Opinion: The Scandal of 9/11 and How America Betrayed the Victims and Their Families.

Even at a time when news is flashed around the world in moments, few events stop us in our tracks. If people remember where they were when Princess Diana died, then 9/11 has engraved itself into the consciousness of a generation so indelibly that the simple date is enough to elicit the same deep sense of shock and outrage we felt so strongly nearly a quarter of a century ago.

We remember the burning World Trade Center towers; bodies falling like rag dolls from the sky, the immense buildings, those monuments to America’s pride, collapsing into rubble.

We saw what happened on September 11, 2001. Some were there and lived to tell the tale. We all watched it on television.

Four hijacked passenger aircraft fell from the sky in New York, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing 2,977 people in a nightmare plot conceived and carried out by Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda followers.

But not everything was as it seemed. Incredibly, on the 24th anniversary, disturbing, fundamental questions remain over what exactly happened that fateful day.

Like many people, I have visited One World Trade Center, the $25 billion complex that sits uncomfortably at the site of the Twin Towers in downtown Manhattan as a cross between a bustling tourist destination and a solemn memorial.

What’s remaining of the rubble is scrubbed and on display in a museum filled with photographs that reflect the fading snapshots in our minds. We can read how history remembers that terrible morning, but if you were to ask the survivors, or, indeed, the families of the nearly 3,000 people who died, if they know what led to the attacks, I can guarantee you that most of them would not be able to tell you the full story.

The U.S. government will certainly not tell you. This explains why so many conspiracy theories have sprung up attempting to explain the events leading up to 9/11. There are rabbit holes here that are certain to infuriate most right-minded people, let alone those who lost their loved ones.

When a president of the United States publicly doubts the election results of the world’s defining democracy, and people can seriously question whether an atrocity on the scale of the Sandy Hook school shootings that left 20 children dead even happened at all, then it is little wonder that people bristle at the term conspiracy theory.

There are certainly people who promote preposterous ideas for their own nefarious or deluded ends about everything from the Holocaust to the moon landings.

But history is also littered with brave souls who dared to stand up and speak out, sometimes at great danger to themselves. Indeed, what do you call a conspiracy theory that proves to be correct? I guess you’d call that the truth.

Conspiracy theorists may argue over what happened, but there is no questioning that we have been misled over why it happened.

It is both astonishing and shameful that so many of those who lost so much on 9/11 are still trying to discover the full facts about that fateful day, and it is disgraceful that the people in power we trust to protect and to lead us still obfuscate the truth.

The 9/11 families have long complained that nobody has connected the dots for them to satisfactorily explain the lead-up to the attacks on New York and Washington. It partly explains why so many of them—more than 6,000 family members of those who were killed and survivors of the attacks—are still involved in two lawsuits, the biggest in US history, seeking to prove Saudi Arabia’s complicity in the plot.

This is no conspiracy theory; it’s a serious legal complaint that has already changed the law in America, making it possible to sue a foreign power through the US courts.

It’s easy to forget, too, that fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.

What is certain is that Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, two of the Saudi-born terrorists who hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon, arrived in California 18 months before the attacks, and the CIA was aware of their presence. However, they did not inform the FBI, the agency responsible for domestic operations in the U.S.

Former FBI Special Agent Mark Rossini, who was working as a liaison between the CIA and FBI at the time, told me that he and a colleague were instructed not to pass that information to their superiors. He is convinced the reason was that the spy agency wanted to let the terrorists run in the hope that—with the cooperation of the Saudis—they could land some bigger fish, perhaps even bin Laden himself. If that was, indeed, the plan, then it went disastrously awry.

Rossini is not alone in the intelligence community in believing the U.S. authorities have gone to great lengths to cover up this horrendously botched operation.

Similarly, many members of families who lost loved ones believe the 9/11 Commission, formed by President George W. Bush to get to the bottom of the atrocity, was a complete whitewash.

“It’s unconscionable. I think what’s really bad is that twenty years out, we’re still trying to get documents and evidence,” said Kristen Breitweiser, one of the renowned “Jersey Widows” who lost her husband, Ronald, in the Twin Towers and has spent nearly two-and-a-half decades fighting to find out what happened.

