U.S. Anti-War Movement writer Don Paul is the author of an anti-war book,
9/11: Facing Our Fascist State. Paul's 9/11 book hasn't been reviewed much
by the U.S. academics that generally review books on recent historical
events for the U.S. media. Yet Paul's 9/11 book provides anti-war readers
with an alternative to the U.S. military-industrial-media-university-foundation
complex's official version of what happened in Downtown Manhattan on September 11, 2001.

Besides being the author of the anti-war book 9/11, Paul also holds the New
York Road Runners Club record for both running 50 kilometers and 50 miles in
its Central Park events. In 1980 the 9/11 author finished the 50-mile run
event in 5:09:58; and, in 1982, Paul finished the 50-kilometer run in
2:50:55. In 1971 he was the youngest winner of a Stegner Fellowship in
Creative Writing at Stanford, after Ken Kesey and Tillie Olsen and before
Ray Carver, and in the 1990s he produced albums by the jazz artists Glenn
Spearman, Lisle Ellis, India and Paul Plimley.'

Anti-War Movement writer Paul lives in California's Bay Area and was
recently interviewed via e-mail--bob f. (Bob Feldman)

September 11, 2003 will mark the second anniversary of the collapse of the
World Trade Center buildings that killed thousands of New Yorkers. Like MIT
Professor Noam Chomsky, you've written a book about what happened on 9/11.
Would the New Yorkers who read MIT Professor Chomsky's book on 9/11 learn
anything new about why 9/11 happened, by reading your book?

Don Paul: My views as to the why of the 9/11 attacks differ radically from
Noam Chomsky's. His view accords with the U.S. Government's line that "Arab
terrorists" (i.e., al-Qaeda) committed those attacks. Chomsky's explanation
as to why differs from George W. Bush's only in that he attributes the
reason for the attacks to "blowback" from nefarious U.S. Government
operations and policies in the Middle East and Afghanistan over the past
several decades, while our current selected President attributes the attacks
to envy at freedom and prosperity in the U.S. by fanatical followers of a
fundamentalist kind of Islam.

Chomsky also limits his explanation to the confines of what's widely known
as "structural analysis." That is, he and his followers reject the
importance of individual perpetrators of crimes such as the 9/11 attacks and
the ensuing invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq--just as they reject the
importance of which Government politician ordered which crime in the more
distant past--such as Suharto "in" East Timor, Kissinger and Nixon "in"
Cambodia, Brzezinski "in" Afghanistan, Reagan and George H.W. Bush "in"
Afghanistan, Nicaragua, El Salvador, et cetera. They say that structural
realities, structural inequities, are really determinative, not the villains
who come and go as heads of State.

So far as such analysis goes, I agree with it. The U.S. Presidency has
passed from a Bush to a Clinton and back to a Bush with very little variance
in the direction that material realities and an elite's drive for profits
and power have compelled "U.S. foreign policy." Oil remains the U.S. elite's
prime concern and opium from Afghanistan remains a main mover in the world's
illegal and legal economies, just as both commodities were 15 years ago.

The failing of analysis such as Chomsky's, I think, is that it stays short
of identifying and examining the structures that are really most powerful
and determinative in the world. And so it stays short of naming those
structures' most consequential criminals. So it doesn't name, of course, the
institutions and Foundations that fund and promote the limits of "structural
analysis:; I mean institutions funded by Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Pews, et
cetera. George Soros and his Open Society Institutes and Human Rights Watch,
particularly, maintains illusions of democracy and investigation that
misleads millions of people.

I think these structures and forces and their operators are far above
elected Governments. They far outstrip Governments in their reach and power.
At the heart of their structure and operation is, I think, the international
financial system--a cruel, abstract system that depends upon more and more
exploitation of people and resources--a profoundly irrational system whose
failings can only be disguised and whose operations that can only be
sustained by the kind of "endless war" and Patriot Acts brought to the U.S.
public after September 11, 2001.

In my view, a secret team within the U.S. Government primarily carried out
the 9/11 attacks. The attacks could not have happened without the
participation of such a team. In particular this team was responsible for
the unprecedented failure to intercept hijacked airliners on the 9/11
morning--one hour and 28 minutes elapsed between 8:15 EDT, the time of the
first off-course deviation by American Airlines Flight 11, the airliner that
hit World Trade Center Building 1, the North Tower, at 8:48--and the crash
into the Pentagon at 9:43.

