Part 5

Lars Schall: There is another thing you took a look at. A few weeks ago, the Senate released the report on the CIA torture program. You are aware that the core of the 9/11 story is based on tortured testimony. Can you talk about this please, because this is very, very crucial.

Graeme MacQueen: I actually mentioned this, Lars, and maybe this is what you are referring to – I was part of a press conference at the Parliament buildings in Ottawa, in my country’s capital, not too long ago, when we had managed to get a petition presented to our Parliament to conduct an independent review of the 9/11 attacks. And the day that I ended up giving that talk in the press conference in the House of Parliament, the Senate report on torture was in the news, and everybody was talking about it and it was being discussed in the Canadian Parliament, and so on. So I decided, even though I had only three minutes for my little speech, I would mention the torture connection – because, as you say, it is extremely important.

The first thing to be said here is that there is nothing outside the mainstream, there is nothing particular radical or controversial about the statement that torture was crucial to that 9/11 Commission Report. In fact, I believe it was NBC of all things who commissioned a study that discovered that over one quarter, over one fourth of the footnotes in the 9/11 Commission Report were based on these interrogations. (4) And of course we know that many of those interrogations involve the use of torture, such as suffocating people with water. And if you look at the footnotes of the Commission Report, well, I was certainly stunned years ago when I first read it by all the references to KSM, KSM, KSM – Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was supposedly suffocated about a 183 times.

The 9/11 Commission not only used information gathered under torture, it made it central to the report. Chapters 5 (“Al Qaeda Aims At The American Homeland”) and 7 (“The Attack Looms”) of the report couldn’t be written – at least in their current form – without these interrogations.

So it has to do with Osama bin Laden and his group, deciding to carry out these attacks, and the nature of the attacks, how al Qaeda came to the US, and where they went, what their names were – all kinds of things that are central to the official story were supposedly gathered through these harsh interrogations. And the 9/11 Commission collaborated with this. They actually submitted a new bunch of questions to the CIA – so that, as far as we know, these guys were interrogated harshly again specifically to answer questions for the 9/11 Commission. Now, the 9/11 Commissioners of course asked if they could directly talk to these poor guys who were being tortured. They didn’t call it torture, they said, can we talk to the people who are being interrogated? No, you can’t, you can’t see them, you can’t talk to them. Well, can we at least interview their interrogators? No, you can’t, none of your business, stay away, you interrupt the delicate process of interrogation.

So here we have a 9/11 Commission that has reason to believe people have been tortured to give this testimony, but doesn’t have direct access to anybody of any significance in the process, and so therefore decides to just trust the alleged transcripts that they get. It’s the weakest, most flimsy, not to mention immoral and illegal kind of evidence you can imagine. Imagine trying to introduce that to any decent court room. So this is what the 9/11 Commission Report, which is the closest thing to an official US document, giving the main story about 9/11, is based on. And this is why we’re trying to make the case to the Canadian Parliament that you can’t accept this. If you are saying you don’t collaborate with torture, then you can’t accept this document, you got to have an independent review. I don’t expect that we’ll be successful anytime soon, but that’s an argument we are making.

Lars Schall: Does every country of the West has to make this – to ask their governments to come clean about it?

Graeme MacQueen: I absolutely think they should. I think this is really important, because journalists and government leaders to the extent that they are asked about this they usually try to distant themselves immediately from these horrible interrogation techniques – oh, we don’t do that, oh, we were not collaborating, blah blah blah. It needs to be pointed out publicly, people need to be writing this in Op-Eds in newspapers and in official letters circulating in the internet – every government has to be asked, well, then why do you accept the official story of 9/11, because it is based on torture testimony? Everybody needs to be confronted with that.

Lars Schall: Thank you very much for your efforts and your book!

Graeme MacQueen: Thank you, Lars!

Graeme MacQueen received his Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from Harvard University and taught in the Religious Studies Department of McMaster University for 30 years. While at McMaster he became founding Director of its Centre for Peace Studies, after which he helped develop the B.A. program in Peace Studies and oversaw the development of peace-building projects in Sri Lanka, Gaza, Croatia and Afghanistan. Graeme MacQueen was a member of the organizing committee of the “Toronto Hearings” held on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and is co-editor of “The Journal of 9/11 Studies” – a peer-reviewed, electronic-only journal covering research related to the events of September 11, 2001. For an overview of MacQueen’s book “The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy” see here. And here you can read a review of MacQueen’s book by Professor Edward Curtin.

