Photo “September 11th” by hankplank / Flickr
Charlie Sheen has been on the offensive lately, demanding answers to questions surrounding the events of September 11th, 2001. Careful to distance himself from being just another “deluded Hollywood liberal”, Sheen simply wants answers from the government and is demanding a “truly independent congressional investigation into 9/11 and its aftermath”.
Sheen is using his celebrity to attempt to garner the attention of President Obama. However Sheen lost any credibility he had when his “partner-in-crime”, Inforwars.com’s Alex Jones posted a fake 20-minute interview between Charlie Sheen and President Obama.
Not that there is anything wrong with posting a fake “mock” interview, but it should certainly be identified as such. The problem with Jones’ fake interview is that when the interview was first published there was no mention that it was a fake. This was obviously a cheap, deceptive publicity ploy that backfired.
Under pressure from more credible news agencies, Sheen/Jones inserted a line at the end of the fake interview stating “Author’s Note: What you have just read didn’t actually happen… yet.”
I must admit that I was fooled when I first read it. I found it odd however that there were few media agencies reporting on Sheen’s “interview with the President” while searching on the topic. This would certainly generate a lot of buzz in the media if Sheen did in fact sit down with President Obama.
To further confuse and deceive readers, the fake interview includes the following paragraph at the beginning:
I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with our 44th President of the United States of America, Barack Hussein Obama, while he was out promoting his health care reform initiative. I requested 30 minutes given the scope and detail of my inquiry; they said I could have 20. Twenty minutes, 1200 seconds, not a lot of time to question the President about one of the most important events in our nation’s history. The following is a transcript of our remarkable discussion.
Although the fake interview is extremely deceptive, they did a good job in their characterization of the President and his answers were very realistic and believable.
As someone who has read the 9/11 Commission report, I have a very high level of interest in the investigation of 9/11.
In the fake interview, Sheen lays out 20 bullet points for the President to consider. Here are a few (paraphrased):
- Why wasn’t the 9/11 Commission report interested in the “Doomsday plane” that was spotted and video taped on 9/11?
- WTC building 7 appears to be a controlled demolition.
- Three months before 9/11 Dick Cheney usurped exclusive control of NORAD and didn’t give the shoot down orders until 10:10-10:20AM. Three months after 9/11 he gave control of NORAD back to the military.
- In 2004, 2 New York firefighters claiming they had found black boxes at the World Trade Center but were told to keep their mouth shut by the FBI.
- Hundreds of witnesses described multiple explosions in both towers before and during the collapse.
- Ted Olsen said his wife called him twice from the hijacked airplane when technology to use cell phones from high altitudes was not created until 2004 and there were no airplane phones on her airplane.
- The Pentagon impact zone is only 16-feet wide, even though the Boeing 757 is 125ft in width.
- What is the meaning behind the folllowing quote attributed to Dick Cheney?
- “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 turned and whipped his neck around and said, “Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?””
- Top Pentagon officials cancelled their scheduled flights for September 11th on September 10th. San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, following a security warning, cancelled a flight into New York that was scheduled for the morning of 9/11.
- The technology to enable cell phone calls from high-altitude airline flights was not created until 2004, and even by that point it was only in the trial phase. Calls from cell phones which formed an integral part of the official government version of events were technologically impossible at the time.
Although I think Sheen has some good questions, I don’t agree with the conclusion that he’s alluding to – and it’s not because I believe the US Government is transparent and not deceptive.
At worst, Sheen is suggesting the US Government orchestrated the events of 9/11. At best he’s suggesting that the US Government had prior knowledge of the impending attack and turned a blind eye and even engaged in clandestine subversion to disrupt actions that could have prevented the attack.
First of all, I think we can completely dismiss the first allegation – that the US Government orchestrated the 9/11 attack. In order for the US Government to orchestrate the attack and its cover-up, thousands of personnel would need to be involved. Coordinating a planned demolition of two of the tallest skyscrapers in the world and keeping it secret from the buildings tenants is no small feat – and that’s only one small aspect of the allegation.
We’re talking about a government that can’t even keep a foreign coup d’état secret. To give credit to the government for coordinating the events of 9/11 and keeping it secret puts an tremendous level of faith in the ability, efficiency and effectiveness of the US Government’s operations.
Addressing the second allegation – that the US Government had prior knowledge of the impending attack and did nothing to prevent it is also a damning allegation. Like the first allegation, it suggests that certain officials within the US Government would be willing to sacrifice thousands of innocent civilians in order to win over its populace to support an offensive on two countries in the Middle East that provide a strategic advantage in the balance of world power.
This allegation is perhaps more realistic than the first. Turning a blind eye to known events requires far less personnel than actually orchestrating the attack – making it far easier to keep a secret from the general public.
I’m certain that there exists classified information about 9/11 that would be embarrassing for the government to release. What if the people of the United States found out that the US Military was in fact training at least 5 of the hijackers to fly airplanes? That doesn’t mean the government knew they would later become hijackers or that a plan to fly airplanes into the World Trade Center existed.
But it is substantial enough that releasing this information to the general public would be a political disaster, even if released by President Obama.
For this reason, there is classified information that will never be released to the public about the 9/11 attacks – even if the President has the best of intentions to be transparent and open to his people. It’s like a husband who starts lying to his wife, and has to continue digging deeper into his web of lies. After a while a small disclosure about an innocent lie could compromise the husbands bigger lie and that would be the end.
The US Government is no different – it has to engage in some level of deception in order to retain its status as the world’s superpower.
Having said that, my opinion on the events of 9/11 is that the government was sloppy in handling the situation due to complex bureaucracy and lack of cooperation between government entities. There is no doubt in my mind that the government’s hands aren’t completely clean on the events that led to 9/11, but I don’t think government officials willingly authorized or allowed mass murder on their own people.
