UN Human Rights Official Under Fire For Describing 9/11 As A Cover Up

An official working within the recently established UN Human Rights Council is under fire from an NGO closely affiliated with Israel for suggesting that the official explanation of the 9/11 attacks is a cover up.

Richard Falk, a former professor of international law emeritus at Princeton University, and an expert on human rights made the comments in a blog post last week, noting that the mainstream media is “unwilling to acknowledge the well-evidenced doubts about the official version of the events: an al Qaeda operation with no foreknowledge by government officials.”

Falk described this version of the 9/11 story as an “apparent cover up” containing “gaps and contradictions”.

The group UN Watch, which describes itself as “an independent Geneva-based watchdog organization”, pounced on the comments, in a letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, calling for Falk to be removed from his post immediately. The group described Falk’s comments as an insult to the victims of the attacks and their families and loved ones.

Hilel Neuer, the group’s chief executive, described Falk as “a serial offender with zero credibility”.

Ban Ki-Moon responded Monday by publicly condemning Falk’s comments, but added that he was not in a position to fire Falk from the Human Rights Council.

The story has since found its way into the mainstream media, however there is one vital detail that you will not read in such articles.

The UN Watch group is closely affiliated with the American Jewish Committee and has been described as “a lobby group with strong ties to Israel”. The group has been after the head of Richard Falk and others like him for years, purely because he and other human rights experts alike continue to criticize and condemn the Israeli government’s treatment of the Palestinian people.

Falk’s appointment to the Human Rights Council, as a monitor on human rights issues relating to the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, hit headlines in 2008 owing to the fact that he has previously slammed the Israeli occupation of Palestine and compared the Zionist government’s treatment of Palestinian Arabs to the Nazi treatment of Jews in the holocaust.

As a result, the Israeli government has routinely denied Falk a visa to enter Israel, Gaza and the West Bank.

This legitimate criticism of the Zionist Israeli government gets boiled down to “Richard Falk believes that Jews are Nazis” in pieces such as this op ed in last Friday’s New York Daily News. This disgusting piece of tabloid trash suggests that Falk and his contemporaries are “apologists for dictatorships”, ironically for criticizing the actions of a vehemently racist government regime.

Despite this and the now customary attacks from the Anti-Defamation League, Falk has stood by his criticisms, previously telling the BBC: “If this kind of situation had existed for instance in the manner in which China was dealing with Tibet or the Sudanese government was dealing with Darfur, I think there would be no reluctance to make that comparison.”

Falk’s position on 9/11 has remained constant. Just over two years ago he called for a fresh investigation into 9/11 in order to examine the possible role that neoconservatives may have played in the attacks.

Indeed, two days prior to his appointment to the UN Human Rights Council in March 2008, Falk appeared on former University of Wisconsin lecturer Kevin Barrett’s radio show and spoke of how he was keen to see a fresh investigation into 9/11 in order to address inconsistencies in the official account of what happened.

Mr. Falk told Barrett, “It is possibly true that especially the neoconservatives thought there was a situation in the country and in the world where something had to happen to wake up the American people. Whether they are innocent about the contention that they made that something happen or not, I don’t think we can answer definitively at this point. All we can say is there is a lot of grounds for suspicion, there should be an official investigation of the sort the 9/11 commission did not engage in and that the failure to do these things is cheating the American people and in some sense the people of the world of a greater confidence in what really happened than they presently possess.”

Falk previously penned the preface to Professor David Ray Griffin’s groundbreaking 2004 book The New Pearl Harbor, in which the theologian catalogued scores of unexplained facets surrounding 9/11 and inconsistencies in the official government version of events.

Given that the majority of those who sat on the 9/11 Investigative Commission have themselves expressed doubts about the official findings and described their roles as participation in a cover up, it is perfectly legitimate for anyone else in the world to ask questions about 9/11. In fact it should be a priority of every official in Falk’s circle to ask the same questions and raise the same doubts.

Richard Falk has continually acted as a thorn in the side of the establishment. He has published a number of notable books and essays analyzing the legality of the Vietnam War and other military operations, including the Iraq invasion.

In 2007 he played a prominent role in a Citizens’ hearing on the legality of the Iraq War as a tribunal testifier. Of the Invasion he has previously written:

inescapable that an objective observer would reach the conclusion that this Iraq war is a war of aggression, and as such, that it amounts to a Crime against Peace of the sort for which surviving German leaders were indicted, prosecuted and punished at the Nuremberg trials conducted shortly after the Second World War.

The UN Human Rights Council has been afforded little opportunity to function in any meaningful way. It has met stiff opposition at every turn from the US Congress and was recently described by the chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs as a “rogues’ gallery” for “pariah states”.
There is a clear worry within the establishment that like Falk, some of the officials within the Human Rights Council are legal experts that recognize war crimes and illegitimate attacks when they see them and are actually attempting to do something about it.

This is one instance where some are attempting to work within and through the establishment left arm of the global elite system to meter out some justice.

In a 2008 interview, Japanese member of Parliament Yukihisa Fujita told the Alex Jones Show that there are numerous individuals within the UN structure that are significantly interested in pursuing the coordination of a new 9/11 investigation in order to address unanswered questions.

However, it remains to be seen whether the Human Rights Council is composed of enough well meaning individuals to have a significant impact, or whether, like much of the rest of the UN, it will merely become a powerless part of the overall establishment control mechanism.