What Really Happened on 9/11

http://blog.abovetopsecret.com/wecomeinpea...e_real_ver.html

http://www.netscape.com/viewstory/2006/09/...html&frame=true

The Controlled Demolition of the World Trade Center, 9/11/02 and "National Security Breach"
As Presented to the US Senate Oversight Committee, and others

AFFIDAVIT:

"The destruction of the World Trade Center, as witnessed on September 11th, 2001, was the result of an elaborately planned, Controlled Demolition." This is the conclusion of thousands of witnesses and hundreds of forensics experts. Given due consideration, these findings imply, that *US MILITARY* personnel are responsible for crimes that led to the murder of an estimated 3,000 innocent Americans.

As a living witness to these actions, as I have described herein, I do hereby officially charge those responsible, both for the execution, and for the '9/11 cover-up,' with the crimes of: Conspiracy, Treason, Genocide and Murder. Additional criminal charges also apply.

My sole objective in composing this document is to publicize the *initial phase* of this covert operation at the World Trade Center, dating back to 1987.* While I was employed by the WTC Architects of Record; Emery Roth and Associates, AIA, New York City, where I discovered both physical samples and written documentation concerning potential hazards with the physical integrity of the Twin Towers. After witnessing these events, I publicly expressed my concern for a thorough public safety-inspection of the Twin Trade Towers, to other architects and contractors.

To date, not one of our staff, nor the 40-or so full-time employees of the WTC building engineering team has spoken-out publicly, or provided a testimony under oath. A thorough investigation of these parties, named herein, will provide disclosure as to precise nature of these events as I have described. This shall serve as a complete legal record of my direct exposure to these *pre-existing physical, materials conditions* at the Twin Trade Center, that collectively support the *financial motivation* which had prompted the New York Port Authority, AND operatives within NORAD, (or NSA) to engage in this seditious act of "espionage."

No similar information has been provided by any other witness(es) that I am aware of, and no individuals have provided details that would serve to dispute my claims in any way. I remain hopeful that others, more closely connected with this property, and ideally, those having access to the City of New York Buildings Departments, will continue with the points of research as suggested by the information in this document.





--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Tom-Scott Gordon, 9/11/2001 Legal Deposition, contd., page 2:

Before these events, I was required to pledge a formal, sworn "Oath of Allegiance, to honor and defend the United States of America, from enemies, both foreign and domestic," -prior to my gaining access to the WTC properties, and while working at "Level 'D' Security-access" at the "USAF, Falcon-CSOC facilities, better known as the "NORAD Earth Monitoring Station," in Colorado Springs. I was allowed direct exposure to the workings of these facilities, while photographing their Chain of Command in action. It was explained that;

"Neither the Pentagon, nor the FAA, nor the Whitehouse can by-pass the established, hierarchical data-control mechanisms installed there. This involves a two-tier, rotating 'On-controls' staff, with over 21 'live' operators, who witness and provide a permanent record of,- Not just the Territorial United States, but Every aircraft and satellite currently under motive power in the world! These operative systems can not be moved to the Pentagon, at the whims of the Joint Chief of Staff, as outlined in the CSOC's Permanent Charter."

- Therefore, I must state, unequivocally and emphatically;

To 'override' the U.S. Military's fully redundant, multi-node global Security systems was an essential component of this mission! Doing so, is categorically *IMPOSSIBLE.* Numerous and simultaneous breaches of our Nation's Strategic Defenses can not be dismissed as either a matter of system failure, or substitute foreign, (Mossad) software.

Official admissions of advance intelligence warnings and insider trading attest that there is NO Viability in the claim that the "WAR GAMES" had served to "complicate, or delay our response units," which may have resulted in the "stand-down" orders issued that day!

In publishing this document, I am acting in accordance to the letter of my officially sworn, "United States of America's Patriotic Oath."

Today, All American citizens must accept these same responsibilities.

The U.S. Government must be held accountable as we demand a thorough and transparent public investigation of September 11th. The integrity of our "National Security Policies and Procedures" depends upon the subsequent trial and punishment of those responsible. My testimony, herein, should be included into the official records concerning these case proceedings, as I am a living material witness to these crimes.

Whereas, these 'Charter conditions,' (as I have generally outlined them here;) "DO NOT, and SHALL NOT enable the opportunity for ANY acting "President of the United States, or his Assigns," to randomly usurp the power, and/or Chain-of-Command that would enable any direct control over our Nation's Strategic Defenses, or Policies."







--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Tom-Scott Gordon, 9/11/2001 Legal Deposition, contd., page 3:

I was informed of all of this by a "Command-Shift Sergeant," as he and I witnessed the gathering of "The U. S. Joint Chiefs of Staff,' an event that is tense to say the least! "Only Medical and Food-services Personnel were allowed to move from room-to-room during these proceedings." So we sat and talked. This criteria, as he explained, "has been instated for the safety and welfare of every US Citizen, both here and abroad." Immediately following the JCS meeting, (lasting just under two hours,) it was announced over the loudspeakers that,- "ALL Civilian Personnel must Depart at this time!"

This occurred on the same day that the Denver Post announced, on their front-page, top News headline: "President Selects Site for Star Wars". Yet, the entire Falcon facilities, including numerous out-buildings, was completely operational at that time.

The following statements are completely true and faithful to the actual events, as I am best able to describe them.

*All critically sensitive photographs have been withheld from public view.*

A complete, descriptive narrative of my experience at the World Trade Center follows this cover-letter.



__*_________________________________ Date: _7/7/2006____
by: Thomas-Scott Gordon, prior Architectural Photographer;
Emery Roth and Associates, AIA, New York City
Current residence: 2510 Hidden Valley Dr.
Little Rock, AR 72212 (501) 225-1323



Witnessed by: ___**____________________ Date: ___7/7/2006____


Little Rock, Arkansas, USA



* I have just received a notice that suggests a confirmable date of '1987' not 1989 for the completion of building #7. I am dyslexic and I must apologize for this critical error, and I am making this date correction now.* Signatures were provided on the official filings. A link to a .PDF of the actual physical document is available for download at this site, by request only. -You're either with US, or you are working for the New World Order!



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------






I.) Why The World Trade Towers­
"Must come down!"



A BRIEF TECHNICAL SUMMARY, WHY:

The structural integrity of the massive World Trade Center Towers was contingent upon the combined -value of *both* the internal, perimeter STEEL columns and the adjoining ALUMINIUM fascia-panels.

Over the years, the process known as 'galvanic corrosion' had structurally degraded these buildings beyond repair. Supporting statements to this effect had been compiled by the engineers and delivered to the building owners during the time-frame that I have described. Subsequently, both Mayor Giuiliani's Office, and the New York Port Authority, had allegedly received an order for the buildings to be completely dismantled, by 2007."

Through the continual effects of wind-sheer and [flex-fatigue] this process had eroded the bolt-holds at roughly floors #7 through #25, that fulcrum-point where the lateral pressures were inherently sustained. Photographs, taken after the disaster, reveal that it was only those lowest exterior column sectional groupings which do not appear to have shown severe de-coupling of the joinery, therein. This is evidenced by the bright 'shiny,' cage-like forms that served to contain the bulk of the physical contents among a burning rubble.

Physical evidence verifies that an incendiary 'explosive' material, such as 'thermate,' had come into contact with numerous Steel structural members throughout the entire structures. This has now been verified by independent research scientists from actual samples that had been collected from the site. Witnessed by their locations within the burning pyre, these supporting columns had fallen from the upper-most portions of the two building core-sections.

*My views concerning the chronic construction "flaws" in the World Trade Towers, follows at the end of this document, in section IV. I do not wish to assign 'blame,' nor do I feel the need for me to address these physical matters with any degree of scientific analysis. Sadly enough, the end result of simple human error has now brought the entire world to a state of heightened alarm, to say the very least. I strongly encourage you to cross-reference these issues, as recorded in countless independent and government source documents pertaining to the critical stress-dynamics, and galvanic properties inherent in aluminium alloys.

I also witnessed numerous, "highly suspicious" activities that took place at WTC, building #7, shortly after the structure was erected, and thus concurrent to the events that I have described. Mr. Silverstein was involved from the onset! *Virtually no information concerning the floor-plans, or the construction-phase* has been collected for anyone to do any real investigation into Building #7!

I realize this is a leading statement, but I will challenge any NYC architect to accept the chance to disprove it. After -all, I am the ONLY current spokesperson for the original architects, once officially recognized as the World's foremost design firm. -Put that feather in your cap, Mr. Robert A. M. Stern!



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


II.) T. S. Gordon's Inside-experience...

>>> For the complete story, please go to part II. (This page repeats)>>>

(A page of related photographs also follows.)

this link gives a 404

http://www.netscape.com/viewstory/2006/09/....php&frame=true


Sergeant Lauro "LJ" Chavez, 9/11 Whistle Blower Speaks Out in Cincinnati Post.

Thought I'd share this rant with all you Veterans - It kills me when
idiots don't do their homework...

Greetings Mr. White,

I felt it necessary to follow up to a recent story that
was published in Cincinnati Post. It was the 1 in 3 believe 9-11
conspiracy theory. I must admit that at first I was overwhelmed with
joy that our local paper was actually starting to have real journalism
and talk about real issues. Then I read the story and it was a total
debunk to make the actual people around the world who feel there was
something not right about 9-11, to look like over reacting
conspiracy theorists.

