The former Director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis, showed that the defendants conspired to create a false cover story of suicide hijackings in order to "blow the World Trade Center to kingdom come" with explosives-a shock-and-awe psy-op designed to coerce the American people into supporting a pre-planned "long war" in the Middle East, massive increases in military spending, and the rollback of Constitutional civil liberties.

Reynolds stated that everyone in the worldwide intelligence community knew that 9/11 was an inside job as soon as it happened, with the obvious stand-down of US air defenses, controlled demolition of the World Trade Center, and non-protection of the President in Florida being the biggest tip-offs. The head of the Russian equivalent of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the former head of the German intelligence service Andreas Von Bulow, former National Security Agency official Wayne Madsen, and former MI-6 agent David Schayler have all openly called 9/11 an inside job, while former CIA official Ray McGovern has confirmed this directly in private, and indirectly in public by way of his ringing endorsement of David Ray Griffin's work on 9/11.

Reynolds, who served as George W. Bush's Labor Department Chief Economist in 2001-2002, believes that a 9/11 truth victory is looming on the near-term horizon. He predicted that one or more of the 9/11 insiders will soon "give it up" and come forward with what they know, saying "Remember, you heard it here first." He said that most of those complicit in the attacks did not realize how over-the-top the plot was, due to the need-to-know compartmentalization of such covert operations, and that some semi-complicit individuals will probably be coming forward. Reynolds said that most of his email acquaintances are now worried that the 9/11 truth movement is going to win, triggering the greatest Constitutional crisis in U.S. history. For Reynolds, this is less a cause for worry than for rejoicing: "We need a Constitutional crisis!"

Reynolds argued that 9/11 truth is a matter of extreme urgency, since the perpetrators seem to be preparing another 9/11-style terror hoax as a pretext for attacking Iran with nuclear weapons. He said that exposing the 9/11 fraud is the best way to stop Cheney's plan to stage an unprovoked nuclear attack on Iran, and the military draft and Pinochet-style prison camps and death squads for dissenters that might accompany it.

Reynolds urged the audience to help educate the American public about the 9/11 inside job. Personal contact with family and friends, the internet, alternative Media, and public events like this are all good educational strategies, he said, adding that a demonstration of 100,000 9/11 truth supporters at Ground Zero next year would be hard for the Media to ignore.

Politicians and the Media will help expose the 9/11 inside job, he said, only after the growing grassroots movement reaches critical mass. The organizers of Reynolds' talk urged audience members to come to the upcoming international 9/11 truth conference in Chicago, 9/11: Revealing the Truth, Reclaiming Our Future, June 2nd-4th, 2006: http://911revealingthetruth.org

Such were the words given to The Iconoclast by Lieutenant Colonel Jane Crichton after inquiring why SFC Buswell is the focus of an investigation initiated by Colonel Luke S. Green, Chief of Staff at Fifth Army in Ft. Sam Houston.

According to unnamed military sources contacted by The Iconoclast, SFC Buswell "used his Government issued email account to send messages disloyal to the United States ..." Because of these statements, SFC Buswell could soon find himself dishonorably discharged, court marshaled, or worse.

It all started as a simple response to a common, unsolicited mass email, sent to 38 individuals at Ft. Sam Houston on Aug. 2, 2006. The message, as well as Buswell's response, is among documents obtained by The Iconoclast. The sender of the first message is identified as "Anderson, Larry Mr JMC". It reads:

This is being sent more as assurance for what happens when a plane hits a nuclear site more so than in response to that German website alleging a government conspiracy related to the 9/11 Pentagon plane crash (though the website does present an interesting perspective) - LarrySubject: F-4 vs. Concrete Wall

Take a look at this clip [not included] and you'll get a good feel for what happens to an airplane when it hits a concrete wall. Many of you have seen the produced (but not factual), Michael Moore-esque website that asks the question; "If it's true that a Boeing airliner hit the Pentagon, what happened to all the parts of it? Why do we not find more pieces of it?

Where did all that mass GO???" (Therefore, the paranoid loony liberal reasoning, 9-11 must have been a US gov't conspiracy!) Well, for those who question what happened to "all the mass of that airplane".......watch this clip.

It's the old Air Force engineering tests of the concrete barrier that surrounds nuclear reactor domes -tests to see if it will indeed survive an aerial attack. With the hi-speed cameras rolling, they accelerated an F-4 Phantom to 500mph and.........

