In the days after 9/11, a former Pakistani colleague from my days in Kandahar commented, “The people who did this watched it on TV and will never be prosecuted”. He was not talking about Osama bin Laden and the alleged hijackers.
The 25th anniversary of 9/11 took place in September 2026 — a whole generation ago. Yet, the public remain in a state of mass delusion as to who was responsible, what really happened in New York City and Washington, D.C. that day, and how the failure to investigate and understand these events has affected our lives. Within hours of the Twin Towers coming down, a vicious media campaign was launched, leading to a narrow ‘Overton window’ of acceptable discourse held in place by Goebbels-like repetition of simplified messaging. It included the horror of the Twin Towers coming down with huge loss of life, the hijackers, their ‘terrorist’ al-Qaeda brethren in Afghanistan, and pictures of Afghan women being executed by the Taliban. The purpose was to conjure fear and revulsion; to build support for a multi-decade series of wars, beginning with Afghanistan. President George W. Bush sneered, “Either you’re with us, or you’re with the terrorists”. He called anyone questioning the official story a conspiracy theorist disrespectful of the victims’ families.
I was frustrated by the compliance of mainstream media reporters, who were so fixated on the ordnance about to be rained upon the Afghan people that they failed to question whether al-Qaeda were really the culprits, or whether an invasion of Afghanistan was the answer. Having spent several months working in Kandahar and Herat on humanitarian and community projects in the year 2000, I was concerned for the fate of my Afghan colleagues. Yet, to question the media’s universal amplification of the ‘official story’ of the 9/11 events or the impending invasion of Afghanistan was quickly taboo; the public accepted it as ‘fact’ and the world — including myself — moved on. Listening to the Today programme, I was dismayed to hear a universal hysterical baying for vengeance from the House of Commons, and I offered to take the sole MP against the bombing to visit refugee camps on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
For the next four and a half years, I remained in Afghanistan and Pakistan working in jobs related to the ‘intervention’ (as the US-led invasion was euphemistically called). I worked for the World Food Programme during the initial US bombing campaign, as an election monitor in spring 2002 on the CIA-organised ‘Emergency Loya Jirga’, the first stage of the so-called ‘democratisation’ process, which was sold to the gullible Western taxpayer who was paying for this as bringing ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’ to Afghanistan. Upon witnessing unindicted warlords — who had committed atrocities in earlier phases of the war — being reinstated to government posts against the wishes of women, I began writing for various publications. I also worked on the Afghan Central Bank’s currency exchange project with US firm Lewis Berger and researched ‘judicial reform’ issues for thr International Crisis Group. After spending time in eastern Afghanistan with a tribal family famed for their role in the 1980s jihad, I became political advisor to the EU Ambassador and later wrote a book about an important indigenous peace plan to bring down the Taliban. The ‘Abdul Haq’ plan had buy-in from all sides, and the former King was to be the glue, yet Western elites jettisoned it, preferring to keep control.
For years, my focus became the injustices and inconsistencies of this and its effects on the people in Afghanistan. Later, I published academic papers and completed a PhD on issues surrounding ‘state building’, ‘fragile states’, ‘intervention’, and ‘democracy building’ as the ‘War on Terror’ unfolded, bringing carnage to the Middle East and costing the US taxpayer some $8 trillion. After Afghanistan, the US had invaded Iraq, then Syria, Libya, and so on — the famous ‘seven countries in five years’, as revealed by General Wesley Clark. The last countries on that list to be invaded are Iran and Lebanon, with this now happening, albeit 25 years later. These invasions of secular Islamic states were justified on the grounds of ‘terror threat’, as in Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’, ‘humanitarian intervention’, ‘responsibility to protect’, and so on. Yet, these justifications were built on the lies of 9/11 — that is, on the narrative that ‘fragile states’ and ‘extremists’ were responsible for it, and that ‘blowback’ from Western support of such ‘extremists’ during the 1980s Afghan-Soviet war is what had led to 9/11. I was so caught up in all this drama that it was over a decade before I revisited the events of 9/11 itself.
This is the story of how I exited the mass delusion about the events of that day and woke up to the real horror of 9/11: that it was, essentially, perpetrated by people a lot closer to home and not some ‘raghead in a cave with a laptop’. Because there are multitudinous aspects to this complex story, I think it is simplest is to take you on a journey of how my own awakening came about.
