As I write this, we're nearing 20 years since the sickeningly world-changing event(s) and it is - for example - getting harder and harder to use YouTube to find the viewpoints alternative to the "official story" that were once present in droves.
Interestingly, at one point a while ago we would have said that the official story in question was the one encapsulated in the 585-page Report of the 9/11 Commission (which was ultimately set up 442 days after the attacks, initially under an obviously entirely-neutral Henry Kissinger and with a budget of $3M - later raised by a princely sum of $9M when Old Henry's replacement Gov. Thomas Kean asked if the Commission for its work might actually be granted just a tiny fraction of the $75bn in SUPPLEMENTARY spending allotted by Dubya and co. to the Iraq War). Doubtless it's worth knowing that in November 2019, cnbc suggested that the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns had cost $6.4 trillion!
However, this programme gives quite a large amount of time to the Commission's own Sen. Bob Graham, who has actually been more than willing to condemn his own report, not least but not only on account of the "28 pages" of sensitive stuff straightforwardly and openly cut out of the published version and only declassified in 2016.
And here we have a clue to the nature of this 2016 programme from Director Nick London, which - despite a title purporting to be all-embracing in a way that a 46-minute documentary could obviously never be - actually pursues only one major agenda. As we can see, this is one that was hot in 2016 and it mainly concerns the subject matter of those "28 pages", i.e. the nature of the connection with Saudi Arabia and its authorities. A sub-part of that sub-part of the story is the way that quite a bit of this seems to trace back to suspicious-looking events taking place on American soil in the runup to September 11th - in San Diego and above all around what one person appearing dubs brutally "Terrorist Central" - in reference to Sarasota, Florida.
And, yes, believe it or not that REALLY IS the same Sarasota that hosts Booker Elementary School - where George W. Bush was at a kids' reading class when an ear-whisperer went up on to the stages and told him of events unfolding on that hideous day!
That ludicrously amazing coincidence worth suspicious speculation in and of itself might connect with a mysterious and notorious (rumoured?) early-morning event (of which there is no word in this programme) that may have happened with a "news crew" near the President's base in Florida from which he travelled to the school (at the now-bulldozed Longboat Key complex)
And there alone you've got a "doesn't add up" scenario worth four 45-minute programmes (and a book or two).
So, yes, this programme has to ditch hundreds or thousands of weird-looking items of stuff about 9/11 even to begin to get into its stride, and therefore uses Jimmy Walter as a way of representing - and at the same time dismissing in a sentence - most conspiracy theories (of which there are a large number of variants) in the first few minutes of the programme.
Likewise, the pain of the victims and their families is represented by just two cases, while the attack on the Pentagon is reduced to two lines.
Indeed, rather quickly the makers as it were avail of the services of Mark Rossini of the FBI, whose key sentence uttered reveals to us that the programme-makers are not going to be interested in any outrageous inside-job related theories (let alone any of the more way-out ones on how the Towers came down), but is only going to consider how key agencies failed (presumably by oversight or incompetence) to stop the thing from happening.
And frankly, this is at odds with the programme's subsequent content - for many reasons, but inter alia because the FBI are later shown to have hidden plenty here deliberately (while the CIA are still the biggest bad-guys, presumably because Rossini says so (mentioning their "need-to-know" clause via-a-vis the Bureau); while the NSA - represented by ex-head General Michael Hayden - is portrayed as too overloaded by work to check everything out, so that's just too bad).
Despite this tone and these claims, the programme does actually hint strongly that all three agencies have sought to cover up - and while that is attributed to their need to cover their own asses in respect of failures, love of whitewash might cover a multitude of sins. Among people who may have known something was in the offing are (the makers here suggest) "the Saudis" (whatever that means).
Strangely, in that context the programme is more than happy to refer to an event it might otherwise attribute to wacko conspiracy theories, i.e. the apparent fact that Saudis took flights back to their country from the US even when all of America was in lockdown with all flights grounded.
This would actually be a classic example of how conspiracy theorists latch on, not only to wild and weird and way-out stuff, but also to strange events that seem really to have happened. So frankly one should never readily close one's mind to what they say. They put hours of work in, and may indeed get something out.
And there's the point, and a touch of hyprocrisy from the makers of the programme. One man's conspiracy theory is another man's conspiracy, and sceptical openness to thinking out of the boxmight be more helpful than dismissal outright of 99% on top of the selection of events that happen to match one's own narrative.
Assuming of course that anybody outside victims' families) actually any longer wants to know what happened on 9/11...
Needless to say, the Saudis were unwilling to talk to the programme-makers, but then neither were current representatives of the key agencies in the US. But it was noted in passing that successive Presidents (e.g. Obama) were keen to go the extra mile (or indeed several thousand extra miles) to ensure no suspicion ever attached to the Saudis. At the same time, by accident or design we failed to hear a word about apparently close Bush family-Saudi links.
And there in a nutshell is what we have here - a programme that hints at some further truth, continues to purvey some lies, and sheds light on one conspiracy (more than just a theory) even as it determinedly writes off most of the others.
And in there somewhere are families of victims.
Personally, I lost nobody close in the Towers, or indeed in any of the 4 events of that dreadful day, but I am ALSO a victim. The event changed me awfully, but the aftermath changed me even more as - like so many millions around the world - I have come to believe no version of the official line, while flirting with, but also floundering hopelessly among, a welter of alternative versions more or less extreme but all homing in - sometimes desperately (perhaps even with deliberate oficial coaxing?) on the way that ... SOMETHING DOES NOT ADD UP HERE.
The 28 pages are just one (tiny) example of the fact that authorities (not just in the USA) do INDEED know things that ordinary people may not have access to.
And lawyers associated with the class action against the Saudis continue to receive key documents with more blanked-out bits on the page than there is page...
