May 03, 2005
| Griffin Speech To Be Rebroadcast On C-SPAN | 9/11 |
Ethicist, theologian, and 9/11 investigator David Ray Griffin, author of The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 and The 911 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions spoke before a standing room only crowd of about 450 people here in Madison on April 18. In a lecture entitled, "9/11 and the American Empire — How Should Religious People Respond?", Griffin laid out a small part of the evidence he has amassed that implicates elements of the US government as having, at best, foreknowledge of — or, at worst, an active role in — the 9/11 attacks. The lecture was covered by C-SPAN, the first time such questions have been covered in any mainstream national medium.
C-SPAN will re-broadcast the lecture this Saturday May 7th at 2:30 PM Eastern on C-SPAN2. C-SPAN's program note is here.
Alternatively, you can download video (50 MB) or audio (32 MB) here or audio here. Here is some coverage of the original lecture from Madison's Capital Times.
Kevin Barrett, who organized Griffin's Madison appearance, asks Wisconsin residents to phone Senator Russ Feingold this week at 202-224-5323 to urge him to tune in for the speech.
Posted by Jonathan at 10:42 PM | Comments (1) | Link to this
April 22, 2005
| One More Month To Go? | 9/11 |
An interesting bit of perspective from Utopian Turtletop [via Digby]
1,347: Number of days from the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, to VJ Day (Victory in Japan) on August 15, 1945.1,317: Number of days from the airplane-bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, to today.
So in another month we should pretty much have this thing all wrapped up.
Or not.
Posted by Jonathan at 01:42 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this
April 16, 2005
| David Ray Griffin In Madison Monday | 9/11 |
Ethicist, theologian, and 9/11 investigator David Ray Griffin, author of The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 and The 911 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, will be speaking here in Madison Monday night (April 18) at 7:30 in 272 Bascom Hall on the UW campus. His appearance will be covered by C-SPAN.
Griffin's talk is entitled "9/11 and the American Empire: How Should Religious People Respond?" An advance blurb says the talk "will focus on the ethical and spiritual dimension of facing the overwhelming evidence that the Bush Administration was complicit in the attacks of September 11th, 2001." A provocative topic, to say the least.
If you're familiar with Griffin's books or have heard him interviewed, you know he is a thoughtful and careful researcher and a man of integrity and conscience. It's encouraging that C-SPAN will cover the event. Let's see if they actually put it on air.
Update: C-SPAN will be taping the talk for later broadcast on C-SPAN2's BookTV. Every Thursday, http://www.booktv.org posts the schedule for the coming weekend. There is typically a two-week delay between taping and broadcast.
Posted by Jonathan at 02:40 PM | Comments (1) | Link to this
March 12, 2005
| "The Legal Landscape Has Changed" | 9/11 Rights, Law |
The Pentagon has decided that recent court decisions and public opinion have turned against their Gitmo detention center, so they want to transfer large numbers of prisoners beyond the reach of US law, to Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. NYT:
The Pentagon is seeking to enlist help from the State Department and other agencies in a plan to cut by more than half the population at its detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in part by transferring hundreds of suspected terrorists to prisons in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Yemen, according to senior administration officials.The transfers would be similar to the renditions, or transfers of captives to other countries, carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency... [...]
The White House first embraced using Guantánamo as a holding place for terrorism suspects taken in Afghanistan, in part because the base was seen as beyond the jurisdiction of United States law. But recent court rulings have held that prisoners there may challenge their detentions in federal court. [...]
[A senior Defense Department] official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that future transfers into Guantánamo remained a "possibility," but made clear that the court decisions and the burdens of detaining prisoners at the American facility had made it seem less attractive to administration policymakers than before.
"It's fair to say that the calculus now is different than it was before, because the legal landscape has changed and those are factors that might be considered," a senior Defense Department official said.
So the good news is that legal activism can still prompt the government to act. The bad news is that their response is just to shift the problem somewhere legal activism can't reach.
Posted by Jonathan at 03:43 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this
December 16, 2004
| Support Cynthia McKinney | 9/11 Politics |
Cynthia McKinney is returning to Capitol Hill.
McKinney served five terms from Georgia's 4th District before being unseated in 2002 when she was targeted by Republicans — and abandoned by many Democrats — for asking too many embarrassing questions about 9/11, about Pentagon contracts with the Carlyle Group and Halliburton, about the "Bush Doctrine" of preemptive war, and about Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories.
What sealed her fate were some remarks she made in March 2002 during an interview with Pacifica Radio. According to the Washington Post, McKinney said:
We know there were numerous warnings of the events to come on September 11th. ... What did this administration know and when did it know it, about the events of September 11th? Who else knew, and why did they not warn the innocent people of New York who were needlessly murdered?
People juxtaposed that statement with this one:
What is undeniable is that corporations close to the administration have directly benefited from the increased defense spending arising from the aftermath of September 11th.
And soon it became "common knowledge" that McKinney had said, as the New York Times reported, "President Bush might have known about the September 11 attacks but did nothing so his supporters could make money in a war."
Actually, says Greg Palast, McKinney was taken out of context and her meaning distorted. Indeed, she stated, on the floor of the House:
George Bush had no prior knowledge of the plan to attack the World Trade Center on September 11.
But, the feeding frenzy was on. Zell Miller called her "loony" (and he knows loony!). White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said she "must be running for the hall of fame of the Grassy Knoll Society." And so on.
Suddenly, McKinney's seat was in play. Conservative Denise Majette ran against her, and in the Democratic primary Majette benefitted from an organized effort by Republicans to get their voters to cross over and vote in the Democratic primary. Some 43,000 Republicans did so, and McKinney lost by nearly 20,000 votes.
In 2004, though, despite being significantly outspent by her opponents, McKinney won back her seat.
As Mark Bonham writes in Counterpunch, it is customary, when a Representative loses her seat for a single term and then wins it back, for her seniority and committe assignments to be restored. In McKinney's case, this would return her to the International Relations and Armed Services Committees, with important roles. There appears to be some question, however, whether seniority will, in fact, be restored in McKinney's case.
Please join me in emailing House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, at sf.nancy@mail.house.gov, to urge her to restore Cynthia McKinney's seniority and committee assignments.
McKinney makes strong statements and asks tough questions, but we desperately need someone with her guts to ask the questions that need asking.
Let me leave you with these words from McKinney's concession speech in 2002:
There is still work to be done. Somewhere tonight, a man is making himself a bed of newspapers and cardboard on the sidewalks of the city. Somewhere tonight, a child is too hungry to do his homework. Somewhere tonight, an elderly couple must make the unfair choice between food and medicine. Somewhere tonight, a woman lives in fear of domestic violence.And somewhere tonight, men in powerful positions are taking the first steps toward sending our country into war. Somewhere tonight, powerful interests are working to silence those that are a threat to their power. Every day in Congress I kept those images in mind. Images of real people with real problems. And real abuses of real power. Today, even in defeat, I have been lifted. Lifted upon the shoulders of the people of Georgia. [My emphasis]
Welcome back, Cynthia.
Posted by Jonathan at 07:38 PM | Comments (1) | Link to this
December 13, 2004
| Why The Kerik Nomination Scares Me | 9/11 Politics |
You've probably been reading about Bernard Kerik's walk-in closet full of skeletons, and his withdrawing his nomination for Secretary of Homeland Security supposedly because of nanny problems — which seems to have become the default excuse in cases like this.
Something bothers me, though: Kerik is such a complete and obvious goon that you have to ask yourself, why would the White House pick him in the first place? As White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan seemed to acknowledge today, the White House knew all about Kerik's record (nanny aside) and nominated him anyhow.
One view is that the White House is incompetent and has an ethics blindspot the size of Texas. And maybe that's all it is. A paranoid alternative, though, is that there's something coming that calls for putting a blindly loyal, thoroughly unprincipled thug in a key position in the apparatus of domestic counter-terrorism. A scary thought. If you suspect there's more to 9/11 than is commonly acknowledged (bearing in mind that Kerik was himself a key figure in the aftermath of 9/11 who, incidentally, got rich in the process), it's downright terrifying. Suppose you wanted to mobilize the populace for more war (and a military draft), and you wanted to further curtail civil liberties (and democracy in general), wouldn't another terror attack be just the ticket? Then again, this is probably just me being paranoid, trying to make sense out of something that ultimately makes no sense. Or not.
Posted by Jonathan at 09:53 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this
October 30, 2004
| No Cause For Concern | 9/11 |
March 13, 2002:
Q: Mr. President, in your speeches now you rarely talk or mention Osama bin Laden. Why is that? ...Bush: So I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him, Kelly, to be honest with you. ...
Q: But don't you believe that the threat that bin Laden posed won't truly be eliminated until he is found either dead or alive?
Bush: Well, as I say, we haven't heard much from him. And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don't know where he is. I — I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him.
Posted by Jonathan at 02:57 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this
| Why Is Bin Laden Still At Large? | 9/11 |
This might be a good time to review the considerable evidence that the US intentionally let bin Laden slip out of its grasp in Afghanistan. As one American official put it at the time, "casting our objectives too narrowly" risked "a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr. bin Laden was captured." I.e., the administration needed bin Laden alive so they would have a justification for war. Read more about this in an earlier post, here.
Similarly, the White House let Abu Musab al-Zarqawi go when they had the chance to kill him. Fred Kaplan, in Slate, in March:
Bush had three opportunities, long before the war, to destroy a terrorist camp in northern Iraq run by Abu Musab Zarqawi, the al-Qaida associate who recently cut off the head of Nicholas Berg. But the White House decided not to carry out the attack because, as [an NBC News] story puts it:[T]he administration feared [that] destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.The implications of this are more shocking, in their way, than the news from Abu Ghraib. Bush promoted the invasion of Iraq as a vital battle in the war on terrorism, a continuation of our response to 9/11. Here was a chance to wipe out a high-ranking terrorist. And Bush didn't take advantage of it because doing so might also wipe out a rationale for invasion.
As Kaplan tells it, on three different occasions the Pentagon drew up plans to attack Zarqawi's base (which was located in a remote area so "collateral damage" wasn't an issue), but all three times the White House scrubbed the mission.
According to a WSJ story this week, Zarqawi was known to have been in the camp at the time. Moreover:
Intelligence indicated the camp was training recruits and making poisons for attacks against the West.
By the time the camp was hit, after the Iraq invasion was underway, Zarqawi had fled. Since then, he and his followers have been responsible for many hundreds of killings in Iraq.
In Orwell's 1984, popular fear and hatred were mobilized by the loathsome image of the arch-traitor Emmanuel Goldstein. In 2004, we have the images of Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The purpose is the same. To use fear as the basis of rule, one needs enemies — live enemies, not dead ones.
Posted by Jonathan at 12:45 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this
October 29, 2004
| OBL: I'm Still Here — The DNC Reacts | 9/11 Politics |
Now that Osama bin Laden's reminded everyone he's alive and well, the DNC's got a devastating short ad to drive home the point: Bush said "Dead or Alive," then lost interest. Has Bush succeeded at anything?
See the TV spot here [via The Talent Show]. Now to get it on the air.
No matter how BC04 and associated media whores try to spin the bin Laden tape, it's manifest proof of Bush's failure to achieve even the most basic objective in the "war on terror": capturing or killing the putative arch-villain behind it all.
Posted by Jonathan at 10:39 PM | Comments (1) | Link to this
October 22, 2004
| 100 Damning Facts | 9/11 Afghanistan Iraq Politics Rights, Law |
As a kind of follow-up to the previous post (below), here's a list of 100 damning facts about the Bush administration, as compiled by The Nation.
This is what's been happening down here in the real world.
[Thanks, Mom]
Posted by Jonathan at 03:34 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this
October 20, 2004
| WTC-7 — Part 7 | 9/11 |
[Continuing from Part 6]
The Rubble Pile, 3
Five days after 9/11, NASA did thermal imaging from an airplane flying over the WTC site. Thermal imaging measures temperature; hot spots show up as red, orange, or yellow.
The spots labelled "A" and "B" are in the rubble of WTC-7. "A" is the hotter of the two, at approximately 730 degrees Celsius (1300 degrees Fahrenheit). This is a measurement of the heat at the surface after five days of cooling. It seems reasonable, therefore, to expect that even higher temperatures existed deeper in the rubble immediately after 9/11.
In fact, American Free Press quoted Mark Loizeaux, president of Controlled Demolition, Inc. (CDI) of Phoenix, Md., who cleaned up the bombed Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and had a role as well in the WTC cleanup, as saying that molten steel was found in the rubble at WTC-7. Temperatures of 2500 degrees Fahrenheit (1370 degrees Celsius) or more are needed to melt steel. This is a problem, since building fires do not get anywhere near that hot.
Besides molten steel, the rubble reportedly contained some partially evaporated steel. The New York Times quoted Dr. Jonathan Barnett, professor of fire protection engineering at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, as saying that fire in WTC-7:
would not explain steel members in the debris pile that appear to have been partly evaporated in extraordinarily high temperatures.
