September 11, 2001: Plumes of smoke and ash blanket Manhattan after the World Trade Center towers collapse.
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(Photo: ap)
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Düsseldorf The official version of the events of September 11, 2001 is as follows: Mohammed Atta and his 18 co-conspirators hijack four airliners on behalf of al-Qaeda boss Osama bin Laden. They steer two machines into the twin towers of the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York, with the third plane they race into the Pentagon in Washington. The fourth machine alone does not reach the planned destination. The resistance of the passengers prevents this, the terrorists crash United Airlines Flight 93 near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
This is what it says in the “9/11 Commission Report” presented by the administration of US President George W. Bush in 2004. But is that also the truth?
What really happened on September 11, 2001? Who is actually behind the attacks: Al-Qaeda – or is it the US government, CIA, Mossad? This question has been on the minds of millions of people around the world for ten years now. They don’t believe the government’s version. On internet forums like www.911truth.org and http://patriotsquestion911.com conspiracy theorists are heating up the debate on the anniversary again. New books once again list apparent contradictions and errors in the official version. As FAZ author Raphael Gross recently described it, these authors are “working diligently to build up a panorama of uncertainties”.
As a result, most and most popular theories boil down to a suspicion: Bush, his then Vice President Richard “Dick” Cheney and ex-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld are the masterminds of the attack. Or they accepted the attack in order to be able to implement an expansive and repressive policy.
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Former US President Bush and his Vice President Cheney: Many Americans consider them the masterminds of the attack.
(Photo: Reuters)
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Regular polls show that distrust of the former Bush administration remains high. According to an Emnid survey in January 2011, 90 percent of Germans doubt that the US government painted a true picture of the events of the time.
Even a former federal minister has mingled with the active doubters. Andreas von Bülow, until 1994 for the SPD in the Bundestag and from 1980 to 1982 Research Minister in the Schmidt cabinet, argued in his book Die CIA und der 9/11, published in 2003, that the American secret service and the Israeli Mossad were behind the attacks . According to von Bülow, the hijacked passenger planes were remote-controlled and the towers were deliberately blown up from the inside.
von Bülow does not provide any solid evidence, nor do representatives of the “Truther” movement in the USA, whose ideological mastermind is the historian Webster Tarpley and to whom the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” recently dedicated a large portrait. Tarpley also vehemently supports the thesis of remote-controlled aircraft, although without being able to prove this. The “truthers” don’t need answers, questions are enough. The most important one is: why do you think the Bush administration hasn’t lied to you?”
Webster Tarpley has tens of thousands of followers who communicate with each other in the vastness of the Internet, who largely ignore the state media that are supposedly brought into line, and who keep presenting each other with new evidence for their conspiracy theories. Tarpley makes a good living at it. He not only wrote the book “Synthetic Terror – Made in USA”, which has already appeared in its fifth edition. He also lectures and distributes DVDs.
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