Political analyst Peter Dale Scott was one of the first to point out some parallels between the Kennedy assassination and the September 11th attacks. Each of these events was specifically designed to justify the illegitimate invasion of a foreign country and the overthrow of its hostile regime: Cuba in the first case, Afghanistan in the second, with the difference that the invasion of Cuba was eventually called off. Each of the two false flag crimes also preceded a second lie that justified war, conducted unilaterally by the United States against a far away country: the mock incident in the Gulf of Tonkin justified the aggression against North Vietnam, just as the lies surrounding Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” justified the war against Iraq. Unlike the first two crimes, the two secondary lies are today publicly recognized as such by politicians and historians alike. In both cases, the plot originated in the upper echelons of the National Security State, and directly served the interests of the military-industrial complex and all its parasites. In both cases, the goal was to traumatize the American nation with a crime so heinous as transform the public's fear into hatred, and through the characterization of the event as merely a fraction of what was to come, their hatred into violence, all manifest, sharpened, and finally articulated through the creation and stigmatization of some stereotypical enemy who poses a mortal threat: communism in the former case, Islamism in the second.



It is also interesting to look at the preparatory methods and the eventual execution of the two events; doing so reveals a characteristic pattern and thereby allows for the development of a “theory of false flag operations”, and an increased ability to expose them. In both cases, for example, we note that the pseudo-culprit is identified almost instantaneously, along with the murder weapon. Oswald was arrested and accused in the hour that followed his alleged crime. Bin Laden was not arrested, but his name was plastered across TV screens everywhere by a slew of so-called terrorism experts in the hours following the collapse of the towers. The aim is to quickly and efficiently cut off any alternative theory and inspire confidence in the concreteness, veracity, and stabilizing explanatory power of an official narrative, marginalizing in advance all the skeptics. Official information, in this kind of event, circumvents public discussion and debate, preventing the people from collectively build hypothesis, interpretations, and meaning. Less than a week after September 11th, the Pakistani General Hamid Gul, a former ISI Director, keenly analyzed the technique: “Within 10 minutes of the second twin tower being hit in the World Trade Center, CNN said Osama bin Laden had done it. That was a planned piece of disinformation by the real perpetrators. It created an instant mindset and put public opinion into a trance, which prevented even intelligent people from thinking for themselves”. Studies show that information received from an authority during a period of emotional shock, and thus psychological vulnerability, is embedded into the memory of the trauma, in a way that the distinction between facts and their interpretation becomes impossible.

Once the authorities assuredly designate a patsy, it becomes almost unnecessary to provide further evidence of his guilt. It is remarkable that the FBI never formally charged bin Laden for the attacks of September 11th; he appears on the list of the ten most wanted criminals on their official website, but only as a suspect in the attacks against the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. When questioned by journalist Ed Hass of the Muckraker Report in June 2006, FBI spokesman Rex Tomb said: “The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Osama bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11”. Even the identification of the hijackers was presented to the public without any evidence; instead, conflicting information abounds, casting serious doubt on those identified: the flight manifests first provided by United Airlines and American Airlines did not include the names of the 19 hijackers, and there are no video images showing them boarding. The little evidence of their identity that has been made public is so convenient it’s rendered barely credible, for example two passports and one identity card of the hijackers recovered miraculously from the crash sites of Flights AA11, AA77 and UA93, or a Qur’an and flight manual written in Arabic found in the “luggage” of Mohamed Atta, which he left in a rental car.



Another instructive parallel between the immediate identifications of Oswald and bin Laden: in both cases, they were charged with a second crime in order to strengthen the suspicion of their guilt. An hour after Oswald was pinpointed, it was reported that he had just shot a police officer, J. D. Tippit, who had recognized him and approached him in the street. The Tippit murder served to present Oswald as armed and dangerous, and further to give explanation in advance for his shooting during his own arrest, as was likely planned. Similarly, the responsibility of the Taliban in the attacks of September 11th was made easier to believe by the report, one day before, of Commandant Massoud’s assassination, readily attributed to the same Al-Qaïda-Tabiban alliance.



A good patsy is a dead patsy; that is another fundamental rule of false flag operations that we can see applied in both Kennedy’s assassination and September 11th. Once designated, the falsely accused culprit must be eliminated as soon as possible, because once condemned or arrested, he will have nothing to lose in saying what he knows, and he knows enough to realize that he is the subject of something malicious. Lee Harvey Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby two days after his alleged crime; already a bit late — his assassination did not quite go according to plans, during his arrest in the Texas Theater, where Jack Ruby had been seen by its manager George Applin. It is unfortunate for the conspirators that Oswald had time to understand what was happening and run to the press: “I'm just a patsy”. This might be one of the mistakes that prompted them to abandon of their Communist conspiracy theory, which would have incurred to many inconsistencies.



A patsy’s claims to innocence are barely a speed bump when up against the steamroller of an aligned media; bin Laden’s denial meant nothing. Regarding the hijackers, they died by definition, meaning any question of their culpability simply could not arise. Again, however, problems arose: a few days after the FBI identified the culprits (September 14th), seven of the nineteen hijackers appeared through various channels, proving that they were alive and consequently innocent. They were in Morocco, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, and the FBI confirmed their identity. The father of Mohamed Atta, the supposed ring-leader, told the German magazine Bild am Sonntag in late 2002 that “[his] son called [him] the day after the attacks, September 12”, and that he was hiding out of fear for his life.



