posted 08-27-2003 09:00 PM            

Fastwalker, Seeker, and Proud Veteran were ALL WRONG.

Of course, SOME OF US already knew that.

The towers didn't collapse due to the steel beams melting/bucking.

ROFLMAO!!!!

*******

Steel Not Seen As Factor in WTC Collapse
2 hours, 55 minutes ago

8/27/2003

By DEVLIN BARRETT, Associated Press Writer

GAITHERSBURG, Md. - Early tests on steel beams from the World Trade Center show they generally met or were stronger than design requirements, ruling them out as a contributing cause of the collapse of the towers, federal investigators said Wednesday.

Engineers with the National Institute of Standards and Technology have conducted preliminary tests on some of the 236 pieces of steel from the wreckage, said Frank Gayle, who is leading NIST's review of the steel.

The tests found that, typical for construction steel used in the 1960s when the World Trade Center was erected, the steel beams exceeded requirements to bear 36,000 pounds per square inch. Often they were capable of bearing around 42,000 pounds per square inch.

"What that is showing us is that the steel that was applied certainly met the specifications, but was also significantly higher in some instances," lead investigator Shyam Sunder said.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=519&ncid=1776&e=2&u=
/ap/attacks_collapse

posted 10-21-2003 07:48 PM            

10/21/03 The Pentagon Plane Government disinformationalists are still trying to crank up this ludicrous story that a passenger jet did not actually hit the Pentagon. The purpose is twofold, to make critics of the official story look silly, and to waste everyone's time in a pointless argument that serves only to distract from the fact that We The People have never been told the truth about 9-11. Those who are pushing this lemon on the public cannot answer a few simple questions. If the passenger jet didn't hit the Pentagon, where did it go? And if the plane and passengers had to be made to vanish anyway, why NOT crash them into the Pentagon? Why risk faking it, only to have to go to the trouble of "disappearing" the plane and passengers later on? Hundreds of witnesses saw the plane flying towards the Pentagon. Where are the hundreds who saw it flying away? Following a loud "bang", wouldn't MORE people be looking up in the sky? Logically, MORE people would see the passenger jet fly away from the Pentagon than towards it. Where are they?

THE FINAL WORD ON THE PLANE THAT CRASHED INTO THE PENTAGON
It seems that those parties still wishing to keep the distraction away from the Israeli Spy/Phone Tap Scandal are still trying to flog the dead horse of whether a passenger jet really crashed into the Pentagon or not. Word has reached me that those not supporting the "Boeing Hunt" story are being accused of fraud or cover-up. This is a device to force those who are trying to keep the story of the Israeli Spy/Phone Tap Scandal before the public to take time away from that task to respond to the allegations of covering up for the fact that a passenger plane did not hit the Pentagon. It's the disinformationalists' way of trying to force attention away from the spy scandal to something harmless, or as is the case here, to an issue which will later be revealed to be a fraud in order to discredit legitimate questions regarding the official story of 9-11.

This will be the last time I expend effort on this question of whether a passenger jet did or did not hit the Pentagon, and do so only to point out how silly (or desperate) those individuals are who seek to prevent the public from looking at certain issues. After all, if the passenger jet didn't hit the Pentagon, then where did it go? *

Click for larger image of the damage to Pentagon

In response to the question of "where is the wreckage of the plane", the answer is that the majority of the wreckage crashed into the ground floor of the Pentagon. It slid INTO the building, into the first floor space, starting a fire in the first floor, whereupon the upper floors crashed down onto the remains of the aircraft. Most of the aircraft wreckage is therefore under the collapsed roof section in the photo.

So where is the rest of the wreckage from the passenger plane? Right in plain view, for those who actually look.

In the above copy of the wide area view, a red rectangle marks an area to be examined. This area appears below.

Click for larger image of the insert

The Pentagon is a building mostly made of concrete and wood. Yet here is a pile of crumpled aluminum debris, and clearly seen mixed in with it are pieces of luggage. Since the Pentagon itself does not travel, we can conclude that the luggage (and the aluminum shards mixed with them) are part of the remains of the passenger jet which hit the Pentagon.

