The two great myths that have settled across the nation, beyond the Hussein-9/11 connection, are that Clinton did not do enough during his tenure to stop the spread of radical terrorist organizations like al Qaeda, and that the attacks themselves could not have been anticipated or stopped. Blumenthal's insider perspective on these matters bursts the myths entirely, and reveals a level of complicity regarding the attacks within the journalistic realm and the conservative political ranks that is infuriating and disturbing.
Starting in 1995, Clinton took actions against terrorism that were unprecedented in American history. He poured billions and billions of dollars into counterterrorism activities across the entire spectrum of the intelligence community. He poured billions more into the protection of critical infrastructure. He ordered massive federal stockpiling of antidotes and vaccines to prepare for a possible bioterror attack. He order a reorganization of the intelligence community itself, ramming through reforms and new procedures to address the demonstrable threat. Within the National Security Council, "threat meetings" were held three times a week to assess looming conspiracies. His National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, prepared a voluminous dossier on al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, actively tracking them across the planet. Clinton raised the issue of terrorism in virtually every important speech he gave in the last three years of his tenure. In 1996, Clinton delivered a major address to the United Nations on the matter of international terrorism, calling it "The enemy of our generation."
Behind the scenes, he leaned vigorously on the leaders of nations within the terrorist sphere. In particular, he pushed Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to assist him in dealing with the threat from neighboring Afghanistan and its favorite guest, Osama bin Laden. Before Sharif could be compelled to act, he was thrown out of office by his own army. His replacement, Pervez Musharraf, pointedly refused to do anything to assist Clinton in dealing with these threats. Despite these and other diplomatic setbacks, terrorist cell after terrorist cell were destroyed across the world, and bomb plots against American embassies were thwarted. Because of security concerns, these victories were never revealed to the American people until very recently.
In America, few people heard anything about this. Clinton's dire public warnings about the threat posed by terrorism, and the massive non-secret actions taken to thwart it, went completely unreported by the media, which was far more concerned with stained dresses and baseless Drudge Report rumors. When the administration did act militarily against bin Laden and his terrorist network, the actions were dismissed by partisans within the media and Congress as scandalous "wag the dog" tactics. The TV networks actually broadcast clips of the movie "Wag The Dog" to accentuate the idea that everything the administration was doing was contrived fakery.
The bombing of the Sundanese factory at al-Shifa, in particular, drew wide condemnation from these quarters, despite the fact that the CIA found and certified VX nerve agent precursor in the ground outside the factory, despite the fact that the factory was owned by Osama bin Laden's Military Industrial Corporation, and despite the fact that the manager of the factory lived in bin Laden's villa in Khartoum. The book "Age of Sacred Terror" quantifies the al-Shifa issue thusly: "The dismissal of the al-Shifa attack as a scandalous blunder had serious consequences, including the failure of the public to comprehend the nature of the al Qaeda threat."
In Congress, Clinton was thwarted by the reactionary conservative majority in virtually every attempt he made to pass legislation that would attack al Qaeda and terrorism. His 1996 omnibus terror bill, which included many of the anti-terror measures we now take for granted after September 11, was withered almost to the point of uselessness by attacks from the right; Jesse Helms and Trent Lott were openly dismissive of the threats Clinton spoke of.
Clinton wanted to attack the financial underpinnings of the al-Qaeda network by banning American companies and individuals from dealing with foreign banks and financial institutions that al Qaeda was using for its money-laundering operations. Texas Senator Phil Gramm, chairman of the Banking Committee, killed Clinton's bill on this matter and called it "totalitarian." In fact, he was compelled to kill the bill because his most devoted patrons, the Enron Corporation and its criminal executives in Houston, were using those same terrorist financial networks to launder their own dirty money and rip off the Enron stockholders.
Just before departing office, Clinton managed to make a deal with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to have some twenty nations close tax havens used by al Qaeda. His term ended before the deal was sealed, and the incoming Bush administration acted immediately to destroy the agreement. According to Time magazine, in an article entitled "Banking on Secrecy" published in October of 2001, Bush economic advisors Larry Lindsey and R. Glenn Hubbard were urged by think tanks like the Center for Freedom and Prosperity to opt out of the coalition Clinton had formed. The conservative Heritage Foundation lobbied Bush's Treasury Secretary, Paul O'Neill, to do the same. In the end, the lobbyists got what they wanted, and the Bush administration pulled America out of the plan. The Time article stated, "Without the world's financial superpower, the biggest effort in years to rid the world's financial system of dirty money was short-circuited."
