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Jeez Bob...

Has it ever occurred to you that the U.S. government looks upon your(obvious)obsession as a welcome diversion from the very real and uncontroversial crimes that are well documented? I would suggest focusing on what is not discussed, yet very well documented and uncontroversial, rather than wasting everyone's time with speculation. This of course only matters if you are serious about working to prevent suffering in the world. Otherwise, it seems to me, that you are only interested in fantasizing about slaying some bogeyman.

What is the goal? Do you honestly think that this avenue will enlighten people and result in change? For fucksake, look at history and how real change was achieved.

Another Bush administration mythograph has been Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of
Defense. But Rumsfeld as well has a troubled relation to truth. In a press conference, he
was asked if he planned to lie in order to protect state secrets. Rumsfeld boasted that he
was clever enough to keep secrets in other ways, but that his underlings might have to
preserve secrecy any way they could:

Rumsfeld: Of course, this conjures up Winston Churchill’s famous phrase
when he said – don’t quote me on this, okay? I don’t want to be quoted on
this, so don’t quote me. He said sometimes the truth is so precious that it
must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies…. That is a piece of history,
and I bring it up just for the sake of background. I don’t recall that I’ve
ever lied to the press, I don’t intend to, and it seems to me that there will
not be reason for it. There are dozens of ways to avoid having to put
yourself in a position where you’re lying. And I don’t do it.

Reporter: That goes for everybody in the Department of Defense?

Rumsfeld: You’ve got to be kidding. (Laughter.)
(September 25, 2001)

Theodore Olson, together with his wife Barbara Olson, had been the host of a salon
which served in 1998-1999 as a meeting place for one of the principal cliques supporting
the Clinton impeachment. This group included the late Wall Street Journal editor Robert
Bartley, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Federal Appellate Judge Robert
Silberman, failed Supreme Court candidate Robert Bork, and other militant reactionaries.
Olson had on one occasion lectured the US Supreme Court that “it is easy to imagine an
infinite number of situations…where government officials might quite legitimately have
reasons to give false information out.” (Yahoo News, March 22, 2001) Mrs. Olson was
later counted among the victims of 9/11; we will return to her story.

In neocon philosophy, the art of lying has been raised to a fine art. Let us take the case of
William Kristol, a leading Washington Straussian, and founder of the Project for a New
American Century, a congeries of warmongers. Kristol told Nina J. Easton, the author of
a profile of some top neocon leaders of the 1990s, Gang of Five (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2000) that “One of the main teachings [of Strauss] is that all politics are limited
and none of them is really based on the truth. So there's a certain philosophic disposition
where you have some distance from these political fights....You don't take yourself or
your causes as seriously as you would if you thought this was 100% ‘truth.’ Political
movements are always full of partisans fighting for their opinion. But that's very different
from 'the truth.'” With the help of money from Rupert Murdoch, Kristol has cultivated the
art of the Goebbels Big Lie since 1995 in his weekly magazine, the Weekly Standard, the
neocon house organ.

But, discredited as Tenet, Clarke, Powell, the FBI, Rumsfeld, Kristol, and Bush may
appear, perhaps other proof has been offered since? No.
In the days right after the attacks, Colin Powell promised the world a white paper or
white book to set forth the contentions of the United States government about what had
happened, with supporting evidence. Powell did this on NBC’s Meet the Press, where the
following exchange occurred on September 23, 2001:

Question: Are you absolutely convinced that Osama Bin Laden was
responsible for this attack?

Secretary Powell: I am absolutely convinced that the al Qaeda network,
which he heads, was responsible for this attack. […]

Question: Will you release publicly a white paper, which links him and his
organization to this attack, to put people at ease?

Secretary Powell: We are hard at work bringing all the information
together, intelligence information, law enforcement information. And I
think, in the near future, we will be able to put out a paper, a document,
that will describe quite clearly the evidence we have linking him to the
attack. And also, remember, he has been linked to previous attacks against
US interests and he was already indicated for earlier attacks against the
United States. (www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2001/5012.htm)

Hey guys... if they were just going to plant explosives in the WTC anyhow, um, why bother with the planes?

Did they want us to take off our shoes that badly?

