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05/28/2004:

"Poking Holes in the Official Story of 9/11"

Published on Friday, May 28, 2004 by the Toronto Star
by Antonia Zerbisias

Citizens can choose to buy the official line on the events of Sept. 11, 2001 — or they can ask questions about holes in that story as big as the crater at Ground Zero.

This week, at the unlikeliest of locations, the Ukrainian Cultural Center in west-end Toronto, the International Citizens' Inquiry into 9/11 picks up where it left off in San Francisco in March.

Here, international authors, filmmakers, academics, military and intelligence experts as well as, yes, probably the occasional conspiracy theorist, are mixing it up with ordinary people who can't accept that all the systems simply failed on one terrible and tragic morning.

They're gathering to focus attention on why, still, nearly three years after two planes tore through the World Trade Center, one crashed into the Pentagon and a fourth into a Pennsylvania field, the White House still hasn't produced a plausible explanation for why so much went so wrong all at once.

"To ask questions and to ask them fearlessly," says Citizens' Inquiry director Barrie Zwicker. "This is the heart of this."

Indeed, a majority of Canadians doubt the line out of Washington. A poll conducted for the non-profit inquiry (http://www.911inquiry.org) this month shows that 63 per cent of us believe the U.S. government had "prior knowledge of the plans for the events of September 11th, and failed to take appropriate action to stop them."

Perhaps that's a testament to our media, which were not at Ground Zero, not personally affected by events and not waving the flag.

Whatever the explanation, Zwicker, a media critic for more than 30 years, says the U.S. press abdicated its responsibility to probe what happened and has been "complicit" in advancing the official explanation.

"If the corporate media had looked at this from the beginning, we would be living in a different world now," he insists. "(U.S. President) George W. Bush would have been impeached by now."
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