Noam Chomsky disdains to consider such a conspiracy ("I think such
speculations lead us away from issues of prime significance, not towards
them...Personally, I don't think it's worth the effort."). But I find such a
conspiracy from the inside of the U.S. Government far more likely than the
absurd cartoon which is the official story--made up of physical
impossibilities, incapable pilots, hard-drinking Muslims, indestructible
passports, et cetera--a cartoon that both Corporate and supposedly "Left"
media continue to parrot and thereby promote.

Why were the attacks carried out? Why was such mass murder and horror and
suffering visited on New York City in particular? The superelites'
exploitative, irrational economy needed a pretext to avoid the consequences
of its failings--over 1.1 million jobs had been lost in the U.S. between
January and August 2001--and needed a pretext to grab control of oil and gas
reserves from Central Asia and to regain control of the opium potential in
Afghanistan--the Taliban had cut the opium crop there from 4600 metric tons
to 173 over the year before 9/11/01, removing $150-200 billion from the
world's illegal economy in one year and an amount 20 times greater than
$150-200 billion from Banks and Stock Markets and other legal institutions
through laundering of profits from the narcotic. Economic vulnerability and
the grab for reserves of oil and gas are also leading the U.S. to invasion
and occupation of the Middle East--Iraq first--mass murder on top of mass
murder--and all these invasions are based on the cartoon-like lies about
9/11 that Corporate and "Left" media refuse to examine and expose.

What actually caused the collapse of the Twin Towers in Manhattan on
September 11, 2001?

DON PAUL: To tell the truth, I'm not sure. My book states: "Neither jet
fuel's fire nor anything else that was in the Towers that morning burns hot
enough (1022 degrees Fahrenheit)...to deform steel." And that: "to not
topple sideways, but to instead fall straight-down within their foundations,
the 110-story Towers had to be imploded by explosives set off against their
load-bearing columns and beams."

I remain sure of those statements. I'm also sure that the Twin Tower's
central columns must have been severed at their bases, 7 stories
underground, by explosives comparable to nuclear devices. The largest
seismic spikes that Columbia University's Laboratory record on the 9/11/01
morning, 2.3 and 2.1 on the Richter scale, came within the first five
seconds of each Tower's fall, not at the moment of the collapses' impact
with ground. Also, temperatures 7 stories underground of the Towers' sites
remained above 2000 degrees F. three weeks after 9/11/01, suggesting that
something very hot and independent of the need for oxygen must have
continued to burn there. Recent analyses on the internet, however, suppose
that the volume of dust in the Towers' in-air collapse--3 to 5 times each
Tower's diameter--points to other, explosive causes in the Towers' collapse.

I can say for sure, too, that the U.S. Government's explanations for the
collapse of both the Towers' and WTC Building 7 are grossly inadequate. In
May of 2002 the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) issued its "World
Trade Center Building Performance Study." FEMA's group of professorial
experts had a budget of only $600,000 to investigate the collapses that
killed almost 3000--compared with the $40 million that was spent for
investigation of Bill Clinton's activities with Monica Lewinsky in 1998-99.
FEMA's Study states: "With the information and time available, the sequence
of events leading to the collapse of each tower could not be definitively
determined."

FEMA's Study is even more waffling in regard to WTC Building 7, the 47-story
Building 7 that fell straight-down in classic controlled-demolition fashion
at 5:25 on 9/11 afternoon. FEMA's Study states: "The specifics of the fires
in WTC 7 and how they caused the building to collapse remain unknown at this
time."

WTC 7 and the Twin Towers were owned and heavily insured by Silverstein
Properties.

What actually caused the initial fires at the World Trade Center buildings
to start on September 11, 2001?

DON PAUL: So far as I know, collisions by airliners started the first fires
in the Twin Towers on 9/11. Regarding WTC-7, the origin of its intern fires
appears more mysterious.

FEMA's Study says that fires burned in WTC 7 for 7 hours before its
collapse. That puts their start in the same hour as the North Tower, WTC 1,
which fell at 10:29.

There's no evidence I know, however, that debris from 1 ignited anything
inside 7. Video and photographs show that 7 remains wholly upright and
scarcely marred at mid-afternoon of 9/11, only small fires visible on the
7th and 12th floors. Its upper floors begin to fall straight-down from its
base at 5:25.

Before 9/11, no buildings of structural steel had ever collapsed due to
fire. In February of 1991 a fire burned for 19 hours in the 38-story
building at One Meridian Plaza in Philadelphia, spreading to 8 floors and
causing the death of three firefighters. But this building stood.

