Christopher Bollyn is an American journalist and researcher. He is widely known for his extensive research on the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that cost the lives of 2,976 victims and left more than 6,000 injured. The U.S. government under former President George W. Bush blamed the terrorist group Al-Qaida as the main culprit of the attacks and adopted an aggressive policy towards Muslim nations. It also enacted the USA PATRIOT Act and issued an illegal order to search and investigate the telephone and email communications of the U.S. citizens under the pretext of discovering and mapping out possible threats to U.S. national security. Bollyn has written on U.S.–Israel relations comprehensively and believes that a powerful corporate cartel of Zionists control and mastermind large-scale U.S. foreign policy.

What follows is the full text of an in-depth interview with Christopher Bollyn in which we discuss the post 9-11 “War on Terrorism” project devised by the Bush administration, the alleged complicity of the state of Israel in the 9-11 attacks, the fate of the Israeli regime in the wake of its growing isolation, the stance of the United States towards Iran’s nuclear program, and the double standards it exercises with regards to Israel’s military nuclear program.

Kourosh Ziabari: Dear Christopher; you’ve written on the 9/11 attacks and the involvement of the Mossad and CIA in the attacks extensively. The former Italian President Francisco Cossiga has also claimed that Mossad and the CIA were involved in the attacks. Would you please summarize for our readers the evidence that, according to your research, indicates that Israel created the 9/11 catastrophe?

Christopher Bollyn: The earliest evidence of Israeli involvement in 9-11 was actually revealed in the news on the very day of the terror attacks and shortly thereafter, but never followed up in the mainstream media.

First, there was the van of 5 Israelis who were arrested in New Jersey on 9-11. This group, which included two Mossad agents known to U.S. law enforcement, had been observed videotaping the destruction of the Twin Towers with themselves celebrating in front of the camera, flicking their lighters and laughing with the burning towers in the background across the river. These Israelis worked for a fake moving company, Urban Moving Systems of Weehawken, New Jersey, which actually turned out to be a Mossad front operation. Dominic Suter, the head of the phony company, was allowed to escape to Israel shortly after 9-11 although he was a terror suspect being investigated by the FBI. The five Israelis, some of whom refused or failed lie detector tests, were caught in possession of multiple passports, box cutters, and a large amount of cash stuffed in their socks. Their van tested positive for explosives when checked by New Jersey police, at least until the FBI took over the investigation. When the five Mossadniks were returned to Israel in November 2001, three of them appeared on a popular television show and openly admitted that their mission had been to document the terror attacks. Who had given them this mission was not discussed. [Editor’s note: The Israeli’s explained that their purpose in filming the burning towers was to document the event and did not claim to have had foreknowledge of the attacks.]

Secondly, there were some 4,000 Israelis who were expected to have been at the World Trade Center, as per the Israeli foreign ministry and the Jerusalem Post, who did not show up for work on 9-11. [Editor’s note: The Jerusalem Post story in fact read, “The Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem has so far received the names of 4,000 Israelis believed to have been in the areas of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon at the time of the attack.” An estimated 10 to 15 percent of the victims of the attacks on the towers were Jewish.] There were text messages sent on Odigo, an Israeli-owned instant messaging system, warning of the terror attacks several hours before the first plane hit the towers. These warnings were evidently sent in Hebrew and warned of terror attacks at the World Trade Center. Alex Diamandis, Odigo’s vice president, said, “The messages said something big was going to happen in a certain amount of time, and it did – almost to the minute.” The Odigo story was reported in the Washington Post, but not a single New York newspaper picked it up. The Post reported that the FBI had sent a team to Israel to investigate the content and origin of these messages, but the story was dropped and never investigated any further in the U.S. media. How odd.

Both of these stories were reported, but only briefly and then dropped into the memory hole. I began my 9-11 research by investigating these stories. With such clear evidence of Israeli prior knowledge of the attacks, I pursued my investigation to see if Israelis or Zionists were involved in other key aspects of the crime or the cover-up, and I found that they were. Indeed, orthodox Jews and Zionists cropped up at every critical point of the operation, which I discuss in detail in my book, Solving 9-11 – The Deception that Changed the World.

