More than twelve years have passed since 9/11 happened. Although the 9/11 Commission produced a voluminous “9/11 Commission Report”, it did not provide answers to central questions concerning the circumstances of this horrendous crime. Critical observers have noted numerous glaring omissions, contradictions, anomalies and misrepresentations in this report. Even the Chairman and Vice-Chairman of the 9/11 Commission admitted in a joint book they later published, that their report was deficient in many ways and that the Commission had been lied to by government agencies. One of the reactions to this deficient report was the emergence of a “truth movement”, which consists of experts from different scientific fields, who question the official narrative and demand a truly independent investigation of the crime.
Elias Davidsson is one of these “truthers” who challenges the official narrative on 9/11.
He is also concerned about the claim made by some “truthers” that Israel was behind the attacks. He is not, by any means, a sympathizer of Israel. On the contrary, as his writings demonstrate, he not only denounces the oppressive policies of the State of Israel against the Palestinians, but considers that state as inherently dangerous for its neighbors. The fact should be mentioned that he is Jewish and has family in Israel.
Davidsson’s concern appears justified. The catchwords “9/11 and Israel” produce over 66 million hits on Google. Immediately after the attacks some traces to an “Israeli connection” were publicized in U.S. media, including by media notoriously supportive of Israel, such as Fox News.
About this and other topics regarding 9/11, I talked to Mr. Davidsson after he presented in Bonn, Germany, in November 2013, his book Hijacking America’s Mind on 9/11: Counterfeiting Evidence, released in May in New York.
Ludwig Watzal: A few months ago you published the book Hijacking America’s Mind on 9/11. What made you write this book twelve years later, when all questions concerning the 9/11 attacks seem to have been answered?
Elias Davidsson: In 2002, it was pointed out to me, that the official account on 9/11 is dubious. Until then, I believed what mass media told us, namely that the mass murder had been orchestrated by Al Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden and executed by 19 fanatic Muslims. At first, I doubted that the contrary evidence – published by Thierry Meyssan – was credible. Yet, my sense of curiosity led me nevertheless to check the facts. I discovered that grounds for suspicion were justified. This led me to extend my research of 9/11. I was not alone in this endeavor. One of the main focuses of such research was the puzzling demise of the Twin Towers. A consensus is gradually emerging among engineers and architects that the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and building WTC No 7 had been demolished by explosives and/or more exotic means. This conclusion implies official malfeasance and complicity in mass murder. Yet the question remained nagging me: what to make of the other part of the official account, namely the alleged participation of 19 Islamic fanatics in hijacking four airliners, steering them to death and succeeding to avoid interception by the US air force. I decided, therefore, to search for evidence supporting these claims. I discovered that such evidence does not exist. Not a shred of it. This may sound unbelievable, yet despite the most exacting searches, I could not find any such evidence. I also discovered that there exists no evidence that passenger airliners crashed on 9/11: The FBI actually admitted to have failed to link the wreckage of the crashed aircraft to the airliners that were allegedly hijacked. Having made these discoveries, I found it necessary to deal with an additional puzzle, namely what to make of the telephone calls that were allegedly made from the hijacked planes and in which passengers and crew members reported hijackings. I spent a great deal of time to track and analyze all known phone calls. These analyses represent until now, to my knowledge, the most thorough examination of the 9/11 phone calls. I concluded that the callers did not report real events. They did not lie, yet did not say the truth. I won’t reveal here the solution of this paradox and its sinister sequels. Readers are invited to track my analysis and draw their own conclusions from the wealth of details provided in the book. As I finished the book, any doubt that might have lingered in my mind regarding the identity of the 9/11 plotters, dissipated: I became convinced that 9/11 was an inside job by the US military.
LW: There are still many people who believe that the alleged hijackers were able to steer an airliner onto the Pentagon.
ED: To these individuals I only say: The first step in investigating a plane crash is to determine its identity and the identities of its passengers. The next step would be to determine who among the passengers might have had a motive and the capabilities to cause the crash. In the case of 9/11, neither the identities of the debris were determined nor was the presence of the 19 suspects in the planes ever proven. For this reason, it is moot to examine their alleged flight skills. One does not examine the flight skills of ghosts. Those who nevertheless attempted to examine the flight skills of the alleged hijackers discovered that precisely the pilot of flight AA77, which allegedly crashed on the Pentagon, was a completely incompetent pilot who could not, according to his teachers, properly maintain a one-motored Cessna in the air. While even an amateur pilot might have been able to steer an aircraft onto the huge roof of the Pentagon, professional pilots doubt that any pilot could have steered a Boeing 757 horizontally at 500 mph with an altitude of 15 feet above the ground (the aircraft is said to have crashed horizontally on the side of the Pentagon between the first and second floor).
