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Ellen Mariani and her attorney, Phil Berg, applaud the remarks of U.S. Senator
Dayton's denunciation of lies and inconsistencies by Norad regarding 9/11
Ellen Mariani, American widow of the attacks of 9-11, her attorney, Phil Berg, and thousands of their supporters are dedicated to making known to the world the essential truth of the attacks of terror of September 11, 2001. The true story, undoubtedly, little resembles the “official story" promulgated by the American government, and by the 9-11 Commission chaired by former New Jersey Governor Thomas A. Kean.
Ever since 9-11, and ongoing: Two wars. Destruction you will never see shown in establishment media, Tens of thousands of people killed, and no one knows how many wounded. Hundreds of billions of dollars spent. Massive corruption. The erosion of the freedoms guaranteed to Americans by our Constitution. The torture and ill-treatment of Arabs and others. All of this, to America’s enormous discredit in the eyes of the people of the world. All of it, too, based on lies and – it appears more
and more – on treason. And, the mainstream American media (with exceptions too few to make
much impact) know that they’re peddling lies about 9-11, but they go on taking part in the concealment of the truth.
If you are a U.S. citizen, you had better wake up. Your country, your Constitution, even your most fundamental freedoms, are threatened as never before. Even if you are not an American, if you have not yet felt directly the after-effects of 9-11, you will. If not tomorrow, then the day after tomorrow. Unless, perhaps, we can find and make known, together, the real truth of the 9-11 terror attacks. Please help us!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE. CAN BE TRANSLATED INTO ANY LANGUAGE,
AND REPUBLISHED IN WHOLE OR IN PART ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD (WITH ATTRIBUTION TO THE AUTHOR) WITHOUT NEED TO ASK FOR SPECIFIC AUTHORIZATION. Ellen Mariani, American Widow of 9-11 Attacks, Applauds Senator Dayton’s Denunciation of Lies and Inconsistencies by NORAD. Meanwhile, the Mainstream U.S. Media Continue in Their Indifference to This “Enormous Fissure” and Other Fallacies in The Official
Story of 9-11.
By Margaret Atheling Rowe
August 6, 2004. For almost three years, since her husband died in the attacks of September 11, 2001, Ellen Mariani of New Hampshire, 66, has been perplexed by inattention in the American media to the gaping holes in what became "the official history" of 9-11. She even filed a lawsuit against President George W. Bush and others, with the intent to force senior officials, testifying under oath, to explain anomalies and implausibilities in the chronologies of 9-11, wherein waits to be found — much more than in re-hashing “intelligence failures” — the core truth of 9-11. That remains true, despite the recent release of the Report of the 9-11 Commission, co-chaired by the former governor of New Jersey, Thomas A. Kean. According to the Commission, no high-level U.S. official, civilian or military, bears actual responsibility for the attacks! The question must be asked: was 9-11 truly an attack by Islamist terrorists or — however horrifying the prospect — an attack that the government of the United States (or elements of it) allowed to happen, in order to win public approval for wars against Afghanistan and Iraq (which, we now know, were actively being planned before 9-11)? Or, did the government even play an active role in planning and carrying out the attacks?
Many of those who are little-inclined to be labeled “conspiracy theorists” will admit, if only in private, that they are scandalized that America’s air defense system —so highly-skilled, so well-equipped, so terribly expensive — failed to stop even one of the four diverted planes on the morning of 9-11. How this could be is astonishing, given that about an hour and 52 minutes passed, from the last normal communication between Flight 11 and air traffic control (at 8:14 A.M.) and the crash, in a Pennsylvania field, of Flight 93 (at 10:06 A.M.). Also disconcerting to many Americans, is that (with the possible exception of former CIA director George Tenet) no senior officials, persons charged at the time with the national defense, have resigned, or been forced from their jobs, for failure to protect the country, but in certain cases some of them have even been promoted.