Im utterly outraged. My 9 year old daughter could have done more
research in this, as opposed to just trying to throw the publics ideas
and feelings out. Is this not what journalism is supposed to represent
- real issues? There have been many, many polls done in major cities
that actually ask people how they felt about the 9-11 tragedy. One
such poll is called the Zogby poll; which was offered in New York City.

Honestly I could care less what is done with this letter, but I feel
that I should speak my mind and Ill tell you some things that I have
not told many people at all. From 1995 till 2002 I was a Sergeant in
the United States Army. Not only this, but I was stationed at United
States Central Command, which is located at MacDill AFB in Tampa
Florida. I was on active duty when 9-11 happened. In the days prior to
the tragedies, we were involved in many exercises. Some of these
exercises included the scenarios of hijacked planes crashing into, our
building the world trade center, the White House, Sears Tower, and the
Pentagon. These drills or exercises as we called them, where
classified Top Secret. Having a Top Secret rated clearance I was
dumbfounded that they would ever push a training exercise above the
level of Secret. Over my 8 years in the Army, I had participated in
many exercises around the world, none of which were ever classified
over the Secret level.

Ill start by saying a few months prior it was announced by President
Bush that Dick Cheney would be heading up operations over NORAD our
North American Aerospace Defense Command. Along with many of my peers,
we were shocked. Over the years, if you research NORAD, it has always
been under the command of a Military officer. It was done this way
because the defense of this country has always been in the hands of
such. Prior to the months before 9-11 this was all of the sudden
changed. Like I said, if you research NORAD and the command structure
you will find that it was imposed long ago that the military should be
in control of the order to scramble planes in the defense of American
air space. For some strange reason, Bush changed this and gave that
power to a civilian person on his Staff team yes I know, very
interesting.

Back to the morning of 9-11; the command was busy with this training
exercise. We were instructed to bring all our gear in to prep for a
mock (staged) deployment to the Middle East. On the morning of 9-11 I
had been on base prepped and ready to go since about 0400am. During my
time at the base that morning, they were setting up barriers around
the command and placing gun posts on the roofs. When I questioned one
of the security officers about the machine gun and shoulder fired
rockets on the roof I was given the answer its a precaution for a
plane attempting to crash into this building.

So, I was standing in the SCIF (Secure Compartmented Information
Facility), which is basically this underground bunker command post for
USCENTCOM, when the first plane hit. We were watching the fly patterns
of all the planes on the aerospace grid. This contained not only all
commercial flights at the time, but all military flights, and fake
enemy planes that were supposedly put on there for the exercise. Many
of the planes sent to intercept the fake blips were scrambled from
Andrews which is an air defense AFB for the East Coast. They were sent
across the US and left very few planes to defend the capital. After
the first plane hit the tower we were all in disbelief. After the
initial shock was over, our questions were what are the odds this
could happen for real, during a training exercise thats covering the
same scenario? We were all at wits end. Then to top all of this off,
Cheney gave NORAD the order to stand down scrambling jets to
intercept. A few moments later tower 2 was hit. Only after the
Pentagon was hit, did he give the orders to scramble the jets to
intercept the plane bound for the White House.

All of this is very interesting to me it sickened me so that I left
the Army after coming back from an 8 month deployment to Afghanistan.
There were just too many questions that no one could answer, too many
things that did not make sense. How is it possible to have a training
exercise about planes hitting the WTC and then actually have planes
hit the WTC? This kind of thing just does not happen unless its
pre-planned. What reason would there be to have this type of exercise
on that morning, Ill tell you if you are placing fake planes all
over the north American aerospace grid then you have no way of
knowing which planes are real and which are fake. Then to thicken the
plot you put a civilian in charge of NORAD so that the military does
not have the power to initiate the order for jets to be scrambled to
intercept. If the military would have still commanded power over NORAD
they would have scrambled jets because they would have simply
followed the procedures that had been in place for this type of
situation for years and years and scrambled jets.

To delve even further, as Im standing there watching the towers
collapse, next to me is one of my good friends and a former commander
of the Army Corps of Engineers. He is a demolitions expert. He was
even more surprised than me. When the towers collapsed he kept saying
this isnt right, this isnt right. When I asked him what he was
talking about he told me that steel buildings dont fall down that
way. Even if they are struck by objects; he went on to say that in
theory if the top 10 floors were hit, then possibly just that part of
the building would fall over and off, but the rest would remain
standing. When I asked him, not understanding the implications of
demolitions, he told me that it looked as if they were brought down by
controlled demolitions. I was utterly amazed, but after he said that
it did sort of appear that way.

Ill tell you what gave this whole thing away was building 7. If
they would not have brought this building down, then they probably
could have gotten away with it all. It was the most amazing site I
have ever seen. Not only was it amazing, it bore reality to the truth
of the situation something was not right here. Now, Im going to
tell you all I have learned, but I urge anyone to just spend 1hr
reading about this incident on the internet and learning the facts.
There have been numerous scholars, numerous physicists that have
analyzed this over and over and over again. And they all come to the
same conclusion, something does not add up. Building 7 was never
directly hit by a plane. Now it was stated that a piece of one of the
towers fell onto the side of building 7 and caught one of the floors
on fire. A few moments later we all witnessed the most perfect example
of controlled demolitions to ever be caught on camera. It could not be
proved that building 7 fell due to fire. My friend and I standing
there in the SCIF watching in uninterruptible awe with all those other
military members; watching building 7 fall perfectly onto its
footprint; my friend stating that it was beautifully done.

We all knew then we all realized that this was not some group of
unorganized cave dwellers from Afghanistan orchestrating a perfect hit
on American soil. It was impossible. Shortly after the Pentagon was
struck I called my close friend that I went to Basic Training with.
All civilian lines were down and I had to contact him via STU which is
a black line classified phone system. He did not answer, but one of
his soldiers did. I asked if SGT Worthington was ok and he said yes. I
asked if the plane did severe damage and he told me I didnt see any
plane. Then when I finally got to speak to my friend, he started
acting strange saying he could not talk about the incident over this
line. He was shipped off overseas a few weeks later and I never to
this day have had the chance to speak with him.

The Pentagon crash tape was released a few months back after 5 years.
You need to watch that tape no where can you see a plane strike the
Pentagon. This is because it was not a plane. I cannot tell you
exactly what hit the Pentagon, but its unanimous; it was definitely
not a plane. I can assure you that there is more than one CCTV camera
around the Pentagon. On September 25, 4 days before my 25th birthday,
I deployed to Afghanistan. Over the 8months I was there I had never
seen one intelligent Afghani soldier. They were all tattered and
scrawny and could barely shoot their weapons straight. This does not
mean that there were not men that could fly a plane, but after what I
saw it was extremely hard to believe they could be taught to fly a
sophisticated piece of aeronautical equipment.

My point Mr. Editor is that I spent 8 months in combat watching my
brothers die in the name of Freedom. I killed, in the name of Freedom
and to this day my brothers are still being killed for this
illusionary war we call the War on Terror. Where the enemy has no face
where there is no clear objective. In this War, anyone with ill
thoughts toward this country can be defined as a terrorist. Well, I
guess that includes me in this group as well as everyone else who
questions the events of 911, because we all hold ill thoughts toward
the leadership of this country and I say the real terrorists in this
world sit right in the heart of its capital.

I have bled for this country and would do so again in a heart beat
but only to protect its people, the true Americans that live here. I
would never again offer my life under the leadership whose real goal
is oil and money. The same ones who staged the most perfect
illusionary tactic in our history that was a pretext to a war on
terror that would never again go away. Their goal was to scare the
American public into submission making it easier for the world powers
to do their evil and get away with it.

Now that may sound like a typical conspiracy theorist I guess, but how
many do you actually talk to? Im not here saying that Aliens came
down and used laser beams to bring the towers down or control the
planes that were flown; Im telling you as a sane, logical and
intelligent individual, something does not add up about this. Earlier
this year I was watching the Discovery channel. They have a PBS
program called Rebuilding America. This particular episode was about
the WTC building 7. They interviewed Larry Silverstein (the owner)
about building 7. He stated on national TV the following which is the
direct quote and can be found here: http://www.wtc7.net/pullit.html

I remember getting a call from the, ER, fire department commander,
telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain
the fire, and I said, "We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the
smartest thing to do is pull it." And they made that decision to pull
and we watched the building collapse.

I actually have the program recorded and you are more than welcome to
come by my house and watch it. He actually stated this on national TV.
I was so amazed that I almost shat myself. I could not believe he
actually stated this on a nationally broadcasted TV program. You can
ask any person who has done controlled demolitions please interview
someone they will tell you it takes weeks of planning to do this. We
are expected to believe that this was facilitated and planned in a
matter of hours for building 7, while the damn thing was on fire you
have got to be kidding me. If that is not enough to make you believe
something was fishy well then nothing will ever do.

Since that time there have been numerous scholars, some of which have
actually been publicly broadcasted on CSPAN. The latest program was
called: Theories about 9-11. American Perspectives and you can watch
this (which I advise you do) per this link: Theories about 9-11
(American Perspectives) or you can go to www.c-span.org and look under
their video/audio section to find this title. Its an outstanding
video and encompasses the thoughts of not only the American public,
but also Dr Steven Jones from Brigham Young University a physics
professor that actually received a piece of the rubble from the WTC.
Not only does he profoundly agree that building 7 was a controlled
demolition he can prove it. After he analyzed the piece of debris
they found; there were large traces of sulfur and Thermite found. If
you did not know, Thermite is a chemical compound found in many
explosives including C4 which I have used many times in the Army. It
leaves a distinct smell and identifiable residue upon explosion. Dr
Jones found large traces of this from the rubble.

