Alan Hart: Israel did 9/11 and may nuke the U.S.

In an interview with an internet radio talk show called "truthjihad.com", former television journalist Alan Hart has claimed that Israel was responsible for the 9/11 attacks and that it is planning a nuclear attack on the U.S. (Read here: truthjihad.com blog: Senior BBC Mideast Correspondent: "Here's what may have REALLY happened on 9/11"!) According to the interviewer, a former university instructor in Islamic studies named Kevin Barrett, Mr. Hart

said that he has been assured by a top-level demolitions/engineering expert who wishes to remain anonymous that the three World Trade Center skyscrapers were destroyed by controlled demolitions, not plane crashes and fires.

and

During the hour-long interview, Hart discussed Israel's record of engaging in outrageous attacks on friend and foe alike, and spreading even more outrageous lies to cover them up. (Around the midpoint of the show he explained the real reason Israel attacked the U.S.S. Liberty in 1967.)

Regarding 9/11, Hart suggested that while there may have been some original terrorist plot conceived by fellow-travelers of Osama Bin Laden, the Israeli Mossad, with its near-total penetration of Middle Eastern governments and terrorist groups alike, would have quickly detected and hijacked the operation to its own ends, orchestrating a spectacularly successful attack on America designed to be blamed on its Arab and Muslim enemies. Hart added that the Mossad operation that became 9/11 would have been aided and abetted by certain corrupt American leaders.

Sounding a chilling note, Hart added that the U.S. is in grave danger of an Israeli-instigated false-flag nuclear attack, perhaps using an American nuclear weapon stolen from Minot Air Force Base during the "loose nukes" rogue operation of August, 2007. The motive would be to trigger a U.S. war with Iran, and perhaps to finish the ethnic cleansing of Palestine under cover of war--which Hart is convinced the Zionists are planning to do as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

I've had an opportunity to listen to the interview. Hart offers a novel explanation of the attack on the U.S.S. Liberty, asserting (at about 33:00 of the mp3 of the interview) that the Liberty was monitoring Israeli actions to make certain that Israel did not "take land" from Jordan and Syria. This, according to Hart, was the condition of a deal Israel had with the Johnson administration for its permission to go to war with Egypt. Hart offers no evidence to support this apparently implausible motive. The program's host asks Hart why Israel would go to the trouble of sinking the Liberty to conceal territorial gains which were readily apparent. Hart, after several digressions, asserts that he finds it "highly likely" that President Johnson would have called the Israeli leadership and instructed them to immediately retreat from territorial gains against Syria and Jordan if the Liberty had not been sunk.

Hart then calls the Liberty incident a war crime, and says (at 35:50 of the mp3):

The lesson of the cold-blooded attack on the Liberty was that there is nothing that the Zionist state might not do to its friends as well as its enemies to get its own way.

Hart concludes this pseudo-history by defining Zionism as a war by Jews against the rest of humanity. This explains, he says, the mindset behind a deliberate attack on an ally.

In response, Kevin Barrett, the program's host, states (at 40:45 of the mp3):

This actually lends some credibility to the people who argue that 9/11 -- whatever happened on 9/11 -- that it wasn't what we've been told. That whoever ordered the controlled demolition of the World Trade Center -- there are those who argue that Israel, its Mossad and its U.S. allies could have done it, and that it was essentially a Mossad operation. And there are others who say "that's ridiculous. How could a little country like Israel do something like that?" Well ... if you look at the Liberty incident ... it's not clear that there's really any limit to what the Israeli hawks think they can get away with in terms of attacking America.

Hart replies:

I'm going to break a rule now. I mean, you mentioned 9/11. Basically, in public, I don't talk about it because it makes you such a target for abuse and false charges of anti-Semitism and everything, doesn't it?

Barrett breaks in to heartily agree. Hart continues:

Hart: So basically, I've stayed away from it because it give them the focus to take the attention away from your main message. But, since you've mentioned it, I'll tell you what I honestly believe. I think it probably started out as an all Muslim operation, okay? But I think it would be very quickly penetrated by Mossad agents. I detail it in my book. From almost the moment Israel was born, it had its agents penetrating every Arab government, every Arab military organization, and every Arab terrorist group, whatever. So they certainly would have penetrated this. And at some point they said to the bad guys in the CIA, "this is running, what should we do with it?" And the neo-cons said "let's use it".

