As we mark the 20th anniversary of that fateful day on September 11, 2001 when hijacked airliners slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a pervasive sense of dread infused with an inherent sparkle of hope seems to be coloring my sensibilities, filled with memories of the days and months that followed the attacks when paranoia surged, new assaults on basic human freedoms were advanced, blind sloganeering summoned an anger toward dissent, and the public was bullied into accepting whatever new scheme politicians were dreaming up for keeping us ‘safe’.

As for the sparkle of hope, amid ongoing pressure from the families of 9/11 victims, President Biden on September 3rd of this year finally ordered the declassification of FBI documents related to the 9/11 attacks, which is now set to be released over a period of the next 6 months.

The families have long moved through US courts to seek accountability for the Saudi government, accusing multiple  administrations of seeking to cover up close US-ally Saudi Arabia's involvement in supporting the al-Qaeda hijackers. Last month about 1,700 family members of the victims wrote a scathing letter to President Biden urging him to skip 9/11 memorial events unless he's willing to release the documents immediately. 

This should give us all a sense of hope that accountability is still in the American vocabulary.

On the day of the 9/11 attacks I was finishing the #508th issue of The REVIEW for publication and like the rest of my countrymen watched in dumbfounded horror as the catastrophe unfolded.  It was surreal - like a combination of the Book of Revelations and a bad Bruce Willis movie, only the horror was imminent - a strategic attack targeted directly at the soul.

Two days later as details continued to unfold, I was driving back from Standish listening to Rush Limbaugh on the radio, whom I’ve always detested. He was saying how in the weeks ahead we would be hearing many leaders talking about how America needs to pull back on our domestic freedoms and civil liberties, going on to state how “this would be the worst thing we could do because it would signify that the actions of the terrorists had succeeded.”  This marked the first time I had actually ever agreed with anything Limbaugh said, signifying not only a ‘new normal’ in my own world, but a warning that 20 years down the road has proven to be prescient.

As we fast-forward to today, in many ways the current hysteria concerning the way we are dealing with our present national crisis appears worse that the early years of the 21st century. It affects the everyday lives of countless Americans in ways the 9/11 panic did not.  However, to my mind, the current crisis is nonetheless very much a continuation of the attitudes and paranoia that surged so strong 20-years ago.

Trust the Experts

As journalist Ryan McMacken notes, “Then, as now, the public was repeatedly instructed to trust the experts and not question government officials in any way. This manifested itself in a couple of ways. First of all, there was new legislation like the so-called Patriot Act, a smorgasbord of new freedom-destroying federal initiatives that would authorize all sorts of new spying and search powers by the federal government.”  Soon after came the president’s power to declare anyone an “enemy combatant” and subject to torture, imprisonment, and forfeiture of all legal rights.

Those who objected were denounced as reckless and naïve, and unconcerned for human life. Torture, we were told, was absolutely necessary for public safety. The opposition was said to be unfit to comment on the matter or question federal powers because the "experts"—i.e., CIA personnel, etc.—understood the real dangers.

The trust-the-experts claim was trotted out again when the Bush administration and the CIA began to collaborate to "prove" that Saddam Hussein was somehow responsible for the 9/11 attacks and was harboring "weapons of mass destruction" (WMDs) to use on Americans. Politicians and bureaucrats went into high gear, creating countless reports, studies, and claims from alleged witnesses showing that the Iraqi regime was just itching to launch its WMDs at innocents around the world.

The experts, of course, were wrong. Moreover, many were simply lying. There were no WMDs, and Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. But millions of Americans believed the experts, and thus believed the lies.

Thanks to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, we later learned the truth, which many still attempt to deny. We learned that NATO forces in Afghanistan used Special Forces Black Unit Task Force 373 to hunt down targets for death or detention without trial, also killing civilian men, women and children. 

We learned that complex underground fortresses that were bombed by the US in Afghanistan were originally built by the CIA in the 1980’s with Osama bin Laden’s cooperation. As the New York Times reported back in 2005: “The first time bin Laden had seen the Tora Bora Caves he had been a young mujahedeen fighter and a recent university graduate with a degree in civil engineering. It had been some 20 years before, during Washington’s first Afghan war, the decade-long CIA financed jihad of the 1980’s against the Soviet occupation. It’s miles of tunnels, bunkers and base camps, dug deeply into the steep rock walls, had been part of a CIA financed complex built for the mujahedeen.”

And the list of surreptitious betrayals goes on.

20 Years Later • The Truth Under Lockdown

With the pending release of classified 9/11 documents that President Biden has ordered, it remains to be seen how far we will be allowed to see inside the looking glass. 

