to support “programs” there. The Hudson Institute in an article titled, “China Tries to Blame US for Hong Kong Protests,” would admit:
A Chinese state-run newspaper’s claim that the United States is helping pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong is only partially inaccurate, a top foreign policy expert said Monday.
Michael Pillsbury, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told Fox News National Security Analyst KT McFarland the U.S. holds some influence over political matters in the region.
The article would then quote Pillsbury as saying:
We have a large consulate there that’s in charge of taking care of the Hong Kong Policy Act passed by Congress to ensure democracy in Hong Kong, and we have also funded millions of dollars of programs through the National Endowment for Democracy [NED] … so in that sense the Chinese accusation is not totally false.
A visit to the NED’s website reveals an entire section of declared funding for Hong Kong specifically. The wording for program titles and their descriptions is intentionally ambiguous to give those like US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo plausible deniability.
However, deeper research reveals NED recipients are literally leading the protests.
Johnson Yeung Ching-yin, from the Civil Human Rights Front, was among 49 people arrested during Sunday’s protest – deemed illegal as it had not received police approval – in Central and Western district on Hong Kong Island.
The article would omit mention of Johnson Yeung Ching-yin’s status as an NED fellow. His profile is – at the time of this writing – still accessible on the NED’s official website, and the supposed NGO he works for in turn works hand-in-hand with US and UK-based fronts involved in supporting Hong Kong’s current unrest and a much wider anti-Beijing political agenda.
This evidence, along with extensively documented ties between the United States government and other prominent leaders of the Hong Kong unrest reveals US denial of involvement in Hong Kong as yet another willful lie told upon the international stage – a lie told even as the remnants of other victims of US interference and intervention smolder in the background.
The direct ties and extreme conflicts of interest found under virtually every rock overturned when critically examining the leadership of Hong Kong’s ongoing unrest all lead to Washington. They also once again reveal the Western media as involved in a coordinated campaign of disinformation – where proper investigative journalism is purposefully side-stepped and narratives shamelessly spun instead to frame Hong Kong’s ongoing conflict in whatever light best suits US interests.
What’s worse is big-tech giants like Facebook, Twitter, and Google purging thousands of accounts attempting to reveal the truth behind Hong Kong’s unrest and the true nature of those leading it. If this is the level of lying, censorship, and authoritarianism Washington is willing to resort to in order for Hong Kong’s opposition to succeed, it begs one to wonder what this so-called opposition is even fighting for. Certainly not “democracy” or “freedom.”
*** Author Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher, writer and special contributor to 21st Century Wire.
That so many of the 9/11 visas were issued from a single office—the US Consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia—may seem like a minor footnote at first glance, but it is not. In fact, the Jeddah Consulate is not just another US Consular Office. It has a history of issuing visas to terrorists at the request of the CIA. Just ask Michael Springmann. This is his story.
To watch the full 9/11 Whistleblowers series, please CLICK HERE.
TRANSCRIPT
In the days after September 11th, 2001, while the toxic dust was still settling on Lower Manhattan, details began to emerge about the terrorists who had allegedly hijacked the fateful 9/11 flights. Names and pictures were released to the public and broadcast around the world. Ziad Jarrah. Hani Hanjour. Marwan al Shehhi. Mohammad Atta. Even before the official story had begun to coalesce, the foreign faces and unfamiliar names flashing across the screens seared themselves into the consciousness of a traumatized public and left little doubt: This attack was the work of Muslim terrorists.
But at the same time, information began to come out that created problems for this narrative. Reports of these devout Muslim fundamentalists drinking alcohol and partying in strip clubs. Revelations that two of the suspects had been allowed into the US after being identified as Al Qaeda agents. Confirmation that these same agents lived with an FBI asset while in the US. And even the testimony of a senior military intelligence official that a counter-terror program had been specifically warned not to investigate Mohammad Atta in the lead up to 9/11.
WYATT ANDREWS: According to Congressman Kurt Weldon, it was a secret Pentagon intelligence unit code named Able Danger that knew a year before 9/11 that lead hijacker Mohammed Atta was in the United States and connected to Al Qaeda.
CONGRESSMAN KURT WELDON: And as you can see, they identified Mohamed Atta’s cell.
ANDREWS: In the summer of 2000, he says, the Pentagon’s special ops command had identified two terrorist cells inside the US, and knew of the connection between Atta and three other men who became hijackers. When the agents recommended telling the FBI, Weldon says Clinton administration lawyers said “No,” because Atta was in the country legally and could not be targeted by military intelligence.
WELDON: And their recommendation to bring the FBI in, to take that cell out, which was ignored, and they were told you can’t do that.
ANDREWS: So a year before 9/11 they had their picture—they had the picture of Mohamed Atta—
But of the many bizarre pieces of the alleged 9/11 hijacker puzzle, none gets closer to the heart of the mystery than the seemingly innocuous revelation that 14 of the alleged hijackers’ visas to enter the United States had been issued at the same office: the US Consulate in Jeddah. That so many of the visas were issued from a single office may seem like a minor footnote at first glance, but it is not. In fact, the Jeddah Consulate is not just another US Consular Office. It has a history of issuing visas to terrorists at the request of the CIA.
Just ask Michael Springmann.
J. Michael Springmann was a graduate of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service who joined the Commerce Department’s International Trade Administration, serving as an economic/commercial officer in Stuttgart from 1977 to 1980 and as a commercial attache in New Delhi from 1980 to 1982. In 1987, having passed the foreign service exam and gone through an orientation program, Springmann was assigned to the Jeddah consulate in Saudi Arabia.
Whatever he was expecting to find awaiting him in his new office, it’s safe to say that it didn’t take long for Springmann to find that the reality was going to be very different. As he writes in his expose of his time at the Jeddah consulate, Visas for Al Qaeda: CIA Handout That Rocked the World, “the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was a mysterious and exotic place, but it was nowhere near as exotic and mysterious as the American consulate general on Palestine Road.”
J. MICHAEL SPRINGMANN: Well, when I got to Saudi Arabia I began hearing all kinds of strange things about the problems my predecessor had made for me. I heard this in fact from Walter Cutler, the American ambassador, just before I left. He spent 45 minutes telling me about all the problems that my predecessor Greta Holtz had created, and I thought, “Gee, she’s going to make my career for me!”
And I get to Jeddah and I’m being requested: “It’s your decision of course, Mike, but we have this problem here with this visa and we have an especially good contact and we’d like to have the person get a visa to come to the United States. Can you do it?” And I’d interview them and I’d give them the visa.
