“Dr. Kissinger, we just want to make sure you don't have any conflicts of interest. You don't have any business clients by the name of Bin Laden.” At that point, Doctor Kissinger pours the coffee all over the table, partway falls off the couch, blames it on a fake eye, and resigns the next day.

The families are scratching their heads: how is our lawsuit to find out if there was Saudi Arabian complicity in the attacks on September 11th possibly going to harm American national security and state secrets? What state secrets would those be?

This is the date. This is the Chicago Tribune. This is the reporter and the headline, but I might not find that article online. It just might say “page not found.” And so I thought if I can write a physical book that preserves some of this story, that’s at least one effort that I could see myself wanting to do.

Mindy Kleinberg said before the 9/11 Commission, “With regard to the 9/11 attacks, it’s been said the intelligence agencies have to be right 100% of the time, and the terrorists only have to get lucky once.” This explanation for the devastating attacks, simple on its face, is wrong in its value because the terrorists were not lucky just once they were lucky over and over and over again.

Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. I’m very excited today. I don’t normally go down the paths of 9/11 and things like that, but I think there’s a lot to be talked about, and I stumbled onto an author. This guy has a lot of important information to present to us all. And there’s a lot of unanswered questions about 9/11.

I don’t think that makes you crazy. I think that’s human, and I think it’s absolutely natural to question the official narrative, especially when there are so many things that simply don’t add up. So I’m very excited about this interview because the author and I have talked and I got a really good feel for where the information is coming from. So let me bring on my guest here.

The author’s name is Ray McGinnis. His book is titled “Unanswered Questions.” Ray is a Canadian, and he is actively seeking to bring the voices of the families of 9/11 victims to the public and to get the questions they have outstanding answered. And I respect him immensely for that. So without further ado, let me bring on my guest, Ray McGinnis. Welcome to the show, sir.

Great to be with you, Steve.

Well, this is a pretty heavy subject here, is it not?

It is a heavy subject. And I think for me as someone who for many years – for two decades has taught writing workshops – I’ve been with people in health care facilities, teaching journal writing to help people recover from their illness and injury with grief support groups. Helping people to write about their journey of loss and grief and taking people on nature trails and writing poems and memoirs.

And I wanted to write a book that the people who took my writing workshops that knew me first as a writing instructor, who many of them are interested in personal narrative and they’re not necessarily news junkies, that I could write a book that would introduce people to some of the folks who lost loved ones and about their amazing story, to choose not just simply to grieve in private, but to go to Washington, DC and try and make the nation safe.

So as much as there are other books out there that are more hardball political science or history books, I certainly have history and current affairs in my book. But there’s also a lot of personal narrative that made that a book that was interesting for me to write.

Absolutely. One of the things that jumped out at me about this was that you weren’t attacking the facts, so to speak. You were saying here is this important story, and you would think our mainstream media would cover these outstanding questions, but they have not.

To discover that after six years of following the mainstream news in Canada and the States, as I watch, and listen to, and read, I knew about the attacks, of course. I knew a little about the 9/11 Commission, having seen Condoleezza Rice briefly being interviewed by the 9/11 Commission, but otherwise, I knew little about the 9/11 Commission and absolutely nothing about any families that had anything to do with the Commission or an effort to have an investigation.

So that made me curious. And so I was interested and went to their website. And there are hundreds and hundreds of questions that they have that are there that are unanswered questions that they posed to the President, Vice President, other agencies, other people. And I thought in the digital world, we can have a website up, but that might not last forever.

And I can see this is the date. This is the Chicago Tribune. This is the reporter and the headline. But I might not find that article online. It just might say page not found. And so I thought if I can write a physical book that preserves some of this story, that’s at least one effort that I could see myself wanting to do.

Absolutely. There’s a “Wayback Machine”. And I have used this extensively to find things that have long since been forgotten, especially some of the old, funny looking websites from back in the late 80s and 90s, like a single page with a bunch of links. But anyway, let’s get into the book. Tell us the premise of the book. Aside from what you just laid out, how do you start this thing off? Get us into the book.

So the book begins with the calamity of the attacks and the grieving families, and they’re coping with planning funerals. And I introduce people to over a dozen people who lost loved ones, who become members of the Family Steering Committee later on.

I take the reader from the shift of private individuals grieving to their choices to go to Washington, DC, and knock on doors of members of Congress and Senate and contact the White House and rattle the cages and try and get an investigation. And after 14 months, they finally do. And it’s a really interesting story, because most of us, if we lose somebody in our life, we have our family and friends gather and there’s a funeral, and we carry on and people contact us.

