By Dr Muzaffar Iqbal
A number of diverse and mutually exclusive groups will contend for decreasing media attention: the nationalist and hard-core supremacists who keep repeating the official story ad nauseam; the devotees of various conspiracy theories and, in between the extremes, the very large silent majority represented by a very small group of activists seeking the truth. What really happened that day?
Eight years later, the world still does not know what actually transpired on that day. This in itself, indicative of the unwillingness of the American government to come clean on this issue, has fueled conspiracy theories. However, those theories aside, the world deserves to be treated with more respect. So does the memory of some 3,000 Americans who were brutally killed that day.
But 9/11 is not merely an American story; there are literally millions of other human beings who have suffered because of American responses to 9/11--the trail of death and destruction in the wake of 9/11 stretches from Iraq to Afghanistan and from the concentration camp called Guantanamo Bay to numerous undisclosed torture centres operated by American cronies in the Muslim world. The Bush-Cheney years of horror are over but millions of homeless Iraqis are still asking: why were we attacked? Millions of relatives of dead Iraqis keep wondering: why were our loved ones killed?
Closer to home, several groups in America continue to demand transparency and find themselves helpless against a huge government and its institutions unwilling to budge. Thousands of articles and hundreds of books later, 9/11 remains an unresolved puzzle. Beyond the pale of conspiracy theories, several basic questions have never been answered by the US government. These include, but are not limited to, the following:
1. How did two almost pristine passports of the hijackers in New York and Pennsylvania survive when nearly everything else from the planes was incinerated?
2. How was the US government able to provide to the media complete biographical details of all the alleged hijackers so quickly after the event?
3. Technically, the US authorities have never been able to explain how so much debris from the plane that supposedly nose-dived in Pennsylvania could be found so many miles from the crash site?
4. No one has explained how a large plane could disappear into such a small hole in the Pentagon wall with no major debris left on the lawn?
These and numerous other valid questions remain unanswered primarily because of the reluctance of the US government to properly investigate 9/11. Several groups had to work hard to press the government to form the 9/11 Commission in 2002 which was not headed by an independent and powerful individual, but by the former New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean. And when the 9/11 Commission presented its report, the immediate reaction by none other than Lorie Van Auken of East Brunswick -- one of the most ardent supporters of the creation of the 9/11 Commission -- was: "We know we never have learned the truth, it's as simple as that… [Even] members and staff of the 9/11 Commission have said 'many of the questions raised by the attacks have never been answered'."
Van Auken, the founding member of September 11 Advocates, originally a group of four New Jersey widows whose husbands were killed on 9/11 (informally called 'The Jersey Girls'), successfully lobbied for the creation of the Commission only to find out that they cannot get truth out from a government keen on hiding it. Eight years later, Van Auken continues to fight. Now affiliated with the New York City Coalition for Accountability Now (NYC-CAN), she continues to cherish the hope that one day she may learn the whole truth. NYC-CAN collected thousands of signatures on a petition designed to require New York's City Council to place the creation of an investigating commission on the November ballot, but the city clerk's office rejected the petition, disregarding thousands of signatures within its own jurisdiction and the wishes of millions people around the world.
NYC-CAN did what it could do: take the case to court. But the court is unlikely to pass any verdict in the near future. NYC-CAN is also pushing for more signatures, relying on a provision of the law that allows voters to bypass city council action to place a referendum directly on the ballot. Visitors who would gather around the old World Trade Centre site -- now all but inaccessible because of construction -- are likely to find NYC-CAN volunteers seeking signatures. "We are looking for some way to renew interest in the idea of an investigation," says Van Auken.
Then there is McIlvaine who says that "it's a murder -- my son was murdered -- and there never has been a murder investigation and a finding of what happened." McIlvaine was laid off from his teaching job at a mental hospital four months after his son's death. He is retired and spends much of his time pushing for a renewed probe into 9/11. "It's very simple – I'm a father who lost his son," says McIlvaine, who lives in Oreland, Pa, a suburb of Philadelphia. He is a member of the Executive Council of NYC-CAN. "Why wouldn't any father want to know how and why his son died?"
Then there is the unheard voice of millions of other fathers and mothers around the world who yearn to ask Bush-Cheney duo: why did you kill our sons and daughters in revenge of a crime they never committed?
The writer is a freelance columnist. Email: quantumnotes@gmail.com