http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/postelection.html

A Post-Election Wrap-Up:
Iraq, 9/11, Drugs, Cheney, and Watergate Two
by Peter Dale Scott
27 November 2004

excerpts only... see the link for the long article and its footnotes

"... America remains a fundamentally decent country. The crucial test for that decency will be whether it -- or more specifically you, the reader -- can be mobilized to resist the quite alien ideology in the White House and Pentagon, which now threatens to overwhelm decency and replace it with something different.

And the most immediate question is what issue is most likely to arouse that kind of mobilization. There are a number of possible issues, which we should briefly consider. But I shall argue that the most serious and also most viable issue -- the Achilles heel of this seemingly undefeatable machine -- is 9/11.

We saw already in the last Congress that Bush and Cheney were out-lobbied in Congress by the so-called Jersey Girls, widows and mothers of 9/11 victims. Despite strenuous White House opposition, they first obtained a 9/11 Commission, and then obtained an extension for it to complete its work. Almost single-handedly at first, they created a currrent in Washington that has drawn in members of both parties. And at this stage the Jersey Girls are still dissatisfied, having complained publicly about the Commission's failure "to ask the many crucial questions." [19]

The 9/11 movement is still growing, having received an enormous boost from the clear shortcomings of the 9/11 Commission Report."

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"However I believe that the impeachment issue with the most traction and momentum, and the most important issue of all if America is to remain a democracy, is 9/11.

9/11 as an Issue for Impeachment

We now have four new books which between them strengthen the case that the Bush-Cheney Administration itself, taken as a whole, was at least partly responsible for the catastrophe of 9/11, not just by negligence but by design. I hope readers will buy and study them: Paul Thompson's The Terror Timeline, David Ray Griffin's The 9 /11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, Mike Ruppert's Crossing the Rubicon, and Peter Lance's Cover Up. (I'm not impartial on 9/11, after having blurbed the first two books, and being mentioned in the third.)

Each book has its own different merits. Griffin's is the best introduction, Thompson's is the best research guide, Ruppert's is the strongest case against Cheney. Lance's Cover Up, while it says less about Bush and Cheney than the other books, is the best expose of how the 9/11 Commission became a seamless part of an ongoing cover-up, because of the involvement of some of its members and staff in prior pre-9/11 scandals, which a true investigation would have exposed. While his narrative is complex, it reaches to profound malfunctions in America's justice and intelligence establishments."

-- --

"... it is clear that the Commission, instead of getting to the heart of these scandals, consciously recruited as Commissioners, staff and witnesses those who had a major stake in covering them up.

And what they were covering up, in effect, included earlier, pre-9/11 occasions when the US intelligence bureaucracies had, knowingly or unknowingly, facilitated terrorist attacks in which Americans were killed.

In my opinion this cover-up extends to the 9/11 Report's extraordinary and absurd contention that "No persuasive evidence exists that al-Qaeda relied on the drug trade as an important source of revenue." [56] This ignores the British government's report to Parliament, previously cited, that al-Qaeda's financing "includes substantial exploitation of the illegal drugs trade from Afghanistan." [57] It ignores also a US Central Command report that in December 2003 a dhow was intercepted near the Strait of Hormuz carrying almost two tons of hashish valued at up to $10 million. There were "clear ties" between the shipment and al-Qaeda, the Centcom statement said. [58]

Once again what is being covered up is the CIA's culpability in helping in the 1980s to build up the Islamist drug networks, in order to help finance its proxy armies in Afghanistan (a pattern repeated in 2001-04). [59]

Just as Watergate ended up being about much broader scandals than a break-in at the DNC, so the 9/11 Commission investigation must be seen as a scab covering major scandals affecting both parties over at least the past decade. If we fail to force a true account of what has happened here, then in truth we are like the good Germans of the 1930s, appalled but powerless as they watched their Republic fade away.

What Happened on September 11, 2001?

I know that many of my friends, left, center, and right, still resist the idea of looking beneath the surface of the official account of 9/11. But whatever one thinks, one must recognize that the still unexplained mysteries of 9/11, reinforced by books like these, have helped to define a new political constituency in America that spans and unites both left and right, and is determined to obtain answers.