But we’re way outside of the spotlight. No reporters, no cameras rolling. But these people went to Washington, DC, spoke to reporters, people like Patty Casazza, a nursing student, her husband, John, died in the North Tower. Mary Fetchet up in Connecticut, who said she was never involved in politics at all, who lost her son, Brad, who was 24, in the South Tower.

People decide that it matters enough to try and change things. So I introduce people to that shift. And then I show a chapter of some of the mainstream news articles because I know that they looked at Paul Thompson, who was a researcher, and he put together this book, “The Terror Timeline”. He has a website still online, which is now called HistoryCommons.org.

And you can see all these thousands and thousands of news articles. And so the families read many articles from thousands of articles from what I can tell. Then they said, if this story came out of The New York Times or this story came out in the Boston Globe or The Washington Post, okay, based on this, we think this would be a good question to ask Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense.

We think this would be a good question to ask FBI Director Robert Mueller. So they thought about the most important pressing questions to ask, so that the investigation that the 9/11 Commission was commencing could be the best questions for the best people and agencies, so that you can find out what went wrong to make sure it never happens again.

Then I move into a second part of the book, which is looking at five of the press releases that the families issued, of nearly 50 over the life of the 9/11 Commission, and take people through the feel of what was going on in the Commission and even behind the scenes. And it’s an interesting tale because the families, like Mindy Kleinberg, whose husband Alan, died in North Tower, said she was always hopeful the government would answer their questions.

Uh-huh. He’s a piece of work, isn’t he?

You got a chorus of St. Louis Post Dispatch, Chicago Tribune, Seattle Post Intelligencer, all kinds of papers saying, no, this is not a good sign. And so the families do some research. Kristen Breitweiser, I think, in particular. And nearly all dozen of the Family Steering Committee members that are newly formed go to Doctor Kissinger’s nice offices/apartment up in Manhattan.

And it’s early December. He turns the heat way up. They’re peeling off their winter coats and sweaters because it’s like a balmy day in Hawaii. And they are concerned that he has possible conflicts of interest, which would not serve the interests of the nation. And so I think it’s Lori Van Auken after he’s pouring coffee and she asked Dr. Kissinger, we just want to make sure you don’t have any conflicts of interest.

You don’t have any business clients by the name of Bin Laden. At that point, Doctor Kissinger pours the coffee all over the table, partway falls off the couch, blames it on a fake eye, and resigns the next day. At the time that this coffee is being poured, the women, especially, go into their training mode, and they run around and get some paper towels and mop up the spilled coffee.

But they’re kind of looking around each other saying, what was that? But then he resigns the next day for whatever reason. It’s so interesting how a story changes. And I found this and also even for the families, how their thinking changes. There was a caution on the part of the media, from what I can read, about how to cover the 9/11 Commission. But there was this sense early on, the Commission is given $3 million to have its investigation.

Contrast that with the 60, 70, $80 million to investigate the Clintons for Vince Foster, Whitewater, and Monica Lewinsky in the 90s. It was clear really early on to numbers of papers and numbers of 9/11 commissioners saying that, well, it looks like they’re going to starve the Commission so they can’t do an investigation. And then you have Lee Hamilton and Thom Kean, the co-chairs.

Thom Kean, happens to be on the board of one of the corporations that is part of a consortium pushing for a pipeline across Afghanistan. So what might he want the 9/11 Commission to avoid regarding tough questions about why go to war in Afghanistan, perhaps. And then Lee Hamilton, who is a best friend of the dearly departed Donald Rumsfeld and also best friend of Dick Cheney.

And the Hamiltons, Cheneys and Rumsfelds, from time to time, would go away on vacations together. And Hamilton has over three decades of close friendship with Cheney and Rumsfeld. And he also has a reputation, having been on the Iran Contra inquiry, of not asking tough questions. He’s told the press, I don’t go for the jugular. He said, when Oliver North told me he never lied, I believed him.

This is not a good sign for the families that are starting to get introduced to the guys who were in charge of this investigation. Kristen Breitweiser was shocked, as was Bob McIlvaine, who is not on the 911 Family Steering Committee but was at one of the meetings. Hearing Lee Hamilton talk about how he didn’t want to have any public hearing, he didn’t want to have anybody swearing under oath, even behind closed doors and didn’t want to have any subpoenas.

Wow.

How do you do an investigation if that’s part of the framework, that one of your key people in leadership is wanting to get things rolling under that constraint?

It’s terrifying.

And for the families and for 9/11 Commission staff who thought that they were earnestly and honestly going ahead to find out the facts wherever they take them. There’s this question. Well, how do you do an investigation when you’ve basically written the narrative for what you’re going to find at the end of the investigation?