The key U.S. official behind the 9-11 cover-up was Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff, an Israeli citizen and son of a Mossad agent. Chertoff was the head of the criminal division of the Department of Justice at the time and the top boss of the FBI. From this position Chertoff managed the FBI’s “non-investigation” of 9-11, and supervised the confiscation and destruction of the critical evidence from the crime scenes, such as videotapes, aircraft debris, and more than 99 percent of the steel from the World Trade Center. The destruction of this crucial evidence is a crime in and of itself.

KZ: You’ve come to the conclusion that Israel was the main culprit of the 9/11 attacks; however, your opponents categorize you as a conspiracy theorist. Is this a fair judgment?

CB: A conspiracy is a secret plan by a group of people to do something harmful or illegal. There is certainly no question that the terror attacks of 9-11 were planned and carried out by a group of people acting in secret. A conspiracy theorist in this context would be a person who believes that a conspiracy is behind the terrorism attacks that started the so-called “War on Terror.” Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have both stated that an Islamic conspiracy, headed by Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaida, is behind 9-11. Based on this specious and unproven assertion, the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 and began a war of occupation which the Obama administration has adopted as its own and continues to fight to this day. President Obama says the U.S. is fighting the war in Afghanistan because of 9-11.

I, on the other hand, consider 9-11 to be an unsolved crime and have pursued my investigation based on the available evidence. Since the evidence indicates that Israeli intelligence had prior knowledge of the attacks and because prior knowledge of something like 9-11 is indicative of involvement in the crime, I have worked on the hypothesis that the state of Israel was involved in 9-11 and have pursued my investigation along that line. That does not make me a conspiracy theorist.

One of the main reasons I rejected the government claim that Al Qaida was behind 9-11 is because all the evidence indicates that the Twin Towers and WTC 7 were demolished with explosives. The plane crashes did not bring down the Twin Towers and Larry Silverstein’s 47-story building, which collapsed a block away without even being hit.

When I learned in the summer of 2002 that molten iron had been found at the base of all three towers, I knew I had evidence that the Bush administration’s explanation of what had happened to the World Trade Center was false. This important discovery revealed that the public had been lied to by the government about what really happened on 9-11.

The publication of the peer-reviewed paper about the discovery of large amounts of active super-thermite in the dust of the demolished World Trade Center by Dr. Steven E. Jones and others in March 2009 provides scientific proof that an extremely energetic form of thermite, made with nanotechnology, was responsible for the pulverization of the 220 concrete floors of the Twin Towers, and everything on them. [Editor’s note: the paper can be found here.] This is what created the immense clouds of hot dust that everyone saw on 9-11. Survivors have said that the dust was burning hot. This is because it contained tiny droplets of molten iron, which were described and shown in the U.S. Geological Survey study of the dust. The hot spots that burned beneath the rubble for three months were hotter than the boiling point of iron and created nano-size particles that were found in large quantities in the smoke rising from the pile. These were all clear indications that thermite had been used to demolish the towers.

Logically, the discovery of chips of super-thermite in the dust marked the end of the official version as an acceptable explanation for what happened to the Twin Towers. Neither Osama Bin Laden nor Al Qaida had anything to do with the creation or application of the super-thermite that pulverized the World Trade Center. These facts are becoming clear to a growing number of people. The game is over for the 9-11 cover-up crowd.

KZ: You introduced Michael Chertoff as the key person responsible for the destruction of 9/11 evidence. Isn’t the U.S. administration really aware of the fact that, as you believe, Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks? Have the U.S. statesmen ever referred to the research carried out by you and other scholars who put forward evidence that Israel carried out the 9/11 attacks?

CB: In March 2010, Dr. Alan Sabrosky, the former Director of Strategic Studies at the U.S. Army War College, said in a radio interview: “It is one hundred percent certain that 9-11 was a Mossad operation, period.” Dr. Sabrosky also stated that high-level U.S. military officers know that Israel did it.

Dr. Sabrosky is, to my knowledge, the first person from the U.S. military establishment to have publicly supported the hypothesis that Israeli intelligence was behind 9-11. I have not heard of any U.S. statesman refer to my research although I am sure there are many politicians who are aware of it.

KZ: The war on terrorism project was initially set off following the 9/11 attacks. In other words, the 9/11 attacks played into the hands of the U.S. administration to launch military strikes against Iraq and Afghanistan, as alleged state sponsors of terrorism. Is there any third country which is liable to be targeted next? Is this third country going to be Iran?