This laundry list of partisan catastrophes goes on and on. Far from being inept on the matter of terrorism, Clinton was profoundly activist in his attempts to address terrorism. Much of his work was foiled by right-wing Congressional conservatives who, simply, refused to accept the fact that he was President. These men, paid to work for the public trust, spent eight years working diligently to paralyze any and all Clinton policies, including anti-terror initiatives that, if enacted, would have gone a long way towards thwarting the September 11 attacks. Beyond them lay the worthless television media, which ignored and spun the terrorist issue as it pursued salacious leaks from Ken Starr's office, leaving the American people drowning in a swamp of ignorance on a matter of deadly global importance.
Over and above the theoretical questions regarding whether or not Clinton's anti-terror policies, if passed, would have stopped September 11 lies the very real fact that attacks very much like 9/11 were, in fact, stopped dead by the Clinton administration. The most glaring example of this came on December 31, 1999, when the world gathered to celebrate the passing of the millennium. On that night, al Qaeda was gathering as well.
The terrorist network planned to simultaneously attack the national airports in Washington DC and Los Angeles, the Amman Raddison Hotel in Jordan, a constellation of holy sites in Israel, and the USS The Sullivans at dock in Yemen. Each and every single one of these plots, which ranged from one side of the planet to the other, was foiled by the efforts of the Clinton administration. Speaking for the first time about these millennium plots, in a speech delivered to the Coast Guard Academy on May 17, 2000, Clinton said, "I want to tell you a story that, unfortunately, will not be the last example you will have to face."
Indeed.
Clinton proved that Osama bin Laden and his terror network can be foiled, can be thwarted, can be stopped. The multifaceted and complex nature of the international millennium plots rivals the plans laid before September 11, and involved counter-terrorism actions within several countries and across the entire American intelligence and military community. All resources were brought to bear, and the terrorists went down to defeat. The proof is in the pudding here. September 11, like the millennium plots, could have been avoided.
Couple this with other facts about the Bush administration we now have in hand. The administration was warned about a massive terror plot in the months before September by the security services of several countries, including Israel, Egypt, Germany and Russia. CIA Director George Tenet delivered a specific briefing on the matter to the administration on August 8, 2001. The massive compendium of data on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda compiled by Sandy Berger, and delivered to Condoleezza Rice upon his departure, went completely and admittedly unread until the attacks took place. The attacks themselves managed, for over an hour, to pierce the most formidable air defense system in the history of the Earth without a single fighter aircraft taking wing until the catastrophe was concluded.
It is not fashionable these days to pine for the return of William Jefferson Clinton. Given the facts above, and the realities we face about the administration of George W. Bush, and the realities we endure regarding the aftermath of September 11, the United States of America would be, and was, well served by its previous leader. That we do not know this, that September 11 happened at all, that it was such a wretched shock to the American people, that we were so woefully unprepared, can be laid at the feet of a failed news media establishment, and at the feet of a pack of power-mad conservative extremists who now have a great deal to atone for.
Had Clinton been heeded, the measures he espoused would have been put in place, and a number of powerful bulwarks would have been thrown into the paths of those commercial airplanes. Had the news media been something other than a purveyor of masturbation fantasies from the far-right, the American people would have know the threats we faced, and would have compelled their Congressmen to act. Had Congress itself been something other than an institution ruled by narrow men whose only desire was to break a sitting President by any means necessary, we would very probably still have a New York skyline dominated by two soaring towers.
Had the Bush administration not continued this pattern of gross partisan ineptitude and heeded the blitz of domestic and international warnings, instead of trooping off to Texas for a month-long vacation, had Bush's National Security Advisor done one hour's worth of her homework, we probably would not be in the grotesque global mess that currently envelops us. Never forget that many of the activists who pushed throughout the 1990s for the annihilation of all things Clinton are now foursquare in charge of the country today.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/101303A.shtml ==========
... and the shock was subsonic
and the smoke was deafening
between the setup and the punch line
cuz we were all on time for work that day
we all boarded that plane for to fly
and then while the fires were raging
we all climbed up on the windowsill
and then we all held hands
and jumped into the sky ...