Recall: "What happens when an 'Unstoppable Force' meets an 'Immovable Object'???" (Remember, as you watch in slow motion as the F-4 turns to vapor, the Phantom was one of the toughest airplanes ever built).

SFC Buswell responded later that day, saying:

Subject: F-4 vs. Concrete Wall Hello,

I receive many unsolicited e-mails daily, this one I chose to respond to. The below mentioned premise that an F4 Phantom fighter jet hitting that hardened concrete barrier is akin to the alleged 757 hitting the Pentagon is like oil and water; they don't mix, and they serve to muddy the issue. The issue is 911 was filled with errors in the 'official report' and 'official story' of that day, and, what happened that day. We all know and saw 2 planes hitting the WTC buildings, we didn't see the 757 hit the Pentagon, nor did we see the plane crash in Shanksville PA. Both the PA and Pentagon 'crashes' don't have clues and tell-tale signs of a jumbo-jet impacting those zones!

The Pentagon would have huge wing impacts in the side of the building; it didn't. Shanksville PA would have had debris, and a large debris field; it didn't.

Getting back to the F4...The Pentagon isn't a nuclear hardened structure, so I can't follow your weak logic that since an F4 vaporized itself in a test impact on a nuclear hardened structure that the alleged 757 hitting the Pentagon should have exhibited the same characteristics!

I say Occums razor is the best way to deduce this 'day of infamy'; if you weigh all options, do some simple studying you will see 911 was clearly not executed by some arabs in caves with cell phones and 3 day old newspapers! I mean how are Arabs benefiting from pulling off 911? They have more war, more death and dismal conditions, so, how did 911 benefit them? Answer: It didn't. So, who benefited from 9-11? The answer is sad, but simple; The Military Industial [sic] Complex.

It's not a paranoid conspiracy to think there are conspiracies out there...and, it's not Liberal Lunacy either, nor is it Conservative Kookiness! People, fellow citizens we've been had! We must demand a new independent investigation into 911 and look at all options of that day, and all plausabilities [sic], even the most incredulous theories must be examined.

Upon returning to his office the next day, Buswell discovered the locks had been changed, his security clearance was revoked, and an investigation had been launched. Buswell's commanding officer, Colonel Luke Green, drafted a letter assigning Major Edwin Escobar to the investigation. According to sources, Colonel Green has asserted that SFC Buswell failed to obey Army regulations when he used his government issued email account to send what have been termed as messages disloyal to the United States with the intent of stirring up disloyalty, in a manner that brings discredit upon the United States Army.

It has been reported that Colonel Green also wrote that SFC Buswell claims to have information proving a conspiracy on the part of the United States Military Industrial Complex to attack targets within the United States, e.g., The Pentagon. Officials have suggested that the email response sent by SFC Buswell may be in violation of CFR 2635.705(a ), DoD-R 5500.7, and Joint Ethics Regulation paragraph 2-301b. These rules SFC Buswell is said to have perhaps violated regulate how soldiers utilize government resources, how they use their off-duty time, and how they use their official time.

The Iconoclast attempted to establish a dialogue with Colonel Green and Major Escobar, but calls were not returned as of press time. SFC Buswell declined to comment on the investigation, but noted that he spoke with his parents about the matter for a period of two days before he was ordered to not disclose any further information.

"My son spoke with me about [the investigation]," said Winthrop Buswell, SFC Buswell's father. "There was an unsolicited email. My son, without divulging anything, without usurping anything, without doing anything to discredit anyone in any way, simply responded to that saying 'Yes, there are what if's. And maybe there is something that is being covered up.' That's all that I know. He responded to it, but it was unsolicited. I think - of course, I'm dad, being very much in love with his son and wanting to praise him - because he is a low man on the totem pole, of course he's of pretty high rank but not quite an officer, that maybe ... Maybe an investigation might be the scapegoat for whomever."

"That is so ridiculous," said Winthrop Buswell. "[To say he is disloyal to the United States] is totally ridiculous. And the discourtesy was, ah, very apparent at that particular time. ... I've always thought the American way is this: to disagree is important. To dissent is important. And my son simply said, without any fanfare, 'Look, let's take a look at the whole picture. If you want to take a look at that, maybe there are a few paragraphs that a Michael Moore might want to emphasize.' That is all that my son has said. Never, however, to at all disparage the country and the patriotism that is so necessary for all of us. But, patriotism, as suggested by FOX News' [Bill O'Reilly], is following the line of George W. Bush and cohorts completely! All my son is saying is, 'Hey, maybe there's a what if.' Never, though, did he get sidetracked from the fact that [he loves his] country."

