read this whole thing. its on point. holla with your opiniones.
The Bush 9/11 Scandal for Dummies
Don't know about you, but all this who-knew-what-when pre-9/11 stuff is mighty confusing. So once again, I head to that all-purpose reference series for some comprehensible answers.
Q. I've heard all these reports about the government knowing weeks and months in advance of 9/11 that airliners were going to be hijacked and flown into buildings, and yet the Bush Administration apparently did nothing and denied they did anything wrong. They claimed the fault lay in the intelligence agencies "not connecting the dots," or that it was the "FBI culture" that failed. Can you explain?
A. Most of the "it's-the-fault-of-the-system" spin is designed to deflect attention from the real situation. Bush and his spokesmen may well be correct in saying they had no idea as to the specifics -- they may not have known the exact details of the attacks -- but it is more and more apparent that they knew a great deal more than they're letting on, including the possible targets.
Q. You're not just going leave that hanging out there, are you? Just bash Bush with no evidence to back it up?
A. There's no need to bash anybody. There is more than enough documentation to establish that the Bush Administration was fully aware that a major attack was coming from Al-Qaeda, by air, aimed at symbolic structures on the U.S. mainland, and that among mentioned targets were the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the White House, the Congress, Statue of Liberty. (According to Richard Clarke, the White House's National Coordinator for Anti-Terrorism, the intelligence community was convinced ten weeks before 9/11 that an Al-Qaeda attack on U.S. soil was imminent.)
Q. If they knew in advance that the, or at least an, attack was coming, why did the Bush Administration do nothing to prepare the country in advance: get photos of suspected terrorists out to airlines, have fighter jets put on emergency-standby status or even in the air as deterrents, get word out to the border police to stop these "watch-list" terrorists, put surface-to-air missiles around the White House and Pentagon, etc.?
A. The explanation preferred by the government is to admit, eight months late, to absolute and horrendous incompetence, up and down the line (although Bush&Co., surprise!, prefer to focus the blame lower down, letting the FBI be the fall guy). But let's try an alternate explanation. Think about it for a moment. If their key goal was to mobilize the country behind the Bush Administration, get their political/business agenda through, have a reason to move unilaterally around the globe, and defang the Democrats and other critics at home -- what better way to do all that than to have Bush be the take-charge leader after a diabolic "sneak attack"?
Q. You're suggesting the ultimate cynical stratagem, purely for political ends. I can't believe that Bush and his cronies are that venal. Isn't it possible that the whole intelligence apparatus just blew it?
A. Possible, but not bloody likely. There certainly is enough blame to spread around, but the evidence indicates that Bush and his closest aides knew that bin Laden was planning a direct attack on the U.S. Mainland -- using airplanes headed for those icon targets -- and, in order to get the country to move in the direction he wanted, he kept silent.
Q. But if that's true, what you've described is utterly indefensible, putting policy ahead of American citizens' lives.
A. Now are you beginning to understand why Bush&Co. are fighting so tenaciously against a blue-ribbon commission of inquiry, and why Bush and Cheney went to Congressional leaders and asked them not to investigate the pre-9/11 period? Now do you understand why they are trying so desperately to keep everything secret, tightly locked up in the White House, only letting drips and drabs get out when there is no other way to avoid Congressional subpoenas or court-ordered disclosures? They know that if one thread of the cover-up unravels, more of their darkest secrets will follow.
Q. You're sounding like a conspiracy nut.
A. For years, we've avoided thinking in those terms, because so many so-called "conspiracies" exist only in someone's fevered imagination. Plus, to think along these lines in this case is depressing, suggesting that American democracy can be so easily manipulated and distorted by a cabal of the greedy and power-hungry. But I'm afraid that's where the evidence leads.
Q. You mean there's proof of Bush complicity in 9/11 locked up in the White House?
A. We wouldn't use the term complicity. So far as we now know, Bush did not order or otherwise arrange for Al-Qaeda's attacks on September 11. But once the attacks happened, the plans Bush&Co. already had drawn up for taking advantage of the tragedy were implemented. A frightened, terrorist-obsessed nation did not realize they'd been the object of another assault, this time by those occupying the White House.