- Ani DiFranco, "Self Evident"
I have a small glass of whiskey sitting beside me on the desk as I write this. I have no intention of drinking it - it is not even noon yet, and despite the notoriously dissolute reputation writers carry around, I have no intention of getting sloshed before the sun crosses the yardarm - but I need it to be there for the smell. The smell, you see, is my memory trigger for September 11. I was teaching that day, and shepherded a building filled with children through their own terror while stuffing mine down into my stomach, and walked out of school with my brave face still on, and stopped on the way home for a bottle of Bushmills, and sat down in front of my television with a glass, and poured, and watched, and wept.
The smell still reminds me, and so here sits the glass as I look back down a blood-soaked corridor of four years gone. I remember the day before that awful morning, Monday September 10th, looking forward to the Newsweek cover story that was going to put the bricks to the woeful Bush v. Gore decision. I remember scanning the headlines of virtually every major publication in the country that day, all of which had nothing but hard words for the wild boys in the White House. I remember thinking that things had been pretty bad, but maybe it was all about to turn around. I remember thinking that the country was finally waking up to a hard fact: this administration was thrashing around in the dark, and has no idea what it was doing.
And then, the smell of whiskey. Suddenly, mystically, the Bush administration could do no wrong, they walked on water, they were the exemplar of all that was good and strong and righteous. The flags came out. The double-barreled blast of "How dare you criticize the president at a time like this!" and "No one could have expected such a thing to happen!" drowned out anything but bullhorn blather, and we were off to the races. The bodies started to drop, the press lined up in stalwart support behind the administration and its policies, and a shroud of fearful stupidity descended over our public discourse. Anyone with a question, a concern or a critique was wrapped in plastic sheeting and duct tape, smothered by everyone's knee-jerk need to cling to an image of strength so as to cleanse their eyes and minds of what they had seen on that sun-blessed Tuesday morning.
We've had four years to let this all cook, and the cake coming out of our collective mental oven reeks of failure. The merry-go-round has rolled and rolled, and as we look things over after four long years, we are finding ourselves right back at the spot I found myself on that innocent Monday four years gone: this administration is thrashing around in the dark, and had no idea what it is doing.
Perspective these days is a beast with damned sharp teeth. Four years ago, we got kicked down onto our knees. In the aftermath, all we heard was that there was no way such an awful attack could have been stopped, so there was no fault to be found. Four years later, we hear the same kinds of excuses coming from our elected leadership in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I'm waiting for the moment when some Bush-bot gets on television and says that criticizing the president at a time like this only strengthens the resolve of the hurricanes.
Here's the thing, though. Katrina was the single most anticipated natural disaster in the history of the country. Report after report, study after study, everything and everyone for years and years said that a hurricane making a direct hit upon New Orleans would flood the city out of existence and kill a lot of people. The National Weather Service dipped into dire poetics to try to warn all of officialdom that the ram was coming. Yet despite all this, the catastrophe happened anyway.
Where is the parallel to September 11? Let's see.
In 1993, a $150,000 study was undertaken by the Pentagon to investigate the possibility of airplanes being used as bombs. A draft document of this was circulated throughout the Pentagon, the Justice Department, and to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
In 1994, a disgruntled Federal Express employee invaded the cockpit of a DC10 with the intention of crashing it into a company building.
Again in 1994, a pilot crashed a small airplane into a tree on the White House grounds, narrowly missing the building itself.
Also in 1994, an Air France flight was hijacked by members of a terrorist organization called the Armed Islamic Group, who intended to crash the plane into the Eiffel Tower.
The 1993 Pentagon report was followed up in September 1999 by a report titled "The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism." This report was prepared for the American intelligence community by the Federal Research Division, an adjunct of the Library of Congress. The report stated, "Suicide bombers belonging to Al Qaida's martyrdom battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House."
Ramzi Yousef was one of the planners and participants in the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. Yousef's right-hand man, Abdul Hakim Murad, was captured and interrogated in 1995. During that interrogation, Murad described a detailed plot to hijack airplanes and use them as weapons of terrorism. The primary plan was to commandeer eleven commercial planes and blow them up over the Pacific Ocean. The secondary plan was to hijack several planes, which would be flown into CIA headquarters, the World Trade Center, the Sears Tower, the White House and a variety of other targets.