"What disturbed him more than anything else, I think, was the fact that the Iraqi citizens suffered so much and are suffering so much now," said Winthrop Buswell. "The time that he was injured, there were several Iraqis burning to death in front of him. He tried to put out the fire. It was a traumatic experience for him. ... He spoke about that a number of times, and how terrible that was to see the citizenry being killed and suffering so much."

"One of his heroes is Abraham Lincoln," Winthrop Buswell continued. "And Abraham Lincoln said many things, but one of the things he said - and I'm paraphrasing - was, 'I may disagree with the fellow who's speaking, but I will stand and defend his right to speak.' That's my son's position. He does look at the what if's. But that doesn't take away from his dedication and his patriotism. I don't know a fellow who gets more chills running up and down his spine when he sees the flag flying."

"As a boy, [Donald was] always a very curious fellow," he added. "Very daring, but never risking anything or stepping over the line. He loved motorcycles, but was always very cautious about it, always wearing proper clothing, always wearing a helmet. Also, he was very active in little model racing cars. He was in Cub Scouts. I remember walking to the gymnasium with him and having wonderful conversations with him years ago. His mother and I went through a divorce, and that is never easy for anyone. My son was also very close to his grandfather on his mother's side, and also his grandfather and grandmother on my side. Donald loves railroading, and my father has the best job that anyone could ever have. He's a locomotive engineer, and my son related to that. My son also has a strong belief in a power greater than ourselves."

"But one of the things that stands out ... is his love and his caring," said Winthrop, choking back tears. "He loves children. He's just the greatest guy, as far as I am concerned. He walks into a room with a big smile on his face. ... He's like my dad - he makes you feel like, you know ... I ... I care for you. Ah, he's ... He's my son ..."

The Iconoclast will continue reporting on this story as new details become available.

This is a watershed moment in the struggle to create a powerful, educated and active contingent of individuals with no hierarchical structure but with a unified cause.

Charlie Sheen is the forerunner of the third wave of 9/11 skeptics to go public.

The first wave was concerned and informed American and worldwide citizens who educated themselves and formed action groups and organizations to inform others.

The second wave was former government officials and people of high office risking their political reputation to voice their doubts on 9/11, people like Paul Craig Roberts, Professor Steven Jones, Michael Meacher and Andreas von Buelow.

The third wave is high profile individuals who already have a substantial media platform from which to speak the truth, Hollywood stars and cultural icons. Charlie Sheen must be commended for risking his entire career for the sake of the truth and the future of America.

The fourth and final wave will be people who were in government at the time of 9/11 or those employed by the Bush administration at the time of 9/11, such as secret service officials and others close to the administration, going public with what they know. By this I don't mean watered down shills like Richard Clarke but individuals with hardcore information that could be the catalyst for impeachment.

At that point the call for a new independent investigation of 9/11 will be deafening and impossible to ignore any further.

Our efforts in stalling these control freaks is really beginning to pay dividends. Our patience for freedom will outlast their lust for power and the human spirit will triumph over evil.

According to ABC's 20/20, when police stopped the cheering Israelis, one of them told the officers: "We are Israelis. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are your problem".

One of the five Israelis had a German passport in addition to his Israeli passport. Another had an international flight booked to Thailand on September 13, two days after the attacks. The FBI also found out that one of them was a former paratrooper, assigned to an elite Israeli defense forces unit.

Two more Israelis were caught in a truck on Interstate 80 in Pennsylvania, near the site of the crash of American Airlines flight 93. Police became very suspicious when they found maps of the city with certain locations highlighted, box cutters (like the ones used by the hijackers), along with other incriminating evidence. Police also said that bomb sniffing dogs reacted as if they smelled explosives when they were brought to the Israelis' truck.

The FBI believes that most of the arrested Israelis belong to an Israeli intelligence unit operating outside New Jersey, near where the Anthrax letters were mailed. They all worked for a U.S.-based company known as Urban Moving Systems.

An editorial on whatreallyhappened.com states that an FBI SWAT team raided the New Jersey warehouse of the Urban Moving Systems and confiscated a number of computer hard drives and files. It further adds that the Israeli owner of the company, Dominick Suter, closed his business days after the Sept. attacks and returned to Israel. He was in such a hurry that some of Urban Moving System's customers were left with their furniture stranded in storage facilities.