Sir, there are many things that I never wanted to know for one that
the government that is supposed to be caring for the American people
could be corrupt. This was the last thing that I ever wanted to be
true but its time we wake up and smell the "expletive deleted" because its
permeating throughout the American public and we are all starting to
realize whats really going on. If your news station actually did a
similar Zogby type poll here in Cincinnati, I think you would find
that a lot more than 1/3 of the people believe this. I know tons just
in this area.

I could literally write you 100 pages of truths that could prove that
9-11 was an inside job, but Id probably just be passed off as some
crazy conspiracy theorist. Instead I want to give you the tools to
look for yourself because the quest for wisdom is a journey we must
all take alone. So, to you I add the following links and if you just
spend a small portion of your day reading and watching some of this
footage, who knows you may wake up and stand along side the rest of us
in utter amazement.


Respectfully,

SGT Lauro Chavez
United States Central Command

Thanks to the Internet, one of the few freedoms we have left, these
truths can be sent to the public. Thank God we dont have to rely on
news media to get this information out to everyone!

This is only about a 10th of my list of sites. Enjoy; and when you are
sick with the truth of things, let me know and Ill buy you a beer to
ease your nerves.

Loose Change Volume 2
(An outstanding documentary done about 911 that includes news reports
and live footage of the tragedy and finds that some things are not
what they seem)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=15...&q=loose+change


Official Pentagon Plane Crash Video
(You tell me where the plane is)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5658198482624505213


Silverstein saying we decided to pull the building
The collapse of building 7
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6...=WTC+building+7

Another video of bldg 7
(In this you can see the widely noticeable crinkle that is common in
controlled demolitions)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=91...3634920&q=wtc+7


Watch the following in sequence:

1. Showing the Thermite at work.
(In this video you can see the molten concrete and metal spewing out
of the WTC. This is what happens when a Thermite type explosive is
used to cut down steel pillars)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=54...6774&q=thermite

2. Then watch this video
(it shows the spot where the molten metal is coming out the same
spot where the building crinkles and collapses)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=47...6355623&q=wtc+7





Misc Links for research:

http://www.911truth.org/

http://www.st911.org/

http://www.infowars.com/

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/augus...esintensify.htm

Zogby Poll Results
http://www.911truth.org/images/911TruthZog...FinalReport.htm



As you can see, Im not your typical conspiracy theorist I
actually have a good job! I thought at first I might send you this
from an anonymous email address, but you know what now you know Im
not just some stupid kid.
Thanks for taking the time to read.

Respectfully,

Lauro "LJ" Chavez
Director of Information Security
Domin-8 Enterprise Solutions
513-492-5831
lchavez@domin-8.com
www.domin-8.com
As the guardians of technology; security shall be our shield and
vigilance our sword

The Chavez letter is fascinating, especially the part about what occurred while he was on active duty on 9/11.

http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/ri...ad_hamilton.htm

-- --
RICE OK'D CLAIM OF 'SAFE AIR' AFTER 9/11

By SUSAN EDELMAN, HEATHER GILMORE and BRAD HAMILTON

September 24, 2006 -- Condoleezza Rice's office gave final approval to the infamous Environmental Protection Agency press releases days after 9/11 claiming the air around Ground Zero was "safe to breathe," internal documents show.
Now Secretary of State, Rice was then head of the National Security Council - "the final decision maker" on EPA statements about lower Manhattan air quality, the documents say.

Scientists and lawmakers have since deemed the air rife with toxins.

Early tests known to the EPA at the time had already found high asbestos levels, the notes say. But those results were omitted from the press releases because of "competing priorities" such as national security and "opening Wall Street," according to a report by the EPA's inspector general.

The chief of staff for then-EPA head Christie Todd Whitman, Eileen McGinnis, told the inspector general of heated discussions, including "screaming telephone calls," about what to put in the press releases.

The notes come from a 2003 probe into public assurances made on Sept. 16, five days after the 9/11 attacks. They tell how a White House staffer "worked with Dr. Condoleezza Rice's press secretary" on reviewing the press releases for weeks.

Whitman said through a spokeswoman Friday that she never discussed her press releases directly with Rice. She also defended her collaboration with the White House.

Now-retired Inspector General Nikki Tinsley told The Post her auditors tried to question the head of President Bush's Environmental Quality Council, but "he would not talk to us."

Calls and e-mails to Rice were not returned.

http://www.netscape.com/viewstory/2006/09/...html&frame=true

Video: Olbermann traces Bush Admin's pre-9/11 actions

David Edwards
Published: Thursday September 28, 2006

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann has taken a critical look at actions the Bush Administration took before 9/11 against Osama Bin Laden and the al Qaeda terrorist network.

In a recent interview on Fox News, Bill Clinton challenged the media to ask the Bush Administration to explain what actions were taken to protect America against terrorist threats between the 8 months from the time Bush took office until the attacks on September 11, 2001.

The 9/11 Commission's summarized the pre-9/11 actions of the Bush administration by writing, "[Bush] did not recall discussing the August 6 report with the Attorney General or whether Rice had done so. We have found no indication of any further discussion before September 11 among the President and his top advisers of the possibility of a threat of an al Qaeda attack in the United States. ...Tenet does not recall any discussions with the President of the domestic threat during this period. Domestic agencies did not know what to do, and no one gave them direction. The borders were not hardened. Transportation systems were not fortified. Electronic surveillance was not targeted against a domestic threat. State and local law enforcement were not marshaled to augment the FBI’s efforts. The public was not warned."

In the following video report Keith Olbermann follows the timeline from when Bush took office until the tragic attacks of 9/11. A transcript follows the video.

TRANSCRIPT

OLBERMANN: As the Bush administration continues to try to deflect questions about whether its war in Iraq is encouraging terrorism, it has managed to score a victory in Congress about how it wants to deal with the people it has detained as terrorists, though victory at what cost remains to be seen for all of us, the House voting mainly on party lines, passing the detainee bill today, despite warnings from Democrats that it fails to meet judicial standards, and will likely get struck down in the Supreme Court for being unconstitutional.

The bill says it is up to the president to interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva Convention, an action interpreted by many international legal scholars as being by itself a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

The Senate is expected to pass the bill later this week.

In a sense, we are all still detainees in the wake of 9/11, but there is some unrest among the inmates, being asked what steps he took to stop al Qaeda, President Clinton freeing many to ask what steps, if any, his successor took in the most critical time before the plot.

Yesterday, President Bush declined to address Mr. Clinton‘s remarks, saying, “We‘ve already had the look back this and look back that.” But if we are to look forward with any clarity, it is important to know the facts about where we have been and how we got where we are.

Thus tonight, a special investigation. Mr. Clinton is not in office, Mr. Bush is. His policies determine how the U.S. fights al Qaeda, so it is important that we understand how he has done so in the past. Comparing the two presidents is valid, necessary, to illuminate the capacities of the office. Mr. Clinton said it plainly, he failed to get bin Laden. Mr. Bush has acknowledged no such failure.

But while it has become conventional wisdom, although debunked by the 9/11 report, that Mr. Clinton dropped an offer from Sudan to hand over bin Laden, it is rare to hear anyone discuss whether similar but real feelers were ever extended to Mr. Bush. And it is, we suspect, even more rare to see this tape of the Bush White House addressing reports of such feelers in February 2001, after the government knew al Qaeda had attacked the U.S.S. “Cole.”

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, February 27, 2001)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Taliban in Afghanistan, they have offered that they are ready to hand over Osama bin Laden to Saudi Arabia if the United States drops its sanctions, and the—they have a kind of deal that they want to make with the United States. Do you have any comments (INAUDIBLE)?

ARI FLEISCHER, WHITE HOUSE PRESS Secretary: Let me take that and get back to you on that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OLBERMANN: There is no record of any subsequent discussion on that matter.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, of course, responded to President Clinton by defending the Bush record. “We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda,” she said.

Our goal in this report is to rise to Mr. Clinton‘s challenge and assess the record of Mr. Bush‘s efforts against al Qaeda in his first eight months in office.

We begin with Rice‘s claim that Clinton left no strategy to fight al Qaeda.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, January 20, 2001)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: So help me God.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Congratulations.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OLBERMANN (voice-over): On January 25, 2001, five days after Mr. Bush took office, counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke sent Rice a memo, attaching to it a document entitled “Strategy for Eliminating the Threat of al Qaeda.” It was, Clarke, wrote, “developed by the last administration to give to you, incorporating diplomatic, economic, military, public diplomacy, and intelligence tools.”

Clarke‘s memo requested a follow-up cabinet-level meeting to address time-sensitive questions about al Qaeda. But President Bush had downgraded counterterrorism from a cabinet-level job, so Clarke now dealt instead with deputy secretaries.

RICHARD CLARKE, FORMER COUNTERTERRORISM CZAR: It slowed it down enormously, by months. First of all, the deputies‘ committee didn‘t meet urgently in January or February.

OLBERMANN: Why the delay? Rice later tried to explain.

RICE: America‘s al Qaeda policy wasn‘t working because our Afghanistan policy wasn‘t working, and our Afghanistan policy wasn‘t working because our Pakistan policy wasn‘t working. We recognized that America‘s counterterrorism policy had to be connected to our regional strategies, and to our overall foreign policy.

OLBERMANN: That, although Clarke‘s January 25 memo specifically warned, “Al Qaeda is not some narrow little terrorist issue that needs to be included in broader regional policy. By proceeding with separate policy reviews on Central Asia, etc., we would deal inadequately with the need for a comprehensive multiregional policy on al Qaeda.”

