The most significant expert may turn out to be Judge Ferdinando Imposimato, the widely respected honorary president of the Italian Supreme Court and legendary mafia hunter who lost his brother in a revenge attack.

Courtesy: liamscheff.com

(LONDON) - As the annual 9/11 remembrance draws to a close, the world is as split as ever. Not only on whether the Afghan and Iraq invasions were justified, but between those who accept Washington's official 9/11 story and those who do not.

Under the mainstream media radar, the number of those who do not is steadily increasing, forming substantial majorities in places like Pakistan and Egypt and significant minorities even in NATO's heartland countries, France, the UK and the US itself. The issue is not whether, despite his denials, Osama Bin Laden might have wanted to organise the 9/11 attacks but whether Al Qaeda actually had the capability to infiltrate 19 terrorists into the US, including some very well known to the CIA, and the four highly skilled pilots necessary to pull off the spectacular coup. Up to then Al Qaeda's biggest success was setting off two truck bombs in East Africa. (1)

The stereotype promoted by the corporate media of a 9/11 sceptic, a badly educated redneck watching Fox News in a trailer park, could hardly be further from the truth. The website Patriot's Question 9/11 lists hundreds of University Professors, over a thousand architects and engineers and hundreds of aviation professionals who have spoken out against the official 9/11 story. (8)

The most significant expert may turn out to be Judge Ferdinando Imposimato, the widely respected honorary president of the Italian Supreme Court and legendary mafia hunter who lost his brother in a revenge attack. Imposimato has written to the Journal of 9/11 Studies announcing his intention to bring a case before the International Criminal Court citing key figures in the US administration for involvement in the execution of the 9/11 attacks. (2)

Imposimato's take has received indirect support from people close to the heart of Washington's power elite. Richard Clarke, White House anti-terror czar at the time, has confirmed what researcher Kevin Fenton has established based on a meticulous examination of recently released official reports. Someone at the top of the CIA "made a decision" to stand down the FBI and the CIA, allowing the alleged hijackers a free run in the US when they would otherwise have been arrested and the plot foiled. (9)

Meanwhile the 9/11 truth movement continues with a drip, drip of new research. This year we have seen nothing on the scale of the revelations of iron spheres and uncombusted nanothermite in the dust at Ground Zero, strong indicators that the Twin Towers' spectacular collapses on live TV were caused by something a lot hotter than diesel fuel fires. But there are significant developments nonetheless.

Scientist Kevin Ryan was fired from work some time ago after he went public saying his employer Underwriters Laboratories, the company which had certified the quality of the steel used in the World Trade Centre, was involved in creating fake computer simulations to help support the official story that the fires were sufficiently hot to cause the disastrous collapse of three skyscrapers. He has since been beavering away at various aspects of the 9/11 story.

This year Ryan has released an analysis of the changes that the 9/11 events have brought to the US building industry. If the official story is to be believed, 9/11 was an architectural and engineering disaster. Buildings expressly designed to withstand a high speed jet impact and subsequent fire failed spectacularly. This disaster should have led to an urgent and exhaustive inquiry with many action points for other buildings of the same construction. Instead, says Ryan, nothing like that happened.The US engineering community has acted as though it does not believe the official 9/11 story any more than the alleged conspiracy theorists in their trailer parks. (3)

Meanwhile the US Public Broadcasting System became the conduit for the latest film from Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth: Explosive Evidence - The Experts Speak Out, with downloads nationally pushing Bill Clinton's Convention Speech into third place, an astonishing success for a topic the mainstream media as usual were entirely deaf to (4). The film has a section in which psychologists and counsellors explain why the media and sections of the public are so reluctant to doubt an official story that might, from another government, seem highly unlikely if not absurd. The reasons come down to trauma, belief in authority and a phenomenon psychologists call cognitive dissonance. For every trailer park dissident there are several other citizens with a very strong desire to believe in authority, especially after the terrifying circumstances and unprecedented media barrage of 9/11. Confronted with contradictory evidence some time later, such people suffer from painful cognitive dissonance and often resort to denial.