Q. This is startling, and revolting. But Bush says he first heard about a "lone" pre-9/11 warning on August 6, and that it was vague and dealt with possible attacks outside the U.S. The FBI and CIA are notorious for their incompetence and bungling.
A. Bush and his spinners want us to concentrate on who knew what detail when; it's the old magician's trick of getting you to look elsewhere while he's doing his prestidigitation. We're not talking about a little clue here and another little clue there, or an FBI memo that wasn't shared. We're talking about long-range planning and analysis of what strategic-intelligence agencies and high-level commissions and geopolitical thinkers around the globe -- including those inside the U.S. -- saw for years before 9/11 as likely scenarios in an age of terrorist attacks.
The conclusion about Al-Qaeda, stated again and again for years by government analysts, was basically: "They're coming, by air. Get prepared. They're well-organized, determined, and technically adept. And they want to hit big targets, well-known symbols of America." (There was a 1999 U.S. government study, for example, that pointed out that Al-Qaeda suicide-bombers wanted to crash aircraft into a number of significant Washington targets; during the 199 5 trial of Ramsi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, he revealed plans to dive-bomb a plane into CIA headquarters, and earlier he had told FBI agents that the list was expanded to include the Pentagon and other D.C. targets.)
Elements in the FBI, all over the country, who suspected what was coming, were clamoring, begging, for more agents to be used for counter-terrorism investigations, but were turned down by Attorney General Ashcroft; Ashcroft also gave counter-terrorism short shrift in his budget plans, not even placing anti-terrorism on his priority list; John O'Neill, the FBI's NYC antiterrorism director, resigned, asserting that his attempts at full-scale investigating were being thwarted by higher-ups; someone in the FBI, perhaps on orders of someone higher-up, made sure that the local FBI investigation in Minneapolis of Zacaria Moussauoi was compromised. All this while Ashcroft was shredding the Constitution in his martial law-like desire to amass information, and continues even now to further expand his police-state powers.
(Note: An FBI agent has filed official complaints over the bureau's interfering with antiterrorism investigations; his lawyers include David Schippers, who worked for the GOP side in the Clinton impeachment effort; Schippers says the agent knew in May 2001 that "an attack on lower Manhattan was imminent." A former FBI official said: "I don't buy the idea that we didn't know what was coming...Within 24 hours [of the attack], the Bureau had about 20 people identified, and photos were sent out to the news media. Obviously this information was available in the files and someone was sitting on it.")
One can accept the usual incompetency in intelligence collection and analysis from, say, an anti-terrorist desk officer at the FBI, but not from the highest levels of national defense and intelligence in and around the President, where his spokesman, in a bald-faced lie, told the world that the 9/11 attacks came with "no warning." More recently, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, in a quavering voice, tried to characterize the many warnings as mere "chatter," and concerned attacks "outside the U.S." But the many warning-reports focused on terrorist attacks both inside and outside the United States; the August 6th briefing dealt with planned attacks IN the United States.
Not only were there clear warnings from allies abroad, but the U.S., through its ECHELON and other electronic-intercept programs, may well have broken bin Laden's encryption code; for example, the U.S. knew that he told his mother on September 9: "In two days you're going to hear big news, and you're not going to hear from me for a while".
And, the word of an impending attack was getting out: put options (hedges that a stock's price is going to fall) in enormous quantities were being bought on United Airlines and American Airlines stock, the two carriers of the hijackers, as early as September 7; San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown was warned by "an airport security man" on September 10 to rethink his flight to New York for the next day; Newsweek reported that on September 10, "a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns"; many members of a Bronx mosque were also warned to stay out of lower Manhattan on September 11, etc. etc.
