The UK's Guardian recently interviewed “current and former US and European officials with access to intelligence on Iran,” and concluded that the United States, its European allies, and even Israel, agree that Tehran is probably years away from having a deliverable nuclear warhead.[1] Twice in recent weeks, CBC News anchor Peter Mansbridge has closely questioned two leaders who hold a different view.

In a January 18th interview, Prime Minister Stephen Harper told Mansbridge that he thinks that “the evidence is...overwhelming” and that it “is just beyond dispute at this point” that Iran’s purpose is to develop nuclear weapons. When pressed about Iran's insistence that it has no intention to build nuclear weapons, Harper said “I think there is absolutely no doubt they are lying”.[2]

Harper's claims are all-too-reminiscent of US Former Secretary of State Colin Powell's February, 2003, statement at the UN that, with “facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence”,[3] there was no doubt in his mind that Saddam Hussein was working to obtain key components to produce nuclear weapons. That intelligence has since been exposed as lies. In fact, the Iraqi chemical engineer who perpetrated the false intelligence, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, confessed his lies on British television April 3rd.[4]

Also troubling is that Harper cited the International Atomic Energy Commission, but in the March 22nd Guardian, the agency’s former director-general, Hans Blix, raised concerns about its recent credibility. The IAEC has been charged with over-reliance on unverified intelligence, and pro-Western bias, since the 2009 arrival of its new chief, Yukiya Amano.

More recently, Harper's conclusion was thrown into question during a CBC News One on One interview with US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta, aired last weekend. Panetta first stated that the best US intelligence has concluded that Iran has not made the decision to build a nuclear weapon. He went on to say that Iran is involved in providing non-nuclear weapons to terrorist-associated groups outside the country.[5]

However, when Mansbridge queried whether containment was an effective policy (sealing off the country to prevent weapons exports to outsiders), Panetta then contradicted his own intelligence claim by saying the US was going to apply economic and diplomatic sanctions because “we cannot allow a country that supports terrorism to have a nuclear weapon.”

When pushed to justify the sanctions, Panetta played the debate-ending trump card – the supposed threat of Muslim terrorism – the card spawned by 9/11. Thus ended the Panetta news segment – Mansbridge did not challenge whether hidden, ubiquitous, amorphous terrorism was a factor in the case of Iran.

The time is long overdue for investigative journalists to challenge such references to unsubstantiated terrorism. They can do so with confidence by becoming knowledgeable about the growing body of evidence refuting the official claims about the events of 9/11.

The 9/11 issue has moved from conspiracy theories and street protests into the realm of laboratories and peer-reviewed science journals. Independent scientific research, as well as FOIA requests and firefighter testimonies, have proved beyond doubt that high-tech incendiaries, not jet impacts and jet-fuel fires, caused the collapses of all three World Trade Center towers.

Nano-technology professor Dr. Niels Harrit of the University of Copenhagen led the team that discovered high-tech incendiary nano-thermite chips in the dust of the WTC towers.[6] With reaction temperatures well above the melting point of steel, this substance can be used to cut the steel framework of buildings as they are taken down by controlled demolitions.

A new authority raising serious challenges to the official narrative of 9/11 is the professional 23-member 9/11 Consensus Panel,[7] made up of PhD's, attorneys, journalists, commercial pilots, and
former NASA researchers. The Panel has used the Delphi Method (a standard consensus model borrowed from medicine) to distill the “best evidence” refuting 18 official claims about the major events of 9/11.

In San Francisco, steel-frame architect Richard Gage leads a group of nearly 1700 architects and engineers[8] calling for a new investigation into the three World Trade Center collapses. Gage is currently on an 11-city tour of Canada, where his technical presentation of the evidence is rapidly converting believers of the official account into doubters of it.

As a result of these investigations, and because nano-thermite can be made in only a few specialized laboratories – which do not include caves in the Middle East – the official claim that 9/11 was perpetrated by Middle Eastern operatives is becoming less credible. Polls have shown that 35-40% of Western people question the official story[9] (a 2011 poll from the prestigious Enmid Institute showed that 89.5% of Germans have doubts[10]), yet the media refrains from challenging the trigger event for the continuing global war on terror.

The tentacles of the 9/11 tale continue to reach down through time, trumping hard questions from responsible journalists, and enabling vague claims of terrorism to be used as justification to punish and pummel the Middle East. The question is, if 9/11 did not happen as we were told, do we as a society want to know the truth about that day?

Notes

3. “Powell presents US case to Security Council of Iraq's failure to disarm,” UN News Centre, February 5, 2003
http://www.un.org/apps/news/storyAr.asp?NewsID=6079&Cr=iraq&Cr1=inspect

5. “US defence chief worries about Iran nuclear potential,” CBC News, March 27, 2012

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2012/03/27/panetta-mansbridge.html?cmp=rss