Building fires do not melt steel structural elements for two reasons. First, the fires are not hot enough. It's hard to get a fire hot enough to melt steel. That's why you can cook food in steel pots over a steel gas stove, why an internal combustion can be made of steel, why you can use an iron grating in your fireplace. To get fires hot enough to melt steel, it is necessary to pump preheated air into the fire under pressure, as in a blast furnace.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, steel is a great conductor of heat. When you heat part of a steel structure (and remember the fires in WTC-7 were, by all accounts, small and isolated) the heat is conducted away from the point where the fire is applied, cooling it. As Jim Hoffman explains:
The steel in these buildings is very well connected to thousands of tons of steel and if you pour heat on to one portion of it, it will simply conduct the heat away. So it's very hard to get columns in such a building heated up anywhere near the temperatures of the actual fires. A company, Corus Construction, conducted extensive fire tests in steel-framed car parks, which were uninsulated, in multiple countries, and measured the temperatures on the steel frames throughout these structures for the duration of these fires, which went on for hours, and the highest temperature they recorded in any of these tests was a mere 360 degrees Celsius. Now, at 360 degrees Celsius structural steel only loses about one percent of its strength.
No jets flew into WTC-7, and it was not doused with jet fuel. It did contain tanks of diesel fuel for backup generators, etc., but diesel fuel does not burn hot enough to melt steel. (Which is why a diesel engine can be made of steel.) If WTC-7 collapsed through normal means, in the absence of explosives, how does one explain the evidence of extremely high temperatures, especially given that the fires were small? Explosives, however, can easily produce such temperatures. Thermite, for example, can reach temperatures of 3000 degrees Celsius.
In Part 8, we'll take one more look at the way the building fell — in particular, the speed at which it fell — and then we'll see what the owner of the building had to say about its collapse.
[To be continued]
Posted by Jonathan at 08:15 PM | Comments (2) | Link to this
October 18, 2004
| WTC-7 — Part 6 | 9/11 |
[Continuing from Part 5]
The Rubble Pile, 2
If you look closely at the "after" photo of the rubble pile in Part 5, or the one below, you will notice that the interior of the building must have started to fall first, pulling the exterior facade in towards the center, because the exterior facade has landed neatly on top of the pile. This is characteristic of controlled demolitions. It is how they keep pieces of the building from falling outward and damaging surrounding structures.
Indeed, this effect can be seen in the videos of the building's collapse: i.e., the collapse begins in the interior. The rooftop utility "penthouse" (containing machinery for the elevators, etc.) starts to disappear first, and then the building develops a "kink" or "fault" as the interior gives way.
Here's a photo taken shortly before the collapse. Note the penthouse on the roof:
Now go back and watch these two videos and concentrate on the penthouse in the first moments of the collapse. You will see that it just "melts" into the building before the rest of the building begins to fall.
Here's the "kink" that develops as the collapse gets going:
The rooftop penthouse has already disappeared by this point, as can be seen in the videos.
Note the small plumes of smoke spurting out of the facade on the upper floors. In the photo, the plumes are spread vertically because the building has fallen downward as the smoke jetted out. These kinds of small plumes are characteristic of controlled demolitions, jetting out as charges are set off on the various floors. See, for example, these videos of other controlled demolitions.
In Part 7, we'll discuss the rubble pile one last time.
[To be continued]
Posted by Jonathan at 08:17 PM | Comments (1) | Link to this
October 17, 2004
| WTC-7 — Part 5 | 9/11 |
[Continuing from Part 4]
The Rubble Pile, 1
One of the most striking refutations of a spontaneous collapse explanation for WTC-7 is provided by the following "before" and "after" photographs.
Before — WTC-7 is the tall building in the center of the photo:
After — 47-story WTC-7 has turned into a two-or-three-story pile of rubble. It has fallen so perfectly vertically that the surrounding buildings are almost completely untouched.
Here's another "before" view:
WTC-7 is the tall building at the center. This building, which sits on an entire city block, somehow managed to turn itself into a two-or-three-story pile of rubble without significantly damaging the buildings that surround it so tightly.
In Part 6, we'll examine some features of the rubble pile itself, to see what it tells us about the way the building collapsed.
[To be continued]
Posted by Jonathan at 05:19 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this
October 16, 2004
| WTC-7 — Part 4 | 9/11 |
[Continuing from Part 3]
No Steel-Frame High-Rise Has Ever Collapsed Due To Fire
There is no agreed-upon official explanation of WTC-7's collapse. It is usually suggested that fires in the building somehow weakened the building causing structural failure, but no one really believes that. Fires simply do not cause steel-frame buildings to collapse. That's one of the reasons why so many fire-fighters were killed in the twin towers on 9/11. No one had any reason to fear a total collapse.
Moreover, if fire were the culprit at WTC-7, how does one explain the perfectly vertical collapse of the building? The load-bearing members of the structure would all have had to fail simultaneously. How does one explain the fact that the resulting rubble pile was only two or three stories tall with all of the building's steel neatly segmented? The small building fires were quite localized, as we saw in Part 3. Most of the building's steel was not exposed to fire and heat at all, yet the upper stories disintegrated as thoroughly as did the lower stories where the fires were observed.
I am not a structural engineer, though, so let's see what experts had to say about the implausibility of fire as an explanation.
In November, 2001, the New York Times reported:
Engineers and other experts... were for weeks still stunned by what had happened to 7 World Trade Center....[E]xperts said no building like it, a modern, steel-reinforced high-rise, had ever collapsed because of an uncontrolled fire....
"Even though Building 7 didn't get much attention in the media immediately, within the structural engineering community, it's considered to be much more important to understand," said William F. Baker, a partner in charge of structural engineering at the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. "They say, `We know what happened at 1 and 2, but why did 7 come down?'" ...
Sprayed on the steel [structure], almost like imitation snow in holiday decorations, was a layer of fireproofing material... [E]xperts said buildings the size of 7 World Trade Center that are treated with such coatings have never collapsed in a fire of any duration.
In December, 2001, structural engineer Ronald Hamburger told an audience at Stanford's engineering school:
WTC-7 was a 47-story building and became a two-story pile of rubble, making it the first major structure in the United States to collapse because of fire.
In October, 2002, John O'Connell wrote in Fire Engineering magazine:
The WTC incident was unique in that this was the first time ever that a steel-frame high-rise building had collapsed — anywhere in the world.
The only official study, one undertaken by the American Society of Civil Engineers and FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, concluded that:
The specifics of the fires in WTC 7 and how they caused the building to collapse remain unknown at this time. Although the total diesel fuel on the premises contained massive potential energy, the best hypothesis has only a low probability of occurrence.
In other words, "We don't know what else to blame it on other than fire, but we don't really believe fire could have done it."
One might suppose that the reason fire-induced steel-building collapses have been unknown is that such buildings experience major fires only very rarely.
However, as Norman Glover wrote in Fire Engineering magazine:
Whereas few buildings will face a bombing attack, almost all large buildings will be the location for a major fire in their useful life. No major high-rise building has ever collapsed from fire. The WTC [itself] was the location for such a fire in 1975; however, the building survived with minor damage and was repaired and returned to service.
Some high-rise fires have been spectacular and of long duration.
In 1988, the 62-story First Interstate Bank building (left photo) in downtown LA burned out of control for several hours:
This was one of the most destructive high-rise fires in recent United States history. The fire presented the greatest potential for the "Towering Inferno" scenario of any U.S. fire experience. [...]In spite of the total burnout of four and a half floors, there was no damage to the main structural members and only minor damage to one secondary beam and a small number of floor pans. Although there was concern for structural integrity during the incident, post fire analysis indicates that there was no danger of major or minor structural collapse.
In 1991, the 38-story One Meridian Plaza building (right photo) in Philadelphia experienced a fire that was "extraordinary in [its] ferocity and intensity" and lasted more than 18 hours:
[The] One Meridian Plaza fire [was] one of the most significant high-rise fires in United States’ history. The fire claimed the lives of three Philadelphia firefighters and gutted eight floors of a 38-story fire-resistive building. [...]After the fire, there was evident significant structural damage to horizontal steel members and floor sections on most of the fire damaged floors. Beams and girders sagged and twisted — some as much as three feet — under severe fire exposures, and fissures developed in the reinforced concrete floor assemblies in many places. Despite this extraordinary exposure, the columns continued to support their loads without obvious damage.
These and many other steel-building fires were of far greater intensity than the fires observed at WTC-7, but those other buildings didn't so much as bend, let alone collapse symmetricaly and perfectly vertically.
The fire explanation is further refuted by an examination of the rubble pile that resulted from WTC-7's collapse. That's the topic we will turn to next, in Part 5.
[To be continued]
Posted by Jonathan at 01:35 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this
October 15, 2004
| WTC-7 — Part 3 | 9/11 |
[Continuing from Part 2]
WTC-7 Sustained Only Minimal Damage When the Towers Collapsed
One possible explanation for the collapse of WTC-7 is that one or both of the twin towers collapsed onto WTC-7, causing massive damage.
Photos taken after the towers collapsed, however, show that WTC-7 sustained little visible damage when the towers fell. In fact, hardly any of WTC-7's windows were even broken. Several small fires did break out during the day, but whether they were started by debris from the towers is unclear.
Below is a view from the WTC plaza. WTC-7 is the pale grey skyscraper in the background. (In the foreground are the heavily damaged WTC-4 on the left and WTC-5 on the right.) No structural damage or fires are apparent in WTC-7 from this angle. If the North Tower's collapse had heavily damaged WTC-7, as is sometimes suggested, we would expect to see damage in this view, which shows the side of WTC-7 that faced the towers.
All three of the above photos were taken on the afternoon of 9/11, hours after the towers had collapsed.
Or, go back to this video from Part 2. Look carefully at the building before it begins to fall. There are no visible fires, no apparent structural damage, and few, if any, broken windows.
So the towers did not land on WTC-7 in any significant way. But, as the top photos show, several small fires of unknown origin did break out in WTC-7 during the day. The fires burned until the building collapsed, but they were confined to parts of just a few floors and do not appear to have spread. All photos of WTC-7 show just a few fires in just a few windows, primarily on just the 7th and 12th floors.
Fire fighters didn't enter the building to fight the fires. It's not clear why. Perhaps NYFD decided, understandably, that they had already taken enough casualties that day. The building’s sprinkler system should have been able to control the fire, but it either failed to function for some unknown reason or the burning material was impervious to water.
Could the fires have gradually weakened the structural integrity of the building eventually causing it to fail? That's the topic we'll turn to in Part 4.
[To be continued.]
Posted by Jonathan at 05:44 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this
October 14, 2004
| WTC-7 — Part 2 | 9/11 |
[Continuing from Part 1]
Videos Of WTC-7’s Collapse
Videos exist of WTC-7’s collapse, though they were shown just a few times on 9/11 and only rarely since. We’ve all seen the collapse of the twin towers scores, if not hundreds, of times. Not WTC-7. Its collapse disappeared from the airwaves almost immediately.
A few videos of WTC-7’s collapse are still available on the Internet, however. I've collected several of them below. As you watch them, I think you'll agree that the most striking thing about WTC-7's collapse is the way it collapsed: perfectly vertically, landing in its own footprint.
The videos:
CBS video
In the CBS video, Dan Rather's spontaneous reaction is that it looks like "when a building [is] deliberately destroyed by well-placed dynamite to knock it down."
And, of course, he's right. That's exactly what it looks like — a controlled demolition, and one that was skillfully done, not some unprecedented kind of random structural failure.
But isn't it possible that WTC-7 sustained major damage when the towers collapsed? Couldn't that be the explanation for its own collapse? That's the topic we will consider in Part 3.
[To be continued.]
Posted by Jonathan at 04:30 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this
October 13, 2004
| WTC-7 — Part 1 | 9/11 |
Three World Trade Center Buildings Collapsed On 9/11
None us will ever forget the video images of the collapse of the two World Trade Center towers on 9/11.
Few people now remember, however, that a third World Trade Center building, Building 7 (WTC-7), also collapsed that day. WTC-7 was not struck by an airplane, and the towers did not fall on it. It was, in fact, located on the next block, more than 350 feet from the North Tower and farther still from the South Tower, separated from the two towers by Buildings 5 and 6 and Vesey Street. In the map below, WTC-7 is the brown building on the right.
The North Tower, the second of the two towers to collapse, collapsed at 10:29 in the morning. WTC-7 didn’t collapse until 5:20 in the afternoon, almost seven hours later.
Nobody has ever explained why WTC-7 collapsed. There is no official explanation. Various theories have been put forward to explain why the twin towers collapsed, but WTC-7 is an entirely different matter. Steel-frame high-rises (at least, ones that haven't had a jetliner crash into them) do not just collapse, even if they experience a major fire of long duration, which WTC-7 did not. Except for WTC-7, it has never happened, anywhere in the world, ever.
Even more improbable than the fact of WTC-7's collapse was the way it collapsed, as we shall see.
Given these facts, it's more than a little strange that the responsible government agencies, professional societies of architects and engineers, insurance companies — and tenants of other steel-frame high-rises, for that matter — haven't made it a matter of the most urgent priority to determine what went wrong. If one steel-frame high-rise can suddenly collapse, can't others? Indeed, if a 47-story steel-frame building just suddenly collapsed in any other location, on any other day, it would be front-page news all over the world. Investigations would be urgently demanded. Lawsuits would be filed. Insurance companies would scramble to assess the risks to other similar buildings. If video existed of the collapse, we’d see it over, and over, and over again.
WTC-7, in contrast, is all but forgotten.
[First installment of a series to examine the collapse of WTC-7, one of the many questionable aspects of the events of 9/11. We'll examine the WTC-7 story step by step over the coming days. If this story is news to you, I think you'll find it compelling.] [Part 2]
Posted by Jonathan at 01:34 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this
September 29, 2004
| It's All About The Fear | 9/11 Politics |
A University of Arizona psychologist has found a dramatic correlation between people's fear and their support for Bush:
As part of a study of times of trouble, UA psychological researcher Mark Landau found that, when reminded about Sept. 11 and mortality, people wanted Bush as their leader and not John Kerry.Further, the more someone thought about Sept. 11 or their own mortality, the more prone they were to support President Bush. "The strength (of the responses) was ridiculous," said Landau, who plans to vote for John Kerry. "These effects were found regardless of a person's political orientation."
