The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [53]
The remains of Olson’s wife, Barbara, were found in the ruins of the Pentagon, scattered in three separate locations. “It took a long time to provide an identification,” her husband has said. “But finally they did release the remains of Barbara. And she’s buried up in Door County, Wisconsin … because she loved that place so much. And she’s there now.”
Absent evidence for his claim about the Olson calls, Griffin resorted to innuendo. One “cannot ignore the fact,” he wrote, “that the information about Barbara came from Ted Olson, that he was working for the Bush-Cheney administration.” It is the notion on which Griffin and the rest harp over and over—in his words that there is “overwhelming” supporting evidence that 9/11 was “an inside job.” There was “a prima facie case for assuming that the Bush administration was involved.”
THE SKEPTICS MAKE much of a document issued exactly a year before the attacks by the Project for the New American Century, a right-wing group that included men soon to hold senior posts in the Bush administration—Cheney, Rumsfeld, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and George Bush’s brother Jeb, the governor of Florida.
The paper, entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” envisaged the removal of “regional aggressors” in the Middle East, and a continuing U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf—“unquestioned military pre-eminence.” Achieving such ambitions would be a lengthy process, the document noted, “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”
The luminaries of the New American Century group, all now appointed to positions in the new administration, got their catalyzing event within eight months. In a diary entry on the night of the attacks, President Bush reportedly called 9/11 “the Pearl Harbor of the 21st century.” Later, he would draw the parallel to 1941 in public. The catastrophe of September 11 did predispose the American public for great military initiatives abroad, wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq—to topple regional aggressor Saddam Hussein.
The skeptics do not believe the September 11 attacks occurred by happenstance. They infer, rather, that those around Bush who yearned for “unquestioned military pre-eminence” must have been involved in 9/11. “Who benefits?” asked Griffin. “Who had the motive? Who had the means? Who had the opportunity? Certainly the U.S. government benefited immensely from 9/11 and cannot therefore be dropped from any rational list of suspect organizations.”
MIHOP—Made It Happen On Purpose—adherents suggest that 9/11 was a false flag operation, a fabrication to justify foreign wars, and rattle off a string of supposed precedents. They cite U.S. provocation as having triggered the Mexican-American War of 1846, resulting in the acquisition of vast new territories from Texas to California. They point to the mysterious sinking of the battleship Maine in 1898. Though perhaps just a tragic accident, the sinking was used to justify the ensuing war with Spain—leading to U.S. dominance over the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico.
MIHOP disciples also recall the argument that the orthodox history of Pearl Harbor itself is incorrect, that—though President Franklin Roosevelt had prior intelligence of a coming attack—he took no preemptive action. Roosevelt’s motive? According to revisionist theory, he needed the day of Japanese “infamy” to ensure support for taking America into the war.
MIHOP people cite, too, the Gulf of Tonkin incident during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. Exposés have shown that the administration greatly exaggerated the facts about skirmishes in the gulf between North Vietnamese and U.S. ships in 1964. The inflated story was used, all the same, as pivotal justification for committing the United States to war in Vietnam.
Those who think the false flag ploy may apply to 9/11 also pounced, within