“Literally, the United States Department of Justice sits on the side of the Saudis in the courtroom and blocks evidence,” she added. “My husband was killed and nearly 3,000 others were murdered in broad daylight and the government itself did not prosecute one person.

“In some ways, the 9/11 Commission was our baby,” she told me. “So, what do you do when your baby grows up to be a serial killer?”

Some of the so-called conspiracy theories stemming from 9/11 are not just the lunatic ramblings of the fantasist fringe; some are serious issues raised by serious people.

The idea that the Twin Towers were felled not by the fires from the planes but by controlled demolitions from explosives planted in advance may sound far-fetched, but a group comprising literally thousands of architects and engineers points to detailed scientific evidence supporting just that.

They ask, with some justification, how two rogue aircraft could bring down the Twin Towers AND World Trade Center Building 7, which also crashed to the ground even though it was 370 feet away and wasn’t even hit?

The group, Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, has commissioned its own studies that suggest it was impossible that the Twin Towers and Building 7 could have fallen into themselves through heat alone, as the official narrative suggests. Many have put their professional reputations on the line to insist that saboteurs planted bombs to ignite simultaneously with the air attacks. They are less persuasive in explaining why such a thing may have happened, but the questions remain.

Similarly, it really doesn’t make sense that the American military, the most powerful and advanced in the world, didn’t manage to get a jet fighter within miles of the doomed airliners in the one hour and seventeen minutes from when American Airlines Flight 11 first hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center through the subsequent hits on the South Tower and the Pentagon in Washington D.C. to United Airlines Flight 93’s crash landing in the fields of Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Some would argue that the U.S. government had a sinister motive for allowing the planes to carry on their disastrous course, allowing the attack to happen to help trigger war in the oil-rich Middle East. To me, that stretches belief too far. A simpler and more realistic reason is that the guardians of America’s skies were ill-prepared for such an audacious attack and were caught by surprise in the chaos of the moment.

Beneath the 1,776-foot-tall Freedom Tower and behind the walls of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, a world away from the noisy hustle and bustle of tourists and workers outside on the streets of New York, is the silent resting place of the 9/11 dead.

Astonishingly, the remains of 1,113 people are still unidentified. Just 293 bodies were recovered intact, a tragic mercy to those families able to give them a conventional funeral.

The great majority of the victims were obliterated by the plane crashes, the fires, or the collapses of the towers—21,905 pieces were eventually collected from the ruins, many of them as small as a nail or an inch of skin. Of those pieces, 7,204 have not been tied to a victim.

The unidentified remains are held in a private, climate-controlled underground repository behind the museum, awaiting the DNA technology that may one day pair them to the names of the dead.

It is a long and painstaking job. But what this repository of heartache does illustrate is the agony that continues to this day for the 9/11 families. For so many of them, it has meant that a funeral left an emptiness that cannot be filled. They will never know the end of the story.

We are too used to Hollywood endings where the hero overcomes all odds to save the world, just in time. The reality is way messier. The line dividing right and wrong is often so thin as to be invisible, and the truth is often simply the most convenient lie.

The deaths of nearly 3,000 people shocked the world and dominated the headlines for a while, and then the world moved on, leaving the families who lost everything to pick up the pieces themselves.

An independent inquiry, backed by the full force of U.S. law, is the only way to right this wrong. The investigators must have full access to every official document connected to the 9/11 attacks and the legal weight to demand what is not volunteered. Every document, every page, should be unclassified.

So much emphasis has been placed on the government’s transparency over the Jeffrey Epstein case. What about the deaths of 2,977 in the worst terrorist attack the world has ever known? Shouldn’t we have transparency there?

Trump once promised the 9/11 families he would help them, but he did nothing. Now is his chance to keep that pledge.

Enough time has passed; the sell-by date on secrecy has long run out. The inquiry should not be answerable to Trump, to Congress, or any political party. It should be answerable to the public.

Only then can the innocent victims of the attacks finally rest in peace …

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