By Peter Duveen
PETER’S NEW YORK, Saturday, April 18, 2009–U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer
(D-NY) said yesterday that while he was positively disposed toward a new investigation
into the events of 9-11, his support for such a probe would depend on the form
it would take.
Schumer, who was attending the launch of the Tour of the Battenkill annual
bicycle races in Cambridge, New York, responded to a question regarding efforts
in New York City to establish a new 9-11 investigation.
"I think it’s not a bad idea," Schumer said. "You know, you’ve
got to do it in a good way, but yes, I’d be for it."
Schumer qualified his remarks by noting that his support would depend upon
the manner in which the investigation was structured. "I’d have to see
the parameters of the investigation and all that," he said. He briefly
mentioned "finding body parts," which may have referred to the discovery
in 2006 that the roof of the Deutsche Bank building near the former site of
the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center was strewn with human remains from
9-11.
A report sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology maintains
that the Twin Towers were brought down entirely due to fire and mechanical damage
from the two airliners that collided with them on 9-11. A similar report by
the same government agency asserts that the sudden and rapid collapse that same
afternoon of a third office tower, the 47-story Building 7, was caused by fires
triggered by the falling debris of the Twin Towers.
Critics of the 9-11 Commission Report and the two NIST studies cite the generation
of a large quantity of small pieces of human remains and the distance the remains
were carried after the collapses as evidence explosives were used to destroy
the buildings. No government agency appears to have examined the human remains
or the World Trade Center debris with the object of determining whether evidence
of explosives was present, even though there were numerous reports of explosions
on that day.
Among such reports were those carried in the New York Times the following day:
"Police officers warned people in the vicinity to move north, that the
buildings could fall, but most people found that unthinkable. They stayed put
or gravitated closer.
"Abruptly, there was an ear-splitting noise. The south tower shook, seemed
to list in one direction and them (sic) began to come down, imploding upon itself.
"’It looked like a demolition,’ said Andy Pollock.
"’It started exploding,’ said Ross Milanytch, 57, who works at nearby
Chase Manhattan Bank. ‘It was about the 70th floor. And each second another
floor exploded out for about eight floors, before the cloud obscured it all.’"
In the same edition, the Times, referring to the collapse of the North Tower,
reported:
"Several people voiced the thought: ‘Get out of here, the other tower’s
going to fall.’
"People started walking briskly north until the premonition became real–another
horrifying eruption, as one floor after another seemed to detonate."
Critics of the NIST study on Building 7, including a growing number of scientists,
engineers and other professionals, contend that fires alone would not have caused
the building to collapse as rapidly as it did, if at all. The NIST report was
primarily based on computer simulations, which critics maintain were tweaked
to achieve the final result of total collapse, and are still not consistent
with the way the building came down, straight into its own footprint at free-fall
or close to free-fall speed.
The government asserts that the airliners that hit the World Trade Center on
September 11, 2001 were piloted by religiously motivated Moslems from the Middle
East, who also commandeered two other airliners, one of which the government
contends hit the Pentagon in Arlington, Va., and another which it says crashed
in a field in rural Pennsylvania while being pursued by military aircraft intent
on shooting it down.
The events of September 11 were used to justify a retaliatory invasion of Afghanistan
for harboring Osama Bin Laden, a Saudi Arabian businessman and religious leader
who the United States accused of instigating the 9-11 attacks. They were also
used to defend the invasion of Iraq on the pretext that the enemy must be taken
out before it attacks, a geopolitical doctrine known as preemtive war. Although
the United States accused Iraq of harboring "weapons of mass destruction"
such as chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, no evidence of such weaponry
was found after the invasion, leaving open speculation as to the actual reason
the United States invaded that country.
Some government critics fear that the U.S. military and intelligence agencies,
under the leadership of the Bush White House, engineered the events of 9-11
in order to create a seminal event to justify the stifling of opposition at
home while mounting costly wars of conquest in the Middle East under the banner
of an international "war on terror." The government continues to defend
its position on 9-11 on a number of web pages hosted by the U.S. State Department,
and through surrogates in the media and other professions.
Schumer attended yesterday’s event to support the incorporation of the Tour
of Battenkill into races sponsored by the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI),
a group that helps organize and oversees cycling races worldwide.
"I just love bicycling," he told a group of 20 or 30 people connected
with the race, saying that he goes cycling every Saturday. "I’m not a spandex
guy, I’m not a racer, I just get on the bicycle and ride forty or fifty miles
around the different parts of New York City."
Schumer, 58, said he had taken up bicycling as advancing age precluded his
participation in other sports such as basketball and running.
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