On the day of 9/11, I was, rather ironically, staying in Suffolk with a member of the Country Land and Business Association, which I had worked with until taking up an opportunity in Afghanistan with UN-Habitat, at the height of the Taliban regime, during summer 2000. I’d spent several months working in Kandahar and Herat before evacuating myself to Pakistan when a US warship, the USS Cole, was attacked in Aden. The expectation was that the US would respond by bombing Afghanistan again, as Clinton had done in 1998 in retribution for an attack on US embassies in Africa. Both these events were blamed on al-Qaeda.
Today, I was in Suffolk to assist ‘Lady C’ in making a report on the ‘Foot and Mouth’ crisis which had taken place while I’d been in Kandahar. Like BSE (mad cow disease), the government had turned foot-and-mouth disease into a national catastrophe. As I packed to leave Lady C’s home, I saw on her wall the painting of Dr Bryden’s famous ride to Jalalabad, bringing news of the disastrous British retreat from Kabul. I left Suffolk at lunchtime and drove into the chaos of Docklands, where a huge arms fair was taking place at ExCeL, meaning roads were closed and police were redirecting traffic. Finally arriving back home in central London, it was only when I called a stockbroker that I was told the markets were closed and was asked, “Have you not seen what is going on in New York?”
Waking Up to 9/11 Truth – Conspiracy in America
I believe I needed to live in New York to awaken to the depth of the crimes committed on 9/11. We arrived there in August 2014 for my husband to take up a post at the Security Council. We lived a seaside life in Larchmont, a village on the north side of Long Island Sound, but within 30 minutes of Grand Central. Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford had once owned a house there. But despite the beauty of the suburbs, I was troubled by what lay beneath the veneer of this privileged environment. All the way up the coast along the Metro-North line were 9/11 memorials in villages and towns to the men and women who had lost their lives on that appalling day.
The year before — 2013 — was the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination. Watching an ARTE documentary opened me to the possibility this was not the work of a ‘lone gunman’ (as Lee Harvey Oswald, the patsy, was portrayed to the American people). I bought a book by James W. Douglass titled JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. A masterpiece; it opened my eyes to the immensely challenging context within which JFK was operating, the multiple theatres of war the in which the US was engaged, and the fact that as the president, you can ‘be in office but not in power’. For, as Douglass writes, JFK was “locked in a struggle with his national security state. That state had higher values than obedience to the orders of a President who wanted peace”.
JFK was up against a powerful network of business interests, the mafia, defence and military-industrial power, the CIA, finance, and Israel, which was already steadily making inroads into US politics. Powerful men such as World War II generals Curtis LeMay and Lyman Lemnitzer, the Dulles brothers (one of whom was Secretary of State and the other head of the CIA), the Rockefellers (who owned Chase Manhattan), and James Jesus Angleton refused to submit to the authority of Kennedy; despite his being the elected President. JFK wanted to designate the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as a ‘foreign influence’ organisation and pushed for inspections of Dimona, the nuclear programme which Israel denied existed. Before JFK was even inaugurated, the CIA orchestrated the killing of Patrice Lumumba in Congo. Later, the Bay of Pigs operation, a disaster, was begun without his permission. He did, however, manage to stop Lemnitzer’s plan, ‘Operation Northwoods’, which proposed a false-flag campaign of terrorism inside the US to be blamed on Cuba, thereby justifying an invasion. Northwoods is significant as a precedent to 9/11 because it demonstrates the willingness of the deep state to perpetrate acts of terror on its own population for political purposes. JFK ultimately found himself isolated, and his plans arrayed against what he called in April 1961 “a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy”.
Some believe it was his 10 June 1963 Commencement Address at American University — in which he called for real peace as the necessary aim of rational men, rejected war and the acquisition of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons, castigated the propagandists, and called for a reset of relations with the USSR — that got him assassinated within months.
