9/11 Conspiracy Theorists Take A Hit

The conspiracy among 19 Arab terrorists mostly from Saudi Arabia, to fly airliners into buildings in New York and Washington, D.C. on 9/11/01, is the official conspiracy theory of the official 9/11 Commission formed by the U.S. Government over a year after the disaster.

One of the officials of the 9/11 Commission who advocated for that official conspiracy theory, Phillip Zelikow, went to work for the U.S. State Department after the 9/11 Commission broke up.

He testified yesterday before a Senate Judiciary Sub-committee that he wrote memos arguing against torture and that it was illegal, but was ordered by other officials in the Bush II regime to destroy the memo and all copies.

He has also stated that he now thinks 9/11 testimony elicited from some individuals, which is part of the official 9/11 record, may have come to the committee through resort to torture.

Zelikow is talking about torture being done before the 9/11 Commission was even formed on 11/27/02. Another Bush II regime official dates it:

What I have learned is that ... the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002 ...

(Washington Note, quoting Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson of the State Department). This is consistent with reports that the Bush II regime was also illegally spying on Americans well before 9/11 ever happened.

The Bush II regime in 2002 first tried to link Al Qaeda to Iraq well before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It quoted a detainee who is now said to have "committed suicide" in a Libyan prison this week.

This surprised some officials who had recent information that the detainee was in good health and no problems were expected:

The story of the detainee, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, became a major embarrassment for the Bush administration after disclosures in 2004 that he had been the principal source for widely cited claims by the White House that Saddam Hussein had provided chemical - and biological-weapons training for Al Qaeda operatives. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Libi recanted his entire story, asserting that he had made it up in order to stop his abusive treatment by interrogators in Egypt —­ where he had been shipped by the CIA under the agency's controversial "extraordinary rendition" program.

(Newsweek). Information is surfacing that orders from Dick Cheney's office directed that al-Libi be tortured until he "revealed" links between Al Qaeda and the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.

That was done and al-Libi "revealed" such links, which the CIA at the time disputed. The detainee al-Libi recanted to Red Cross investigators not long after giving the information to Egyptians who were torturing him then at the behest of the CIA.

Why did the Bush II regime begin to monitor the opinions and statements of millions of Americans 7 months prior to 9/11? Why so soon after 9/11 was the Bush II regime trying to pin some of the masterminding of the 9/11 attacks on Saddam Hussein in Iraq?

Some of the "9/11 truthers" who do not buy into the official conspiracy theory say it was to divert guilt for those attacks away from the Bush II regime, whom they say were the real guilty parties, and to see how well the catapulting of the propaganda was working.

These "truthers" have varied professional backgrounds and are divided as to whether the Bush II regime actually participated, or were just doing such a heckuva job that even cavemen could attack the U.S. using commercial aircraft.

The truthers make a reasonable argument that either way the Bush II regime would have wanted to cover up their own guilt, if they had any such guilt.

If there is evidence of a cover up it would be evidence of a notion of guilt on the part of anyone participating in that cover up.

One reason supporting that argument is the possibility that the 19 young Arab conspirators also did the building demolition through highly sophisticated explosive weapons.

In such a case, there would be no need for anyone else to cover up by framing Iraq, or anyone else, if those 19 Arabs accused of doing it were the ones who actually did it.

Of course it is serious if Dick Cheney ordered torture for any reason, and especially so for political reasons or to frame someone else for his own errors.

UPDATE: Tonight (5/18/09) on Rachel Maddow, MSNBC, Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson focused a bit closer and said he has information showing that al-Libi was tortured in February of 2002 (a month earlier than the torture of others mentioned above).

February 2002 is over a year before the invasion of Iraq, 9 months before the 9/11 Commission began, and a relatively short time after the 9/11 attacks.

Col. Wilkerson went on to say that this torture had absolutely nothing to do with protecting from future attacks, but instead it dealt exclusively with linking the 9/11 attacks to Iraq.

It is clear that for some reason they were uncomfortable and needed to make a link to Iraq, and so they intensified the torture until al-Libi "revealed" the link.

Al-Libi said he made it all up to stop the torture.

UPDATE 2: The British Government ordered some redacted documents be un-redacted which reveal the Bush II regime was torturing a British citizen prior to the 9/11 Commission being formed.