Ramzi Yousef eluded capture until his final apprehension in Pakistan. During his 1997 trial, the plot described by Murad resurfaced. FBI agents testified in the Yousef trial that, "The plan targeted not only the CIA, but other U.S. government buildings in Washington, including the Pentagon."
Abdul Hakim Murad described plans to use hijacked commercial airplanes as weapons in 1995. Ramzi Yousef's trial further exposed the existence of these plans in 1997. Two reports prepared by the American government, one from 1993 and another from 1999, further detailed again the existence and danger of these plots. The Federal Express employee's hijacking attempt in 1994, the attempted airplane attack on the White House in 1994, and the hijacking of the Air France flight in 1994 by terrorists intending to fly the plane into the Eiffel Tower, provided a glaring underscore to the data.
FBI agents in Phoenix issued a warning in the summer of 2001 about suspicious Arab men receiving aviation training in American flight schools. The warning was never followed up. An agent in the Arizona field office commented in his case notes that Zacarias Moussaoui, arrested in August after suspicious activity at one of these flight schools, seemed like a man capable of flying airplanes into the World Trade Center.
Newspapers in Germany, France, Russia and London reported in the months before September 11th a blizzard of warnings delivered to the Bush administration from all points on the compass. The German intelligence service, BND, warned American and Israeli agencies that terrorists were planning to hijack commercial aircraft and use them as weapons to attack important American targets. Egypt warned of a similar plot to use airplanes to attack Bush during the G-8 summit in Genoa in June of 2001. This warning was taken so seriously that anti-aircraft missiles were deployed around Columbus Airport in Italy.
In August of 2001, Russian intelligence services notified the CIA that 25 terrorist pilots had been trained for suicide missions, and Putin himself confirmed that this warning was delivered "in the strongest possible terms" specifically regarding threats to airports and government buildings. In that same month, the Israeli security agency Mossad issued a warning to both the FBI and CIA that up to 200 bin Laden followers were planning a major assault on America, aimed at vulnerable targets. The Los Angeles Times later confirmed via unnamed U.S. officials that the Mossad warnings had been received.
On August 6, 2001, George W. Bush received his Presidential Daily Briefing. The briefing described active plots to attack the United States by Osama bin Laden. The word "hijacking" appeared in that briefing. Shortly after this briefing, George W. Bush departed to Texas for a month-long vacation.
"No one could have anticipated an attack like this," right? Nonsense. Just as with the hurricane, the warnings were there but the disaster happened anyway. The attacks became enveloped in this asinine mysticism, as if they were magic, as if they were some kind of unstoppable bolt from Heaven itself. This was politically expedient, and was also the product of a stunned populace that didn't want to even begin to consider the possibility that their leadership could screw up so catastrophically. In fact, the attacks had been anticipated, feared, described before they ever happened, and warned against. The attacks should have been stopped, should never have happened in the first place. Such is the only available conclusion to be reached once the mystical nonsense is ripped away.
The magical qualities attributed to 9/11 helped the Bush administration to pursue what has since become yet another colossal and bloody disaster: the invasion of Iraq. Had the proper perspective been in place, no one in their right mind would have allowed these fools to pursue an attack of this magnitude after screwing up on 9/11 so badly. Like September 11, like Katrina, this was a scenario that had oodles and oodles of people warning that chaos was in the offing. Like September 11, like Katrina, the Bush administration blew right through the warnings to do as it pleased.
More:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/091105A.shtml ==========
The fact is that the Bush administration has labored mightily and long to make sure no such answers are coming. They fought the creation of an independent investigative body because they wanted to be able to choose the chairman. Once they were gifted this privilege, they abused it with the appalling nomination of Henry Kissinger. If you want a fair and open examination of facts, regardless of shadowy loyalties and compromising corporate connections, you do not choose Kissinger. If you want the master of the black bag and the black op, the undisputed heavyweight champion of Washington insiderdom, the gold standard for cover-up and cover-your-ass, you cannot do better than Henry. This choice told us everything we need to know about the Bush administration's desire to get to the bottom of 9/11.