As for bin Laden, it’s not until April 30th, 2011, in the operation known as Neptune’s Spear, that he is supposed to have been eliminated by a SEAL commando, shot fatally in the head in his home in Abbottabad, Pakistan. His body, we were told, was dumped in the sea after identification. The only picture presented to the public was a vulgar photomontage, as the media quickly acknowledged. The farce would be funny if not for the tragic epilogue: Friday, August 5th, 2011 around 11 pm, a Chinook helicopter of the U.S. Army crashed in a province in central Afghanistan after being hit by two rocket-propelled grenades (RPG-7s) from the Afghan resistance. The attack killed 38, including 30 members of Navy SEAL Team 6, the elite unit who had led Neptune’s Spear. And thus there will be little chance of contradiction to the official story of bin Laden’s death, coming from a member of the team stating for example, that they had only participated a training exercise that day. Family members of the dead SEALs are now raising questions, however.



It’s likely that bin Laden actually died in late 2001, as was announced by the Pakistani President Musharraf (CNN, January 18, 2002), the Afghan President Hamid Karzai (CNN, October 7, 2002) and the leader of the anti-terrorism division of the FBI, Dale Watson (BBC, 18 July 2002). On January 28th, 2002, CBS reported that on the eve of September 11th Bin Laden had been treated in a military hospital in Pakistan for kidney dialysis, and was escorted by the Pakistani army. How could he have survived until 2011, holed up in the caves of Afghanistan, when he had to undergo dialysis every three days? More troubling still: two months earlier, bin Laden stayed at the American Hospital in Dubai, where he was visited by the local CIA station chief Larry Mitchell. This information comes from credible sources (administrative management of the hospital, members of the Saudi royal family, and French Intelligence) and was covered by Le Figaro in October 2001.



It was purposefully decided, however, to hold back the announcement of bin Laden’s death until 2011. There were two advantages to this. First, it allowed the continued invasion of Afghanistan under the auspices of a manhunt. Second, it allowed bin Laden to “speak” when needed, and thus clear the doubts raised by his denials. Even better than a dead patsy, the architects of September 11th created for themselves a virtual patsy. The guilt of bin Laden is based mainly upon three video confessions “accredited by the CIA”.  The first was mysteriously found in December 2001 in Jellalabad, translated and released two months later. Despite the poor image quality, it is easy to see that the character presented as bin Laden is hardly a credible semblance. The second video appeared in October 2004, a week before the U.S. elections reappointed George W. Bush. An independent analysis by the Swiss Institute IDIAP specialized in perceptual intelligence, basing their study on comparisons with twenty previous recordings of bin Laden, concluded with 95% probability that the voice on the October tape is not that of bin Laden. A third video appeared to the public on September 8th, 2007, in which bin Laden announced an intensification of al-Qaeda activities in Iraq; this just before the debate in Congress regarding the need for new troops in Iraq. The image is frozen for most the message, and even when it is not, the quality is so bad that it is impossible to verify whether the movement of the lips corresponds to the words spoken. Finally, the videos of 2004 and 2007 were filmed in the same studio with the same frame and the same posture, but bin Laden looks younger on the second (he had dyed his beard black, it was explained).



After September 11th and after Kennedy's assassination, it was necessary to appease doubts with a presidential commission of inquiry. The 9/11 Commission was created in November 2002, and was led by Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, but its executive director was Philip Zelikow, who also happened to be the senior editor of the NSS 2002 document defining Bush’s preemptive war doctrine. In 2006, Kean and Hamilton revealed in their book Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, that the Commission “was set up to fail” from the beginning, and that Zelikow had already written a synopsis of the final report before the first meeting. He controlled all the working groups, prevented them from communicating with each other, and gave them the singular mission to prove the official story; Team 1A, for example, should “tell the story of Al-Qaeda’s most successful operation — the 9/11 attacks”. All information, and any request for information, had to pass through him. On top of that, most of the information obtained by the commissioners from the CIA and NORAD was “far from the truth”, according to Kean and Hamilton. The Commission had no access to any direct evidence or even the recordings of the interrogations of the suspected al-Qaeda members, who came to them third hand “in the form of reports, not even transcripts”. They had to be content, for example, with CIA affirmations that the confessions of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (described as the operational manager of the attacks), which were obtained between 183 waterboarding sessions, were certifiable evidence that bin Laden had authorized and supported the operation. Before the Commission published its final report in July 2004, several members expressed their frustration. One of them, Max Cleland, even resigned, calling the Commission a “national scandal”: “One of these days we will have to get the full story because the 9-11 issue is so important to America. But the White House wants to cover it up”. John Farmer, the Senior Counsel, said for his part: “what government and military officials had told Congress, the Commission, the media, and the public about who knew what when — was almost entirely, and inexplicably, untrue”.



The Commission also threw a veil over one of the most disturbing elements of Sept. 11th: between the 6th and the 10th of September 2001, there were massive purchases of “put options”, twenty-five times higher than average, on American Airlines and United Airlines, whose shares fell 40% after the attacks, but also on companies housed in the WTC such as Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. and Merrill Lynch & Company. The International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) concluded on October 15th that the gains be in the hundreds of millions of dollars and could be the “largest insider trade ever committed”. The Commission rejected the hypothesis in a few lines: “further investigation has revealed that the trading had no connection with 9/11. A single US-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al-Qaeda purchased 95 percent of the UAL puts on September 6 as part of a trading strategy that also included buying 115,000 shares of American [Airline] on September 10”. In other words: postulating that the culprit was al-Qaeda, and noting that the investors in question did not have the al-Qaeda profile, enabled the Commission to conclude that these suspicious transactions were just an unfortunate coincidence. The “institutional investor” in question was Alex Brown Inc., a subsidiary of Deutsche Bank whose CEO and Chairman A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard had just become Executive Director of the CIA in March 2001.