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9/11 Questions Remain Unanswered
 The Real News Network
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September 10, 2010
Bio: Peter Dale Scott a former Canadian diplomat and Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. His most recent books are Drugs, Oil, and War (2005), The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (2007), The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11 and the Deep Politics of War (2008) and Mosaic Orpheus (poetry, 2009).
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Transcript
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Washington. Nine-eleven, 2010, nine years after the events that helped shape the beginning of this century, led to the war in Afghanistan, became the rationale for the war in Iraq, and nine years later, debate still rages. What really happened on 9/11? And why? And who's responsible? Millions of people still have questions about what really happened, including author Peter Dale Scott, former Canadian diplomat, retired professor at the University of Berkeley, a researcher and author. Here's a little bit of what he's written. "I do not know the truth of what happened on 9/11. I do know for a certainty that there has been a cover-up of 9/11; and also, what the 9/11 Commission itself admits, that there has been a high-level governmental lying about what happened, and what didn’t happen, on that day. It became clear to me early on that 9/11 was another in a string of what I have called 'deep events'". Now joining us from Berkeley, California, is Peter Dale Scott. Thanks very much for joining us, Peter.
PROF. PETER DALE SCOTT: I'm glad to be back with you.
JAY: So what questions about 9/11 are left unanswered for you?
SCOTT: Well, just about all of them. We don't know what brought the buildings down. We don't know who was on the planes and what their exact role was. Let's start with what we do know. We know that a lot of the first testimony given to the 9/11 commission was, by their own account, false. They actually considered prosecutions of people for covering up. And both the cochairmen have agreed that they never did get the truths on some basic matters. So they're more satisfied with their product than I am, because they're convinced that it was 19 Arab hijackers. I don't know that. What most interests me, and I said this in my book, The Road to 9/11, that morning, Vice President Cheney became a key figure, because President Bush was in Air Force One flying all over the country, and he has given two different accounts of what he did on that day. One of them I think is false and I think is designed to cover up what is perhaps the most important event in the US response on that day, which was to invoke the procedures of what's called continuity of government, something which Cheney himself had been planning, working on for 20 years before that.
JAY: Peter, before we get into that (and we will dig into that), let's go back to the beginning of what you said. Why do we have reason to doubt that on that plane were 19 terrorists and so on? That part of the story I don't think is what the people who are critiquing from the 9/11 Commission themselves, who have said there—things were covered up, they're not suggesting that's a piece of what was covered up, are they?
SCOTT: No. No, not that. What they really focus on are the timetables that the military initially provided about when they knew about the planes and when the fighters were finally mustered up into the air and that sort of thing. But it's very significant. These are, you know, full generals and so on who, in effect, the cochairs of the commission have accused of perjury. They say that it was just false testimony. And it is irreconcilable with other things that are known. I don't think it's very fruitful at this stage, after nine years, to start rehearsing all of the details as to what we don't know. I must say for myself a very big priority would be what brought down World Trade Center building number seven, which was not hit by a plane, which was separated. There was another building in between the towers, which fell, and building seven, which fell. And although there was a lot of fire damage to World Trade Center six in between, it did not fall. That is something, I think, which we should all be asking for an explanation to. And here again there has been lying. I mean, the first NIST reports [National Institute of Standards and Technology] said even the best explanation has only a small probability of being true. And then, since then, they conducted a very full investigation—or they said it was very full—and then someone said, well, what do you think about the possibility of an implosion, that it was brought down by a controlled implosion? And they said, oh, we didn't look into that. So it was—.
JAY: That's building seven you're talking about.
SCOTT: Building seven, yes.
JAY: Yeah. In their report, I think they attribute it to fire, but they do acknowledge that there's never been a building that came down as a result of the fire the way seven did. The other two is little different issue 'cause there's so little precedent for what happened there. But as you said, seven was just fire without being hit by anything.
SCOTT: The other two, there was airplane fuel, which might or might not have been a factor, depending on who you believe.
JAY: Maybe one of the really interesting things here is that there's just so many millions of people that simply won't accept the official version of that. That in itself has some significance about what people think, in terms of how this whole story's been presented.
SCOTT: And in the case of the buildings, there's this organization Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, and these are qualified people who are united in saying that the explanations the government has offered just aren't good.
JAY: Part of this that's always intrigued me is what's on the public record and acknowledged by everyone, more or less, as true, and that doesn't seem to ever have been properly accounted for. For example, Condoleezza Rice gets a memo saying Osama bin Laden plans to attack America on American soil. You have the FBI in Minneapolis say they've been trying to get someone's computer who they say is doing training, and they're stopped. You have the guy that wrote the history of the Mossad, who is a credible British journalist, saying that the Mossad tried to tell the FBI and CIA that something was coming, that they'd infiltrated a cell, and nobody wanted to hear it.
SCOTT: So did the Egyptians. So, possibly, did the Germans. Yes, there were. I think the 9/11 Report itself says that the system was blinking red in the month before. And there was the famous August 6, 2001, warning. And then Bush went off to Crawford, Texas, and Cheney went off to Wyoming, which is interesting to me, because also in the '80s he would disappear for a summer holiday, but actually he was on a very secret project, nine-oh-eight, which was to plan for continuity of government, for the rules and emergency measures which were invoked on September 11.
JAY: Well, the issue of continuity of government is something which is quite verifiable in terms of the data, as I understand. So in the next segment of our interview, let's drill into what was this continuity of government plan, and also let's talk about the fact that it's still in place, if I understand it correctly. So please join us for the next segment of our interview with Peter Dale Scott. |
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