Did the Government Know in Advance About 9/11?

by Richard

The other day while I was in New Hampshire campaigning for Rudy Giuliani I missed a debate in the Lower East Side in which my friend Karol Shenin participated. Karol a New York City Republican activist and blogger at Alarming News debated Sandra Hicks on the subject "Did the Government Know in Advance About 9/11?".

Sander Hicks a local liberal blogger argued in the affirmative that yes our Government knew about 9/11 in advance while Karol argued against the idea. Below is a copy of Karols responce to Sanders ridiculous claims that Bush Knew, in the end of course cool heads did prevail and Karol beat Sanders in the debate.

By Karol Shenin

One of my favorite writers, Mark Steyn, once wrote “A good indication of societal decadence is when it prefers to obsess over fictional offences rather than real ones.” I add that there’s no decadence quite like American decadence.

Conspiracy theories are very tempting. “I know something the rest of you don’t know”. It’s a childish impulse that some people carry over into adulthood. It makes people feel special and, in the case of 9/11 conspiracies, safe.

It isn’t a complicated network of Islamist terrorists that want to kill you, it’s George W. Bush. And really, which would you prefer as an enemy? The people who would chop off your head and send it to your mother or the guy who mispronounces nuclear and falls off his Segway?

When I started researching this topic, I came across dozens of conspiracy laden explanations for what happened on 9/11. There were bombs in the buildings, no plane actually hit the Pentagon, it was the Jooooos that done did it, and, the most popular, that Building 7 was brought down by controlled demolition because apparently that’s the most effective way to erase documents on a computer.

Most conspiracy theorists subscribe to their favorite theory and generally discount the rest. In fact, Anthony Luppe who wrote the forward to Sander’s book laughs at the people who believe in some of the more outlandish theories like that there were no airplanes or that there were missiles on the planes and essentially accuses the people who believe in conspiracy theories other than the ones described in this particular book as possible government plants who want to deliberately spread disinformation so that we don’t find out the truth.

Some conspiracy theorists, particularly the ones who profit off of their nuttiness simply adjust their perspective when one of their theories gets discredited. With every new video they produce, they just edit out the old information that they can no longer support. The general public doesn’t have the time to sift through the overwhelming amount of detail provided by these people because they have jobs, families, car payments and PTA meetings to attend to. In short, they have lives.

Every one of these theories has holes you can fly a 747 through. But I’m not here today to debate these theories, I’m here to debate one conspiracy theory only: that the US government had knowledge of the 9/11 attacks and purposely didn’t stop it.

After reading his book, I find that my opponent basically believes that the Pakistani government was behind 9/11 and that our government let it happen. Let me make this very clear. He doesn’t believe that some bureaucrat somewhere got a tip that planes were going to be hijacked and flown into our buildings and the government official just put it at the bottom of a pile of other tips he had gotten that day.

No, Sander believes that the government LET 9/11 happen. His reasons are all over the map but essentially our government decided to let this one terrorist attack happen so as not to embarrass our friends the Pakistanis and let our connections to their intelligence agency be found out. Additionally, our government would be able to pursue their imperialistic goals with neverending war but my opponent really doesn’t cover this until the very end of his book.

He bases this on the word of one supposed ex-CIA agent who had dinner, in TriBeCa, with a Pakistani man variously described in the book as both an arms dealer and a spy for Pakistan’s spy agency, and the Pakistani man pointed at the towers and said “they’re coming down.”

Assuming that this exchange actually happened, and like everything else in this book, I doubt this account is factual, so what? The towers had been previously attacked and it didn’t take that big a leap in imagination to think they might be again. Right after the USS Cole was attacked, the guy from Yemen who owned my local bodega in Greenpoint, Brooklyn told me and a friend that “this was just the beginning” and said America had future attacks coming its way.

Does that mean he knew 9/11 was going to happen? Or, more likely, is it that there is a large segment of the Muslim population that feels it is at permanent war with the West—Jihad after all is “the struggle”—to impose their backward beliefs about what society should be on the rest of us. Additionally, no one knew that hitting the towers with planes would bring them down. If that was common knowledge, it’s doubtful that our firemen would have been in the buildings at the time of their collapse.

To my opponent’s credit, he often introduces new characters in his book by telling you their criminal records right up front. He seems to have really learned that Karl Rove lesson of getting out in front of the story. He knows these con men will be exposed as thieves, liars and general criminals, so why not make it clear at the start? And while it’s possible that these men lied to so many people that they stole from or harmed, Hicks never entertains the possibility that they’re lying to him. About one of the main con men in the book, my opponent writes “although he was accused of credit card fraud in Michigan, Vreeland’s credit card report states that he never had a credit card.” Oooooh. Conspiracy! Or, more likely, he stole someone else’s credit card and that’s why he’s charged with fraud.

By the way, my opponent realizes later in his story that the 17-year old Vreeland refers to as his “son” is more likely his lover. Upon this realization, though, he concludes that Vreeland was “the victim of child sexual abuse”. I mean, he discovers the guy is a sexual predator and then calls him a “victim”. He later writes that Vreeland’s “multiple reality mix of truth and lies is something akin to the multiple personality disorders of the victims of childhood abuse.” Touching, I assure you, but now that we know the con man is a liar, why does my opponent continue to believe anything he says?

That’s a big part of the problem for conspiracy theorists, this inability to prescribe bad motives for the people they sympathize with. Sander writes “the official story from the FBI is that Atta was a fundamentalist Muslim who hated America and led the 9/11 attacks. In real life, however, Atta seemed to be something of an Egyptian double agent who fell in love with an American ex-stripper and did a lot of coke.” Again, assuming this is accurate, which, again, I doubt, my opponent can believe that the US government was ok with killing 3000 of its people and the CIA is in Pakistan’s pocket, but the idea that this one guy could live a hypocritical life is just beyond his imagination.

I actually laughed out loud when my opponent talks about one of his main sources Randy Glass, who my opponent describes as “a jewelry conman turned FBI informant”, that Glass revealed more every time they spoke. It never crosses my opponent’s mind that he was making it up as he went along.

Conspiracies are sexy, no doubt about it. They make people feel smart and in the know. But these conspiracy theories make no sense and seem to have no point.
In closing, the US government did not know in advance about 9/11. Is the government incompetent? Sure. Bungling? Absolutely. But in bed with the Pakistani government and a willing participant in 9/11? No.
Concluding remarks:

At one point in his book, my opponent quotes some rap lyrics by a group called Dead Prez who basically call the American government terrorists, etc. I love, no, make that I live, for quoting rap lyrics so I was going to go with Jay-Z’s “a wise man told me don’t argue with fools, cause people from a distance can’t tell who is who”.

But actually, I think it’s very important to mount this argument, even if I’m tarred by association. When I agreed to do this debate, I had so many people ask me why I would do something like this. They felt I was giving legitimacy to what they consider a crackpot segment of our population. I’m not doing this for the people in the “Investigate 9/11” shirts, I’m not trying to change their minds, if they’ve got the shirt I guess they’re pretty committed. I’m also not doing this so that people who agree with me can nod their heads. I’m doing it so there can be a record of opposition to the people that support these conspiracy theories, lest they somehow find their place into our history books.

Sander makes a lot of wild accusations in his book and talks about all these whistleblowers having their lives destroyed. It’s funny, then, that he published this book and is sitting right here. Our all-powerful government seems unable to get rid of this one menacing café owner.

~AWSOME