I was taken with Douglass’s descriptions of JFK’s growing spiritual development and the influence of Catholic monk Thomas Merton. Merton was famously writing to influential figures in politics and media, begging them to engage with the USSR or risk nuclear annihilation. I had attended a Catholic college in Kentucky for a year in the 1980s, close to Merton’s monastery at Gethsemani, so this resonated. Maybe Merton’s wisdom helped guide JFK to create back-channels (beyond the reach of his national security state) to negotiate the Cuban missile crisis with Khrushchev and bring the world back from the brink of nuclear war. Ultimately, my growing awareness that we had been lied to about the assassination of JFK enabled me to be open to considering that we had been lied to about 9/11. Lance de Haven-Smith, in Conspiracy Theory in America, details how anyone questioning the killing of JFK was quickly labelled a ‘conspiracy theorist’ in a CIA plan to induce silence and suspend legitimate inquiry.
I sent Douglass a copy of my book. We exchanged letters and spoke by phone. A Catholic peace activist since the 1960s, he was part of the East Coast peace movement that included the Berrigan brothers. Douglass had also written a book called Resistance and Contemplation and explained that both he and his wife were imprisoned several times in their quest to resist nuclear war. He explained how peace movements become infiltrated by deep state elements who plant charismatic characters to herd people like sheep into following a ‘red herring’, thus discrediting the whole movement. But for peace to prevail, society needed resisters, and this entailed being willing to go to prison. He likened it to the Indian philosophy of Satyagraha.
Maybe it was Douglass who recommended the next book I bought, by former Canadian diplomat Peter Dale Scott. Titled The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on US Democracy (2015), it argued that a hidden ‘deep state’ exists which influences and often opposes official US policies. Dale Scott said a series of ‘structural deep events’ ranging from the assassination of President Kennedy to 9/11 had significant points in common, such as overlapping personnel and modes of operation to shared sources of funding.
He also said that this deep state is “partly institutionalised in non-accountable intelligence agencies like the CIA and NSA, but also includes private corporations such as Booz Allen Hamilton and SAIC; to which 70% of intelligence budgets are outsourced.” Booz Allen Hamilton was owned by the infamous ‘Carlyle Group’, which counted politicians including George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, John Major, and James Baker among its senior figures. Dale Scott added, “Behind these public and private institutions is the traditional influence of Wall Street bankers and lawyers, allied with international oil companies beyond the reach of domestic law”. He explained this supranational deep state was “sometimes demonstrably opposed to both White House policies and the American public interest”.
In other words, it faced the same opposition that JFK was up against. Dale Scott named the structural deep events that often presaged massive escalation in foreign wars ‘crimes against democracy’. What he said applied equally to the shocking assassination of JFK as it did to the events of 9/11.
Meanwhile, after dropping my children at school, I would head to a café in Larchmont where each day the same crowd buried themselves religiously in their copies of The New York Times. A man called George stood out; he didn’t read the papers, and he was the type who would help you buy a used car. One morning, as I was trying to meet a deadline, tapping away at my laptop, George interrupted me, looked directly at me, and said, “You do know the Twin Towers were brought down with pre-positioned explosives?”
Astonished, I asked him if we could return to this later. I’m ashamed to say I initially thought he was totally ‘off the reservation’. But within weeks I heard about a group of architects, engineers, and firefighters who also disputed the official story of 9/11. My heart sank; it was true that George was not a nutter and there was a case to answer.
Sometime later, I heard from an academic who I had met while attending a military conference in the UK years earlier. I had made some comments for him on a paper about the ’45 minutes’ claim that presaged the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ pretext for war in Iraq. He said, “I’m sending you scientific links related to 9/11, and it is imperative you watch them ASAP!”
I watched the videos over Christmas 2015, and I was shocked. Yes, I know I was much later to the party than many others! But I was amazed that such a huge body of important evidence had been completely ignored by the media (and academia) for so long. The videos I watched (many now censored online) included Loose Change and also documentaries from the website of the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. But he had told me to watch a physics professor named Steven E. Jones first. Jones had taken his own samples of World Trade Center (WTC) dust in the days after 9/11. Many researchers complained that in the days after 9/11, the government (and law enforcement) were apparently not taking samples, protecting the site, or properly investigating the crime. Rather, the emphasis was on a ‘clean-up’ of the site (and ultimately destruction of evidence), which was unprecedented. Professor Jones found the presence of nano-thermitic compounds in the WTC dust, raising the question of how an advanced military-grade explosive had made its way into the buildings. There were also videos of firefighters talking about explosions as the buildings came down, including in lift shafts and basements. Also, there was the fact that WTC 7, which had not been hit by a plane, collapsed at 5.20pm. To compound this, the BBC’s Jane Standley was filmed apparently reading off a newswire script saying WTC 7 had collapsed while it was still standing behind her!
