Another Academic 9/11 Conspiracy Promoter: Working for the U.N. This Time

From Fox News:

Critics are calling for the resignation of a U.N. official who publicly supports investigating theories that the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were an “inside job.”

Richard Falk, the special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, investigates alleged Israeli violations of human rights law for the U.N.’s Human Rights Council.

But the former Princeton professor would also like to investigate whether “some sort of controlled explosion from within” destroyed the Twin Towers, he told FOXNews.com.

“I do think there are questions that haven’t been answered, questions about the way the buildings collapsed and the failure to heed a variety of signals that there was danger coming,” Falk said.

In 2004, Falk wrote the forward to “The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11,” a book written by David Ray Griffin, a Sept. 11 conspiracy theorist.

Griffin’s book argues that the Twin Towers may have been brought down by a “controlled demolition” — not by two airliners hijacked by Al Qaeda operatives — and that the Pentagon may not have been hit by a plane at all.

Griffin “doesn’t take a so-called conspiracy view and he raises questions that haven’t been answered,” Falk told FOXNews.com. “I think [the book] deserved to be published and I have no regrets about that.”

Falk said that while he supports alternative theories behind the World Trade Center attack, he doesn’t claim the U.S. government was responsible.

“I’m an agnostic on the issue,” he said.

This, of course, is equivalent to being agnostic on whether the holocaust happened.

But Bolton is hardly agnostic on the issue of Falk’s views.

“It’s just an example of the inmates running the asylum,” Bolton said. “It’s a particularly graphic example for Americans, but this is not an aberration — this is, unfortunately, typical of much of what goes on” at the U.N.

In an online article for the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research last year, Falk — prior to his appointment as an unbiased human rights investigator — compared Israeli actions in Gaza to the Nazi treatment of Jews. This may have led to his appointment as the rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, Bolton said.

“He was picked for a reason, and the reason is not to have an objective assessment — the objective is to find more ammunition to go after Israel,” Bolton said.

This is yet another piece of data to consider when leftist critics of the Bush Administration accuse it of a “go it alone” attitude toward international affairs, or of “ignoring world opinion.”

There are doubtless plenty of occasions when it it prudent and useful to work through the U.N., and when U.N. projects are helpful.

But the United Nations simply has no moral authority. It’s a bunch of bureaucrats in a big building on the East River who, like all bureaucrats, have their own agenda. The agenda might be ideological, it might be nationalistic, or it might simply be the protection of their own perks and privileges. Its agenda is not morally binding on the U.S. taxpayer, nor on the U.S. government.