There is still an appalling lack of resolution as to what happened in the USG on 9/11. The 9/11 Commission Report had to admit that information first supplied by NORAD, and then later corrected, was still simply wrong (though the Report's unsupported "corrections" to the record seem just as doubtful). [60]

Paul Thompson is much blunter:

NORAD's explanations about 9/11 have never made sense, and their new eagerness to be seen as an incompetent "Cold War vestige" is equally suspect. NORAD officials brazenly lied throughout their testimony. In the new NORAD timeline they presented, they even claimed that CNN first began showing images of the World Trade Center on fire at 8:57 when it is easily verifiable that CNN began doing this at 8:48. [CNN, Transcript, 9/11/01, NORAD Testimony, 5/23/03] Like their many other lies, one can see how this lie serves to cover up the extent of their failure. Unfortunately, the Independent Commission did not require that testimony be given under oath, so these officials cannot be charged with perjury. [61]

Even from the flawed data in the 9/11 Commission Report itself, it is clear that in pursuing the truth about this matter, all eyes should now be focused on the behavior of Cheney that day. As a non-conspiratorial article by Benjamin Demott in the October Harper's concludes, "Details in the President's, Vice President's, and other accounts of the framing and delivery of the `presidential' order to shoot down the hijacked airlines inspire severe doubt that the order came from Bush himself, rather than from an official -- Vice President Cheney -- with no military authority." [62] The bulk of DeMott's article focuses on ways that Bush (fortunately for him, not under oath) lied to the Commission.

We need a comparable article focusing on the apparent lies, to the Commission and elsewhere, by Cheney. As the webblogger Xymphora has noted,

"apologists for the Official Story can't rely on the delay in Cheney's orders reaching the pilots to explain why no defensive action was taken. Someone still has to explain why NORAD acted as if it was under a standdown order." [63]

If there was a standdown order given that day, almost certainly Cheney had something to do with it.

Cheney's behavior on that day, as Paul Thompson points out, was extraordinary:

"In his May 2003 testimony, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta claimed that about 9:25 or 9:26, a few minutes after his arrival at the bunker beneath the White House, he overheard an aide tell Vice President Cheney that a hijacked plane headed toward Washington was 50 miles away, then 30 miles away (judging by the speed of the plane it would have been 50 miles from Washington around 9:27). [Norman Mineta Testimony, 5/23/03, Washington Post, 1/27/02, ABC News, 9/11/02] When the plane was announced to be 10 miles away, the aide asked the vice president, "Do the orders still stand?" Cheney replied, "Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?" Mineta inferred that the order was an order to shoot down the plane." [Norman Mineta Testimony, 5/23/03]. . . .

Why did Cheney and others track Flight 77 getting closer and closer to Washington, and fail to give any evacuation orders? How many of the 125 people killed inside the Pentagon could have been saved?

Mike Ruppert's book (citing a White House Press Release of 5/8/01) shows that, in the weeks before 9/11, "all counter-terror response planning and organization had been placed under the control of Dick Cheney" (337). Ruppert makes an initial if still circumstantial case, the strongest that I have seen so far, that "on the day of September 11th Richard Cheney was in full and complete control" of a properly functioning command system, which then deliberately let some of the hijacked planes hit their targets (591, cf. 411, 433). [64]

Ruppert argues that Cheney was in charge because of the multiple wargames running that day -- Vigilant Warrior, Vigilant Guardian, Northern Vigilance, an NRO exercise (name unknown), and Tripod II (a non-military biochemical attack exercise involving FEMA) -- that needed coordination from outside NORAD. [65] If he has no single source to nail this claim down, it is because of the extreme evasiveness shown by officials about that day, as for example:

"When asked who was responsible for coordinating the multiple wargames running on the morning of September 11, 2001, General Ralph E. Eberhart, the man in charge of NORAD on the morning in question, replied "No Comment." [66]

This anecdote can stand as a synecdoche for the performance of the 9/11 Commission as a whole, and its studied efforts to avoid answering the most urgent questions about September 11.

Whatever the real truth, it is surely fair to quote here James Fenimore Cooper, as Benjamin DeMott does in the October Harper's: "In all the general concerns the public has a right to be treated with candor. Without this manly and republican quality . . . [American] institutions are converted into stupendous fraud."

