Mainstream Media Drops Ball on 9-11

• Why did Osama bin Laden deny al Qaeda involvement in the 9-11 attacks?

• And why did the mainstream media completely ignore this astounding revelation?

By Paul Craig Roberts

On September 28, 2001, Karachi, Pakistan, daily newspaper Ummat published an interview with Osama bin Laden, 17 days after the alleged, but unsubstantiated, al Qaeda attack of September 11, 2001, on the World Trade Center twin towers and Pentagon. The interview was sensational. The alleged mastermind of 9-11 said that he and al Qaeda had nothing to do with the 9-11 attack. The BBC’s World Monitoring Service had the interview translated into English and made public on September 29, 2001.

Bin Laden’s sensational denial was not reported by the United States print and TV media. It was not investigated by the executive branch. No one in Congress called attention to bin Laden’s refusal of responsibility for the greatest humiliation ever inflicted on a superpower.

To check my memory of the lack of coverage, I Googled “Osama bin Laden’s interview denying responsibility for 9-11.” Some Internet sites reproduced the interview, but the only mainstream news source that I found was a one-minute YouTube video from CNN in which the anchor, after quoting an al Jazeera report of bin Laden’s denial, concludes that “we can all weigh that in the scale of credibility and come to our own conclusions.” In other words, bin Laden had already been demonized, and his denial was not credible.

The sensational news was unfit for U.S. citizens and was withheld from them by the U.S.’ “free press,”* a press free to lie for the government but not to tell the truth.

Obviously, if bin Laden had outwitted not only the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but also all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, all intelligence agencies of Washington’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) puppet states, Israel’s Mossad, and in addition the National Security Council, NORAD, U.S. air traffic control and airport security four times on the same morning, it would be the greatest feat in world history, a movement-building feat that would have made al Qaeda the most successful anti-imperialist organization in human history, an extraordinary victory over “the great Satan” that would have brought millions of new recruits into al Qaeda’s ranks. Yet the alleged “mastermind” denied all responsibility.

I remember decades ago when a terrorist attack occurred in Europe, whether real or a false-flag attack, innumerable organizations would claim credit. Perhaps this was the CIA’s way of diverting attention from itself, but it illustrates that every intelligence service understands the value to an organization of claiming credit for a successful attack. Although bin Laden denied responsibility, in 2011 some al Qaeda leaders, realizing the prestige value of the 9-11 attack, claimed credit for the attack and criticized Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for questioning the official U.S. story.

Although only a few Americans are aware of the September 28, 2001 interview in which bin Laden states his non-involvement with the 9-11 attacks, many Americans have seen post-2001 videos in which a person alleged to be bin Laden takes credit for the attacks. There are two problems with these videos. Experts have examined them and found them to be fakes, and all of the videos appeared after bin Laden was reported by the Pakistan Observer, the Egyptian press and Fox News to have died in mid-December 2001 from lung disease.

Bin Laden also suffered from kidney disease. According to a CBS news report on January 28, 2002, bin Laden was hospitalized for dialysis treatment in the Pakistani military hospital in Rawalpindi on September 10, 2001, the day before 9-11.

Obviously, a man suffering from terminal lung and kidney disease did not survive for another decade to be murdered by a U.S. Navy SEAL team in Abbottabad. A Pakistani TV interview with the neighbor of the alleged “bin Laden compound” exposed the assassination hoax. This sensational interview also went unreported by the U.S. “free press.”

Shortly after the alleged assassination, 30 members of the SEAL unit died in a mysterious helicopter crash in Afghanistan, and now we learn that not a single one of the thousands of sailors on the aircraft carrier, the USS Carl Vinson, witnessed bin Laden’s alleged burial at sea from that ship. The press reports with a straight face that for unexplained reasons it was kept secret from the ship’s sailors. This is supposed to be the explanation of the sailors’ emails reporting to family and friends that they witnessed no burial at sea. Some speculate that the SEALs were bumped off before their questions to one another, “Were you on that raid?” reached outside the unit.

Apparently, it doesn’t strike the media or most of the public as strange that the U.S. government captured and killed the terror mastermind without interrogating him and without keeping any evidence or presenting any witnesses to support the assassination claim.

Paul Craig Roberts is a former assistant undersecretary of the U.S. Treasury and former associate editor of The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of many books including The Tyranny of Good Intentions, Alienation and the Soviet Economy, How the Economy Was Lost and others.