It was only by analysing what scientists were saying about the collapse of the buildings, about the presence of thermite in the dust, the strange beams of blue light shining into the sky for weeks after the event (from the epicentre of where the towers had once stood), and the failure of the government-controlled National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to engage with professional architects and engineers who raised questions about inconsistencies in the official story that I began to get a handle on the fact that we had been sold a big fat lie about 9/11.
Yet 9/11 remained the linchpin justification for the ‘War on Terror’, the loss of our civil liberties, the increasing demonisation of Muslims, the trillions spent on weaponry, and the loss of life. In short, the narrative surrounding 9/11, the ‘founding myth’ of our National Security State, appears to be based on a lie.
I soon found there were many groups of credentialed experts for ‘9/11 truth’ beyond Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, such as pilots, firefighters, law enforcement officers, cabin crew, and intelligence officers. They raised serious questions. Many had lost colleagues on the day — 343 firefighters were killed at the Twin Towers — yet all had been ignored or, worse, mocked, by an arrogant mainstream media that was clearly involved in a cover-up. I saw that the supposedly celebrated New York Times also ignored these questions, despite 9/11 being the biggest story to take place on its home turf.
I went to my local library and asked what books were available on 9/11; there was nothing except a single history book that reiterated the official story. Amazed, I asked the librarian to search other New York City libraries. And though I soon discovered many serious books on Amazon (and later met some of the writers), I was amazed that not a single one made it into the libraries of the city where the events took place.
Disturbed by these findings, I again contacted Jim Douglass. Resignedly, he confirmed this was all true and recommended reading David Ray Griffin, a professor of religion and theology who had written several books on 9/11, the most famous being aptly named The New Pearl Harbor. Griffin argued the attacks were an ‘inside job’ orchestrated by elements within the Bush Administration, and he focused on several core theses to illustrate the inconsistencies and lies inherent in the official narrative. These included the symmetrical collapse of the buildings and the total collapse of WTC 7 as evidence of controlled demolition. He questioned the official narrative around the failure of North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) to intercept the hijacked planes, arguing that standard operating procedures were ignored to ensure the success of the attacks. He disputed the official claim that American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon and said the attacks were a ‘false-flag’ operation designed to manufacture public consent for pre-planned geopolitical goals. Among other books, he wrote an important critique of the controversial 9/11 Commission, titled The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions. Philip Zelikow, the Commission’s executive director, had written academically about the creation of ‘public myths’. Ghislaine Maxwell had been proposed as a member of the Commission, to the disgust of the ‘Jersey Girls’ — as a group of the 9/11 widows were dubbed.
In spring 2016, I heard an interview between radio journalist Bonnie Faulkner and Christopher Bollyn, an investigative journalist specialising in government conspiracies. Bollyn said that he was going to give a talk about his 2012 book Solving 9/11: The Deception That Changed the World. I decided to attend, and the next evening, I arrived at a church on the Upper West Side to find a fair-haired, solid American man in his 40s. The theme of his talk was ‘Solving 9/11 Ends the Wars’, and Bollyn alluded to the Watergate lesson regarding how ‘the cover-up helps discover who committed the crime’. He provided crucial background to the events of 9/11 that had been ignored by corporate media.
In December 2001, Bollyn had met Eckehardt Werthebach, the former president of Germany’s Verfassungsschutz intelligence service, who told him:
The deathly precision of the attacks and the magnitude would have required years of planning. Such a sophisticated operation would require the fixed frame of a state intelligence organisation, something not found in a loose group like the one led by the student Mohammad Atta in Hamburg.
In his book, Bollyn states:
If Werthebach’s analysis is correct, and I have every reason to believe it is, the official version is nothing but a pack of lies. This would mean that the members of the criminal network are still occupying the highest positions of power in the United States, Israel, and other nations. The members of this network are dedicated to preventing the evidence from being released because it would expose the real perpetrators. This is the only logical reason why the 9-11 evidence has been suppressed, the investigation controlled, and the litigation and discovery processes obstructed.