When I ask my question at these talks, someone in the audience always demands an answer. More often than not, I tell them about Zbigniew Brzezinski and the Afghan Trap. In 1979, Brzezinski was serving as Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor, and he decided the time had come to challenge the Soviet Union in their own back yard. At this time, Afghanistan was ruled by a communist puppet regime of the Soviets called the People's Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, or PDPA. Brzezinski instituted a plan to train fundamentalist Islamic mujeheddin fighters in Pakistan, and sent those fighters to attack the PDPA. The idea was not to destroy the PDPA, but to make the Soviets so nervous about the stability of their puppet regime that they would invade Afghanistan to protect it. Brzezinski wanted, at bottom, to hand the Soviet Union their own debilitating Vietnam.
The plan worked. The Soviets invaded in 1979, and over the next ten years spent its blood and treasure trying to defeat the Afghan warriors who banded together to defend their country. By 1989 millions of Afghan civilians had been killed, millions more had been internally displaced, and hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops had been killed or wounded. In the process, the nation of Afghanistan was torn to pieces. Worst of all, the United States ? which energetically worked to start the war, and which armed and funded the Afghan mujeheddin once the war was underway ? did absolutely nothing to aid ravaged Afghanistan once the Soviets withdrew. Brzezinski proudly described the Afghan Trap in an interview he gave to a French publication called Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998:
Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs <"From the Shadows">, that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?
Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.
Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?
B: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?
B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
How innocent we were in 1998. How gravely we misjudged the dire ramifications of empowering the Taliban. How profoundly we underestimated the strength of the "stirred-up Moslems" we armed and trained with American tax dollars. What a price we have paid.
You see, the Afghan Trap led to the incredibly vicious civil war in Afghanistan that came once the Soviets withdrew. By 1996, the Taliban ? made up of our secret allies in the Soviet war - had won the civil war and controlled the nation. The Afghan Trap likewise gave birth to a man named Osama bin Laden, who became a demigod to the Taliban and the Afghan people for his service in the war against the Soviets we started in the first place. The combination of our efforts to begin that war, the social annihilation in Afghanistan caused by that war, the Taliban's rise, and the succor they gave bin Laden, led like an arrow to the attacks of September 11 and the dire estate we currently endure.
How ironic that Brzezinski's desire to end one Cold War gave birth to another. Actions, I tell the listeners at these talks, have consequences. You stir up a hornet's nest, best you expect to get stung. Boy, did we ever get stung.
The actions of a Carter administration official in 1979 can hardly be laid at the feet of George W. Bush and his administration, of course. It is telling, however, that no one in that administration has made an effort to put 9/11 into the historical context to which it belongs. Why such an oversight? Perhaps the folks in the administration believe Americans too dull-witted to comprehend the complex Cold War motivations that gave birth to Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. Perhaps they are afraid to speak of such things, because it suggests that we inadvertently bought the trouble that came two Septembers ago to find us.
Then again, perhaps the administration was engaged in similar gamesmanship before 9/11. Perhaps they are afraid to address the issue at all. The nomination of Kissinger to the 9/11 committee certainly suggests a desire on the administration's part to never, ever, ever have the facts of that attack come fully to light. They do not want people to know that Brzezinski's actions in 1979, and the naivet頲egarding the potential blowback from his decisions he displayed in 1998, was compounded by the actions of the Bush administration in 2001. Brzezinski asked in his interview what was more important in 1979: Ending the Cold War or creating the Taliban? In the early days of the Bush administration, a similar question was certainly asked - what is more important in 2001: Gaining access to an incredibly lucrative energy supply, or the dangers of threatening the Taliban?
A pipeline project, aimed at exploiting massive natural gas reserves along the Caspian Sea in Turkmenistan, was revived by the Bush administration when it arrived in Washington in January of 2001. The pipeline project, which sought to bring oil and natural gas from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to a warm water port, had been the brainchild of American petroleum giant Unocal for much of the 1990s. After the destruction of two American embassies in Africa in 1998 by Osama bin Laden, the Clinton administration forbade any American companies from doing business with the Taliban, which had been sheltering bin Laden in Afghanistan. Unocal's pipeline project was frozen.