And after a while, these people began to be really strange characters that had no ties to either Saudi Arabia or to their own country and I would refuse them. And I would get a rocket from the Consul General Jay Freres, who’s dead now, about “Why didn’t you issue the visa? This guy is a good contact.”
I said, “Well, he couldn’t prove he had any ties either to Saudi Arabia or to his own country that was strong enough to make him return from the United States to Saudi Arabia or to his own country.” There’s no set list of contacts and connections, but it’s things like having a job, having businesses, having property, having family, something that would prevent you from staying in the United States and disappearing into the woodwork.
And it got to the point where it was “Either issue the visa or you’re not going to work for the State Department anymore.” And as time went by I found out that of some 20 Americans there were only three including myself that I knew for a certainty to work for the Department of State. The rest worked for the CIA or the National Security Agency.
Eventually reassigned as a political/economic officer in Stuttgart and, finally, as an economic analyst for the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, it took years for Springmann to fully comprehend the story that he had found himself in the middle of during his time at the Jeddah Consulate. A key piece of that puzzle was provided when Springmann returned to the US and talked to journalist Joseph Trento, who informed him that the Jeddah office was being used by the CIA to ship in Osama Bin Laden’s associates for training in the US.
SPRINGMANN: So I came across Joe Trento, the journalist, in the middle of all of this, and he said, “Well, what you were doing in Saudi Arabia was issuing visas to the Mujahedin who were being recruited for Afghanistan to fight the Soviets.” And then the penny dropped and my eyes were opened and I said “Yeah! That explains why they got so ferocious when I said no to these visas and why they stonewalled me when I tried to find out what was going on.”
I was talking formally to people. I talked formally to the Bureau of Consular Affairs when I was in Washington on the advice of the council for consular affairs in Riyadh. And then I talked to the Congressional Committee on Foreign Affairs for the House of Representatives. I talked to the the Government Accountability Office, which is a watchdog for Congress on the executive branch and got nowhere. People just didn’t want to talk to me. And I said “Well this is really strange.”
And it bears out exactly what Trento had said that they had an intelligence operation going on. And according to Joe the reason they didn’t tell people in Jeddah about this was they wanted plausible deniability. They wanted to be at arm’s length from what people were saying and saying “Well oh, gee. We didn’t know anything about that. He made a mistake. He didn’t get with the program. He didn’t know what was going on. He was violating the law. Put him in jail. Fine him.” Whatever.
Although the idea seems outlandish from a post-9/11 perspective, at the time it was not particularly surprising. The CIA had worked with Osama Bin Laden and other so-called “Mujahedin,” including many Saudis who had been drawn to Afghanistan to fight America’s arch-enemy, the Soviets, during the Afghan War. There were glowing articles framing Bin Laden as an “Anti-Soviet Warrior” who was “On the Road to Peace” in mainstream publications well into the 1990s. And in the weeks after 9/11 it was even reported in the pages of Newsweek that in the late 1980s—precisely at the time that Springmann was stationed at the Jeddah consulate—”the veterans of the [Mujahedin’s] holy war against the Soviets began arriving in the United States—many with passports arranged by the CIA.”
One infamous example of an intelligence agency helping a known terrorist to enter the United States in this period came in the case of Omar Abdel Rahman, better known as the “Blind Sheik.” In December 1990 it was revealed that the Blind Sheik had “slipped into the United States” despite being on a State Department terrorist watchlist. At the time, the State Department insisted “[t]hey made a mistake” by issuing him a tourist visa from the United States Embassy in Khartoum. But three years later, the truth finally came out. As The New York Timesreported in 1993 after a State Department inspector general investigation: “Central Intelligence Agency officers reviewed all seven applications made by Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman to enter the United States between 1986 and 1990 and only once turned him down because of his connections to terrorism.”
In this context, the revelation that Springmann was being directed by the CIA to let Mujahedin into the US for training was not unthinkable or outlandish conspiracy conjecture. On the contrary, it was practically expected.
As Springmann himself admits, if he had simply been informed at the time that the CIA was helping to facilitate such an operation in support of their foreign policy goals against the Soviet Union, he probably would have went along with it.
SPRINGMANN: And you know it goes back to Trento saying “Well, they wanted somebody—some schlub is his word—to be there and take the heat if something went wrong. And at the time I was dumb enough that if they’d explained it to me, “Yes, we’re recruiting the Mujahedin” I would have said “Well, yeah, OK, this is an important foreign policy goal. I hate those godless communist bastards! So yeah, I’ll go with this.” But they never did.
And it would have saved a lot of effort on my part and saved a lot of embarrassment on their part, because I’ve been writing and talking about this for the last 25 years.
Springmann’s attitude is reflective of much of the American public’s perception of Muslim terrorists in the late 1980s. As tools of US foreign policy—convenient pawns to be wielded on the global chessboard against America’s enemies—they were not regarded as enemies themselves, but embraced as “freedom fighters” and “anti-Communist warriors.”
KENNETH BRANAGH: US National Security Adviser Brzezinski flew to Pakistan to set about rallying resistance. He wanted to arm the Mujahedin without revealing America’s role. On the Afghan border near the Khyber Pass, he urged the Soldiers of God to redouble their efforts.
ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: We know of their deep belief in God, and we are confident that their struggle will succeed. That land over there is yours. You will go back to it one day, because your fight will prevail and you’ll have your homes and your mosques back again, because your cause is right and God is on your side.
PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN: The goal of the United States remains a genuinely independent Afghanistan, free from external interference, an Afghanistan whose people choose the type of government they wish, an Afghanistan to which the four million refugees from Soviet aggression may return in safety and, yes, in honor.
On behalf of the American people, I salute Chairman Khalis, his delegation, and the people of Afghanistan themselves. You are a nation of heroes. God bless you.
But that was before “the day that changed everything.”
After the FBI released their list of suspected 9/11 hijackers, it didn’t take long for questions to emerge about these men, their background, and their travels. What paper trail and travel documents had been left in their wake? How did they obtain their visas to enter the US? Where did they obtain them? When? Which consular officers were in charge of issuing the visas, and were there any irregularities in the process?
It took years for these questions to be answered, but when they were the results were scarcely believable. Not only had 14 of the alleged hijackers’ visas been obtained from the same Jeddah consulate that the CIA had used to funnel terrorists to the US during Springmann’s tenure, but 12 of those visas were issued by a single consular officer: Shayna Steinger.