It's discouraging to think that modern human beings are as prone to conditioning as any lab rat, but there it is. We've been deeply imprinted: 9/11, terror, 9/11, terror, I love Big Brother.
[Via Billmon]
Posted by Jonathan at 01:13 PM | Comments (1) | Link to this
September 23, 2004
| Three Years, Three Lessons | 9/11 |
Jeffrey Sachs, Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University and special advisor to Kofi Annan, writes of three lessons he draws from the three years since 9/11.
Lesson #1. The US is a deeply divided country. Half of the country is appalled by Bush's aggression in Iraq, half supports it. Much of the latter half is motivated by Christian fundamentalism. Sachs:
Bush has not exactly hijacked American politics with his radicalism. Instead, he is representing a major strand of public opinion, though by no means a majority. For people like me, who completely oppose the President’s policies, the strong support that these policies receive in much of the country is probably the most troubling lesson since 9/11. [...]The core constituency of the Bush Administration is fundamentalist Christian, and the war is interpreted in the cultural and religious terms of these fundamentalists. This is the most frightening lesson about the U.S. in the past three years.
What do the American fundamentalists believe? From all accounts, a large percentage believe that events in the Middle East represent a struggle between good and evil in which Christian believers will triumph over non-Christians. Tens of millions believe in the so-called Rapture, in which the world will end in the great war at Armaggedon, as in biblical prophecy. From these religious perspectives, small matters of evidence about WMDs simply don’t matter. They believe that Bush is fighting the Christian cause. [So does Bush. See this.]
It is frightening that the Christian fundamentalists shape a considerable amount of U.S. public policy, and not only on the war but on other issues as well. In general, the fundamentalists are hostile to the biological and environmental sciences. An astounding 45 percent of Americans profess to believe in the literal biblical account of creation, with the world created just a few thousand years ago. Only 12 percent believe in Darwinian evolution, and the rest believe in some kind of evolution with divine guidance. When asked to choose between "creationism" and "evolution," 57 percent of the American public chose creationism. The Bush supporters tend to oppose stem cell research and policies to fight climate change, on the basis of faith rather than science. [...]
[E]vidence simply doesn’t matter for half of the country, which supports policies on the basis of faith rather than reason.
Lesson #2: The "neoconservative" project of applying US military power to achieve global hegemony has been shown to be an utter failure. Sachs:
The Bush Administration should be understood as a coalition between the Christian fundamentalists and the neoconservative foreign policy advisors. The neocons believe, essentially, in translating the US's vast military power into political hegemony on a global scale. Since the U.S. is unchallengeable militarily, they reason, and can conquer countries at will, this power should be harnessed to political goals, such as remaking the Middle East in the US's interests, or stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons through pre-emptive wars. The Iraq War, from their point of view, was a demonstration project of American power.The whole approach of the neoconservatives is a fantasy. They don't understand the limits of military power in achieving political ends. [...]
A conventional army on the ground cannot suppress local uprisings or guerrilla warfare without tremendous bloodshed and years of agony. For decades, the British could not suppress the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland. The vast military might of Israel cannot suppress the Palestinian uprising. The Russians could not suppress the mujahedin in Afghanistan in the 1980s or the Chechens in the 1990s. [...]As our unilateralist actions make enemies where none existed before, we will find ourselves facing an intifada that extends far beyond Palestine and Al Qaeda. There are literally tens of thousands of soft U.S. targets to attack...
The world does not need to fear a successful U.S. empire. It can't be made. The U.S. represents a mere 5 percent of the world’s population, and around 20 percent of the world's economy… In the important words of writer Jonathan Schell, we now live in "the unconquerable world," in which the demands for self determination can outlast even the most powerful army.
Lesson #3: There are non-military approaches that could, if used, succeed in reducing global instabilities. Sachs:
Global instabilities have several causes that need to be addressed at the core, and that cannot be solved solely by military approaches. The biggest problems include the large number of impoverished "failed states," unable to provide prosperity or security for their citizens, and often the bases of operation for terrorists. ...[S]tate failures are usually rooted in the problems of poverty. Nevertheless the United States’ approach to these problems has been overwhelmingly military. A more balanced approach is required, where the United States does much more to tackle the roots of instability by significantly scaling up its foreign aid programs around the world. [...][The US] gives just $15 billion per year in official development assistance, compared with $450 billion per year in military spending. This reckless imbalance between peaceful and military approaches to global instability is the main reason for failure of American foreign policy.
The year 2005 could be a pivotal year in getting to a more productive path for world peace. In particular, the United Kingdom and France have promised to make increased official development assistance the centerpiece of the G-8 Summit in Scotland in July 2005. If Europe speaks with a united voice, following through on the long-standing pledge to commit 0.7 percent of GNP in official development assistance, and calls upon the United States do the same, it might still be possible to rescue the U.S. from its disastrous militarized approach to global politics.
Sachs' second lesson says that the US will be forced to acknowledge the limits of American military power sooner or later — hopefully sooner. With luck, then, we'll come to see the wisdom of Sachs' third lesson. That is, we'll realize how much more cost-effective, productive, and — ironically — Christian a peaceful policy of generosity towards the world's neediest nations would be than the current policy that wastes trillions on arms and simply doesn't work. Of course, the many people, corporations, and institutions that profit from war will have other ideas.
It truly is a grotesque historical irony that one of the great barriers to a constructive, peaceful approach to tackling world poverty, instability, and terrorism is the Christian fundamentalist extremism identified in Sachs' first lesson. I.e., the people most opposed to applying Christ's teachings in the real world turn out to be fundamentalist "Christians" who have distorted Christ's meaning and message beyond all recognition. Our own home-grown jihadist extremists. The Bush people and the right-wing media echo chamber are their mullahs and ayatollahs, fueling and validating their extremism.
Fundamentalists (Christian, Muslim, what-have-you) are right about this much: there is a battle shaping up between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, between the forces of peace and the forces of war, between the forces of knowledge and understanding and the forces of ignorance and dogma, between the forces that seek a mature, humane, forward-looking, and cooperative approach to solving world problems and the forces that look backward and seek to impose their will and remake the world in their image through force of arms. The fundamentalists are on the wrong side of that contest.
Posted by Jonathan at 09:53 AM | Comments (0) | Link to this
September 22, 2004
| Somebody Tell Cheney | 9/11 Iraq |
The Village Voice points out a map that's been posted on the US State Dept. site since November 10, 2001. The map lists 45 countries where al Qaeda had operated as of that date.
Guess what country is not listed?
Iraq.
[Via Cursor]
Posted by Jonathan at 04:13 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this
| Oh-fer | 9/11 |
Pop quiz: Of the more than 5,000 "suspected terrorists" arrested and imprisoned by John Ashcroft since 9/11, how many have been convicted on a terrorism charge?
Zero. Zip. Not one.
David Cole, in The Nation:
On Sept. 2 a federal judge in Detroit threw out the only jury conviction the Justice Department has obtained on a terrorism charge since 9/11. In October 2001, shortly after the men were initially arrested, Attorney General John Ashcroft heralded the case in a national press conference as evidence of the success of his anti-terror campaign. The indictment alleged that the defendants were associated with al Qaeda and planning terrorist attacks. But Ashcroft held no news conference in September when the case was dismissed, nor did he offer any apologies to the defendants who had spent nearly three years in jail.Until that reversal, the Detroit case had marked the only terrorist conviction obtained from the Justice Department's detention of more than 5,000 foreign nationals in anti-terrorism sweeps since 9/11. So Ashcroft's record is 0 for 5,000. When the attorney general was locking these men up in the immediate wake of the attacks, he held almost daily press conferences to announce how many "suspected terrorists" had been detained. No press conference has been forthcoming to announce that exactly none of them have turned out to be actual terrorists. [My emphasis]
Could this administration be any more incompetent and corrupt?
Posted by Jonathan at 11:05 AM | Comments (0) | Link to this
September 21, 2004
| Something Of A Contemplative Nature | 9/11 |
Midwest Airlines cancelled a flight ready to take off from Milwaukee Sunday when a "passenger found Arabic-style handwriting in the company's in-flight magazine and alerted the crew." The passengers had to spend the night in hotels and take another flight in the morning.
What did the writing turn out to be? AP:
The writing was in Farsi, the language used in Iran, said airline spokeswoman Carol Skornicka. She said she didn't know exactly what the writing said but [it] was similar to a prayer, "something of a contemplative nature."
Run for your lives!
Posted by Jonathan at 05:03 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this
September 11, 2004
| Jihadist Extremism | 9/11 Politics Religion War |
From The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty (a book sympathetic to the Bush family) comes this profoundly shocking quote about George W's view of the "War on Terror":
"George see this as a religious war," one family member told us. "He doesn't have a p.c. view of this war. His view of this is that they are trying to kill the Christians. And we the Christians will strike back with more force and more ferocity than they will ever know." [My emphasis]
Could anything possibly be less Christ-like? How have we let this dangerous, ignorant, savage little man hijack our country? Are we, finally, just superstitious primates with guns?
I didn't sign up for this.
Gandhi: "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." A-men.
Update: [Sep 11, 1:04 PM] Shortly after I posted the above, I happened to open Arundhati Roy's War Talk to the following passage:
The more the two sides try and call attention to their religious differences by slaughtering each other, the less there is to distinguish them from one another. They worship at the same altar. They're both apostles of the same murderous god, whoever he is.
She's writing about Hindus and Muslims in India, but she might as well be writing about Christians and Muslims in the "War on Terror." Each side thinks it's merely retaliating for the others' transgressions. Each side thinks God's on its side. Superstitious primates with guns.
Posted by Jonathan at 01:43 AM | Comments (2) | Link to this
September 05, 2004
| Bob Graham Blasts Bush, CIA, FBI | 9/11 Afghanistan Iraq Politics |
The Miami Herald reports on a soon-to-be-released book by Senator Bob Graham (D-FL) [via Atrios]. Graham, who chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee from June 2001 through the run-up to war in Iraq, and who's therefore in a position to know a few things, has extremely harsh words for Bush, the administration, the FBI, and the CIA.
For one thing, Graham says the Bush administration covered up direct ties between the 9/11 hijackers and agents of the Saudi Arabian government [my emphasis thoughout]:
Two of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers had a support network in the United States that included agents of the Saudi government, and the Bush administration and FBI blocked a congressional investigation into that relationship, Sen. Bob Graham wrote in a book to be released Tuesday.The discovery of the financial backing of the two hijackers "would draw a direct line between the terrorists and the government of Saudi Arabia, and trigger an attempted cover-up by the Bush administration," the Florida Democrat wrote.
[Graham] makes clear that some details of that financial support from Saudi Arabia were in the 27 pages of the congressional inquiry's final report that were blocked from release by the administration, despite the pleas of leaders of both parties on the House and Senate intelligence committees. [...]
[Graham] oversaw the Sept. 11 investigation on Capitol Hill with Rep. Porter Goss, nominated last month to be the next CIA director. According to Graham, the FBI and the White House blocked efforts to investigate the extent of official Saudi connections to two hijackers.
Graham wrote that the staff of the congressional inquiry concluded that two Saudis in the San Diego area, ... who gave significant financial support to two hijackers, were working for the Saudi government. [...]
When the staff tried to conduct interviews in that investigation, and with an FBI informant ... who also helped the eventual hijackers, they were blocked by the FBI and the administration, Graham wrote. [It's one thing to block certain information from coming out in the committee's public report. It's another to prevent the committee from conducting interviews in the first place. Evidently there are things the administration does not want even the Senate Intelligence Committee to know.]
The administration and CIA also insisted that the details about the Saudi support network that benefited two hijackers be left out of the final congressional report, Graham complained.
Bush had concluded that "a nation-state that had aided the terrorists should not be held publicly to account,"' Graham wrote. "It was as if the president's loyalty lay more with Saudi Arabia than with America's safety."
Graham also says that the problem with pre-war intelligence on Iraqi WMD wasn't that the intelligence was wrong. The problem was that the story the administration and CIA were telling in public was a series of lies that contradicted their own classified internal assessments. I.e., they knowingly lied the country into war:
On Iraq, Graham said the administration and CIA consistently overplayed its estimates of Saddam Hussein's threat in its public statements and declassified reports, while its secret reports contained warnings that the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction was not conclusive.In October 2002, Tenet told Graham that "there were 550 sites where weapons of mass destruction were either produced or stored" in Iraq.
"It was, in short, a vivid and terrifying case for war. The problem was it did not accurately represent the classified estimate we had received just days earlier," Graham wrote. "It was two different messages, directed at two different audiences. I was outraged."
Graham says that the Bush administration pulled the plug on the Afghanistan war just four months after invading so they could shift resources to prepare for a war in Iraq. This was, of course, long before Congress had approved of such action:
Graham also revealed that Gen. Tommy Franks told him on Feb. 19, 2002, just four months after the invasion of Afghanistan, that many important resources — including the Predator drone aircraft crucial to the search for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda leaders — were being shifted to prepare for a war against Iraq.Graham recalled this conversation at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa with Franks, then head of Central Command, who was "looking troubled":
"Senator, we are not engaged in a war in Afghanistan."
"Excuse me?" I asked.
"Military and intelligence personnel are being redeployed to prepare for an action in Iraq," he continued.
