Comment: After the first news bulletin on Sept 11 2001, I spent several hours watching news telecasts for updates. I don't know anyone who didn't watch the TV coverage, and frankly can't imagine anyone who wouldn't -- except, I guess, President Bush, who sat down at a desk with his back to the television as the catastrophe unfolded...   Helen & Harry     PERMANENT LINK

Putting it in plain English

Effort to curb coverage

Excerpt:  "It is infuriating that a report which shows that high- level people were not doing their jobs in a satisfactory manner before 9/11 is being suppressed," an intelligence official who has read the report told me, adding that "the report is potentially very embarrassing for the administration, because it makes it look like they weren't interested in terrorism before 9/11, or in holding people in the government responsible afterward."

Excerpt:  At a town-hall style forum in the swing state of Ohio, Cheney described Saddam as a "man who provided safe harbour and sanctuary to terrorists for years" and a man who "provided safe harbour and sanctuary as well for al Qaeda."

The commission that investigated the September 11, 2001 attacks has said it had not discovered any evidence of a "collaborative" relationship" between the fallen Iraqi government and al Qaeda.

Excerpt:  Given the wireless technology available on September 11 2001, these cell calls could not have been placed from high altitude.

The only way passengers could have got through to family and friends using their cell phones, is if the planes were flying below 8000 feet. Yet even at low altitude, below 8000 feet, cell phone communication is of poor quality.

The crucial question: at what altitude were the planes traveling, when the calls were placed?

Aug. 3, 2004: Miracles and wonders of September 11: Jet-to-ground cell phone calls, indestructable passports, Pentagrass by Alan Cabal, New York Press Aug. 2, 2004: Lone Senator takes government to task over 9/11 "lies," "cover-up" Aug. 1, 2004: Dereliction of duty on September 11 ... and today and tomorrow Gagged FBI whistleblower names names

Excerpt:  Considering what is at stake, our national security, we are entitled to demand answers to unanswered questions, and to ask for clarification of issues that were ignored and/or omitted from the report.

I, Sibel Edmonds, a concerned American Citizen, a former FBI translator, a whistleblower, a witness for a United States Congressional investigation, a witness and a plaintiff for the Department of Justice Inspector General investigation, and a witness for your own 9/11 Commission investigation, request your answers to, and your public acknowledgement of, the following questions and issues:

Excerpt:  Where the Report's authors test our credibility beyond reason is in their non-committal yet lapdog-trusting description of that seven minutes Bush dallied indecisively in a Florida schoolroom. Their report states, with palpable deference, that:

"The President was seated in a classroom when, at 9:05, Andrew Card whispered to him : "A second plane hit the second tower, America is under attack." The President told us [the Committee, in front of which he made a brief private appearance with his vice-president] his instinct was to project calm, not to have the country see an excited reaction at a moment of crisis. The press was standing behind the children; he saw their phones and pagers start to ring. The President felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening."

Of all the baloney that has been written about Bush, this adulatory self-serving crap takes the cake. A novice trial lawyer could have torn him to ribbons in a heartbeat. But the patriotic deference factor set in. George Bush told the senators what he says he believes he said, and nobody on that Commission was going to take issue with him.

Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani testified that he rushed to Ground Zero on Sept. 11, and was there before the first tower collapsed. According to Giuliani's testimony, he had to call the White House -- almost two hours after the FAA knew the hijackings were underway -- to ask what was going on.

Why didn't anyone in Washington call the mayor of New York?   =H&HH= | LINK

Excerpt:  Despite the best efforts of the Jersey Girls, leaders of the 9-11 Family Steering Committee, no member of the 9-11 commission this afternoon asked FBI chief Robert Mueller embarrassing questions about two former FBI translators who claim to have knowledge bearing on the attacks. One of them says she is being suppressed and can't talk because Attorney general John Ashcroft has placed a gag order on her.

Excerpt:  Specifically, when questioned by Congress in 2002 about why he tried to de-prioritize and slash funding for counterterrorism before 9/11, Ashcroft resorted to dishonest denials --even in the face of budget documents that proved he was not telling the truth.