A Columbia University graduate with no apparent foreign service background, Steinger was appointed as a consular officer in 1999 and arrived in Jeddah for her first foreign service assignment on July 1, 2000. From that point on, she proceeded to issue the visas to more than half of the alleged hijackers, many of them based on incomplete applications and fraudulent documents.
Saeed al Ghamdi received two visas, one in September, 2000, and the other in June, 2001. His second application was incomplete, lied about his earlier visa and was linked to a different passport with fraudulent features. Both visa requests were approved by Shayna Steinger.
Hani Hanjour received a visa from Steinger in September, 2000, just two weeks after she rejected his first application. In subsequent investigations, she gave conflicting accounts of why she denied Hanjour’s visa the first time and why she issued it the second time.
And, later that week, despite an incomplete application and suspicious indicators in his passport, Steinger issued a visa to Ahmed Alnami.
From the time of her arrival at Jeddah until just weeks before the attacks, the pattern continued: Men with incomplete, error-ridden applications and fraudulent or suspicious documents had their visas rubber stamped by Steinger and, in September, their names and faces ended up on the FBI’s hijack suspect list.
In researching his book, Springmann tracked down and confronted Steinger about her time at Jeddah and her role in issuing these visas.
SPRINGMANN: So in the course of doing more research I ran across Jon Gold who was a 9/11 researcher and an activist, and he came up with Shayna Steinger’s name. She was my successor several times removed who was in Jeddah and who would issued visas to 11 of the 15 Saudis who got the visas in Saudi Arabia to go fly airplanes into American buildings. I said “Wait a minute. What is this?”
And she went on—She was hired out of Columbia University with no real background in foreign affairs that I could see at a very high “GS” or foreign service level of about an FSO-4 which is maybe a GS-13 I can guess in the civil service. And she went on for a full 20 years with the State Department and retired, if she in fact worked for State. And after a bit I came across or actually a journalist came across me and said, “Look I found Shayna Steinger out in Iowa. Do you want to talk to her about your experience and her experience and compare them?”
So I did. I called her up. I found her phone number and she was living with her mother. And we had a bit of a fight to get her to talk to me, and I said, “Look, you either talk to me or I’ll write an article about it.” So she finally broke down and we talked, but only in general terms, saying, “Well, yes, I did the right thing. I did what I was told. They did an investigation. They cleared me.”
And I said “Well, what was the story? You know, my understanding was they were recruiting terrorists for the Mujahedin to come to the US for training at US military facilities, generally on the East Coast. And they even had recruiting offices in the United States, including one in Washington, DC, but I could never find any background exactly where they were located.”
And she said, “I didn’t do anything wrong. I just did what I was told.” And it was kind of like talking to my cats sometimes. They were there and they knew you were talking to them but they didn’t give you any real good answers. So the book went out. It’s never been challenged by the government, but it’s gotten me interviewed such as with you and with a lot of September 11th people.
Like so many of the 9/11 whistleblowers, Springmann paid a heavy price for his desire to tell the truth. His refusal to bow to the CIA and issue visas to unqualified applicants during his time at Jeddah, his refusal to stop asking questions about the operation he had been involved in after he was transferred elsewhere, and his refusal to stop speaking about the visas for Al Qaeda long after he left the State Department have had drastic repercussions on his career and his personal life.
SPRINGMANN: Once I was out of state I found I couldn’t get a job anywhere. I mean I spoke several languages to a greater or lesser extent, I had experience working on three continents, I knew how to manage offices. I couldn’t get a job and I got the impression after a bit that I was being blacklisted.
So I hired one of these resume checking services over in California and asked them to ask around so they they called up Day Mount and pretended to be someone hiring me and wanted to know how I was as an employee in Jeddah, and what he thought of me and could he think of anything that special that I had done. And he said, “Well, I can’t think of anything anything really right off the bat,” and he came up with these weasel worded responses to their questions, which gave the impression that, no, you shouldn’t hire this guy. But he didn’t come out and say that, but it was by implication very very clear that Mike Springmann is not to be touched.
So then I went to law school and worked at getting a job after law school. I started asking around when I was in law school. I interned in various organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union. I talked to various national security organizations and found out that I couldn’t get a job again to save my soul.
[. . .]
I tried writing I tried everything I could think of. And while collecting unemployment I was told to issue them reports on how many people I talk to during the week, and I would send page after page after page in of companies I applied to that I had hoped would fit my talents and abilities but got nowhere.
So I figured, you know, the government is still in there, pitching, trying to keep me out of any kind of a gainful employment because that’s how you get rid of people permanently. They don’t have any money, they can take your house, you have no money to do anything except put food on the table, which you can. So it was a very nasty few years.
And for all of this sacrifice, we are still no closer to learning the truth about the Jeddah consulate and the CIA operations there then we were two decades ago. That 14 of the 19 alleged hijackers received their visas from the same office—12 from the same consular officer—is just the start of a deep and largely unexplored rabbit hole that brings not just the travel patterns or the intelligence connections but the very identity of those suspects into question.
Biographical details and pictures of two separate Ziad Jarrahs have been released to the public, and in fact multiple photographs of a number of the alleged hijackers appear to be pictures of entirely different people. A Waleed al-Shehri appeared alive and well in Morocco after 9/11 to protest the use of his name and photograph in stories about the supposed hijackers, and he was joined by an Abdulrahman al-Omari in Jeddah, who the FBI were forced to apologize to for falsely naming as a suspect. Newsweekreported that five of the alleged hijackers received training at secure U.S. military installations in the 1990s. Amidst the confusion, FBI Director Robert Mueller was forced to admit that the Bureau was “not certain” as to the identity of several of the men on their suspect list.
These issues remain untouched and largely forgotten by a public that, through a process of suggestion and association, have come to believe largely without question that the 19 faces in the iconic “hijacker line up” are the perpetrators of 9/11. It is only through the story of people like Mike Springmann that we can begin removing those layers of lies and obfuscations from the story of 9/11, and come to a better understanding of the truth.
And, in the end, that idea—that we can get closer to the truth, that wrongs can be righted and lies exposed—is the idea that motivates whistleblowers like Mike Springmann. Whistleblowers who have come forward at great personal expense to shine light on these long-buried and inconvenient truths.