WTC 7 contained offices of the FBI and CIA and then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's
Command Center. Many people speculate that WTC 7 served as the base for
executing operations that took down the Twin Towers. It offers a wide, open
view to both Buildings 1 and 2. Evidence of the operations would be largely
destroyed with Building 7's demolition.

We're not likely to know for sure what happened to the three collapsed WTC
Buildings and their thousands of victims, however, till courageous witnesses
offer testimony. Evidence from the Buildings' sites--where more people lost
their lives than at Pearl Harbor--was removed and destroyed with
unprecedented speed.in the weeks after 9/11.

The company responsible for this removal, Controlled Demolition of Maryland,
also took care of the wreckage left after bombing of the Murrah Building in
Oklahoma City killed 168 people (none of them the personnel of the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms who were the attack's supposed target) on
April 19, 1995, prompting passage of the federal Anti-Terrorism Act.

Was there any connection between what happened at the World Trace Center on
9/11/01 and a previous 1990s alleged "terrorist" attempt to destroy the
World Trade Center?

DON PAUL: Again, you'll have to draw your own conclusions.

For one fact, bolstering supposition that a secret team within the U.S.
Government primarily carried out the 9/11 attacks, the FBI is directly
connected to the bombing of the World Trade Center Twin Towers on February
26, 1993, a blast that killed 6 people and injured more than 1000. Israel's
counterpart to the CIA, the Mossad, is also connected to this bombing.

The FBI is on record that an Egyptian, Emid Ali Salem, was its informant
within this admitted conspiracy. According to a New York Times piece of
October 28, 1993, Emid Ali Salem secretly recorded talks between himself and
his FBI supervisor, John Anticev. Salem's tapes reveal that the FBI's
Anticev stopped a plan to substitute harmless powder for the nitrate that
eventually exploded the huge bomb under the Twin Towers.

Remember that 6 people were killed and more than 1000 were injured by this
bomb. Salem's statement is that he built the bomb and received $1,000,000
from the FBI for his work. We also know that the rental agreement for the
truck that carried the 1993 WTC bomb gives the phone number and address of a
Mossad agent, Josie Hadas.

There are parallels with the official story for 9/11. The supposed
" spiritual leader" of 1993's group of "Arab Terrorists" and "Muslim
extremists," their name the Gamaa Al-Islamya, was Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman.
Sheikh Abdel-Rahman resembles both "al-Qaeda mastermind" Osama bin Laden and
9/11's supposed "terrorist ringleader" Mohamed Atta in his history.

Like Osama bin Laden, Sheikh Abdel-Rahman was a CIA asset in Afghanistan in
the 1980s. Like Mohamed Atta, Sheikh Abdel-Rahman recieved U.S. Government
assistance in entering this nation. In 1996 Sheikh Omar was sentenced to
life-imprisonment for his part in planning the first World Trade Center
attack.

Attorney Ron Kuby represented one of the 1993 defendants. In response to the
New York Times article of October 28, 1993, Ron Kuby said in the Atlantic
Monthly: "The article on the FBI being involved in the World Trade Center
bombing actually understated the evidence, believe it or not. The informer,
Emid Salem, is actually on tape saying that he built the bomb that
ultimately blew up the World Trade Center...The mastermind is the government
of the United States. It was a phony, government-engineered conspiracy to
begin with. It would never have amounted to anything had the government not
planned it."

To what degree was the U.S. Government responsible for the deaths of so many
New Yorkers on September 11, 2001?

DON PAUL: In my view, 100% responsible, whether by neglect or participation.

Do you see any similarities between what happened on September 11, 2001 in
New York City and what happened on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas?

DON PAUL: I see a skein of conspiracies that have benefited a tiny
superelite within the U.S. over at least the past 40 years--from "Dallas" to
" 9/11" and beyond. They've caused numberless atrocities--assassinations,
wars started with false pretexts, invasions, massacres, entire countries and
generations devastated by imported violence, oppression and addictions.
These conspiracies' endgame, I believe, is a "New World Order" that will rob
everyday people of their rights and powers to resist the superelites'
accelerating degradation of once natural environments. By degradation I
mean, in part, the plagues and disasters that are arising now.

The conspiracies follow a pattern. Lee Harvey Oswald called himself "a
patsy" before he was somehow shot by Mafia nightclub-owner Jack Ruby in the
basement of police headquarters.