Interesting how that works.

Yeah, it is. And that way you can ignore a lot of things. You can have people that are members of different agencies who may be whistleblowers who need the protection of a subpoena to testify so that there’s no retribution when they go back to their agency. But what happens is you’ve got numbers of people who are coming to the Family Steering Committee members and saying, I’d like to testify before the 9/11 Commission.

Wow.

“Where will you be staying?” No answer. “What will you be studying or working?” No answer. I can tell you, I’ve been to about 29 countries in the world, and some of those I’ve needed visas for. And I know that if I had filled out incomplete information about my birth date or what hotel I was staying or my accommodation or how long I was staying, my visa would have been rejected. So what’s with that?

And for the first time in my life, I saw armed soldiers on American soil in real civilian situations. It was the first time I ever truly felt scared as an American. I take that back. I was scared one other time when I saw the very first pictures of the downed airmen from the Gulf War under Daddy Bush. When I saw the picture of that pilot that had his face all scarred up from getting beaten, the one they had captured.

That was frightening when I was a young man, and I was much, much younger. But you carry that forward and seeing all those soldiers around the country, ultimately, you’re feeling insecure. I mean, it changes that nice comfy setting that many of us had grown to believe was just the American way. I remember all the terror threat levels. It was absolutely terrifying.

And so all this is going on, people are frightened, so frightened, even though they mistrust these people. Bush’s popularity as President at that time was unprecedented. He was the most popular President in the history of our country. At that point, everyone was there to support it until cracks in the armor started showing up. And I think they’ve rewritten that now.

I think we can flip that script pretty much on its head with all the other things that we’ve learned since then. But I’m curious, what did that tension of a country fearful of terrorism do to these families as they were going through asking these questions? Did that come through in their questions, or are they just concerned about their family members? How did that play out?

Well, I think that in alignment with the great popularity of President Bush up into the Iraq War, I know from Kristen Breitweiser’s memoir that she’s saying as they’re asking the questions, there’s a sense on the part of the families that there’s a whole bunch of protocols, people that just have fallen down in their job inexplicably.

I’ll just read a little exerpt of what Mindy Kleinberg said before the 9/11 Commission, she says “With regard to the 9/11 attacks, it’s been said the intelligence agencies have to be right 100% of the time, and the terrorists only have to get lucky once. This explanation for the devastating attacks September 11, simple on its face, is wrong in its value.

Because the 911 terrorists were not lucky just once they were lucky over and over and over and over again. Is it luck that aberrant stock trades were not monitored? Is it luck when 15 visas are awarded based on incomplete forms? Is it luck when airline security screenings allowed hijackers to board planes with box cutters and pepper spray?

Is it luck when the emergency FAA and NORAD protocols to intercept planes are not followed? Is it luck when a national emergency is not reported to top government officials on a timely basis? To me, luck is something that happens once. When you have this repeated pattern of broken protocols, broken laws, broken communication, one cannot still call it luck.”

So the question that they’re asking is just sort of like, tell us how this happened. How did this happen? So it’s not out of skepticism of the story of record, certainly not at the beginning. But I think that the families are also expecting that all the people that they’re going to be meeting in the 9/11 Commission who are going to be doing this investigation are going to be doing a transparent, accountable effort that they all want to find out whatever needs to be found out in order to fix things. But as the story unravels, they find out that there’s lots of resistance and obstacles all over the place.

What would you say are the key insights that you found, as you did your research, as it pertains to facts that maybe the mainstream media and the general public haven’t really gotten their arms around?

Well, I think that so often information is shared in a headline that gives us partial information or it’s vague. There’s also a lot of emotion around this. I sometimes find myself really emotional, even unexpectedly, in the middle of interviews talking about this. So people want to believe the very best about everybody who was in charge that day.

An example is the question the families asked, and the families include military families who lost loved ones, too. So, there is a term called scrambling fighter jets. I only knew about the word scramble in my life up until the point I started researching this in relationship to what I do with eggs for breakfast. Really. I’m starting at square one. So what does scrambling fighter jets mean?

128 people died. And there were about three or four other midair collisions of commercial flights, mostly on the Eastern Seaboard in the late 50s. And at the time, the traveling public needed to be assured that when they buy tickets for a flight, a commercial flight in domestic US airspace, that when that flight goes up into the air, that it will not crash into another plane coming in the opposite direction.