Ultimately, therefore, Bollyn concluded that the crimes of 9/11 would only ever be solved by independent researchers.
Bollyn’s talk was spellbinding. He went where no mainstream media propagandist would dare. He covered the arguments already made by Griffin about the collapse of the Twin Towers, and also went further by setting the event in the context of Israel’s history of false-flag terrorism, and its links to a shadowy group of American neoconservatives and their objective, clearly spelt out in policy documents of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC): ‘Rebuilding America’s Defences’ and the paper ‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm’. These objectives included the ‘Greater Israel Project’ aiming to dominate countries in the Middle East not yet under their control.
He looked into discrepancies about the 9/11 planes, the terror drills that became real, the London bombings, and the sinking of the Estonia. He asked why crucial computer systems failed, looked at the Florida (Mossad) connection, mapped what he felt was the network behind 9/11, the media cover-up, and the fact that the supposed mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had been reported dead in a September 2002 raid in Karachi (yet was still ‘apparently’ in Guantánamo awaiting a trial that could never occur). He also looked into something called Ptech and the financial crisis, and alluded to Maxwell and the stolen PROMIS software. He asked why iron boiled beneath the rubble and repeatedly referred to the impetus by the authorities to destroy evidence.
An aspect that stood out for me was his questioning about the transition of the WTC from its previous owner, the Port Authority, which had lost a case with the Environmental Protection Agency related to asbestos in the buildings. The ‘white elephant’ Twin Towers were then privatised and leased to Larry Silverstein for a mere $100,000 only six weeks prior to 9/11. Silverstein, who already owned WTC 7, reinsured the towers for ‘terrorism’ and ‘airplanes flying into buildings’ and ultimately collected a payout of some $4.55 billion (after successfully suing the Munich-based Allianz for a ‘double payout’). Bollyn provided evidence of a powerful group of Zionist dual Israeli-US citizens in New York who had facilitated this privatisation and had links both to the neoconservatives and to military intelligence in Israel. Bollyn went on to discuss the history of companies responsible for security at the Twin Towers and analysed the 1993 WTC attack. He discussed the Mossad (and — now we know — Epstein) links with this group of powerful Zionists and Hollywood, and showed examples of predictive programming of the public with films made by — for example — Arnon Milchan showing planes flying into the Twin Towers.
He showed footage of Silverstein in Israel discussing architectural plans for a new Building 7 prior to the WTC attacks. He discussed the collapse of the Twin Towers, showed what he described as squibs of the explosives, and alluded to the odd presence of the Israeli ‘art students’ in the buildings during the summer before the attacks, who were thought to have been laying charges.
He showed how the event was immediately framed by former Israeli prime minister (and Epstein associate) Ehud Barak in a BBC World interview before the Twin Towers collapsed. Barak, former commander of Israel’s Sayeret Matkal, its covert operations force under the Directorate of Military Intelligence, called for a ‘Global War on Terror’ and US military intervention in Afghanistan. Bollyn said the interview was a textbook example of how ‘false-flag terror’ works and asserted that Barak was a commander of the 9/11 operation.
Like Jones, Bollyn was also troubled that the crime scene of 9/11 was both unprotected and cleaned up without a regular ‘blue riband’ investigation. Later, I saw a firefighter say there would have been more investigation into a house fire than there was into 9/11.
Bollyn’s work was thorough. He went to Zionist-controlled steelyards in New Jersey, and visited the site where a plane supposedly disappeared into a hole in Pennsylvania as well as the Pentagon — a plane that nobody could find. In addition to the ‘art students’ project on the Twin Towers, he talked about the famous ‘Dancing Israeli’ Mossad agents (later dubbed by Trump ‘Dancing Palestinians’) arrested ‘documenting the event’ from the New Jersey side of the Hudson River. These agents were held and then released to Israel, where they famously admitted to being Mossad on a TV show some months later.
Bollyn showed how the 9/11 wives and families faced a judicial war of attrition as their cases were moved to the Southern District of New York court, controlled by neocon Zionist Judge Alvin Hellerstein. He talked about ICTS, the airport security firm begun by Israeli agents from Shin Bet — and which apparently controlled security at all airports where the planes supposedly took off from — as well as US flights from Heathrow. He discussed the history of the Zionist state, which he said was founded based on terror. He reminded us of the bombing of the King David Hotel by Irgun.
