The Reichstag Fire and 9/11

On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag Building in Berlin which housed the German parliament burned to the ground. Hitler had been Germany’s chancellor for less than a month.

Looking for clues to what was obviously an arson fire, police arriving at the scene found an unemployed Dutch bricklayer and self-professed communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, in the rubble. That was all Hitler and Goering needed to declare the blaze the work of German communists and the international Bolshevik organization Comintern. The Hitler government wasted no time in declaring a state of emergency and suspending the basic rights provisions of the constitution.

While debate over the origins of the Reichstag fire is still ongoing, historians today generally believe that it was the work of the upper echelons of the Nazi Party, particularly Goering, who used the mentally unstable and publicity-infatuated van der Lubbe as a tool. Three Comintern members tried for the crime later proved their innocence in court and were acquitted, and there is no doubt that the Nazis used the fire as a pretext to suspend constitutional protections and attack their enemies without restraint.

Turning to the events of 9/11/01 in New York and Washington D.C., we are now forced to ask whether there are similarities between that disaster and the Reichstag fire. During the past three years, and with increasing frequency as time has gone by, Americans have asked openly whether the Bush administration may have played a part in the events of that day, either by refusing to take steps to ward off an attack they knew was coming, or even, as some suggest, playing an active part in those attacks.

The debate on both sides of these issues has been characterized by hyperbole, wild speculation, and emotionalism. However, there are three things we know for certain, and it's now time to raise this issue putting those three certainties in the forefront of the discussion.

First, we know that the Bush administration has used the events of 9/11 as a lever and enabling device to attack its enemies and political opponents, foreign and domestic, real and imagined, in totally unrestrained ways. This government has cast aside constitutional protections of citizens’ rights and treaty obligations protecting the rights of foreigners, citing 9/11 as the justification, and Bush never makes a foreign policy speech without recalling the carnage of that day more than once.

Secondly, we know the administration was aware by the summer of 2001 that some kind of attack was coming, but did nothing to stop it. Documents such as the Daily Presidential Briefing of August 6, 2001 and numerous internal FBI memos render this point undebatable. Furthermore, once the attack was under way, no defensive measures such as the scrambling of Air Force fighters were undertaken.

Finally, no one has been able to satisfactorily explain the collapse of Building 7, a 47-story skyscraper which stood one block north of the main structures of the World Trade Center, and was separated from the complex by Building 6 and Vesey Street. This structure was not hit by a plane, and was seen and photographed with a few small debris-related fires before it fell at 5:20 p.m.

So we're now obliged to take up the question of whether the Bush administration was complicit in and needs to be held accountable for the events of 9/11, either by engaging in planned, deliberate negligence which enabled those events, or by more active crimes of commission.