Behind closed doors, Israeli authorities were doing all what they can to get the men released and the FBI probe closed. Israeli lawmakers contacted their "friends" in the U.S. Congress, and the Mayor of Jerusalem, Ehud Ohmert personally called the New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and asked him to intervene.

An article on Power of Prophecy reported that a war brewed inside the FBI between the agents conducting the probe and their superiors, who warned that involving the Israelis in the attacks could be an "explosive political volcano." But the lower-level agents didn't buy it. They believed that the arrested Israeli Jews might just hold the key to the whole 9/11 debacle. "These Israeli guys knew what was coming down," one FBI veteran was quoted as saying. "We would be fools if we let them just fade away into the sunset and pretend they weren't involved."

It was later confirmed that the five detained Israelis were in fact Mossad agents. However, FBI and Justice Department superiors succeeded in pushing aside the local FBI agents and the Israelis were released after spending just 71 days in U.S. custody. "Evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It's classified information," a U.S. official told Fox News at the time.

The compliant mainstream media completely ignored the Israeli connection. Rather it immediately blamed OSAMA BIN LADEN even though he had no record of doing anything on this scale. On the day of the attacks, CIA Director George Tenet said "You know, this has bin Laden's fingerprints all over it."

But a number of intelligence officials have raised questions about BIN LADEN's capabilities. "This guy sits in a cave in Afghanistan and he's running this operation?" one CIA official said at the time. "It's so huge. He couldn't have done it alone."

BIN LADEN himself denied any involvement in the attacks. The BBC published his denial in which he clearly stated: "I was not involved in the September 11 attacks in the United States nor did I have knowledge of the attacks. There exists a government within a government within the United States. The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself..." (Most of us never heard that quote on our nightly newscast).

To date, the only shred of "evidence" against bin Laden is a barely audible fuzzy amateur video that the Pentagon just happened to find "lying around" in Afghanistan.

U.S. intelligence analysts believe that Israel benefited most from the September 11 attacks. Israel has been widely criticized by the West for its aggression against the Palestinians. Israeli occupation soldiers were, and still are, shown on international TV news in heated exchanges with Palestinian youths armed with nothing more than stones. Israeli tanks bulldoze Palestinian farms and homes, and human rights groups complain that Palestinian detainees are tortured and abused in Israeli jails.

But after 9/11, things changed dramatically. Sympathy for the Palestinians vanished. The Arabs were universally portrayed as the "bad guys." Israeli Prime Minister ARIEL SHARON reportedly said: "Now we and the Americans are in the same fight."

An article by political analyst Richard Becker published on Jan. 9, 2003 on the Workers World newspaper states that "SHARON and other Israeli leaders aspire to fulfill what the goals of the political ZIONIST movement have been since its origin a century ago: to turn all of historic Palestine into an exclusively Jewish state. A central tenet of the ZIONIST ideology is expressed in the racist slogan, 'A land without people for a people without a land.'"

The implication of the Arabs in the 9/11 attacks provided the Israelis with a golden opportunity to achieve the above-stated goals because the world would view the Palestinians as terrorists.

Blaming the horrible attacks on the Arabs was the best thing that has even happened to Israel. Now Washington, once again, solidly stands in the pro-Israeli camp, and "Palestinians be damned!"

Yesterday's New York Times editorial on National Security Agency spying in the United States refers to "your mail and your e-mail" and "your telephone conversations" being monitored.

The connotation of course is that the "you" is some New York Times reading Cappuccino drinking upper middle class Manhattan intellectual, that thousands if not tens of thousands of similar Americans are having their phones tapped and e-mails intercepted.

Come on. The government is not just repeating the targeting of political opponents a la J. Edgar Hoover or Richard Nixon. It is not picking out a Seymour Hersh or a Cindy Sheehan to find their links to foreign influences nor seeking to ruin their lives by developing incriminating evidence on them.

I know I sound like some Fox news watching, flag waiving, gun toting, Cappuccino hater defending the national security state.

The New York Times and the government may not want to say the obvious, that by and large, it is Muslims in America who are being monitored in the 9/11 Order. It is not the liberal or the literary in the back of the New York City taxicab that is the target. It is the driver.

If the government is going to find the next Mohamed Atta in our midst, it is going to do so, it thinks, through the intercepted phone call to uncle Mohamed in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. It is going to correlate the purchase, the airline ticket, the license plate at the Mosque.

