MY DAWNING 9/11 REALIZATION

I really had nothing special to say tonight. It was getting late (even for me), so I figured that I would just post a few links, rehearse my monologues, play some Starcraft, and get to bed before sunrise. That plan changed in mid-flight. The stories I ended up reading have led me to a few tentative, disturbing conclusions.

For nearly two years now, I have resisted conspiracy-nut ideas about the horrific terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In the wake of the Congressional report on pre-9/11 intelligence, however, I now find myself drifting into wacko territory. I don't want to belive, but the evidence is mounting: it may very well turn out that the White House had a great deal of foreknowledge about the attacks and purposely allowed them to happen.

I'm a bit stunned, even though I've been reading about such theories for months now.

First, consider Nation writer David Corn's essay on the report (via AlterNet):

The committees' report covers many missed -- and botched -- opportunities. It shows that warnings and hints were either ignored or neglected. Some of this has been covered in interim reports released last year and in media accounts. But the final report does contain new information and new details that only confirm an ugly conclusion: A more effective and more vigilant bureaucracy would have had a good chance of detecting portions of the 9/11 plot. "The message is not to tell the intelligence community," said the source familiar with the report, "that you didn't have the final announcement of the details of the September 11 attacks and therefore you could not prevent it. We have to have an intelligence community that is able to connect dots and put the pieces together and investigate it aggressively."

This is pretty much the standard mainstream news media reaction to the report, as far as I can tell--of course, Corn, being a liberal, goes further into detail and blasts the government more harshly, but the idea is pretty much the same: we had enough information to figure it out, but we blew it. Reading the report more deeply, however, and considering some contextual information that is not included in the report paints a somewhat different picture.

Politicians and the media have made quite a bit of noise about the classified 28 pages in the report that refer to a "foreign power." Everyone, including myself, assumes that this mystery nation is Saudi Arabia. Our weird relationship with the Saudis is well known, but just how weird is it?

From journalist Greg Palast's weblog:

And on BBC TV last month, I reported this: following the bombing of our embassies, the Clinton Administration sent two delegations to Saudi Arabia to tell their royal highnesses to stop giving money to the guys who are killing us. But Mr. Bush, once in office, put the kibosh on unfriendly words to the Saudis.

Furthermore, in the summer of 2001, Mr. Bush disbanded the US intelligence unit tracking funding of Al Queda. What is it our G-men were uncovering? According to two separate sources speaking to BBC, the funders of Al Queda fronts include those who have previously funded Bush family business and political ventures.

And

And there's this: a document marked "Secret" and "199I" (meaning 'national security') which found its way out of the offices of the FBI in into the office of our BBC/Guardian newspaper team. It indicates (and whistleblowers confirmed) that, prior to the September 11 attack, the Bush Administration held back agents of the FBI from tracking two members of the bin Ladin family. According to the buried FBI report, the bin Laden lads were operating in the USA for "a suspected terrorist organization", WAMY.

It appears that our (and the Bush family's) relationship with Saudi Arabia is so weird that the President pretty much refused to allow them to be investigated. Bush also seemingly had no inclination to grapple with Attorney General John Ashcroft's unwillingness to take terrorism seriously.

Again from David Corn's essay:

According to the report, an FBI budget official said that counterterrorism was not a priority for Attorney General John Ashcroft prior to 9/11, and the bureau faced pressure to cut its counterterrorism program to satisfy Ashcroft's other priorities. (The report did not state what those other priorities were.) In a particularly damning criticism, the report notes, "there was a dearth of creative, aggressive analysis targeting bin Laden and a persistent inability to comprehend the collective significance of individual pieces of intelligence."

What the hell was going on? What the hell is going on now? It's really starting to look like it wasn't some screw-up; it's starting to sound like the White House was trying not to stop bin Laden from the get-go.

It gets worse.

Nixon White House lawyer, John Dean, a man who knows about presidential conspiracies, analyzes National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice's statements about the now-famous August 6, 2001 intelligence briefing received by Bush, and reaches some disturbing conclusions of his own. Rice essentially said that they understood that al Qaeda was considering hijackings, but they never dreamed that they would fly airplanes into buildings. Not so, says Dean:

But the Inquiry's 9/11 Report lays out all such threats, over that time period, in thirty-six bullet point summaries. It is only necessary to cite a few of these to see the problem:

*In September 1998, the [Intelligence Community] obtained information that Bin Laden's next operation might involve flying an explosive-laden aircraft into a U.S. airport and detonating it.

*In the fall of 1998, the [Intelligence Community] obtained information concerning a Bin Laden plot involving aircraft in the New York and Washington, D.C. areas.

*In March 2000, the [Intelligence Community] obtained information regarding the types of targets that operatives of Bin Laden's network might strike. The Statute of Liberty was specifically mentioned , as were skyscrapers, ports, airports, and nuclear power plans.

In sum, the 9/11 Report of the Congressional Inquiry indicates that the intelligence community was very aware that Bin Laden might fly an airplane into an American skyscraper.

Given the fact that there had already been an attempt to bring down the twin towers of the World Trade Center with a bomb, how could Rice say what she did?

It sure does seem like they knew.

Are you starting to see why I'm slowly moving into conspiracy-nut territory? Or is it that such territory is slowly moving toward me? Just for good measure, here is a list of some interesting quotes compiled by the Memory Hole about whether or not 9/11 could have been prevented. Also for good measure, and also from the Memory Hole, here is a link to some footage of Bush first hearing of the attacks--at the top of the video, a man in a suit whispers the terrible news in the President's ear; Bush just sits there with a sort of blank look, doing nothing for some five minutes (it's Quicktime, so you may need to download the software)--given all the above info, I ask, is this the reaction of a President learning that his country is under attack? Maybe he was learning about something that he expected...

God, I am starting to sound like a nut, here.

I still don't want to believe it, but it now seems like there is a good argument developing. And if it's true...well, stories about pipeline deals in Afghanistan, getting the PATRIOT act passed, the Iraq war...all these things must be considered in a new light. I don't want to believe it; it's an absolutely horrible thought, but...

I urge you to post your thoughts below. I'm very curious as to whether I really do sound like the wacko that I'm afraid I sound like. What do you think?

UPDATE on the Bush video. I don't know if you are having the same Quicktime problems I'm having, but I figured out a way to get it to work. Open up a Quicktime screen, open the File menu, click on "open URL in a new player," a screen will pop up asking for the URL, which is:

http://www.thememoryhole.org/911/bush-911.mov

copy and paste the URL onto the appropriate blank...it should all be easy from there...

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