Introduction

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodies?”
[Who will guard the guards themselves?]
Roman poet Juvenal, Satires, vi.347

Knowledge is indeed power.

The information within this book will empower Americans who are ready for some straight talk about the many factual anomalies, conflicting claims, and unanswered questions that still surround the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001.

It was these provocative attacks which provided the underlying justification for all that followed - the hurried passage of The Patriot Act, increases in the defense and intelligence budgets, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, and the stifling of dissent in a nation that claims to be free.

This knowledge should have been available in print within months of the 9/11 tragedies - but it seems that freedom of the press, at least within the United States, belongs only to those who own the press.

To those who follow the shadowy side of America’s national life, the events of 9/11 immediately raise red flags of warning. Just one day after 9/11, I posted my initial thoughts in a piece on the Internet. Here are some excerpts:

Who’s truly behind the attack on America?
Many people have compared the horrendous terrorist attack on New
York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington to the
attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. It is an apt comparison, though not
for the reasons most people think.

For true students of history, it is now beyond dispute that certain high--
ranking officials in Washington, DC, knew in advance of the Japanese
intention to attack the US fleet in Hawaii, yet did nothing to prevent it.

Must the citizens of the United States wait another fifty years to learn
that the 9/11 terrorist attack was allowed to take place just like Pearl
Harbor? Could such an appalling scenario possibly be true?

Simple countermeasures against such an attack now seem apparent.
For example, if the airlines would assign just one armed plainclothes
security man to each flight, this tragedy may have been averted since
the hijackers were apparently armed only with knives or other type
blades. So, how were they able to overpower a planeload of people
and, more importantly, gain access to the cockpits? Who taught them
to fly jumbo jets?

As in the case of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the
key to understanding the event lies not in who actually committed the
violence but rather who was able to strip away the normal security
protection.

Government and airline officials knew immediately that planes had been
hijacked, yet no interceptors appeared in the air until after the attacks
were completed. Who stripped away the normal security protection of
America on 9/11?

At least in this most recent case, the government cannot blame the
attack on a lone deranged individual, some Lee Harvey McVeigh. They
must deal with a full-blown conspiracy, even though authorities were quick
to point the finger at Osama bin Laden. Any investigation of bin Laden
must look beyond the man, to his backers and financiers.

The trail of the terrorist will most probably become murky, with plenty of
accusations for all concerned. But one thing appears quite clear, the
tragic events of 9/11 play right into the hands of persons with an agenda
aimed at eroding American liberties and sovereignty.

After decades of bloated and misused defense budgets, there are now
calls for doubling our defense allocation. In a time of rising recognition
that the CIA is an agency never sought by the public and one which has
brought so much condemnation on this nation, there are now cries for
doubling its size and budget. If the chief security officer for a large
company fails to protect one of its most prized assets, is he more likely to
be fired or have his pay doubled?

Watch for more antiterrorist legislation further shred the US Constitution.

As we all scramble to deal with the effects of terrorism, are we in danger
of losing our few remaining individual liberties?

Also, consider that we are distracted from a faltering economy (the current
crisis may require more federal financial controls), a plummeting opinion of
George W. Bush, and surging energy prices.

Would leaders allow a public disaster to happen with an eye toward advanc-
ing their agendas? It’s happened before - in Nero’s burning Rome, Germany’s
gutted Reichstag, at Pearl Harbor, and again at the Gulf of Tonkin.

While we should grieve for our losses, we must keep our heads. When the
emotions of the moment run hot, we must remain cool and thoughtful so that
we can find who is truly behind this attack on America.

I believe the basic questions I raised above are as valid today as in September
2001.

And I didn’t stop there. Within two months of 9/11 I had gathered much of the material on this book and presented it as a proposal to my publisher, HarperCollins of New York, under the title The War on Freedom.

I was told that emotions were too high and the content too “hot” for immediate publication. Foot dragging on a book deal continued until mid-2002. At that time, several employees of the FBI and CIA had come forward to testify that they had tried to warn superiors of an impending terrorist attack. The attitude toward my book proposal softened and I signed a contract to publish the book, along with a sizable advance.

Working feverishly throughout the summer of 2002, I produced a manuscript by October. My editor was elated with the work and predicted it would sell more than a million copies.

The wheels of major publishing grind slowly and it was not until March of 2003 that the book received a legal review. I had already been sent a copy of the cover and publication was just a few weeks away. The legal review, or vetting, is a process in which legal counsel verifies the source material and checks for anything that might cause a legal problem. This hurdle was passed and the last words from the attorney were, “You have satisfied me”.

Within two days, however, I was informed that the book had been cancelled by a senior officer who had not even read it. The only justification given was that the officer “did not want to upset the families of 9/11 victims”. This was obviously a specious argument as, by today, more than six hundred families have filed lawsuits against either Saudi Arabia or senior members of the Bush administration.

Under normal circumstances, if a book must be cancelled for legal reasons, the author is required to return any payments mad in advance. In this case, I was paid the remainder of the entire advance. To me, this was a clear indication that the cancellation of the book was nothing less than outright censorship.

“Why would they want to prevent people from learning truths about 9/11, even if those truths were discomforting to the public and embarrassing to government authorities?” I asked myself, still believing that I lived in a nation which valued free speech.

I proceeded to self-publish The War on Freedom and the book’s reception was uniformly good. (By sheer coincidence, another book with the same title was published by a scholar named Nafeez Ahmed around the same time as mine. It provides an excellent analysis of the events of 9/11.) As my readers kept expressing astonishment at the book’s information, I realized that the knowledge gleaned from a study of published matter, both in print and on the Internet, was indeed painting a dark picture of the persons and forces behind today’s current events. I came to see that some force existed which did not want this information available to the general public. It would certainly upset the carefully constructed “official” explanations for the horrors of 9/11.