After the Bush administration came to power, reinvigorating the pipeline project became a high-priority matter of policy. Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca was dispatched to Pakistan to discuss the pipeline with Taliban officials in August of 2001. Rocca, a career officer with the CIA, had been deeply involved in Agency activities within Afghanistan. A Pakistani foreign minister was present at the meeting, and witnessed the exchange.
How does this pipeline relate to September 11th? The main obstacle to the completion of the pipeline was the fact that it had to pass through Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. The project would receive no international support unless the Afghan government somehow became legitimized. In bargaining for the pipeline, the Bush administration demanded that the Taliban reinstate deposed King Mohammad Zahir Shah as ruler of Afghanistan, and demanded that the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden for arrest. In return, the Taliban would reap untold billions in profit from the pipeline. A central part of the Bush administration's bargaining tactics involved threats of war if these conditions for the legitimization of Afghanistan were not met.
The BBC of London reported on September 18th, 2001 of the existence of war plans on Bush's desk aimed at Afghanistan. Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, stated that the war plans were slated for October of 2001. Conditions set by the Bush administration to avoid war involved the Taliban's handing over of bin Laden and the acceptance of King Zahir Shah. Naik went so far as to doubt that America would hold off on war even if these conditions were met.
The result was total disaster. The Bush administration fundamentally misunderstood the Taliban regime, much the way Brzezinski did in 1998. To bring back the King and hand bin Laden over to the West would have been tantamount to suicide for the Taliban. The arrival of Shah would shove them out of power, and handing bin Laden over to the West would have been seen as a high crime to the Islamic world. Instead of acquiescing to the hard-sell tactics of the Bush administration, the Taliban unleashed Osama bin Laden upon America. They were going to lose everything, and chose to attack first in the hope that all-out war would break out in Central Asia and rally other Muslim nations to their cause.
Actions do indeed have consequences. The motivations behind 20 months of silence regarding the cause of 9/11, along with the appalling nomination of Kissinger as chief investigator, become far more clear.
The families of those slain on 9/11 have not taken all of this lying down. They have sued the government of Saudi Arabia for civil damages totaling $1 trillion, accusing them of harboring and aiding the terrorists who took down the Towers. There is profound merit to their claim, as 15 of the 19 terrorists who flew the planes on 9/11 came from Saudi Arabia, as does Osama bin Laden and the Wahabbi sect of Islam that motivates their jihad. The suit seems logical and reasonable. It is disturbing, then, to consider the legal team hired by the Saudi government to defend against the charges. Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the Saudi defense minister, is being represented in court by the prestigious Houston law firm Baker Botts.
The 'Baker' in Baker Botts is James Baker III, Secretary of State to George Bush Sr. and prime fighter for Bush Jr. in the Florida election brawl. Baker also shares another employer with Bush Sr.: Massive multinational corporation The Carlyle Group, owner of the arms manufacturer United Defense, which is making a gold-plated mint off the war in Iraq.
I'd be gratified if someone could explain all this away. I could sleep at night.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/042203A.shtml ==========
No one anticipated the kinds of strikes that took place in New York and at the Pentagon."
- 'The 9/11 Debate,' Washington Post editorial, 03-24-04 That line from the Washington Post has been repeated ad nauseam by other newspapers, and across radio and television. It has achieved the status of bedrock conventional wisdom, of something axiomatic. These statements are a paraphrase of National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who said on May 17th, 2002, "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile - a hijacked airplane as a missile."
This kind of thinking elevates the attacks to something mythical, a magic trick, an act of God that no mere mortal could possibly have interfered with or anticipated. In fact, it was an operation planned for years by men who left clear tracks. As such, it could have been stopped. It should have been stopped. Saying so, however, interferes with the cultivation of a national attitude of vengeful victimhood, an attitude the Bush administration is actively promoting for its own benefit and political protection. Surely we were victims of terrorism on September 11, but was this unavoidable? Are the Washington Post, Condoleezza Rice and others correct in stating that no one anticipated these kinds of attacks?
The facts say no.
Ramzi Yousef was one of the planners and participants in the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. Yousef's right-hand man, Abdul Hakim Murad, was captured and interrogated in 1995. During that interrogation, Murad described a detailed plot to hijack airplanes and use them as weapons of terrorism. The primary plan was to commandeer eleven commercial planes and blow them up over the Pacific Ocean. The secondary plan was to hijack several planes, which would be flown into CIA headquarters, the World Trade Center, the Sears Tower, the White House and a variety of other targets.