LW: Shortly after the attacks the story of Osama bin Laden and his men were aired worldwide and nobody dared to question it. Do you think that bin Laden from a cave in Afghanistan could have masterminded such an attack with dilettantes armed with box cutters?
ED: Before asking whether bin Laden could have masterminded anything, it is worthwhile to note that the U.S. government had never accused him of complicity in 9/11, as admitted by the FBI in 2006. The U.S. government did not even take seriously the conclusion of the German Upper Court of Hamburg (Oberlandesgericht), that Osama bin Laden had selected Mohamed Atta and his friends to conduct 9/11. This conclusion was not shared by the US. This leaves us with the question what role Osama bin Laden played during the years in which he was depicted as a master terrorist: Was he a willing or unwitting US agent, as some maintain, or a genuine, but pathetic, fighter against Americans and Jews, as others maintain? This question has, however, no direct bearing on 9/11. A true history of Osama bin Laden has still to be written.
LW: In a speech before the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco on October 3, 2007, General Wesley Clark mentions an accidental meeting with Paul Wolfowitz in 1991 at the Pentagon in which Wolfowitz said that the US could use its military in the Middle East without being stopped by the Russians: “We have got about 5 to 10 years to clean up those old Soviet client regimes – Syria, Iran, Iraq – before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us.” And Clark continued: “This country was taken over by a group of people with a policy coup. Wolfowitz and Cheney and Rumsfeld, you can name a half of dozen collaborators from the ‘Project of a New American Century’. They wanted us to destabilize the Middle East, turn it upside down, and make it under our control.” Taking this statement into account and linking it to the call of this “Project” for a “new Pearl Harbor”, what comes up to your mind regarding 9/11?
ED: It is fairly logical that after the demise of the Soviet bloc, the US had an immense window of opportunity to secure its global hegemony for decades to come. But doing so required immense resources and thus the approval of the US population. Such approval could only be secured if a traumatic event would arise, which could be ascribed to a deadly enemy. The mass-murder of 9/11 filled the bill. Such reasoning is no proof that 9/11 was an inside job. It is, however, a proof that the U.S. administration, acting on behalf of Corporate America and the military-industrial complex, possessed a huge motive to see a “new Pearl Harbor” occur.
Wolfowitz was correct in assessing the window of opportunity as five to ten years. There exists evidence that the United States began “manufacturing” its new epochal enemy (Islamic terrorism), replacing the Red Menace, precisely around 1990.
LW: The circumstances surrounding 9/11 seem to be the West’s newest and greatest taboo. To question the official narrative endangers a person’s career. Even the academic community seems afraid to ask the relevant questions. You have been in direct contact with representatives of academia over 9/11. What is your experience?
ED: The overwhelming majority of academics do not wish even to discuss 9/11, let alone examine the nuts and bolts of these events. Part of this fear is that of being ostracized by peers or even endangering one’s career. Another part of the fear is that discovering the truth about 9/11 would inevitably shatter the questioner’s comfortable world view. I suspect that many academics regard 9/11 as a Pandora’s Box, best kept locked. If 9/11 was indeed an “inside job”, that would mean that political parties, media, the business community and the judiciary have been lying to us through their teeth for more than a decade and based their various policies, including wars and massive surveillance, on a monumental lie. Not many people are willing to live with such conclusions about their cherished institutions, even if such conclusions are, in my view, justified. We have here, I argue, an unprecedented case of mass denial, a pathological phenomenon that undermines the fundaments of the Age of Reason.
LW: In an recently published article by Eric Walberg on the website Dissident Voice, the author hinted at a connection between Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the CIA concerning the 9/11 attacks. Does such collaboration makes more sense to you than the “official” story?
ED: It is possible that various states, including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Israel, Germany have provided the United States some assistance in preparing 9/11. However – and this is an important caveat – I do not believe that the governments of these states or even their intelligence services, knew about the plans of 9/11. The U.S. planners would have been foolish to share the plans of 9/11 with other states. Thus, it is likely that the Saudi authorities helped recruit some individuals to be used as patsies in the United States and later designated as hijackers. But it is unlikely that the Saudis were advised about the ultimate role of these patsies.
