Category: Archive

Although I am a philosopher of religion and theologian, I have spent most of my time during the past three years on 9/11—studying it, writing about it, and speaking about it. In this lecture, I will try to make clear why I believe this issue worthy of so much time and energy. I will do this in terms of the distinction between myth and reality.

I am here using the term "myth" in two senses. In one sense, a myth is an idea that, while widely believed, is false, failing to correspond with reality.

In a deeper sense, which is employed by students of religion, a myth serves as an orienting and mobilizing story for a people, a story that reminds them who they are and why they do what they do. When a story is called as a myth in this sense—which we can call Myth with a capital M—the focus is not on the story’s relation to reality but on its function. This orienting and mobilizing function is possible, moreover, only because Myths with a capital M have religious overtones. Such a Myth is a Sacred Story.

However, although to note that a story functions as a Myth in the religious sense is not necessarily to deny its truth, a story cannot function as a Sacred Myth within a community or nation unless it is believed to be true. In most cases, moreover, the truth of the Myth is taken on faith. It is not a matter of debate. If some people have the bad taste to question the truth of the Sacred Story, the keepers of the faith do not enter into debate with them. Rather, they ignore them or denounce them as blasphemers.

According to the official story about 9/11, America, because of its goodness, was attacked by fanatical Arab Muslims who hate our freedoms. This story has functioned as a Sacred Myth for the United States since that fateful day. And this function appears to have been carefully orchestrated. The very next day, President Bush announced his intention to lead "a monumental struggle of Good versus Evil."¹ Then on September 13, he declared that the following day would be a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance for the Victims of the Terrorist Attacks. And on that next day, the president himself, surrounded by Billy Graham, a cardinal, a rabbi, and an imam, delivered a sermon in the national cathedral, saying:

Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of Evil. War has been waged against us by stealth and deceit and murder. This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger. . . . In every generation, the world has produced enemies of human freedom. They have attacked America, because we are freedom’s home and defender. And the commitment of our fathers is now the calling of our time. . . . [W]e ask almighty God to watch over our nation, and grant us patience and resolve in all that is to come. . . . And may He always guide our country. God bless America.²

Through this unprecedented event, in which the president of the United States issued a declaration of war from a cathedral, French author Thierry Meyssan observed in 2002, "the American government consecrated . . . its version of events. From then on, any questioning of the official truth would be seen as sacrilege."³

That attitude has remained dominant in the public sphere until this day, as the official account has continued to serve as a Sacred Story. When people raise questions about this story, they are either ignored, ridiculed as conspiracy theorists, or—as Charlie Sheen has recently experienced—attacked personally. When anyone asks what right the administration has to invade and occupy other countries, to imprison people indefinitely without due process, or even to ignore various laws, the answer is always the same: "9/11." Those who believe that US law and international law should be respected are dismissed as having "a pre-9/11 mind-set."

Given the role the official account of 9/11 has played and continues to play, the most important question before our country today is whether this account, besides being a Myth in the religious sense, is also a myth in the pejorative sense—that is, whether it is simply false.

As a philosopher of religion, I would emphasize that the fact that a story has served as a Myth in the religious sense does not necessarily mean that it fails to correspond with reality. Many religious accounts contain at least a kernel of truth that can be defended in terms of a rational examination of the relevant evidence.

In many cases, however, stories that have served as religious Myths cannot stand up to rational scrutiny. When such a story is stripped of its halo and treated simply as a theory, rather than an unquestionable dogma, it cannot be defended as the best theory to account for the relevant facts. The official account of 9/11 is such a theory. When challenges to it are not treated as blasphemy, it can easily be seen to be composed of a number of ideas that are myths in the sense of not corresponding with reality. Using the word "myth" from now on only in this pejorative sense, I will discuss nine of the major myths contained in the official story about 9/11. I will thereby show that the official account of 9/11 cannot be defended, in light of the relevant evidence, against the main alternative account, according to which 9/11 was an inside job, orchestrated by people within our own government. I will begin with a few myths that prevent many people from even looking at the evidence for this alternative account.

Myth Number 1: Our political and military leaders simply would not do such a thing.

This idea is widely believed. But it is undermined by much evidence. The United States, like many other countries, has often used deceit to begin wars—for example, the Mexican-American war, with its false claim that Mexico had "shed American blood on the American soil,"⁴ the Spanish-American war, with its "Remember the Maine" hoax,⁵ the war in the Philippines, with its false claim that the Filipinos fired first,⁶ and the Vietnam war, with its Tonkin Gulf hoax.⁷ The United States has also sometimes organized false flag terrorist attacks—killing innocent civilians, then blaming the attacks on an enemy country or group, often by planting evidence. We have even done this in allied countries. As Daniele Ganser has shown in his recent book NATO’s Secret Armies, NATO, guided by the CIA and the Pentagon, arranged many such attacks in Western European countries during the Cold War. These attacks were successfully blamed on Communists and other leftists to discredit them in the eyes of the voting public.⁸

Finally, in case it be thought that US military leaders would not orchestrate such attacks against US citizens, one needs only to read the plan known as Operations Northwoods, which the Joint Chiefs of Staff worked up in 1962, shortly after Fidel Castro had overthrown the pro-American dictator Batista. This plan contained various "pretexts which would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba." American citizens would have been killed in some of them, such as a "Remember the Maine" incident, in which: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantánamo Bay and blame Cuba."⁹

At this point, some people, having seen evidence that US leaders would be morally capable of orchestrating 9/11, might avoid looking at the evidence by appeal to

Myth Number 2: Our political and military leaders would have had no motive for orchestrating the 9/11 attacks.

This myth was reinforced by The 9/11 Commission Report. While explaining why al-Qaeda had ample motives for carrying out the attacks, this report mentions no motives that US leaders might have had. But the alleged motive of al-Qaeda—that it hated Americans and their freedoms—is dwarfed by a motive held by many members of the Bush-Cheney administration: the dream of establishing a global Pax Americana, the first all-inclusive empire in history.

This dream had been articulated by many neoconservatives, or neocons, throughout the 1990s, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union made it seem possible. It was first officially articulated in the Defense Planning Guidance of 1992, drafted by Paul Wolfowitz on behalf of then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney—a document that has been called "a blueprint for permanent American global hegemony"¹⁰ and Cheney’s "Plan . . . to rule the world."¹¹

Achieving this goal would require four things. One of these was getting control of the world’s oil, especially in Central Asia and the Middle East, and the Bush-Cheney administration came to power with plans already made to attack Afghanistan and Iraq. A second requirement was a technological transformation of the military, in which fighting from space would become central. A third requirement was an enormous increase in military spending, to pay for these new wars and for weaponizing space. A fourth need was to modify the doctrine of preemptive attack, so that America would be able to attack other countries even if they posed no imminent threat.

These four elements would, moreover, require a fifth: an event that would make the American people ready to accept these imperialistic policies. As Zbigniew Brzezinski explained in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, the American people, with their democratic instincts, are reluctant to authorize the money and human sacrifices necessary for "imperial mobilization," and this refusal "limits . . . America’s . . . capacity for military intimidation."¹² But this impediment could be overcome if there were "a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat"¹³ —just as the American people were willing to enter World War II only after "the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor."¹⁵ This same idea was suggested in 2000 in a document entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses, which was put out by a neocon think tank called the Project for the New American Century, many members of which—including Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz—became central members of the Bush administration. This document, referring to the goal of transforming the military, said that this "process of transformation . . . is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor."15

When the attacks of 9/11 occurred, they were treated like a new Pearl Harbor. Several members of the Bush administration spoke of 9/11 as providing opportunities. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said that 9/11 created "the kind of opportunities that World War II offered, to refashion the world."¹⁶ It created, in particular, the opportunity to attack Afghanistan and Iraq; to increase the military budget enormously; to go forward with military transformation; and to turn the new idea of preemptive warfare into official doctrine. This doctrinal change was announced in the 2002 version of the National Security Strategy, which said that America will "act against . . . emerging threats before they are fully formed."¹⁷

So, not only did the Bush administration reap huge benefits from 9/11. These were benefits that it had desired in advance. The idea that it would have had no motives for orchestrating 9/11 is a myth. But there is one more myth that keeps many people from looking at the evidence. This is

Myth Number 3: Such a big operation, involving so many people, could not have been kept a secret, because someone involved in it would have talked by now.