SPRINGMANN: I think, you know, I have to look at what I did and look at myself, and as the story goes look at your face in the mirror every morning. But I’ve been reading some emails sent to me by a good lawyer contact, lobbyist and attorney, on stoicism. And there have been things from Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and other folks. And one of the things that I saw was their comment that—memento mori—that you expect to die and you don’t fear death. You don’t look forward to death, but at the end of the day you think “what have I done this day, the last day that might be the rest of my life? I may not wake up tomorrow morning. Have I balanced the accounts? Have I done something of substance? Have I tried to rectify a wrong and have I tried to do something good to balance out the evil in the world?”
[. . .]
So that’s one of the reasons why I keep doing this. I figure if I’ve got nothing else to do for the rest of my life I’ve got to square the balance, and, regrettably, I’ve got to say educate the ignorant if I can.
I would appreciate hearing from readers whether they have come across a report in the print, TV, or NPR media of the highly professional four-year investigation of WTC Building 7’s demise. The international team of civil engineers concluded that the official story of Building 7’s destruction is entirely false. I reported their findings here.
I suspect that the expert report is already in the Memory Hole. Popular Mechanics, Wikipedia and CNN cannot label a distinguished team of experts “conspiracy theorists.” Therefore the presstitutes and assorted cover-up artists for the 9/11 false flag attack on the United States will simply act as if no such report exists. The vast majority of people in the world will never hear about the report. I doubt that the real perpetrators of 9/11 will even bother to hire their own team to “refute” the report as that would bring the report into the news, the last place the perpetrators want it to be.
The 9/11 Commission report was not an investigation and ignored all forensic evidence. The NIST simulation of Building 7’s collapse was rigged to get the desired result. The only real investigations have been done by private scientists, engineers, and architects. They have found clear evidence of the use of nano-thermite in the destruction of the twin towers. More than 100 First Responders have testified that they experienced a large number of explosions inside the towers, including a massive explosion in the sub-basement prior to the time the airliners are said to have hit the tower. Numerous military and civilian pilots have said that the flight maneuvers involved in the WTC and Pentagon attacks are beyond their skills and most certainly beyond the skills of the alleged hijackers. Wreckage of the airliners is surprisingly missing from impact sites. And so on and so on. That Building 7 was a controlled demolition is no longer disputable.
On the basis of the known evidence, knowledgeable and informed people have concluded that 9/11 was an inside job organized by Vice President Dick Cheney, his stable of neoconservatives, and Israel for the purpose of reconstructing the Middle East in Israel’s interest and enriching the US military/security complex in the process.
Most people are unaware of Robert Mueller’s role as FBI Director in protecting the official 9/11 story from the evidence. Paul Sperry reports in the New York Post the many actions Mueller took as FBI director to hide the facts from Congress and the public.
Patrick Pasin, a French author, provides additional evidence of Mueller’s misuse of his office to protect an official lie. An English language translation of Pasin’s book, The FBI Accomplice of 9/11, has been published by Talma Studios in Dublin, Ireland.
Pasin’s book consists of his organization of the known evidence, which has been suppressed in order to perpetrate a false story of 9/11, into a compelling account of how a false flag attack was protected from exposure. He details the plan “through which the FBI tried to prove the government conspiracy narrative—no matter the cost.” Keep in mind that Mueller is the one that the Deep State set on President Trump. Dirty business is Mueller’s business.
Pasin collects the evidence and weaves it into a compelling story. It is all there. The insider trading in advance of the airliner hijackings, the impossibility of cell phone calls from airliners in 2001, the anthrax letters sent to senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy which paved the way for the PATRIOT Act, the effort to blame American military scientists for the letters once it emerged that the anthrax was unique to a US military lab, the total implausibility of finding an undamaged passport in the rubble of the twin towers where fires allegedly were so hot that they melted steel.
It is extraordinary that anyone could have believed a word of this. Try to image such intense heat as to melt steel but not enough to burn a passport!
Pasin’s book is easy to read. He just lays it out, revealing falsification after falsification, lie after lie. The obviously false story is fed to the world, and the experts who expose it as false are called “conspiracy theorists” by people too stupid and uninformed to carry their books.
This is America in the 21st century, and apparently the rest of the world’s population is not any brighter.
In 3 days it will be the 18th anniversary of 9/11. What have we learned in these 18 years? We have learned that thousands of experts with hard evidence cannot prevail over a transparent official lie.
If the ancient storyteller Aesop was correct and “a man is known by the company he keeps” what can we learn about Irwin Cotler from his friends and associates?
As I’ve written, the former Liberal justice minister has been a leading anti-Palestinian activist for decades. More recently, he has sought to unseat Venezuela’s government and stoke confrontation with Iran and Russia. Since writing two stories about Cotler earlier this year I’ve come across more about his dubious human rights credentials and links to some questionable characters, including:
The MEK. Cotler has enabled the violent, cult like, Iranian Mujahedin-e Khalq. In 2012 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency cited Cotler, alongside Alan Dershowitz and Elie Wiesel, as prominent pro-Israel activists who worked with Iranians dissidents to convince the State Department to remove the MEK from the US terrorism list, which paved the way for Ottawa to follow suit. In 2014 Cotler invited MEK leader, Maryam Rajavi, to speak at Iran Accountability Week on Parliament Hill. In “We asked Canadian politicians why they engaged with a ‘cult’-like group from Iran”, Shenaz Kermalli points out that Cotler regularly attends events organized by the MEK-aligned groups Canadian Friends of a Democratic Iran and National Council of Resistance of Iran. The MEK backed Iraq in the 1980s Iran-Iraq war and, according to US government sources, teamed up with Israel to assassinate Iranian scientists more recently. It is thought to be funded by Saudi Arabia.
