Twenty-Two Things We Now Know Six Years After 9/11

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By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers (about the author) Page 1 of 5 page(s)

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By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers

Each year around the anniversary of 9/11, I summarize what we ordinary citizens have learned since that awful day in 2001. This is the sixth annual look backwards, an update based on new information about those horrific events and what followed.

What we now more fully understand is how the CheneyBush Administration utilized the murderous terrorism of 9/11 as the one-size-fits-all justification for their unfolding domestic and foreign agenda.

By and large, one can sum up that overall agenda as: Amass and control power in the U.S. and much of the world, and, in cahoots with their corporate supporters, loot the treasury. All this was to be carried out secretly, with no accountability.

9/11 AND "THE WAR ON TERROR"

1. Iraq Plan Preceeded 9/11. Let's remember the chronology of how we got here: The Administration's far-right domestic agenda was bogged down in 2001 after Jim Jeffords left the Republican caucus and joined the now-majority Democratic one in the Senate. 9/11, and the mysterious anthrax attacks that followed, had the side effect of providing the CheneyBush Administration pretty much a free ride in putting police-state tactics in place (symbolized by the so-called "Patriot Act"), overriding Constitutional protections, and greasing the wheels for all sorts of domestic legislation that otherwise might have been bottled up forever.

Planning for an attack on Iraq, as Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill later told us, already had begun at the first cabinet meetings after Inauguration Day in early 2001; after 9/11, those plans proceeded apace, even when the intelligence indicated that it was not an Iraq operation but an al-Qaida terrorist attack, out of Afghanistan.

It appeared that the U.S. military over time would capture or kill Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and effectively destroy al-Qaida forces that had attacked America on 9/11. But CheneyBush abruptly pulled the U.S. forces from Afghanistan and headed them for Iraq, a country that was no real danger to the U.S. and its allies. (Late Flash: The resurgent Taliban allies of al-Qaida now control a good share of Afghanistan; if the U.S. had stayed in that country and taken care of business, today's reality there might well have been significantly different.)

2. Unanswered 9/11 Questions. There still are unanswered questions about the horrific events of September 11, 2001, mainly centered around: A. Why Bush sat there for seven minutes reading the "Pet Goat" book after he'd been informed of the plane hitting the second tower ("America is under attack," his chief of staff whispered to him), and why the Secret Service, as they are trained to do when the President is believed to be in danger, didn't surround him and get him the hell out of that classroom (the clear implication is that a delay-operation was in progress). B. Why NORAD didn't scramble its fighters in time to do anything (same implication). C. Whether World Trade Center Towers 1, 2 and 7 collapsed into their footprints as a result of fire/structural damage or from pre-set demolition charges (there are reputable scientists on both sides of that one). D. How to explain all the "put" options on American Airlines and United Airlines stocks just prior to the attacks, clearly suggesting someone knew which airlines were going to be hijacked and was trying to profit from the pending attacks?

But regardless of whether CheneyBush were complicit in any degree in the deaths and destruction that day -- and there is no proof that they were -- what we do know is that in the months, weeks and days prior to 9/11, red-hot warnings about a planned terrorist attack, using planes as weapons aimed at buildings in New York and Washington, were coming into the White House from a wide variety of other countries.

At the very least then, CheneyBush and a few other key insiders knew that a "spectacular" attack was coming and did absolutely nothing. Even after Bush was briefed on August 6 with a report entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the U.S." -- which talked about preparations for hijackings, suspected terrorists surveilling federal buildings in New York, teams of terrorists being inside the U.S. with explosives -- there was no heightening of awareness, no alerting airlines, no sending out photos of al-Qaida suspects to be on the lookout for, no calling an urgent meeting of counter-terrorism experts inside the White House to coordinate either a way of minimizing the damage or dealing with a post-attack response. Nothing.

Again, if the above is true, one is left with two alternative explanations. A: These CheneyBush guys in charge were (and remain) totally over their heads in terms of governance. They simply didn't have a clue what was about to happen and what to do about it. Administration actions during the past six and a half years supply more than enough evidence that Bush and his crew are total fuckups. It's a reverse-Midas syndrome: everything they touch turns to excrement. Total bumblers, screwups, incompetent dolts.

B: They knew something major was about to go down (although 3000 deaths may have been way beyond what they imagined) in order to use those attacks as a rallying point to amass power and push their agenda through a Congress that otherwise was antagonistic to them.

3. The Facts of 9/11. We know that the Bush Administration didn't want the public to learn much, if anything, about the events of that day six years ago. Bush&Co. had to be dragged kicking and screaming into agreeing to the appointment of the official 9/11 Commission, and they named as the executive director one of their made men, Philip Zelikow (now an Administration official).

As it turned out, the Administration wasn't all that cooperative in furnishing documents, Bush would not testify under oath and would deign to appear only with Cheney by his side, (here's my imagined transcript of that testimony) ( www.crisispapers.org/essays/911-testimony.htm ) and we later learned that the commission was so angered by the constantly-shifting stories told by the Pentagon/NORAD that they were ready to urge that legal charges be filed. ( www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/01/AR2006080101300.html ) In short, the 9/11 Commision's probe was not exhaustive, leaving many areas of investigation unplumbed, and many questions still unsatisfactorally unanswered.

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Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked for two decades as a writer-editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers (more...)

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