Excerpt:  There's a raft of evidence to suggest that Philip D. Zelikow, the executive director of the commission, has personal, professional and political reasons not to see the commission hold Rice and other Bush officials accountable for pre-9/11 failings, and may be the de facto swing vote for Republicans on the panel. Here are just a few of them ...

Another 9/11 investigation that leads nowhere

Excerpt:  For months, the Bush administration and the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 terror attacks have been locked in low-intensity warfare. The White House opposed creation of the commission, and after it reluctantly yielded, it sought to bar the commission from seeing reams of documents pertaining to the attacks. The stonewalling went on so long that some commissioners say they're months behind in their work --and yet, the White House is insisting that the May 27 deadline for the commission's final report shouldn't be extended.

Excerpt:  It is, frankly, amazing that this has fallen down the memory hole. Recall two headlines from that period. The first, from the UK Guardian on May 19, 2002, was titled 'Bush Knew of Terrorist Plot to Hijack US Planes.' The first three paragraphs of this story read:

"George Bush received specific warnings in the weeks before 11 September that an attack inside the United States was being planned by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, US government sources said yesterday. In a top-secret intelligence memo headlined 'Bin Laden determined to strike in the US', the President was told on 6 August that the Saudi-born terrorist hoped to 'bring the fight to America' in retaliation for missile strikes on al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan in 1998. Bush and his aides, who are facing withering criticism for failing to act on a series of warnings, have previously said intelligence experts had not advised them domestic targets were considered at risk. However, they have admitted they were specifically told that hijacks were being planned."

Excerpt:  At his press conference yesterday, President Bush was asked about charges that he had received warnings prior to the September 11th attacks that a terrorist incident was imminent. He answered that even asking such a question was "an absurd insinuation." It was the same sentiment expressed by Bush's National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who said in May of 2002 that "[no one predicted] that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane."

The problem for the president and the administration is that the White House has previously admitted that the president had personally received such specific warnings. ...

Excerpt:  There is a 'rooted public perception of what al-Qaeda is', says Dolnik, who is currently carrying out research on the Terrorism and Political Violence Programme at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies in Singapore; but, he says, such perceptions are far from accurate. Dolnik argues that where many imagine that al-Qaeda is 'a super organisation of thousands of super-trained and super-secret members who can be activated any minute', in fact it is better understood as something like a 'global ideology that has not only attracted many smaller regional groups, but has also facilitated the boom of new organisations that embrace this sort of radical and violent thinking'. Dolnik and others believe that, in many ways, the thing we refer to as 'al-Qaeda' is largely a creation of Western officials.

'Bin Laden never used the term al-Qaeda prior to 9/11', Dolnik tells me. 'Nor am I aware of the name being used by operatives on trial. The closest they came were in statements such as, "Yes, I am a member of what you call al-Qaeda". The only name used by al-Qaeda themselves was the World Islamic Front for the Struggle Against Jews and Crusaders -- but I guess that's too long to really stick.'

Another of the men named by the FBI as a hijacker in the suicide attacks on Washington and New York has turned up alive and well.

The identities of four of the 19 suspects accused of having carried out the attacks are now in doubt.

Saudi Arabian pilot Waleed Al Shehri was one of five men that the FBI said had deliberately crashed American Airlines flight 11 into the World Trade Centre on 11 September.

His photograph was released, and has since appeared in newspapers and on television around the world.

Now he is protesting his innocence from Casablanca, Morocco.

He told journalists there that he had nothing to do with the attacks on New York and Washington, and had been in Morocco when they happened. ...

Comment: Is there anything we actually, really truly know about what happened on Sept. 11, 2001? Or is everything we've been told going to continue turning out to be bunk?   H&HH    PERMANENT LINK 

Excerpt:  Amazingly, Air Force One took off [from Florida after the attacks of September 11] with no military protection. It remained unprotected in the sky for more than an hour, though Florida is filled with Air Force bases just minutes away with planes that are supposed to be on twenty-four-hour alert.

Bush's aides later offered, and retracted, the excuse that he spent the day flying around the country because of threats to Air Force One believed to have been received at the White House. What nobody has ever explained is this: If you think Air Force One is to be attacked, why go up in Air Force One?

