Nothing To Hide...

"You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide." No doubt you've heard this parroted by virtually every proponent of the president's post-9/11 intrusions on civil liberties. What if this same principle is applied to the federal government?

Counterpunch.org, an admittedly liberal news website (the facts do seem to check out in this case), ran an article today questioning the disappearance of the flight recorders -- commonly called "black boxes" -- from the two airliners that crashed into the WTC towers on September 11, 2001. While the FBI alleges that none of the four devices (two flight recorders per plane) were recovered, two NYC firefighters claim to have recovered the boxes from the wreckage. In addition to this, an anonymous official at the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) claims to have been in possession of the boxes, however the board officially denies that the boxes were ever recovered.

There has always been some skepticism about this assertion [that the boxes from the WTC were not recovered], particularly as two N.Y. City firefighters, Mike Bellone and Nicholas De Masi, claimed in 2004 that they had found three of the four boxes, and that Federal agents took them and told the two men not to mention having found them. (The FBI denies the whole story.) Moreover, these devices are almost always located after crashes, even if not in useable condition (and the cleanup of the World Trade Center was meticulous, with even tiny bone fragments and bits of human tissue being discovered so that almost all the victims were ultimately identified). As Ted Lopatkiewicz, director of public affairs at the National Transportation Safety Agency which has the job of analyzing the boxes' data, says, "It's very unusual not to find a recorder after a crash, although it's also very unusual to have jets flying into buildings."
[...]
A source at the National Transportation Safety Board, the agency that has the task of deciphering the date from the black boxes retrieved from crash sites-including those that are being handled as crimes and fall under the jurisdiction of the FBI-says the boxes were in fact recovered and were analyzed by the NTSB.

"Off the record, we had the boxes," the source says. "You'd have to get the official word from the FBI as to where they are, but we worked on them here.

Why would the main intelligence and law enforcement arm of the U.S. government want to hide from the public not just the available information about the two hijacked flights that provided the motivation and justification for the nation's "War on Terror" and for its two wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, but even the fact that it has the devices which could contain that information? Conspiracy theories abound, with some claiming the planes were actually pilotless military aircraft, or that they had little or nothing to do with the building collapses. The easiest way to quash such rumors and such fevered thinking would be openness.

Instead we have the opposite: a dark secrecy that invites many questions regarding the potentially embarrassing or perhaps even sinister information that might be on those tapes.

Combined with the myriad other anomalies that occurred on 9/11 (why are there gag orders on all firefighters restricting them from talking about what happened that day? Why are 4 of the supposed suicide hijackers alive and well?), and the failure of Bush's administration (or anyone else) to explain these discrepancies, there are more than enough questions regarding what happened on 9/11 to justify a full, independent (meaning not government-run or -funded) investigation.

So far, those backing the official story have silenced questions by calling questioners "conspiracy theorists", however there will eventually have to be a full accounting for what happened on that day, and an explanation for why the truth is being hidden from the American people.