Disquieting, too, is that several of the top-level chiefs, in particular Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, have on several occasions changed their accounts of their whereabouts and activities at various times on 9-11. In other instances, their accounts are flatly contradicted by those of other senior officials. Perhaps most astonishing of all, is that although the primary American media (owned, mostly, by right-wing or even far-right-wing interests, friendly to the Administration, or at least little disposed to offend it) have, for almost three years now, reported sheaves of so-called “facts,” they have provided virtually no real analysis. Thus, the public is largely uninformed that very little of the “Official Story” — from the 19 Arab hijackers, to how the Twin Towers fell, to right-wing commentator (and Flight 77 passenger) Barbara Olson’s supposed telephone conversations with her husband, to Flight 93 passengers crying “Let’s Roll!” and struggling with hijackers, and a host of additional details — is supported by evidence that could withstand the heat of cross-examination in a court of law. No doubt that is why the “investigation” was restricted to a team of Washington insiders, who (except for a handful of public hearings “for show”) met for the most part in secret.
No one of the “Establishment” media has pointed out, either, that the “Official History” was cobbled together, and has been tinkered with whenever deemed expedient, by precisely those people who would stand to gain by selling a false story to the public, if one were to assume that the 9-11 attacks truly were an “inside job,” conceived or allowed to unfold by high-level U.S. authorities. Many of the proponents of the Official Story are people who demonstrably have profited, politically and/or financially, from the events of 9-11, and the dubious “War on Terror” that has followed it.
Ms. Mariani, a widow who has been on a mission for three years to determine and reveal the truth of the attacks of 9-11, and of the murder of her husband, is therefore pleased and grateful that, at long last, a high-level U.S. official has had the courage to say that the Emperor wears no clothes. On July 31st, during deliberations of the Governmental Affairs committee of the U.S. Senate, Sen. Mark Dayton, Democrat of Minnesota, stated to members of the Commission that the recently-released final report of the Commission cannot be reconciled with the chronology which was provided, one week after the attacks, by NORAD (the joint U.S.-Canadian air defense system). Dayton describes the report as "excessively misleading,”" according to a copyrighted article by Greg Gordon, and published in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Sen. Dayton is quoted by Gordon as saying that the chiefs of NORAD ". . . lied to the American people, they lied to the Congress, and they lied to your Commission to create a false impression of competence, communication and protection of America." Sen. Dayton, according to the article in the Star-Tribune, stated to the co-chairs of the Commission, Mr. Kean and Lee Hamilton (formerly a Democratic member of Congress from Illinois) that President Bush ought to fire any person, whether employed by NORAD or by the Federal Aviation Agency, who "betrayed their public trust by not telling us the truth.”
In short, if the chronology of the morning of 9-11 now found in the final report of the 9-11 Commission is true, then, to an absolute certainly, the chronology that NORAD published just a few days after the attacks (and had not openly disavowed until now) is wrong in critical aspects. Moreover, the earlier, long-standing September 2001 NORAD timeline — according to which F-15 and F-16 fighters were “scrambled,” in failed attempts to stop the diverted planes — was contrary to sworn testimony by Gen. Myers, before the Senate committee that was deliberating making permanent his “acting” status as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, on September 13, 2001. At that time, Gen. Myers stated that, to the best of his knowledge, no fighter planes were “scrambled” until after the Pentagon was struck (which occurred at 9:37 A.M.).
Thus, the first deliberate public pronouncement on the subject by General Myers, given in a context (i.e., his confirmation hearing) in which presumably he would be well-prepared, and at least avoid telling lies for which he would likely get caught, said no fighters were ordered aloft until after three civilian aircraft had crashed, and at least an hour and 23 minutes had elapsed (from 8:14 A.M. until 9:37 A.M.) from Flight 11’s last routine communication with air traffic control, and the impact at the Pentagon. If the story Gen. Myers told the Senate committee two days after attacks — no fighters scrambled for at least 1:23 after Flight 11 should have been suspected as having been hijacked — it should outrage every American that such a torpid response did not cause many, many high-level heads to roll, including that of Gen. Myers.