What has happened since the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks is as pernicious and as damaging as any abuse or panic or misstep of the past: We must pledge allegiance to a certain post 9/11 Order, abandon the rule of law, compromise our values, turn against our neighbors, enlist in a clash of civilizations, all in the name of defeating the terrorists.

We are being asked to destroy our country in order to save it.

In October 2001, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to collect intelligence on U.S. persons -- citizens and residents -- suspected of having connections to al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.

As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday on NBC's Meet the Press, government counter-terrorism fighters complained about a "seam" between intelligence and law enforcement agencies that allowed al Qaeda to infiltrate. This is the central paradigm of the 9/11 Order: The government isn't to be held responsible for its incompetence and failure to protect Americans. It is the laws and the handcuffs placed on the government that is the problem.

Soon we all became agents of "actionable intelligence." On NBC's Meet the Press on Sept. 30, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld introduced the term and referred to the measures the government was taking "so that, in fact, things can be done" against terrorist networks. Terrorist networks operating not just in Afghanistan or the Middle East, but also in Buffalo and Detroit.

Actionable intelligence is data: Intercepted phone calls and e-mails, credit card receipts, library transactions, web preferences, and associations. The 9/11 Order is all about the data.

An ever larger and unleashed government vacuum cleaner sucks up the words and the actions and collects the material in giant databases.

The government tells us that plots have been uncovered and new attacks thwarted. They say that the old rules were too cumbersome, that they just couldn't wait the extra hours.

Tonight on ABC's "Nightline" Vice President Dick Cheney will make the precise argument that the new surveillance was necessitated by the old rules.

"It's the kind of capability if we'd had before 9/11 might have led us to be able to prevent 9/11," the Vice President says.

It is a giant fishing expedition as much as it is a highly targeted campaign. The hundreds of millions of intercepts and data points are massaged by the data miners and link analyzers and churned through banks of computers and dozens of new software programs in pursuit of the holy "connecting of the dots."

They just might track a license plate to a cave in Pakistan.

It's all here in the seams, in the dots, this actionable intelligence: ghost detainees, renditions, coalitions of the willing to torture, special authorities and special operations, warrantless surveillance, corners being cut and laws being broken.

"These are stateless networks of people who communicate, and communicate in much more fluid ways," Secretary Rice said yesterday.

Stateless networks of people in our midst. We are not safe and the government is doing God's work to protect us. That is the message.

The reasonable answer will be congressional hearings and government contrition and revised laws to continue the 9/11 Order.

The right answer is to challenge the presumption of a terrorist threat that is so potentially destructive that it demands we destroy ourselves to fight it. Terrorists will continue to exist, they will continue to live in our midst and there will be terrorist incidents, probably even terrible ones, in our future. If we just stopped providing ever more excuses for the America haters and the haters of democracy, that would be a far more effective counter-terrorism strategy.

Al-Zawahiri addressed the US and its citizens in a video, seen by Aljazeera on Monday, which appeared to be new.

He said, "You gave us every legitimacy and every opportunity to continue fighting you ... You should worry about your presence in the [Persian] Gulf, and the second place you should worry about is Israel.

"Your leaders are hiding from you the true extent of the disaster, and the days are pregnant and giving birth to new events with Allah's permission and guidance."

He also said al-Qaeda was justified in continuing its fight against America as the US administration had "ignored our offer of a truce", adding US troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan "were doomed".

New footage

Al-Zawahiri refers to Israel's bombardment of Lebanon this summer, the capture of Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah and fighters in Gaza in the video, entitled Hot Issues, leading experts to believe it is probably new.

He says that Israel was attacking Lebanon and Gaza only because Egypt had left the "field of conflict with Israel".

As-Sahab website, al-Qaeda's media arm, posted on Sunday the full video of a smiling Osama bin Laden and other commanders in a mountain camp, apparently planning the September 11 attacks, excerpts of which were first aired by Aljazeera last Thursday.

The documentary-like retrospective of the five years since the attacks was unusually long - 91 minutes, split into two segments and sophisticated in its production quality compared to previous al-Qaeda videos.

It included the last testament of two of the September 11 hijackers, Wail al-Shihri and Hamza al-Ghamdi, and showed bin Laden strolling in the camp, greeting followers.

"Among the devout group which responded to the order of Allah and the order of his messenger were the heroes of September 11, who wrote with their blood the greatest pages of modern history," the narrator said, referring to the hijackers who flew planes into the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre.

