September 11th: the truth coming out?

Ever since the disasters hitting the United States on September 11th last year, when the hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon building in Washington, we have been deeply suspicious of the accounts of what happened which have come from the ‘orthodox’ politicians and mass media. From the outset, there has been something distinctly over-simplistic - even fishy - about these explanations. The biggest question of all has been that of how such a highly sophisticated operation as these terrorist attacks, employing as they must have done an extensive network of subversion and requiring inexcusable lapses in US national security, could have succeeded while taking the President his administration entirely by surprise.

While the mainstream media have been virtually silent on this question, the uncensored Internet has been buzzing with theories, some of them indeed hatched in the minds of cranks, but all pointing to a possibility which those in power just do not seem to want to face: that the outrages of September 11th could have been part of a conspiracy for which, so far, there has been a gigantic cover-up.

We have waited with great interest to see what will be unravelled by the investigations into the disasters, for we have suspected that the findings could be highly embarrassing to people in very high places. So it might well now be turning out.

A report in The Sunday Telegraph of May 19th disclosed that at a CIA briefing a month previous to the disasters the agenda focused on a threat to targets in the USA itself coming from Islamic terrorists, and that: "The FBI had known for far longer than previously acknowledged that the Al Qaeda network was training pilots in America and had been contemplating an airborne suicide attack."

The report went on to say that President Bush's comically named (and appointed) ‘national security adviser’, Condoleezza Rice had denied that either she or Bush ever knew about this information.

All of which suggests either that the President is even more stupid than he looks or that he and his colleague are hiding something. We suspect that this disclosure is going to prove merely the first particle in an almighty can of worms that will be opened during the next few months as a result of further investigations. This will be a space well worth watching.

Tories plumb the depths

At the end of April it was announced that a body calling itself the Institute for Public Policy Research, a Blairite think-tank, had produced a report urging new laws to ensure that candidates selected by political parties are chosen according to racial quotas which reflect the ‘ethnic mix’ in the populations of the country's various regions - so that, for instance, 20 of London's 74 MPs should come from the ethnic minorities in the capital, since 27 per cent of its population is non-white.

No, this is not a piece of satire from the Daily Telegraph's Peter Simple column. It actually is true. Just such a report was published and, we can assure you, it is being taken very seriously!

In fact, as announced in The Mail on Sunday on April 28th, the report has the backing of all three main parties.