But regardless of whether CheneyBush were complicit in the deaths and
destruction that day -- and there is no conclusive 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. Bush was presented
by the CIA on August 6 with a Presidential Daily Briefing entitled "Bin Laden
Determined to Attack Inside the U.S.", which talked about preparations for
plane hijackings, suspected terrorists surveilling federal buildings in New York,
teams of terrorists being inside the U.S. with explosives. But, even
following these dire warnings, there was no heightening of awareness in the Bush Administration, 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.
One is left with two reasonable 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 seven and a half years supply more than enough evidence that Bush and his crew are total f*ck-ups. 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), and did nothing 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.
7. 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. 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, who later would be named a high-ranking Administration official.
As it turned out, the Administration stonewalled many of the Commission's
requests for documents. Moreover, Bush would not testify under oath and would
deign to appear only with Cheney by his side. 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 against those who testified from those two governmental bodies.
In short, the 9/11 Commission's probe was not exhaustive, leaving many areas
of investigation unplumbed, and the documentation provided by the
Administration was insufficient and often late in arriving. Conclusion: Even today, many questions remain unsatisfactorily unanswered.
8. PNAC & the Neo-Cons. We know that a FarRight segment of the conservative movement, by and large former Reagan Administration officials in exile from power during the Clinton presidency, was dedicated to using America's sole superpower status to move aggressively in the world while, they believed, no other country or international force could put up much resistance. The key neo-con leaders who were placed in charge of U.S. foreign/military policy after the 2000 election (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bolton, Perle, Khalilzad, et al.) were founders of, and affiliated with, The Project for The New American Century (PNAC), a group that urged the U.S. to use its sole-superpower muscle in creating Pax Americana "hegemony" over key regions of the world.
The Bush neo-cons realized that presidents enjoy enormous patriotic support
during wartime, but when the war ends, those leaders lose their compelling
luster, as was the case with President Bush#1. Ergo, Bush#2 would become a
PERMANENT wartime president, and those who opposed him could then be tarred forever with the smear of "unpatriotic" and "hating America," thus marginalizing their political impact. And it worked: the Democrats cowered and gave Bush virtually everything he wanted, up until relatively recently, when occasionally they remembered that they have spines and stood up and fought as an opposition party should. As they did more of that, and promised to end the war and reign in CheneyBush lawlessness, the public swept them into majority control of the House and Senate in the 2006 elections. (Note: After the election, however, the Democrats continued funding the war, approved the Administration's illegal domestic-surveillance, and took "off the table" the possibility of impeaching Bush and Cheney for their gross abuse of power and of the Constitution.)
We know that Bush&Co. saw, in Condi Rice's apt term at the time, the
"opportunity" offered by the 9/11 attacks to move quickly and forcefully with the
Administration's foreign and domestic agenda. PNAC talked about its Pax Americana plan for global "benevolent hegemony" using a retooled military. This military transformation would take forever to implement, a PNAC report said, unless a "new Pearl Harbor" changed the equation in the public mind. 9/11 came along and was used as that "new Pearl Harbor." (See "How We Got Into This Imperial Pickle: A PNAC Primer").
We know that after 9/11, Bush seemed to bring the entire country along with
him when he launched an attack on al-Qaida and its Taliban-government
supporters in their Afghanistan homebase. But there's no oil in that destitute country, and, as Rumsfeld reminded us, not much worth bombing. Thus, no lessons could be drawn by Middle East leaders from the U.S. attack. But, as Cheney's secret energy panel was aware, there was another country in the region that did have oil, and lots of it, and which could be taken easily by U.S. forces. Thus Iraq became the object-lesson to other autocratic leaders in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Iran. If you do not do our bidding, prepare to accept a massive dose of "shock&awe." You will be removed and replaced by
democratic-looking governments as arranged by the U.S. Control of Iraq's oil has been at the forefront of U.S. occupation policies in Iraq, and remains so there and elsewhere as oil and gas become even more sought-after energy sources.
These neo-con members of PNAC and similar organizations, such as the American Enterprise Institute and Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, had urged Clinton to depose Saddam Hussein in 1998. But he demurred, seeing a mostly contained dictator there, whereas Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, and those terrorists like him, actually were successfully attacking U.S. assets inside the country and abroad.
But the PNAC crowd had larger ambitions than simply toppling a brutal Iraqi
dictator. They were after effective control of energy sources around the globe.
To get to that hegemonic point, they developed a philosophy that included:
"pre-emptively" attacking countries that were of no imminent danger to the U.S.,
abrogating treaties when they conflicted with U.S. goals, making sure no
other nation or organization (such as the United Nations) could ever achieve
power-parity with the U.S., installing U.S.-friendly governments to do America's
will, expressing a willingness to use tactical nuclear weapons, and so on. All
of these extreme PNAC suggestions, once regarded as lunatic, were enshrined in
2002 as official U.S. policy in the National Security Strategy of the United
States of America.
IRAQ INVASION & OCCUPATION
9. Sexing Up the Intel. Given the extreme nature of the neo-con agenda in fomenting support for an invasion and occupation of Iraq, Bush&Co. had their work cut out for them. Therefore, among the first moves by Rumsfeld following 9/11 was to somehow try to connect Saddam to the terror attacks. When the various intelligence agencies reported to Rumsfeld that there was no Iraq connection to 9/11, and since the CIA and the other intelligence agencies would not, or could not, supply the intelligence needed to justify a war on Iraq, Rumsfeld set up his own rump "intelligence" agency, the Office of Special Plans, stocked it with political appointees of the PNAC persuasion and soon was stovepiping cherry-picked raw intel, much of it untrue, from self-interested Iraqi exiles, straight to Cheney and others in the White House. Shortly thereafter, the White House Iraq Group -- the in-house marketing cabal for the war, with such major players as Libby, Rove, Card, Rice, Hadley, Hughes, Matalin, et al. -- went big-time with the WMD and mushroom-cloud scares and the suspect melding of Saddam Hussein with the events of 9/11.
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