{"id":194783,"date":"2021-09-13T12:00:33","date_gmt":"2021-09-13T11:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=194783"},"modified":"2021-09-12T04:50:29","modified_gmt":"2021-09-12T03:50:29","slug":"unanswered-questions-what-the-september-eleventh-families-asked-and-the-9-11-commission-ignored","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/09\/unanswered-questions-what-the-september-eleventh-families-asked-and-the-9-11-commission-ignored\/","title":{"rendered":"Unanswered Questions: What the September Eleventh Families Asked and the 9\/11 Commission Ignored"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Unanswered Questions: What the September Eleventh Families Asked and the 9\/11 Commission Ignored<\/em><\/strong>, <\/strong>by Ray McGinnis, Kindle Edition, 11 Sep 2021, 454 pp.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

11 Sep 2021 – <\/em>It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of this book.\u00a0 It is a tour de force that blows away twenty years of U.S. government lies and obfuscations about the mass murders of September 11, 2001, the foundational event of recent times that claimed thousands of victims whose relatives still cry out for truth and justice.<\/p>\n

Reading Unanswered Questions<\/em><\/a> will roil you to the depths of your soul and illuminate your mind as Ray McGinnis presents fact after fact backed up by almost one thousand endnotes and twelve years of meticulous research.\u00a0 There is nothing speculative about this book.\u00a0 It is not a \u201cconspiracy theory.\u201d<\/p>\n

McGinnis ingeniously and brilliantly documents those murders through the eyes of victims\u2019 relatives and their decades-long, agonizing efforts to seek honest answers from the U.S. government.\u00a0 To have their simple and obvious questions answered.\u00a0 To know the truth about why their loved ones died and who killed them.<\/p>\n

Their struggles have been met with cruel indifference from four presidents (Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden), three New York City mayors (Giuliani, Bloomberg, and de Blasio), the 9\/11 Commission, and so many others in positions of authority who have turned deaf ears to their cris de coeur.<\/em>\u00a0 The corporate mass media have rubbed salt in their wounds as they have stage-managed the lies and coverups.\u00a0 And controlled opposition operatives have played slick games to direct attention away from the heart of the matter.<\/p>\n

The families\u2019 search for answers to their questions have been either ignored or answered with lies and dissimulation piled upon dissimulation to protect the guilty.\u00a0 McGinnis is their champion.\u00a0 He insists on answers.<\/p>\n

He powerfully unfurls layer upon layer of facts and the government\u2019s fictions in a timeline that brings us to the twentieth anniversary of these atrocities.\u00a0 While reading it, one cannot help but think of the thousands of innocent victims of that terrible day and their suffering families, and the millions of innocent victims throughout the world who have been murdered by the U.S. government in the name of 9\/11.\u00a0 The \u201cwar on terror\u201d has been waged by a government that continues to refuse to tell the truth about who the \u201cterrorists\u201d were on September 11, 2001.<\/p>\n

By refusing to answer the families\u2019 questions and thereby hypothetically claiming the Fifth Amendment for fear of incriminating themselves, government officials have ironically incriminated themselves.<\/p>\n

For McGinnis is like a prosecuting attorney who works not for the state but for the people.\u00a0 He forces the issue by asking the questions his clients want answered.\u00a0 Like them, he is persistent and requests answers to a litany of interrogations that are met with silence.\u00a0 The government\u2019s stonewalling is deafening, and readers \u2013 who are the jury \u2013 are left to decide the case partially based on those non-answers, often justified under the sham of \u201cnational security\u201d or just plain arrogance.\u00a0 When answers are forthcoming, they are incomplete and disingenuous.<\/p>\n

Seventy per cent of the questions the Family Steering Committee asked the 9\/11 Commission were left unanswered in The 9\/11 Commission Report.\u00a0 <\/em>Those that were answered raised more questions than they answered.<\/p>\n

But the reason that this book is so powerful is because McGinnis answers the questions that the government does not.\u00a0 And so his title \u2013 Unanswered Questions<\/em> \u2013 is ironically false while also being true.<\/p>\n

This should in no way put off those who still cling to the official story. For McGinnis is exceedingly fair in assessing and presenting the facts and readily admits when there are disagreements.<\/p>\n

While focusing on a core group of bereaved families called The Family Steering Committee who are insistent on answers, a group that includes four New Jersey widows known as \u201cThe Jersey Girls\u201d whose husbands died in the Twin Towers, he includes many others and does not shy away from saying when they are at odds.\u00a0 The only way a fair-minded person can assess the book is to read it.\u00a0 And if you don\u2019t read it and you have bought the government\u2019s official fabrications or are still sitting on the fence, you are in flight from truth.\u00a0 This book demands attention.<\/p>\n