We will not here examine in detail the “later, improved” and “latest, unquestionable” timelines about the fighters that supposedly were scrambled, but if you do that exercise, you will find that the Commission wants us to accept that the fighters took off late, flew very slowly, and did bizarre things like flying out over the Atlantic Ocean — perhaps with the expectation that the “jihadist hijackers” (minimally skilled pilots, flying comparably slow, cumbersome, and unarmed civilian airliners) would revise their plans to crash into buildings to fly in pursuit of the Air National Guard pilots, to join battle with them out over the water. Not only are we supposed to believe such ridiculous things; we are also supposed to believe that it is not alarming, shocking, and disgraceful that they are being proposed to us as the truth.
Moreover, and completely unbelievably, according to the Commission Report, General Myers, as well as the Secretary of Defense, Mr. Rumsfeld, both were unaware of the attacks until after 10:00 A.M. Secretary Rumsfeld, supposedly, was attending a breakfast meeting as the attacks unfolded, and Gen. Myers knew nothing until, while approaching the Pentagon by car, he saw smoke. To the contrary, in the recent book by Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies, the former anti-terror chief places both Myers and Rumsfeld in attendance at a videoconference, directed by the White House, beginning at approximately 9:12 A.M.
NORAD, according to the article in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, is now refusing to discuss its chronology that dates back to September 2001, which was an important part of the “Official Story” of 9-11 for more then two years. In a recent radio interview on station WGDR, the translator and "whistleblower" Sibel Edmunds, fired by the FBI, and a target of various legal proceedings and vigorous efforts by the Attorney General, John Ashcroft, to force her to keep quiet concerning everything she knows about 9-11 and the FBI, said: "If real investigations were to be made, we would see several high level serious criminal prosecutions in this country. And that’s not something they are going to allow to happen. In fact, believe me, they will do anything to cover it up.”Mariani’s lawyer, Philip J. Berg of Pennsylvania, applauds Sen. Dayton for being the first high-level politician to speak the truth: that NORAD lied, and has repeatedly changed its story, concerning critical aspects of the timeline of its actions on 9-11, and efforts it supposedly made to mount a response to the attacks. “And,” Berg adds, “it should be said also that, up to now, despite also having failed in protecting the country and the life of Ellen Mariani’s husband and thousands of others, NORAD has done all of this lying and casual story-changing with complete impunity.”
Berg regrets, also, that so far as he knows, only one major daily newspaper, Sen. Dayton’s hometown Minneapolis Star-Tribune, has reported, at least with any prominence, the Senator’s strong words directed to the co-chairs of the Commission. “The fact is,” Berg insists, “that what the public ought to be seeing is a huge fissure in the false Official Story, concocted by the Bush Administration, and cynically and uncritically sold to the American public by a media establishment that is fast becoming a virtual Ministry of Untruth. With pitifully few exceptions, certainly among the echelons of the best-known news celebrities, the media establishment certainly appears to have shed whatever journalistic integrity it had left, and to have sold its soul.”