Al-Shihri and al-Ghamdi were each shown speaking to the camera, their image superimposed over background pictures of the crumbling World Trade Centre towers and the burning Pentagon, as well as a model of a passenger jet.

The Hollywood trade paper Daily Variety, citing sources close to the project, reported the network was considering canceling the miniseries altogether.

The docu-drama, which ABC says is based largely on the official 9/11 Commission Report, opens with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York and traces subsequent events leading up to the coordinated suicide hijackings five years ago that killed nearly 3,000 people.

Much of the controversy focuses on a scene depicting CIA agents and Afghan fighters coming close to capturing al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, only to have then-White House national security advisor Samuel Berger refuse to authorize completion of their mission.

An unfinished version of the film circulated by ABC to TV critics for review portrays Berger as abruptly hanging up the phone while the CIA is pressing him to approve the raid.

In letters of protest to Disney President Robert Iger, Berger and former White House aide Bruce Lindsey said no such episode ever occurred.

The executive producer of the film, Marc Platt, acknowledged to Reuters on Thursday the Berger scene was a "conflation of events."

The film also drew denunciations from Clinton supporters for strongly suggesting his administration was too distracted by the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal to deal effectively with the gathering threat of Islamic militancy. Lindsey said the 9/11 Commission Report disputed that notion.

The New York Times acknowledged the United States had lost the feeling of unity and purpose which gripped the nation in the aftermath of the attacks, and lamented a lost opportunity.

"When we measure the possibilities created by 9/11 against what we have actually accomplished, it is clear that we have found one way after another to compound the tragedy," said the paper's editorial.

Summing up the mood in the British press, the Financial Times said: "The way the Bush administration has trampled on the international rule of law and Geneva Conventions, while abrogating civil liberties and expanding executive power at home, has done huge damage not only to America's reputation but, more broadly, to the attractive power of Western values."

German daily Handelsblatt said the war in Iraq had been erroneously started in the name of September 11, while Spain's El Pais said the Bush administration used the attacks to impose a neo-conservative foreign policy.

"The result, five years after, is a more dangerous world," El Pais said.

The criticism, and in particular the condemnation of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, was echoed in newspapers across the Middle East and Asia.

Many Arab newspapers said the US campaign and the invasion of Iraq had pushed the world closer to a clash of civilisations between the West and the Muslim world.

"Instead of isolating and wiping out Al-Qaeda, Bush has created a long list of new foes in his ever-broadening war on terror," Lebanon's Daily Star said.

"In doing so, he has bolstered the popular impression that the United States is waging a crusade against Islam -- an impression which Al-Qaeda skillfully exploits in order to gain more support."

Egypt's semi-official Al-Ahram compared Bush to the mastermind of the attacks Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.

"Five years ago, the history of the world changed twice, once in the hands of Bin Laden and his gang, and once in the hands of Bin Bush and his administration."

The Al-Ghad daily in Jordan was similarly critical saying: "The administration of George W. Bush used a vengeful mentality in dealing with the 9/11 crime and has turned the entire world into a battleground."

Many newspapers in Iran speculated that Washington staged the attacks so that it could justify attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan.

Iraq, meanwhile, ignored the anniversary altogether with not a single mention of it in the press.

In Pakistan, a key US ally in the battle against Al-Qaeda, The News daily wrote a hard-hitting editorial entitled "Five Years of Nothing".

"Looking back it would be hard to say whether the years have been spent in something meaningful or constructive," it said. "Many would agree the world is a more dangerous place and the United States is nowhere close to winning the war on terror."

The US administration received some support from the media in Australia, where the government has been a staunch supporter of US policy since the 2001 attacks.

The Australian newspaper said terrorist strikes against Western interests since 9-11 in London, Madrid, Indonesia and elsewhere had left no doubt the world faced a concerted attack by extremists.

"Radical Islam is corrupting impressionable minds, encouraging disaffected youth and the newly converted with a poor understanding of faith to offer their lives as suicide bombers in what is essentially a political campaign."

In Thailand, The Nation said the impact of September 11 on Asia was much bigger than people wanted to admit, while in the Philippines the Manila Times said the damage was so great that many were still trying to cope.

"We are still shocked by the number of lives that were lost that day, close to 3,000. And we still remember how dread enveloped the world like a thick black shroud.

"But 9/11 left us with a deeper sense of loss, a loss of innocence. We are still trying to comprehend how hatred could drive people into a senseless act of violence. It is that loss that we find it hardest to get over."