Regardless of government’s involvement in the events of 9/11, the tragedy was certainly exploited as a means to achieve the vision laid out by the Project for the New American Century – a now inactive group that many of Bush’s senior administration members belonged to. PFNAC made no attempt to hide the fact that they wanted a war in Iraq to protect “a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil”. They asked for a war and they got one.
I would love nothing more than to see Sheen’s questions answered by President Obama – but I’m not going to hold my breath. We may never know the answers to Sheen’s questions.
Maybe we don’t want to know the truth.
Hmmm.
Good article. I seem to comment more on the political articles than the environmental ones.
I agree, the second allegation (gov’ment didn’t orchestrate, but had knowledge but turned a blind eye) is more likely than the first allegation. However, I do think there are people in the gov’t that would sacrifice the lives of some of their citizens to better their agenda.
You actually mentioned what I wanted to say and that was the “excuse” for a war in Iraq. My suspicion is that the gov’t did turn a blind eye (didn’t necessarily organize it), with the main goal being: fabricating an enemy in the middle east.
Your article is misleading and deceptive. The disclaimer was posted along with the interview within half an hour of publishing. NOT from pressure from so-called “credible” news sources. You did not even check it yourself. You simply parrot what you heard from others. Do your homework.
What you may think or feel has nothing to do with the truth (at least not necessarily). The truth can only be established by facts.
I am not a US citizen, but this subject goes way beyond the US; as you know the whole world followed closely these events.
The truth may be sometimes dark, but it is still the truth, and a world that is not ready to deal with it is doomed, no matter how you want to look at it.
Take it from a national from Argentina, that has seen it all…
A friend of mine from Israel has an interesting take on this: the holocaust in large part was helped along by people who were afraid to question the establishment.
Never stop asking questions and challenging the status quo.
To say 911 was carried out by the US, is rude, in my opinion. They made mistakes, they were warning signs that perhaps they they didn’t take seriously, and the list goes on…
As for Charlie Sheen, I don’t think an actor should not be allowed to voice his opion, because he is an actor. He has a right to his opinions. But with rights come great responsiblity.
Great analysis. I always enjoy reading your posts.
There seems to be a very wide range of viewpoints on this topic. I agree with all of you that we have a right to ask questions and even demand answers from our government. After all, the government is there to serve the people – not the other way around.
Let me re-iterate: I would love for all of Sheen’s questions to be answered by the US Government. I think he has some really good questions and deserves answers.
However, the point I was trying to make it that the US Government has lots of dirty secrets – and no matter who is running the United States of America, there is a structure in place that protects those secrets.
My opinion that the US Government wasn’t responsible for the attack is a personal opinion – a gut feel you might say. Of course I don’t have enough information to make a judgement one way or another – but that’s why it’s just an opinion.
Nariman, I agree 100% with your friend’s assessment of the Holocaust. We’re very fortunate to live in countries where we can ask the tough questions. During the 1930’s in Germany, people who questioned the establishment were executed, so fearing for one’s own life was the reason many people didn’t (openly) question the establishment.
Finally, I wanted to point out that when I began writing this article I was fascinated by the amount of research and preparation Charlie Sheen has done to lay out his questions for the President. I have to admit that the tone of the article changed when I found out the interview with the President wasn’t real.
Want to wake America up to the truth regarding 9/11? Here’s how…….
http://blandyland.com/?p=388
Please leave a comment voicing your support for this idea. It is a very small price to pay considering everything that has happened in our world based on the tragic events of that fateful September morning.
Thanks,
Daniel Edd Bland III
http://www.BlandyLand.com
To claim that Dick Cheney and a cadre of trusted compadres, orchestrated 9/11 is far different the implicating the entire U.S. Government. It wouldn’t take thousands to take down a building either. A few demolition experts, are all that is needed. The placement of explosives could have taken place over a period of weeks.
But instead, can we look at who benefited most from 9/11 and deduce the culprits that way?
Turn the clock back to 1999.
If one were to just look at what the largest of corporations had on their wish list in 1999 and then zip ahead to 2011 and examine how many have been realized, and to further poner how many of these wish list items could not have occurred without 9/11.
For example, there have been several “securities and technology firms that could never have sold their scanners to airports (and the American public) had 9/11 and the patriot act, formation of homeland security etc not precipitated the need for such scanners. Government contractors, from nowhere sprung up, almost overnight and garnered no-bid contracts.
Now at first glance, It would boggle the mind to try to calculate all the pieces that had to fit into place for so much to be gained, in so short a period of time, by so few.
It would seem like an impossibility to have been able to map it out in advance. Or would it?
The U.S. has an entire game plan outlining precise events kicking off and conducting a nuclear war.
It’s call SIOP and it takes into consideration human, political, national and international events. It tracts, analysises and factors into it’s answers, friendly and foe military tactics, and strategies, troop movements, temporary maneuvers, permanent emplacements etc… using supercomputers to digest all the variables, it spits out answers to how to survive and…win a nuclear war.
What would the cost of such a program be? Could it be funded by a small fraction of the total revenues of, say for example the 500 largest corporations in the world?
Could, for example, the CEOs of the 500 largest companies in the world, sitting around a in a secluded good-ol-boys club chamber, plot, plan, fund, and assemble a team of scientists and programmers to develop such a computational soothsayer?
My answer is “…Not impossible….”. You may think otherwise, but just as If, when I were 9 years old, I lost a great deal of my trick or treat candy and 6 months later my brother had gained 20 lbs and there were wrappers under his bed, I would start to doubt his denials.