Media Mogul’s Sinister Links to
September 11
The Aussie Connection
Exclusive
to American Free Press
By
Christopher Bollyn
With close connections to the key
individuals who had control of the twin towers shortly before they were destroyed,
the obvious question is: Did Rupert Murdoch have prior knowledge of the
impending Sept. 11, 2001, attacks?
Rupert Murdoch
sits at the helm of News Corp. and is described as television’s “most powerful
man in the world with the capacity to reach more than 110 million viewers
across four continents.” Murdoch’s network owns more than 175 newspapers,
journals and magazines on three continents, publishes 40 million papers a week
and dominates the newspaper markets in Britain, Australia and New Zealand. In
the United States, Murdoch owns, among other things, The New York
Post and the Fox News network.
An old, close friend of Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon, Murdoch openly supports the extremist Likud Party of Israel and
the Anglo-American “war on terrorism.”
What is less well known, however, is Murdoch’s
involvement in the production of a television program in 2000, which
foreshadowed the attacks on the twin towers, and his personal connections to
the key individuals who came into possession of the World Trade Center shortly
before its destruction.
Having produced a film about a 9-11-like attack on
the World Trade Center and being closely connected to the individuals who
leased and insured the WTC against precisely such an attack is indicative of
some prior knowledge.
Calls to Murdoch’s office by American Free
Press to ask what he may have known about the possibility of such an attack
were not returned.
‘THE LONE GUNMEN’
On March 4, 2001, Fox TV, a branch of Murdoch’s
media empire, broadcast the pilot episode of a program called “The Lone
Gunmen.” A spin-off of the popular “X-Files,” Murdoch-owned companies produced
the pilot episode in Vancouver, Canada, and New York from March 20 to April 7,
2000.
The pilot episode depicted a passenger aircraft
being hijacked by a hostile computer hacker and flown directly into one of the
towers of the World Trade Center.
The climactic sequence actually shows the plane
heading for one of the twin towers; but, at the very last moment, the pilots
are able to regain control of the plane and avoid the building by inches.
After 9-11, however, rather than being discussed
as a prescient warning of the possibility of such an attack, the pilot episode
of “The Lone Gunmen” series was quietly forgotten.
Although an estimated 13.2 million viewers watched
the pilot episode, very few recalled the program when life imitated art six
months later on 9-11.
“I woke up on Sept. 11 and saw [the actual attack]
on TV, and the first thing I thought of was ‘The Lone Gunmen’,” Frank Spotnitz,
one of the program’s four executive producers, said. “But then in the weeks and
months that followed, almost no one noticed the connection.”
Spotnitz, John Shiban, Vince Gilligan and Chris
Carter are all listed as executive producers of the program.
“What’s disturbing about it to me is, you think as
a fiction writer that if you can imagine this scenario, then the people in
power in the government who are there to imagine disaster scenarios can imagine
it, too,” Spotnitz said.
Robert McLachlan, director of photography,
received an award from the Canadian Society of Cinematographers on March 31,
2001, for his work on the pilot episode.
“It was odd that nobody referenced it,” McLachlan
told American Free Press about the uncanny similarity between the television
program he filmed and the reality of 9-11. “You’re the first person who
mentioned it,” he claimed. “In the ensuing press nobody mentioned that [9-11]
echoed something that had been seen before.”
AFP asked McLachlan about the creative talent
behind the pilot program. “John Shiban was primarily the creator,” McLachlan
said, adding, “Chris Carter was not there.” Carter is well known for his
production of the “X-Files.”
“It’s their baby,” Carter said about “The Lone
Gunmen.” Carter reportedly had “a minor part” in the production. Carter and
Shiban could not be reached for comment.
CONNECTIONS
Murdoch’s sympathies for Zionism and Israel are
well known and a matter of record. As New York Gov. George Pataki said, “There
is no newspaper in the United States more supportive of Israel than the
[Murdoch’s] New York Post.”
It is through his involvement in Zionist
organizations that Murdoch is seen to be connected to the key individuals who
arranged the privatization of the World Trade Center shortly before its destruction.
These key individuals include Larry Silverstein and Frank Lowy, the lease
holders of the WTC property, and Port Authority Chairman Lewis M. Eisenberg,
who supervised the transfer of the leases.
Shortly before 9-11, Silverstein Properties and Lowy’s
Westfield America obtained 99-year leases on the WTC. Silverstein Properties
controlled the 10.6 million-square-foot complex, which included the twin towers
office buildings and two nine-story office buildings. Lowy leased the shopping
concourse called the Mall at the World Trade Center,
“Six weeks before the WTC towers were destroyed,
the Port Authority completed the process of leasing them for 99 years to Larry
Silverstein, the developer who had built the World Trade Center. Simultaneously,
the retail space underneath the complex was leased to Westfield America, the
U.S. division of an Australian company that is one of the world’s largest
operators of shopping malls.” Paul Goldberger wrote in New Yorker, May
20, 2002.
“Silverstein and Westfield were given the right to
rebuild the structures if they were destroyed, and Westfield has the right to
expand the retail space by 30 percent,” Goldberger wrote.
Silverstein is suing to obtain $7.2 billion in
insurance money for the destroyed World Trade Center, property he had leased
with a reported $100 million down payment of borrowed funds.
Murdoch has been honored by, and belongs to
Zionist organizations in which Silverstein, Lowy and Eisenberg hold senior
positions, or which they fund. These organizations include the Anti-Defamation
League (ADL), the United Jewish Appeal (UJA), and the New York-based Museum of
Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.
Silverstein and Eisenberg have both held senior
leadership positions with the United Jewish Appeal (UJA), a billion dollar
Zionist “Charity” organization, to which Murdoch and Lowy generously
contribute. In 1997, Henry Kissinger presented Murdoch with the UJA’s award for
“Humanitarian of the Year.”
Silverstein is a former chairman of UJA. This
organization raises hundreds of millions of dollars every year for a network of
Zionist agencies in the United States and Israel. Eisenberg, who was
instrumental in obtaining the lease for Silverstein, is on the Planning Board
of UJA.
Eisenberg in his role with the Port Authority was
the key person who negotiated the 99-year leases for Silverstein and Frank
Lowy’s Westfield America, who were in fact low-bidders for the lease on the
110-story towers and the retail mall.
Murdoch and the Czechoslovakian-born Israeli
commando Frank Lowy, a former fighter in Israel’s Golani Brigade who went to
Australia in the 1950s, have had a long friendship, which Murdoch recounted
during an American Australian Association fund-raising dinner in honor of
Frank’s son, Peter S. Lowy, in New York on November 20, 2002.
THE ZIONIST MURDOCH
Sam Kiley, veteran journalist on the Middle East
for The Times (UK), wrote about the man who took over the famous British
paper: “Murdoch is a close friend of Ariel Sharon.” Kiley said Murdoch’s friendship
with Sharon, led senior staff at the paper to rewrite important copy.
“Murdoch’s executives were so afraid of irritating
him that, when I pulled off a little scoop of tracking down and photographing
the unit in the Israeli army that killed Mohammed al-Durrah, the 12-year-old
boy whose death was captured on film and became the iconic image of the
conflict, I was asked to file the piece ‘without mentioning the dead kid,’ ”
Kiley wrote. “After that conversation, I was left wordless, so I quit.”
The visit with Sharon included a trip for Murdoch
and his editors from New York and London that “took them on a bird’s-eye tour
of Israel aboard a helicopter gunship, flying over the Golan Heights, West Bank
and settlements.”