Sen. Schumer lends qualified support to a new 9-11 investigation

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."

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.

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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(Original, with photos, corrections and additions may be found at http://www.petersnewyork.com/SCHUMER1.html.)