Another lawsuit has been filed against top officials in the Bush administration, accusing them of complicity in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
William Rodriguez, a former maintenance worker at the World Trade Center, has filed suit in a Philadelphia federal court naming George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and others as being complicit in the 9-11 attacks. Rodriguez claims that top officials either planned the attacks or had foreknowledge of the attacks and permitted them to succeed for the purpose of exploiting a “New Pearl Harbor” in order to launch wars against Afghanistan and Iraq.
The lawsuit—Rodriguez v. Bush, et al., Civil Action No. 04 CV 4952—was filed in the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia on Oct. 22.
The phrase “new Pearl Harbor” comes from a declaration of principles by the neo-conservative Project for the New American Century. In it, the neo-cons proposed that an event is needed to propel American public opinion toward supporting the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and U.S. military domination of the Middle East.
“The official story of what actually took place on 9-11 is a lie,” Philip Berg, Rodriguez’s attorney, told Margaret Atheling Rowe of yuba.net, an Internet news site. “We do not pretend to have put together a full and definitive account of how, and by whom, the attacks were carried out. But information reported in the mainstream media, and viewed in the light of common sense and the laws of physics, demonstrates that the official story, examined closely, is not credible.
Berg is also the attorney for Ellen Mariani, the wife of Louis Neil Mariani, who died when United Air Lines flight 175 was flown into the South Tower of the World Trade Center on 9-11.
The official story contains an alarming number of inconsistencies and implausibilities, said Berg.
On Sept. 11, 2001, Rodriguez, a Puerto Rican-born maintenance worker at the World Trade Center in Manhattan, rescued 15 people.
Rodriguez, who had the master key to the North Tower staircases, unlocked doors and led firefighters up the stairwell, aiding in the evacuation of hundreds of additional people who might have otherwise perished.
Rodriguez re-entered the building three times after the first plane struck, and was the last person to exit the North Tower alive except for those few survivors later pulled from the rubble. He survived the collapse of the North Tower by diving beneath a fire truck to avoid the avalanche of concrete and steel. After on-site treatment for his injuries, Rodriguez plunged right back into the rescue efforts. The next morning, Rodriguez returned to the site to continue to aid in rescue efforts.
Later, Rodriguez became an unofficial spokesman for survivors and helped in the creation of the World Trade Center Memorial Fund.
Berg, a former deputy attorney general in Pennsylvania, maintains that many prominent figures in politics, the military and the mass media consider the official story of 9-11 to be untrue.
But while the truth is emerging bit by bit, thanks to anonymous whistleblowers and independent researchers, “to date no one with the stake in being a senator, a presidential candidate, or a media celebrity has found the courage to risk being ridiculed as a ‘tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist.’ ”
Berg points out that the only senator who has dared to publicly question even parts of the official story, Sen. Mark Dayton (D-Minn.), has received threats ominous enough to compel him to shut down his Washington office until after the coming election.
In his interview with yuba.net, Berg continues:
Some facts cannot be denied. Clearly, 9-11 was carried out by more than one person. Therefore, by definition, there was a conspiracy. What we’re arguing is that the true conspirators have abused their enormous power and the trust of the American people to concoct and to sell to the world a false conspiracy theory, to justify war and mass murder for economic and political gain.
Since the neo-cons, allied with the president, said in almost so many words that they wished for a new Pearl Harbor, why dismiss out of hand an allegation that they used their undeniably sufficient power to actually bring it about? Why has there been no full and transparent investigation? Isn’t it shocking that the federal government grabbed up all of the physical evidence, and that no police authority has conducted a true criminal investigation into 3,000 homicides?
Instead of due process of law, government officials and the mass media convicted Osama bin Laden, and had names and photos of his 19 accomplices on the Internet, literally within hours of the attacks.
Asked why he decided to bring this controversial lawsuit, Rodriguez said that having survived the World Trade Center disaster when so many did not, he feels he must learn the truth of what happened on that day.
“If what the government has told us about 9-11 is a lie,” said Rodriguez, “somebody has to take action to reveal the truth. If suing President Bush is what I have to do to accomplish that, so be it.”