Today is a new day. The authorized story of 9/11 has been all but discredited in the eyes of an increasingly aware population, thanks to the dedicated work of dozens of journalists and researchers, courageous government whistleblowers, and even revelations from official enquiries. As I write this in the spring of 2004, we now know that:

· A wide variety of standard defense mechanisms designed to prevent such an attack systematically failed on 9/11. Especially notable are the atypical failures which occurred simultaneously within the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the National Military Command Center (NMCC), and the North American Arospace Defense Command (NORAD), all charged with protecting US airspace.

· Interceptor jets were not scramble for more than thirty minutes after it was obvious that four airliners had gone off course and were presumably hijacked. In the case of Flight 77, which reportedly slammed into the Pentagon, an hour and forty-five minutes elapsed with no interception.

· Missile batteries designed to protect Washington, DC, failed to stop the strike on the Pentagon, one of the world’s most protected structures, and fighter jets on constant alert at Andrews Air Force Base just twelve miles away were never scrambled.

· By a “bizarre coincidence”, two government homeland defense agencies (NORAD and the NRO) were practicing war games on the morning of 9/11. The games simulated responses to a scenario in which hijacked planes were crashed into buildings. This fact could explain the government’s lack of rapid response t the real hijackings, yet this plausible alibi has never been brought to public attention. One also wonders: How did the hijackers know the time and date of these war games in order to time their attacks to coincide with them?

· President Bush proceeded with a photo op at a Florida elementary school even after he and his aides knew that three planes had been hijacked. He lingered in the classroom for nearly twenty minutes after being informed that a second plane had struck the World Trade Center (WTC).

· Not one steel-framed high-rise building in history has collapsed soley due to fire. The free-fall speed collapse of the Trade Center towers, with attendant melted steel and powdery dust, exhibited all the characteristics of a controlled demolition.

· Just such a controlled demolition apparently occurred about 5.00pm that same day when, according to the leaseholder of the WTC complex, the 47 story Building 7 was “pulled”, i.e., intentionally demolished.

· Vital evidence, including the buildings’ structural steel, was destroyed though rapid removal and destruction by US government officials with no investigation. This is only one of the many reasons why Fire Engineering magazine called the official investigation “a half-baked farce”.

· An eight-mile-long debris trail indicated that Flight 93 was destroyed in the air rather than in the Pennsylvania crash reportedly caused by an onboard struggle between the hijackers and passengers.

· More than a dozen countries firmly warned US authorities that an attack on American soil was imminent., some only days before the events.

· Strong evidence points to complicity in the attacks by senior intelligence operatives from Israel and Pakistan who are closely aligned with American intelligence agencies.

· A classified Congressional report incriminates senior officials in the Saudi Arabian government, showing that they had close ties to the hijackers. The Saudis enjoy long-term business and social ties to the Bush family and close political ties to the US government.

· The US government expedited the swift departure of over 100 Saudis from the country, even as the American public had been denied the right to fly. Two dozen members of bin Laden’s own family, presumably potential witnesses, were allowed to leave the country without interrogation.

· Insiders with foreknowledge of the events to come engaged in massive and highly profitable short-selling of shares in American Airlines and United Airlines, as well as other stocks readily affected by the disaster. The public has still not been presented with the final results of official investigations into these transactions - if there are any.

· A growing number of whistleblowers from within the federal government have pointed to evidence that various agencies were well aware of the possibility of attack, and were prevented by senior officials from mounting full investigations.

· Far from being a mere reaction to 9/11, evidence now proves that the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were the culmination of long-standing plans which only awaited a provocation such as 9/11.

· The official explanations for the invasion of Iraq, such as the need to capture weapons of mass destruction, and to “bring democracy” to the country, have proven false.

· Within a few hours, the FBI released names and photos of the suspected hijackers although many of those named turned up alive in the Middle East.

· Also within hours of the attacks, FBI agents were scouring the houses, restaurants, and flight schools they frequented. If no one had foreknowledge of the hijackers or their activities, how did they know where to look?

· Far from ordering a full and objective investigation to determine who was responsible for the 9/11 tragedies, the Bush administration dragged its feet and actually took actions to impede a swift and truthful probe into the events of that day. It was nearly two years after the events that mounting pressure from the public, led by families of 9/11 victims, finally forced the creation of an “independent” investigatory commission.

· No one in government has been reprimanded or even scolded for what we are told was the greatest intelligence and homeland defense failure in US history. In fact, the very agencies which failed the nation watched their budgets increase dramatically, and some of the officials ostensibly at fault were actually promoted.

· No person in government, other than former National Security Council counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clark, has felt the need to apologize to the American people for the 9/11 security failure.

· President Bush himself declined to apologize for the 9/11 tragedy to either the American public or to victims’ families during an April 2004 press conference, despite being presented with the opportunity to do so at least three times.


This is actually a short list of unanswered questions, anomalies, and puzzles concerning the 2001 attacks. These journalistic findings - backed up by a massive outpouring of research data from independent investigations even now under way by hundreds of researchers - have prompted honest thinkers from all across the political spectrum to conclude, reluctantly no doubt, that the tragic attacks of 9/11 were an inside job.

You see, one does not have to actively participate in a crime to be part of it. The employee who knowing unlocks the rear door to a business is just as guilty as the burglars who loot the building later that night.

This is called an inside job. It happens all the time in criminal operations.

The 9/11 attacks were without doubt among the most monstrous crimes in history. It is my great hope that this book - along with other volumes of information, the revelations of whistleblowers still to come, and independent citizens’ enquiries of all kinds - will motivate the American public to seek out and bring to justice the real perpetrators behind the horrors that chilled the world on September 11, 2001.

Jim Marrs
2004