Clarke‘s deputies‘ meeting came in April, when, he says, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz insisted the real terrorism threat was not al Qaeda, but Iraq.

By July 16, the deputies had a proposal for dealing with al Qaeda, a proposal, Clarke says, was essentially the same plan he gave Rice five months earlier, and it still had to go to the principals, the cabinet secretaries.

CLARKE: But the principals‘ calendar was full, and then they went on vacation, many of them, in August, so we couldn‘t meet in August. And therefore the principals met in September.

OLBERMANN: Although the principals had already met on other issues, their first meeting on al Qaeda was not until after Labor Day, on September 4, 2001.

But what were Mr. Bush and his top advisers doing during this time? Mr. Bush was personally briefed about al Qaeda even before the election, in November 2000. During the transition, President Clinton and his national security adviser, Sandy Berger, say they told Bush and his team of the urgency of getting al Qaeda.

Three days before President Bush took office, Berger spoke at a passing-the-baton event, which Rice attended.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, January 17, 2001)

SANDY BERGER, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: With (ph) survivors of the U.S.S. “Cole” reinforced the reality that America is in a deadly struggle with a new breed of anti-Western jihadists. Nothing less than a war, I think, is fair to describe this.

OLBERMANN: Eight days later, Clarke sent Rice the strategy Clinton had developed for retaliating in the event that al Qaeda was found to have been behind the previous October‘s attack on the U.S.S. “Cole.” The next day, the FBI conclusively pinned the “Cole” attack on al Qaeda.

Mr. Bush ordered no military strike, no escalation of existing Clinton measures. Instead, he repeated Clinton‘s previous diplomatic efforts, writing a letter to Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf in February and another on August 4.

Until September 11, even when Mr. Bush was asked about the “Cole,” an attack carried out on water by men in a boat, he offered a consistent prescription for keeping America safe, one he reiterated upon taking office.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BUSH: To protect our own people, our allies and friends, we must develop and we must deploy effective missile defenses.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OLBERMANN: Democrats, who controlled the Senate, warned that his focus was misplaced.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. CARL LEVIN (D): I‘m also concerned that we may not be putting enough emphasis on countering the most likely threats to our national security and to the security of our forces deployed around the world, those asymmetric threats, like terrorist attacks on the U.S.S. “Cole,” on our barracks and our embassies around the world, on the World Trade Center.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OLBERMANN: He was not alone. The executive director of the Hart-Rudmann Commission‘s request to brief Bush and Cheney on the terror threats they had studied was denied.

On February 26, 2001, Paul Bremer said of the administration, quote, “What they will do is stagger along until there‘s a major incident, and then suddenly say, Oh, my God, shouldn‘t we be organized to deal with this?”

According to the 9/11 Commission report, even bin Laden expected Bush to respond militarily to the “Cole” bombing. Quote, “In February 2001, according to a source, bin Laden wanted the United States to attack, and if it did not, he would launch something bigger.”

The most famous warning came in the August 6 presidential daily briefing, reporting “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.”

According to the 9/11 report, “Bush did not recall discussing the August 6 report with the attorney general, or whether Rice had done so. We have found no indication of any further discussion before September 11 among the president and his top advisers of the possibility of a threat of an al Qaeda attack in the United States. Tenet does not recall any discussions with the president of the domestic threat during this period. Domestic agencies did not know what to do, and no one gave them direction. The borders were not hardened, transportation systems were not fortified, electronic surveillance was not targeted against the domestic threat, state and local law enforcement were not marshaled to augment the FBI‘s efforts. The public was not warned.”

Explanations after the fact suggested a lack of familiarity with the recent history of terrorism.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIPS)

RICE: I don‘t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center.

(Subtitle: 1994, France disrupts plot to fly a jet into Eiffel Tower.)

DICK CHENEY, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: There wasn‘t any

way then we could have anticipated what was about to happen, of course, in

on 9/11.

(Subtitle: 1995, Philippines uncovers plot to fly planes into Pentagon and World Trade Center.)

(Subtitle: September 1999, U.S. study: Al Qaeda might crash planes into Pentagon.)

(Subtitle: Spring 2001, New York City trial testimony: Bin Laden sending agents to acquire planes.)

BUSH: These terrorists had burrowed in our country for over two years. They were well organized. They were well planned. They struck in a way that was unimaginable.

(Subtitle: July 2001, FBI told of Zacarias Moussaoui‘s interest in flying jumbo jets.)

(Subtitle: September 2001, FBI memo: Moussaoui could fly something into the World Trade Center.)

(END VIDEO CLIPS)

OLBERMANN: On September 10, 2001, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California requested a meeting with Vice President Cheney to press the case for aggressive counterterrorism measures. She is told Mr. Cheney will need some time to prepare first, six months.

That same day, the NSA intercepted a communique from Afghanistan to Saudi Arabia, stating, “Tomorrow is zero hour.” That communique was only translated into English on September 12.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

OLBERMANN: It appears now that the operative word in the phrase “We could not have anticipated” was the word “we.”

COUNTDOWN‘s look at what the Bush White House did to take the threat of terrorism seriously on its watch, and what it did not do, from Rice‘s claim this week they were handed no al Qaeda strategy from the Clinton administration, to President Bush‘s reaction to the confirmation that al Qaeda indeed was behind the attack on the U.S.S. “Cole.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJ11i6fi7KQ&eurl= (8 minutes)

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,...2382788,00.html

Focus: Chilling message of the 9/11 pilots
A video shows two of the world’s most infamous terrorists joking and laughing while filming their ‘death wills’ at Osama Bin Laden’s lair in Afghanistan. The journalist and author Yosri Fouda explains the terrible significance of the new find

See the video from noon today

Two bearded young men laugh and joke for the camera. They appear relaxed, well groomed, intelligent; they might be high-achieving students quietly celebrating an exam success. They look at a piece of paper and laugh some more.

What is so funny? Certainly not the piece of paper. There is Arabic script on it. Easily decipherable is the word “al wasiyyah”. This means “the will”.

It is the handwritten last testament of Ziad Jarrah, the lighter-haired and better-looking of the two young men. A well educated, middle-class Lebanese, he has been studying in Germany. So has his dark-haired companion, Mohammed Atta, also middle class and university educated, but born in Egypt. Atta has his will, too. Unsmiling, both men read them to camera.

These images are part of a videotape, nearly an hour long, that was filmed at Osama Bin Laden’s lair in Afghanistan 6½ years ago. They are revealed today for the first time, and they are a missing chapter in the searing story of the attacks on America on September 11, 2001.

Atta led the team of 19 suicide attackers and flew American Airlines flight 11 into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Jarrah piloted United Airlines flight 93. His assigned target was Capitol Hill, but the plane crashed.


ATTA and Jarrah have never been pictured together before. Indeed, a key element of their tradecraft was that they steered clear of each other. They were leading figures in the September 11 story, not only because they flew the planes but also because they apparently had everything to live for. Unlike most of the other hijackers, who were mainly provincial Saudi fundamentalists, Atta and Jarrah fitted easily into western society.

To the Germans who knew them in Hamburg they seemed entirely normal. The tape explains this mistake. It would be hard to look less homicidal — until the camera pulls back and reveals that Atta is sitting next to an AK-47.

So the tape not only fills a gap in the story of September 11 but also provides chilling proof of the difficulty of fighting Islamic terrorism: these two “normal”, happy, unthreatening individuals turned out to have an explosive effect on the history of the 21st century.

The unedited video was passed to The Sunday Times through a previously tested channel. On condition of anonymity, sources from both Al-Qaeda and the United States have confirmed its authenticity. It has no sound — and lip-readers have failed to decipher it, according to a US source — but the images speak loudly for themselves.

The tape not only features Atta and Jarrah. It also gives a rare and intriguing sight of Bin Laden with his inner court.

It opens with 100 or so Al-Qaeda hardcore members sitting on the ground in the open air, obviously expecting something to happen. Among them are several children.

A very tall man surrounded by three armed bodyguards arrives in a sedate, presidential manner. It is Bin Laden, dressed in white from head to toe with an all-enveloping, light brown robe. He looks serene as he makes his way to a makeshift podium and beings to speak into a microphone.

The date recorded on this section of the video is January 8, 2000. That makes the occasion Eid ul-Adha, the end of Ramadan.

There are a few recognisable faces among the audience, including Ramzi Binalshibh, Atta’s Hamburg flatmate who was later to become the co-ordinator of the September 11 attacks. And among the bodyguards is Abu Jandal, who was the only one with the authority to put two bullets in Bin Laden’s head if he was about to fall into enemy hands.

In the background are the tall mud-red walls of an impressive compound. It is clear that the location is part of a complex of about 80 buildings called Tarnak Farm in the desert near Kandahar airport. It was Bin Laden’s clan base during his Afghan sojourn — where he lived with his family and the inner core of Al-Qaeda.
American intelligence knew all about Tarnak Farm. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, “CIA officers were able to map the entire site, identifying the houses that belonged to Bin Laden’s wives and the one where he himself was most likely to sleep”.

Less than two years before the video was recorded, the CIA had a plan to work closely with some of the local tribes to grab Bin Laden as he slept. It was a clear-cut, well rehearsed “perfect operation”, according to Michael Scheuer, who ran the CIA Bin Laden unit at the time. But it was never executed and there is still controversy in America about who cancelled it.