This claim is based on a more general myth, which is that is impossible for secret government operations to be kept secret very long, because someone always talks. But how could we know this? If some big operations have remained secret until now, we by definition do not know about them. Moreover, we do know of big some operations that were kept secret as long as necessary, such as the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb, and the war in Indonesia in 1957, which the United States government provoked, participated in, and was able to keep secret from its own people until a book about it appeared in 1995.¹⁸ Many more examples could be given.

We can understand, moreover, why those with inside knowledge of 9/11 would not talk. At least most of them would have been people with the proven ability to keep secrets. Those who were directly complicit would also be highly motivated to avoid public disgrace and the gas chamber. Those people who had knowledge without being complicit could be induced to keep quiet by means of more or less subtle threats—such as: "Joe, if you go forward with your plans to talk to the press about this, I don’t know who is going to protect your wife and kids from some nutcase angered by your statement." Still another fact is that neither the government nor the mainstream press has, to say the least, shown any signs of wanting anyone to come forward.

I come now to

Myth Number 4: The 9/11 Commission, which has endorsed the official account, was an independent, impartial commission and hence can be believed.

One needs only to look at the reviews of The 9/11 Commission Report on Amazon.com to see that this assumption is widely accepted. Perhaps this is partly because in the Preface, the Commission’s chairman and vice chairman tell us that the Commission sought "to be independent, impartial, thorough, and nonpartisan." But these terms do not describe the reality. The Commission’s lack of impartiality can be partly explained by the fact that Chairman Thomas Kean, most of the other commissioners, and at least half of the members of the staff had conflicts of interest.¹⁹

The most serious problem, however, is that the executive director, Philip Zelikow, was essentially a member of the Bush-Cheney administration. He had worked with Condoleezza Rice on the National Security Council in the administration of the first President Bush. When the Republicans were out of office during the Clinton administration, Zelikow and Rice wrote a book together. Rice then, as National Security Advisor for the second President Bush, had Zelikow help make the transition to the new National Security Council. After that, Zelikow was appointed to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Zelikow was, therefore, the White House’s man inside the 9/11 Commission.

And yet, as executive director, he guided the staff, which did virtually all the work of the Commission.²⁰ Zelikow was in position, therefore, to decide which topics would be investigated and which ones not. One disgruntled member reportedly said at the time, "Zelikow is calling the shots. He’s skewing the investigation and running it his own way."²¹

Accordingly, insofar as the Commission was supposed to be investigating the failure of the Bush administration to prevent the attacks, the Commission was no more independent and impartial than if Dick Cheney had been running it. (The only difference is that no one got shot.)

Zelikow’s ideological and personal closeness to the Bush administration is shown by one more fact that has until now not been widely known, even within the 9/11 truth movement. I mentioned earlier the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy statement of 2002, in which the new doctrine of preemptive warfare was articulated. The primary author of this document, reports James Mann in Rise of the Vulcans, was none other than Philip Zelikow. According to Mann, after Rice saw a first draft, which had been written by Richard Haass in the State Department, she, wanting "something bolder," brought in Zelikow to completely rewrite it.²² The result was a very bellicose document that used 9/11 to justify the administration’s so-called war on terror. Max Boot described it as a "quintessentially neo-conservative document."²³

We can understand, therefore, why the Commission, under Zelikow’s leadership, would have ignored all evidence that would point to the truth: that 9/11 was a false flag operation intended to authorize the doctrines and funds needed for a new level of imperial mobilization.

The suggestion that 9/11 was a false flag operation brings us to:

Myth Number 5: The Bush administration provided proof that the attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda terrorists under the direction of Osama bin Laden.

One of the main pieces of alleged proof involved the claim that the baggage of Mohamed Atta, called the ringleader of the hijackers, was discovered at the Boston airport, from which Flight 11 departed. This baggage, besides containing Atta’s passport and driver’s license, also contained various types of incriminating evidence, such as flight simulator manuals, videotapes about Boeing airliners, and a letter to other hijackers about preparing for the mission. But the bags also contained Atta’s will. Why would Atta have intended to take his will on a plane that he planned to fly into the World Trade Center? There are also many other problems in this story.²⁴ We appear to have planted evidence.

Another element of the official story about the alleged hijackers is that they were very devout Muslims. The 9/11 Commission Report said that Atta had become very religious, even "fanatically so."²⁵ The public was thereby led to believe that these men would have had no problem going on this suicide mission, because they were ready to meet their maker. Investigative reporter Daniel Hopsicker, however, discovered that Atta loved cocaine, alcohol, gambling, pork, and lap dances.²⁶ Several of the other alleged hijackers, the Wall Street Journal reported, had similar tastes.²⁷ The Commission pretends, however, that none of this information was available. While admitting that Atta met other members of al-Qaeda in Las Vegas shortly before 9/11, it says that it saw "no credible evidence explaining why, on this occasion and others, the operatives flew to or met in Las Vegas."²⁸

Another problem in the official account is that, although we are told that four or five of the alleged hijackers were on each of the four flights, no proof of this claim has been provided. The story, of course, is that they did not force their way onto the planes but were regular, ticketed passengers. If so, their names should be on the flight manifests. But the flight manifests that have been released contain neither the names of the alleged hijackers nor any other Arab names.²⁹ We have also been given no proof that the remains of any of these men were found at any of the crash sites.

One final little problem is that several of these 19 men, according to stories published by the BBC and British newspapers, are still alive. For example, The 9/11 Commission Report named Waleed al-Shehri as one of the hijackers and reproduced the FBI’s photograph of him. It even suggested that al-Shehri stabbed one of the flight attendants shortly before Flight 11 crashed into the north tower.³⁰ But as BBC News had reported 11 days after 9/11, al-Shehri, having seen his photograph in newspapers and TV programs, notified authorities and journalists in Morocco, where he works as a pilot, that he is still alive.³¹

But if there are various problems with the government’s story about the hijackers, surely it presented proof that Osama bin Laden was behind the operation? Insofar as this belief is widely held, it also is a myth. Secretary of State Colin Powell promised to provide a white paper providing proof that the attacks had been planned by bin Laden, but this paper was never produced. British Prime Minister Tony Blair did provide such a paper, which was entitled "Responsibility for the Terrorist Atrocities in the United States." But it begins with the admission that it "does not purport to provide a prosecutable case against Usama Bin Laden in a court of law."³² (So, evidence good enough to go to war, but not good enough to go to court.) And although the Taliban said that it would hand bin Laden over if the United States presented evidence of his involvement in 9/11, Bush refused.³³

This failure to provide proof was later said to be unnecessary because bin Laden, in a video allegedly found in Afghanistan, admitted responsibility for the attacks. This "confession" is now widely cited as proof. However, the man in this video has darker skin, fuller cheeks, and a broader nose than the Osama bin Laden of all the other videos.³⁴ We again seem to have planted evidence.

There are, moreover, other problems in the official account of Osama bin Laden. For one thing, in June of 2001, when he was already America’s "most wanted" criminal, he reportedly spent two weeks in the American Hospital in Dubai, at which he was treated by an American doctor and visited by the local CIA agent.³⁵

Also, after 9/11, when America was reportedly trying to get bin Laden "dead or alive," the US military evidently allowed him to escape on at least four occasions, the last one being the "battle of Tora Bora," which the London Telegraph labeled "a grand charade."36 Shortly thereafter, Bush said: "I don’t know where he [bin Laden] is. . . . I just don’t spend that much time on him. . . . I truly am not that concerned about him."³⁷ (Sometimes the truth slips out.)

In any case, the idea that the Bush administration has provided proof for its claims about Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda hijackers is a myth. I turn now to:

Myth Number 6: The 9/11 attacks came as a surprise to the Bush administration.

Nothing is more essential to the official story than this idea. About 10 months after 9/11, for example, FBI Director Robert Mueller said: "To this day we have found no one in the United States except the actual hijackers who knew of the plot."³⁸ There is much evidence, however, that counts against this claim.