In similar crashes, the resulting debris was in small pieces, 6 feet long at most. You don't SEE huge pieces of airplane sitting at crash sites in head on collisions such as slamming into the wall of the Pentagon. Despite their impressive size, aircraft and relatively fragile objects due to weight considerations.

The government spooks who are trying to distract you from the Israeli Spy Ring and its connections to the attacks on the World Trade Towers will no doubt scream that this photo is a fake, just as they have insisted that all the photos which show debris at the crash site are fakes, but this is just another desperation play to create a controversy to hold your attention away from where they don't want you to look. It's just another way to control you.

End of story.

posted 10-21-2003 07:54 PM            

THE ISRAELI SPY RING SCANDAL
The Story That Will Not Go Away
"Evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It's classified information."
US official quoted in Carl Cameron's Fox News report on the Israeli spy ring.

10/09/02 Windows Media File: Part 4 of the Carl Cameron story on the Israeli Spies. This story reports on the penetration of US telephone systems by Amdocs and Comverse Infosys, and shows how quickly the US Government moved to cover it all up.

OVERVIEW
"Israel does not spy on the United States of America."
-- Mark Regev, a spokesman at the Israeli embassy in Washington

Prior to 9/11, the FBI had discovered the presence of a massive spy ring inside the United States run by the government of Israel. This seems a harsh gratitude from a nation which obtains 10% of its annual budget from the American taxpayer, $3+ billion a year. Over the years, American taxpayers have been required to send Israel more than four times what the US spent to go to the moon.

What Israel has done in return was to set up government subsidized telecommunications companies which operate here in the United States. One of these companies is Amdocs, which provides billing and directory assistance for 90% of the phone companies in the USA. Amdocs' main computer center for billing is actually in Israel and allows those with access to do what intelligence agencies call "traffic analysis"; a picture of someone's activities based on a pattern of who they are calling and when. Another Israeli telecom company is Comverse Infosys, which subcontracts the installation of the automatic tapping equipment now built into every phone system in America. Comverse maintains its own connections to all this phone tapping equipment, insisting that it is for maintenance purposes only. However, Converse has been named as the most likely source for leaked information regarding telephone calls by law enforcement that derailed several investigations into not only espionage, but drug running as well. Yet another Israeli telecom company is Odigo, which provides the core message passing system for all the "Instant Message" services. Two hours before the attacks on the World Trade Towers, Odigo employees received a warning. Odigo has an office 2 blocks from the former location of the World Trade Towers.

Let us be clear here. There is nothing benign about Israel spying on the United States. When Jonathan Pollard stole our nuclear secrets (which your taxes paid to develop) and sent them to Israel, Israel did not hesitate to trade those secrets to the USSR in exchange for increased emigration quotas.

The implication of these facts is that the billions of our tax dollars sent to Israel (while women and children sleep in America's alleys and eat out of trash bins) have bought and paid for a monstrous phone tracking and phone tapping system that can eavesdrop on almost any phone call in America. Even the White House phones were open to such tapping by listening in on the other end outside the White House itself.

This actually happened. The Ken Starr report on Whitewater describes how Bill Clinton informed Monica Lewinsky that their phone sex conversations had been recorded. At the same time, Clinton ordered the FBI to cease the hunt for an Israeli mole known to be operating inside the White House itself!

So here we have a foreign nation able to listen in on most phones at will, using taps that cannot be found because they are built into the phone system itself, and willing to use the information gleaned from those calls to blackmail Americans into any desired course of action. This may well be what Ariel Sharon meant when he stated that the Jewish people control America.

That the information gleaned from these phone taps is being used to coerce the behavior of key individuals in the US Government and media is illustrated by the manner in which the government and the media have handled this scandal of the largest spy ring ever uncovered inside the United States, and of phone taps on all of our phones. They are downplaying it. Actually, burying it is a better word.

Fox News, alone of all the media, actually ran the story as a four part broadcast, and put the story up on its web site. Then, without explanation, Fox News erased the story from their web site and have never mentioned it again. CNN followed by "Orwellizing" their report of the two hour advance warning of the WTC attacks sent to Odigo employees. But far more telling is the admission made by a US Official in part one of the Fox News report that hard evidence existed linking the events of 9/11 not to Arab Muslims, but to some of the more than 200 Israeli spies arrested both before and after 9/11, but that this evidence had been CLASSIFIED.