Much of this is now coming into focus for people due to the atrocities committed by Israel, a supposed ally, in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. If anything, the complicity and depth of involvement of our own ‘deep state’ in the Gaza genocide against the will of the people underlines that Bollyn was correct in saying that a criminal network controls our governments.
He described what he said was Israeli control over the interpretation of the 9/11 events, including the son of a former Israeli ambassador to the US, Michael Arad, designing the new Freedom Tower, and Israel controlling the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. At each ‘cog in the wheel’ of the 9/11 cover-up, Bollyn found a Zionist or an Israeli dual citizen. Ultimately, he stated that 9/11 was the ignition for the already planned ‘War on Terror’ as outlined in PNAC documents. All these were questions the mainstream media apparently ignored.
Bollyn’s talk was so detailed and convincing that at the end a man in a yarmulke applauded him, commenting, “This is a crime and needs to be prosecuted as such”. But another man was aggressive and rude, labelling Bollyn ‘antisemitic’. I later found out this man had written his own book on 9/11 blaming Pakistan (with little context). Nevertheless, it was interesting that a Jewish man recognised the existence of a Zionist cabal and stressed the need to prosecute the actual crimes, while a WASP ignored Bollyn’s findings and, instead of engaging with them, immediately labelled him ‘antisemitic’. Quite pathetic!
I attended several impressive conferences on 9/11 truth in New York City, which brought together a fascinating range of people. They included former Italian politicians, academics, ex-military personnel, firefighters, and retired staff from the US Government, among others. One such event was held in September 2017 in the Old Union Building at the lower end of Manhattan. The local press ignored these significant gatherings and what they had to say about what had taken place on 9/11.
I heard two more of Bollyn’s talks in the following months, including one hosted by retired senior firefighter Rudy Dent, who I had seen online discussing explosions bringing down the buildings. He was not alone in saying this, but many were scared to speak out due to the threatened loss of their pensions. Another talk by Bollyn was scheduled for Brooklyn, organised by a woman I had met at Dent’s home on the other side of the Hudson River. But she was subjected to an orchestrated protest from ‘the blob’, who smeared her and Bollyn as ‘antisemitic’ and even threatened other tenants in the building with reprisals if they didn’t push the landlord to call off the talk! Finally, a group of us gathered under the stars on her roof near Times Square in the heat of late summer to see his presentation. Bollyn said he had also been invited to speak in Britain by David Icke, but he was refused entry at the airport upon his arrival!
Moving Back to England
I returned to live in England in summer 2017. It was the first time I had lived there since September 2001, when I had moved to Pakistan for six months to work for the World Food Programme (WFP), and then moved on to Afghanistan, Geneva, and New York. I was now a different person, as these experiences had certainly changed me and inspired a quest to correct the wrongs I had witnessed in the mainstream reporting of events. But my new-found interest in 9/11 was the most polarising.
I moved to the Cotswolds and felt I’d re-entered a world so insulated it was like living in an ‘Aga saga’ novel. My brother commented, “Clearly Gloucestershire was not ready for you!” as my attempts to shake people out of their apathy led to my abrupt ejection from a genteel book club and — I suspect — my being given notice on a rental cottage. The attitude was basically, “We take the FT every weekend and get all our news from that”. When I asked why anyone would want their information curated by the ownership of the FT, with its stable of Ed Luce, Gideon Rachman, and Gillian Tett, I was met with a confused, blank look.
Upon escaping to London to protest outside the BBC on the anniversary of 9/11, a lady wearing cardboard replicas of the Twin Towers commented, “The apathy is so bad in Britain that people won’t wake up until the coming totalitarianism hits them like a juggernaut”. This was two years before Covid.
A well-known leading writer for one of the left-leaning broadsheets had asked me to be in touch on my return to London. He had written several opinion pieces mentioning my book, so I assumed he would take what I had learnt in New York seriously. He invited me for tea at the Garrick, one of the few men-only clubs left in the West End. When I mentioned 9/11, he looked dismayed, said his American wife would be furious, and said that he could not possibly write about it.