The Put Options: One type of evidence involves an extraordinarily high volume of "put options" purchased in the three days prior to 9/11. To buy put options for a particular company is to bet that its stock price will go down. These extraordinary purchases included two, and only two, airlines–United and American–the two airlines used in the attacks. They also included Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, which occupied 22 stories of the World Trade Center. The price of these shares did, of course, plummet after 9/11, resulting in enormous profits for the purchasers. These unusual purchases, as the San Francisco Chronicle said, raise "suspicions that the investors . . . had advance knowledge of the strikes."³⁹ It would appear, in other words, that those who made the purchases knew that United and American airliners were going to be used in attacks on the World Trade Center.

The 9/11 Commission tried to show these suspicions to be unfounded. It claimed, for example, that the purchases for United Airlines do not show that anyone other than al-Qaeda had foreknowledge of the attacks, because 95 percent of these options were purchased by "[a] single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda."⁴⁰ But the Commission thereby simply begged the question at issue, which is whether some organization other than al-Qaeda was involved in the planning.

Also, the Commission ignored the other crucial point, which is that US intelligence agencies closely monitor the stock market, looking for any anomalies that might provide clues about untoward events in the works.⁴¹ Therefore, regardless of who orchestrated the attacks, the US government would have had intelligence suggesting that United and American airliners were to be used for attacks on the World Trade Center.

Bush and the Secret Service: Further evidence of advance knowledge is shown by the behavior of President Bush and his secret service agents during the photo-op at the school in Florida that morning. According to the official story, when Bush was first told that a plane had struck one of the Twin Towers, he dismissed the incident as merely a "horrible accident," which meant that they could go ahead with the photo-op.⁴² News of the second strike, however, would have indicated—assuming that the strikes were unexpected—that terrorists were using planes to attack high-value targets. And what could have been a higher-value target than the president of the United States?

His location at the school had been highly publicized. The Secret Service agents should have feared, therefore, that a hijacked airliner might have been bearing down on the school at that very minute, ready to crash into it. It is standard procedure for the Secret Service to rush the president to a safe location when there is any sign that he may be in danger. And yet these agents allowed the president to remain another half hour, even permitting him to deliver an address on television, thereby announcing to the world that he was still at the school.

Would not this behavior be explainable only if the head of the Secret Service detail knew that the planned attacks did not include an attack on the president?

The 9/11 Commission, of course, did not ask this question. It was content to report that "[t]he Secret Service told us they . . . did not think it imperative for [the president] to run out the door."⁴³ Maintaining decorum, in other words, was more important than protecting the president’s life. Can anyone seriously believe that highly trained Secret Service agents would act this way in a situation of genuine danger?

Mineta’s Report about Cheney: The attack on the Pentagon, as well as the attack on the World Trade Center, was said to be a surprise, even though it occurred over a half hour after the second strike on the Twin Towers. A Pentagon spokesperson, in explaining why the Pentagon was not evacuated before it was struck, claimed that "[t]he Pentagon was simply not aware that this aircraft was coming our way."⁴⁴ The 9/11 Commission claimed that there was no warning about an unidentified aircraft heading towards Washington until 9:36 and hence only "one or two minutes" before the Pentagon was struck at 9:38.⁴⁵

But this claim is contradicted by Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta’s testimony about an episode that occurred in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center under the White House. In open testimony to the 9/11 Commission, Mineta gave this account:

During the time that the airplane was coming in to the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President, "The plane is 50 miles out." "The plane is 30 miles out." And when it got down to "the plane is 10 miles out," the young man also said to the Vice President, "Do the orders still stand?" And the Vice President . . . said, "Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?"⁴⁶

Mineta said that that this final exchange occurred at about 9:25 or 9:26.⁴⁷ According to Mineta’s account, therefore, Cheney knew about an approaching aircraft more than 12 minutes before 9:38, when the Pentagon was struck. Assuming that Cheney would not have kept this information from his good friend Donald Rumsfeld, Mineta’s testimony contradicts the claim of the Pentagon and the 9/11 Commission that there was no advance knowledge, at least not sufficient advance knowledge to have evacuated the Pentagon, which would have saved 125 lives.

This example gives us one of the clearest examples of the fact that the Zelikow-led 9/11 Commission cannot be trusted. Having claimed that there was no knowledge that an aircraft was approaching the Pentagon until the last minute or so, it simply omitted Mineta’s testimony to the contrary, which had been given in open testimony to the Commission itself, from its final report. Then, to rule out even the possibility that the episode reported by Mineta could have occurred, it claimed that Cheney did not even arrive in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center until almost 10:00 o’clock, hence about 20 minutes after the Pentagon was struck.⁴⁸ But this claim, besides contradicting Mineta’s eyewitness testimony that Cheney was already there when Mineta arrived at 9:20, also contradicts all other reports as to when Cheney had arrived there, including a report by Cheney himself.⁴⁹

In light of this information about the put options, the Secret Service, and Mineta’s testimony, we can reject as a myth the idea that the attacks were unexpected. However, even if the attacks had been unexpected, should they not have been intercepted? This brings us to:

Myth Number 7: US officials have explained why the hijacked airliners were not intercepted.

Actually, there is a sense in which this statement is true. US officials have explained why the US military did not prevent the attacks. The problem, however, is that they have given three explanations, each of which is contradicted by the others and none of which is a satisfactory explanation. I will explain.

According to standard operating procedures, if an FAA flight controller notices anything that suggests a possible hijacking, the controller is to contact a superior. If the problem cannot be fixed quickly (within about a minute), the superior is to ask NORAD—the North American Aerospace Defense Command—to send up, or "scramble," jet fighters to find out what is going on. NORAD then issues a scramble order to the nearest air force base with fighters on alert.

The jet fighters at NORAD’s disposal could respond very quickly: According to the US Air Force website, F-15s can go from "scramble order" to 29,000 feet in only 2.5 minutes, after which they can fly over 1800 miles per hour.⁵⁰ Therefore–according to General Ralph Eberhart, the head of NORAD—after the FAA senses that something is wrong, "it takes about one minute" for it to contact NORAD, after which, according to a spokesperson, NORAD can scramble fighter jets "within a matter of minutes to anywhere in the United States."⁵¹ These statements were, to be sure, made after 9/11, so we might suspect that they reflect a post-9/11 speed-up in procedures. But an Air Traffic Control document put out in 1998 warned pilots that any airplanes persisting in unusual behavior "will likely find two [jet fighters] on their tail within 10 or so minutes."⁵²

If these procedures had been carried out on the morning of 9/11, AA Flight 11 and UA Flight 175 would have been intercepted before they could have reached Manhattan, and AA Flight 77 would have been intercepted long before it could have reached the Pentagon.

Such interceptions are routine, being carried out about 100 times a year. A month after 9/11, the Calgary Herald reported that in the year 2000, NORAD had scrambled fighters 129 times. Do these scrambles regularly result in interceptions? Just a few days after 9/11, Major Mike Snyder, a NORAD spokesperson, told the Boston Globe that "[NORAD’s] fighters routinely intercept aircraft."⁵³ Why did such interceptions not occur on 9/11?

During the first few days, the public was told that no fighter jets were sent up until after the strike on the Pentagon at 9:38. However, it was also reported that signs of Flight 11’s hijacking had been observed at 8:15. That would mean that although interceptions usually occur within "10 or so" minutes after signs of trouble are observed, in this case 80 or so minutes had elapsed before fighters were even airborne. This story suggested that a "stand-down" order had been issued.

Within a few days, however, a second story was put out, according to which NORAD had sent up fighters but, because notification from the FAA had been very slow in coming, the fighters arrived too late. On September 18, NORAD made this second story official, embodying it in a timeline, which indicated when NORAD had been notified by the FAA about each airplane and when it had scrambled fighters in response.⁵⁴

Critics showed, however, that even if the FAA notifications had come as late as NORAD’s timeline indicated, NORAD’s jets would have had time to make the interceptions.55 This second story did not, therefore, remove the suspicion that a stand-down order had been given.

Hoping to overcome this problem, The 9/11 Commission Report provided a third account, according to which, contrary to NORAD’s timeline of September 18, 2001, the FAA did not notify NORAD about Flight 175 until after it had struck the south tower or about Flight 77 until after it had struck the Pentagon. But there are serious problems with this third story.