And so General Accounting Office gives reports to the Congress so they can track the spending – what does it cost in terms of fuel and staff time to send one fighter jet up into the air to intercept a plane that’s gone 2 miles off course or more. Maybe it’s bad weather, very occasionally a hijacking, maybe a pilot that’s sick, maybe problems with the equipment.

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I remember watching, I think it was the second plane hit as I was in my home office working. And it was a very bleak time for me. I was going through a divorce, so I was already in a bad place and watching that happen, it was surreal. It was like, did I just see this? And as a father, what I would have felt like if I had lost one of my kids in that – or anybody, right?

Yeah.

And that gives you some perspective of what an individual who’s seeking those answers might feel. I think empathy is really important, and I think that this has become such a politicized hot potato even now, twenty years later and a whitewashing of the facts is occurring. Even the 9/11 Museum. This is the only narrative you’re allowed to tell. There are no other narratives. And that’s got to be incredibly unsatisfactory to the people that hear that. What’s been the feedback from them?

And yet I experienced some surprise I would write a book like this. I have to remind people these are the questions that the families ask, because it’s almost as though nobody can ask a question about what happened that might be dissenting in any kind of way because it’s seen by some people as disrespectful to the families themselves. And yet it’s the families that ask the most important questions.

And so it’s just a funny thing of let’s not ask questions then and then let’s not ask questions now, or let’s not even look back and see what the questions were because we’ve moved on. There’s always this thing about moving on. We have to move on in the moment. And 20 years later, it’s history. But I think that we learn something when we look at history. And I think now, 20 years later, the historical efforts of the families to have an investigation, which they were successful at least having, is part of the history that we need to acquaint ourselves with.

Very good. As you went through this, have you had any interactions with the 9/11 Museum at all?

So you’ve got people in the Family Steering Committee, former members of Family Steering Committee who were involved with the Museum. And you have other members, the Jersey Girls and a few others that will not go to the Museum. So the Museum is a hot potato, and it’s interesting to go. I got on a tour around the parapets with all the names and the footprints of the former towers.

And the guide with me and a bunch of other people from other states and countries who were there, was telling us all that the fire had weakened the building. And it’s interesting to hear that. There are questions about that. And then in the exhibit itself, there’s the 19 hijackers. And that’s an interesting story because the exhibit shows the 19 mug shots.

You can say we don’t know who all of these people are. But then you can say two years later, yes, these were the same people, even though the reports in the news that were calling into question some identities, still stand, as though it’s parallel universe or something.

So let me ask you in my best, “I didn’t do the research, you did” voice. What did you think will ever come from this? Do you see any evidence of the media or government at any level being more transparent? I think they keep us out of the know just to keep the lights off. I’m curious if there’s any movement whatsoever that you see, have they begun to become more transparent?

But I guess the most well known, publicized, is the effort of many families, thousands and thousands of families that have for 20 years been pressing successive US administrations to investigate the possible complicity of Saudi Arabia in the attacks. And you’ve had, surprisingly, the stonewalling of Bush, Obama and Trump administrations.

Wow.

The families are scratching their heads: how is our lawsuit to find out if there was Saudi Arabian complicity in the attacks on September 11, possibly going to harm American national security and state secrets? What state secrets would those be? For some family members that I’ve talked to they are concerned that there could be some things that Saudi intelligence knows about American intelligence.

There might be some people that have blood on their hands in America. Some family members believe that is the case. But many family members are more neutral. Just saying, when you point to Saudi Arabia, it’s hard to understand the position of the FBI and the Department of Justice on this story for example.

I think that type of bold push for a public hearing, these questions are brought out. We as a nation have stopped doing that altogether. Everything is about preventing the public from knowing the truth. It feels like every step along the way, we are gaslit into submission. So I guess my question to you is, as you did your research. What are some of the things that jumped out at you about Saudi Arabia. What did you find out about Saudi Arabia as you were digging?

Well, it’s more what I don’t find out than what I do, because you’ve got these 28 pages that are blacked out that are apparently very sensitive.

[laughs] Redacted!

The families know that there are very sensitive documents that have been kept out and that there’s reason to believe that there could be Saudi complicity. You also have the 15 hijackers from Saudi Arabia, of the 19 that are named. Again, there’s some problems with identities, but on the face of it, you’ve got CIA staff assisting in the fast tracking of those visas.

And in that meeting, Donald Rumsfeld is trotting out the familiar talking points we all heard later about regime change, weapons of mass destruction, Saddam is a bad man, and all kinds of stuff. And O’Neill was just flabbergasted. Why are we at the beginning of a new administration talking about needing to go to war in Iraq? Max Cleland was one of the 9/11 commissioners, and he wanted the 9/11 Commission to press, to explore if there was any connection between the Iraq war and the rush to go to war in Iraq and what happened on September 11.