THIS ARTICLE CONTINUES WITH IMPORTANT AND INTERESTING INFO HERE:
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0601-01.htm
The Bush 9/11 Scandal for Dummies
Don't know about you, but all this who-knew-what-when pre-9/11 stuff is mighty confusing. So once again, I head to that all-purpose reference series for some comprehensible answers.
Q. I've heard all these reports about the government knowing weeks and months in advance of 9/11 that airliners were going to be hijacked and flown into buildings, and yet the Bush Administration apparently did nothing and denied they did anything wrong. They claimed the fault lay in the intelligence agencies "not connecting the dots," or that it was the "FBI culture" that failed. Can you explain?
A. Most of the "it's-the-fault-of-the-system" spin is designed to deflect attention from the real situation. Bush and his spokesmen may well be correct in saying they had no idea as to the specifics -- they may not have known the exact details of the attacks -- but it is more and more apparent that they knew a great deal more than they're letting on, including the possible targets.
Q. You're not just going leave that hanging out there, are you? Just bash Bush with no evidence to back it up?
A. There's no need to bash anybody. There is more than enough documentation to establish that the Bush Administration was fully aware that a major attack was coming from Al-Qaeda, by air, aimed at symbolic structures on the U.S. mainland, and that among mentioned targets were the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the White House, the Congress, Statue of Liberty. (According to Richard Clarke, the White House's National Coordinator for Anti-Terrorism, the intelligence community was convinced ten weeks before 9/11 that an Al-Qaeda attack on U.S. soil was imminent.)
Q. If they knew in advance that the, or at least an, attack was coming, why did the Bush Administration do nothing to prepare the country in advance: get photos of suspected terrorists out to airlines, have fighter jets put on emergency-standby status or even in the air as deterrents, get word out to the border police to stop these "watch-list" terrorists, put surface-to-air missiles around the White House and Pentagon, etc.?
A. The explanation preferred by the government is to admit, eight months late, to absolute and horrendous incompetence, up and down the line (although Bush&Co., surprise!, prefer to focus the blame lower down, letting the FBI be the fall guy). But let's try an alternate explanation. Think about it for a moment. If their key goal was to mobilize the country behind the Bush Administration, get their political/business agenda through, have a reason to move unilaterally around the globe, and defang the Democrats and other critics at home -- what better way to do all that than to have Bush be the take-charge leader after a diabolic "sneak attack"?
Q. You're suggesting the ultimate cynical stratagem, purely for political ends. I can't believe that Bush and his cronies are that venal. Isn't it possible that the whole intelligence apparatus just blew it?
A. Possible, but not bloody likely. There certainly is enough blame to spread around, but the evidence indicates that Bush and his closest aides knew that bin Laden was planning a direct attack on the U.S. Mainland -- using airplanes headed for those icon targets -- and, in order to get the country to move in the direction he wanted, he kept silent.
Q. But if that's true, what you've described is utterly indefensible, putting policy ahead of American citizens' lives.
A. Now are you beginning to understand why Bush&Co. are fighting so tenaciously against a blue-ribbon commission of inquiry, and why Bush and Cheney went to Congressional leaders and asked them not to investigate the pre-9/11 period? Now do you understand why they are trying so desperately to keep everything secret, tightly locked up in the White House, only letting drips and drabs get out when there is no other way to avoid Congressional subpoenas or court-ordered disclosures? They know that if one thread of the cover-up unravels, more of their darkest secrets will follow.
Q. You're sounding like a conspiracy nut.
A. For years, we've avoided thinking in those terms, because so many so-called "conspiracies" exist only in someone's fevered imagination. Plus, to think along these lines in this case is depressing, suggesting that American democracy can be so easily manipulated and distorted by a cabal of the greedy and power-hungry. But I'm afraid that's where the evidence leads.
Q. You mean there's proof of Bush complicity in 9/11 locked up in the White House?
A. We wouldn't use the term complicity. So far as we now know, Bush did not order or otherwise arrange for Al-Qaeda's attacks on September 11. But once the attacks happened, the plans Bush&Co. already had drawn up for taking advantage of the tragedy were implemented. A frightened, terrorist-obsessed nation did not realize they'd been the object of another assault, this time by those occupying the White House.