As far as I know, while there have been many excellent books critiquing the government\u2019s account of 9\/11, led by about a dozen extraordinary works by David Ray Griffin, and many books supporting the government\u2019s explanation led by The 9\/11 Commission Report<\/em>, Unanswered Questions <\/em>is the first to approach the subject from the perspective of the questions asked by the relatives of the victims.<\/p>\n

For many people, the murders of that day are abstract, although they naturally stir the human emotions of pity, fear, and terror. But from a distance, for they are now fading into history and are not personal.\u00a0 For some, there may have been a catharsis with The 9\/11 Commission Report<\/em> which they no doubt never read although it was said to be a \u201cbest-seller.\u201d\u00a0 That would be fake catharsis, for such fiction fails to tell the truth since it was written by people blind in mind and ears as well as in their eyes.\u00a0 But then again, who reads Sophocles or Aeschylus any longer?\u00a0 Better to read The New York Times<\/em>, Slate<\/em> magazine, Time<\/em>, The New Republic<\/em>, The Nation<\/em>, etc., all of which effusively praised the 9\/11 Commission Report<\/em> when it was released.\u00a0 As McGinnis reports, \u201cThe New York Times <\/em>called the Report<\/em> \u2018an uncommonly lucid, even riveting narrative\u2019 and an \u2018improbable literary triumph.\u2019\u201d\u00a0 This is simply propaganda.<\/p>\n

But let us take a look inside Unanswered Questions, <\/em>a genuine non-fiction book motivated by a deep compassion for the victims and a scholar\u2019s dedication to the truth.\u00a0 It is divided into four parts, each containing multiple chapters.<\/p>\n

\u201cPart One: From Grief to Advocacy\u201d<\/strong> is the briefest and introduces the reader to firefighters, first responders, and family members who lost loved ones in the calamity.\u00a0 We learn how their grief turned to advocacy when they formed many groups to channel their energies.\u00a0 We learn how President Bush and his minions (or was Bush the minion and others like Cheney in charge?) opposed establishing a special commission to probe into the events of September Eleventh and how when his opposition was overcome he had the audacity to try to name Henry Kissinger to head the 9\/11 Commission and how this was stopped.\u00a0 Finally, McGinnis tells us how the families\u2019 questions were greatly expanded after discovering Paul Thompson\u2019s extraordinary Internet timeline with its vast numbers of links to news reports that was later published as The Terror Timeline<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cPart Two: Family Steering Committee Statements to the 9\/11 Commission\u201d <\/strong>examines how the 9\/11 Commission was a setup from the start, not even close to being an impartial investigation.\u00a0 It began with the naming of Philip Zelikow as the Director.\u00a0 Zelikow had deep ties to the Bush administration and its neocons.\u00a0 He had been a member of Bush\u2019s transition team.\u00a0 Even \u201cRichard Clarke, chairman of the \u2018Counterterrorism Security Group,\u2019 said \u2018the fix is in\u2019\u201d when Zelikow was appointed. \u00a0Zelikow completely controlled the investigation and the final report despite many conflicts of interest.\u00a0 He essentially wrote the report before the hearings commenced.\u00a0 He had authored a book with Condoleezza Rice and was an advocate for preemptive war that was used to attack Iraq in early 2003, etc.\u00a0 His appointment was a sick joke, and the Family Steering Committee called for his immediate resignation but was rebuffed just as quickly by Chairman Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton.\u00a0 As a result, the final report ended being a fictional account authored by Zelikow (who has now been named to head a Covid-19 commission).<\/p>\n

This section also covers the lies told by Mayor Rudy Giuliani when he testified.\u00a0 Three hundred and forty-three FDNY members were killed that day, heroes who didn\u2019t have to die. Giuliani\u2019s testimony so outraged the\u00a0 families of first responders that their fury was uncontained.\u00a0 McGinnis tells us:<\/p>\n

They held up signs that read \u2018lies\u2019 and \u2018liar.\u2019\u00a0 Family Steering Committee member Sally Regenhard held up a sign that read \u2018FICTION.\u2019\u00a0 She hollered, \u2018My son [Christian Regenhard, a probationary firefighter] was not told to \u00a0 get out!\u00a0 He would\u2019ve gotten out!\u00a0 My son was murdered, murdered \u00a0 because of your incompetence and radios that didn\u2019t work!\u2019<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

McGinnis captures the increasing anger felt by family members throughout this section as the final report was rammed through despite their protests.<\/p>\n