An example of cognitive dissonance occurred last week on CNN when Piers Morgan tried to dismiss Jesse Ventura, a maverick politician and broadcaster. Morgan clearly knew little about the issue and could only say the suggestion of an inside job was "preposterous". The studio audience applauded Ventura. (10)

Another 9/11 researcher who goes by the name of Shoestring has presented a very detailed analysis of the various emergency offices that failed on the morning of 9/11. Probably the most shocking was the FBI's emergency management office in Washington, designed to cope with up to five major emergencies at one time, which knew nothing more than the TV channels. In the light of so much other bizarre activity - at the CIA, on the building investigation, the failure of Washington's Andrews Airbase to scramble any of its fighters for nearly two hours - the official 9/11 story of coincidence, surprise and cock-up begins to look less likely than some of the alternatives. (5)

But surely the post 9/11 war against Al Qaeda has produced a network of detainees, led by Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who have corroborated the official 9/11 story of a plot hatched in the caves of Afghanistan? Even the supine 911 Commission was disturbed by the CIA's refusal to allow them any contact with KSM or even his interrogators. As suspicions of systematic torture were confirmed in media leaks, the CIA illegally destroyed most of its own records, presumably to save its officers the worry of future prosecution. This ugly picture of detainees tortured into corroborating the official 9/11 story has been enhanced by another recent revelation from the Defence Department Inspector General: detainees were given truth drugs, or to put it in official language were drugged with powerful antipsychotic and other medications that “could impair an individual’s ability to provide accurate information". (6)

Last year's bombshell from the White House anti-terror czar at the time has produced a sequel. Richard Clarke has focused on the role of the CIA saying the then boss George Tenet must have known about the shocking unexplained decision to block three FBI field offices from acting against several 9/11 hijackers. Most researchers agree that the CIA's dedicated Osama Bin Laden Unit, kept secret until some years after 9/11, is the best place to start asking questions. Up to now they have focused on Bush favorite and torture advocate Cofer Black who oversaw the unit before moving on to make money as a principal in Blackwater, the mercenary company in Iraq.

Recently another CIA official has come into the frame: Black's deputy in the CIA's counter terror center, Enrique “Ricky” Prado. A book based on sources in the Miami Vice Squad describes Prado's apparent double life as CIA official and a member of Florida's Cuban mafia. The story was ignored by much of the mainstream media but carried in detail in Wired magazine, the Daily Beast and the UK's Daily Mail, which operates under stringent libel laws. (7)

When will the truth be known? Many agree that the planet's intelligence services probably already know. Iran's President Ahmedinajad's UN General Assembly speech calling for a new investigation into 9/11 was greeted with predictable outrage and the corporate media applauded when the NATO countries angrily walked out. But most countries did not walk out and with global opinion ever more sceptical as time goes by, this could prove a bad omen for Washington.

(1) In the UK a poll by ICM taken last year showed only seven percent were fully confident they had been told the whole story of the attacks, while in France a large minority thought the US government was involved in the attacks. Middle East experts as diverse as Alan Hart and Mohamed Heykal have both said that any Al Qaeda plot would have immediately been known to the many intelligence services who had agents in the ramshackle setup.

(2) http://www.journalof911studies.com/

(3) http://digwithin.net/2012/09/07/are-tall-buildings-safer/. Note: the media have featured someone claiming to be from the original engineers team who has said that planners never imagined a plane crash into the WTC but this is contradicted by the written record and there is scant evidence that this individual was in the role he claims.

(4) digitaljournal.com/article/332051

(5) http://shoestring911.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/why-were-us-intelligence-facilities-in.html

(6) http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/07/u-s-drugged-detainees-to-obtain-false-confessions.html

(7) http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/28/did-a-cia-agent-work-for-the-mob-excerpt-from-evan-wright-s-new-book.html

(8) For an interesting review of some of the questions raised see

http://www.WantToKnow.info/9119-11_official_story_questions

(9) Fenton's book is "Disconnecting the Dots", published by Trine Day