By Stefan Kløvning

Eighteen years after the most devastating attack on the Western world in peacetime in modern history, we can all see the destructive development against individual liberties that has been unfolding as a consequence: Never-ending wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and later Syria, Libya, and various other countries in the Middle East and Africa; the power of mass surveillance granted to the FBI and NSA through the Patriot Act; the acceleration of the trend towards a Police State with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and police contracts with the military; and the utter humiliation of citizens having their most basic bodily autonomy violated through patdowns by the post-9/11 created Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

Looking back on this development, I find it at the very least warranted to reconsider and reflect more deeply on the justification that started it all: the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001. As a timely contribution for such reconsideration of the event, conspiracy researcher David Icke published The Trigger: The Lie That Changed the World on its 18th anniversary, at about 875 pages in total. Many may say it’s a waste of time to read up on “conspiracy theories”, but with the numerous anomalies found in such events, which the official narrative ignores or underexaggerates, I consider it worthwhile to investigate perspectives that in fact do try to address these. After all, the term “conspiracy theory” was originally weaponized by the CIA, as outlined in Document 1035-960, to silence those questioning the official story about the assassination of John F. Kennedy by charging that

critics are (I) wedded to theories adopted before the evidence was in, (I) politically interested, (III) financially interested, (IV) hasty and inaccurate in their research, or (V) infatuated with their own theories.

The legacy of this we can clearly see today with the censorship of anyone criticizing the official story of what happened on 9/11, for instance with YouTube tweaking their search results to prevent “conspiracy theories” from showing up as recommended videos. “If you want to know who controls you,” as Voltaire said, “find out who you are not allowed to criticize.

To figure out what actually did happen on that day, we must first ascertain what didn’t happen, by subjecting the official story to proper scrutiny, and Icke uses several hundred pages in the first part of the book on exactly this. James Corbett has done a good job in summarizing the ludicrosity of the official story in a five-minute video, which I recommend checking out, and Icke elaborates in-depth on the details of these anomalies. In short, the official story wants us to believe that

• Four planes were deliberately hijacked by a total of 19 Islamic extremists with small knives and boxcutters and took easily control without much resistance except for United Airlines Flight 93, which was intended to hit the White House or the Capitol, but crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania after the passengers grouped up and fought back;


• Despite the fact that the pilots must have gone through a lot of training on what to do in potential hijack scenarios, with simple procedures to communicate such occurrences further, seemingly none of them did;


• NORAD and the Federal Aviation Association, who we’re told operate with top-quality equipment to quickly react to such occurrences, were nowhere to be seen, and, in fact, the number of practice drills had “coincidentally” been stacked up on that day so it had the lowest-ever degree of protection;


• Despite New York City being designated a no-flight zone with the procedure as planes even approaching the vicinity being shot down, the two planes which crashed in the twin towers were subjected to no such reaction;


• The day before 9/11, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld revealed that up to $2.3 trillion of Pentagon expenses couldn’t be tracked, a significant fact of how the U.S. taxpayer money was used but which were commonly forgotten after the World Trade Center attacks (not to mention that their budget significantly increased in the aftermath);


• Hani Hanjour, the hijacker pilot of Flight 77,  who supposedly crashed into the Pentagon through a maneuver that even professional pilots consider extremely difficult or impossible with a large passenger plane, was barred from even using a small and basic plane just six weeks prior to 9/11 because he was considered too incompetent;


• The hole remaining in the Pentagon after the attack had no sign of any wings having hit and damaged the building, which one would’ve expected if it actually was a plane and not some sort of missile used for the attack;


• Fifteen of the nineteen supposed hijackers (as well as Osama bin Laden who was accused of orchestrating the attack) were Saudi Arabian citizens, two were from the United Arab Emirates, one from Lebanon, and one from Egypt (while it was Iraq and Afghanistan Bush started wars against while keeping a cozy relationship with the Saudis);


• The first thought of President George W. Bush to the first attack on the North tower wasn’t devastation and haste over the largest attack on America in modern history, but that “There’s one terrible pilot,” and “It must have been a horrible accident,” and went on with his schedule for a reading program for school children as if nothing of remote significance ever happened;


• Building 7, the third building of the World Trade Center, collapsed suddenly without having been hit by a plane like the two other towers, looking exactly like a case of controlled demolition (a hypothesis denied by the official narrative);


• The vast amount of steel, concrete, and other materials left from the collapsed buildings and planes were quickly removed and kept secretive about with the justification that one likely couldn’t find any useful information from the remaining scrap;


• At the time of the attack, five Israelis were witnessed to be dancing and celebrating it, later revealed to be agents of Mossad (Israeli intelligence agency) to “document” the event (how did they know it’d happen?);


• Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the New York Times that the attacks were “very good” for the relationship between the United States and Israel, elaborating that “‘Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy” and ”strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.”

