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Reasons to Doubt the Official Story about the 9/11 Attacks
By Andrew Mills (about the author) Page 3 of 4 page(s)
4. President Bush initially refused to testify before the Commission, and subsequently refused to testify without Vice President Cheney.
5. The Administration and House Speaker Dennis Hastert mounted stiff resistance to the attempt to extend the life of the Commission to January 2005. The Family Steering Committee obtained the support of the Democratic caucus for this extension. However when Hastert and his Chief of Staff heard this, they went back on their word that they would support the January 2005 extension if the Democrats agreed. So only a two-month extension was obtained, not the requested 8-month extension.
6. The Department of Defense has prohibited the officers involved with the Able Danger project of the Special Operations Command to speak to members of Congress or to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee about their pre-9/11 identification of Mohammed Atta, among others, as a terrorist.
7. The Justice Department put a gag order on FBI whistle-blower Sybel Edmunds, preventing her from talking to members of Congress or the media about major pre 9/11 intelligence mishandling in the translation department of the FBI.
8. The Administration continues to refuse to release or show most of videotapes it has of the crash of Flight 77 into the Pentagon.
9. In February 2002, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence agreed to conduct a joint inquiry into the activities of the U.S. intelligence community in connection with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Their report dated December 2002 is titled: Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001. Unfortunately, 28 pages of that report were redacted, and the Administration still refuses to make these pages public.
10. Overall there was a complete lack of transparency on the part of the federal government, in terms of both the executive branch and the legislative branch, when it came to putting on the table all the facts known regarding the 9/11 attacks.
Lies by Government Officials about 9/11
1. Condoleezza Rice claimed to Time Magazine that a statement in an article that appeared in the New York Times on December 30, 2001, was not true. The Times article said, "As he prepared to leave office last January, Mr. Berger met with his successor, Condoleezza Rice, and gave her a warning. According to both of them, he said that terrorism-and particularly Mr. bin Laden's brand of it-would consume far more of her time than she had ever imagined." Al Franken learned from a White House official that she had in fact met with Berger in a briefing and that he had told her about the seriousness of the al Qaeda threat. Rice lied.
2. On May 17, 2002, Condoleezza Rice said "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." But there had been seven specific instances when the government was aware of plots and attempts to utilize airplanes as weapons. One of the most dramatic was the 1995 plot (Project Bojinka), disrupted by the Philippine authorities, to blow up 11 commercial airliners over the Pacific, and an associated alternative plan to hijack US planes and crash them into CIA headquarters, the World Trade Center, the Sears Tower and the White House. In 1999, a report prepared for US intelligence said that suicide bombers linked to al Qaeda could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA or the White House. Also Rice had attended the G-8 summit meeting with the president only two months before 9/11, when the possibility of an assassination attempt on President Bush was mentioned to the group-an assassination, officials considered, that could be carried out by crashing planes into the summit meeting building. Rice lied.
3. In his recent book State of Denial, Bob Woodward described an encounter between Condoleezza Rice and George Tenet, then-director of the CIA. The latter was in a near panic about a rising flood of intelligence warnings just presented to him by top aide Cofer Black. Tenet reportedly forced an unscheduled meeting with Rice on July 10, 2001, because he wanted the Bush administration to take action immediately against al Qaeda to disrupt a possible domestic attack. On Monday October 2, 2006, a State Department spokesman conceded that then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice had indeed been briefed in July 2001 by George Tenet about the alarming potential for an al Qaeda attack. "I don't remember a so-called emergency meeting," Rice had said only hours earlier, apparently still suffering from the same post-9/11 amnesia that seemed to afflict her during her forced testimony to the 9/11 Commission. Rice lied.
The omission of this meeting from the final commission report is another example of how the Bush administration undermined the bipartisan investigation that the president had tried to prevent. Rice is unusually sharp and has an awesome memory. Considering the trauma of 9/11 and its effects, it is inconceivable that Rice would not recall such an ominous and prescient briefing by Tenet and Black, especially after the 9/11 Commission forced her to document and review her actions in those crucial months.
4. CIA Director George Tenet said on March 11, 2002, "We knew in broad terms last summer that terrorists might be planning major operations in the United States. But we never had the texture, meaning enough information, to stop what happened." Yet Condoleezza Rice herself said on June 28, 2001, "It is highly likely that a significant al Qaeda attack is in the near future, within several weeks." And on July 5, 2001, Richard Clarke said, "Something really spectacular is going to happen here and it's going to happen soon." Tenet distorted the truth to shield himself from any responsibility for the attacks.
5. Pentagon officials associated with the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) confessed in the summer of 2006 that they had in essence lied to the 9/11 Commission about the time when NORAD was informed by the FAA about the hijacked planes. The strange part about that lie was that their first version implied the FAA had informed them in a timely manner, while their current story actually puts more blame on the FAA for that agency's slowness in reporting the hijacking. Why would the first official story from NORAD protect the FAA from blame? It's inexplicable. In any case, NORAD officials lied.
Motive
In searching for a possible motive as to why Administration officials might have been involved in the 9/11 attacks, it's helpful to ask cui bono? (or, who benefited?) The 9/11 attacks didn't benefit the Islamic world in any way at all, quite the opposite. They didn't benefit the al Qaeda members in Afghanistan, because they were completely routed and suffered huge casualties there. It was only America's subsequent invasion and occupation of Iraq that have apparently brought many new recruits into the al Qaeda fold.
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