\u201cPart Three: The Family Steering Committee\u2019s Unanswered Questions\u201d<\/strong> is the heart of the book.\u00a0 It contains eleven chapters devoted to questions addressed to NORAD, the FAA, the CIA\/SEC\/FBI, Mayor Giuliani, President Bush, the Port Authority\/WTC\/City of New York, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld but never answered.\u00a0 Over a thousand questions were posed to the 9\/11 Commission to aid the investigation.\u00a0 McGinnis writes:<\/p>\n

The questions were intended to direct the focus of the inquiry, and ask those most directly involved what led to the failures that day.\u00a0 They understood that it would not be the FSC members themselves asking the questions.\u00a0 Instead, they would be posed to witnesses by 9\/11 commissioners in public hearings, or asked by Commission staff behind closed-door proceedings.<\/em><\/p>\n

Some of these questions were directed at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).\u00a0 One question the FSC asked the 9\/11 \u00a0 Commission was: \u2018Why weren\u2019t NORAD jets able to intercept the hijacked \u00a0 planes if they were airborne within eight minutes of notification?\u2019<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

NORAD had an extremely successful history of intercepting errant aircraft, and a part of their mission was \u201csurveillance and control of the [domestic] territorial airspace \u201c in the U.S. and Canada.\u00a0 Nevertheless, on September 11, 2001 none of the hijacked aircraft were intercepted even though they were allegedly being flown by inexperienced and incompetent hijackers who, according to experts, could never fly such massive commercial airliners into the World Trade Towers or the Pentagon.\u00a0 Government witnesses either lied about the systemic failures to intercept the planes, omitted important details, or gave contradictory stories. Of course, they were then promoted.\u00a0 And although there was an unprecedented number of war games being \u201ccoincidentally\u201d held on September 11, none of the 9\/11 Commissioners asked any witnesses about them.<\/p>\n

It was clear that all the questions about the failure to intercept the planes would not be answered, but McGinnis makes it obvious that their non-answers were indeed answers by omission, for in this section and all the others, he makes sure the questions are indeed answered and the cumulative effect is devastating.\u00a0 He does this not simply by expressing his own opinions but by quoting others and always giving sources.<\/p>\n

In a similar vein, the FSC wished to know from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) why these hijacked planes were able to evade all of the highly sophisticated radar?\u00a0 McGinnis says, \u201cThe 9\/11 Commission concluded that NORAD had failed to do its job on September Eleventh; NORAD\u2019s decisions impaired the FAA radar operator\u2019s conduct.\u201d\u00a0 Of course the radar questions were linked to the war games issue and since the war games questions were never asked, these massive failures were explained away in gobbledygook worthy of the Three Stooges.<\/p>\n

Mindy Kleinberg, a FSC member whose husband Alan died in the North Tower, told the Commission that its theory of luck was bullshit, although she phrased it more diplomatically:<\/p>\n

With regard to the 9\/11 attacks, it has been said that the intelligence agencies have to be right 100% of the time and the terrorists only have to get lucky once. \u00a0This explanation for the devastating attacks of September 11, simply on its face, is wrong in its value.\u00a0 Because the 9\/11 terrorists were not just lucky once; they were lucky over and over again\u2026Is it luck that aberrant stock trades were not monitored?\u00a0 Is it luck when 15 visas were awarded on incomplete forms?\u00a0 Is it luck when Airline Security \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 screenings allow hijackers to board planes with box cutters and pepper \u00a0\u00a0 spray?\u00a0 Is it luck when emergency FAA and NORAD protocols are not followed? \u00a0Is it luck when a national emergency is not reported to top government officials on a timely basis?\u00a0 To me luck is something that happens once.\u00a0 When you have this repeated pattern of broken protocols, broken laws, broken communication, one cannot still call it luck.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Comically, The 9\/11 Commission Report<\/em> concluded that, as McGinnis notes, \u201cThe reason for the attacks was due simply to a [U.S. government] failure of imagination.\u201d<\/p>\n

In regard to foreknowledge of the attacks, the families asked the CIA, the SEC, and the FBI for the names of the individuals and financial institutions who placed \u201cput\u201d orders on American and United Airlines in the three weeks prior to 9\/11.<\/p>\n

This involved the number three man at the CIA, CIA Executive Director Alvin \u201cBuzzy\u201d Krongard, former Vice Chairman of the board at Bankers Trust that had been acquired by Deutsche Bank through which many of these suspect stock trades passed.\u00a0 This insider trading that anticipated the 9\/11 attacks was connected to a security firm named Stratesec that provided security to Dulles Airport, the World Trade Center, and United Airlines, and to Wirt Walker III, a business partner of the president\u2019s brother, Marvin Bush.\u00a0 Walker III was a board member of the Carlyle Group that was in turn connected to the bin Laden and Bush families.<\/p>\n