TEN days after Bin Laden’s Eid speech, according to the date on the film, Atta and Jarrah read their martyrdom wills to the camera. This proof of their presence in Afghanistan at that time is just about the final main piece of the jigsaw: Atta, the man who decided zero hour on September 11 is for the first time on video, getting ready to record his “martyrdom” will.

Investigators have pieced together most of Atta’s life from his childhood as the son of a lawyer in Giza, northern Egypt, to the moment he boarded flight 11 — except for an unexplained absence from Hamburg in early 2000. The date on the tape perfectly corresponds with this.

Those who have been closely following the story had little doubt where Atta had been. Binalshibh told me, “Afghanistan, what else?” when I asked him during a secret meeting four years ago. But in their painstaking efforts to find the proof that connected the dots, US investigators and, especially, their German counterparts, have struggled with little more than circumstantial evidence and presumed facts.

This played nicely into the hands of conspiracy theorists, both in the Muslim world and in the West. Now the investigators have the proof, and only the flakiest of anti-American fantasists can go on claiming that Bin Laden, Atta, Jarrah and co had no hand in September 11.

We can now even reveal Atta’s itinerary. On November 29, 1999 he boarded Turkish Airlines flight TK1662 from Hamburg to Istanbul, Turkey, where he changed to flight TK1056 bound for Karachi, Pakistan. From there he would have crossed into Afghanistan by road, most probably through Quetta. On the return journey, he left Karachi on February 24, 2000 by flight TK1057 to Istanbul where he changed to flight TK1661 to Hamburg. Five months later he entered the United States to start flight training.

Unedited, the extraordinary footage also gives us a glimpse into the superficially ordinary character of the man who would later spearhead the devastating terrorist attack.

Wearing western clothes — black trousers and a dark brown, zip-collared sweater with zigzag stripes — Atta appears uncomfortable putting on a typical Pashtun hat.

He gives a how-do-I-look glance at the camera. The hat goes off, on, off and he throws it away with wry smile. Ready now. He crosses his legs and picks up his handwritten will.

Cool, gathered and deliberate, Atta reads to camera for 10 minutes before the tape cuts to a collector’s item: Atta and Jarrah together for the first time on camera.

With his stylish glasses, the handsome Lebanese is wearing a white, Saudi-style robe but appears to have western clothes on underneath.

Smiling, laughing and exchanging remarks, they discuss Jarrah’s will as he holds it — a superb set-up shot. Jarrah then gets his seven-minute exclusive appearance to tell the camera his last words.

THE significance of even a single frame of any of the September 11 pilots in Afghanistan could not be overestimated, let alone the sudden appearance of nearly 6,000 frames of the two most important and most puzzling hijackers.

Distinctively the black sheep of the whole lot — plotters and hijackers — Atta and Jarrah came from the two most liberal Arab countries, both from the heart of their respective communities, both from middle-class families, both intelligent, pleasant and trusted wherever they went, and both with impressive educational track records. Jarrah went to a Christian school in Beirut; Atta advanced his English at The American University in Cairo.

Then they both had ambitions beyond what they thought their countries could offer. They both went to Germany; Atta in 1992 to end up preparing a masters degree in city planning; and Jarrah in 1996 to end up preparing his in aeronautical engineering.

Again, they both could not cease to impress. So much so that Professor Dittmar Machule, who taught Atta at the Technical University in Harburg, a quiet suburb of Hamburg, still cannot understand what happened to the brilliant student he used to pick to fill in for him in seminars whenever he was busy.

While they lived in Hamburg, Atta and Jarrah were never meant to be seen together in one place at the same time, almost certainly on instructions.

Atta lived with other members of the Hamburg cell in a small flat while Jarrah was kept apart in a nicer part of Hamburg, living with a girlfriend and drinking alcohol. Yet in Afghanistan they appear at ease in other’s company.

When in mid-2000 they travelled to Florida, they were separate once again — even though they enrolled at flying schools that stood virtually next to each other.

If the appearance of this video solves one mystery, the big question about both Atta and Jarrah is still with us: how on earth did such impressive young men with everything to live for develop such a mindset? Neither was mad and neither was brainwashed. If anything at all they were both the antithesis of such naive and easy explanations.

One would confidently argue that someone of the calibre of Mohammed Atta would have been incapable of being brainwashed.

When Atta taped his will, he was not yet the leader of the hijackers. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the organiser of the plot, had earmarked two other men — Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Midhar — as his spearhead and had sent them to flight school in California. But he quickly changed his mind.

His protégés failed to live up to his expectations. One flight instructor actually called them “dumb and dumber”.

Much more importantly, Atta’s exceptional abilities had just been discovered.

The perfect soldier was here and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed could not have asked for more. I would even argue that had not Atta accidentally appeared on Khalid’s radar, the “aeroplanes operation”, as it as known to Al-Qaeda, may never have stood a chance of success.


Yosri Fouda is the chief investigative reporter for Al-Jazeera Television Pictures: The Sunday Times Tarnak Farm, near Kandahar, where Mohammed Atta’s video was shot, has a special place in the history of Al-Qaeda: it was once Osama Bin Laden’s personal kingdom within Afghanistan.


Exclusively Arab, it was home for Bin Laden’s wives and children, as well as for the elite fighters being trained for special operations. And, as we now know, for a few weeks in early 2000 it was home to Atta, leader of the 9/11 hijackers.

The farm, which covered about 100 acres, lay on a patch of desert about three miles south of Kandahar airport. It had originally been constructed by the Afghan government as an agricultural co-operative.

A mud-brick wall was built 10ft high to create a compound; inside there were about 80 one and two-storey buildings, including dormitories, storehouses, a small mosque and a building that Bin Laden converted into a medical clinic for his family and followers.

US intelligence knew Bin Laden, already a wanted terrorist, used Tarnak as his base, and in spring 1998 the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center began working on a plan to capture him at the compound, partly with the help of Afghan tribal fighters.

Afghans scouted and mapped the farm, and the CIA photographed it from space. The plan called for about 30 fighters to assemble at a staging post before driving to a second position a few miles from Tarnak.

From there the main raiding party would walk to the farm, arriving at 2am and avoiding minefields by crawling through drainage ditches. A second group would make its way towards the front gate, taking out the two guards as the main party attacked the group of huts where Bin Laden’s wives slept.

The plan was to bundle Bin Laden into a Toyota Land Cruiser and drive him to to a cave complex 30 miles away already stocked with food and water.

However, getting the plan accepted at CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, was not straightforward. It was known that dozens of women and children lived in the compound, and security chiefs feared there would be many casualties.

By June 1998, much to the disappointment of the field officers responsible for devising the plan, nobody at a senior level within the CIA seemed willing to support it. Nor was there any support within the White House.

The plan was called off shortly afterwards. CIA abandoned plan to snatch Bin Laden from Afghan farm

Atta's journey to mass murder

September 1, 1968 Born in Kafr el-Sheikh in the Nile delta, Egypt

October 1986 Joined Cairo University to study town planning; graduated in 1990

July 24, 1992 Arrived in Germany on a cultural exchange programme
November 23, 1992 Registered for a master’s degree in urban planning at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg

End 1997 Thought to have travelled to Afghanistan for the first time, staying close to the compound of Osama Bin Laden near Kandahar

November 1, 1998 Moved into an apartment in Germany with other members of what later became known as the Hamburg cell. Many Al-Qaeda members lived in this apartment at various times; the September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed visited repeatedly. Ziad Jarrah, the flight 93 pilot with whom Atta is pictured above, moved close by at about the same time

November 29, 1999 Atta flew from Istanbul to Pakistan. From there he travelled to Afghanistan

January 2000 At Bin Laden’s Tarnak Farm he is filmed laughing and joking with Jarrah while filming his last will and testament

March 2000 From Germany, Atta contacted 31 US flight schools to discuss pilot training

June 3, 2000 Entered US for the first time

July 2000 Atta enrolled at Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida. Jarrah trains at a flight school nearby

November 2000 Both earned their instrument certificates from the FAA

December 29, 2000 Atta practised on a Boeing 727 simulator in Miami

January 4, 2001 Atta flew to Spain to co-ordinate with Ramzi Binalshibh, a key Al-Qaeda planner, returning to America a week later

April 11 2001 Atta rented an apartment in Coral Springs, Florida, and assisted with the arrival of other hijackers

July-September 2001 Atta made eight or nine flights around America, some to meet other hijackers, some to carry out reconnaissance

August 28, 2001 Atta and other hijackers buy flight tickets for September 11

The other hijackers

Nineteen men hijacked four planes. They acted in teams of five, except on United Airlines 93, which had four hijackers led by Jarrah

Fifteen of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates. Atta came from Egypt, while Jarrah came from Lebanon. Only Atta and Jarrah were highly educated

Four weeks before the attacks Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20th hijacker, had been arrested, ostensibly on immigration charges, after the FBI became suspicious about his pilot training

He later denied knowing about the September 11 attacks, but did plead guilty to conspiring to hijack planes. He is serving life in a US prison

It is thought that 18 of the 19 terrorists recorded video wills. Before this weekend only five had come to light and none from the four pilots
The attacks and the toll

United Airlines flight 175 and American Airlines flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center towers on the morning of September 11, 2001. A total of 2,602 people died in the towers and on the ground

American Airlines flight 77, carrying 64 people, crashed into the Pentagon shortly afterwards: 125 people died on the ground

United Airlines flight 93 is thought to have been heading for Capitol Hill. But it crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back. Forty crew and passengers died

There were no survivors from any of the planes, which were carrying 265 people. In total, the September 11 attacks are thought to have killed 2,973 people, although some others are still listed as missing

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...6093000282.html

wo Months Before 9/11, an Urgent Warning to Rice
Sunday, October 1, 2006; Page A17


On July 10, 2001, two months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet met with his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, at CIA headquarters to review the latest on Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Black laid out the case, consisting of communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States. It was a mass of fragments and dots that nonetheless made a compelling case, so compelling to Tenet that he decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately.