The following day, September 24, saw a front page article in the New York Times which
bragged that Powell’s evidence “reaches from the southern tip of Manhattan to the
foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan.” However, there was clearly
something wrong with the US case, since, in an appearance with Bush at the White
House rose garden on September 24, Powell somewhat obliquely retracted his promise.
And on that same afternoon, Bush’s spokesman Ari Fleischer, a past master of
mendacity, said that Powell had been the victim of a misunderstanding. No white paper
would be forthcoming, he suggested. According to Fleischer, much of the information of
Bin Laden was classified, and making it public would compromise US intelligence
methods and sources. Even the press trollops in the White House briefing room rebelled
at this attempted sleight of hand. A reporter challenged Ari, asking if there was in fact
“any plan to present public evidence so that the average citizen, not just Americans, but
people all over the world can understand the case against Bin Laden.” Fleischer
disappeared in a cloud of verbiage: “In a democracy it’s always important to provide the
maximum amount of information possible. But I think the American people also
understand that there are going to be times when that information cannot immediately be
forthcoming.” As of this writing, it still has not been forthcoming.

Bush himself rejected any white paper. He said that any such publication may “make the
war more difficult to win.” (AP, September 24, 2001) Amidst much embarrassment, the
Bush regime quickly fell back on the following ploy: they would assemble a watertight
case against Bin Laden, but this was so sensitive that could only be shown to
governments. We must always bear in mind that these assertions were not presented in
the manner of a scholarly debate, but as part of brutal pressure on sovereign states to
yield to Bush’s manichean Diktat.

Even though Bush did not have enough information on the 9/11 events to put out a
credible white paper, he nevertheless ordered the FBI to curtail their investigation of the
case. The FBI order to stop probing described the investigation done so far as “the most
exhaustive in its history.” A government official said in an understatement that “The
investigative staff has to be made to understand that we’re not trying to solve a crime
now.”

Well, I'll give you this much, clocker bob: at the beginning of this thread, I was skeptical in the extreme of everything you were saying. Now, at the end of the thread, I'm intrigued, and I'll watch this video when I get home.

Do you think "New Pearl Harbor" is the best term for it, if you're right? How about "New Maine"? How about "New Gulf of Tonkin"? "New Lusitania"?

There's a lot out there about the inappropriateness of Afghanistan as our first target after 9/11. I don't have a link handy, but for one thing, the best intelligence suggested that bin Laden wasn't even in Afghanistan. Maybe I'll try to find a link later.

If taking Afghanistan was so useful, why did we just ignore the shit out of it after we whipped 'em a bit?

Antero wrote:If taking Afghanistan was so useful, why did we just ignore the shit out of it after we whipped 'em a bit?

I don't know what else we need to do, now that we've installed a former director of Unocal as the first "democratically elected" president of Afghanistan. Mission Accomplished, as it were.

Antero wrote:If taking Afghanistan was so useful, why did we just ignore the shit out of it after we whipped 'em a bit?

There is nothing useful in Afganistan. That is why we didn't bother fighting there. And that is why we have little interest in building it up.
Pipeline? Seems more to me like a convenient fleecing opportunity, than a motive. If they had an undeveloped gold mine, we'd probably exploit that as well.

Afghanistan is an outpost. It's a nice prime location for us to have installed a bunch of US forces. It's a point from which we can deploy military forces to other parts of the region. It's close to a lot of stuff that interests us, including Russia. The bear is sleeping, but from what I've heard, Russia isn't as happy as it was a decade or so ago.

What happens when Saudi Arabia says "get all of your shit out of here, right now!!"??? Now they can move it to Afghanistan.

BANKRUPT LEFTISTS

Not just the impotence, but the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of many US leftists was
pitilessly displayed by the events of 9/11. Many who would never dream of believing
Bush or the FBI on matters far less important were willing to swallow the entire official
story this time around. Noam Chomsky went so far as to issue a lengthy interview in the
wake of 9/11; he even had it published as a small book. This passage is at the heart of the
matter:

Q: NATO is keeping quiet until they find out whether the attack was
internal or external. How do you interpret this?

Chomsky: I do not think that is the reason for NATO’s hesitation. There is
no serious doubt that the attack was ‘external.’ […]

Q: Could you say something about connivance and the role of America
secret service?

Chomsky: I don’t quite understand the question. This attack was surely an
enormous shock and surprise to the intelligence services of the West,
including those of the United States.” (Chomsky 17)

This leaves our poor Chomsky far to the right of the 9/11 euroskeptics – and that means
foreign ministers, defense ministers, and generals -- in the NATO ministerial council!