In the assassinations of JFK, MLK and RFK a patsy was used, I believe, to
distract attention from the real killers. With Oswald, an elaborate history
was developed over years, connecting him with Communism and especially with
sympathy for the Cuban Revolution. With Atta, in particular, of those blamed
for 9/11, a similarly elaborate history is shown. But with Atta the fiction
is much cruder. Mohamed Atta goes from being an abstinent recluse in
Hamburg, averse to touching women, to a coke-snorting habitué of strip-clubs
in Florida.

The whole story of the 19 "hijackers" seems to me a crude fiction. At least
5 of the 19 who were indicted in the United States District Court for the
Eastern District of Virginia in December of 2001, these 19 named by an FBI
attachment in the case against Zacarias Moussaoui, had vigorously declared
themselves alive, after all, in Saudi Arabia or Morocco, in the few weeks
immediately following 9/11.

The killing of JFK and the attacks on 9/11 both served objectives that the
superelites deemed urgent. JFK was threatening to pull troops out of Vietnam
and to dismantle the Federal Reserve Bank and to further arms-reduction
treaties with the Soviet Union. He'd already yanked former Wall Street
attorney Allen Dulles as Director of the CIA. He threatened financial and
militarist superlites' profits and plans. So they took him out.

9/11 is more complicated. 9/11 was planned for many years, as pages in
Brzezinski's 1997 The Grand Chessboard and the 2000 Project for a New
American Century study (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and
Zalmay Khalizad among its authors) suggest when they imagine that "a new
Pearl Harbor" might be necessary to arouse public support for more military
spending and U.S. wars in Central Asia and the Middle East.

The colossal, crude crime of 9/11 is also a far more desperate move than the
murder of JFK. By August of 2001 the U.S. economy was foundering even for
superelites. 9/11 and its subsequent transfusions of Federal capital gave
several months of respite. By July of 2002, however, material
vulnerabilities threatened to sink even the biggest capitalists. Through
their holdings in "derivatives", the JP Morgan Chase Bank, Citigroup, and
the Bank of America are at risk for a combined amount of over $40
trillion--an amount of liability many, many times greater than their
combined amount of assets. On July 23, 2002--on a single day of trading--JP
Morgan Chase lost 18.1% of its total value. July of 2002 was also when
Government and media drums began to beat for U.S. military action in Iraq
and Saudi Arabia.

What I see more comprehensively is a skein of conspiracies and pretexts by
which the U.S. superelites have ruthlessly killed people and launched wars
and grabbed territories and multiplied their profits since the late 19th
century. The sinking of the Maine, the sinking of the Lusitania, the attack
on Pearl Harbor, the fraudulent "Gulf of Tonkin incident" are a few of the
conspiracies and pretexts we know. Why Noam Chomsky and other ostensibly
moral critics don't call out these conspiracies is a question they'll have
to answer. It may be that examination of these conspiracies would reveal the
real structures and criminals behind them.

All that said, let me end with hope. Only one force on Earth can directly
confront and defeat the U.S. Corporate State and its criminal Government.
That force is us, the overwhelming majority of the people in this country.
Despite the horrors of 9/11, the overwhelming majority in New York City are
with that same majority around the world, I think, in opposing any American
Empire.

Have the mainstream or alternative radio show producers in New York City
been eager to invite you onto their shows to discuss before a New York City
audience the issues you raise in your book on the 9/11 events?

DON PAUL: I've gotten no contact from either mainstream or alternative radio
producers in New York City about the book. Although it lacks a distributor
and exposure of it has not been widespread, it has been up on the
www.onlinejournal.com and www.questionsquestions.net sites and orders for it
are coming from across the country and around the world. I should also add:
Neither has anyone from KPFA or any Pacifica station contacted me about the
book, though I gave it last December to Dennis Bernstein and Davey D and
others with whom I was allied in "the fight for Free Speech Radio" four
years ago. There's an interview with the warm and wonderful Sue Supriano up
at www.suesupriano.com and I understand that more stuff through other
outlets is upcoming.

How can readers in New York City go about obtaining a copy of your book?

DON PAUL: The easiest way online to access purchase of it is through the
www.onlinejournal.com site. Front cover of book can be clicked at the top of
books and tapes in the right-hand column at www.onlinejournal.com There is a
direct url to the book's page on my www.wireonfire.com/donpaul/911.html
site. But going through www.onlinejournal.com will get people to some good
pieces posted there.