Tenet called Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, from the car and said he needed to see her right away. There was no practical way she could refuse such a request from the CIA director.

For months, Tenet had been pressing Rice to set a clear counterterrorism policy, including specific presidential orders called "findings" that would give the CIA stronger authority to conduct covert action against bin Laden. Perhaps a dramatic appearance -- Black called it an "out of cycle" session, beyond Tenet's regular weekly meeting with Rice -- would get her attention.

Tenet had been losing sleep over the recent intelligence he'd seen. There was no conclusive, smoking-gun intelligence, but there was such a huge volume of data that an intelligence officer's instinct strongly suggested that something was coming. He and Black hoped to convey the depth of their anxiety and get Rice to kick-start the government into immediate action.

He did not know when, where or how, but Tenet felt there was too much noise in the intelligence systems. Two weeks earlier, he had told Richard A. Clarke, the National Security Council's counterterrorism director: "It's my sixth sense, but I feel it coming. This is going to be the big one."

But Tenet had been having difficulty getting traction on an immediate bin Laden action plan, in part because Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had questioned all the National Security Agency intercepts and other intelligence. Could all this be a grand deception? Rumsfeld had asked. Perhaps it was a plan to measure U.S. reactions and defenses.

Tenet had the NSA review all the intercepts, and the agency concluded they were of genuine al-Qaeda communications. On June 30, a top-secret senior executive intelligence brief contained an article headlined "Bin Laden Threats Are Real."

Tenet hoped his abrupt request for an immediate meeting would shake Rice. He and Black, a veteran covert operator, had two main points when they met with her. First, al-Qaeda was going to attack American interests, possibly in the United States itself. Black emphasized that this amounted to a strategic warning, meaning the problem was so serious that it required an overall plan and strategy. Second, this was a major foreign policy problem that needed to be addressed immediately. They needed to take action that moment -- covert, military, whatever -- to thwart bin Laden.

The United States had human and technical sources, and all the intelligence was consistent, the two men told Rice. Black acknowledged that some of it was uncertain "voodoo" but said it was often this voodoo that was the best indicator.

Tenet and Black felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off. President Bush had said he didn't want to swat at flies.

As they all knew, a coherent plan for covert action against bin Laden was in the pipeline, but it would take some time. In recent closed-door meetings the entire National Security Council apparatus had been considering action against bin Laden, including using a new secret weapon: the Predator unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, that could fire Hellfire missiles to kill him or his lieutenants. It looked like a possible solution, but there was a raging debate between the CIA and the Pentagon about who would pay for it and who would have authority to shoot.

Besides, Rice seemed focused on other administration priorities, especially the ballistic missile defense system that Bush had campaigned on. She was in a different place.

Tenet left the meeting feeling frustrated. Though Rice had given them a fair hearing, no immediate action meant great risk. Black felt the decision to just keep planning was a sustained policy failure. Rice and the Bush team had been in hibernation too long. "Adults should not have a system like this," he said later.

The July 10 meeting between Tenet, Black and Rice went unmentioned in the various reports of investigations into the Sept. 11 attacks, but it stood out in the minds of Tenet and Black as the starkest warning they had given the White House on bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Though the investigators had access to all the paperwork on the meeting, Black felt there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they didn't want to know about.

Philip D. Zelikow, the aggressive executive director of the Sept. 11 commission and a University of Virginia professor who had co-authored a book with Rice on Germany, knew something about the July 10 meeting, but it was not clear to him what immediate action really would have meant. In 2005 Rice hired Zelikow as a top aide at the State Department.

Afterward, Tenet looked back on the meeting with Rice as a tremendous lost opportunity to prevent or disrupt the Sept. 11 attacks. Rice could have gotten through to Bush on the threat, but she just didn't get it in time, Tenet thought. He felt that he had done his job and had been very direct about the threat, but that Rice had not moved quickly. He felt she was not organized and did not push people, as he tried to do at the CIA.

Black later said, "The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head."

Editor's Note: How much effort the Bush administration made in going after Osama bin Laden before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, became an issue last week after former president Bill Clinton accused President Bush's "neocons" and other Republicans of ignoring bin Laden until the attacks. Rice responded in an interview that "what we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/washingt...int&oref=slogin

October 1, 2006
9/11 Panel Members Weren’t Told of Meeting
By PHILIP SHENON
WASHINGTON, Oct. 2 — Members of the Sept. 11 commission said today that they were alarmed that they were told nothing about a White House meeting in July 2001 at which George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, is reported to have warned Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, about an imminent Al Qaeda attack and failed to persuade her to take action.

Details of the previously undisclosed meeting on July 10, 2001, two months before the Sept. 11 terror attacks, were first reported last week in a new book by the journalist Bob Woodward.

The final report from the Sept. 11 commission made no mention of the meeting nor did it suggest there had been such an encounter between Mr. Tenet and Ms. Rice, now secretary of state.

Since release of the book, “State of Denial,” the White House and Ms. Rice have disputed major elements of Mr. Woodward’s account, with Ms. Rice insisting through spokesmen that there had been no such exchange in a private meeting with Mr. Tenet and that he had expressed none of the frustration attributed to him in Mr. Woodward’s book.

“It really didn’t match Secretary Rice’s recollection of the meeting at all,” said Dan Bartlett, counselor to President Bush, in an interview on the CBS News program “Face the Nation.”

“It kind of left us scratching our heads because we don’t believe that’s an accurate account,” he said.

Although passages of the book suggest that Mr. Tenet was a major source for Mr. Woodward, the former intelligence director has refused to comment on the book.

Nor has there been any comment from J. Cofer Black, Mr. Tenet’s counterterrorism chief, who is reported in the book to have attended the July 10 meeting and left it frustrated by Ms. Rice’s “brush-off” of the warnings.

He is quoted as saying, “The only thing we didn’t do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.” Mr. Black did not return calls left at the security firm Blackwater, which he joined last year.

The book says that Mr. Tenet hurriedly organized the meeting — calling ahead from his car as it traveled to the White House — because he wanted to “shake Rice” into persuading the president to respond to dire intelligence warnings that summer about a terrorist strike. Mr. Woodward writes that Mr. Tenet left the meeting frustrated because “they were not getting through to Rice.”

The disclosures took members of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission by surprise last week. Some questioned whether information about the July 10 meeting was intentionally withheld from the panel.

In interviews Saturday and today, commission members said they were never told about the meeting despite hours of public and private questioning with Ms. Rice, Mr. Tenet and Mr. Black, much of it focused specifically on how the White House had dealt with terrorist threats in the summer of 2001.

“None of this was shared with us in hours of private interviews, including interviews under oath, nor do we have any paper on this,” said Timothy J. Roemer, a Democratic member of the commission and a former House member from Indiana. “I’m deeply disturbed by this. I’m furious.”

Another Democratic commissioner, former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste, said that the staff of the Sept. 11 commission was polled in recent days on the disclosures in Mr. Woodward’s book and agreed that the meeting “was never mentioned to us.”

“This is certainly something we would have wanted to know about,” he said, referring to the July 10, 2001, meeting.

He said he had attended the commission’s private interviews with both Mr. Tenet and Ms. Rice and had pressed “very hard for them to provide us with everything they had regarding conversations with the executive branch” about terrorist threats before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Philip D. Zelikow, the executive director of the Sept. 11 commission and now a top aide to Ms. Rice at the State Department, agreed that no witness before the commission had drawn attention to a July 10 meeting at the White House, nor described the sort of encounter portrayed in Mr. Woodward’s book.

Mr. Zelikow said that it was “entirely plausible” that a meeting occurred on July 10, during a period that summer in which intelligence agencies were being flooded with warnings of a terrorist attack against the United States or its allies.

But he said the commissioners and their staff had heard nothing in their private interviews with Mr. Tenet and Mr. Black to suggest that they had made such a dire presentation to Ms. Rice or that she had rebuffed them.

“If we had heard something that drew our attention to this meeting, it would have been a huge thing,” he said. “Repeatedly Tenet and Black said they could not remember what had transpired in some of those meetings.”

Democratic lawmakers have seized on Mr. Woodward’s book in arguing that the Bush administration bungled the war in Iraq and paid too little attention to terrorist threats in the months before Sept. 11.

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on “Face the Nation” on CBS that there had been “rumors” of such an encounter between Mr. Tenet and Ms. Rice in the summer of 2001.

Mr. Woodward’s book, he said, raised the question of “why didn’t Condi Rice and George Tenet tell the 9/11 commission about that? They were obliged to do that and they didn’t.”

http://911blogger.com/node/3378#comment-76232
-- -- --
The 9/11 Commissioners have reacted to Bob Woodward's disclosure that CIA director George Tenet briefed Condie Rice about the imminent attack by saying "no one told us!"

Uh, turns out someone did, but they didn't mention it in the 9/11 Commission Report. As McClatchy Newspapers [ http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/15662785.htm ] puts it:

"The independent Sept. 11, 2001, commission was given the same “scary” briefing about an imminent al Qaida attack on a U.S. target that was presented to the White House two months before the attacks, but failed to disclose the warning in its 428-page report.