Michael Parenti’s book on the terrorism trap falls into it, at least as far as the 9/11 official
story is concerned. Amy Goodman of the Democracy Now radio program banned all
criticism of the official 9/11 story, while proclaiming her own superlative courage in
tackling issues like East Timor. When she finally let the dignified academic David Ray
Griffin come on her show, she insisted on balancing him with the slimy character
assassin Chip Berlet, who knew nothing in particular about 9/11.
The left wing of the Democratic Party, grouped around The Nation magazine, was
rudderless. Some time after 9/11 this magazine produced an anthology of its most
important post-9/11 articles. A key contributor to this collection was Jonathan Schell,
who wrote in his introduction: “It was clear from the start that Islamic fundamentalists
were responsible, almost certainly in the service of the Al Qaeda terrorist organization,
but the magnitude of the force involved remained hazy in the extreme.” (Vanden Heuvel
xv) Other articles in the collection, some by very distinguished and well-meaning
authors, may have more or less merit, but they do not rise above this inadequate level.

The US left might object all it liked to the consequences which Bush derived from his
fabricated 9/11 premise, but unless those leftists were willing to attack the premise, it was
clear that their efforts would not be effective. Even in the pages of The Nation, it was the
neocon bully Christopher Hitchens, billed until only yesterday as the “last Marxist,” who
seemed to carry the day, based on the refusal of all the others to challenge the myth he
shamelessly used to club them into submission.

Some governments found ways to leak their estimate of Bush’s alleged proof. One was
the government of Pakistan, which had been placed under a US war ultimatum to
cooperate in an attack on Afghanistan. Here the distinguished retired military leader
General Mirza Aslam Beg told an interviewer some months after the fact that the
“evidence” provided to Pakistan's Musharraf government “would not hold in a court of
law, because of the inherent weaknesses.” (EIR, December 10, 2001) In a newspaper
interview, Gen. Beg insisted that the attacks had been the work of highly-trained experts
“who used high technology for destruction. He argued that even ordinary trained pilots
could not have carried out the missions observed. (Nawa-Waqt, September 13, 2001)1
Egyptian strategic analyst Tal’at Muslim argued in al-Akhbar of Cairo that the resources
available to Arab and Islamic terror organizations were “well below” what was plainly
necessary to carry out operations on the scale of 9/11. (September 13, 2001) In the
Palestinian paper al-Quds, Hatim Abu Sha’ban found that the US authorities were
searching for the perpetrators in entirely the wrong places. “They accused…the least
likely to be perpetrators in light of the operation’s nature, which requires great planning
capabilities, knowledge of information, and mobility on the part of the criminals who
committed this terrorist operation.” (September 18, 2001)

The Saudi government complained that its citizens were being accused of crimes, but that
the US had provided no hard evidence. Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef said that he
viewed Osama Bin Laden more “as a tool,” than the mastermind of the September 11
attacks. “He's at the top of the pyramid from the media point of view, but from my
personal views and conviction, I don't think he's at the top of the pyramid,” commented
Prince Nayef. U.S. officials were claiming that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. But
Nayef noted that “until now, we have no evidence that assures us they are related to
September 11. We have not received anything in this regard from the United States.”
(New York Times, December 10, 2001)

Some indication of the problems being encountered by the US bureaucracy in trying to
pin 9/11 on Bin Laden were reflected in a Wall Street Journal article entitled “Faint Trail: It's Surprisingly Tough To Pin Terror Attacks on the ‘Prime Suspect.’”

Here the paucity of evidence was the dominant note. Such evidence as did exist was largely circumstantial,
the Journal noted, such as ties of suspected hijacker Mohammed Atta to Egyptian Islamic
Jihad, which allegedly was part of bin Laden's Al Qaeda; the presence of one hijacker in
Malaysia in January 2000, meeting with someone linked to the bombing of the USS Cole,
which was in turn allegedly linked to bin Laden; communications intercepts showing Al
Qaeda operatives had some advanced knowledge of the strikes; or that two of the
suspected hijackers were perhaps linked to a suspected bin Laden operative in Boston.
The Journal conceded that the issue of proof was a key component of the U.S.'s ability to
enlist support of Islamic countries such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and
perhaps Syria. “The issue of proof is no small matter,” one Administration official was
cited as observing. But the US case was plainly a lame one, with an unidentified
intelligence official concluding weakly that “no information has come up that suggests
that bin Laden wasn't involved.” None of this could even begin to explain how these rag-
tag forces could mount such a spectacular action. Here was surely no justification for
abandoning the entire edifice of international law, which had been formed in large part as
a result of wars in which tens of millions of people had perished.