One problem is the very fact that it is the third story. Normally, when a suspect in a criminal investigation keeps changing his story, we get suspicious. Let’s say that the police ask Charlie Jones where he was Saturday night. He says he was at the movie theater, but they say, "No, the movie theater has been closed all week." Then Charlie says, "Oh, that’s right, I was with my girl friend." But, the police say, "No, we checked with her and she was home with her husband." If at that point Charlie says, "Oh, now I remember, I was home reading my Bible," you are probably not going to believe him. And yet that’s what we have here. The military told one story right after 9/11, another story a week later, and a third story through The 9/11 Commission Report in 2004.

A second problem with this third story is that it contradicts several features of the second story, which had served as the official story for almost three years.

For example, NORAD’s timeline of September 18, 2001, had indicated that the FAA had notified it about Flight 175 exactly 20 minutes before it hit its target and about Flight 77 some 14 minutes before the Pentagon was struck. The 9/11 Commission maintains that both of these statements were "incorrect"—that, really, there had been no notification about these flights until after they hit their targets. This, it claims, is why the military had failed to intercept them.⁵⁶ But if NORAD’s timeline was false, as the Commission now claims, NORAD must have been either lying or confused. But it is hard to believe that it could have been confused one week after 9/11. So it must have been lying. But if the military’s second story was a lie, why should we believe this third one?

Further scepticism about this third story arises from the fact that it is contradicted by considerable evidence. For example, the Commission’s claim that the military did not know about Flight 175 until it crashed is contradicted by a report involving Captain Michael Jellinek, a Canadian who on 9/11 was overseeing NORAD’s headquarters in Colorado. According to a story in the Toronto Star, Jellinek was on the phone with NORAD as he watched Flight 175 crash into the south tower. He then asked NORAD: "Was that the hijacked aircraft you were dealing with?"–to which NORAD said "yes."⁵⁷

The 9/11 Commission’s claims about Flights 175 and 77 are also contradicted by a memo sent to the Commission by Laura Brown of the FAA. Her memo stated that at about 8:50 the FAA had set up a teleconference, in which it started sharing information with the military about all flights. She specifically mentioned Flight 77, indicating that the FAA had been sharing information about it even before the formal notification time of 9:24. Her memo, which is available on the Web,58 was discussed by the 9/11 Commission and read into its record on May 23, 2003.59 But Zelikow’s 9/11 Commission Report fails to mention this memo.

Because of these and still more problems, which I have discussed in my book on the 9/11 Commission’s report and also in a lecture called "Flights of Fancy",⁶⁰ this third story does not remove the grounds for suspicion that a stand-down order had been issued.

There is, moreover, ear-witness testimony for this suspicion. An upper management official at LAX, who needs to remain anonymous, has told me that he overheard members of LAX Security–including officers from the FBI and LAPD—interacting on their walkie-talkies shortly after the attacks. In some cases, he could hear both sides of the conversation. At first, the LAX officials were told that the airplanes that attacked World Trade Center and the Pentagon had not been intercepted because the FAA had not notified NORAD about the hijackings. But later, he reports, they were told that NORAD had been notified but did not respond because it had been "ordered to stand down." When LAX security officials asked who had issued that order, they were told that it had come "from the highest level of the White House."⁶¹

Accordingly, the idea that the attacks could not have been prevented is a myth. I turn now to:

Myth Number 8: Official Reports have explained why the Twin Towers and Building 7 of the World Trade Center collapsed.

This claim suffers from the same problem as the previous one: We have had three explanations, each of which contradicts the others and none of which is anywhere close to adequate. The first explanation, widely disseminated through television specials, was that the buildings collapsed because their steel columns were melted by the jet-fuel-fed fires. But this explanation contained many problems, the most obvious of which is that steel does not begin to melt until about 2800 degrees F, while open fires based on hydrocarbons such as kerosene—which is what jet fuel is—cannot under the most ideal circumstances rise above 1700 degrees.

A second explanation, endorsed by The 9/11 Commission Report, is a "pancake" theory, according to which the fires, while not melting the steel, heated it up sufficiently to cause the floors weakened by the airplane strikes to break loose from the steel columns—both those in the core of the building and those around the outside. All the floors above the strike zone hence fell down on the floor below the strike zone, causing it to break free, and this started a chain reaction, so the floors pancaked all the way down. But this explanation also suffered from many problems, the most obvious of which was that it could not explain why the buildings collapsed into a pile of rubble only a few stories high. The core of each of the Twin Towers consisted of 47 massive steel columns. If the floors had broken loose from them, these columns would have still been sticking up a thousand feet in the air. The 9/11 Commission Report tried to cover up this problem by claiming that the core of each tower consisted of "a hollow steel shaft."⁶² But those massive steel columns could not be wished away.

The definitive explanation was supposed to be the third one, issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, often simply called NIST. The NIST Report claimed that when the floors collapsed, they, rather than breaking free from the columns, pulled on them, causing the perimeter columns to become unstable. This instability then increased the gravity load on the core columns, which had been weakened by tremendously hot fires in the core, which, NIST claims, reached 1832°F, and this combination of factors resulted in "global collapse."⁶³

But, as physicists Jim Hoffman and Steven Jones have shown, this account is riddled with problems. One of these is that NIST’s claim about tremendously hot fires in the core is completely unsupported by evidence. NIST’s own studies found no evidence that any of the core columns had reached temperatures of even 482°F (250°C).⁶⁴ A second problem is that, even if this sequence of events had occurred, NIST provided no explanation as to why it would have produced global—that is, total—collapse. The NIST Report asserts that "column failure" occurred in the core as well as the perimeter columns. But this remains a bare assertion. There is no plausible explanation of why the core columns would have broken, or even buckled, so as to produce global collapse.⁶⁵

And this is only to begin to enumerate the problems in NIST’s theory, all of which follow from the fact that it, like the previous two theories, is essentially a fire theory, according to which the buildings were brought down primarily by fire. In the case of the Twin Towers, of course, the impact of the airplanes is said to have played a role. But most experts who support the official theory attribute the collapses primarily to the fires. NIST, for example, says that the main contribution of the airplanes, aside from providing jet fuel, was to dislodge a lot of the fire-proofing from the steel, thereby making it vulnerable to the fires.⁶⁶ But these fire-theories face several formidable problems.

First, the fires in these three buildings were not very hot, very big, or very long-lasting, compared with fires in some steel-frame high-rises that did not collapse. A 1991 fire in Philadelphia burned 18 hours, and a 2004 fire in Caracas burned 17 hours, without causing even a partial collapse.⁶⁷ By contrast, the fires in the north and south towers burned only 102 and 56 minutes, respectively, before they collapsed, and neither fire, unlike the Philadelphia and Caracas fires, was hot enough to break windows.

Second, total collapses of steel-frame high-rise buildings have never—either before or after 9/11—been brought about by fire alone, or fire combined with externally produced structural damage. The collapse of Building 7 has been recognized as especially difficult to explain. It was not hit by a plane, so the explanation has to rely on fire alone, and yet, because there was no jet fuel to get a big fire started, this building had fires on only two or three floors, according to several witnesses⁶⁸ and all the photographic evidence.⁶⁹ FEMA admitted that the best explanation it could come up with it had "only a low probability of occurrence."⁷⁰ The 9/11 Commission Report implicitly admitted that it could not explain the collapse of Building 7 by not even mentioning it. The NIST Report, which could not claim that the fire-proofing had gotten knocked off the steel of this building, has yet to offer an explanation as to why it collapsed.

And NIST, like the 9/11 Commission, evidently did not want citizens asking why Building 7 collapsed even though it was not hit by a plane. On its Website, it says that one of its objectives is to determine "why and how World Trade Center buildings 1, 2, and 7 collapsed after the initial impact of the aircraft"—thereby implying that building 7, like the Twin Towers, was hit by a plane.⁷¹

In any case, a third problem with the official account of the collapse of these three buildings is that all prior and subsequent total collapses of steel-frame high-rises have been caused by explosives in the procedure known as "controlled demolition." This problem is made even more severe by the fact that the collapses of these three buildings manifested many standard features of the most difficult type of controlled demolition, known as implosion. I will mention seven such features.

