What the September 11 commission hearings revealed

[RBHam]

Part four: A deliberate stand-down against airplane hijackings
By Patrick Martin
1 May 2004

EXCERPT:
Kerrey: Let me ask you one last question: How in God’s name did this thing happen? I’ve got to tell you, I hear battle stations and everything we’re doing, and at our airports we were at ease. We were stacked arms. We were not prepared for a hijacking. And you may say, “Well, we didn’t know all the conspiracy”—a hijacking surprised us. That’s what Betty Ong said, when we heard her voice, that the government and the FAA—none of us were prepared for even a simple hijacking. How in God’s name did that happen?

Black: Am I meant to answer that, sir?

Kerrey: Yes. If you can. If can’t fine. I mean, I’m not sure I could.

Black: My answer is that I don’t know, but what I will say is that, from my perspective, that’s why we tend to be a group of pretty paranoid people who don’t get to sleep much.

Kerrey’s point is worth pondering. The warhawk senator expresses exasperation at the transparent falseness of the Bush administration’s claims that it had taken the threat of terrorist attacks seriously before 9/11. Even elementary precautions against conventional hijacking were not taken, he points out. Why not? The suggestion that the entire, vast US intelligence apparatus went to sleep, folded up shop, “failed to imagine,” etc., is simply preposterous.

The far more plausible answer—which neither Kerrey nor Black can dare to utter—is that at some level the US government stood down its defenses deliberately. The Bush administration wanted a terrorist attack, perhaps an airline hijacking that would put at risk a few hundred people, to provide the pretext for the worldwide campaign of military aggression which has already seen US forces overthrow two governments and occupy Afghanistan and Iraq.

Rice, Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney & Co. have made incessant—and curiously worded—claims to the effect that if they had known that terrorists were going to hijack four airplanes on September 11 and fly them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, they would have done something about it. If there is any truth to these claims, it is this: the Bush administration was probably only generally aware that a terrorist attack was coming, and privately welcomed it as a casus belli. Its “failure to imagine” was that it did not anticipate the colossal damage that would be inflicted on September 11.

THE WHOLE, SORDID, TRUTH...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/may2004/911-m01.shtml

[goclark]

1. Check the wording from the Rethugs

I think this was from CondiLIEzza...

"if they had known that terrorists were going to hijack four airplanes on September 11 and fly them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, they would have done something about it."

But if they only knew that terrorists were going to hijack THREE
planes, they would have LIHOP

or

if they only knew that terrorists were going to hijack 2 helicopters on September 12 and let them fly into a building in Harlem and kill 200 people,they would have LIHOP.

It is not what they say but what they DON'T say that allowed them to continue to tell their lies.