Ramzi Yousef eluded capture until his final apprehension in Pakistan. During his 1997 trial, the plot described by Murad resurfaced. FBI agents testified in the Yousef trial that, "The plan targeted not only the CIA, but other U.S. government buildings in Washington, including the Pentagon."
In 1993, the same year as the first World Trade Center attack, a $150,000 study was undertaken by the Pentagon to investigate the possibility of airplanes being used as bombs. A draft document of this was circulated throughout the Pentagon, the Justice Department, and to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The circulation of the report was timely.
In 1994, a disgruntled Federal Express employee invaded the cockpit of a DC10 with the intention of crashing it into a company building. Again in 1994, a pilot crashed a small airplane into a tree on the White House grounds, narrowly missing the building itself. Also in 1994, an Air France flight was hijacked by members of a terrorist organization called the Armed Islamic Group, who intended to crash the plane into the Eiffel Tower.
The 1993 Pentagon report was followed up in September 1999 by a report titled 'The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism.' This report was prepared for the American intelligence community by the Federal Research Division, an adjunct of the Library of Congress. The report stated, "Suicide bombers belonging to Al Qaida's martyrdom battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House."
Abdul Hakim Murad described plans to use hijacked commercial airplanes as weapons in 1995. Ramzi Yousef's trial further exposed the existence of these plans in 1997. Two reports prepared by the American government, one from 1993 and another from 1999, further detailed again the existence and danger of these plots. The Federal Express employee's hijacking attempt in 1994, the attempted airplane attack on the White House in 1994, and the hijacking of the Air France flight in 1994 by terrorists intending to fly the plane into the Eiffel Tower, provided a glaring underscore to the data.
No one anticipated the use of airplanes as weapons before September 11? Given the facts, the claim from Condoleezza Rice, carried forward to today by the mainstream media, seems impossible to believe.
We come, next, to priorities.
A mission statement from the internal FBI Strategic Plan, dated 5/8/98, describes the FBI's Tier One priority as 'counterterrorism.' The FBI, under the Clinton administration, was making counterterrorism its highest priority. The official annual budget goals memo from Attorney General Janet Reno to department heads, dated 4/6/00, detailed how counterterrorism was her top priority for the Department of Justice. In the second paragraph, she states, "In the near term as well as the future, cybercrime and counterterrrorism are going to be the most challenging threats in the criminal justice area. Nowhere is the need for an up-to-date human and technical infrastructure more critical."
Contrast this with the official annual budget goals memo from Attorney General Ashcroft, dated 5/10/01, which directly compares to the 4/6/00 Reno memo. Out of seven strategic goals described, not one mentions counterterrorism. An internal draft of the Department of Justice's plans to revamp the official Department of Justice Strategic Plan, dated 8/9/01, describes Ashcroft's new priorities for the Department of Justice. The areas Ashcroft wished to focus on were highlighted in yellow. Specifically highlighted by Ashcroft were domestic violent crime and drug trafficking prevention. Item 1.3, entitled "Combat terrorist activities by developing maximum intelligence and investigative capability," was not highlighted.
There is the internal FBI budget request for 2003 to the Department of Justice, dated late August 2001. This was not the FBI's total budget request, but was instead restricted only to the areas where the FBI specifically requested increases over the previous year's budget. In this request, the FBI specifically asked for, among other things, 54 translators to translate backlog of intelligence gathered, 248 counterterrorism agents and support staff , and 200 professional intelligence researchers. The FBI had repeatedly stated that it had a serious backlog of intelligence data it has gathered, but could not process the data because they did not have the staff to analyze or translate it into usable information. Again, this was August 2001.
The official Department of Justice budget request from Attorney General Ashcroft to OMB Director Mitch Daniels is dated September 10, 2001. This document specifically highlights only the programs slated for above-baseline increases or below-baseline cuts. Ashcroft outlined the programs he was trying to cut. Comparing this document to the FBI's request to the Department of Justice request described above, it is clear that Ashcroft ignored the FBI's anti-terrorism requests. Specifically, Ashcroft was planning to ignore the FBI's specific requests for more translators, counterintelligence agents and researchers. It additionally shows Ashcroft was trying to cut funding for counterterrorism efforts, grants and other homeland defense programs before the 9/11 attacks.