Despite these and other highly suspect connections, the \u201c9\/11 Commission wasn\u2019t interested in exploring leads about possible foreknowledge of the attacks.\u201d\u00a0 Nor were they interested in the strange matter of Larry Silverstein, who had already owned World Trade Center Building 7, but who obtained a 99-year lease on the Twin Towers two months before the attack and who insisted that insurance cover a terrorist attack for $3.5. billion dollars.\u00a0 Silverstein was later awarded $4.55 billion when it was determined that there had been two suicide attacks.<\/p>\n

Silverstein later claimed that there was agreement to \u201cpull\u201d (a controlled demolition term) Building 7, which happened at 5:20 PM that day despite never having been hit by a plane.\u00a0 Questions about the collapse of Building 7 were of course never answered, but the videos of its collapse are available for all to see with their own eyes.\u00a0 An excellent film about Building 7, Seven<\/a> by Dylan Avery, should be seen by all.\u00a0 Seeing is believing, and what any objective observer can only conclude is that the building was taken down by controlled demolition, which the government denies.<\/p>\n

Which brings us to other key questions that the FSC asked, McGinnis explores, and that went unanswered: Why did President Bush enter a Sarasota, Florida elementary classroom, stay there as the attacks unfolded, and not immediately return to Washington, D.C.?\u00a0 Why did he enter that classroom at 9:03 AM and remain there for fifteen minutes when it was clear the U.S. was under a terrorist attack?\u00a0 Why was he, unlike Dick Cheney, not immediately taken out of the building by the Secret Service but was allowed to sit and read to children and not depart the building until 9:34 A.M.?<\/p>\n

\u201cThe vice president was reported by President Bush\u2019s personal secretary as being \u2018seized by arms, legs, and his belt and physically\u2019 carried out of his office at 9:03 A.M.\u00a0 Cheney was taken to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center below the White House, where Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta saw him prior to 9:25 A.M.\u201d\u00a0 Yet Bush stayed to read a book when colleagues of the Secret Service agents protecting him had already been evacuated from the largest Secret Service Field Office in WTC 7.<\/p>\n

\u201cHowever,\u201d writes McGinnis, \u201con December 4, 2001, President Bush made the following statement at a Town Hall meeting about the moment \u2013 9:01 a.m. \u2013 that he said he learned about the attack.\u00a0 \u2018And I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower \u2013 the television was obviously on, and I used to fly myself, and I said , \u201cThat\u2019s one terrible pilot.\u201d\u00a0 And I said, \u201cIt must have been a horrible accident.\u201d\u00a0 But I was whisked off there \u2013 I didn\u2019t have much time to think about it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

You can\u2019t make this stuff up, yet it\u2019s offered to the public and the victims\u2019 families as acceptable.\u00a0 Bush was informed that a second plane had hit the South Tower by Andrew Card who came into the classroom and whispered in his ear.\u00a0 But three months later he claims he saw on television the first plane hit the North Tower when no one could have seen it since video of the first plane hitting the building at 8:46 A.M. was not available until much later.<\/p>\n

These ridiculous discrepancies and other questions the FSC wished the 9\/11 Commission to ask Bush under oath in sworn public testimony went unasked and unanswered.\u00a0 Instead, as McGinnis writes:<\/p>\n

But, the meeting with Bush and Cheney took place in secret on April 29, 2004.\u00a0 It was not held under oath.\u00a0 No transcript was made available of\u00a0 their conversation with the commissioners.\u00a0 Nothing was learned about why the president remained at an elementary school during the attacks. Nothing was learned about what the president knew regarding foreign intelligence agencies forewarning the U.S.\u00a0 Nothing was learned about why the president had authorized America to prepare for war against Afghanistan in the days and weeks prior to the attacks of September 11.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Nor was anything learned about why Pentagon brass suddenly cancelled flights scheduled for September 11.\u00a0 Nothing about who warned them and why.<\/p>\n

Essentially all the key questions the families asked were not answered.\u00a0 But McGinnis answers them, including those addressed to Cheney, Rumsfeld, Giuliani, the CIA, and the Port Authority\/WTC\/City of New York.\u00a0 By using the documented records against them, he does the job the 9\/11 Commission refused to do. He unravels the lies, circumlocutions, and straightforward propaganda used to hide the truth, including the following:<\/p>\n