On George Bush:
He reserves his harshest criticism for Bush.Graham found the president had "an unforgivable level of intellectual — and even common sense — indifference" toward analyzing the comparative threats posed by Iraq and al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
When the weapons were not found, one year after the invasion of Iraq, Bush attended a black-tie dinner in Washington, Graham recalled. Bush gave a humorous speech with slides, showing him looking under White House furniture and joking, "Nope, no WMDs there."
Graham wrote: "It was one of the most offensive things I have witnessed. Having recently attended the funeral of an American soldier killed in Iraq, who left behind a young wife and two preschool-age children, I found nothing funny about a deceitful justification for war."
Article II, Section 4: The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.
Sounds like a bunch of high Crimes and Misdemeanors to me.
Posted by Jonathan at 01:15 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this
August 30, 2004
| An Astounding Poll Regarding 9/11 | 9/11 |
A poll conducted last week in New York produced some startling findings.
Question: "Some have argued that some leaders in the US government knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to take action. Do you agree or disagree with this argument?" [My emphasis]
Half (49.3%) of NYC residents, and 41% of NY residents state-wide, said they agreed.
The poll, commissioned by 911truth.org, broke down the state-wide numbers by age, race, gender, political party, etc.:
The poll is the first of its kind conducted in America that surveys attitudes regarding US government complicity in the 9/11 tragedy. Despite the acute legal and political implications of this accusation, nearly 30% of registered Republicans and over 38% of those who described themselves as "very conservative" supported the claim.The charge found very high support among adults under 30 (62.8%), African-Americans (62.5%), Hispanics (60.1%), Asians (59.4%), and "Born Again" Evangelical Christians (47.9%).
Less than two in five (36%) believe that the 9/11 Commission had "answered all the important questions about what actually happened on September 11th," and two in three (66%) New Yorkers (and 56.2% overall) called for another full investigation of the "still unanswered questions" by Congress or Elliot Spitzer, New York's Attorney General. Self-identified "very liberal" New Yorkers supported a new inquiry by a margin of three to one, but so did half (53%) of "very conservative" citizens across the state. The call for a deeper probe was especially strong from Hispanics (75.6%), African-Americans (75.3%) citizens with income from $15-25K (74.3%), women (62%) and Evangelicals (59.9%).
Poll results like these have been seen in Canada and Western Europe, but I don't think anyone expected those kinds of numbers here in the US. From the 911truth.org article again:
W. David Kubiak, executive director of 911truth.org, the group that commissioned the poll, expressed genuine surprise that New Yorkers' belief in the administration's complicity is as high or higher than that seen overseas. "We're familiar with high levels of 9/11 skepticism abroad where there has been open debate of the evidence for US government complicity. On May 26th the Toronto Star reported a national poll showing that 63% of Canadians are also convinced US leaders had 'prior knowledge' of the attacks yet declined to act. There was no US coverage of this startling poll or the facts supporting the Canadians' conclusions, and there has been virtually no debate on the victim families' scores of still unanswered questions. I think these numbers show that most New Yorkers are now fed up with the silence, and that politicians trying to exploit 9/11 do so at their peril. The 9/11 case is not closed and New York's questions are not going away." [My emphasis]
There really are a lot of unanswered questions surrounding 9/11 and a lot of good reasons to doubt the official story. It's a topic I've hesitated to write about here, however, (except for this), partly because it's something of a bottomless pit, and partly for fear of being written off as a conspiracy theorist (as opposed to the coincidence theorists who've given us the offical account). Now, though, it sounds like it's time.
Posted by Jonathan at 08:55 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this
August 26, 2004
| Gitmo Justice | 9/11 |
ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero reports from the Guantanamo military tribunals:
[T]here is a great desire to show how the commissions and the tribunals are fair and just, and how they mirror the American system of justice. But yet, when you compare the rules for both the commissions and the tribunals, you find serious departures from either military justice proceedings or regular criminal proceedings. For instance, under the Combatant Status Review tribunals, which are "administrative" we were told, each detainee is assigned a personal representative who is not a legal representative and whose conversations with the detainee are not confidential in any way. In fact, this personal representative is able to provide both exculpatory and inculpatory evidence that he gleans in his "personal representation" of the detainee. [My emphasis]
I know that's what I'd want: a lawyer who isn't actually a lawyer and who's free to give evidence against me based on anything I tell him or her.
[Thanks Mark]
Posted by Jonathan at 06:33 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this
August 10, 2004
| Porter Goss — A Fox To Guard The Hen-House | 9/11 |
Today President Bush nominated Rep. Porter Goss, R-FL, to head the CIA. Goss chairs the House Intelligence Committee, and was an officer in the CIA's Clandestine Service for 10 years before entering Congress.
Not everyone's happy with the choice.
Stansfield Turner, CIA Director under Jimmy Carter, says:
This is the worst nomination in the history of the job. To put somebody who is so highly partisan in this job will further diminish public confidence in our intelligence.
Ray McGovern, who was a CIA analyst for 27 years, calls Goss Dick Cheney's cat's paw and says:
[H]is appointment as director would be the ultimate in politicization. He has long shown himself to be under the spell of Vice President Dick Cheney, and would likely report primarily to him and to White House political adviser Karl Rove rather than to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
Goss' relationship to 9/11 is, at best, strange. In late August, 2001, Goss and Senator Bob Graham, D-FL, chair of the Senate Intelligence committee, traveled to Pakistan to meet with President Musharraf. According to the Center for Cooperative Research:
They reportedly discuss various security issues, including the possible extradition of bin Laden. They also meet with Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan. Zaeef apparently tells them that the Taliban want to solve the issue of bin Laden through negotiations with the US. Pakistan says it wants to stay out of the bin Laden issue.
Two weeks later, on the morning of 9/11, at the moment the planes flew into the WTC, Goss and Graham were back in Washington having a breakfast meeting with Lt. General Mahmood Ahmed, head of the Pakistan intelligence service, the ISI. The ISI had been the CIA's instrument in funding and training the mujahadin in Afghanistan, which gave rise to al Qaeda. A month after 9/11, Ahmed was forced to resign when it became known that he had ordered the transfer of $100,000 to Mohammed Atta, reputedly the head 9/11 hijacker, some time in advance of 9/11.
Let that sink in. At the moment of the 9/11 attack, the heads of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, Goss and Graham, were meeting in Washington with Pakistan's head spook, who, it turns out, was helping to fund the 9/11 hijackers.
Graham said of the meeting, "We were talking about terrorism, specifically terrorism generated from Afghanistan." According to the New York Times, they were discussing Osama bin Laden.
Which Goss denies. He told the Washington Post that the issue was Kashmir and nuclear proliferation. But then he bade goodbye to the Post's interviewer with these words:
You can spend two hours in here saying, "I've talked to Porter Goss," and still not have a clue what my plans and intentions are.
As chairs of the Intelligence Committees, Goss and Graham co-chaired the Joint Congressional Investigation into 9/11 which famously concluded that there was "no smoking gun" that showed that the administration had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks or could have prevented them.
And just to complete this cozy picture, Senator Graham had been informed in advance of 9/11 that participants in a South Florida sting operation targeting arms dealers supplying weapons to terrorists had tape-recorded one R. G. Abbas, a Pakistani working for the Taliban, who said on three occasions that the WTC would soon be attacked.
Oh, and when asked last week if the White House's leaking of the identity of covert operative Valerie Plame warranted an investigation by Congress, Goss said, "Somebody sends me a blue dress and some DNA, I'll have an investigation."
Posted by Jonathan at 08:30 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this
| Khan Job III | 9/11 |
A continuation of earlier posts regarding the Bush administration's leaking of the name of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, thereby blowing his cover.
It now appears that the administration did, in fact, give reporters Khan's name, not just the fact that they had an al Qaeda source who was cooperating.
The Toronto Star, for example, reports:
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice acknowledged Sunday that Khan's name had been disclosed to reporters in Washington "on background," meaning that it could be published, but the information could not be attributed by name to the official who had revealed it.
As I argued earlier, the administration is culpable in any case, but this just removes all doubt.
Posted by Jonathan at 11:24 AM | Comments (0) | Link to this
August 08, 2004
| If Only the Grownups Were In Charge | 9/11 |
A friend sent me this New York Times Op-Art graphic, "Safety Second". (If you're using Internet Explorer, hover your cursor in the lower right corner of the image and click the "Expand to regular size" icon to make the image large enough to read.)
It takes a figure of $144.4 billion for the direct costs of the Iraq war to date — actual costs are no doubt higher, given, for example, the participation of intelligence agencies with secret budgets, not to mention the astronomical indirect costs — and shows a breakdown of how the money could have been spent instead to pursue an honest policy of protecting the homeland.
What might have been.
The Iraq War is the Bush administration's baby, but the state of American politics today is such that it's hard to imagine any administration and Congress being sufficiently mature, practical, focused, and just plain rational to have implemented the listed initiatives. Oh, how I wish the grownups were in charge.
[Thanks, Maury]
Posted by Jonathan at 03:06 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this
| Chatter's Bad, So No Chatter's... Bad | 9/11 |
CNN yesterday had this to say:
A drop in so-called "chatter" among suspected terrorists is troubling some counterterrorism officials, who noticed a reduction in intercepted communications before the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, government sources said.Diminished communication prompted the concern because the counterterror experts don't know why suspected terrorists would be talking less. But they noted that similar reductions have happened several other times during the past few years. [My emphasis]
For years they've been telling us to be afraid because there are high levels of chatter. Now we need to be afraid because there aren't high levels of chatter. That's because there weren't high levels of chatter right before the 9/11 attacks. Even though every time since then when there weren't high levels of chatter nothing happened.
QED
Posted by Jonathan at 12:44 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this
August 07, 2004
| Khan Job II | 9/11 |
A reader of an earlier post asks:
Can you clarify something for me? I know the NYT published this guy's name, which was subsequently confirmed by the administration. I'm confused as to whether the source was burned by the original NYT article, making the confirmation an 'after the fact' item or if the confirmation itself is what burned the source.If the NYT's article was the cause of the source being compromised, it may not be the administration's fault. But then, would the NYT check with a government source to get a comment/confirmation and wouldn't the government make a "don't print" request?
It does appear that the NYT got Khan’s name independently. According to a Reuters story carried by the NYT:
Last Sunday, US officials told reporters that someone held secretly by Pakistan was the source of the bulk of the information justifying the alert. The NYT obtained Khan’s name independently, and US officials confirmed it when it appeared in the paper the next morning.
However, it was the administration that told the world of Khan’s existence in the first place. They effectively blew his cover by telling reporters that their information came from "someone held secretly by Pakistan", which prompted the NYT to go find out who it was and publish the name. If you have a mole in al Qaeda, you don’t make an announcement to that effect.
You also have to wonder how the NYT was able to obtain Khan's name independently. It seems unlikely that Pakistani ISI would just give this information out to a NYT reporter on their own. And it's hard to understand why the administration would just confirm the name to other news outlets without a fight. They announce Khan's existence and 24 hours later they're confirming his name. It all seems like an unbelievable screw-up — or a deliberate effort to quickly blow Khan's cover while preserving some measure of deniability.
Reuters again:
Security experts contacted by Reuters said they were shocked by the revelations that the source whose information led to the alert was identified within days, and that U.S. officials had confirmed his name."The whole thing smacks of either incompetence or worse," said Tim Ripley, a security expert who writes for Jane's Defense publications. "You have to ask: what are they doing compromising a deep mole within al Qaeda, when it's so difficult to get these guys in there in the first place?
"It goes against all the rules of counter-espionage, counter-terrorism, running agents and so forth. It's not exactly cloak and dagger undercover work if it's on the front pages every time there's a development, is it?"
A source such as Khan — cooperating with the authorities while staying in active contact with trusting al Qaeda agents — would be among the most prized assets imaginable, he said.
"Running agents within a terrorist organization is the Holy Grail of intelligence agencies. And to have it blown is a major setback which negates months and years of work, which may be difficult to recover." [My emphasis]
I have no idea what the administration's motives are. It may be purely political. No doubt there's some panic at the White House these days as things spin out of their control and November approaches. This all happened so fast and so easily, however, that it's hard not to suspect something else is going on. What that could be is anyone's guess.
Posted by Jonathan at 05:52 PM | Comments (1) | Link to this
| Khan Job | 9/11 Politics |
During its flurry of terror-warning announcements early this week, the Bush administration revealed that it had based the warnings on information obtained from one Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, recently arrested in Pakistan.
According to the New York Times, Khan was "a 25-year-old computer engineer, arrested July 13, who had used and helped to operate a secret al Qaeda communications system where information was transferred via coded messages."
After his July arrest, Khan had agreed to work as a double-agent against al Qaeda on behalf of Pakistan and the US. By announcing his name, the Bush administration blew his cover.
Reuters reports:
US officials providing justification for anti-terrorism alerts revealed details about a Pakistani secret agent, and confirmed his name while he was working under cover in a sting operation, Pakistani sources said on Friday.A Pakistani intelligence source told Reuters Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, who was arrested in Lahore secretly last month, had been actively cooperating with intelligence agents to help catch al Qaeda operatives when his name appeared in US newspapers.
"After his capture [in July] he admitted being an al Qaeda member and agreed to send e-mails to his contacts," a Pakistani intelligence source told Reuters. "He sent encoded e-mails and received encoded replies. He's a great hacker and even the US agents said he was a computer whiz."
"He was cooperating with interrogators on Sunday and Monday and sent e-mails on both days," the source said.
The New York Times published a story on Monday saying US officials had disclosed that a man arrested secretly in Pakistan was the source of the bulk of information leading to the security alerts.