LW: Shortly after the attacks, there were media reports on a possible “Israeli connection”. These reports centered on Larry Silverstein, Dov Zakheim, the five “dancing Israelis” and the “Israeli art students”. Please could you unravel this tangle of guesswork for the public and give us your judgment?
ED: Larry Silverstein was and is a known real-estate mogul in New York. He is Jewish and a known friend of Israeli politicians, such as Ariel Sharon and Benyamin Netanyahu. He was for many years the owner of WTC No. 7, a 47-floor building that housed, inter alia, New York City’s Emergency Center, offices of the CIA, SEC, the Secret Service and other government bodies. In 2001, the City of New York decided to lease out the Twin Towers to private investors. One of the bidders was Larry Silverstein.
Larry Silverstein is suspected in some circles for the above reasons to be an accomplice to the mass murder of 9/11, in which several of his own employees died. Yet, he did not make any effort to cover his alleged tracks. He leased the WTC just six weeks before 9/11, announced this lease to the world, insured it against terrorism for a whopping $3.2 billion and “admitted” in a documentary film to have given on 9/11 the authorization to “pull” WTC 7 (that is to demolish the building). He then sued insurance companies for double damages, because each tower was hit by a separate aircraft, thus displaying what would be widely regarded as greed. He even admitted to have escaped death by canceling a meeting at the WTC on 9/11. And he has never attempted to conceal his friendship with controversial Israeli politicians, such as Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu.
We have here all the requisite elements: A greedy Jew, proximity to the crime, motive. It is precisely the high visibility of Larry Silverstein as an ideal villain that makes me hesitate to implicate him in the crime. His alleged complicity is simply too obvious. It is difficult to believe that a person implicated in planning arson would take out a lease of the building six weeks before the crime and announce his agreement publicly. It is even more difficult to believe that a smart businessman, such as Silverstein, would risk the electrical chair in a criminal enterprise whose outcome he could not foresee. It is far more probable that Silverstein was framed into leasing the World Trade Center by the real plotters, precisely because he is greedy, because he is Jewish, and because of his ties to Israel. More to the point: Silverstein was not in a position to manage the hijacking exercises conducted by the military on the morning of 9/11, not in a position to steer airplanes against buildings and not in a position to wire WTC 7 within hours to demolish the building. Whatever his alleged role in 9/11, if any, the coordinators of Operation 9/11 did not sit in his office, but presumably in the Pentagon, led by Donald Rumsfeld. Larry Silverstein, however, represents an ideal bogeyman.
The fact that Mr. Silverstein did not demonstrate any interest in investigating the demise of the Twin Towers he had leased, is no evidence of malfeasance. In that he acted like most Americans, who till this day do not wish to ask questions and know the truth.
Dov Zakheim is another such ideal bogeyman. He is an ordained rabbi who made it to a high position in both government and private business. He worked in the Pentagon between 1985 and 1987. From 1987-2001, Zakheim was CEO of SPC International, a high-technology firm that manufactures, inter alia, equipment to remotely control aircraft. During 2000, he served as a foreign policy advisor to George W. Bush. He was hired as a Comptroller of the Pentagon in the spring of 2001. On September 10, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld, Defense Secretary, announced to a stupefied internal Pentagon audience that the Pentagon could not track $2.3 trillion dollars in its books. This statement disappeared, as it were, into the memory hole the next day because of the deadly events, but continues to be widely quoted by Jew-bashers, who connect these missing funds to Zakheim. A Google search on the string “$2.3 billion Zakheim” yields no less than 150,000 hits. But is it at all true that the Pentagon could not track $2.3 trillion, as Rumsfeld claimed? And if that was the case, could Zakheim make that money disappear from Pentagon accounting within a few months? And if he could do so, why wasn’t he accused, charged, and prosecuted? But probably the most important question is: Why did Rumsfeld make at all this statement, and precisely on the eve of 9/11? Wouldn’t a political leader rather attempt to conceal such apparent malfeasance? Or was there a hidden motive behind this bizarre announcement?
In order to implicate Israel in the events of 9/11, the story of the “five dancing Israelis” is often invoked. There is no dispute that five young Israelis were seen photographing the Twin Towers after they were hit and possibly making signs that were interpreted as celebration. They were arrested by the New York police after a woman, only known as Maria, called the police to report their suspicious conduct, as seen from her window. Interestingly, it was highlighted in the media that these Israelis were found in the possession of box cutters when they were arrested. The theme of box cutters was to remain attached to the alleged hijackings. A mere coincidence? The boys were, anyway, kept in detention in the United States for several weeks, and then deported to Israel. Two of them appeared in an Israeli TV show and said that they were photographing the Twin Towers to “document the event”. They implied that this had been their task but did not say who tasked them with that mission. This episode suggests Israeli foreknowledge of the events. Another case of foreknowledge, also involving Israelis, is an email message received by two employees of the Israeli company Odigo two hours before the attacks. It has not been determined who sent the message and the reason for informing Odigo. One explanation would be that the plotters wished to connect Israel somehow to the attacks.