Since then, any and all mention of the Israeli spy ring and phone tapping scandal has resulted in a barrage of shrill screams of "hate" and "anti-Semite", two well worn and frankly over used devices to try to silence discussion on any topic unfavorable to the nation which owns the spy ring in question.

The story of the uncovering of the largest spy ring ever discovered inside the United States should be the story of the century, if indeed the US media is looking out for the best interests of the American people. That this spy ring helped drug smugglers evade investigators should be a major scandal, if indeed the US media is looking out for the best interests of the American people. That the spy ring includes companies able to track and tap into any phone in America, including the White House, should be a cause celebre', if indeed the US media is looking out for the best interests of the American people.

But they are not. The media is trying to bury this story. They are spiking it, erasing it from their web sites in a chilling real-life Orwellian rewriting of history.

The actions of the US media are those of people trying to protect this spy ring and those that the spy ring worked for.

posted 10-22-2003 07:57 PM            

George of Arabia

The unholy alliance between the Bushes and the Saudis

By Michael Moore

Bush still hasn't come clean

I'm not into conspiracy theories, except the ones that are true or involve dentists. I believe that all dentists must have gotten together at some point and decided that the real money was in root canals and full sets of X-rays every time you go in. No other mammal in the animal kingdom has to go through this.
The questions I have about the attacks on September 11th, however, are not about how the terrorists got past our defense system, or how they were able to live in this country and never be detected, or how all the Bulgarians who worked at the World Trade Center got a secret communique to not show up to work that day, or how the towers came down so easily when they were supposedly built to withstand earthquakes, tsunamis and truck bombs in their parking garage. These were all questions that a special commission investigating September 11th was supposed to answer. But the very formation of that commission was opposed by the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress. Reluctantly, they finally agreed -- but then they tried to block the investigative body from doing its job by stonewalling it on the evidence it sought.

Why wouldn't the Bush people want to find out the truth? What were they afraid of? That the American people would learn that they screwed up, that they were asleep at the wheel when it came to terrorist threats, that they belligerently ignored the warnings from outgoing Clinton officials about Osama bin Laden simply because they hated Clinton (Sex! Bad!)?

The American people are a forgiving lot. They didn't hold it against Franklin Roosevelt when Pearl Harbor was bombed. They didn't shun John F. Kennedy over the Bay of Pigs fiasco. And they still don't care that Bill Clinton had those forty-seven people mysteriously murdered. So why, after this monumental breakdown of national security, does George W. Bush not come clean, or, at the very least, stop preventing the truth from coming out?

Perhaps it's because George & Co. have a lot more to hide beyond why they didn't scramble the fighter jets fast enough on the morning of September 11th. And maybe we, the people, are afraid to know the whole truth because it could take us down roads where we don't want to go.

Though I myself was filled with the healthy skepticism that is required for a citizen in a democracy, I also shared the basic mind-set held by most Americans in the fall of 2001: Osama did it, and whoever helped him with it must be tracked down and brought to justice. I hoped that this was what Bush was doing. And then one night in November 2001, as I lay in bed, half asleep, reading an article in The New Yorker by investigative journalist Jane Mayer, I stumbled across a paragraph that made me sit up and read it again, because I couldn't believe what it said. It read, "Around two dozen other American-based members of the bin Laden family, most of them here to study in colleges and prep schools, were said to be in the United States at the time of the attacks. The New York Times reported that they were quickly called together by officials from the Saudi Embassy, which feared that they might become the victims of American reprisals. With approval from the FBI, according to a Saudi official, the bin Ladens flew by private jet from Los Angeles to Orlando, then on to Washington, and finally to Boston. Once the FAA permitted overseas flights, the jet flew to Europe. United States officials apparently needed little persuasion from the Saudi ambassador in Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, that the extended bin Laden family included no material witnesses."

What? How had I missed this story in the news? I got up and went back through the New York Times, and there I found this headline: fearing harm, bin laden kin fled from u.s. The story began, "In the first days after the terror attacks on New York and Washington, Saudi Arabia supervised the urgent evacuation of twenty-four members of Osama bin Laden's extended family from the United States."