Paul Kagame. Asked about Kagame’s human rights record on the sidelines of an event on Rwanda in April, Cotler refused to criticize Africa’s most bloodstained leader. Cotler and the Rwandan president both attended the 2017 American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference in Washington, DC, and the self-declared human rights champion spoke alongside the “Butcher of Africa’s Great Lakes region” later that year. Cotler has also participated in events put on by the Rwandan High Commission in Ottawa. In 2008 Cotler pushed a House of Commons motion to commemorate genocide prevention/Rwanda’s genocide on April 7. The choice of the day reflects the simplistic, one-sided, version of Rwanda’s tragedy Kagame promotes to legitimate his dictatorship and belligerence in the region. On April 6, 1994, the plane carrying Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down, unleashing the genocidal killings. So why choose April 7, rather than April 6, to commemorate genocide prevention/Rwanda’s genocide? Because Kagame’s RPF shot down the plane carrying the two Hutu presidents and most of Rwanda’s military command, which facilitated their seizing power after a multi-year war
Proponents of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine. A high-minded cover for Western imperialism, R2P was cited by Paul Martin’s government, which included Cotler as justice minister, to justify overthrowing elected Haitian president Jean Bertrand Aristide. Thousands were killed in post-coup violence. Cotler called R2P “arguably the most significant development in the defence of human rights since the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” In 2011 Cotler pushed for R2P to be invoked in Libya. He co-wrote a New York Times op-ed headlined “Libya and the Responsibility to Protect” that argued for ousting Muammar Gaddafi. They wrote, “the Security Council should adopt a new resolution to immediately extend recognition to the nascent provisional government of the country, authorize a NATO-supported no-flight zone over Libya to preclude any bombing of civilians, and permit all U.N. members to provide direct support to the provisional government.” That’s largely what transpired. But the NATO war has been a disaster. Eight years later Libya remains divided and the NATO bombing destabilized large parts of Africa’s Sahel region.
Proponents of the Magnitsky Act. Cotler led the campaign for Canada to adopt sanctions legislation modeled after the 2012 US Magnitsky Act. Designed to demonize Russia, Ottawa immediately sanctioned Russian and Venezuelan officials under legislation that allows the government to freeze individuals’ assets/visas and prohibit Canadian companies from dealing with sanctioned individuals. Cotler recently called for Canada to invoke the 2017 Magnitsky Act to “impose sanctions in the form of travel bans and asset freezes” on Iranian officials. The legislation is named after Sergey Magnitsky who proponents claim was tortured to death for exposing Russian state corruption. The source of the claim is William Browder, an American who got rich amidst the fire sale of Russian state assets in the 1990s. With billionaire banker Edmond J. Safra, Browder co-founded Hermitage Capital Management, which became the largest hedge fund in Russia. Hermitage Capital earned a staggering 2,697% return between 1996 and 2007. Those who question the western-backed story line say Magnitsky was an accountant who helped Browder claim illicit tax breaks. According to this version of the story, Browder exploited Magnitsky’s death – caused by inhumane jail conditions – to avoid being extradited to Russia on tax fraud charges. Investigative journalist Adrian duPlessis recently emailed me about Cotler being “the person who’s opened doors for Browder and his scam in Ottawa.” duPlessis has followed Browder for years, receiving a 1998 National Newspaper Award for Business Reporting about Russian mafia money in North America. As part of the campaign for Canada to adopt the Magnitsky Act, Cotler held multiple press conferences and public meetings with Browder. (While it’s hard to be confident about the truth, I find it difficult to believe that a US capitalist who got rich in Russia in the 1990s would simply turn into a human rights activist. On the other hand, the idea that a wealthy and powerful individual meshed self-preservation with growing Russophobia seems plausible.)
Organized crime. duPlessis pointed me to Le Journal de Montréalcoverage of Cotler’s business associates’ ties to the Montréal mafia. In one of two stories from 2015 the newspaper noted, “for the last decade or so, former Minister of Justice Irwin Cotler has been a shareholder in a company that has financed promoters close to organized crime.” In one of the firms, Faybess Investments, Cotler owned a third of the shares and in the other, Ace Investments, 1/6 of the company. Cotler’s main associates in these companies — Hyman Bloom and Richard Dubrovsky — invested millions of dollars with the notorious Rizzuto family. The police bugged Dubrovsky and Bloom’s offices and their names came up at the Charbonneau inquiry into corruption in Québec. Cotler claimed his role in the companies was passive even though he was vice president of Faybess, which he co-founded with Dubrovsky, for part of the period in question.
Alan Dershowitz, an important figure in the Jeffrey Epstein pedophilia/rape scandal. Dershowitz negotiated (partly through intimidation) the scandalous “non-prosecution agreement” under which Epstein served 13 months in a Florida jail, which was largely spent on “work release” in an office. A close friend of Epstein, Dershowitz is accused of raping two of Epstein’s sex slaves. In a court filing Virginia Roberts said, “Dershowitz was so comfortable with the sex that was going on that he would even come and chat with Epstein while I was giving oral sex to Epstein.” Roberts added that she had sex with Dershowitz “at least six times”. In the 2015 article “Israel defender Alan Dershowitz has long history of attacking sex abuse victims” Rania Khalek details his aggressive anti-woman positions. In 1997 Dershowitz argued that “puberty is arriving earlier, particularly among some ethnic groups.” As such, the eminent lawyer called for — a position repeated recently — the age of consent to be lowered (if a child reaches puberty at ten should they be legitimate targets for sexual predators?). A close friend and political ally, Cotler would have almost certainly been aware of Dershowitz’s position. In 2004 the Globe and Mail reported, “Dershowitz and Mr. Cotler met at Yale Law School in the early 1960s and are so close that the first person Mr. Cotler called after being appointed to cabinet last December was his friend at Harvard.” In 2014 Dershowitz called Cotler “my mirror image in Canada” and nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016. They are both currently part of the Honorary Board of the Jewish Coalition for Kurdistan and Dershowitz is a Senior Fellow at the Cotler chaired/founded Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights. According to Cotler, “everyone regards Alan as not only the best defender of Israel, but the best defender of the most just of causes in the court of public opinion.” In the Acknowledgments section for The Vanishing American Jew Dershowitz lists Cotler’s name right before Epstein’s. They are both also listed in the Acknowledgments for The Case for Israel.
Leslie Wexner. Cotler has done a series of events with the Wexner Foundation, including serving as “distinguished faculty member” at the Wexner Israel Fellowship Alumni Institute in Haifa. Jeffrey Epstein was one of three trustees of the Wexner Foundation for over a decade and its namesake, Leslie Wexner, was the main source of Epstein’s wealth. Epstein had power of attorney for a significant portion of Wexner’s fortune and in May 1997 Epstein posed as a talent scout for Victoria’s Secret — owned by Wexner — to lure model Alicia Arden to his hotel room where he sexually assaulted her.
Other key figures in the Epstein sex scandal. Epstein’s decades-long sex ring coordinator/partner Ghislaine Maxwell is the daughter of Robert Maxwell, a crooked British press baron and Mossad spy. Bill Browder worked for Robert Maxwell before he died in a mysterious boating incident in 1991. Additionally, the co-founder of Hermitage Capital with Browder was Edmond Safra whose name is cited in Epstein’s little black book. Cotler has repeatedly spoken at the Edmond J. Safra synagogue and, as mentioned previously, Cotler hosted a series of events with Browder.