Bollyn: My hypothesis is that 9-11 was an Israeli-designed “false-flag” operation that was meant to be blamed on Al Qaida in order to kick-start the Zionist-designed “War on Terror.” Actually, Iran is probably the main target, at least in the minds of the Zionist war planners. This is because the CIA and the Mossad got kicked out of Iran when Shah Pahlavi was overthrown in 1979. The foreign oil corporations, big capital, and their intelligence agencies want to get Iran back under their control.

I always thought that the name “Central Command” or CENTCOM was a strange name for the military command that oversees U.S. operations in the Middle East – central to whom? Iran now finds itself surrounded by U.S. military interventions on three sides and CENTCOM is based in Qatar, right in the middle.

Furthermore, Iran has long been the target of a concerted effort led by the Zionists and the controlled press to impose sanctions in an effort to weaken the largest independent nation in the Middle East. This is why they use the issue of Iran’s nuclear development, most unfairly, as a club to attack the Iranian government. The Zionist Axis of New York, London, and Tel Aviv refuses to accept that Iran is not under their control.

KZ: You’ve published pictures on your website which depict the Jews demonstrating against Tel Aviv, holding placards that read: “The state of Israel does not represent world Jewry”. Is the controversial regime of Israel, which is even criticized by a large number of its own citizens, going to survive with the trajectory it has adopted?

CB: No. I don’t see how a small, artificial state run by terrorists and despised by its neighbors and most of the world can possibly survive in the long term. It simply is not sustainable. This is, after all, why 9-11 was carried out – to bring the U.S. military into the Middle East to protect the Zionist hegemony in the region. Public opinion, however, has turned strongly against Israel as a result of a long string of Zionist crimes and atrocities. A state that is so despised simply cannot survive for long.

KZ: United States officials regularly reaffirm their commitment to the security of Israel and disallow the international community to hold it accountable for the war crimes it commits. Is it possible for the international bodies, including the United Nations Security Council, to investigate Israel’s criminal conduct independently and put on trial Tel Aviv officials while the United States continually supports the Jewish state?

CB: This is the real problem. Zionist influence and control over the U.S. government prevents the international community from reining in the behavior of the nuclear-tipped outlaw state of Israel. The U.S. veto in the U.N. Security Council has effectively protected Israel from sanctions for decades. But the failure to enforce international law and apply corrective measures on the state of Israel has resulted in the creation of a monster-state that is now out of control. Had the system of international law worked as it should, Israel would have been forced to adjust its behavior and find a way to live in peace with the Palestinians and its neighbors.

KZ: What do you think about the recent massacre of peace activists aboard the Freedom Flotilla who were heading towards the Gaza strip to break the siege of the beleaguered enclave? Why did the U.S. and European leaders keep silent in respect of the vicious assault of the Israel Defense Forces on the peace activists? Would the international reactions have been the same if Iran had carried out the attack?

CB: Of course not. If Iran had committed such a massacre on the high seas it would have been punished severely and immediately by the United Nations and international community. Furthermore, if any other state besides Israel were to impose a blockade on 1.5 million civilians causing extreme hardship and suffering, it would be condemned by every nation in the world. To understand the mild response of the Obama administration to the blockade and the massacre of the nine Turkish peace activists we should recall that Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff of the Obama White House, was in Israel the week before the attack and met with Benjamin Netanyahu only four days before the Israeli assault on the Freedom Flotilla. It should be noted that Emanuel, an Israeli citizen and the son of an Irgun terrorist, runs the Obama administration.

When it comes to the European response, we now have a weak centralized European Union that discourages unilateral actions taken by the member states. Furthermore, European foreign ministers remember very well what happened to Anna Lindh of Sweden who had called for a European boycott of Israel. She was murdered in broad daylight in Stockholm.

KZ: In one of your recent articles, you’ve reviewed the bankruptcy of three Icelandic banks and related it to the Israeli regime’s plundering of Iceland’s economy. Would you please elaborate on this for us and our readers?

CB: The bankrupting of Iceland’s three biggest banks in the fall of 2008 was caused by a foreign-run operation which involved people connected to the Mossad and the most extreme right-wing politicians from the Likud, including Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Olmert. The First Lady of Iceland also happens to be an Israeli. The operation basically gained control of the privatized and deregulated banks and puffed them up as it sucked money out of them in the form of billions of dollars in unsecured loans. The privatized banks were simply loaded up with debt and pushed off a cliff. The Icelandic banks were lending huge amounts of money to dodgy Jewish financial tycoons left and right – without any collateral of real value. The largest Icelandic bank to fail, Kaupthing, for example, lent more than $2.5 billion to the Tchenguiz operation, which is run by Victor Tchenguiz in Israel. Robert Tchenguiz, who received billions from Kaupthing, was also one of the largest stockholders in the bank.