I approached Susannah at Friends of le Monde Diplomatique, where I had been invited to do a book talk years earlier. They were open and kindly folk, but when I asked if they would be interested in a talk about 9/11 Truth, she said, “People don’t want to believe that is the world we live in”.
Then, in early 2018, I heard a lecture was taking place at Queen Mary University in London by Professor Colin Bailey. It was to be the inaugural lecture by a man who was clearly being positioned as the ‘go-to’ expert on the collapse (in case, for example, any journalist dared to write about it). I went along and was astonished that he mentioned nothing about the controversy surrounding the government-approved NIST study, nothing about the huge number of architects and engineers who had signed a petition calling for a new study and proper scientific engagement on the collapse, and nothing about the University of Alaska Fairbanks study, which challenged NIST’s problematic ‘official version of events’ report. It seemed extraordinary that he chose WTC 7 as a topic for an inaugural lecture, yet airbrushed this context out of the story.
Having recently returned from New York, I was angered. I put my hand up but was summarily ignored as question after question was taken from what appeared to me to be ‘positioned’ members of the audience. Finally, I challenged him on all this, but later, outside the lecture, other members of the audience were furious that I’d spoilt his party. When I told another academic what had happened and how furious people appeared to be with me, he commented, “Yes, it’s just not cricket, is it?” It was a perfect encapsulation.
So why does this all matter?
Questioning 9/11 is stigmatised. 9/11 has assumed the quality of a myth or religion, instead of being examined rationally and scientifically, as it should have been. We must change our approach and question these events precisely because the way we have reacted to them has been devastating to our societies and economies. These effects include:
- The prosecution of ‘the war on terror’ under false pretences. The wars in the Middle East led to the removal of stable and secular Arab leaders and replaced them with chaos and fragility. Libya, for example, has seen a return to slave markets. Afghanistan is ruled once more by the Taliban. Millions have been displaced or killed, and the environment has been devastated. Today, Trump’s invasion of Iran after being pushed by Israel has led to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and now the Red Sea. It means global energy is in for a crunch with the resultant effect on bond markets, the stock market, the dollar, global shipping, the global supply chain, and the oil supply needed to keep a modern economy going. Apparently, oil production levels are correlated with population, so a huge reduction in oil will lead to famine.
- The USA PATRIOT Act and the terrorism laws in the UK. The thousands of pages of the USA PATRIOT Act were apparently written before 9/11 and then passed by Congress unchallenged within days of 9/11. This is the foundation, therefore, of the National Security State which was made possible by the ‘myths’ of 9/11.
- Restrictions on the way we travel and the advent (by Israel) of invasive and potentially cancer-causing or DNA-altering ‘scanning’ equipment in airports.
- Demonisation of Muslims plus plenty of legislation to push that, such as the Prevent strategy.
- Zionist control over our institutions, as Friends of Israel seems to be a prerequisite to join for all MPs.
- Those who perpetrated 9/11 were never held to account. Hence, they have gone on to commit far greater crimes. These have arguably included genocide, as well as perpetrating a series of illegal wars during the ‘War on Terror’. Today, the world sits on the apex of World War II and nuclear war both in the Russo-Ukrainian War and with Iran.
- Mass wastage of taxpayers’ funds leading to a debt crisis, especially in Europe, the UK, and the US. The UK is having to borrow to pay the interest just on its debt. All these countries are on the brink of the credit crunch/debt trap as the yields on the 10-year bonds rise.
Finally, it matters that people must wake up from the 25-year spell they have been put under and show a willingness to challenge the official version of events because 9/11 is, as Helen Buyniski says, “the founding myth of our security state”. It is the linchpin justification for relentless attacks on our civil liberties, Islamophobia, government overreach, massive military spending, and endless war.
My interest in 9/11 took me on a journey that brought me new friends, spurred my curiosity in history, and led me to understand that our governments and media do not represent us, but rather act for deeper, more nefarious, interests. But there is light on the horizon if one is prepared to look deeper, to find a greater diversity of better informed voices — for there are brave souls out there, willing to risk all to speak the truth.
For more information regarding ongoing truth-seeking efforts within the 9/11 Truth movement, visit the websites for the Turning the Tide: 9/11 25 Years Later conference, the Guns and Butter Show, the Lawyer’s Committee for 9/11 Inquiry, and their film series.