Of particular significance, however, is the release of a final report of an academic study released on March 25, 2020,  the conclusion of a four year investigation by researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, which determined that the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 on September 11th, 2001 was not caused by fire.

The peer-reviewed inquiry was funded by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, a nonprofit organization composed of more than 3,000 building architects and engineers who are a signatory to the group’s formal appeal calling for a new investigation into the three — not two — WTC skyscrapers destroyed on 9/11. 

The 47-story WTC 7 was the third skyscraper to be completely destroyed on September 11, 2001, collapsing rapidly and symmetrically into its footprint at 5:20 PM. Seven years later, investigators at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) concluded that WTC 7 was the first steel-framed high-rise ever to have collapsed solely as a result of immolation.

Contrary to the conclusions of NIST, the UAF research team found that the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11 was not caused by fires, but instead was caused by the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building [which means it was a controlled demolition].

Interestingly enough, this also ties in with Hurricane Erin, which was located 150 miles off the coast of Manhattan on the morning of 9/11.   Dr. Judy Wood, in her book, "Where Did the Towers Go?' www.wheredidthetowersgo.com found through a Freedom of Information Act request that "Erin", a Category 3 hurricane, was not reported for 4 days before 911, even though it was headed for New York City.

It moved generally in a straight line, did a button hook toward Manhattan, and sat there until after 911 was over, and then it moved off.   While the government  has admitted it can affect and control weather; the question remains can it control hurricanes?   And if it can, as is seen in Dr Wood's evidence, then why can't they steer hurricanes away from the US?  Moreover, who in the government has the power to tell NOAA not to report a hurricane heading for NYC?

These are some of the questions Woods raises and addresses, explaining also how  a spinning hurricane creates millions of joules of electrical energy.  As absurd as it sounds on the surface, it is Woods’ thesis that this energy was used in an ionized atmosphere surrounding Manhattan for a high scalar directed energy beam weapon.

What makes this largely unheard tale even more fascinating is that Woods proved her science in two state Supreme Court cases, where the courts noted that while her book and work had "scientific merit"; subsequently the federal district court refused to hear her case, refusing to investigate the veracity of her assertions nor the evidence she had to back it up.

According to Wood’s work, which also ties in with the University of Alaska Fairbanks study, where there should have been a pile of debris, each building of the Twin Towers showed a hole in the center.  It's been proven the WTC was not brought down by the traditional pancake demolition method (Cited by the 911 Truthers) as Wood showed.  About 12-15% of the mass was turned to dust, not chunks of cement.

Each floor contained an acre of cement 4 inches thick and it has been proven by the evidence that millions of tons of debris was in fact turned into toxic dust, (See Wood, Chapter 2, "Dustification"), not normal chunks, with dangerous vapors and dust streaming for days after the Towers came down, causing the deaths of thousands of first responders from organ cancers and COPD.

After Dr. Wood published her book, she subsequently lost her tenured professorship as a result. Apart from being eminently qualified based on her education to determine what happened on 9/11, and given that 1.5 million tons of concrete and steel came down in just under 10 seconds and was turned mostly to toxic dust, Wood was never called to the 9/11 Commission Hearing, despite the fact no scientific evidence has been shown to disprove anything in her book, which contains over 100 pages of citations and abstract footnotes.

Living with the Aftermath

It takes many years for a society to recover from fits of panic and paranoia such as these. The taxpayers will still be paying interest on the trillions of dollars spent on disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan decades from now. Thousands of American troops have died for nothing in conflicts that have done nothing to make any American safer and indeed, given the hundreds of thousands of innocent foreigners that also died in those same conflicts, have only exacerbated the situation.

Thanks to the reaction to 9/11, governments in the US are now far larger, far more expensive, and far less limited by laws and constitutions than in the past. This is what happens when a country believes itself to be in a constant state of emergency. Due process goes out the window and governments get away with far more than would have been the case otherwise.

And now we see the same thing today. We're repeatedly ordered to trust the official arbiters of scientific truth. Never mind the facts of how many other experts have dissented on a wide variety of topics, from the lethality of covid-19 to the wisdom of lockdowns, because we are told they’re not the ‘real experts’.

Then as now, it's only acceptable to believe the experts who support untrammeled growth in state power.

Americans are ruined, arrested, destroyed, and humiliated in the name of "safety." Those who dissent and seek to limit government’s powers are silenced, threatened, arrested, shouted down, and ignored.

This is America in a state of permanent emergency.

And while the justification for the ever growing power of government changes over time, the results are always the same.