The difference in priorities is clear. The Clinton administration was focusing on terrorism and al Qaeda as its highest priority. This focus was dramatically reversed by senior officials within the Bush administration. The idea that no one could have anticipated the kinds of attacks which came on September 11 comes into sharper focus. It isn't that "no one" could have anticipated the threat. It is the Bush administration itself that could never have anticipated the threat, because they were paying little attention to the existence of these threats.
Then, of course, there were the warnings.
FBI agents in Phoenix issued warnings in the summer of 2001 about suspicious Arab men receiving aviation training in American flight schools. The warning was never followed up. An agent in the Arizona field office commented in his case notes that Zacarias Moussaoui, arrested in August after suspicious activity at one of these flight schools, seemed like a man capable of flying airplanes into the World Trade Center.
Newspapers in Germany, France, Russia and London reported in the months before September 11th a blizzard of warnings delivered to the Bush administration from all points on the compass. The German intelligence service, BND, warned American and Israeli agencies that terrorists were planning to hijack commercial aircraft and use them as weapons to attack important American targets. Egypt warned of a similar plot to use airplanes to attack Bush during the G-8 summit in Genoa in June of 2001. This warning was taken so seriously that anti-aircraft missiles were deployed around Columbus Airport in Italy.
In August of 2001, Russian intelligence services notified the CIA that 25 terrorist pilots had been trained for suicide missions, and Putin himself confirmed that this warning was delivered "in the strongest possible terms" specifically regarding threats to airports and government buildings. In that same month, the Israeli security agency Mossad issued a warning to both the FBI and CIA that up to 200 bin Laden followers were planning a major assault on America, aimed at vulnerable targets. The Los Angeles Times later confirmed via unnamed U.S. officials that the Mossad warnings had been received.
On August 6, 2001, George W. Bush received his Presidential Daily Briefing. According to reports, the briefing described active plots to attack the United States by Osama bin Laden. The word "hijacking" appeared in that briefing. Shortly after this briefing, George W. Bush departed to Texas for a month-long vacation.
Richard Clarke, former Director of Counter-Terrorism for the National Security Council, has worked on the terrorist threat for the Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, and Bush Jr. administrations, amassing a peerless resume in the field. He is now a central figure in the commission investigating the September 11 attacks. Clarke has laid bare an ugly truth: The administration of George W. Bush did not consider terrorism or the threat of al Qaeda to be a priority prior to the attacks.
Clarke, along with former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who as a member of the National Security Council was privy to military strategy meetings, indicate that the Bush administration was obsessed with an invasion of Iraq from the day it arrived in Washington. This obsession continued even after the attacks, despite the fact that the entire intelligence community flatly declared that Iraq was not involved.
The attacks of September 11 were not mythical, not a magic trick, not an act of God that no mere mortal could possibly have interfered with or anticipated. The warnings, the data, stretch back all the way to 1993. The Bush administration came into power and absorbed a barrage of warnings about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. Former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger told Condoleezza Rice that al Qaeda terrorism would be the single most important problem the Bush administration would deal with while in office, and handed her a huge file on the matter. Rice has admitted that she did not read that file until after the attacks of September 11 had taken place.
Of course the Bush administration could never have anticipated an attack like the one that took place on September 11. They weren't paying attention to the threat. Had they done so, the attack could have been stopped. Final proof of this can be found in the events of December 31, 1999. Al Qaeda planned, and put into motion, simultaneous attacks against the national airports in Washington DC and Los Angeles, the Amman Raddison Hotel in Jordan, several holy sites in Israel, and the USS The Sullivans at dock in Yemen. In scope, scale and import, these attacks would have matched the catastrophe of September 11. Each and every single one of these attacks, which ranged from one side of the planet to the other, were foiled by the efforts of the Clinton administration. They were able to stop these attacks because of one simple reason: They were paying attention to the threat.
September 11 could have been stopped. September 11 should have been stopped. The "No one could have anticipated this" excuse is dangerous nonsense.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0403/S00295.htm 
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