In this picture, which is worth even more than a thousand words, MediaLab has merged a map of the 9/11 planes' flightpaths with a map of military bases in those areas. The flights went through some of the most heavily militarized parts of the country, yet nothing could be done to stop them?

German intelligence told the CIA about suspected terror links of an Arab student over two years before he flew a plane into the World Trade Center, Stern reported. The information was ignored, the weekly magazine said.

Agents from Germany's BfV office for the Protection of the Constitution tipped off the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in March 1999 that student Marwan al-Shehhi had links to Mohammed Haydar Zammar, a suspected al-Qaeda organizer in Germany, Stern said, citing research it has undertaken with ARD television.

Al-Shehhi was one of the al-Qaeda hijackers who piloted two airliners into the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001. Another hijacked plane was flown into the Pentagon in Washington, and one crashed into the ground in Pennsylvania. More than 3,000 people died in the terror attacks.

The coverage of 9/11 shows, that mass-media is doing a perfect job if it comes to grave criminal activities like presidential sex with White House trainees, but if it comes to small sins like the 9/11 events and letting them happen, there had been (and still is) no investigative journalism at all. The mainstream-media has gone to rack and ruin and became a brothel of propaganda.

To understand this you do not need any conspiracy theories. All you need is a closer look at the official version of events -- and dozens of contradicting facts, which appeared shortly in the news, and then disappeared forever. But thanks to the memory and archives of the internet it has become possible to reconstruct the puzzle -- not sufficiently yet to get a "true" picture, but more than enough to show, what the official version of 9/11 really is: a conspiracy theory which lacks any evidence whatsoever.

The follow-up stories

It's not just the Saudi secret that's being kept.

The recent report of the joint congressional committee that probed intelligence failures before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon reveals what the Bush administration doesn't want Americans to know about the American government.

You would not know this from media accounts about this report. They have dwelled on what the Bush administration doesn't want us to know about the Saudi government.

This is the famous 28-page chapter, a series of blank lines across page after page, that the president refuses to declassify despite the pleadings of the bipartisan group of lawmakers and the Saudi government itself.

The dustup over Saudi secrets is exquisitely convenient. It obscures George W. Bush's relentless hold on U.S. secrets and on information he maintains should be secret, though it has not necessarily been before now.

The report's appendix hints at what these secrets are, and why they are kept. "Access Limitations Encountered by the Joint Inquiry," the section is titled.

The White House refused to provide contents of the president's daily brief. This would clear up questions about how much specific information President Bush received about an impending attack during the spring and summer of 2001 --a period in which the intelligence community was reporting with alarm that a "spectacular" attack against the United States involving "mass casualties" was in the works.

They are known as the "Jersey Girls" -- widows who lost their husbands on Sept. 11 and found a mission.

"I don't want anyone to know what it's like to watch your husband burn alive on television," Kristen Breitweiser told CBS News Correspondent Mika Brzezinski.

After the attacks they fought hard for an independent investigation, showing up in Washington on a regular basis. They wanted to know why so many government agencies failed to stop the 9/11 hijackers.

"Two years out and there still seems to be a shroud of secrecy," she said.

Thursday they were back on Capitol Hill to express in person their dissatisfaction with the congressional report investigating the attacks on America.

"The report is incomplete at best," said Breitweiser. "Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi. We have clear and convincing money trails linking the Saudi princes to the terrorists. Why that's not finding its way into the report, I don't know."

Patti Casazza says she knows why. "Geopolitical interests. Saudi Arabia provides a large amount of oil." ...

Withholding funding and documentation, the Bush Administration is the major roadblock for the 9/11 Commission. Why?

September 11 was the most traumatic incident in recent American history. Three thousand people died in New York, billions in property was destroyed, the national economy tanked and Americans' sense of security was shattered. The men responsible for the attacks are still at large and openly threaten to attack us again.

Yet the commission's budget is only $3 million, a pittance compared to the $100 million that was wasted getting to the bottom of Bill Clinton's Whitewater investment and his extramarital affairs. The hearings in the Republican-dominated Congress were a perfunctory affair that attracted even less attention from a sensation-oriented media than is being paid to this commission.

"The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning."

