Tuesday 21 September 2004

9-11 Mysteries Remain

Three Years After Terror Attacks, Public Still Doubts 'Official' Story

Three years after the events of 9-11, half of the residents of New York City believe U.S. leaders had foreknowledge and “consciously failed” to act to prevent the disasters, while two in three want a new investigation of the “still-unanswered questions.”

In the first survey of public opinion about allegations of U.S. government complicity and whitewashing of the events of 9-11, a Zogby International poll found that fewer than two in five New Yorkers believe the official 9-11 commission “answered all of the important questions about what actually happened on Sept. 11.”

One in two New York City residents say that senior government officials “knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around Sept. 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act,” according to the poll of Aug. 24-26, 2004.

Sixty-six percent called for another full investigation, by Congress or Elliot Spitzer (left), New York’s attorney general, to resolve the “unanswered questions.”

“I think these numbers show that most New Yorkers are now fed up with the silence, and that politicians trying to exploit 9-11 do so at their peril,” said W. David Kubiak, executive director of 911truth.org, one of the groups that commissioned the poll. “The 9-11 case is not closed, and New York’s questions are not going away.”

The New York Times, on the other hand, told puzzled readers on Sept. 11, 2004, that it’s possible to know what happened on 9-11 “without knowing what happened.”

“In the three years since 9-11, we’ve begun to understand that it’s possible to know what happened without knowing what happened,” the editorial began. “Some of what we need to know publicly has been provided by the report of the 9-11 commission. Other answers are lacking.”

Sept. 11 is “a central event in this nation’s history,” the Times editorial concluded. “It’s important that we who live most immediately in its shadow press hard to learn everything that can be learned about that day and to make sure that nothing is allowed to fade into the world of the publicly unknowable.”

The New York Times efforts, however, did not include sending a reporter to either of the two recent 9-11 conferences held on Broadway in downtown Manhattan that addressed the unanswered questions.

The first event, “The 9-11 Citizens Commission: The Omissions Hearings,” was held Sept. 9 at Symphony Space on Broadway. This six-hour conference was chaired by former Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) and brought together panels of experts who presented new evidence and raised questions about the official version of what happened.

The second event, “Confronting the Evidence: 9-11 and the Search for Truth,” was held at the Manhattan Center Ballroom during the evening of Sept. 11.

While American Free Press participated in both conferences, The New York Times, which says it should “press hard to learn everything that can be learned about that day,” confirmed it had not covered either event.

While the Times carried a 9-11 story daily during the days leading up to the third anniversary, its reporting failed to ask critical questions. For example, in a Sept. 10 article entitled “Falling Bodies,” the fate of more than 1,000 people trapped in the twin towers above the levels impacted by the planes is discussed without mentioning the possibility of rescue by helicopter—or the fact that the doors to the roof had been locked.

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