Two years ago one of my wisest political friends suggested, not altogether seriously, that the first step in a program for a better America should be to "Impeach Cheney First." If enough people insist on learning what the 9/11 Commission covered up, that proposal could have legs. An impeachment debate as a political event in Congress may still be far off, but I believe that a vigorous pursuit of the 9/11 mysteries is likely to create a demand for it.

Of course it is most unlikely that the new Congress would actually impeach Cheney. But the case for malfeasance on 9/11, if pursued, could be a strong enough one to force Bush eventually to accept Cheney's resignation, much as Nixon in his Watergate crisis was forced to drop Agnew. And the resignation of Agnew (who had been regarded as Nixon's insurance against impeachment) was more the beginning than the end of a critical purgation, a crisis which, although painful, left America in the end better off than it had been before.

The Challenge of Watergate Two

In the Watergate crisis an important, even crucial role was played by the media. In part the media were protecting themselves: Nixon like Bush despised the so-called "responsible" press, and was threatening to deprive the Washington Post of its lucrative TV franchises. But the "responsible" media in 2005 are less likely to display as much independence as they showed in 1971, when they printed the leaked Pentagon Papers. Both the country and the media have changed, and the Northeastern establishment is no longer as powerful as before.

At present the mainstream media have been unwilling to touch the 9/11 controversy. As Paul Thompson reports on his website, when the 9/11 Commission held important hearings in May 2003 on the critical issue of air defense, the New York Times and Los Angeles Times failed to report them at all. [67]

It is obvious that, for reasons summarized by Ben Bagdikian and others, the corporate media are not now likely to perform the cleansing and healing role they played in Watergate One. In this new crisis the American people will have to be actors, not witnesses; and they must help to achieve what the media will not do for them.

There is, at least at the present, a great new medium for those interested in speaking truth to power. It is the blogosphere of the Web, and more and more of us are becoming blogonauts. The old media themselves swept Watergate One under the rug, as soon as it was about to raise issues about the malfeasance, not just of Nixon, but of the CIA. One can predict that the Web, as currently constituted, will never do that.

I have never agreed with those on the left who argued that the way to make things better was to make them worse (je schlimmer, desto besser). But if a power-crazed administration takes us down the path to disaster in the Middle East, we should use all our efforts to turn disaster into opportunity.

It is of course inconceivable that ordinary people using the web could by themselves bring down a sitting president. But the coming months do indeed promise a political contest at a high level -- between those in power -- over values: the traditional values of the American democratic process versus the new "values" (if that is what they are) being imposed by a radical new right.

Frank Gaffney wrote in his National Review essay that the Bush strategy of preemptive war rested squarely on "the ultimate moral value -- freedom -- as the cornerstone of his strategy." The test of the coming months will be how much of American society still prefers the traditional value of freedom in a context of multilateralism, moderation, and peace.

My act of faith is that there is still in American society a strong preference for the moderation advocated by John Adams, as in a passage I keep quoting from his Autobiography:

This is the established order of Things, when a Nation has grown to such an height of Power as to become dangerous to Mankind, she never fails to loose her Wisdom, her Justice and her Moderation, and with these she never fails to loose her Power; which however returns again, if those Virtues return. (IV, 58)

In the coming contest between these values of expansionism and of moderation, the immediate task for those who wish for a much better society will be to encourage and lend their weight behind the better part of the existing one.

The main truth established by the 9/11 Commission is the existence of a massive cover-up in which Commission members and staff were also actively involved. The country still needs to learn what lies behind the cover-up. As a first step there should be a campaign to release all of the records of the 9/11 Commission, officially the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.

To obtain these records expeditiously may require legislation analogous to the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. [68] This set up the Assassinations Records Review Board, which was responsible for the release of many important documents, including the now notorious documents on Project Northwoods.

These papers will not tell us what really happened. But they will give more details about the cover-up of the last two years, a cover-up in which Cheney himself played an active role. [69] And the cover-up, some of us can remember, was all that emerged, and all that needed to emerge, about Watergate One.

Impeach Cheney First."