  --CIA Intelligence Report for President Bush, July, 2001

"We've been fighting for nearly 21 months -- fighting the administration, the White House," says Monica Gabrielle.

Her husband, Richard, an insurance broker who worked for Aon Corp. on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center's Tower 2, died during the attacks. "As soon as we started looking for answers we were blocked, put off and ignored at every stop of the way. We were shocked. The White House is just blocking everything."

Another 9/11 family advocate -- a former Bush supporter who requested anonymity -- was more blunt: "Bush has done everything in his power to squelch this [9/11] commission and prevent it from happening."

As Randal Davis, owner of a small Oregon floor cleaning company, noted in an e-mail to me, "If someone slips and falls at the supermarket where I contract, there is always an investigation. We want to know why things happen so they don't happen again." This investigative zeal applies to just about everything in America -- except 9/11. If nothing else, aren't Americans curious to know what went wrong that day?

Why did the US military, with the most powerful arsenal in world history, fail to prevent or at least try to stop a series of hijackings and crashes that went on for nearly two hours? Where was the Air Force? If President Bush and his cabinet were not, at this very moment, still trying to censor, suppress and delay the publication of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11, if there had been honest disclosure and straight stories from the beginning, perhaps all these "dark questions," as the Post puts it, would never have arisen. The great majority of people, sickened and overwhelmed by the horror of the attacks, unquestioningly accepts the White House version. Many thousands, however, are patiently stitching together the documented evidence and noting the huge holes in the fabric of that official story.

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 allow hijackers to board planes with box cutters and pepper spray? Is it luck when Emergency FAA and NORAD protocols 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.

If at some point we don't look to hold the individuals accountable for not doing their jobs properly then how can we ever expect for terrorists not to get lucky again?   --Mindy Kleinberg

Marvin P. Bush, the president's younger brother, was a principal in a company called Securacom that provided security for the World Trade Center, United Airlines, and Dulles International Airport. The company, Burns noted, was backed by KuwAm, a Kuwaiti-American investment firm on whose board Marvin Burns also served.

... According to Wayne Black, head of a Florida-based security firm, it is somewhat unusual for a single firm to handle security for both an airline and a airport. It's also unusual for a firm linked so closely with a foreign-owned company to handle security on such a “sensitive” international airport as Dulles. “When you have a security contract, you know the inner workings of everything,” he said. “Somebody knew somebody,” he added, or the contract would have been scrutinized more carefully.

Kean's conflict of interest is at the very heart of
what his commission is supposed to investigate

•   Part 1: A preliminary "hearing" in the Court of Common Sense
•   Part 2: The "vague warning" that mapped out a blueprint for disaster
•   Part 3: Osama bin Laden hunter John O'Neill was killed at World Trade Center:Was he also a casualty of the Bush administration? •   Part 4: The Pentagon tragedy -- A plot that keeps on thickening
•   Part 5: The events, planes and players of September 11: Putting it all together

Britain gave President Bush a categorical warning to expect multiple airline hijackings by the al-Qaeda network a month before the September 11 attacks which killed nearly 3000 people and triggered the international war against terrorism.

In December, the Joint Inquiry issued its report, but only 24 pages were publicly released out of a total of over 800.

In May 2003, Newsweek, Knight Ridder, and other media outlets reported that the Bush Administration was working to block the release of the Joint Inquiry's full report. In fact, officials were quoted as saying that they'd like to retroactively classify parts of the material that came out during the open hearings.

FBI and military intelligence officials in Washington say they were prevented for political reasons from carrying out full investigations into members of the Bin Laden family in the US before the terrorist attacks of September 11.

... They said the restrictions became worse after the Bush administration took over this year. The intelligence agencies had been told to "back off" from investigations involving other members of the Bin Laden family, the Saudi royals, and possible Saudi links to the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Pakistan.

"There were particular investigations that were effectively killed." ...

"Today we focus on Afghanistan, but the battle is broader. Every nation has a choice to make. In this conflict, there is no neutral ground. If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocence, they have become outlaws and murderers themselves. And they will take that lonely path at their own peril."

