Mr Margolis, having been released, thank goodness, by the Sun papers,
Good riddance to an awfully rubbishy columnist
has re-upped with the apparently welcoming Tehran Times; who’d a thunk it?
9/11: The mother of all coincidences
Ever since 9/11, readers keep asking me my views on these attacks. I have been barraged with emails until my head spins with engineering studies about melting steel, controlled explosions, claims about nefarious plots, and wreckage analysis.
One of the most colorful theories comes from Gen. Hamid Gul, former director of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, ISI. He insists that 9/11 was staged by Israel’s Mossad and a cabal of rightwing U.S. Air Force generals [Ceasefire.ca interestingly takes the good Gen. Gul most seriously on another matter]…
While visiting the Pentagon to consult on the Mideast, I also inspected its outside wall hit by the third hijacked aircraft.
I saw photos of the impact site and could not understand what had happened to all the aircraft wreckage. There was almost none…
A day after 9/11, I was asked on CNN if Osama bin Laden was behind the attack. ‘We have yet to see the evidence,’ I replied. I maintain this position today…
Tapes that appeared to confirm bin Laden’s guilt were clumsy fakes. They were supposedly “found” in Afghanistan by the anti-Taliban Afghan Northern Alliance, which was created and funded by Russian intelligence.
I had met Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and told CNN viewers that he was not the man in the tapes…
I remain uncertain that Osama bin Laden was really behind the attacks. Much circumstantial evidence points to him and Al-Qaeda, but conclusive proof still lacks…
Back to 9/11. I still cannot understand how amateur pilots could manage to maneuver in low to hit the World Trade Center and Pentagon. As a Pakistani intelligence agent told me, “if they were really amateur Arab pilots, they would have crashed into one another, not the World Trade Center!”
The arrest of Israeli “movers” filming the attack and dancing with joy, and the subsequent arrest of groups of Israeli “students” supposedly tracking the would-be hijackers remains a deep mystery. So does the immobilization of U.S. air defenses…
As a veteran [if lousy, intellectually lazy and louche] journalist, to me, all this smells to high heaven. There are just too many unanswered questions, too many suspicions, and that old Roman legal question, “cui bono” — “to whose benefit?”
…I’ve seen no hard evidence to date that 9/11 was a plot by America’s far right or by Israel or a giant cover-up. Just, perhaps, the Mother of All Coincidences. In the end, it may just have been 19 angry Arabs and a bumbling Bush administration looking for someone else to blame.
Eric Margolis is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World.
Via Moby Media Updates. As far as I can see no other regular media outlet besides the Tehran Times ran the piece. The Huffington Post deleted it (it’s listed under “Eric Margolis: WILL WE EVER LEARN THE TRUTH ABOUT 9/11?” at the penultimate, Google, link).
What a disingenuous and intentionally useful idiot.
Update: More from BruceR. at Flit:
Margolis discredit watch: no, this probably won’t be enough either
Eric Margolis was an old bugbear of mine: I used to call him “Wormtongue“, as I recall, for his consistent defenses of those who wanted to kill Canadians, defenses which somehow were never so egregious as to keep him from being a frequent commentator on the national news, sitting alongside genuinely non-insane people like Andrew Coyne and Janice Stein…
Mark
Ottawa