The plundering of the banks of Iceland is very similar to the Bernard Madoff scam, the bank failures, and the huge bail-out that occurred at the same time in the United States. Madoff was the chairman of the Sy Syms business school at Yeshiva University. His partner, the late Sy Syms, was also a long-standing director of the privatized Israel Discount Bank of New York, which has a branch in Switzerland that operates under Swiss bank secrecy laws. Kaupthing also had a bank in Luxembourg that had a Swiss branch in Geneva. When Kaupthing collapsed, their Luxembourg subsidiary with the Swiss branch were taken over by David Rowland, an offshore financier who works closely with Israeli intelligence. When the Icelandic banks collapsed under a mountain of debt, the national government and international lenders were called in to absorb the losses while the bank robbers escaped with the money they stashed in secret bank accounts in Switzerland.

KZ: The United States frequently attacks Iran over its human rights record and what is claimed to be the undemocratic nature of the Iranian regime. Should we take the Washington’s accusations for granted, we come across to the identical situations in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt in which the human right records are far more disappointing and deplorable than Iran; however, the United States maintains close ties with them and never states a single word in protest to their repression of the public freedoms and violations of human rights. How is it possible to justify this double standard?

CB: This is the typical double standard seen in U.S. foreign policy. Any behavior is acceptable from a regime that is willing to play ball with big capital, big oil, and Israel. On the other hand, any regime that refuses to go along will find itself ostracized and penalized. The Hamas government of Palestine is a good example. Hamas won the democratic election fair and square, but because it refuses to accept Israeli demands and conditions, it has been ostracized. Meanwhile, Mahmoud Abbas is treated as the president of Palestine by the United States although he has not been elected and simply extends his term like a tyrant.

Iran is treated in the same way. It is ostracized because it pursues its own national interests and challenges the Anglo-American and Zionist hegemony in the Middle East. This is why the U.S. uses its influence to sanction Iran for its nuclear development program, which is legal and monitored, while completely ignoring Israel’s secret nuclear arsenal. We should remember that BP, the oil company that has mucked up the Gulf of Mexico, originally started as the Anglo-Iranian Oil company, with the rights to virtually all the oil of Iran. A BP tanker was the first ship to load up with Iraqi oil after the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. These are the people who wage war to steal the assets of sovereign nations.

KZ: What’s your anticipation for the prospect of the Israeli regime? It is being isolated in the eyes of nations around the world while being supported by the U.S. and European governments. Will the sponsorship of the U.S. and its EU allies for the state of Israel come to cease one day? Will the Washington – Tel Aviv ties eventually end in altercation and animosity?

CB: The state of Israel is an artificial state that is protected and supported by the United States. This support is due to Zionist influence and corruption of the American political system. Were this to change and were Israel to lose the support of the U.S. government it would be unable to survive. The current government in Israel is composed of the most extreme elements of Israeli society, which is increasingly becoming more orthodox and Russian. Zionist moderates have been pushed aside by the most aggressive and unscrupulous extremists. Those who could have made peace have been killed and replaced by terrorists who know only war.

The people of the United States are fed up with these costly and disastrous wars in the Middle East. A growing number are becoming aware that we have been conned into these wars. The growing divide between the people who know they have been lied to and the government who covers up the truth about 9-11 is simply not sustainable. The United States is sitting on a political fault line that may slide at any time. When the truth of 9-11 reaches a critical mass there will be a political earthquake that will sweep the criminals from power. This is why the discovery of super-thermite in the dust of the World Trade Center is so important, because it marked the end of the government version of 9-11 as an acceptable explanation.

When the deception and lies about 9-11 are exposed and the Zionist and Israeli culprits revealed, Israel will be left without a friend in the world. The racist and militant Zionist regime of Israel is bound to pass from the stage of history just like the communist dictatorships of the Soviet Union and the apartheid regime of South Africa. Such deeply unpopular regimes often fall without a shot being fired. They simply collapse because they are rotten to the core and unable to stand any longer.