The newspaper named him as Khan, although it did not say how it had learned his name. US officials subsequently confirmed the name to other news organizations on Monday morning. None of the reports mentioned that Khan was working under cover at the time, helping to catch al Qaeda suspects. [My emphasis]
You may recall that soon after the terror warning British police conducted a series of raids to round up al Qaeda suspects in England, based again on Khan's information. What hasn't been widely reported, however, is that the British were forced to carry out these raids prematurely and in haste, because the Americans had outed Khan.
Reuters again:
...British police said they had been forced to carry out their swoop more hastily than planned — a day after Khan's name appeared in the New York Times as the source of information behind the US alerts. [My emphasis]On Monday evening, after Khan's name appeared, Pakistani officials moved him to a secret location.
The next day British police mounted the sweep that caught the 12 suspects. Such raids are normally carried out late at night or in the early morning, when suspects might be at home and less likely to resist.
But showing clear signs of haste, British police pounced in daylight. Some suspects were taken in shops; others were caught in a high-speed car chase.
According to Juan Cole, the British have already had to release one of the suspects for lack of evidence, a result of their having to make the arrests prematurely.
There are so many ways to read this, none of them favorable to the Bush administration. Maybe they're just incredibly clumsy and stupid. Or maybe they don't care if they burn an undercover asset who's helping them to catch al Qaeda operatives, just so long as they get some political mileage out of it, no matter how temporary or insignificant. Or maybe they have their own reasons for wanting to sabotage activities that strike too close to the heart of al Qaeda.
In any case, it doesn't look good. How many times have we heard how hard it is to get human intelligence access to al Qaeda? Then when we get someone, it only takes a few days before the White House blows his cover to the New York Times. Somebody should burn for this.
Posted by Jonathan at 02:38 PM | Comments (2) | Link to this
August 06, 2004
| Department of Homeland Photo Ops | 9/11 Politics |
Tom Ridge recently brushed off questions about Homeland Security's habit of raising the terror threat level at politically opportune moments by saying, "We don't do politics at Homeland Security."
But Pandagon reminds us of this quote from Time magazine in March:
Administration sources tell TIME that employees at the Department of Homeland Security have been asked to keep their eyes open for opportunities to pose the President in settings that might highlight the Administration's efforts to make the nation safer. The goal, they are being told, is to provide Bush with one homeland-security photo-op a month. [My emphasis]
Posted by Jonathan at 04:43 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this
August 05, 2004
| Home of the Brave | 9/11 |
AP reports that when seven Iraqis — who were taking part in a State Department sponsored US tour intended to educate them in the workings of American democracy — showed up at the city hall in Memphis, Tennessee, the city council chairman refused them entrance.
The Iraqis were scheduled to meet with a city council member, but Joe Brown, the council chair, said he feared the group was dangerous."We don't know exactly what's going on. Who knows about the delegation, and has the FBI been informed?" Brown said. "We must secure and protect all the employees in that building."
Elisabeth Silverman, the group's host and head of the Memphis Council for International Visitors, said Brown told her he would "evacuate the building and bring in the bomb squads" if the group entered. [My emphasis]
"They are in charge of setting up processes in their country. They have to educate themselves about how it works in this country," Silverman said.
I guess they learned.
Update: AP reports that the following evening, two members of the Iraqi delegation were "robbed at gunpoint on a Memphis street". Yikes.
Posted by Jonathan at 09:46 AM | Comments (0) | Link to this
August 04, 2004
| Shame On Us | 9/11 |
From the Associated Press comes this report:
Three Britons freed from Guantanamo Bay claim they suffered systematic brutality during their detention at the U.S. military base.A report released by their lawyers Wednesday claims that the men were held in open cages in the sweltering Cuban heat, with scorpions and snakes roaming the cells, and that they were forced through brutal treatment to make false confessions.
"That's what you're getting in Guantanamo, false confession after false confession," said Michael Ratner, head of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Asif Iqbal, Ruhal Ahmed and Shafiq Rasul, friends from Tipton in central England, were released without charge from Guantanamo in March after being held for more than two years. [My emphasis] [...]
According to the report, the men were told that prisoners had been stripped naked and forced to watch videotapes of other prisoners ordered to sodomize each other.
The men said the guards would throw the prisoners' Qurans into the toilet and forcibly shave the prisoners to try to force people to abandon their Muslim faith.
Abusive treatment by prison guards included shackling, extreme temperatures, beatings and the use of dogs, the report said.
Under pressure, Iqbal confessed to being the man interrogators pointed to on a videotape with Osama Bin Laden. This was later disproved by British intelligence; in truth, Iqbal was in England at the time the videotape was made.
Guilty of nothing, but held for two years under these conditions. What is happening to us?
Posted by Jonathan at 12:18 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this
August 02, 2004
| Who Elected the 9/11 Commission? | 9/11 Politics |
The 9/11 Commission has made "urgent" recommendations for sweeping changes in the US intelligence agencies, including creating a new National Intelligence Director (NID) based in the White House but subject to Senate confirmation and congressional oversight. The NID would oversee and manage the various intelligence agencies. His or her position as a member of the White House staff would grant the President extraordinary powers with respect to the secret intelligence capabilities of the US government (USG).
John Kerry has called for immediate adoption of the Commission's recommendations. The Bush Administration is working on legislation that would create the NID role, but with one essential difference: the NID would not be based in the White House. The Administration's motive for that change appears to be that it does not want to establish a precedent for congressional oversight of any White House staff position. Congress has jumped on the bandwagon as well: various congressional hearings are planned for the coming weeks, and legislation will be acted on prior to the November elections.
Besides the creation of the NID role, there are a number of other Commission recommendations that have received less publicity. Several of these recommendations may impact the freedoms of US citizens: e.g., adoption of biometric passports (i.e., incorporating some form of biological "fingerprint" in passport databases and entry/exit screening procedures); use of secure identification cards within the US; and increased information sharing with foreign governments and among USG agencies.
Several of the proposed changes reallocate responsibilities among USG agencies: e.g., establishment of a National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC); transfer of responsibility for paramilitary operations, including covert ops, from the CIA to the DOD; and creation of a "specialized and integrated national security workforce... at the FBI".
Taking covert ops away from the CIA seems like a seismic shift, but I haven't seen any discussion of it. It will be interesting to see if the CIA takes it lying down. Creation of a "national security workforce" at the FBI is also an important change, creating, in effect, a domestic CIA.
In this election year, no one wants to be seen as dragging his or her feet with respect to terrorism, so Bush, Kerry, and the Congress are all rushing to implement the Commission's recommendations as if they were handed down to Moses. But the Commission is just an assortment of unelected people with no special monopoly on wisdom. Politicians of both parties are embracing the Commission's recommendations because it's a politically safe way to do something.
This kind of haste seems more than a little foolhardy, however. The Department of Homeland Security was created in the same kind of political stampede, and it's now spending $30 billion a year with no evident benefit. The new recommendations are substantially more ambitious and no doubt will affect the allocation and expenditure of even more vast amounts of money. No business would dream of jumping headlong into an undertaking on this scale without careful consideration and planning. Hard problems are solved by hard work, not by a slapdash stroke of the pen. And freedoms, once surrendered, are seldom regained.
Posted by Jonathan at 04:54 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this
July 30, 2004
| A Failure of Imagination | 9/11 |
People have short memories. Otherwise, they'd know that every big, blue-ribbon bipartisan investigation designed to lay to rest some governmental scandal or failure is an exercise in damage control, public relations, and coverup. Without exception. These investigations reveal enough to create the appearance of an exhaustive inquiry — what Nixon called a "limited hangout" — but they steer clear of areas that nobody in government wants to expose.
This was true of the Warren Commission (which Nixon called "the greatest hoax that has ever been perpetuated"), of Watergate (e.g., its connection to what Nixon called "the whole Bay of Pigs thing"), of Iran-Contra (e.g., CIA drug trafficking and Iran-Contra's relation to looting of S&Ls), and it's true of the 9/11 Commission. These are political exercises, designed to serve political purposes, and subject to political compromises and horse-trading.
The surest sign that the 9/11 Commission Report adheres to this pattern is the fact that it's been praised so glowingly for its "bipartisanship" by politicians of all stripes. That, and the fact that nobody's concerned that there's stuff in the report that may reveal intelligence secrets and sources (where are the redactions?), are proof that the report's been watered down until it's safe for public consumption and palatable to all, including the people who should have been the targets of an authentic, hard-nosed inquiry.
The report says the most important failure was "one of imagination." It says, "We do not believe leaders understood the gravity of the threat." I.e., people didn't fail us, imaginations did. A convenient, "bipartisan" way of not assigning blame.
This sounds an awful lot like Condoleezza Rice's testimony:
I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.
Which is a flat-out lie. In the decade leading up to 9/11 there were several instances where people actually did hijack planes to use them as missiles, the best-known being a 1994 attempt by Algierian militants to crash an airliner into the Eiffel Tower. That same year, an American suicide pilot crashed a small (not hijacked) plane into the White House. The Pentagon, the CIA, NORAD, and others repeatedly explored the planes-as-missiles possibility in plans, scenarios, simulations, and drills, and it was showing up in Tom Clancy novels and in TV shows.
In 1995, Philippine police captured a plan (Project Bojinka) by Ramzi Yussef (convicted mastermind of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center) that included the simultaneous crashing of hijacked airliners into such targets as the World Trade Center, the Sears Tower, and CIA headquarters. This plan was turned over to the US and was used as evidence in Yussef's trial in 1997.
In October of 2000, the Pentagon ran a "detailed" emergency drill based on a scenario of a hijacked plane crashing into the Pentagon. In July of 2001, less than two months before 9/11, when the leaders of the G-8 nations met in Genoa, there was so much concern about the possibility of a plane being used as a missile to attack the summit that local air-space was closed, the site was ringed by anti-aircraft missile batteries, and President Bush was removed to a nearby aircraft carrier at night.
On the very morning of 9/11 itself, the National Reconaissance Office (the US spy satellite agency) and the CIA were holding an exercise based on the scenario of a civilian jetliner crashing into NRO headquarters.
And on that same morning, according to Michael Ruppert, the Joint Chiefs and NORAD were conducting their own joint exercise, which apparently involved one or more actual aircraft posing as hijacked airliners. (If true, this obviously would have created enormous confusion on 9/11. In the 9/11 Commission Report, p. 20, when Boston FAA controllers inform NORAD that Flight 11 has been hijacked, the first thing NORAD says is, "Is this real-world or exercise?" The 9/11 Commission reports this — without context or comment — but fails to investigate or discuss the various exercises then occurring and what role they may have played in creating confusion in America's air defenses. The Commission certainly knew that many people, including 9/11 families, thought the exercises were an important issue and were frustrated by the Commission's refusal to investigate them. Indeed, it reached the point finally where spectators were ejected from public hearings of the Commission for standing up and shouting "What about the exercises?")
There are a number of other examples, but you get the point. Condi Rice is a liar. Lots of people, including many in the government, were anticipating exactly what she says no one could have predicted.
The Commission's "failure of imagination" point is perhaps broader than the mere failure to imagine the 9/11 planes-as-missiles scenario. Maybe so, but I think the real failure of imagination lies with the Commission members themselves. They seem to have failed to imagine — publicly, anyway — that some people in the administration have been lying through their teeth and that the Commission itself has left many of the most important questions about 9/11 unasked, let alone unanswered.
Posted by Jonathan at 01:12 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this
July 26, 2004
| Kafkaesque | 9/11 |
Rumsfeld once called Guantanamo Bay "the least worst place" to store evil-doers, after which the Navy embraced Rumsfeld's quote as a slogan, proudly displaying it across the banner of their Guantanamo Bay website. When a new commanding officer took over near the end of last year, he ordered the slogan removed.
From The Register (via Xymphora):
"The removal was ordered because the commanding officer did not feel it accurately reflected his vision of the base," said Navy spokesman Lieutenant Mike Kafka.(Yes, you're reading that correctly. A man named Kafka has been deployed to field questions about a prison where the criminals are only vaguely charged with crimes, can't speak to lawyers and likely will never get out.)
Posted by Jonathan at 08:37 AM | Comments (0) | Link to this
July 21, 2004
| The Case of Cynthia McKinney | 9/11 Politics |
Former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney easily won the Democratic primary in Georgia yesterday, bringing her a step closer to regaining the seat she lost two years ago.
McKinney served her district from 1992, when she was the first African-American woman elected to Congress from Georgia, until 2002, when her defeat was engineered by an organized effort that got Republicans to cross over and vote for her opponent by the tens of thousands in the Democratic primary. Georgia permits cross-over voting in primary elections. However, the Supreme Court ruled (in 2000) that an open primary system in California was illegal and unconstitutional, since it permitted "nonparty members to hijack the party." McKinney's opponent was also helped by a huge influx of out-of-state contributions from various business and pro-Israel groups.
McKinney's case is interesting because, prior to her defeat, she was slammed in the media for supposedly saying that George Bush knew about 9/11 in advance and allowed it to happen.
But, as Greg Palast reports, she never said it. Here's Palast:
According to those quoted on National Public Radio, McKinney’s "a loose cannon" (media expert) who "the people of Atlanta are embarrassed and disgusted" (politician) by, and she is also "loony" and "dangerous" (senator from her own party).Yow! And why is McKinney dangerous/loony/disgusting? According to NPR, "McKinney implied that the [Bush] Administration knew in advance about September 11 and deliberately held back the information."