So, with the approval of the FBI and the help of the Saudi government -- and even though fifteen of the nineteen hijackers had been Saudi citizens -- the relatives of the number-one suspect in the terror attacks were allowed not only to just up and leave the country, but they were assisted by our own authorities! According to the Times of London, "the departure of so many Saudis worried U.S. investigators, who feared that some might have information about the hijackings. FBI agents insisted on checking passports, including the royal family's."

That's all the FBI could do? Check some passports, ask a few brief questions, like "Did you pack your own bags?" and "Have your bags been in your possession since you packed them?" Then, these potential material witnesses were sent off with a bon voyage and a kiss goodbye. As Jane Mayer wrote in The New Yorker, "When I asked a senior United States intelligence officer whether anyone had considered detaining members of the family, he replied, 'That's called taking hostages. We don't do that.' "

Was he serious? I was dumbstruck. Had I read this correctly? Why wasn't this being reported more widely? Not that this is personal or anything, but I was stranded in Los Angeles on the morning of September 11th. I scrambled to find a rental car, and then drove 3,000 miles to get back home -- all because traveling by air was forbidden in the days following the attack. Yet private jets under the supervision of the Saudi government -- and with Bush's approval -- were allowed to fly around the skies of America and pick up twenty-four members of the bin Laden family and take them to Europe, out of the reach of any U.S. officials. One FBI agent I spoke to told me that the bureau was "furious" that it was not allowed to keep the bin Ladens in the country to conduct a real investigation -- the kind police like to do when they are trying to track down a murderer. Usually, the police like to talk to the family members of the suspect to learn what they know, who they know, how they might help capture the fugitive. None of the normal procedures were followed.

This is mind-boggling. Here are two dozen bin Ladens on American soil, and all Bush can do is come up with some lame excuse that he's worried about "their safety." Might it have been possible that at least one of the twenty-four bin Ladens would have known something? Or maybe just one of them could have been "convinced" to help track Osama down?

Nope. None of that. So while thousands were stranded and could not fly, if you could prove you were a close relative of the biggest mass murderer in U.S. history, you got a free trip overseas!

I started wondering what else was going on that we weren't being told. So I got out a big-ass legal pad and started making a list of all the questions that just didn't add up. Of course, I was never good at math, so to help me add it all up and analyze what it all meant, I figured I needed the help of, say, a graduate of the Harvard Business School.

So, George W., how about giving me a hand? Seeing how most of the questions involve you personally, you are probably the best individual to help me -- and the nation -- sort through what I've dug up.

My first question is: Is it true that the bin Ladens have had business relations with you and your family off and on for the past twenty-five years? Back in 1977, when your dad set you up with an oil company named Arbusto, you received financing from an old buddy of yours named James R. Bath. He had been hired by Salem bin Laden -- Osama's brother -- to invest the bin Ladens' money in various Texas ventures. Some $50,000 -- or five percent of control of Arbusto -- came from Mr. Bath.

After leaving office, your father became a consultant for the Carlyle Group, an investment firm with billions in defense holdings. The bin Laden family has invested a minimum of $2 million in the Carlyle Group. Frank Carlucci, secretary of defense under Reagan and now the head of Carlyle, also happens to sit on the board of directors of a think tank called the Middle East Policy Council along with a representative of the bin Laden family business.

After September 11th, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal both ran stories pointing out this strange coincidence. Your first response, Mr. Bush, was to ignore it, hoping, I guess, that the story would just go away. Your father and his buddies at Carlyle did not renounce the bin Laden investment. Your army of pundits said, We can't paint these bin Ladens with the same brush we use for Osama. They have disowned Osama! They have nothing to do with him! They hate and despise what he has done! These are the good bin Ladens. And then the video footage came out. It showed a number of those "good" bin Ladens -- including Osama's mother, a sister and two brothers -- with Osama at his son's wedding just eight months before September 11th. The New Yorker reported that not only have the family members not cut ties to Osama, but they have continued to fund him as they have for years. It was no secret to the CIA that Osama bin Laden had access to his family fortune (his share is estimated to be at least $30 million), and that the bin Ladens, as well as other Saudis, kept Osama and Al Qaeda well funded.