Q. This is startling, and revolting. But Bush says he first heard about a "lone" pre-9/11 warning on August 6, and that it was vague and dealt with possible attacks outside the U.S. The FBI and CIA are notorious for their incompetence and bungling.
A. Bush and his spinners want us to concentrate on who knew what detail when; it's the old magician's trick of getting you to look elsewhere while he's doing his prestidigitation. We're not talking about a little clue here and another little clue there, or an FBI memo that wasn't shared. We're talking about long-range planning and analysis of what strategic-intelligence agencies and high-level commissions and geopolitical thinkers around the globe -- including those inside the U.S. -- saw for years before 9/11 as likely scenarios in an age of terrorist attacks.
The conclusion about Al-Qaeda, stated again and again for years by government analysts, was basically: "They're coming, by air. Get prepared. They're well-organized, determined, and technically adept. And they want to hit big targets, well-known symbols of America." (There was a 1999 U.S. government study, for example, that pointed out that Al-Qaeda suicide-bombers wanted to crash aircraft into a number of significant Washington targets; during the 199 5 trial of Ramsi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, he revealed plans to dive-bomb a plane into CIA headquarters, and earlier he had told FBI agents that the list was expanded to include the Pentagon and other D.C. targets.)
Elements in the FBI, all over the country, who suspected what was coming, were clamoring, begging, for more agents to be used for counter-terrorism investigations, but were turned down by Attorney General Ashcroft; Ashcroft also gave counter-terrorism short shrift in his budget plans, not even placing anti-terrorism on his priority list; John O'Neill, the FBI's NYC antiterrorism director, resigned, asserting that his attempts at full-scale investigating were being thwarted by higher-ups; someone in the FBI, perhaps on orders of someone higher-up, made sure that the local FBI investigation in Minneapolis of Zacaria Moussauoi was compromised. All this while Ashcroft was shredding the Constitution in his martial law-like desire to amass information, and continues even now to further expand his police-state powers.
(Note: An FBI agent has filed official complaints over the bureau's interfering with antiterrorism investigations; his lawyers include David Schippers, who worked for the GOP side in the Clinton impeachment effort; Schippers says the agent knew in May 2001 that "an attack on lower Manhattan was imminent." A former FBI official said: "I don't buy the idea that we didn't know what was coming...Within 24 hours [of the attack], the Bureau had about 20 people identified, and photos were sent out to the news media. Obviously this information was available in the files and someone was sitting on it.")
One can accept the usual incompetency in intelligence collection and analysis from, say, an anti-terrorist desk officer at the FBI, but not from the highest levels of national defense and intelligence in and around the President, where his spokesman, in a bald-faced lie, told the world that the 9/11 attacks came with "no warning." More recently, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, in a quavering voice, tried to characterize the many warnings as mere "chatter," and concerned attacks "outside the U.S." But the many warning-reports focused on terrorist attacks both inside and outside the United States; the August 6th briefing dealt with planned attacks IN the United States.
Not only were there clear warnings from allies abroad, but the U.S., through its ECHELON and other electronic-intercept programs, may well have broken bin Laden's encryption code; for example, the U.S. knew that he told his mother on September 9: "In two days you're going to hear big news, and you're not going to hear from me for a while".
And, the word of an impending attack was getting out: put options (hedges that a stock's price is going to fall) in enormous quantities were being bought on United Airlines and American Airlines stock, the two carriers of the hijackers, as early as September 7; San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown was warned by "an airport security man" on September 10 to rethink his flight to New York for the next day; Newsweek reported that on September 10, "a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns"; many members of a Bronx mosque were also warned to stay out of lower Manhattan on September 11, etc. etc.
THIS ARTICLE CONTINUES WITH IMPORTANT AND INTERESTING INFO HERE:
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0601-01.htm