Notes:

(1) Compare Glenn Greenwald: “The unresolved story of ABC News’ false Saddam-anthrax reports”, published on April 9, 2007 at Salon under:http://www.salon.com/2007/04/09/abc_anthrax/, and: “Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News” published on August 1, 2008 at Salon under:http://www.salon.com/2008/08/01/anthrax_2/.

(2) Graeme MacQueen: “The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy”, Clarity Press, 2014, page 106.

(3) Ibid, pages 187 – 188.

(4) MacQueen refers to Robert Windrem and Victor Limjoco: “9/11 Commission Controversy”, published at MSNBC on January 30, 2008. The article has been taken offline at MSNBC, but here it is still available: http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/post911/commission/msnbc_commission_torture.html

Part 3

Lars Schall: I wanted to ask you about this specifically: How would you respond if our listeners / readers dismiss your research as just another whacky conspiracy theory?

Graeme MacQueen: The term “conspiracy theory” is what I refer to as a “thought stopper.” It doesn’t provoke us to think, it doesn’t stimulate thought, it doesn’t open up a discussion, it doesn’t encourage us to have a debate. What it tries to do is to stop the discussion. It’s an anti-intellectual move. It basically says, here is a person who is either immoral or stupid or insane – they’re “conspiracy theorists”, we’re not going to engage in dialogue with them. We are just going to paint them with a brush, they’re tainted, they’re spoiled, they’re taboo, somehow they are outside of the circle of respectable society, and therefore we don’t have listen to them, we don’t have to look at their evidence, we don’t have to read their books, we can just push them outside the circle. That is what the term “conspiracy theorist” does and that what I think it was mainly designed to do. It came into popularity after the JFK assassination, and it has been very useful for governments and intelligence agencies ever since then.

The sad thing is that even people that I personally respect a great deal, especially people on the left, often buy into this whole way of thinking. Where is Mr. Chomsky on 9/11, where is wonderful Chris Hedges, and Glenn Greenwald, and Amy Goodman, all these people who are so important in North America right now and whom I do not demonize by the way, I respect them all, I think they’re doing good work, but where are they on 9/11, where are they on the anthrax attacks? Well, they’re missing. They seem to have accepted the idea that those of us who question the official story on this are somehow radically wrong, we’re somehow tainted, we’re outside the boundaries of thinkable thought, and that’s too bad.

What I did in my book, I thought I could run away from this term, or I could run directly toward it, I could embrace it, and that’s what I decided to do, and that’s why the subtitle of the book is deliberately “The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy”. I define conspiracy in my introduction. It’s simply a plan made in secret by two or more people to commit an immoral or illegal act. Now, conspiracies in that sense happen all the time. That’s why laws are designed to deal with them. There is nothing weird about the fact that I’m claiming there was a conspiracy. What it comes down to is evidence. Do I have the evidence to support my argument? And if a person wants to know, they’ll have to read the book because the devil is in the details.

Lars Schall: If our listeners are interested in what you were referring, I think there was a memo in 1967 related to the case of Jim Garrison in New Orleans, where the CIA said, we should use the term “Conspiracy Theory” instead of “Assassination Theory”. Anyway, you conclude your book with the chapter “The Unthinkable.“ What do you mean with that?

Graeme MacQueen: This is how a part of the investigation proceeded. I noticed when I read the newspapers of the time – that is, the newspapers that were dealing with the anthrax attacks back in the Fall of 2001 –, that the term “The Unthinkable” kept coming up again and again. People would say, is it really true that the unthinkable is happening in the United States? Or they would say, it seems like a bioweapon attack is finally happening, we must now think the unthinkable. If you bump into one or two references like that, it’s no big deal, but I kept coming up with it again and again. And it wasn’t just journalists, because of course journalists borrow from other journalists. If it was just journalists, you could say, well, the guy in the New York Times likes the way the Washington Post did that, so he kind of borrowed it. But it wasn’t that simple. There were also scientists and government leaders, everybody seemed to be joining into the chorus. So I thought I would look a little more deeply into it.

I was aware that the term “The Unthinkable” has been a kind of a code word for decades among those who are concerned with nuclear weapons. It was used for a long time, it referred to nuclear warfare – The Unthinkable. This use of the term was probably pioneered, as far as I know, by Herman Kahn, who was an American strategic thinker, a guy who used game theory and so on to figure out how the US could best play this game most fruitfully with the Soviet Union.