The New York Times' Lynette Clemetson revealed her comments went even further over the edge: "Ms. McKinney suggest[ed] that President Bush might have known about the September 11 attacks but did nothing so his supporters could make money in a war."
That’s loony, all right. As an editor of the highly respected Atlanta Journal Constitution told NPR, McKinney’s "practically accused the President of murder!"
Problem is, McKinney never said it.
That’s right. The "quote" from McKinney is a complete fabrication.
Greg Palast called Lynette Clemetson of the New York Times to see where she got her information. Here's the transcript of his phone call to her:
Palast: Hi, Lynette. My name is Greg Palast, and I wanted to follow up on a story of yours. It says, let’s see, after the opening — it’s about Cynthia McKinney — it’s dated Washington byline August 21. "McKinney’s [opponent] capitalized on the furor caused by Miss McKinney’s suggestion this year that President Bush might have known about the September 11 attacks but did nothing so his supporters could make money in a war." Now, I have been trying my darndest to find this phrase ... I can’t...Clemetson: Did you search the Atlanta Journal Constitution?
Palast: Yes, but I haven’t been able to find that statement.
Clemetson: I’ve heard that statement — it was all over the place.
Palast: I know it was all over the place, except no one can find it and that’s why I’m concerned. Now did you see the statement in the Atlanta Journal Constitution?
Clemetson: Yeah....
[Note from Palast: No such direct quote from McKinney can be found in the Atlanta Journal Constitution.]
Palast: And did you confirm this with McKinney?
Clemetson: Well, I worked with her office. The statement is from the floor of the House [of Representatives].... Right?
Palast: So did you check the statement from the floor of the House?
Clemetson: I mean I wouldn’t have done the story.... Have you looked at House transcripts?
Palast: Yes. Did you check that?
Clemetson: Of course.
Palast: You did check it?
[Note from Palast: No such McKinney statement can be found in the transcripts or other records of the House of Representatives.]
Clemetson: I think you have to go back to the House transcripts.... I mean it was all over the place at the time.
Yes, it was all over the place. But, Palast says, it was not "in the Congressional Record, nor in any recorded talk, nor on her website, nor in any of her radio talks. Here’s the Congresswoman’s statement from the record:
George Bush had no prior knowledge of the plan to attack the World Trade Center on September 11."
Oh.
This is an increasingly common occurrence. A reporter sees something that's all over the place and reports it as true without confirming it. No matter that the statement in question was planted with some right-wing commentator or website and then picked up in the right-wing echo chamber. If it's all over the place it must be true, right?
What were Cynthia McKinney's actual crimes? She was a tireless champion of human rights (including the rights of Palestinians), of civil rights (including US citizens' rights threatened in the aftermath of 9/11), and of peace and justice. Moreover, according to her own website:
Cynthia voted against near-record Bush Administration Pentagon budgets and challenged the Pentagon to explain how it "lost" over $2.3 trillion in un-trackable transactions. She decried the Pentagon's sweetheart deals with Halliburton, the funding of an unworkable weapon system built by the Carlyle Group, and the administration of the Pentagon's anthrax and smallpox vaccine program by a well-connected corporate friend. [...][When she] became one of the first Members of Congress to demand a thorough investigation into the events of September 11, 2001 and responsibly asked the question, "What did the Administration know and when did it know it about the events of September 11th?" she was vilified and targeted by Georgia and national Republicans.
McKinney is expected to win in November. According to Wayne Madsen, Congresspeople who regain their seat after a single term are customarily given back their seniority. It will be interesting to see if that happens with McKinney.
Posted by Jonathan at 08:01 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this
July 15, 2004
| Seymour Hersh's ACLU Keynote Speech Transcribed | 9/11 Iraq Politics |
On July 8, Seymour Hersh addressed the ACLU's 2004 Membership Conference. The program can be streamed here, with Hersh's remarks beginning at the 1:07:40 mark.
I've transcribed Hersh's remarks below. It's a long talk, but I've added some headings and emphasized some things in bold, so you can scan through it if you don't wish to read the whole thing.
Introduction [1:07:40]… The truth is, it's so ironic… the best information we may get about this election may come from a combination of The Control Room, Fahrenheit 9/11, John Sayles, the nightly news from Jon Stewart if some of you watch that. At the height of the prisoner abuse stories, [Jon Stewart] had one of his mock news broadcasters say very seriously to the camera, on the Stewart show, he said, "The important thing is not that we commit torture and abuses, it's that we're a country that doesn't condone torture and abuses" [laughter] — that's a wonderful line.
And so, you start talking about failures of communication, I don't know where we're going to go with this, I can't make you feel happy about where we are. We've got a very important election coming up, probably the most important since, what, 1860. I think it is, and there's nothing I can say to you about any of that. …
So here we are. The bottom line is, by the way, I'm in a tough position because I'm not done reporting on all of this. … It's a tough position because there is more to the story. …Standards for Government Ethics [1:10:25]
I guess the way to describe how you look at things is, I don’t know about you, but I have a wife and children, and one of the things that makes life livable is trusting in my partner, never lying to my children and never wanting my children — with the exception of teenage girls [laughter] — to lie to me about anything. …
But basically you know what I’m talking about, the core of how we exist. The way we live — not us, there’s nothing special about us, everybody in the world — we all live, the most important thing in our life is our family structure and the integrity with which we live, and the honesty with which we conduct our life, and the trust with which we have people [sic].
And if you think about it, you begin to understand the bad bargain we have [now]. It’s, it's, it's a condition, a requirement, one that we so desperately live with our own families with that we don’t even begin to levy on the President of the United States and the National Security Advisor. It’s not even a requirement [for them]. We don’t even have any expectation that they’re going to have the same trust and integrity in conducting their affairs as we do in our own personal life.
It’s a bad bargain for us in the commonweal. We don’t even begin — we understand what they are. You heard talking about Henry Kissinger, who, for all of his genius, lied like most of us breathe. And when you’re in a situation like that — is that partisan or non-partisan, I don't know [referring to the ACLU's need to remain non-partisan].
But it’s really a bad bargain. And we live with it pretty happily, we go along, ok another President, another National Security Advisor, Condi Rice in this case — and we know we don’t get the story, and what do they have the right to do? They have the right to send our children, men and women now, in the name of democracy to go kill people and be killed and torture and perhaps be tortured in return, which is always going to be the end result of torture. And so, I think there’s nothing wrong with holding these people to the highest possible standards. It doesn’t happen enough. But that’s what we have to do.
Scope of the Crimes of Torture [1:12:50]
We don’t know — I’ll tell you right now, the reason I’m saying all that — is what happened at Abu Ghraib, I can just tell you this, and I have to do the reporting on this and you have to wait for me to do it — but it’s not about an academic debate in long essays between the Justice Department and the White House, legal essays about where the Geneva Convention ends and the Presidential prerogative begins.
What we had was a series of massive crimes, criminal activity by the President and the Vice President, by this administration anyway, I can say that, I can’t say who did it.
The only way to look at this is as war crimes. What happened are war crimes. I’m not saying it’s there yet. It’s not there yet. But that’s where it has to go. We have to stop looking at it as some sort of academic debate about Geneva Conventions and really begin to look at it in terms of: Who did what? Who died? Why did he die? Are there people missing? Are we doing what the Brazilians and Argentineans did back two or three decades ago and actually into this decade? Are we disappearing people? Are there people being tortured knowingly in advance that the torture was going to put their lives in peril and is nothing being done to relieve their suffering to the point that they die?
Is there mens rea? Is there guilty knowledge? Is it a crime? And we’re going to get there, because I think that’s where it’s sort of ineluctably going, you can just see on and on and on, and we’re not there yet. I’m not telling you I can take it there, I’m just telling you that that’s the way you have to look at it.
Repercussions in the Arab World [1:14:25]
I’ll tell you what an Israeli told me. And the Israelis as you know — a very tough, hard-nosed Israeli told me at one point, about all this — he said, you know, we hate the Arabs. This is a guy who spent his career in the intelligence service and, you know, his hands are bloody. He said, we hate the Arabs, and the Arabs hate us, and before 1948, we’ve been killing Arabs, and they’ve been killing us. But I have to tell you something, he said. We know somewhere down the line, we’re going to have to live with these people, much as we can’t stand them, they’re going to have to be our neighbors. And if we had done in our prisons to the Arabs what you have done to the Arabs in your prisons, we couldn’t live that way.
And so the bottom line is we have started something that we don’t know [what] the end, the bottom line, is of this treatment, as more details come out.
And I can tell you it was much worse, and the government knows it's much worse, than they’ve even told you. There are worse photos, worse videotapes, worse events. To The New Yorker’s credit we decided, not for censorship, but just how much can you, how much can you levy on Arab manhood, in public?
But Arabs, I will tell you, it’s not just the radicals — and we all know how this policy, this administration’s policies, in Afghanistan, too, and also of course in Iraq, has really done exactly the contrary of what they said they were going to do. They haven't ended the war of terrorism — they’ve expanded it — that’s nothing obvious [sic], that’s totally clear.
But Arabs now, moderate Arabs, Arabs that normally would be doing the kind of — as you know, the overwhelming, the vastly overwhelming percentage of moderate Arabs deplored what happened to this country on 9/11, as much as anybody here — but those Arabs we’ve lost. They see us as a sexually perverse society. The sexual stuff we did to them is seen as just perversion. And I think we’re going to have consequences for a long time to come. There’s an awful lot of respect in the Arab world for Americans, I travel there all the time, and American Jews even, it’s not, nobody’s going to — I wouldn’t walk around Baghdad — but most of the world is very safe. We have a lot of problems.
The Neocon Cult [1:16:47]
So, rather than deal with the obvious stuff about Bush and this election and what it means, I think the real question we have to answer, and this is the question I'm inchoate about, I don't have an answer …
The question we have to say to ourselves is, ok, so here’s what happens, a bunch of guys, 8 or 9 neoconservatives, cultists — not Charles Manson cultists, but cultists — get in and it's not, with all due respect to Michael Moore, and you’ll read it, his movie’s fine, but it’s not about oil, it’s not even about protecting Israel, it’s about a Utopia they have, it’s about an idea they have. Not only about — democracy can be spread — in a sense, I would say Paul Wolfowitz is the greatest Trotskyite of our time, he believes in permanent revolution, and in the Middle East to begin, needless to say.
And so you have a bunch of people who've been for 10, 12 years have been fantasizing since the 1991 Gulf War on the way to resolve problems. And of course Israel will be a beneficiary and etc. etc., but the world in their eyes — this was Utopia. And so they got together, this small group of cultists, and how did they do it? They did do it. They’ve taken the government over. And what’s amazing to me, and what really is troubling, is how fragile our democracy is. Look what happened to us.
[In the press, there is] self-censorship, which is the beacon word for me, you know I always think it comes more, you know there is a corporate mentality out there, but there’s also a tremendous amount of self-censorship among the press. It’s like a disease.
But also — they not only — they took away the edge from the press, they also muzzled the bureaucracy, they muzzled the military, they muzzled the Congress, and it’s an amazing feat. We’re supposed to be a democratic society, and all of those areas of our democracy bowed and scraped to this group of neocons who advocated a policy.
General Shinseki [1:19:05]
You know, we all know the story of how mad they got at General Shinseki, who I think is going to run for the Senate in Hawaii and should, for Inouye’s seat, he’s a great general. The important thing about Shinseki for me, and this is just heuristic, I don’t know this, the important thing about Shinseki is this. He testifies before the Gulf War we’re going to need a couple hundred thousand troops and everybody, Wolfowitz and the others — I count Wolfowitz, I lead with him, because he’s sort of the, he’s the genius in the background, he’s the man, very articulate, very persuasive — and so Shinseki testifies we need a couple hundred thousand and everybody’s mad at him, it's about two weeks before the war, and it made sense, everybody said, they were mad because he's talking about numbers these guys say you won’t need. They're going to go invade Iraq and you know the story, they were going to be greeted with flowers and all that stuff, we all know that story.
But it wasn’t that. Their complaint with Shinseki was really much more interesting. It was: didn’t he get it? Didn’t he know what we’ve been talking about, in the tank with the JCS and the generals — didn’t he get it? We could do it with five thousand troops, we have to make these bargains with these crazy Clinton-ized generals — I’m talking like Rummy, like Rumsfeld would talk — literally, unfortunately — these soft generals, these Clinton-ized generals — didn’t Shinseki get it? Didn’t he understand what we’re doing here? We did it in Afghanistan, we’re going to do it in Iraq. Some Special Forces, some bombing, we’re going to take it over. It’s going to be like this. He didn’t get it, that was the problem, that’s why they had to read him out. He wasn’t on the team.
And so you have a government that basically has been operating since 9/11 very successfully on the principle that if you’re with us you’re a genius, if you’re against us you’re not just somebody [in the] loyal opposition, you’re a traitor. They can’t deal with you. I’m exaggerating very slightly.
Pentagon in Disarray [1:21:00]
So what does that mean? That means no dissent. Somebody I know recently was working with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on a budget issue. The budget’s in incredible chaos, the Defense Department budget. Don’t hold me to this, because, you know The New Yorker has this great fact-checking system, this is just something I’ve heard, but among the problems they have, they can’t find something like one billion dollars in cash that was known to be in Iraq, they just can’t find it. And you know we’re talking with the b-word there, you known one billion.