With little hope that Dayton’s remarks, or the coming sharp critiques of the “what happened” parts of the 9-11 Commission’s report, will find fair coverage in major American media, Mariani and Berg are hopeful that a more scrutinizing, and perhaps less mesmerized, foreign public and press will cast such a strong light on the Commission Report that Americans will be forced to examine it, and with a critical eye. Mariani and Berg make no bones about their own views: that the Commission, once it was forced on the Bush Administration to fend off bitter, public attacks threatened by victims’ families, was artfully turned into a device to mislead the public, and to support the Bush Administration’s (and the “neo-cons’”) agenda of a national intelligence “czar,” increased internal surveillance at the expense of Constitutional protections, and “terror” (as exemplified by the falsified Iraqi weapons of mass destruction) as the pretext to launch successive “regime change” wars. “We’re aware, of course,” says Mariani,” “that Americans have the defect of thinking the entire world revolves around us. In normal circumstances, I would not be saying that I hope people all around the world will take an interest in what, in some respects, are domestic American issues. "However, "Berg adds, "it appears obvious that this Commission sat through months of hearings, and listened to top officials, civilian and military, Myers, Condi Rice, John Ashcroft, and others, testifying falsely, and they, the Commissioners, rarely so much as winced. With infrequent exceptions, whenever an Administration source, at least in the public sessions, told a whopper, instead of tearing into that witness with follow-up questions, some Commissioner would politely change the subject. Even when they were being lied to on matters of the utmost importance. It’s pretty hard to avoid the conclusion that the liars of the government and the Pentagon, and the liars who were members or staff of the Commission, worked together to cobble together a false report. “Facts,” a very high proportion of them from sources that are essentially immune from open challenge, like the CIA, and are thus able to present as truth whatever they want, were cobbled together to support false conclusions ordered from above, by the true authors of the events, and others who have benefited. The hope, obviously, is that an impressive-looking volume, produced by a bipartisan panel of solemn-looking people and little criticized by “journalists” pulling down huge paychecks from Bush allies and war profiteers, will largely be accepted by the public as the final word. Not to mention, the government’s willing sacrifice of 3,000 people, from more than 80 countries but most of them Americans, to justify launching a war to seize the world’s second-largest proven oil reserves, is not a subject the average American wants to think about.
”Whether it is widely acknowledged or not, the truth is — and I think this is what Sen. Dayton is getting at, to his great credit — if critical witnesses lied to the Commission, and the Commission bought, or pretended to buy, those lies and put them into their report, the Commission and its literary product are unworthy of acceptance or respect. If this is what has happened, and if the political opposition and the press continue to say nothing, it is up to the rest of us to “connect up the dots.” Only, in that case, it’s almost certainly not a matter of connecting such-and-such a Muslim terrorist to that-and-so stupid a bureaucrat who let him into this country. Rather, the line looks increasingly like it begins with a neo-con wish for a “New Pearl Harbor,” and continues to a corrupted presidential election, and then on to a failed negotiation with the Taliban for a pipeline right-of-way, that continued, with liberal applications of cash, up to a few weeks before 9-11. Then, there are lots of dots, lots of corporate and other insider scandals and crimes that had to be covered up, including government price-fixing in the gold market, and then we can trace the dots through the horrible day of 9-11, and past the searing images that none who survived will ever forget, the smell that pervaded lower Manhattan for months, and the empty graves of 3,000 victims. The 9-11 dots next connect up with the Orwellian, pre-prepared “Patriot Act,” wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, dreadful destruction, and tens of thousands of dead and wounded, mostly hidden from our view. Then we can “connect the dots” to an obscene corporate porkfest, hundreds of billions of dollars being spent to immerse us in two quagmires, Dick Cheney’s company continuing to get huge no-bid contracts even after getting caught gouging the American taxpayers, and on to rapes and torture of Arabs in Abu Ghraib, and who knows how many persons in other, secret, prisons all over the world.”
“I don’t think we can say,” Mariani concludes drily, “that this is a picture of which Washington, Jefferson, or Madison would be proud.” So, today, America is in very grave trouble, and I’m sorry to say to those who are not Americans that you, too, are in trouble as a result. Our recent conduct impacts even the citizens of our mostly prosperous, traditional allies. And, certainly, except perhaps for some favored and rich nations, if you’re on Paul Wolfowitz’s long list of countries with oil and gas or that could otherwise profit from a “regime change,” some day soon you may wake up with American soldiers kicking down your door, and the imposition of a government that takes its orders from the CIA. This is why, we beseech you, please help us to expose to the world the true facts, and the many lies, concerning 9-11.”
FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT:
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