The twin towers were brought down by a controlled ground explosion, not the planes. Now I'm going to tell you in passing that one of my friends is a consultant for one of the world's leading engineering firms. I'm not going to name him. They've studied the films and they've found that there's no doubt whatsoever that the planes were brought down... sorry, that the towers were brought down by controlled ground explosion. And then we have the film of the -- what is sometimes called the five dancing Israelis. Are you aware of that Kevin?

Barrett: I certainly am. They were celebrating the attacks. They had set up to film before the attacks and they were high-fiving and flicking cigarette lighters in front of the twin towers.

Hart: That's right. But the point is that they all had mobile phones. Right?

Barrett: Right.

Hart: Now they were initially reported as being Muslims. Are you aware of that?

Barrett: Um... Middle-easterners.

Hart: (Impatiently) Alright, middle-easterners. But the impression was that they were Muslims -- they were the bad guys.

Barrett: Right.

Hart: So the FBI gave chase, and these five guys, they tried to avoid being arrested. But they were eventually caught, and they were arrested. And guess what. They were all Mossad agents.

Barrett: That was confirmed by the Forward.

Hart: That's right. It's established fact. It suggests that they knew that it was going to happen. It was possible, and this is Alan Hart speaking, that the planes were fitted with transponders, and these guys were calling in the planes to the targets. It's not impossible.

Barrett: I suppose not. These are many possibilities, but the possibility of remotely-guided planes is a good one, being that, if one had planned a very complex demolition of three skyscrapers which would have been the three largest buildings taken down in history by controlled demolition, one would have to make sure that they were hit in order to justify that.

Hart: And isn't it the case, Kevin, that quite a lot of your top pilots have said that it would have been a bloody difficult job to drive those planes into those buildings.

Barrett: Well, that's right. I've had a number of pilots who are members of Pilots for 9/11 Truth come on my show, and they said that the clocked speed of the aircraft, when it hit the South Tower, was nearly 600 miles per hour at sea level. And that's a speed that, well, some of them say that these 767 aircraft couldn't possibly reach that speed at ground level. They would be torn apart at substantially lower speeds than that by the air pressure of the much thicker air at sea level. But, in any case, that nobody in their right mind could claim that it would be possible to guide a plane at that speed at sea level and hit those targets in the way they were hit.

Hart: So the speculation is that were fitted with some kind of transponder and they were called to the target electronically is not totally irrational?

Barrett: Uh... well no it's not, and in fact, it's even somewhat questionable whether normal passenger aircraft would be able to do that consistently at that kind of speed. In any case, it seems very doubtful that pilots who couldn't even solo in a Cessna would be performing these amazing stunts to hit their targets.

Hart: Well, that and two other things Kevin. We know as a fact that at least six and maybe nine of the alleged hijackers who died are in fact alive and living in...

Barrett (interrupting): Well, that's right. And that's confirmed in Jay Kolar's article "What we now know about the 9/11 hijackers", which was published, actually, in a volume by Europe's top scholarly outfit (inaudible). It's amazing that the scholarly literature is all so one-sided. There's no scholarly counter-literature except for...

Hart (interrupting): Except for "how dare you be so anti-Semitic". That's the only counter-literature.

Barrett: Right, right. And then there's Cass Sunstein's counter-literature published in the Harvard Law Review. He's that Harvard guy who's advising Obama...

After Barrett discusses Cass Sunstein's article on how to counter conspiracy theories, Hart spends several minutes detailing how Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle were likely conspirators in planning a Pearl Harbor-like attack (i.e. 9/11) designed to involve the U.S. in a war with Iraq. After discounting the threat posed by a nuclear-armed Iran, Hart claims that

The reason why the Israelis are hyping up Iran is to take attention away from the continuing Zionist colonization and genocide in Palestine.

