An inside job?
By Salah Montasser
I don't think it would be contentious to say that the unprecedented disaster witnessed by New York and Washington the day before yesterday was planned and executed by American citizens.
The list of potential perpetrators resentful of American foreign policy is tediously long, but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that neither the Palestinians nor the Serbs were implicated.
First, the airports at which the planes were hijacked made no reference to an Arab passenger, whose presence the media would have seized upon immediately.
Second, an American journalist on board the plane that crashed into the Pentagon called her husband on her cell phone to tell him that the plane had been hijacked. Had she suspected an Arab was involved, she would certainly have mentioned that. On another plane, one passenger had a similar phone conversation with his mother, and he too failed to mention seeing any Arab faces among the passengers.
Those who violated the quintessential symbols of the most powerful country in the world -- the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the White House -- could not have been Palestinians, who are in no position to contemplate, let alone implement, anything more than acts of sabotage designed to pressure America to alter its unfair Middle East policy.
An operation involving the simultaneous hijacking of a number of planes at three different airports requires months of planning as well as access to computers and other advanced technologies; this exceeds the abilities of any Arab or Palestinian within the United States. Arab suspects, moreover, are under constant surveillance. They could never have organised the operation under the nose of the American security apparatus. If they were able to do so, this would indicate that US intelligence has broken down irreparably.
Those who piloted the planes were perfectly familiar with their routes and targets, perfectly coordinated and able to fly at low altitudes among high-rise buildings, which suggests that they are insiders. The fact that the operation was conducted so precisely and on such a large scale, also implies that it was carried out by Americans.
Finally, this catastrophe resembles, in conception and method, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, for which Timothy McVeigh was executed on 11 June. That there were so many explosives on the plane that crashed into the second World Trade Centre tower suggests that the perpetrator belongs with the extremist Michigan Organisation, of which McVeigh was a member. Perhaps an investigation of the planes' black boxes, which has yet to be undertaken, will surprise the Americans more than anyone.
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