Perhaps all this company that Cotler has kept means nothing, but you’d think, at a minimum, the political, corporate and media establishment that promote his ‘human rights’ credentials might be made anxious by the possibilities it suggests. You’d also think that some mainstream investigative journalist would ask questions. I emailed Cotler to ask if he had met Jeffrey Epstein, been on his private plane or private island. Of course he failed to respond to my repeated messages, but maybe Cotler would feel compelled to answer a CBC, CTV, Globe and Mail, Montreal Gazette or Toronto Star journalist.
Last year Professor Deborah Lipstadt gave a lecture about Holocaust denial at the University of Oxford. There she stated:
“In not one war-crimes trial since the end of World War Two has a perpetrator of any nationality ever said it didn’t happen.” (1:55)
There are many, many people in fact who are under the same impression; they are quite certain that during the trials all the Nazis fell to their knees exclaiming “We did it!”. But is this true?
In order to find out we will have a look at several Nazi testimonies from the International Military Tribunal (IMT) and Nuremberg Military Tribunal (NMT) transcripts regarding the alleged attempt to exterminate the Jews – testimonies you will never find in history books.
We begin with Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel (IMT, v. 10, p. 594, 598):
“DR. LATERNSER: Do you know whether the higher military commanders at any time were informed of the intention of Hitler or Himmler to kill the Jews?
KEITEL: According to my opinion, that was not the case, since I personally was not informed either. […]
DR. HORN: In connection with the testimony by General Lahousen, I want to ask you one question. At the time of the Polish campaign, was there a directive or an order by Hitler to exterminate the Jews in the Polish Ukraine?
KEITEL: I cannot recall any such things. I know only that during the occupation of Poland – that is after the occupation – the problem of the Polish Jews played a part. In that connection I also put a question once to Hitler to which, I believe, he answered that that area was well suited for settling the Jews there. I do not know or remember anything else.”
We continue with Reichskommissar Arthur Seyss-Inquart (v. 16, p. 19):
“DR. HAENSEL: You said in your interrogation that a decree of Heydrich’s caused you to have Jews transported from Holland. Did you see Hitler’s decree to Heydrich?
SEYSS-INQUART: I think so – a decree from Hitler to Heydrich alone would not have been for Heydrich.
DR. HAENSEL: You picture the situation as if Heydrich had told you that he had this decree.
SEYSS-INQUART: Yes, he told me that, and a few weeks later he sent me this decree.
DR. HAENSEL: Was it in writing?
SEYSS-INQUART: Yes, it was in writing.
DR. HAENSEL: And what did the decree say?
SEYSS-INQUART: That he had complete charge of the final solution of the Jewish question as well as other matters dealing therewith.
DR. HAENSEL: And when was this? 1941? 1940?
SEYSS-INQUART: It was at about the time when the evacuations started. That was in 1942.
DR. HAENSEL: That must be wrong. It was 1941, not later.
SEYSS-INQUART: Perhaps he showed me the decree later. I do not know the date of the decree.
DR. HAENSEL: That must be the case. But this decree, you said, was conceived in general terms?
SEYSS-INQUART: General terms.
DR. HAENSEL: It could be interpreted one way or another? I mean, you know…
SEYSS-INQUART: Yes, I had the impression that in the occupied territories Heydrich was to carry through the evacuation, and at that time I was not quite sure whether that was to be a final evacuation – which, however, was possible. The most extreme possibility was that the Jews would be collected in camps and after the end of the war settled somewhere.
DR. HAENSEL: I beg your pardon, Witness, the most extreme possibility would certainly be that the Jews would be destroyed, is that not so?
SEYSS-INQUART: I am speaking of the most extreme possibility which I thought of at the time.”
He also added (p. 20):
“DR. HAENSEL: Before 1943 did you discuss these problems with Hitler?
SEYSS-INQUART: I was merely present when Hitler talked about these problems. It was always along this line, to eliminate the Jews from the German population and to send them somewhere abroad.
DR. HAENSEL: But there was no talk at all about destruction of the Jews?
SEYSS-INQUART: Never.”
Now we turn to the Chief of the Reich Chancellery Hans Lammers (v. 11, pp. 50-53):
“DR. THOMA: I have only one more question. Did you know anything regarding the fact that Hitler had decided to solve the Jewish question by the final solution, that is, by the annihilation of the Jews?
LAMMERS: Yes, I know a great deal about that. The final solution of the Jewish question became known to me for the first time in 1942. That is when I heard that the Führer supposedly, through Göring, had given an order to the SS Obergruppenführer Heydrich to achieve a solution of the Jewish question. I did not know the exact contents of that order and consequently, since this did not come within my jurisdiction, at the beginning I took a negative attitude, but then as I wanted to know something I, of course, had to contact Himmler. I asked him what was really meant by the idea of the final solution of the Jewish question. Himmler replied that he had received the order from the Führer to bring about the final solution of the Jewish problem – or rather Heydrich and his successor had that order – and that the main point of the order was that the Jews were to be evacuated from Germany. With that statement I was satisfied for the time and waited for further developments, since I assumed that I would now in some way – I really had no jurisdiction here – I would obtain some information from Heydrich or his successor, Kaltenbrunner. Since nothing did come I wanted to inform myself about this, and back in 1942 I announced a report to the Führer, whereupon the Führer told me that it was true that he had given Himmler the order for evacuation but that he did not want any further discussion about this Jewish question during the war. […]
In the meantime I once more turned to Herr Himmler. He was of the opinion that it was necessary to discuss this question since a number of problems would have to be solved, particularly since the intention of achieving a final solution of the Jewish question would probably extend to persons of mixed blood, first grade, and would also extend to the so-called “privileged” marriages, that is to say, marriages where only one party was Aryan whereas the other party was Jewish. The Führer stated once more that he did not wish to have a report on it but that he had no objections to consultation on these problems. That some evacuations had taken place in the meantime had become known to me. At that time, at any rate, not the slightest thing was known, about the killing of Jews; if crass individual cases came up, I always addressed myself to Himmler and he was always very willing to settle these individual cases. Finally, however, in 1943, rumors cropped up that Jews were being killed. I had no jurisdiction in this field; it was merely that I occasionally received complaints and on the basis of these complaints I investigated the rumors. But, as far as I could tell, at any rate, these rumors always proved to be only rumors. Every one said he had heard it from somebody else and nobody wanted to make a definite statement. I am, in fact, of the opinion that these rumors were based mostly on foreign broadcasts and that the people just did not want to say from where they had the information. That caused me once more to undertake an investigation of this matter. First of all, since I, for my part, could not initiate investigations of matters under Himmler’s jurisdiction, I addressed myself to Himmler once again. Himmler denied any legal killings and told me, with reference to the order from the Führer, that it was his duty to evacuate the Jews and that during such evacuations, which also involved old and sick people, of course there were cases of death, there were accidents, there were attacks by enemy aircraft. He added too, that there were revolts, which of course he had to suppress severely and with bloodshed, as a warning. For the rest, he said that these people were being accommodated in camps in the East. He brought out a lot of pictures and albums and showed me the work that was being done in these camps by the Jews and how they worked for the war needs, the shoemakers shops, tailors shops, and so forth. He told me:
“This is the order of the Führer; if you believe that you have to take action against it then tell the Führer and tell me the names of the people who have made these reports to you.”