First, the collapses began suddenly. Steel, if weakened by fire, would gradually begin to sag. But as one can see from videos available on the Web,⁷² all three buildings are completely motionless up to the moment they begin to collapse.

Second, if these huge buildings had toppled over, they would have caused enormous death and destruction. But they came straight down. This straight-down collapse is the whole point of the type of controlled demolition called implosion, which only a few companies in the world can perform.⁷³

Third, these buildings collapsed at virtually free-fall speed, which means that the lower floors, with all their steel and concrete, were offering no resistance to the upper floors.

Fourth, as mentioned earlier, the collapses were total collapses, resulting in piles of rubble only a few stories high. This means that the enormous steel columns in the core of each building had to be broken into rather short segments—which is what explosives do.

Fifth, great quantities of molten steel were produced, which means that the steel had been heated up to several thousand degrees. Witnesses during the clean-up reported, moreover, that sometimes when a piece of steel was lifted out of the rubble, molten metal would be dripping from the end.⁷⁴

Sixth, according to many fire fighters, medical workers, journalists, and World Trade Center employees, many explosions went off before and after the collapses. For example, Fire Captain Dennis Tardio, speaking of the south tower, said: "I hear an explosion and I look up. It is as if the building is being imploded, from the top floor down, one after another, boom, boom, boom."⁷⁵ Firefighter Richard Banaciski said: "It seemed like on television [when] they blow up these buildings. It seemed like it was going all the way around like a belt, all these explosions."⁷⁶ Thanks to the release in August of 2005 of the oral histories recorded by the Fire Department of New York shortly after 9/11, dozens of testimonies of this type are now available. I have published an essay on them, which will be included—along with an essay on "The Destruction of the World Trade Center," which I am here summarizing—in a forthcoming book on 9/11 and Christian faith.⁷⁷

A seventh feature of controlled implosions is the production of large quantities of dust. In the case of the Twin Towers, virtually everything except the steel—all the concrete, desks, computers—was pulverized into very tiny dust particles.⁷⁸

The official theory cannot explain one, let alone all seven, of these features—at least, as Jim Hoffman and Steven Jones have pointed out, without violating several basic laws of physics.⁷⁹ But the theory of controlled demolition easily explains all these features.

These facts are inconsistent with the idea that al-Qaeda terrorists were responsible. Foreign terrorists could not have obtained access to the buildings for the hours needed to plant the explosives. Terrorists working for the Bush-Cheney administration, by contrast, could have gotten such access, given the fact that Marvin Bush and Wirt Walker III—the president’s brother and cousin, respectively—were principals of the company in charge of security for the World Trade Center.⁸⁰ Al-Qaeda terrorists would also probably not have had the courtesy to ensure that these huge buildings came straight down, rather than falling over onto other buildings. They also would not have had the necessary expertise.

Another relevant fact is that evidence was destroyed. An examination of the buildings’ steel beams and columns could have shown whether explosives had been used to slice them. But virtually all of the steel was removed before it could be properly examined,⁸¹ then put on ships to Asia to be melted down.82 It is usually a federal offense to remove anything from a crime scene. But here the removal of over 100 tons of steel, the biggest destruction of evidence in history, was carried out under the supervision of federal officials.⁸³

Evidence was also apparently planted. The passport of one of the hijackers on Flight 11 was allegedly found in the rubble, having survived the fire caused by the crash into the north tower and also whatever caused everything else in this building except the steel to be pulverized.⁸⁴ As a story in the Guardian said, "the idea that [this] passport had escaped from that inferno unsinged would [test] the credulity of the staunchest supporter of the FBI’s crackdown on terrorism."⁸⁵

To sum up: The idea that US officials have given a satisfactory, or even close to satisfactory, explanation of the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings is a myth. And they have implicitly admitted this by refusing to engage in rational debate about it. For example, Michael Newman, a spokesman for NIST, reportedly said during a recent interview that "none of the NIST scientists would participate in any public debate" with scientists who reject their report. When Newman was asked why NIST would avoid public debate if it had confidence in its report, Newman replied: "Because there is no winning in such debates."⁸⁵ In that same interview, Newman had compared people who reject the government’s account of the collapses with people who believe in Bigfoot and a flat earth.⁸⁶ And yet he fears that his scientists would not be able to show up these fools in a public debate!

In any case, I come now to the final myth, which is:

Myth Number 9: There is no doubt that Flight 77, under the control of al-Qaeda hijacker Hani Hanjour, struck the Pentagon.

There are, in fact, many reasons to doubt this claim.

We have, in the first place, reasons to doubt that the aircraft that hit the Pentagon was under the control of Hani Hanjour. For one thing, the aircraft, before striking the Pentagon, reportedly executed a 270-degree downward spiral, and yet Hani Hanjour was known as a terrible pilot, who could not safely fly even a small plane.⁸⁷ Russ Wittenberg, who flew large commercial airliners for 35 years after serving in Vietnam as a fighter pilot, says that it would have been "totally impossible for an amateur who couldn’t even fly a Cessna to maneuver the jetliner in such a highly professional manner."⁸⁸

Moreover, as a result of that very difficult maneuver, the Pentagon’s west wing was struck, but terrorists brilliant enough to get through the US military’s defense system would have known that this was the worst place to strike, for several reasons: The west wing had been reinforced, so the damage was less severe than a strike anywhere else would have been. This wing was still being renovated, so relatively few people were there; a strike anywhere else would have killed thousands of people, rather than 125. And the secretary of defense and all the top brass, whom terrorists would presumably have wanted to kill, were in the east wing. Why would an al-Qaeda pilot have executed a very difficult maneuver to hit the west wing when he could have simply crashed into the roof of the east wing?

A second major problem with the official story: There are reasons to believe that the Pentagon was struck only because officials at the Pentagon wanted it to be struck. For one thing, Flight 77 allegedly, after making a U-turn in the mid-west, flew back to Washington undetected for 40 minutes. And yet the US military, which by then clearly knew that hijacked airliners were being used as weapons, has the best radar systems in the world, one of which, it brags, "does not miss anything occurring in North American airspace."⁸⁹ The idea that a large airliner could have slipped through, especially during a time of heightened alert, is absurd.

Also, the Pentagon is surely the best defended building on the planet.⁹⁰ It is not only within the P-56-A restricted air space that extends 17 miles in all directions from the Washington Monument, but also within P-56-B, the three-mile ultra-restricted zone above the White House, the Capitol, and the Pentagon. The Pentagon is only a few miles from Andrews Air Force Base, which has at least three squadrons with fighter jets on alert at all times. (The claim by The 9/11 Commission Report that no fighters were on alert the morning of 9/11 is wholly implausible, as I have explained in my critique of this report.⁹¹) The Pentagon, moreover, is reportedly protected by batteries of surface-to-air missiles, so if any aircraft without a US military transponder were to enter the Pentagon’s airspace, it would be shot down.⁹² Even if the aircraft that hit the Pentagon had been Flight 77, therefore, it could have succeeded only because officials in the Pentagon turned off its missiles as well as ordering the fighters from Andrews to stand down.

A third major problem with the official story is that there is considerable evidence that it could not have been Flight 77 because it was not a Boeing 757. For one thing, the strike on the Pentagon, unlike the strikes on the Twin Towers, reportedly did not create a detectable seismic signal.⁹³

Also, according to several witnesses and many people who have studied the available photographs, both the damage and the debris were inconsistent with a strike by a large airliner. That issue, however, is too complex to discuss here, as is the issue of the what should be inferred from the conflicting eyewitness testimony.

Deferring those topics to another time, I will conclude by pointing out that the suspicion that the Pentagon was not struck by a 757, as the government claims, is supported by the fact that evidence was destroyed. Shortly after the strike, government agents picked up debris and carried it off.⁹⁴ Then the entire lawn was covered with dirt and gravel, so that any remaining forensic evidence was literally covered up.⁹⁵

Also, the videos from security cameras on the nearby Citgo gas station and Sheraton Hotel, which would show what really hit the Pentagon, were immediately confiscated by agents of the FBI, and the Department of Justice has to this day refused to release them.⁹⁶ If these videos would prove that the Pentagon was really hit by a 757, most of us would assume, the government would release them.