Many more anomalies could be mentioned, but these provide a general picture of just how the official narrative fails to adequately explain what happened that day, warranting us to look for alternative perspectives to address them. There are just too many coincidences and interests characterizing the event.

A quote David Icke goes back to again and again to explain the attack is by Colonel Leroy Fletcher Prouty, who long worked with the CIA and later became a whistleblower thereof, contending that

No one has to direct an assassination – it happens. The active role is played secretly by permitting it to happen. This is the greatest single cue. Who has the power to call off or reduce the usual security precautions?

Applying it to 9/11, we may ask, why didn’t the pilots, NORAD, FAA, etc. react in accordance with the procedure they’ve been trained up with to react in such circumstances, why weren’t the planes entering the no-flight zone in NYC shot down, and why did the President react with indifference when he first heard about it?

Though the usual strawman argument of 9/11 “conspiracy theories” is that “Bush did 9/11”, Icke considers Bush merely to be a patsy in this scheme (both Bush and the Democrat Presidential candidate John Kerry had been members of the secret society Skulls and Bones at Yale, so it’s by no means self-evident that things would’ve ended differently had Kerry been elected instead), with Vice President Dick Cheney (former Director of the Council on Foreign Relations and CEO for the oil company Halliburton) playing the more active role in pushing for war, etc. What Icke considers most fundamental in the conspiracy, however, is the role of the Israeli government and intelligence agencies in the attack, with the two last anomalies we looked at provided some worrying indicators of.

To prepare the reader for the final conclusions of who ultimately orchestrated the conspiracy, Icke shows why and how they could be so psychopathic as to kill thousands of people to start more wars and destruction and further tear down what little of the individual liberties had until then remained by documenting the origins and history thereof. What he calls the “Death Cult” responsible for the attack started in the 17th century (though with predecessors several hundreds of years before, i.e. Knights Templar) with the Satanists Sabbata Zevi and Jacob Frank becoming more influential and playing a role in the emergence of the Jesuit order, Freemasonry, the Illuminati, etc., plotting global domination and (according to Icke) coming quite far in this sense especially with the Rothschilds family dominating the financial market globally and the Rockefeller family similarly dominating the energy market. Icke strongly emphasizes, however, that the conspiracy he’s presenting is not one of Jews as an ethnic or religious demographic group, but that they only represent about 0.2% of the global Jewish population, with the Sabbatian-Frankists running the show and the “ultra-Zionists” (those seeking an ethnostate in Israel by any means necessary) doing their bidding.

Relating all of this up to the 9/11 incident, Icke shows how these ultra-Zionists have strong influence in American politics, being so significant that politicians seeking to enter Congress first have to pledge to vote in favor of bills in support of Israel (as revealed by former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney), as well as having a strong foothold in Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Furthermore, he claims that there are many Mossad-fronts disguising themselves as think-tanks and private businesses that in some way or another played a role in 9/11; for instance, a company with the function of regulating communications between the FAA and NORAD. As such, according to Icke, Israeli intelligence agencies (following the orders of the Sabbatian-Frankists) could impact what happened on 9/11, benefiting themselves by the following stir-up of conflicts among their geopolitical enemies, justifying brutality against Palestinian citizens, and tightening control of the people in the United States and more generally across the world, by causing the deaths of thousands of people without remorse.

Is this really what happened, and is there really such a far-reaching conspiracy controlling the world? Whether one finds this convincing or not depends a lot on to which extent one trusts the people in power to act in accordance with the well-being of the citizens or not, and what one has previously heard and read that seems to indicate such a top-down structure being in place or not. It’s very dependent on what information and convictions one has from before to judge this kind of “conspiracy theories” based upon, and the enormous amount of information used as a basis to indicate that there’s more going on definitely isn’t always easy to decipher. As I wrote in my book review of Icke’s previous book Everything You Need to Know But Have Never Been Told,

As an epistemological principle, I consider it more beneficial to look at truth as probabilistic than binary, as humans don’t have a direct connection with the objective world but have to discover it by using an imperfect mind looking at incomplete and possibly skewed information. In some cases, where all the scientific research and observation appears to support a position, it can seem “obvious” that something is true, i.e. that it has a very high probability – approaching 100% – of being so. In other cases, however, the evidence may be less clear, and what has been previously considered obvious in past eras may sound nonsensical to most of us today.