Of course, I could not tell him the names, first of all because they did not want to be named, and secondly, they only knew these things from hearsay, so as I said, I could not have given him any definite material at all. Nevertheless, I once again reported this matter to the Führer, and on this occasion he gave me exactly the same reply which I had been given by Himmler. He said, “I shall later on decide where these Jews will be taken and in the meantime they are being cared for there.” […]
DR. THOMA: But, Witness, please be quite brief. I am now putting this question to you: Did Himmler ever tell you that the final solution of the Jewish problem would take place through the extermination of the Jews?
LAMMERS: That was never mentioned. He talked only about evacuation.
DR. THOMA: He talked only about evacuation?
LAMMERS: Yes, only about evacuation.
DR. THOMA: When did you hear that these 5 million Jews had been exterminated?
LAMMERS: I heard of that here a while ago.”
And later (p. 115):
“MAJOR JONES: Are you, as the head of the Reich Chancellery, the man who knew all the secrets of the Third Reich, saying to this Tribunal that you had no knowledge of the murder of millions and millions who were murdered under the Nazi regime?
LAMMERS: I mean to say that I knew nothing about it until the moment of the collapse, that is, the end of April 1945 or the beginning of May, when I heard such reports from foreign broadcasting stations. I did not believe them at the time, and only later on I found further material here, in the newspapers. If we are speaking now of the elimination of a harmful influence that is far from meaning annihilation. The Führer did not say a word about murder; no mention was ever made of such a plan.”
Lammers also testified at the Ministries Case (NMT, v. 13). Asked again about the Final Solution he affirmed (pp. 419-421):
“Q. Witness, I must return to the killings of Jews. You stated that you had no knowledge of that. But I must nevertheless ask you, didn’t you at least hear rumors of such killings of Jews, and what did you undertake on hearing them?
A. Only in the year 1943 did such rumors come to my knowledge and this happened through private conversations and through a few anonymous and pseudonymous letters. But for me these rumors remained rumors. I looked into them. However, I never succeeded in ascertaining anything positive regarding the truth of such alleged facts. People bringing me such rumors never wished to stand their ground and withdrew when I tried to pin them down to their statements. It always turned out that they would name their informants or did not wish to and that they themselves were not eyewitnesses. I myself always had the impression that such rumors rested solely on the listening to foreign radios which was strictly forbidden and punishable and in the last analysis no one wished to confess this activity. So far as I looked into letters that were actually signed, I found out that these were pseudonymous letters, and so far as I wished to pin any individual down to an actual deposition of facts, that never came about because the persons did not wish to stick to their stories and could produce no actual recounting of facts, and were themselves not eyewitnesses. […]
Q. In what then did the problem of the final solution consist so far as you understood that term at that time and I emphasize your understanding of the term at that time?
A. The solution was to lie in the evacuation of full-blooded Jews, and secondly, a regulation of some sort concerning the privileged Jews and the half-Jews.
Q. Witness, on the basis of the minutes of the three meetings of 20 January 1942, 6 March 1942, and 27 October 1942 put in by the prosecution, are you stilI of the opinion that no program for exterminating the Jews was ever set up and that, secondly, with regard to including half-Jews and privileged Jews in the evacuation or other measures, no program was set up?
A. Yes. I am of that opinion. At least this program never came to my attention. The program cannot have been set up.”
Minister of Finance Schwerin von Krosigk and Secretary of the Foreign Office Ernst von Weizsäcker were also examined during that trial. On the Final Solution, von Krosigk stated (p. 406):
“Q. With reference to the problem of the treatment of the Jews I have one more question. These matters have been repeatedly discussed here. I would only like to hear your personal attitude. What did you know about the so-called Final Solution [Endloesung] of the Jewish Question?
A. I cannot remember ever having heard the term at all before the collapse. At any rate I was not aware of any physical extermination as a solution of the Jewish question.
Q. The prosecution naturally says that many people in Germany knew it and asks why you, as a minister, did not know it. Is it possible for you to explain that?
A. Of course it could not remain hidden from me that in wartime Jews were evacuated from Germany. All the less since the property they left behind them was transferred to my financial authority for administration and evaluation. But as far as a plan, the execution of such a plan went, that this evacuation was to lead to extermination, that is something of which I never heard anything at all. When I asked I was always told that these measures were equivalent to the internment of enemy nationals in wartime for security reasons.
Q. At that time were you ever given the name of a place where they were taken?
A. The East was mentioned quite generally. I only heard one name. That was Theresienstadt. That was given to me as a place which had been evacuated by other inhabitants and made available for the settlement of German Jews.”
And von Weizsäcker (p. 437):
“Q. Were you kept currently informed about what was happening to the Jews and what extent the extermination [Vernichtung] had assumed?
A. From the very beginning I considered many atrocious actions possible, but my imagination did not suffice to picture what I actually learned after the collapse.
Q. Didn’t you know of the plan of the so-called Final Solution [Endloesung], I mean the plan regarding the final extermination of all the Jews who were reported to the East?
A. This plan was completely unknown to me.”
We return to Nuremberg with the testimony of Julius Streicher (IMT, v. 12, p. 374):
“LT. COL. GRIFFITH-JONES: We will go on. Now, I just want to put one or two further articles of your own to you. You remember what I am suggesting, that you are inciting the German people to murder. We know now that at least you had read one article in the Israelitisches Wochenblatt where murder is mentioned. I just want to see what you go on to publish in your own paper after that date. Would you look at Page 47-A. This is an article by yourself on 6 January 1944. This is after you had been living on your estate for some time.