Reasonable people can dispute that Bush is "intentionally" skewering the dollar with his lavish tax cuts, but how does that explain Cheney’s portfolio?

"Between 2000 and 2003 alone, foreign firms built 60,000manufacturing plants in China. European chemical companies, Japanese carmakers, and US industrial conglomerates are all building factories in China to supply export markets around the world. Similarly, banks, insurance companies, professional-service firms, and IT companies are building R&D and service centers in India to support employees, customers, and production worldwide." ("The Globally integrated Enterprise" Samuel Palmisano, Foreign Affairs page 130)
"60,000 manufacturing plants" in 3 years?!?
"Banks, insurance companies, professional-service firms, and IT companies"?

No job is safe. American elites and corporate tycoons are loading the boats and heading for foreign shores. The only thing they’re leaving behind is the insurmountable debt that will be shackled to our children into perpetuity and the carefully arranged levers of a modern police-surveillance state.

Welcome to Bush’s 21st Century gulag; third world luxury in a Guantanamo-type setting.

Take another look at Cheney’s investment strategy; it tells the whole ugly story. Interest rates are going up, the middle class is going down, and the poor dollar is headed for the dumpster. The country is not simply teetering on the brink of financial collapse; it is being thrust headfirst by the blackguards in office and their satrapies at Federal Reserve.

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at: fergiewhitney@msn.com

In the shadow of Winston Churchill’s statue opposite the House of Commons, a rather odd ritual has developed on Sunday afternoons. A small group of people – mostly young and dressed outlandishly – hold a tea party on the grass of Parliament Square. A woman looking very much like Mary Poppins passes plates of frosted cakes and cookies, while other members of the party flourish blank placards or, as they did on the afternoon I was there, attempt a game of cricket.

Sometimes the police move in and arrest the picnickers, but on this occasion the officers stood at a distance, presumably consulting on the question of whether this was a demonstration or a non-demonstration. It is all rather silly and yet in Blair’s Britain there is a kind of nobility in the amateurishness and persistence of the gesture. This collection of oddballs, looking for all the world as if they had stepped out of the Michelangelo Antonioni film Blow-Up, are challenging a new law which says that no one may demonstrate within a kilometre, or a little more than half a mile, of Parliament Square if they have not first acquired written permission from the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. This effectively places the entire centre of British government, Whitehall and Trafalgar Square, off-limits to the protesters and marchers who have traditionally brought their grievances to those in power without ever having to ask a policeman’s permission.

The non-demo demo, or tea party, is a legalistic response to the law. If anything is written on the placards, or if someone makes a speech, then he or she is immediately deemed to be in breach of the law and is arrested. The device doesn’t always work. After drinking tea in the square, a man named Mark Barrett was recently convicted of demonstrating. Two other protesters, Milan Rai and Maya Evans, were charged after reading out the names of dead Iraqi civilians at the Cenotaph, Britain’s national war memorial, in Whitehall, a few hundred yards away.

On that dank spring afternoon I looked up at Churchill and reflected that he almost certainly would have approved of these people insisting on their right to demonstrate in front of his beloved Parliament. "If you will not fight for the right," he once growled, "when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves."

Churchill lived in far more testing times than ours, but he always revered the ancient tradition of Britain’s "unwritten constitution". I imagined him becoming flesh again and walking purposefully toward Downing Street – without security, of course – there to address Tony Blair and his aides on their sacred duty as the guardians of Britain’s Parliament and the people’s rights.

For Blair, that youthful baby-boomer who came to power nine years ago as the embodiment of democratic liberalism as well as the new spirit of optimism in Britain, turns out to have an authoritarian streak that respects neither those rights nor, it seems, the independence of the elected representatives in Parliament. And what is remarkable – in fact almost a historic phenomenon – is the harm his government has done to the unwritten British constitution in those nine years, without anyone really noticing, without the press objecting or the public mounting mass protests. At the inception of Cool Britannia, British democracy became subject to a silent takeover.

Last year – rather late in the day, I must admit – I started to notice trends in Blair’s legislation which seemed to attack individual rights and freedoms, to favour ministers (politicians appointed by the Prime Minister to run departments of government) over the scrutiny of Parliament, and to put in place all the necessary laws for total surveillance of society.

There was nothing else to do but to go back and read the Acts – at least 15 of them – and to write about them in my weekly column in The Observer. After about eight weeks, the Prime Minister privately let it be known that he was displeased at being called authoritarian by me. Very soon I found myself in the odd position of conducting a formal e-mail exchange with him on the rule of law, I sitting in my London home with nothing but Google and a stack of legislation, the Prime Minister in No 10 with all the resources of government at his disposal. Incidentally, I was assured that he had taken time out of his schedule so that he himself could compose the thunderous responses calling for action against terrorism, crime, and antisocial behaviour.

The day after the exchange was published, the grudging truce between the Government and me was broken. Blair gave a press conference, in which he attacked media exaggeration, and the then Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, weighed in with a speech at the London School of Economics naming me and two other journalists and complaining about "the pernicious and even dangerous poison" in the media.

So, I guess this column comes with a health warning from the British Government, but please don’t pay it any mind. When governments attack the media, it is often a sign that the media have for once gotten something right. I might add that this column also comes with the more serious warning that, if rights have been eroded in the land once called "the Mother of Parliaments", it can happen in any country where a government actively promotes the fear of terrorism and crime and uses it to persuade people that they must exchange their freedom for security.

Blair’s campaign against rights contained in the Rule of Law – that is, that ancient amalgam of common law, convention, and the opinion of experts, which makes up one half of the British constitution – is often well concealed. Many of the measures have been slipped through under legislation that appears to address problems the public is concerned about. For instance, the law banning people from demonstrating within one kilometre of Parliament is contained in the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act of 2005. The right to protest freely has been affected by the Terrorism Act of 2000, which allows police to stop and search people in a designated area – which can be anywhere – and by antisocial behaviour laws, which allow police to issue an order banning someone from a particular activity, waving a banner, for instance. If a person breaks that order, he or she risks a prison sentence of up to five years. Likewise, the Protection from Harassment Act of 1997 – designed to combat stalkers and campaigns of intimidation – is being used to control protest. A woman who sent two e-mails to a pharmaceutical company politely asking a member of the staff not to work with a company that did testing on animals was prosecuted for "repeated conduct" in sending an e-mail twice, which the Act defines as harassment.

There is a demonic versatility to Blair’s laws. Kenneth Clarke, a former Conservative chancellor of the exchequer and home secretary, despairs at the way they are being used. "What is assured as being harmless when it is introduced gets used more and more in a way which is sometimes alarming," he says. His colleague David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, is astonished by Blair’s Labour Party: "If I had gone on the radio 15 years ago and said that a Labour government would limit your right to trial by jury, would limit – in some cases eradicate – habeas corpus, constrain your right of freedom of speech, they would have locked me up."

Indeed they would. But there’s more, so much in fact that it is difficult to grasp the scope of the campaign against British freedoms. But here goes. The right to a jury trial is removed in complicated fraud cases and where there is a fear of jury tampering. The right not to be tried twice for the same offence – the law of double jeopardy – no longer exists. The presumption of innocence is compromised, especially in antisocial behaviour legislation, which also makes hearsay admissible as evidence. The right not to be punished unless a court decides that the law has been broken is removed in the system of control orders by which a terrorist suspect is prevented from moving about freely and using the phone and internet, without at any stage being allowed to hear the evidence against him – house arrest in all but name.

Freedom of speech is attacked by Section Five of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, which preceded Blair’s Government, but which is now being used to patrol opinion. In Oxford last year a 21-year-old graduate of Balliol College named Sam Brown drunkenly shouted in the direction of two mounted police officers, "Mate, you know your horse is gay. I hope you don’t have a problem with that." He was given one of the new, on-the-spot fines – £80 – which he refused to pay, with the result that he was taken to court. Some 10 months later the Crown Prosecution Service dropped its case that he had made homophobic remarks likely to cause disorder.