And in this case above all cases, that is just plain wrong.
Interestingly, at one point a while ago we would have said that the official story in question was the one encapsulated in the 585-page Report of the 9/11 Commission (which was ultimately set up 442 days after the attacks, initially under an obviously entirely-neutral Henry Kissinger and with a budget of $3M - later raised by a princely sum of $9M when Old Henry's replacement Gov. Thomas Kean asked if the Commission for its work might actually be granted just a tiny fraction of the $75bn in SUPPLEMENTARY spending allotted by Dubya and co. to the Iraq War). Doubtless it's worth knowing that in November 2019, cnbc suggested that the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns had cost $6.4 trillion!
However, this programme gives quite a large amount of time to the Commission's own Sen. Bob Graham, who has actually been more than willing to condemn his own report, not least but not only on account of the "28 pages" of sensitive stuff straightforwardly and openly cut out of the published version and only declassified in 2016.
And here we have a clue to the nature of this 2016 programme from Director Nick London, which - despite a title purporting to be all-embracing in a way that a 46-minute documentary could obviously never be - actually pursues only one major agenda. As we can see, this is one that was hot in 2016 and it mainly concerns the subject matter of those "28 pages", i.e. the nature of the connection with Saudi Arabia and its authorities. A sub-part of that sub-part of the story is the way that quite a bit of this seems to trace back to suspicious-looking events taking place on American soil in the runup to September 11th - in San Diego and above all around what one person appearing dubs brutally "Terrorist Central" - in reference to Sarasota, Florida.
And, yes, believe it or not that REALLY IS the same Sarasota that hosts Booker Elementary School - where George W. Bush was at a kids' reading class when an ear-whisperer went up on to the stages and told him of events unfolding on that hideous day!
That ludicrously amazing coincidence worth suspicious speculation in and of itself might connect with a mysterious and notorious (rumoured?) early-morning event (of which there is no word in this programme) that may have happened with a "news crew" near the President's base in Florida from which he travelled to the school (at the now-bulldozed Longboat Key complex)
And there alone you've got a "doesn't add up" scenario worth four 45-minute programmes (and a book or two).
So, yes, this programme has to ditch hundreds or thousands of weird-looking items of stuff about 9/11 even to begin to get into its stride, and therefore uses Jimmy Walter as a way of representing - and at the same time dismissing in a sentence - most conspiracy theories (of which there are a large number of variants) in the first few minutes of the programme.
Likewise, the pain of the victims and their families is represented by just two cases, while the attack on the Pentagon is reduced to two lines.
Indeed, rather quickly the makers as it were avail of the services of Mark Rossini of the FBI, whose key sentence uttered reveals to us that the programme-makers are not going to be interested in any outrageous inside-job related theories (let alone any of the more way-out ones on how the Towers came down), but is only going to consider how key agencies failed (presumably by oversight or incompetence) to stop the thing from happening.
And frankly, this is at odds with the programme's subsequent content - for many reasons, but inter alia because the FBI are later shown to have hidden plenty here deliberately (while the CIA are still the biggest bad-guys, presumably because Rossini says so (mentioning their "need-to-know" clause via-a-vis the Bureau); while the NSA - represented by ex-head General Michael Hayden - is portrayed as too overloaded by work to check everything out, so that's just too bad).
Despite this tone and these claims, the programme does actually hint strongly that all three agencies have sought to cover up - and while that is attributed to their need to cover their own asses in respect of failures, love of whitewash might cover a multitude of sins. Among people who may have known something was in the offing are (the makers here suggest) "the Saudis" (whatever that means).
Strangely, in that context the programme is more than happy to refer to an event it might otherwise attribute to wacko conspiracy theories, i.e. the apparent fact that Saudis took flights back to their country from the US even when all of America was in lockdown with all flights grounded.
This would actually be a classic example of how conspiracy theorists latch on, not only to wild and weird and way-out stuff, but also to strange events that seem really to have happened. So frankly one should never readily close one's mind to what they say. They put hours of work in, and may indeed get something out.
And there's the point, and a touch of hyprocrisy from the makers of the programme. One man's conspiracy theory is another man's conspiracy, and sceptical openness to thinking out of the boxmight be more helpful than dismissal outright of 99% on top of the selection of events that happen to match one's own narrative.
Assuming of course that anybody outside victims' families) actually any longer wants to know what happened on 9/11...
Needless to say, the Saudis were unwilling to talk to the programme-makers, but then neither were current representatives of the key agencies in the US. But it was noted in passing that successive Presidents (e.g. Obama) were keen to go the extra mile (or indeed several thousand extra miles) to ensure no suspicion ever attached to the Saudis. At the same time, by accident or design we failed to hear a word about apparently close Bush family-Saudi links.
And there in a nutshell is what we have here - a programme that hints at some further truth, continues to purvey some lies, and sheds light on one conspiracy (more than just a theory) even as it determinedly writes off most of the others.
And in there somewhere are families of victims.
Personally, I lost nobody close in the Towers, or indeed in any of the 4 events of that dreadful day, but I am ALSO a victim. The event changed me awfully, but the aftermath changed me even more as - like so many millions around the world - I have come to believe no version of the official line, while flirting with, but also floundering hopelessly among, a welter of alternative versions more or less extreme but all homing in - sometimes desperately (perhaps even with deliberate oficial coaxing?) on the way that ... SOMETHING DOES NOT ADD UP HERE.
The 28 pages are just one (tiny) example of the fact that authorities (not just in the USA) do INDEED know things that ordinary people may not have access to.
And lawyers associated with the class action against the Saudis continue to receive key documents with more blanked-out bits on the page than there is page...
And in this case above all cases, that is just plain wrong.