And so they’ve got huge problems that they’re spending and the Joint Chiefs, this was in big league meetings, and then this gentleman has to go and brief his findings. He’s an outside expert, he’s done an investigation, he has to brief Rumsfeld, and one of the senior generals who happens to be a very good guy — not General Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who’s know to many generals as “hear no evil, see no evil”, you know we have that incredible sort of problem — I wish, this is a digression, I wish they had more guts, the two, three, and four stars. I shouldn’t say that because I’m obviously a beneficiary, you know, indirectly, I’m the beneficiary for their thoughts in some cases, but it is sort of sad that none of them have come forward and really blasted away, because I can tell you right now, the disaffection inside the Pentagon is really extremely acute, there’s never been anything like it, and they feel that this government doesn’t care about — you know a good officer, and I could tell you right now, don’t make the mistake of thinking that they’re not good people, they are, and in the intelligence service too, they’re people like everybody else. They want to do their job right, they want to do it with as much honor as they can. And this is something that I feel — I know these guys, and they do care. But they also, the good ones, also they’re in loco parentis. One of the things they take very seriously, particularly, you known I'm a Marine, you know what I’m talking about, you give your children to them, they take of you. They can’t do that now in Iraq. They really don’t think we care, and they don' think, they certainly don’t think people in the White House care. …
Rumsfeld Refuses to Listen [1:23:10]
So one of the good generals, one of the good guys goes in for a meeting with Rumsfeld, and the person I’m talking about is describing the condition that he’s discovered of the budget planning. We’re talking about lots of billions of dollars, this war is going to probably end up being the trillion dollar war that nobody — you can’t even begin to estimate the cost.
When you see the Moore movie, and in [The] Control Room, when you see those movies, the photographs that are the most gripping are the photographs of Baghdad before the war. And look, I know he's a bad guy, etc., etc., etc., Saddam, but still, and the rebuilding —
Anyway, the point is that my friend, this person told Rumsfeld how bad things are, and Rumsfeld of course said, oh my God, that’s absolutely wrong, he said, there’s nothing like that, there’s no problem with the budget and he turned to this ranking general and said, isn’t that right? And this general, in front of this outsider, said yes sir, you’re right. And that’s what happens, that’s what you have now, and to me, there’s nothing more scary. That the Secretary of Defense is simply incapable of hearing what he doesn’t want to hear. And he’s not the ideologue that Wolfowitz is. You couple that with an ideologue, and I don’t know what we can do. I don’t know what any of us can do to stop it.
Transfer of Iraqi “Sovereignty” [1:24:50]
I think what’s going to happen is the President’s — my guess is, first of all, again, the idea that three networks — or at least two of them — I think all three sent their anchormen through Baghdad on the 30th for this transfer of sovereignty and I just wonder, I mean, how out of touch are they? What sovereignty? What sovereignty do we have to give? There’s no phones, there’s no electricity [laughter] — no, this is a sad fact. There is no sovereignty, there’s no army. It’s a Potemkin village maybe, yes, so they’re going to go inside the CPA where the grass is green and the air-conditioning works and they’re going to have a change of command with the press monitoring it and they had all three anchors there. I thought to myself, wow, it’s really scary. We’re getting into — we’re making the pictures and we’re believing them now, more than ever. So it doesn’t have much reality.
So the President’s, I would guess the President’s policy is — he’s got no, he doesn’t have a policy behind the new government, the Allawi government, which is basically a bunch of outsiders taking control, and everybody’s got their hands in certain — there’s no way this government’s going to be acceptable to anybody except a very small minority of people. It’s not going to work, it’s not going to stop the insurgency.
What’s Next in Iraq [1:26:10]
I think you’re going to see a lot of efforts to try to paint the insurgency in the next month as increasingly being outsiders. I’ve seen already the first “showdown” between al Qaeda and the United States. “Al Qaeda’s taken over the insurgency” — I don’t think that’s true at all. And I can tell you right now — this I'm telling you I know — a year ago, a year and a half ago, there was total panic inside, because the opposition, the insurgency, was operating in 1, 2, and 3 man cells and we knew nothing about them. I can tell you right now, they're operating in 10 and 15 man cells right now and we still know nothing about them. The interrogations haven’t worked, no matter how much pressure they put on people. We have no tactical information of any use whatsoever.
And if you go to Europe and talk to some of the intelligence people there and some of the people in the Middle East who are our friends — we have many friends, who are very sad about what’s happened to America, are praying for the next election — they will tell you even the stuff you’re hearing about Zarqawi — Zarqawi, excuse me, Zarqawi is mister everybody, he’s never liked bin Laden, and it’s not clear that the person that we claim responsible for all those acts is he. Some of the people who know the Arab world very well and very carefully and listen to his statements. He’s a Jordanian, and many of the comments that have been alleged to have been in his name are not made by him. In other words, the suggestion is that he’s a composite figure. He’s very convenient.
I don’t want to suggest to you that we’ve ever been propagandized by our government [laughter], but it’s very convenient. It’s very convenient to keep on telling the press that Zarqawi’s — my favorite one is that nice kid that was beheaded, remember. The guy that beheaded him had a hood over him. He was described very confidently by the American establishment government as Zarqawi. Well, if they can see through hoods. Anyway —
So, I think the policy’s going to be, we’ve got this guy Allawi and this government, let’s stand him up and see if he can past the election, and let’s just escalate, and bomb, and bomb, and bomb. And the only answer for these guys is going to be more pressure, more military force. We accept as commonplace, every day now, we’re emulating Israel in [their] missile attacks, and it’s a daily occurrence. We keep on bombing places in Fallujah, claiming we’ve gotten rid of Zarqawi, who keeps on not showing up anyway, whoever he is.
We don’t have much intelligence, and we’re escalating a war. Bombing, missile attacks, much more violence, it’s come, crept up on us, you know little cat paw, and we’re there. We’re there in a full-scale, increasingly intense military activity, more bombing, more air force planes, more ordnance, more shelling, what we call force protection — that is, you’re not going to send troops somewhere where you can just fire a lot of missiles [instead], which means of course more collateral damage, more civilians, which means of course more opposition, more insurgency.
Torture: Worse Revelations to Come [1:29:08]
What they did at Abu Ghraib and other places was, the people they would get, they would torture. And sometimes, for an Arab man, being photographed without clothes on — in the Koran, you’re not allowed, this front [motioning to his body] cannot be exposed — and to be exposed that way and to be forced to simulate sexual activity with other males and have women give the thumbs-up sign is the ultimate degradation. It’s literally — any classic definition of — it’s torture. Torture isn’t always physical. It’s a torturous process.
And the purpose of it, of course, is to generate information. So what do you get? You get people that know nothing. The ICRC, the international Red Cross, estimated in the prison population at Abu Ghraib at the time of the worst abuses, they estimated that upwards of 90% had no bearing at all on anthing anti-American, or any activity that had anything to do with the insurgency. This wonderful general, Antonio Taguba, the report that I got, this guy Taguba's report estimated that 60% had nothing to do [with it].
So you take these people, you expose them to the ridicule and physical torture that you can, and they end up telling you. Yes, they'll give you the names of people in their neighborhood that are al Qaeda, or terrorists, insurgency, and they give you names. And of course they're just names, they're just doing it, and then you arrest those people, and bring them in, and you start the process. And the circle gets bigger, and bigger, and bigger.
And I would — debating about it [long pause]. Some of the worst things that happened that you don’t know about. OK? Videos. There are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at [Abu Ghraib], which is about 30 miles from Baghdad — 30 kilometers, maybe, just 20 miles, I'm not sure whether it's — anyway. The women were passing messages out saying please come and kill me because of what’s happened. And basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children, in cases that have been [video] recorded, the boys were sodomized, with the cameras rolling, and the worst above all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking. That your government has, and they’re in total terror it’s going to come out. It’s impossible to say to yourself, how did we get there, who are we, who are these people that sent us there.
When I did My Lai, I was very troubled, like anybody in his right mind would be about what happened, and I ended up in something I wrote saying, in the end, I said, the people that did the killing were as much victims as the people they killed, because of the scars they had.
I can tell you some of the personal stories of some of the people who were in these units who witnessed this. I can also tell you written complaints were made to the highest officers. And so we’re dealing with an enormous, massive amount of criminal wrong-doing that was covered up at the highest command out there and higher. And we have to get to it, and we will. And we will, I mean, you know, there’s enough out there, they can't — [applause]
So — so, it’s going to be an interesting election year, it is. It’s going to be Bush vs. Bush, I think, largely, in my view, not that the Democrats, or Ralph Nader, won’t have something to do with it, but it’s really going to be, it’s Bush running against Bush.
The Justice Department [1:33:05]
And, I don’t know where we’re going to come out. And, I guess, I guess the only thing I can say is that above and beyond that, all of you know because all of you care about the Constitutional rights and what’s going on in the government, the issues that many in [the ACLU] are deeply involved in, one of the other great shocking examples of self-censorship, or just sheer cowardness, or what you will, is just the inability of the press corps to deal with the Justice Department and what’s happened there.
It’s one of the great failings — I can tell you the degradation of that place has been so total, and there are people, again, there are many people in those places that really care about human rights. I was getting emails on September the 12th, 2001, from people the inside the FBI saying we are in real trouble with this guy Ashcroft. So there are people there that care, they fight, as hard as they can. It’s not as if — when you have the kind of leadership we have, I don’t know where we go. I just wish I could tell you — I am telling you — go back, do what you can, … you’re going to say to yourself, as many people have said to me, I’d better do more. But also be terribly aware, that we are so disconnected with this leadership that it’s not necessarily clear that what you do is going to impact on them.
Because these are people that are really out there. We have really been — you know, as I say, it’s not the Manson clan — but we really have been taken over, and we have to do something to stop it, and let’s hope we can do it electorally.
Posted by Jonathan at 07:17 PM | Comments (36) | Link to this
July 14, 2004
| Governments Lie | 9/11 |
One of the greatest and most fearless independent journalists in American history, the late I. F. Stone, said:
All governments are run by liars. Nothing they say should be believed.
And when asked for his advice for aspiring journalists, Stone boiled it down to just two words: "Governments lie."
His point was not that every utterance of every government official is a lie, but that one should never forget that all governments lie, constantly. When they say something, don't just take their word for it. Verify it for yourself.
I thought of Stone's admonition yesterday when I saw the news about the supposed surrender in Saudi Arabia of one Khaled al-Harbi. I don’t have TV these days, but I made a point of watching the online CNN video of the story.
Major cognitive dissonance. The CNN anchor trumpeted it as a significant victory in the war on terror, but the video showed somebody who looked like he might have been an airline employee helping an old man into a wheelchair and wheeling him off. No security, no handcuffs, no excitement of any kind.
As evidence of al-Harbi's importance, the anchor noted that al-Harbi was the visiting Saudi whom we saw with bin Laden in the "smoking gun" video released in mid-December, 2001, the video in which bin Laden expressed knowledge of and satisfaction with — if not responsibility for — the 9/11 attacks.
There may be reason, however, to believe the "smoking gun" video is a fake. What would that make al-Harbi?
Here are some stills from that "smoking gun" video:
Here are a couple of photos of bin Laden. The first is from the FBI's bin Laden "Wanted" poster.
Now some images comparing bin Laden from a different video (on the right) with the "bin Laden" in the "smoking gun" video (on the left).
And a montage of images, in which the last one is from the "smoking gun" video.
[Images from WhatReallyHappened.com, UK Indymedia, Robert-Fisk.com]
Trying to draw conclusions from low quality images of this kind may be a fool's errand, but to my naive eye the images certainly appear to be of two different men. Compare the shape and length of the nose for example. Look at the length of the nose in proportion to the distance from eye to mouth.
There are other reasons to question the video’s authenticity — e.g., "bin Laden" wears a ring on his right hand, bin Laden does not; "bin Laden" appears to write notes with his right hand, bin Laden is left-handed [FBI]; "bin Laden" looks a bit porky, bin Laden is a very skinny 6'4"-6'6" and 160 lbs [FBI].
There's the quality of the video and audio itself. The video is surprisingly hard to find on the web, but the BBC has it here. Take a look. The audio of "bin Laden" is often inaudible at critical points, and the face of "bin Laden" is generally quite difficult to make out. Obviously not proof of a fake, but certainly convenient if the video is a fake. Other bin Laden videos are of much higher quality.
And then there's the fact that the video seems "too good to be true". US forces just happened to find, left behind in a vacant house, the "smoking gun" that could be used in the media world-wide.
Except for this video, bin Laden has never taken responsibility for 9/11, so its authenticity is a significant issue. Let me be clear: I have no idea if bin Laden was involved in 9/11. I am not trying to say that he wasn't involved. He may well have been. I just question whether this video is proof.
For what it's worth, shortly after 9/11, the Pakistani newspaper Ummat (Karachi) published (9/28/2001) an interview with bin Laden, in which he said:
I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people. Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of a battle.
Which also proves nothing, but it's worth noting that this interview seems to have received no significant coverage in the US mainstream media — at least nothing that comes up in Google — then or since.
Posted by Jonathan at 05:25 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this
July 09, 2004
| Treason | 9/11 |
This has been commented on elsewhere but deserves emphasis.
The New Republic cites a number of sources that say the Bush administration is putting intense pressure on Pakistan to kill or capture "high-value targets" (HVTs) like Osama bin Laden, his deputy Ayman Al Zawahiri, and the Taliban's Mullah Omar "before Americans go to the polls in November."
This paragraph is especially outrageous:
[A]n official who works under ISI's director, Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq, informed The New Republic that the Pakistanis "have been told at every level that apprehension or killing of HVTs before [the] election is [an] absolute must." What's more, this source claims that Bush administration officials have told their Pakistani counterparts they have a date in mind for announcing this achievement: "The last ten days of July deadline has been given repeatedly by visitors to Islamabad and during [ul-Haq's] meetings in Washington." Says [NSC spokesman Sean] McCormack: "I'm aware of no such comment." [A non-denial denial.] But according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that "it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July" — the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston. [My emphasis]
Foreign policy by Karl Rove.