There are other people the police have investigated but failed to prosecute: the columnist Cristina Odone, who made a barely disparaging aside about Welsh people on TV (she referred to them as "little Welshies"); and the head of the Muslim Council of Great Britain, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, who said that homosexual practices were "not acceptable" and civil partnerships between gays were "harmful".

The remarks may be a little inappropriate, but I find myself regretting that my countrymen’s opinions – their bloody-mindedness, their truculence in the face of authority, their love of insult and robust debate – are being edged out by this fussy, hairsplitting, second-guessing, politically correct state that Blair is trying to build with what he calls his "respect agenda".

Do these tiny cuts to British freedom amount to much more than a few people being told to be more considerate? Shami Chakrabarti, the petite whirlwind who runs Liberty believes that "the small measures of increasing ferocity add up over time to a society of a completely different flavour". That is exactly the phrase I was looking for. Britain is not a police state – the fact that Tony Blair felt it necessary to answer me by e-mail proves that – but it is becoming a very different place under his rule, and all sides of the House of Commons agree. The Liberal Democrats’ spokesman on human rights and civil liberties, David Heath, is sceptical about Blair’s use of the terrorist threat. "The age-old technique of any authoritarian or repressive government has always been to exaggerate the terrorist threat to justify their actions," he says. "I am not one to underestimate the threat of terrorism, but I think it has been used to justify measures which have no relevance to attacking terrorism effectively." And Bob Marshall-Andrews – a Labour MP who, like quite a number of others on Blair’s side of the House of Commons, is deeply worried about the tone of government – says of his boss, "Underneath, there is an unstable authoritarianism which has seeped into the [Labour] Party."

Chakrabarti, who once worked as a lawyer in the Home Office, explains: "If you throw live frogs into a pan of boiling water, they will sensibly jump out and save themselves. If you put them in a pan of cold water and gently apply heat until the water boils they will lie in the pan and boil to death. It’s like that." In Blair you see the champion frog boiler of modern times. He is also a lawyer who suffers acute impatience with the processes of the law. In one of his e-mails to me he painted a lurid – and often true – picture of the delinquency in some of Britain’s poorer areas, as well as the helplessness of the victims. His response to the problem of societal breakdown was to invent a new category of restraint called the antisocial behaviour order, or Asbo.

"Please speak to the victims of this menace," he wrote. "They are people whose lives have been turned into a daily hell. Suppose they live next door to someone whose kids are out of control: who play their music loud until 2 am; who vilify anyone who asks them to stop; who are often into drugs or alcohol? Or visit a park where children can’t play because of needles, used condoms, and hooligans hanging around.

"It is true that, in theory, each of these acts is a crime for which the police could prosecute. In practice, they don’t. It would involve in each case a disproportionate amount of time, money and commitment for what would be, for any single act, a low-level sentence. Instead, they can now use an Asbo or a parenting order or other measures that attack not an offence but behaviour that causes harm and distress to people, and impose restrictions on the person doing it, breach of which would mean they go to prison."

How the Asbo works is that a complaint is lodged with a magistrates’ court which names an individual or parent of a child who is said to be the source of antisocial behaviour. The actions which cause the trouble do not have to be illegal in themselves before an Asbo is granted and the court insists on the cessation of that behaviour – which may be nothing more than walking a dog, playing music, or shouting in the street. It is important to understand that the standards of evidence are much lower here than in a normal court hearing because hearsay – that is, rumour and gossip – is admissible. If a person is found to have broken an Asbo, he or she is liable to a maximum of five years in prison, regardless of whether the act is in itself illegal. So, in effect, the person is being punished for disobedience to the state.

Blair is untroubled by the precedent that this law might offer a real live despot, or by the fact that Asbos are being used to stifle legitimate protest, and indeed, in his exchange with me, he seemed to suggest that he was considering a kind of super-Asbo for more serious criminals to "harry, hassle and hound them until they give up or leave the country". It was significant that nowhere in this rant did he mention the process of law or a court.

He offers something new: not a police state but a controlled state, in which he seeks to alter radically the political and philosophical context of the criminal-justice system. "I believe we require a profound rebalancing of the civil liberties debate," he said in a speech in May. "The issue is not whether we care about civil liberties but what that means in the early 21st century." He now wants legislation to limit powers of British courts to interpret the Human Rights Act. The Act, imported from the European Convention on Human Rights, was originally inspired by Winston Churchill, who had suggested it as a means to entrench certain rights in Europe after the war.

Blair says that this thinking springs from the instincts of his generation, which is "hard on behaviour and soft on lifestyle." Actually, I was born six weeks before Blair, 53 years ago, and I can categorically say that he does not speak for all my generation. But I agree with his other self-description, in which he claims to be a moderniser, because he tends to deny the importance of history and tradition, particularly when it comes to Parliament, whose powers of scrutiny have suffered dreadfully under his government.

There can be few duller documents than the Civil Contingencies Act of 2004 or the Inquiries Act of 2005, which is perhaps just as well for the Government, for both vastly extend the arbitrary powers of ministers while making them less answerable to Parliament. The Civil Contingencies Act, for instance, allows a minister to declare a state of emergency in which assets can be seized without compensation, courts may be set up, assemblies may be banned, and people may be moved from, or held in, particular areas, all on the belief that an emergency might be about to occur. Only after seven days does Parliament get the chance to assess the situation. If the minister is wrong, or has acted in bad faith, he cannot be punished.

One response might be to look into his actions by holding a government investigation under the Inquiries Act, but then the minister may set its terms, suppress evidence, close the hearing to the public, and terminate it without explanation. Under this Act, the reports of government inquiries are presented to ministers, not, as they once were, to Parliament. This fits very well into a pattern where the executive branch demands more and more unfettered power, as does Charles Clarke’s suggestion that the press should be subject to statutory regulation.

I realise that it would be testing your patience to go too deeply into the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, which the Government has been trying to smuggle through Parliament this year, but let me just say that its original draft would have allowed ministers to make laws without reference to elected representatives.

Imagine the President of the United States trying to neuter the Congress in this manner, so flagrantly robbing it of its power. Yet until recently all this has occurred in Britain with barely a whisper of coverage in the British media.

Blair is the lowest he has ever been in the polls, but he is still energetically fighting off his rival, Gordon Brown, with a cabinet reshuffle and a stout defence of his record. In an e-mail to me, Blair denied that he was trying to abolish parliamentary democracy, then swiftly moved to say how out of touch the political and legal establishments were, which is perhaps the way that he justifies these actions to himself. It was striking how he got one of his own pieces of legislation wrong when discussing control orders – or house arrest – for terrorist suspects in relation to the European Convention on Human Rights, which is incorporated into British law under the Human Rights Act. "The point about the Human Rights Act," he declared, "is that it does allow the courts to strike down the act of our ‘sovereign Parliament’." As Marcel Berlins, the legal columnist of The Guardian, remarked, "It does no such thing."

How can the Prime Minister get such a fundamentally important principle concerning human rights so utterly wrong, especially when it so exercised both sides of the House of Commons? The answer is that he is probably not a man for detail, but Charles Moore, the former editor of The Daily Telegraph, now a columnist and the official biographer of Margaret Thatcher, believes that New Labour contains strands of rather sinister political DNA.

"My theory is that the Blairites are Marxist in process, though not in ideology – well, actually it is more Leninist." It is true that several senior ministers had socialist periods. Charles Clarke, John Reid, recently anointed Home Secretary, and Jack Straw, the former foreign secretary, were all on the extreme left, if not self-declared Leninists. Moore’s implication is that the sacred Blair project of modernising Britain has become a kind of ersatz ideology and that this is more important to Blair than any of the country’s political or legal institutions. "He’s very shallow," says Moore. "He’s got a few things he wants to do and he rather impressively pursues them."

One of these is the national ID card scheme, opposition to which brings together such disparate figures as the Earl of Onslow, a Conservative peer of the realm; Commander George Churchill-Coleman, the famous head of New Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist unit during the worst years of IRA bombings; and Neil Tennant, one half of the hugely successful pop group Pet Shop Boys.