And finally, we have the canard that 4,000 Jews, forewarned, did not come to work to the World Trade Center on 9/11. A mere glance at the names and backgrounds of the WTC victims suffices to rubbish this story. Many Jews died in the Twin Towers. While this story is false, it is actually based on an authentic news report that appeared in the Jerusalem Post on September 12, 2001. According to that report, the Israeli Foreign Ministry expressed its concern about the fate of 4,000 Israelis (not “Jews”) believed to be present around or in the World Trade Center. It is not known from where the Ministry obtained the figure of 4,000. As it turned out, only 2-3 Israelis died at the World Trade Center. In order to assess whether this low ratio of Israeli fatalities is plausible or not, it would have been necessary to know how many Israeli nationals actually worked in the Twin Towers and on which floors they worked. I could find no such information. It is known, however, that an Israeli shipping company (ZIM) moved its offices from the WTC shortly before 9/11. It is not known where exactly these offices were located in the buildings. This move is also invoked by some observers as a sign of foreknowledge. If ZIM was forewarned, who was doing the warning and made ZIM thus a suspect?
LW: What might be the motives for linking Israel to 9/11?
ED: Presuming, as I do, that 9/11 served U.S. imperial – and more generally Western – interests and was executed by entities under the control of the U.S. military, the plotters had evidently to conceal their trail and engage in serious efforts to impute their crime to others. Until now they did so by attributing the crime to 19 Islamic hijackers, who are presumably dead (or never existed). As this initial story is being increasingly debunked, a fall-back position for the plotters would be to blame the attack on other entities. Recent attempts are made by members of the U.S. Congress, for example, to blame 9/11 on the Saudis. But who are better placed as bogeymen than Jews or Israel? The Nazis used this method with great success. Why wouldn’t the US elite repeat this sordid game, if it fears that its days are counted? I suspect therefore that the “Israel did it” meme in regard to 9/11 is maintained over low fire by powerful forces in the United States in reserve for the day when the American people will discover that 9/11 was an inside job. If that should happen, the US elite would suddenly “discover” evidence that Jews within the Pentagon orchestrated 9/11 in cooperation with the Mossad; that American Jews led hapless Americans to attack other countries; that Jews were responsible for the introduction of torture and extra-judicial executions and that the PATRIOT Act was a Jewish project to control Americans.
LW: After you rubbished the official narrative and the so-called Israel link, who, in your view, could have had the largest interest to commit such a horrendous crime? What geopolitical and geostrategic interests could the US have in engineering such an operation?
ED: As I already mentioned above, I consider it beyond dispute that the US military planned and executed the mass-murder of 9/11 on behalf of the US elite (which, evidently, includes also persons of Jewish descent). The operation served multiple purposes, all beneficial to the US elite: It provided justification for the occupation of Afghanistan, a strategically location in Central Asia; it provided justification for destroying and rebuilding Iraq (both of which were profitable to U.S. corporations); it provided justification for a U.S.-led global War on Terrorism; it provided justification for huge increases in military appropriations and corresponding profits of the military-industrial complex; it provided justification for the erosion of constitutional rights and international law; it provided justification for global Big Brother measures, led by the NRO and NSA; and it provided the justification for the establishment of a new and profitable security industry. All of these developments have been detrimental to human rights, individual freedoms and global peace. That is one of the reasons why I consider that challenging the official myth of 9/11 is one of the most urgent tasks facing humanity today.
LW: Mr. Davidsson thank you very much for the interview.
Elias Davidsson was born in 1941 in Palestine to Jewish parents. His parents were born in Germany but had to immigrate to Palestine due to the Nazi persecution of Jews. He lived in his youth in France, Germany and the United States until he settled finally in Iceland in 1962. After working for 20 years in the computer field, he changed to musical occupation, as a music teacher, choir master, arranger and composer. In parallel to his profession, Davidsson has for many years been involved in activism and research regarding social and global justice, peace, anti-racism and human rights. Since 1990, Davidsson has focused on the role of international law as a tool for peace and published several scholarly articles in legal journals.
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