What the Administration is pressuring Pakistan's General Musharraf to undertake — extensive military operations in the "lawless tribal areas" of Pakistan — may backfire dangerously. The tribal areas are
regions that enjoy considerable autonomy from Islamabad and where, until Musharraf sided with the United States in the war on terrorism, Pakistani soldiers had never set foot in the nation's 50-year history. [My emphasis]
As the The New Republic points out:
A Pakistani offensive in that region, aided by American high-tech weaponry and perhaps Special Forces, could unite tribal chieftains against the central government and precipitate a border war without actually capturing any of the HVTs.... Pushing Musharraf to go after Al Qaeda in the tribal areas may be a good idea despite the risks [of civil war]. But, if that is the case, it was a good idea in 2002 and 2003. [My emphasis]
Deliberately allowing the enemy to remain at large and timing military operations to further one's personal political advantage. I believe the word for that is treason.
Posted by Jonathan at 03:22 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this
July 03, 2004
| Bedtime for Bozo | 9/11 Film |
A blog I like a lot, The Talent Show, recently had a post called Fahrenheit's Missing Question. Here's how it starts:
When I met Michael Moore last January, we spent most of the time talking about the Democratic primaries and how disastrous the Bush presidency has been, but one of the subjects that naturally came up was Bush's actions on September 11th. Now there's been a lot written about the "seven minutes" sequence in Fahrenheit 9/11 for good reason (it's pretty damning to watch the leader of the free world sit still while his nation is under attack), but that wasn't the question that seemed to tug at Mike the most. When we spoke, his big question was about the reports that on the evening of 9/11, Bush went to bed at his normal time, around 11PM. [My emphasis]"How could he have just gone to bed after all that? Everyone I know was glued to their TVs and unable to sleep." he said.
Our Commander in Chief, at the center of what must have been an absolute tornado of frantic activity and near-panic, can think of nothing better to do than to climb into his jammies and go to bed.
Man, I wish Michael Moore had put that in the movie.
Posted by Jonathan at 07:30 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this
June 28, 2004
| Bush in the Classroom on 9/11 | 9/11 Film |
Bush supporters complain bitterly about Fahrenheit 9/11, but the film could have been far more inflammatory than it was.
Consider, for example, the sequence in which Bush is shown sitting with a 2nd grade class for a number of minutes after the second plane has crashed into the World Trade Center.
If you watch the original video of that occasion (available in several versions on the web, for example here), you will see Bush enter the classroom at a time when authorities already knew that at least two planes had been highjacked, and one of them had already crashed into the World Trade Center, long known to be #1 on the terrorist target wish-list. Bush jokes with the 2nd graders and poses for photos with their teacher. Just another photo op morning. After a minute or two, the smiling President takes his seat, and the reading demonstration begins.
Now suppose Michael Moore had done the whole sequence in split screen. We see Bush on one half, joking and posing, and on the other we see the burning WTC. Maybe we see people beginning to jump from the top floors. A few minutes go by, then we see the second plane slam into the WTC, and Andrew Card comes and whispers in Bush's ear to tell him "America is under attack." Soon the kids begin to read My Pet Goat, and Bush picks up a copy to follow along. Meanwhile, on the other half of the screen, both towers are now in flames, smoke pouring out, people jumping. Minutes pass.
Suppose further that Moore had let the video continue all the way to the end, where Bush again jokes with the 2nd graders as if he's got nowhere else to go that morning, and again poses for photos before finally leaving to go do his job as Commander in Chief. Still in split screen.
Moore was smart not to go that far, and I'm glad he didn't. But just imagine if he had.
Posted by Jonathan at 01:28 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this
June 26, 2004
| Opening Night | 9/11 Film |
I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 tonight. It's an extraordinary film. It's currently showing in just one theater here in Madison, WI, but all shows are already sold out through tomorrow, including the midnight shows they've added to try to meet the demand.
The trailer for the film had a rabble-rousing, fist-pumping electricity, with a rock 'n' roll soundtrack; the film itself isn't like that at all. The tone is a lot more measured than we’ve seen from Michael Moore in previous films, with considerably less of his trademark goofiness and hyperbole. There are laughs to be sure, but the overall effect is that this time, he’s serious, and it’s a whole lot more likely to make you cry than cheer.
The picture that emerges of George Bush is just devastating. For me, what did it wasn’t so much the various factual charges that Moore levels against Bush, though if I hadn’t already been familiar with that material I’m sure I would have been shocked and appalled.
Instead, it was just seeing so many clips of George Bush back-to-back. It leaves one with a deep and very troubling sense of how profoundly shallow, mean-spirited, inauthentic, and juvenile he is, how third-rate, how stunted. He seems hollow. One looks in vain for genuine warmth, for depth or self-awareness, for basic humanity, and he is so shockingly and obviously unequal to being President. He’s faking it – and there's no hiding that fact. He's a nasty, self-important little man, and it's just creepy to watch.
None of this is news, but the impact here is visceral and quite unforgettable.
November can’t come soon enough.
Posted by Jonathan at 01:11 AM | Comments (0) | Link to this
June 25, 2004
| ABC, Disney, Prince Al-Walid, and Michael Moore | 9/11 |
As I'm sure you're aware, Disney tried to prevent Miramax from distributing Michael Moore's new film Fahrenheit 9/11.
In an interview today on Al Franken’s Air America Radio show, Moore talked about an aspect of that story that seems to have gone completely unreported in connection with Disney's attempt to suppress his film. He pointed out that in 1994 Saudi Prince Al-Walid bin Talal bailed Eurodisney out of financial difficulties by buying a 23% stake in the company for $360 million. Moore's film, of course, is critical of the Saudi royal family and their connections with the Bush family.
He said also that last week ABC's This Week show taped an interview with him in which he pointed out the Saudi-Disney connection, and when the interview aired that segment had been deleted. Disney, of course, owns ABC.
Eurodisney has been plagued with losses from the beginning. The BBC reported, "Within months of its opening in 1992, Disneyland Paris seemed close to failure" but "Things [were] stabilised to some extent: its finances were rejigged in 1994" (with the Al-Walid bailout).
Something Moore didn't talk about may actually be more pertinent than Al-Walid's 1994 bailout. Earlier this month, according to the BBC, Eurodisney was bailed out again. The BBC says, "Eurodisney, the French outpost of the global theme-park empire, has struck a deal with its creditors that staves off the immediate threat of insolvency." The terms of the new deal were not revealed, but earlier this year the Los Angeles Times reported that Disney was once again seeking help from Prince Al-Walid.
Whether or not Al-Walid was a part of this most recent bailout, it is evident that Disney, and hence ABC, has lots of reasons (hundreds of millions of them) not to want to piss off the Saudi royal family.
Posted by Jonathan at 11:59 AM | Comments (0) | Link to this
June 19, 2004
| Freedom, Fried | 9/11 |
Check out this post at Whoviating.
Clouds gather.
Posted by Jonathan at 12:28 PM | Comments (1) | Link to this
| The Anti-Hunt for Osama bin Laden | 9/11 |
From The New Pearl Harbor, by David Ray Griffin, comes a startling discussion of the supposed hunt for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda during the war in Afganistan. Griffin draws on the work of Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, author of The War on Freedom, and Paul Thompson, author of the Complete 911 Timeline.
This is a lengthy excerpt, but worth it:
Ahmed and Thompson provide considerable evidence that although the war in Afghanistan was supposedly to root out al-Qaeda and bin Laden -- taking him, in President Bush's language, "dead or alive" -- the actual objective must have been something else, since there were several instances in which the government and its military commanders seemed at pains to allow bin Laden and al-Qaeda to escape.For example, according to many residents of Kabul, a convoy of al-Qaeda forces, thought to include its top leaders, made a remarkable escape [from Kabul] during one night in early November of 2001. A local businessman said:
We don't understand how they weren't all killed the night before because they came in a convoy of at least 1,000 cars and trucks. It was a very dark night, but it must have been easy for the American pilots to see the headlights. The main road was jammed from eight in the evening until three in the morning.
Thompson comments, "With all of the satellite imagery and intense focus on the Kabul area at the time, how could such a force have escaped unobserved by the US?"1 [One might also ask why the al-Qaeda fighters were so confident they could move openly, en masse, without fear of attack from the air.]Also early in November, US intelligence agencies, having watched al-Qaeda fighters and leaders move into the area of Jalalabad, reported that bin Laden himself had arrived. According to Knight-Ridder newspapers, this is what happened next:
American intelligence analysts concluded that bin Laden and his retreating fighters were preparing to flee across the border. But the US Central Command, which was running the war, made no move to block their escape. "It was obvious from at least early November that this area was to be the base for an exodus into Pakistan," said one intelligence official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity. "All of this was known, and frankly we were amazed that nothing was done to prepare for it."2Shortly thereafter, on November 14, the Northern Alliance captured Jalalabad. That night, a convoy of "several hundred cars" holding 1,000 or more al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters, evidently including bin Laden, escaped from Jalalabad and reached the fortress of Tora Bora. US forces bombed the nearby Jalalabad airport, but apparently not the convoy.3
On November 16, approximately 600 al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters, including many senior leaders, reportedly escaped from Afghanistan, by taking a long trek to escape the bombing in the Tora Bora region. Although there are two main routes from the Tora Bora region to Pakistan, US planes bombed only one of these routes, so that the 600 men were able to escape unharmed by using the other one. Hundreds more reportedly continued to use this escape route over the next weeks, generally not bothered by US bombing or Pakistani border guards.4 One Afghan intelligence officer reportedly said that he was astounded that the Americans did not station troops to block the most obvious exit routes. The Telegraph later said: "In retrospect, and with the benefit of dozens of accounts from the participants, the battle for Tora Bora looks more like a grand charade." Eyewitnesses expressed shock, it said, that US forces pinned in Taliban and al-Qaeda forces, thought to contain many high leaders, on three sides only, leaving the route to Pakistan open. An intelligence chief in Afghanistan's new government was quoted as saying, "The border with Pakistan was the key, but no one paid any attention to it."5
A Special Forces soldier stationed in Fayetteville, North Carolina, later stated that on November 28, [2001] US forces had bin Laden pinned in a Tora Bora cave but failed to act. While Special Forces soldiers were waiting for orders, he said, they watched two helicopters fly into the area where bin Laden was believed to be, load up passengers, and fly toward Pakistan. This statement, made on condition of anonymity, is given more credibility, Thompson points out, by the fact that Newsweek separately reported that many Tora Bora locals claimed that "mysterious black helipcopters, swept in, flying low over the mountains at night, and scooped up al-Qaeda's top leaders."6 "Perhaps just coincidentally," Thompson adds, the same day that this story was reported there was also a story reporting that five soldiers at Fayetteville - at least three of whom were Special Forces soldiers who had recently returned from Afghanistan - and their wives had died since June in apparent murder-suicides.7
In late December of 2001, the new Afghan interior minister, Younis Qanooni, claimed that the ISI [the Pakistani intelligence service closely allied with the CIA] had helped bin Laden escape from Afghanistan.8 For critics of the official account, this claim is significant given the fact that the Bush administration has considered Pakistan a partner in its post-9/11 efforts.
In March of 2002, this apparent lack of interest in killing or capturing bin Laden was put into words by the president himself, who said of bin Laden: "He's a person who's now been marginalized... I just don't spend that much time on him... I truly am not that concerned about him." The suspicion that the war was never about bin Laden, which Bush's statement could by taken to imply, was explicitly stated, Thompson points out, a month later by General Richard Myers, who said that "the goal has never been to get bin Laden."9 [My emphasis] Another American official was quoted as making an even more revealing statement, saying that "casting our objectives too narrowly" risked "a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr. bin Laden was captured."10 [My emphasis] A way of making sense of this was provided by George Monbiot, who wrote a week after 9/11:
If Osama bin Laden did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. For the past four years, his name has been invoked whenever a US president has sought to increase the defence budget or wriggle out of arms control treaties. He has been used to justify even President Bush's missile defence programme.... Now he has become the personification of evil required to launch a crusade for good: the face behind the faceless terror.... [H]is usefulness to western governments lies in his power to terrify. When billions of pounds of military spending are at stake, rogue states and terrorist warlords become assets precisely because they are liabilities."11Monbiot's statement, in conjunction with the American official's concern about a "premature collapse of the international effort," provides a possible explanation as to why the "hunt for bin Laden" was unsuccessful.
1 London Times, July 22, 2002.
2 Knight-Ridder, October 20, 2002.
3 Sydney Morning Herald, November 14, 2001, Christian Science Monitor, March 4, 2002, Knight-Ridder, November 20, 2002.
4 Newsweek, August 11, 2002.
5 Christian Science Monitor, March 4, 2002, Telegraph, February 23, 2002.
6 Fayetteville Observeritor, August 2, 2002, Newsweek, August 11, 2002.
7 Independent, August 2, 2002.
8 BBC, December 30, 2001.
9 White House, March 13, 2002, DOD, April 6, 2002.
10 Daily Mirror, November 16, 2001.
11 George Monbiot, "The Need for Dissent," Guardian, September 18, 2001.
I don't know which is more despicable, the fact that the Bush administration has engineered this elaborate charade, or the fact that the mainstream media are content to play along.
Posted by Jonathan at 10:12 AM | Comments (0) | Link to this