Barrett replies by citing anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists Gordon Duff and Alan Sabrosky to the effect that the Mossad carried out 9/11 and that many in the U.S. military establishment know this to be so. Hart responds by saying that he knows Sabrosky and respects him. Then he drops the big one, so to speak. He unleashes a conspiracy theory for the ages, claiming that Israel has been covertly supplied with a nuclear weapon by Dick Cheney, who Hart calls "Dr. Strangelove". Hart speculates that this nuke is still in the United States and the Israelis intend to detonate it here as a "false flag" operation designed to implicate Iran.

Barrett: Do you have any sources where we could follow up on this?

Hart: I would have to dig deeply into my computers to find this, but it's been very well documented.

With that dismissive statement, Hart leaves the listener to either wonder in amazement at the audacity of such an undocumented claim, or to cower in fear that his tin-foil hat will fail to protect him.

The interview can be heard via a player embedded on Hart's website here or at a website called noliesradio.org. A direct link to an mp3 of the interview is available here.

By the way, in the course of the interview, Hart makes several less sensational if equally false arguments, including claims that Israel's existence has never been threatened by its enemies ("not in 1948, not in 1967, not even in 1973") and that the 1967 war "was a war of Israeli choice and aggression". These run-of-the-mill, doctrinaire falsehoods are hardly surprising coming from a man who believes that the World Trade Center attack was accomplished by Mossad-operated remote control planes and planned demolitions and Israel will soon be nuking the U.S. to cover up a genocide in Palestine, but I thought it worth mentioning if only to show that, however extreme his current conspiracy theories may be, Hart is nothing if not a monomaniacally consistent ideologue. The facts, and even a desire to maintain a semblance of sanity, has never interfered with his spinning a good anti-Zionist yarn.

From the truthjihad website:

UPDATE #1 (May 28, 2010):

Bloggers at a truther website called 9/11blogger.com have picked up on this interview and on my reaction to it (read here).  They are for the most part supportive of Hart and Barrett, although a few raise questions as to why Hart would make such explosive charges (so to speak) without having any supportive documentation or even being better identify his sources or, for that matter, cite any evidence.  One blogger at that website points out that, as with Alan Sabrosky, it is the news that someone with the appearance of an impressive resume is making that charge that makes the charge notable.  I would point out to them that, both in the case of Hart and Sabrosky, this veneer of expertise is hardly sufficient to cover the paranoia and bigotry underlying their fraudulent conspiracy theories.  As I intend to write here within the next few days, Sabrosky has been dining out on his having worked at the Army War College in the 1980s and his allegedly having a Jewish grandparent, hardly enough to compensate for his promoting without any evidence whatsoever the charge that most of the military elite in the U.S. believe the Mossad responsible for 9/11, a charge with is patently false.  Similarly, Hart unintentionally reveals just how foolish and reckless he is by making his extreme charges without any documentation -- and even asking his interviewer if the charges seem plausible -- all the while falling back on his having been a TV reporter many moons ago in order to lend some credence to his drivel.

For the most part, however, those at 911blogger.com support Hart's charges.  They link to a conspiracy theory website called propagandamatrix.com where a blogger called Paul Joseph Watson has posted an article which swallows Hart's charges hook, line and sinker.  His headline: "Top Construction Firm: WTC Destrtoyed by Controlled Demolition".  Watson describes Hart as "Respected Middle East expert and former BBC presenter".  He goes on to write:

Given his biography and standing, Hart's comments are not to be taken lightly. Hart is a former Middle East Chief Correspondent for ITN News and has also presented for BBC Panorama specializing in the Middle East. He was also a war reporter in Vietnam and the first journalist to reach Suez Canal with the Israeli army in 1967. Over the decades, Hart has developed close relationships with numerous high profile political figures, including the Shah of Iran, Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres.  Hart has been a successful author for years and has no reason to fabricate the fact that a top construction firm told him point blank that the towers were brought down in a controlled demolition.

On of the bloggers at 911blogger points out that the cartoon posted above, which I found on Kevin Barrett's website, was authored and originally published by a Nazi website.  I haven't verified this.  Any readers with information about the source of that cartoon should feel free to comment here.


UPDATE #2 (May 28, 2010): 

Pat Buchanan's website has signed onto this conspiracy theory.  Read here.