“After the National Socialist uprising in Germany, a development began in Europe, too, from which one can expect that it will free this continent for all time of the Jewish disintegrator and exploiter of nations; and, over and above this, that the German example will, after a victorious termination of the second World War, bring about the destruction of the Jewish world tormentor on the other continents as well.”
What example was the German nation setting to the other nations of the world? What example do you mean there?
STREICHER: This article corroborates what I have been saying all along. I spoke of an international solution of the Jewish question. I was convinced that if Germany had won this war or had been victorious over Bolshevism, then the world would have agreed that an understanding should be reached with the other nations for an international solution of the Jewish question. If I wrote here about destruction, it is not to be understood as destruction by mass killing; as I have said, that is an expression; I have to point out that I do not believe that Erich Kauffmann[1] really wanted to kill the German people by sterilization, but he wrote it, and we sometimes wrote in the same manner, echoing the sounds that we heard in the other camp.
LT. COL. GRIFFITH-JONES: You have not yet told us what is this international solution that you are advocating by talking about extermination; if it is not murder, what is it? What is the solution?
STREICHER: I have already said that I founded the Anti-Semitic Union, and through this Anti-Semitic Union we wanted to create movements among the nations which should, above and beyond governments, act in such a way that an international possibility would be created, such as has been represented today here in this Trial – thus I conceived it, to form an international congress center which would solve the Jewish question by the creation of a Jewish state and thereby destroy the power of the Jews within the nations.
LT. COL. GRIFFITH-JONES: That is your answer – that you were advocating a Jewish state? Is that all that this comes to? Is it simply that you were advocating a Jewish national home? Is that what you have been talking about in all these extracts that we have read? Is that the solution which you are advocating?
STREICHER: Well, I do not know what you want with that question. Of course, that is the solution.
LT. COL. GRIFFITH-JONES: Very well. Let us just go on now. Turn to Page 48-A now, will you? This is 24 January 1944, “Whoever does what a Jew does is a scoundrel, a criminal, and he who repeats and wishes to copy him deserves the same fate – annihilation, death.”
Are you still advocating a national Jewish home?
STREICHER: Yes, that has nothing to do with the big political plan. If you take every statement by a writer, every statement from a daily newspaper, as an example, and want to prove a political aim by it, then you miss the point. You have to distinguish between a newspaper article and a great political aim.”
Next, Chief of the Wehrmacht Alfred Jodl (v. 15, p. 332):
“DR. EXNER: As we are just talking of the Jews, will you tell the Court what you knew about the extermination of Jews? I remind you that you are under oath.
JODL: I know just how improbable these explanations sound, but very often the improbable is true and the probable untrue. I can only say, fully conscious of my responsibility, that I never heard, either by hint or by written or spoken word, of an extermination of Jews. On one single occasion I had doubts, and that was when Himmler spoke about the revolt in the Jewish Ghetto. I did not quite believe in this heroic fight; but Himmler immediately supplied photographs showing the concrete dugouts which had been built there, and he said, “Not only the Jews but also Polish Nationalists have taken refuge there and they are offering bitter resistance”. And with that he removed my suspicions.
THE PRESIDENT: Are you speaking of Warsaw? What example was the German nation setting to the other nations of the world? What example do you mean there?
JODL: I am speaking of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto of which I heard through a personal report from Himmler given in our presence, in the presence of soldiers at the Fuehrer’s headquarters. Himmler spoke only of an uprising and of bitter fighting. As far as the activities of the Police are concerned, of the so-called action groups, Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommandos – a conception, incidentally, of which I first heard here in detail – there was never any explanation through the Fuehrer himself other than that these police units were necessary to quell uprisings, rebellions, and partisan actions before they grew into a menace. This was not a task for the Armed Forces, but for the Police, and for that reason the Police had to enter the operational areas of the Army. I have never had any private information on the extermination of the Jews; and on my word, as sure as I am sitting here, I heard all these things for the first time after the end of the war.”
We continue with Alfred Rosenberg (v. 22, p. 382):
“The thought of a physical annihilation of Slavs and Jews, that is to say, the actual murder of entire peoples, has never entered my mind and I most certainly did not advocate it in any way. I was of the opinion that the existing Jewish question would have to be solved by the creation of a minority right, by emigration, or by settling the Jews in a national territory over a ten-year period of time. The White Paper of the British Government of 24 July 1946 shows how historical developments can bring about measures which were never previously planned.”
And finally, Reich Marshal Hermann Goering (v. 9, p. 619):
“SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: You heard what I read to you about Hitler, what he said to Horthy and what Ribbentrop said, that the Jews must be exterminated or taken to concentration camps. Hitler said the Jews must either work or be shot. That was in April 1943. Do you still say that neither Hitler nor you knew of this policy to exterminate the Jews?
GOERING: For the correctness of the document.
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: Will you please answer my question. Do you still say neither Hitler nor you knew of the policy to exterminate the Jews?
GOERING: As far as Hitler is concerned, I have said I do not think so. As far as I am concerned, I have said that I did not know, even approximately, to what extent these things were taking place.
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: You did not know to what degree, but you knew there was a policy that aimed at the extermination of the Jews?
GOERING: No, a policy of emigration, not liquidation of the Jews. I knew only that there had been isolated cases of such perpetrations.”
So here is the question: Is Dr. Deborah Lipstadt aware of all this? If yes, then she is deliberately misleading the public. If not, she is just an ignoramus who should probably stick to giving lectures on making birthday cakes.
[1] Theodore N. Kaufman, author of Germany Must Perish
A new documentary, based on an interview with a self-confessed member of the Glennane Gang, gives some insights into allegations that British military intelligence was behind a shocking murder plot to cause the situation in Northern Ireland to “spiral out of control”.
In a documentary, Unquiet Graves: The Story of the Glennane Gang, John Weir, a former officer from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), alleges that British intelligence tried to persuade paramilitary group Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) to attack a Catholic primary school at Belleeks in County Armagh.
Weir claimed that the UVF was urged to kill children and teachers in retaliation for the 1976 Kingsmill massacre, in which gunmen stopped a minibus carrying twelve workmen and shot them; only one person survived despite having been shot 18 times.
“The plan that was decided on was to shoot up a school in Belleeks”, he said, adding that the British intelligence plot was to make the situation in Northern Ireland “spiral out of control”. … continue
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If the ancient storyteller Aesop was correct and “a man is known by the company he keeps” what can we learn about Irwin Cotler from his friends and associates?
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