Drew Noftle thinks the 9/11 Commission’s 2004 report is a fraud, and that Canada should look at pulling out of Afghanistan.
August 14, 2008
Calls for domestic probe into 9/11
Do you support a Canadian investigation into 9/11?
Lisa Barrett
Bowen Island councillor and antiwar activist
“If we constantly say we want an investigation…I think we’ll get bogged down in the details of what happened in 9/11 when what happened in 9/11 is affecting us on a daily basis, and a much deeper and comprehensive analysis is required to find out what is this process of militarization and how is fear used to control the population. It’s far more important that we have a conversation about that.”
Kevin Potvin
Vancouver writer and newspaper publisher
“Canada’s war-making in Afghanistan is obviously directly tied to a perspective of what happened on September 11, 2001. I don’t have a lot of patience for wacky conspiracy theories, and the wacky conspiracy told by the White House is too much to swallow.… Wacky conspiracy theories ought to be met with examination and skepticism, and this is a prime candidate for reexamination.”
Henry Lew
Member, Vancouver 9/11 Truth Society
“Twenty-four Canadians were killed in the World Trade Center. There’s been really no satisfactory prosecution of the perpetrators. We owe it to those Canadians and their families to find out what really happened. There’s a very long list of unanswered questions, and there’s every reason to believe that the government of the United States is withholding or suppressing evidence.”
Nita Palmer
Cochair, Mobilization Against War and Occupation
“We don’t have any position that deals with that issue. Our main focus is as an antiwar organization…Our main argument against the war, particularly in Afghanistan, is that it’s killing thousands of civilians. We’re also demanding the right of the people in Afghanistan to self-determination, to be able to control to their lives and country without foreign control and occupation.”
On August 29, Drew Noftle and about a dozen other Vancouver-based 9/11 truth seekers will set out east on board a private bus, holding rallies in different cities along the way to Montreal. There they will link up with other crusaders from across the country for a march to Ottawa that will culminate on the day the world marks the seventh anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the U.S.
As laid out in the 2004 report of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission created by American congressional legislation, “19 young Arabs acting at the behest of Islamist extremists headquartered in distant Afghanistan” carried out the deadliest terrorist strike ever on the U.S. mainland.
But according to Noftle, a founding member of the Vancouver 9/11 Truth Society, there has never been an official Canadian investigation into 9/11, which the 28-year-old English teacher noted is the principal reason why Canada is at war in Afghanistan.
“The main purpose of our group right now is we want to get a Canadian investigation into 9/11 in order to justify our war effort,” Noftle told the Georgia Straight. “If we don’t have a reason, we should pull out immediately.”
Those who are skeptical of the source of the attacks serve a purpose in society, according to SFU political scientist Anil Hira, even though they are usually shunned by left-wing activists and dismissed by others as conspiracy nuts.
“They’re very important for society because after an event like that, just like the Jews with the Holocaust or the Palestinian problem, there’s so much emotion involved…that you need people that are going to kind of commemorate them [the victims],” Hira told the Straight. “You don’t want people to just forget about them.”
Hira likened 9/11 to an event of “biblical proportions” that is bound to create “fascination”.
“Because it was something that was so new and unexpected, people cannot grasp the idea that a plane hit a building and the building collapsed, that it can be that simple, because it had so many implications and effects on our everyday life,” he said. “But that’s the way we mythologize these kinds of events and make meaning out of them.”
Hira has written a number of papers regarding the implications of 9/11. One of them, which he cowrote with fellow SFU political-science professor Douglas Ross, will form a chapter in a book to be published this year by the Connecticut-based Praeger Security International, an imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group.
In a chapter titled “Trilateralism at an End, Asymmetrical Bilateralism Restored? Canadian Ambivalence on U.S. Strategic Primacy After 9/11”, the authors take note of the “greatly increased U.S. demands for historically unprecedented bilateral cooperation in both military operations and national security surveillance and enforcement” with Canada.
“To the extent that Canadians have begun to share fears about a decline in world order and global security as well as a decline in relative American power, the willingness to align Canadian foreign and defense policies more closely with Washington actually may increase,” Hira and Ross write.
The authors recall that Canada’s military presence in Afghanistan started with the deployment of special forces in late 2001 and was followed by a far larger force in 2003, which was the same year the U.S. invaded Iraq.
“With troops in Afghanistan but none in Iraq, Canadian audiences could be told that Ottawa was standing up against American pressures while American officials could be mollified by the sacrifice of money and lives in Afghanistan,” Hira and Ross note.