And the co-chairs, Kean and Hamilton, did not want to look at that at all. So there’s a lot of not looking, but at the same time during the 9/11 Commission hearings, you have no focus on possible Saudi Arabia witnesses coming forward in the public hearings. Instead you have, early on, numbers of people coming forward talking about Iraq.

And Lori Van Auken accused Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, of arranging people to come before the Gallery to do a sales pitch for the Iraq war. This one person, Dr. Laurie Mylroie, said that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the attacks of the Oklahoma City bombing as well.

Wow.

So you can shape and frame and torque a conversation and a discussion in a certain way. And I think that Patty Casazza says that going there and hearing the testimony, she says whether consciously or unconsciously, they lied.

It happened, and now we need to know why they lied and what the results of those lies were. One example is that they had a question about who was involved in having members of the Bin Laden family fly out of American airspace when every other plane was grounded and nobody, not even family members who lost loved ones, could fly anywhere in America.

Wow.

I couldn’t fly. I was in Joshua Tree National Park in southeastern California, and I was in the States for five days and finally got a bus from Seattle to Vancouver, Canada. But Bin Laden family members could fly. It would seem to the families when you have an empty chair at your table every day – your mother, your brother, your father, your son, sister.

This is important to know. Why would you not want to – not necessarily to accuse the Bin Laden family members and relatives of being involved in something – but maybe they might know something. Because at the time, on the days after September 11, there’s all kinds of stuff in the press about maybe more terrorist attacks coming.

So wouldn’t you want to sit someone down for half an hour or 2 hours and ask them some questions to see what they know if they know something. But no, let’s send them off. And so Richard Clarke with Counterterrorism Study Group, says to the 9/11 Commission, well, I was told by someone that this is what we should do. And so we went ahead and they flew away back to Saudi Arabia.

And then after the Commission’s over, he tells The Hill paper in Washington, DC, because the reporter wants to ask a bit more about that. And Richard Clarke says, Well, in fact, the somebody who told me to send the Bin Laden relatives back to Saudi Arabia and out of American airspace was me.

Wow.

He was the one who told himself to do this. This is not what the families expect when it comes to transparency and accountability.

No, I should think not. Let’s go to the next step. The hunt for Osama bin Laden takes place on Obama’s watch, and they have a big soiree celebrating his body. You see some grainy pictures of Osama bin Laden, and Obama is celebrating the victory. My question to you is, what did the families think about that? Did that even come up? Do they have questions about that?

Well, there are some family members, Mary Fetchet in Connecticut, she took the story at its face and said, Well, thank goodness, at least he’s gone and he can’t do any more damage. I think Carie Lemack, whose mother, Judy Larocque, died in a plane that hit the towers, also said the same. Lorie Van Auken, whose husband, Kenneth, died in the North Tower, said, what good is that?

Here you’ve got the named perpetrator and prime suspect by the Bush administration is responsible for these attacks. Wouldn’t you want to capture him alive? Question him. Does he know other nefarious things that are being cooked up? Wouldn’t you want to find out all the things that he still knows with his network? But instead, you have this big show of killing him.

But a lot of the stories that are in the news about any activities by families more recently, especially having any questions, are way off on the margins of small papers and blogs somewhere. So what I will be doing going forward is, as I said, I was the accidental author with this book. If some other journalist had decided to write this book, I would have been happy for that. [laughs]

But I think that what I will be doing is I will continue to follow the news as I do. And if there ends up being some elephant in the room that just seems is not being tackled from an angle that seems to me to be accessible and important, then I’ll put pen to paper again or put my fingers on the keyboard and write another book.

That’s a fantastic way to take this out. So where do we find you and where do we get your book?

Okay. I have a website which is www.unansweredquestions.ca – “ca” like the initials for California – and my book is available as an ebook on Amazon. Amazon also sells the paperback, and then Barnes and Nobles sells the paperback and the hardcover. And then any of your local bookstores can order the paperback or the hardcover.

All right, very good. This was a very informative discussion for me, and I wish we could have done this closer to 9/11. I think that would have been fantastic, but I’m thrilled to get the opportunity to do it now. Thank you so much for your time. I’m going to be reading this book. I bought it.

I’m excited to go through it. Hopefully, everybody out there will take a chance. Pick up Ray’s book. With that, Ray, I want to thank you so much for being a wonderful guest. And for the rest of you out there, my name is Steve Grumbine, my guest is Ray McGinnis. This is Macro n Cheese. We’re out of here.

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