Former CIA Director George Tenet presented the briefing to commission member Richard Ben Veniste and executive director Philip Zelikow in secret testimony at CIA headquarters on Jan. 28, 2004, said three former senior agency officials.

Tenet raised the matter himself, displayed slides from a Power Point presentation that he and other officials had given to then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on July 10, 2001, and offered to testify on the matter in public if the commission asked him to, they said.

In the briefing, Tenet warned "in very strong terms" that intelligence from a variety of sources indicated that Osama bin Laden's terrorist organization was planning an attack on a U.S. target in the near future, but didn't provide specifics about the exact timing or nature of a possible attack, or about whether it would take place in the United States or overseas, said the former senior intelligence officials, all of whom requested anonymity because Tenet’s presentation was classified.

However, said one of the officials, "the briefing was intended to 'connect the dots' contained in other intelligence reports and paint a very clear picture of the threat posed by bin Laden."


The 9/11 Commission needs a new excuse for failing to document Tenet's presentation to the White House. Let's see . . . "the dog ate our homework"?

George Washington at http://www.911blogger.com/ :

The evidence that the government has covered up and whitewashed what really occurred on 9/11 is overwhelming.

For example, the former director of the FBI says there was a cover up by the 9/11 Commission.

And the 9/11 Commissioners knew that military officials lied to the Commission, and considered recommending criminal charges for such false statements, yet didn't bother to tell the American people ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...00.html?sub=new ).

Indeed, the co-chairs of the Commission now admit that the Commission largely operated based upon political considerations ( http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file...&type=printable ).

9/11 Commission co-chair Lee Hamilton says "I don't believe for a minute we got everything right", that the Commission was set up to fail, that people should keep asking questions about 9/11, that the 9/11 debate should continue, and that the 9/11 Commission report was only "the first draft" of history.
[ See CBC Windows video linked at the original).

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/#42666

9/11 Conspiracy Friday
Posted by Evan Derkacz on October 6, 2006 at 11:30 AM.

Will Bunch writes that recent revelations put the pre-9/11 actions of several Administration officials into an even more suspicious light:


On July 26, 2001 - 47 days before the Sept. 11 attacks - CBS News reported that Ashcroft was flying expensive charters rather than commercial flights because of a "threat assessment" by the FBI. CBS said, "Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term." Newsweek later reported that on Sept. 10, 2001, "a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns."


Did either Ashcroft or the Pentagon have advance information about a 9/11-style attack and, if so, why wasn't this shared with the American public?

Well, recent revelations from the Woodward book -- namely that Rice was briefed on the high probability of a threat on 7/10 [VIDEO], weeks before the infamous August 6, Presidential Daily Briefing (Al Qaeda Determined to Attack In U.S.) -- make the above question shine like a new dime.

Bunch then points to this report from McClatchey (formerly Knight-Ridder):


WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and former Attorney General John Ashcroft received the same CIA briefing about an imminent al-Qaida strike on an American target that was given to the White House two months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.


The State Department's disclosure Monday that the pair was briefed within a week after then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was told about the threat on July 10, 2001, raised new questions about what the Bush administration did in response, and about why so many officials have claimed they never received or don't remember the warning.


One official who helped to prepare the briefing, which included a PowerPoint presentation, described it as a "10 on a scale of 1 to 10" that "connected the dots" in earlier intelligence reports to present a stark warning that al-Qaida, which had already killed Americans in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and East Africa, was poised to strike again.

Powerpoint presentation on Al Qaeda threat --> Sudden change in flying habits of those briefed --> 9/11 --> Ugh. (Attytood)

http://www.wpi.edu/News/Transformations/20...ring/steel.html
-- -- --
The "Deep Mystery" of Melted Steel

There is no indication that any of the fires in the World Trade Center buildings were hot enough to melt the steel framework. Jonathan Barnett, professor of fire protection engineering, has repeatedly reminded the public that steel--which has a melting point of 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit--may weaken and bend, but does not melt during an ordinary office fire. Yet metallurgical studies on WTC steel brought back to WPI reveal that a novel phenomenon--called a eutectic reaction--occurred at the surface, causing intergranular melting capable of turning a solid steel girder into Swiss cheese.

Materials science professors Ronald R. Biederman and Richard D. Sisson Jr. confirmed the presence of eutectic formations by examining steel samples under optical and scanning electron microscopes. A preliminary report was published in JOM, the journal of the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society. A more detailed analysis comprises Appendix C of the FEMA report. The New York Times called these findings "perhaps the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation." The significance of the work on a sample from Building 7 and a structural column from one of the twin towers becomes apparent only when one sees these heavy chunks of damaged metal.

A one-inch column has been reduced to half-inch thickness. Its edges--which are curled like a paper scroll--have been thinned to almost razor sharpness. Gaping holes--some larger than a silver dollar--let light shine through a formerly solid steel flange. This Swiss cheese appearance shocked all of the fire-wise professors, who expected to see distortion and bending--but not holes.

A eutectic compound is a mixture of two or more substances that melts at the lowest temperature of any mixture of its components. Blacksmiths took advantage of this property by welding over fires of sulfur-rich charcoal, which lowers the melting point of iron. In the World Trade Center fire, the presence of oxygen, sulfur and heat caused iron oxide and iron sulfide to form at the surface of structural steel members. This liquid slag corroded through intergranular channels into the body of the metal, causing severe erosion and a loss of structural integrity.

"The important questions," says Biederman, "are how much sulfur do you need, and where did it come from? The answer could be as simple--and this is scary- as acid rain."

Have environmental pollutants increased the potential for eutectic reactions? "We may have just the inherent conditions in the atmosphere so that a lot of water on a burning building will form sulfuric acid, hydrogen sulfide or hydroxides, and start the eutectic process as the steel heats up," Biederman says. He notes that the sulfur could also have come from contents of the burning buildings, such as rubber or plastics. Another possible culprit is ocean salts, such as sodium sulfate, which is known to catalyze sulfidation reactions on turbine blades of jet engines. "All of these things have to be explored," he says.

From a building-safety point of view, the critical question is: Did the eutectic mixture form before the buildings collapsed, or later, as the remains smoldered on the ground. "We have no idea," admits Sisson. "To answer that, we would need to recreate those fires in the FPE labs, and burn fresh steel of known composition for the right time period, with the right environment." He hopes to have the opportunity to collaborate on thermodynamically controlled studies, and to observe the effects of adding sulfur, copper and other elements. The most important lesson, Sisson and Biederman stress, is that fail-safe sprinkler systems are essential to prevent steel from reaching even 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, because phase changes at the 1,300-degree mark compromise a structure's load-bearing capacity.

The FEMA report calls for further metallurgic investigations, and Barnett, Biederman and Sisson hope that WPI will obtain NIST funding and access to more samples. They are continuing their microscopic studies on the samples prepared by graduate student Jeremy Bernier and Marco Fontecchio, the 2001–02 Helen E. Stoddard Materials Science and Engineering Fellow. (Next year's Stoddard Fellow, Erin Sullivan, will take up this work as part of her graduate studies.) Publication of their results may clear up some mysteries that have confounded the scientific community.

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=9807

October 6, 2006
States of Denial
Bob Woodward's best-selling State of Denial dooms the official 9/11 narrative
by Justin Raimondo
Bob Woodward's revelation that Condoleezza Rice was warned by George Tenet and two other top CIA officials, on July 10, 2001, that a terrorist attack on the U.S. was imminent continues to reverberate – auguring potentially devastating consequences for the Bush White House. While Rice initially denied it, her spokesman confirmed that a meeting took place on that date, although Rice continues to plead a memory lapse. And as the news that Rice wasn't the only one privy to this briefing leaks out, a veritable epidemic of amnesia seems to be breaking out in Washington.

Less than two months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft stopped taking commercial domestic flights, and started chartering government jets for all his travels. Now why was that? In the wake of the attacks, so-called "conspiracy theorists" immediately glommed on to this information and hailed it as evidence that 9/11 was "an inside job." Now we know that the conspiracy theorists were on to something, although not exactly what they imagined.

According to a report in the McClatchy newspapers, within a week of Rice's brushoff of the CIA's alarum,

"Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and former Attorney General John Ashcroft received the same CIA briefing about an imminent al-Qaeda strike on an American target that was given to the White House two months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks."

Although Ashcroft is telling the media "that it was 'disappointing' that he never received the briefing, either," Rice's office, besides confirming she'd been briefed "on or around July 10," also confirmed passing it on to Ashcroft and Rumsfeld. Both were presented with an explicit warning – described by one CIA officer present as "a 10 on a scale of 1-to-10" – "by July 17." A week or so later, as CBS reported at the time, Ashcroft's office announced that he would henceforth abjure traveling on commercial airlines. A week earlier his office had leased a jet, and the authorities were explaining his decision in terms of a "threat" that went unspecified:

"'There was a threat assessment and there are guidelines. He is acting under the guidelines,' an FBI spokesman said. Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department, however, would identify what the threat was, when it was detected, or who made it."

Ashcroft himself explicitly denied any knowledge of imminent danger:

"'I don't do threat assessments myself and I rely on those whose responsibility it is in the law enforcement community, particularly the FBI. And I try to stay within the guidelines that they've suggested I should stay within for those purposes,' Ashcroft said.

"Asked if he knew anything about the threat or who might have made it, the attorney general replied, 'Frankly, I don't. That's the answer.'"

