Sen. Schumer lends qualified support to a new 9-11 investigation
By Peter Duveen
PETER'S NEW YORK, Saturday, April 18, 2009--U.S. Senator Charles E.
Schumer (D-NY) said yesterday that while he was positively disposed
toward a new investigation into the events of 9-11, his support for
such a probe would depend on the form it would take.
Schumer, who was attending the launch
of the Tour of the Battenkill annual bicycle races in Cambridge, New
York, responded to a question regarding efforts in New York City to
establish a new 9-11 investigation.
"I think it's not a bad idea," Schumer said. "You know, you've got to do it in a good way, but yes, I'd be for it."
Peter Duveen Photo
Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-NY, examines the route to be followed by participants
in the Tour of the Battenkill cycling race in Washington County, New York
Schumer qualified his remarks by
noting that his support would depend upon the manner in which the
investigation was structured. "I'd have to see the parameters of the
investigation and all that," he said. He briefly mentioned "finding
body parts," which may have referred to the discovery in 2006 that the
roof of the Deutsche Bank building near the former site of the Twin
Towers of the World Trade Center was strewn with human remains from
9-11.
A report sponsored by the National
Institute of Standards and Technology maintains that the Twin Towers
were brought down entirely due to fire and mechanical damage from the
two airliners that collided with them on 9-11. A similar report by the
same government agency asserts that the sudden and rapid collapse that
same afternoon of a third office tower, the 47-story Building 7, was
caused by fires triggered by the falling debris of the Twin Towers.
Critics of the 9-11 Commission Report
and the two NIST studies cite the generation of a large quantity of
small pieces of human remains and the distance the remains were carried
after the collapses as evidence explosives were used to destroy the
buildings. No government agency appears to have examined the human
remains or the World Trade Center debris with the object of determining
whether evidence of explosives was present, even though there were
numerous reports of explosions on that day.
Among such reports were those carried in the New York Times the following day:
"Police officers warned people in the
vicinity to move north, that the buildings could fall, but most people
found that unthinkable. They stayed put or gravitated closer.
"Abruptly, there was an ear-splitting
noise. The south tower shook, seemed to list in one direction and them
(sic) began to come down, imploding upon itself.
"'It looked like a demolition,' said Andy Pollock.
"'It started exploding,' said Ross
Milanytch, 57, who works at nearby Chase Manhattan Bank. 'It was about
the 70th floor. And each second another floor exploded out for about
eight floors, before the cloud obscured it all.'"
In the same edition, the Times, referring to the collapse of the North Tower, reported:
"Several people voiced the thought: 'Get out of here, the other tower's going to fall.'
"People started walking briskly north
until the premonition became real--another horrifying eruption, as one
floor after another seemed to detonate."
Critics of the NIST study on Building
7, including a growing number of scientists, engineers and other
professionals, contend that fires alone would not have caused the
building to collapse as rapidly as it did, if at all. The NIST report
was primarily based on computer simulations, which critics maintain
were tweaked to achieve the final result of total collapse, and are
still not consistent with the way the building came down, straight into
its own footprint at free-fall or close to free-fall speed.
The government asserts that the
airliners that hit the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 were
piloted by religiously motivated Moslems from the Middle East, who also
commandeered two other airliners, one of which the government contends
hit the Pentagon in Arlington, Va., and another which it says crashed
in a field in rural Pennsylvania while being pursued by military
aircraft intent on shooting it down.
The events of September 11 were used to justify a retaliatory invasion
of Afghanistan for harboring Osama Bin Laden, a Saudi Arabian
businessman and religious leader who the United States accused of
instigating the 9-11 attacks. They were also used to defend the
invasion of Iraq on the pretext that the enemy must be taken out before
it attacks, a geopolitical doctrine known as preemtive war. Although
the United States accused Iraq of harboring "weapons of mass
destruction" such as chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, no
evidence of such weaponry was found after the invasion, leaving open
speculation as to the actual reason the United States invaded that
country.
Some government critics fear that the
U.S. military and intelligence agencies, under the leadership of the
Bush White House, engineered the events of 9-11 in order to create a
seminal event to justify the stifling of opposition at home while
mounting costly wars of conquest in the Middle East under the banner of
an international "war on terror." The government continues to defend
its position on 9-11 on a number of web pages hosted by the U.S. State
Department, and through surrogates in the media and other professions.
Peter Duveen
Sen. Charles E. Schumer promotes chocolate milk from a Washington County, N.Y. creamery as
the best antidote for post-cycling fatigue after addressing participants and organizers of the
Tour of the Battenkill cycling race in Washington County.
Schumer attended yesterday's event to support the incorporation of the
Tour of Battenkill into races sponsored by the Union Cycliste
Internationale (UCI), a group that helps organize and oversees cycling
races worldwide.
"I just love bicycling," he told a
group of 20 or 30 people connected with the race, saying that he goes
cycling every Saturday. "I'm not a spandex guy, I'm not a racer, I just
get on the bicycle and ride forty or fifty miles around the different
parts of New York City."
Schumer, 58, said he had taken up
bicycling as advancing age precluded his participation in other sports
such as basketball and running.
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