The idea of the ID card seems sensible in the age of terrorism, identity theft, and illegal immigration until you realise that the centralised database – the National Identity Register – will log and store details of every important action in a person’s life. When the ID card is swiped as someone identifies himself at, say, a bank, hospital, pharmacy, or insurance company, those details are retained and may be inspected by, among others, the police, tax authorities, customs, and MI5, the domestic intelligence service. The system will locate and track the entire adult population. If you put it together with the national system of licence-plate-recognition cameras, which is about to go live on British highways and in town centres, and understand that the ID card, under a new regulation, will also carry details of a person’s medical records, you realise that the state will be able to keep tabs on anyone it chooses and find out about the most private parts of a person’s life.

Despite the cost of the ID card system – estimated by the Government as being about £5.8bn and by the London School of Economics as being between £10bn and £19bn – few think that it will attack the problems of terrorism and ID theft.

George Churchill-Coleman described it to me as an absolute waste of time. "You and I will carry them because we are upright citizens. But a terrorist isn’t going to carry [his own]. He will be carrying yours."

Neil Tennant, a former Labour donor who has stopped giving money to and voting for Labour because of ID cards, says: "My specific fear is that we are going to create a society where a policeman stops me on the way to Waitrose on the King’s Road and says, ‘Can I see your identity card?’ I don’t see why I should have to do that." Tennant says he may leave the country if a compulsory ID card comes into force. "We can’t live in a total-surveillance society," he adds. "It is to disrespect us."

Defending myself against claims of paranoia and the attacks of Labour’s former home secretary, I have simply referred people to the statute book of British law, where the evidence of what I have been saying is there for all to see. But two other factors in this silent takeover are not so visible. The first is a profound change in the relationship between the individual and the state. Nothing demonstrates the sense of the state’s entitlement over the average citizen more than the new laws that came in at the beginning of the year and allow anyone to be arrested for any crime – even dropping litter. And here’s the crucial point. Once a person is arrested he or she may be fingerprinted and photographed by the police and have a DNA sample removed with an oral swab – by force if necessary. And this is before that person has been found guilty of any crime, whether it be dropping litter or shooting someone.

So much for the presumption of innocence, but there again we have no reason to be surprised. Last year, in his annual Labour Party conference speech, Blair said this: "The whole of our system starts from the proposition that its duty is to protect the innocent from being wrongly convicted. Don’t misunderstand me. That must be the duty of any criminal justice system. But surely our primary duty should be to allow law-abiding people to live in safety. It means a complete change of thinking. It doesn’t mean abandoning human rights. It means deciding whose come first." The point of human rights, as Churchill noted, is that they treat the innocent, the suspect, and the convict equally: "These are the symbols, in the treatment of crime and criminals, which mark and measure the stored-up strength of a nation, and are a sign and proof of the living virtue in it."

The DNA database is part of this presumption of guilt. Naturally the police support it, because it has obvious benefits in solving crimes, but it should be pointed out to any country considering the compulsory retention of the DNA of innocent people that in Britain 38 per cent of all black men are represented on the database, while just 10 percent of white men are. There will be an inbuilt racism in the system until – heaven forbid – we all have our DNA taken and recorded on our ID cards.

Baroness Kennedy, a lawyer and Labour peer, is one of the most vocal critics of Blair’s new laws. In the annual James Cameron Memorial Lecture at the City University, London, in April she gave a devastating account of her own party’s waywardness. She accused government ministers of seeing themselves as the embodiment of the state, rather than, as I would put it, the servants of the state.

"The common law is built on moral wisdom," she said, "grounded in the experience of ages, acknowledging that governments can abuse power and when a person is on trial the burden of proof must be on the state and no one’s liberty should be removed without evidence of the highest standard. By removing trial by jury and seeking to detain people on civil Asbo orders as a pre-emptive strike, by introducing ID cards, the Government is creating new paradigms of state power. Being required to produce your papers to show who you are is a public manifestation of who is in control. What we seem to have forgotten is that the state is there courtesy of us and we are not here courtesy the state."

The second invisible change that has occurred in Britain is best expressed by Simon Davies, a fellow at the London School of Economics, who did pioneering work on the ID card scheme and then suffered a wounding onslaught from the Government when it did not agree with his findings. The worrying thing, he suggests, is that the instinctive sense of personal liberty has been lost in the British people. "We have reached that stage now where we have gone almost as far as it is possible to go in establishing the infrastructures of control and surveillance within an open and free environment," he says. "That architecture only has to work and the citizens only have to become compliant for the Government to have control.

"That compliance is what scares me the most. People are resigned to their fate. They’ve bought the Government’s arguments for the public good. There is a generational failure of memory about individual rights. Whenever Government says that some intrusion is necessary in the public interest, an entire generation has no clue how to respond, not even intuitively And that is the great lesson that other countries must learn. The US must never lose sight of its traditions of individual freedom."

Those who understand what has gone on in Britain have the sense of being in one of those nightmares where you are crying out to warn someone of impending danger, but they cannot hear you. And yet I do take some hope from the picnickers of Parliament Square. May the numbers of these young eccentrics swell and swell over the coming months, for their actions are a sign that the spirit of liberty and dogged defiance are not yet dead in Britain.

This article is taken from the current issue of Vanity Fair

Charged for quoting George Orwell in public

In another example of the Government’s draconian stance on political protest, Steven Jago, 36, a management accountant, yesterday became the latest person to be charged under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act.

On 18 June, Mr Jago carried a placard in Whitehall bearing the George Orwell quote: "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." In his possession, he had several copies of an article in the American magazine Vanity Fair headlined "Blair’s Big Brother Legacy", which were confiscated by the police. "The implication that I read from this statement at the time was that I was being accused of handing out subversive material," said Mr Jago. Yesterday, the author, Henry Porter, the magazine’s London editor, wrote to Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, expressing concern that the freedom of the press would be severely curtailed if such articles were used in evidence under the Act.

Mr Porter said: "The police told Mr Jago this was ‘politically motivated’ material, and suggested it was evidence of his desire to break the law. I therefore seek your assurance that possession of Vanity Fair within a designated area is not regarded as ‘politically motivated’ and evidence of conscious law-breaking."

Scotland Yard has declined to comment.

Enemies of the state?

Maya Evans 25

The chef was arrested at the Cenotaph in Whitehall reading out the names of 97 British soldiers killed in Iraq. She was the first person to be convicted under section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, which requires protesters to obtain police permission before demonstrating within one kilometre of Parliament.

Helen John 68, and Sylvia Boyes 62

The Greenham Common veterans were arrested in April by Ministry of Defence police after walking 15ft across the sentry line at the US military base at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire. Protesters who breach any one of 10 military bases across Britain can be jailed for a year or fined £5,000.

Brian Haw 56

Mr Haw has become a fixture in Parliament Square with placards berating Tony Blair and President Bush. The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 was designed mainly with his vigil in mind. After being arrested, he refused to enter a plea. However, Bow Street magistrates’ court entered a not guilty plea on his behalf in May.

Walter Wolfgang 82

The octogenarian heckled Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, during his speech to the Labour Party conference. He shouted "That’s a lie" as Mr Straw justified keeping British troops in Iraq. He was manhandled by stewards and ejected from the Brighton Centre. He was briefly detained under Section 44 of the 2000 Terrorism Act.

Experts warned on 5 July that changing rainfall patterns and unpredictable river flows meant the proposed Traveston Dam in Queensland might never meet the State Government’s expectations for water capacity, reported The Australian (6/7/2006, p.7).

Govt water flow figures flawed: University of Queensland emeritus professor in civil engineering, Colin Apelt, said a forecast by government planners of an average water flow rate of 85 per cent in the Mary River above the Traveston site was unwise.

Weather patterns unpredictable: "It is a gross oversimplification to rely on that sort of river flow information, especially when the weather is so unpredictable," Apelt said. He said the Beattie Government had failed to pursue water conservation measures with sufficient vigour. "I have not seen any evidence the options have been considered fully," he said.

Recycled water the preferred option: In particular, the recycling of sewage and grey water should be encouraged, Apelt said. "Now is the time for the tough decisions," he urged. "We should be educating people that they can safely drink and use recycled water."

The Australian, 6/7/2006, p. 7

Source: Erisk Net