Ashcroft was lying then, and he's lying now when he denies receiving Tenet's warning. He knew everything about the threat and who had made it. The McClatchy report describes the Tenet briefing as a PowerPoint presentation that "connected the dots" and urgently predicted al-Qaeda would strike soon. Woodward writes that Tenet and Black tried to impress upon Rice that "al-Qaeda was going to attack American interests, possibly within the United States itself."

Tenet and Black were given "the brush-off," as Woodward puts it, but as the CIA duo's dire premonition of what Tenet called "the big one" was communicated to Bush's inner circle, one doubts that only Ashcroft took precautions. While the rest of us peons went about our lives in ignorant bliss, the warlords of Washington ducked and covered.

What is illuminating about this developing story is that it reveals the essential context in which 9/11 occurred, and how it contradicts the "it-came-out-of-the-sheer-blue-sky" explanation that frames the official narrative. The Tenet briefing, of course, never made it into the report of the 9/11 Commission. Both Richard Ben-Veniste, a top Democratic member of the bipartisan Commission, and Philip Zelikow, the author of the Commission's report, met with Tenet and saw the same PowerPoint presentation viewed by Rice, Ashcroft, and Rumsfeld. According to the McClatchy report,

"Tenet outlined to commission members Ben-Veniste and Zelikow in secret testimony at CIA headquarters. The State Department confirmed that the briefing materials were 'made available to the 9/11 Commission, and Director Tenet was asked about this meeting when interviewed by the 9/11 Commission.'"

Tenet, however, tells a different story. Citing multiple sources within the intelligence community, the McClatchy piece avers that

"Tenet raised the matter with the panel himself, displayed slides from the PowerPoint presentation, and offered to testify on the matter in public.

"Ben-Veniste confirmed to McClatchy Newspapers that Tenet outlined for the 9/11 commission the July 10 briefing to Rice in secret testimony in January 2004. He referred questions about why the commission omitted any mention of the briefing in its report to Zelikow, the report's main author. Zelikow didn't respond to e-mail and telephone queries from McClatchy Newspapers."

Surely Zelikow has some explaining to do, but this yawning gap in the official narrative isn't so inexplicable given his ideological background. A strong supporter of the neoconservative foreign policy agenda, Zelikow is very close to Rice, having co-authored a book with her. She had him rewrite the original National Security Strategy authored by Richard Haass, to emphasize the neocon commitment to the principle of brazen aggression, otherwise known as "preemption."

Zelikow's closeness to the administration was immediately seized on by the families of 9/11 victims as a gigantic conflict of interest. A serious academic, he is also a bit of an odd duck who has been unusually candid about what he calls the real "unspoken" agenda behind the Bush's administration's rush to war with Iraq: the "defense" of Israel. Unlike others who have made this same observation, however, he has not been accused of hatching "conspiracy theories" or smeared as "anti-Semitic." In a piece he co-authored for Foreign Affairs in the winter of 1998, Zelikow wrote of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center that, if it had succeeded on a larger scale,

"The resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America's fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. Like Pearl Harbor, the event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and use of deadly force. More violence could follow, either future terrorist attacks or U.S. counterattacks. Belatedly, Americans would judge their leaders negligent for not addressing terrorism more urgently."

Having anticipated well in advance the judgment of negligence, incompetence, and worse pronounced on this administration, Zelikow did his best to cover up the evidence. It wasn't good enough, however, and the official story is rapidly unraveling. The question now is, what did they know, who knew, and when did they know it?

The level of "chatter" picked up by our intelligence agencies prior to 9/11 kept Tenet up at night and energized him enough to go charging into Condi Rice's office, without notice, with a warning so urgent it couldn't wait a moment longer. Yet he and his fellow CIA officers ran up against a brick wall of, at best, indifference on the part of Condi, as well as Rumsfeld's outright obstructionism. Rumsfeld is said to have disdained the idea that a serious plot was afoot. Woodward writes:

"Tenet has been having difficulty getting traction on an immediate bin Laden action plan, in part because Rumsfeld has questioned all the NSA intercepts and other intelligence. Could all this be a grand deception? Rumsfeld had asked. Perhaps it was a plan to measure U.S. reactions and defenses. Tenet had the NSA review all the intercepts. They concluded they were genuine al-Qaeda communications. On June 30 a TOP SECRET senior executive intelligence brief contained an article headlined, 'Bin Laden Threats Are Real.'"

Incompetence on this scale is hard to imagine. Aside from the pigheadedness we have come to know and loathe in Rumsfeld and our commander in chief, and the tendency of government officials – and any sort of bureaucracy – to move slowly and uncertainly, preoccupied by questions of turf and intramural politics, there is perhaps another and more troubling explanation for why we didn't catch on to what was happening.

Yes, the administration was indeed distracted from real threats, focused as they were on the nonexistent "threat" from Iraq. However, these factors alone do not fully explain how, with all the "noise" emanating from intelligence sources – relayed directly and urgently to the White House by Tenet and others – they managed to miss the rising flood tide of indications that something wicked this way comes. The long trail of "errors" and "intelligence failures" smacks just as much of willful blindness as it does of monumental incompetence. An element of deliberate obstruction, on some level, of Tenet's lonely crusade to get the administration to do something, makes a certain amount of sense: after all, the sheer mass of evidence that something was afoot suggests a considerable effort to downplay or suppress it. There were forces working against Tenet, Black, and the CIA – but who were they, and what were their motives?

What all this suggests is that the U.S. government had been successfully infiltrated on some level. And it wasn't some obscure "conspiracy theorist" but New York Times columnist William Safire, who, two days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, first reported al-Qaeda's success in penetrating the most closely-guarded secrets of the U.S. government:

"A threatening message received by the Secret Service was relayed to the agents with the president that 'Air Force One is next.' According to the high official, American code words were used showing a knowledge of procedures that made the threat credible.

"(I have a second, on-the-record source about that: Karl Rove, the president's senior adviser, tells me: 'When the president said "I don't want some tinhorn terrorists keeping me out of Washington," the Secret Service informed him that the threat contained language that was evidence that the terrorists had knowledge of his procedures and whereabouts. In light of the specific and credible threat, it was decided to get airborne with a fighter escort.')"

Although the White House later backtracked and tried to claim that no such threat was made, I'd go with the first story simply because such an elaborate lie seems unlikely – especially one that makes them look bad. And if al-Qaeda could gain access to super-secret code words and acquire specific knowledge of the security procedures attending the president as well as his exact whereabouts, then surely they had penetrated the U.S. government in some way, shape, or form – perhaps with the aid of a cooperative foreign intelligence agency. At any rate, in this context it is not unreasonable to posit a fifth column operating inside the U.S. government, feeding vital information to the terrorists – and fiercely obstructing Tenet and the CIA from gaining the favorable attention of our addled president and his inner circle.

In this sense, then, it could be said that 9/11 was an "inside job," not because the WTC was felled by "controlled demolition," as the wackos assert, and not because we bombed ourselves on 9/11, but because the plot couldn't have succeeded without some form of outside assistance. Whether this was from a foreign intelligence agency, al-Qaeda spies placed deep inside the national security bureaucracy, or perhaps both, is a matter of pure speculation, but it seems to me that, when it comes to 9/11, the whole question of foreknowledge is now becoming a vitally important question.

This opens up a fascinating investigative trail that leads directly to all sorts of interesting reports – in particular this four-part report from Carl Cameron of Fox News – just as credible as Woodward's journalism, that bear some looking into. Antiwar.com has been in the lead on this issue from Day One, and I have even written a short book on the subject of which intelligence agencies were likely to have stumbled across the 9/11 terrorist plot in the making – and might have been sympathetic to the conspirators' aims, if not their motives. This is the great unexplored aspect of the biggest terrorist attack in our history. When the report by the joint Senate and House Intelligence Committees on intelligence-gathering efforts was released in highly redacted form, Sen. Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate Select Committee, told PBS' Gwen Ifill:

"Yes, going back to your question about what was the greatest surprise. I agree with what Senator Shelby said the degree to which agencies were not communicating was certainly a surprise but also I was surprised at the evidence that there were foreign governments involved in facilitating the activities of at least some of the terrorists in the United States."

Sure, the Bush administration was in a state of denial when it came to realistically assessing the terrorist threat, and they are in a similar state when it comes to the effect our foreign policy – specifically the Iraq war – has on our fight to eradicate that threat. The real problem, however, is that we are all enmeshed in multiple states of denial, blocked from going down certain paths of investigation by taboos against "conspiracism" and "revisionism" that preclude all but a highly sanitized – and unsatisfactory – version of the 9/11 story.

Yet "revisionism" is inherent in the study of history, or, indeed, the study of anything: as we do not have perfect knowledge, we are constantly revising and updating our views in light of new information. Revisionism is the opposite of dogmatism, which carves the "accepted" version in stone even before all the facts are in.

In any event, the cause of 9/11 revisionism, which I have touted in the past, has been given a major boost by Woodward's chronicle of the pre-attack struggle between the intelligence professionals who tried to prevent disaster and those politicians and apparatchiks who stood in their way. He has given us plenty of fresh clues as to where the bodies are buried, and the debunking of the "official" story proceeds apace.

http://www.reason.com/links/links101006.shtml
It Usually Starts with John Ashcroft
The pre-9/11 timeline has never made less sense
Jeff A. Taylor



As the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui conclusively proved, amazing things happen when you ask people to tell the truth or go to jail. Testimony by FBI officials in a real criminal court revealed long-buried facts that show that federal officials had far more information about the 9/11 plot than anyone had suspected.

Now, thanks to Bob Woodward's book State of Denial, we have learned that immediately prior to the Moussaoui-inspired August 2001 attempts by th