Comment: The speech is a typical load of hooey, but this one brief passage stands out, for its ironic honesty.   H&HH    PERMANENT LINK    == | LINK

Although American and British officials say they have "no doubt" that Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda terrorist organization were behind the crimes of Sept. 11, so far no actual evidence has been made public.

Pressure on Afghanistan is mounting as NATO and Britain, America's closest ally in the U.S.-led coalition against terrorism, both said yesterday they are convinced by U.S. evidence that bin Laden masterminded the 11 September attacks, which claimed an estimated 6,000 lives.

But the Afghanistan's ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, said the Taliban would not surrender bin Laden without proof of his involvement in the attacks. He said the Taliban had asked for such evidence, but the U.S. has only insisted on the handover of bin Laden.

Zaeef said: "We are part of the world and want to be treated as such."

Comment: Can anyone seriously believe that if the administration had evidence directly tying bin Laden and his organization to the September 11 attacks, it would not rush to make it public?   H&HH    PERMANENT LINK 

The fact that top officials, at a time of extraordinary crisis and public anxiety, lied to protect the president's image has immense implications. If, within 24 hours of the terror attacks, the White House was giving out disinformation to deceive the American public and world opinion, then none of the claims made by the government from September 11 to the present can be taken for good coin.

If Bush lied about his activities on the day of the attacks, why should anyone assume he has not lied about the government's investigation, the identity of the perpetrators, the motives and aims of US war preparations, and the intent and scope of expanded police powers demanded by his administration to wiretap, search and seize, and detain suspects?

Comment: So far as we know, no public documentation of the evidence against bin Laden and al-Qaeda has ever been released by the State Department, or any office of U.S. government.

Bin Laden and al-Qaeda are terrorists and murderers; there's ample evidence of that. But so long as the evidence comnnecting them to September 11 remains classified, too secret for citizens to see, every mention of bin Laden and al-Qaeda as the masterminds of Sept. 11 is, essentially, taking George Bush and Dick Cheney at their word ... and these are not men known for their honesty.  H&HH    PERMANENT LINK 

The White House has rejected requests from Afghanistan's ruling Taliban for proof that Osama bin Laden was responsible for last week's attacks. According to the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, the United States has enough evidence to try bin Laden in an American court.

The US Government said there would be no negotiations. It said that President Bush had made his conditions clear in a speech before Congress last night. Their position remains that there will be no discussions and no negotiations.

President Bush warned unless his demands were met, Afghanistan would share the same fate as the terrorists, and said that the hour was coming when America would take action.

... Afghanistan's ruling Taliban party insisted that America must produce firm evidence that bin Laden was behind the attacks, or they would not hand him over.

Update: Two years later, the other shoe drops.

Although controllers don't have complete details of the Air Force's chase of the Boeing 757, they have learned the F-16 made 360-degree turns to remain close to the commercial jet, the employee said.

"He must've seen the whole thing," the employee said of the F-16 pilot's view of United Flight 93's crash near Pittsburgh.

Exactly where the call came from is a bit of a mystery. The mayor would say only that it came from "my security people at the airport."

Excerpt:  ... the White House announced in May that it would have Vice President Dick Cheney study the potential problem of domestic terrorism --which the bipartisan group had already spent two and a half years studying --while assigning responsibility for dealing with the issue to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, headed by former Bush campaign manager Joe Allbaugh.

MUNICH, 11 September [2001]. According to this newspaper [Frankfurter [Germany] Allgemeine Zeitung], more than six months ago, western and near eastern news media received information and hints regarding planned attacks on “American and Israeli symbols, which stand out” by hijacked airplanes, not only in the United States.

According to the German secret service, the American, Israeli and apparently also the British secret services had adequate warnings. The American services had taken these warning seriously and increased the secret service measurements for the investigation. There have been disagreements, however, in regard to the method of defense against these kinds of attacks.

In response to inquiries from CBS News over why Ashcroft was traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines, the Justice Department cited what it called a "threat assessment" by the FBI, and said Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term.

"There was a threat assessment and there are guidelines. He is acting under the guidelines," an FBI spokesman said. Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department, however, would identify what the threat was, when it was detected or who made it.

Comment: Someone, it seems, knew something was in the air.   H&HH    PERMANENT LINK 

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