On June 10 this year, the NDP’s Libby Davies read in Parliament a petition signed by approximately 500 Canadians asking for a government probe into 9/11. Davies wasn’t available for an interview, but a member of her staff, Rob Duffy, stressed in an e-mail to the Straight that the Vancouver East MP doesn’t endorse the contents of the petition.
The petition, which Noftle and company will be emphasizing on their cross-country journey, claims that “scientific and eyewitness evidence shows that the 9/11 Commission Report is a fraudulent document and that those behind the report are consciously or unconsciously guilty of covering up what happened on 9/11/2001”.
Notes on the Afghan war
> In 2005, U.S. and NATO forces used an average of 2,300 kilograms of munitions per month in air strikes.
> Since June 2006, their use of air-strike munitions has averaged 36,300 kilograms per month.
> Air munitions use peaked at 76,200 kilograms in December 2007.
> Civilian casualties rose by 62 percent in 2008 compared to figures in the first six months of 2007 because of increased use of air power by U.S. and NATO forces.
> A major challenge facing U.S. and NATO forces targeting insurgents is incomplete or faulty intelligence.
> From 2002 to 2006, insurgent-initiated attacks increased by 400 percent.
> Deaths resulting from these attacks jumped by 800 percent.
> There are approximately 65,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan.
Source: “Killing Friends, Making Enemies: The Impact and Avoidance of Civilian Casualties in Afghanistan” (United States Institute of Peace briefing, July 2008)
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Afghanistan Opium Production Nearly Eliminated
JALALABAD, Afghanistan - February 15, 2001
U.N. drug control officers said the Taliban religious militia has nearly wiped out opium production in Afghanistan -- once the world's largest producer -- since banning poppy cultivation last summer.
A 12-member team from the U.N. Drug Control Program spent two weeks searching most of the nation's largest opium-producing areas and found so few poppies that they do not expect any opium to come out of Afghanistan this year.
Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's supreme leader, banned poppy growing before the November planting season and augmented it with a religious edict making it contrary to the tenets of Islam.
The Taliban, which has imposed a strict brand of Islam in the 95% of Afghanistan it controls, has set fire to heroin laboratories and jailed farmers until they agreed to destroy their poppy crops.
FAST FORWARD 5 YEARS>>>
Afghanistan Opium Crop Sets Record - U.S. Backed Efforts At Eradication Fail
Washington Post - Saturday, December 2, 2006
Opium production in Afghanistan, which provides more than 90% of the world's heroin, broke all records in 2006, reaching a historic high despite ongoing U.S. sponsored eradication efforts, the Bush administration reported yesterday.
In addition to a 26% production increase over the past year -- for a total of 5,644 metric tons -- the amount of land under cultivation in opium poppies grew by 61%. Cultivation in the two main production regions was up by 132%.
Opium cultivation was outlawed during Taliban rule in the late 1990s and was nearly eliminated by 2001. After the overthrow of the Taliban government by U.S. forces in the fall of that year, the Bush administration said that keeping a lid on production was among its highest priorities. But corruption and alliances formed by Washington and the Afghan government with anti-Taliban tribal chieftains, some of whom are believed to be deeply involved in the trade, undercut the effort.
U.S. Government or "We The People" ... which side are you on?
www.marchonottawa2008.org/
Did the Air India bombing warrant an investigation? The missing women whose remains turned up on Willie Pickton's pig farm? Of course there were investigations. We have laws in this country, and that's how crimes are commonly dealt with.
Three thousand people were murdered on September 11 and hundred's of thousand's have died since then in a never ending war on terror that Canada is deeply embroiled in. Should there be an investigation?
The question is utterly absurd. Of course there needs to be an investigation. As Canadian citizens each and every one of us has the responsibility to hold our politicians accountable and to demand this investigation now.
Actually, I can grasp that it can be that simple. The problem is that if you actually study the collapses, which most political scientists, such as Dr. Hira, have evidently not bothered to do, you find that the official account runs afoul of the evidence. That's why many of us want a new investigation. No need for myth, Dr. Hira. Just good old-fashioned evidence.
Dr. Graeme MacQueen
Seems to me that it would be far more useful to investigate the relationship between the hijackers and US intelligence and law enforcement agencies, or the evidence that they were being at least monitored before the event and at most used.
I find it interesting that experts like Hira consistently steer the debate towards the weakest arguments for a new investigation. What about the proven, historical, operational ties between western Intelligence agencies and extremist groups? There's a rather long history of it - no 'mythologizing' necessary.