Mr. Bush, weeks went by after the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, yet your father and his friends at the Carlyle Group refused to buckle in their support for the bin Laden empire. Finally, nearly two months after the attacks, with more and more people questioning the propriety of the Bush family being in bed with the bin Ladens, your father and the Carlyle Group were pressured into giving the bin Ladens their millions back and asked them to leave the company as investors. Why did this take so long?

To make matters worse, it turned out that one of bin Laden's brothers -- Shafiq -- was actually at a Carlyle Group business conference in Washington, D.C. the morning of September 11th. The day before, at the same conference, your father and Shafiq had been chatting it up with all the other ex-government Carlyle bigwigs.

Mr. Bush, in case you don't understand just how bizarre the media's silence is regarding your family's connections with bin Laden, let me draw an analogy to how the press or Congress might have handled something like this if the same shoe had been on the Clinton foot. If after the terrorist attack on the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, it was revealed that President Bill Clinton and his family had financial dealings with Timothy McVeigh's family, what do you think your Republican Party and the media would have done with that one? Do you think at least a couple of questions might have been asked, like "What is that all about?" Be honest, you know the answer. They would have skinned Clinton alive and thrown what was left of his carcass in Gitmo.

Or, to use the Clinton analogy again, imagine, in the hours after the Oklahoma City bombing, Bill Clinton suddenly started worrying about the "safety" of the McVeigh family up in Buffalo -- and then arranged a free trip for them out of the country. What would you and the Republicans have said about that? Suddenly, a stain on a blue dress probably wouldn't have been the top priority for a witch hunt, would it?

Mr. Bush, the bin Ladens are not the only Saudis with whom you and your family have a close personal relationship. The entire royal family seems to be indebted to you -- or is it the other way around?

The number-one supplier of oil to the U.S. is the nation of Saudi Arabia, possessor of the largest known reserves of oil in the world. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, it was really the Saudis next door who felt threatened, and it was your father, George Bush I, who came to their rescue. The Saudis have never forgotten this, and, according to a March 2003 article in The New Yorker, some members of the royal family consider your family to be part of their extended family. Haifa, wife of Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, says that your mother and father "are like my mother and father. I know if ever I needed anything I could go to them."

As Robert Baer -- who was a case officer in the CIA's Directorate of Operations from 1976 to 1997 -- revealed in his book Sleeping With the Devil, your dad even has a special name for the Saudi prince: He calls him "Bandar Bush." Prince Bandar invests in the Carlyle Group, and he attended your mother's seventy-fifth-birthday party. He donated $1 million to the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum in Texas and arranged for $1 million more to be donated to Barbara Bush's literacy program. It has been a fruitful relationship all around.

When there was all that nasty stress surrounding the hanging chads in the Florida ballot boxes in the late fall of 2000, your close friend Prince Bandar was there for your family, offering his support. He took your father on a pheasant-hunting trip to England, to help take his mind off all the chaos, while the royal family's lawyer -- your lawyer, James Baker -- went to Florida to direct the battle for the ballots. (Baker's firm later represented Saudi royals in the lawsuits filed against them by the families of September 11th victims.) To be fair, Mr. Bush, it's not just your family members who are the recipients of the Saudis' largesse. A major chunk of the American economy is built on Saudi money. They have a trillion dollars invested in our stock market and another trillion dollars sitting in our banks. If one day they chose to suddenly remove that money, our corporations and financial institutions would be sent into a tailspin, causing an economic crisis the likes of which has never been seen. Couple that with the fact that the one and a half million barrels of oil we need daily from the Saudis also could vanish on a mere royal whim, and we begin to see how not only you but all of us are dependent on the House of Saud.

Maybe that's why you've blocked attempts to dig deeper into Saudi Arabia's connections to the attacks of September 11th. The headlines blared it the first day, and they blare it the same way now, two years later: terrorists attack United States. Terrorists. I have wondered about this word for some time, so, George, let me ask you a question: If fifteen of the nineteen hijackers had been North Korean, and they killed 3,000 people, do you think the headline the next day might read, North Korea attacks United States? Of course it would. Or if it had been fifteen Iranians or fifteen Libyans or fifteen Cubans, I think the conventional wisdom would have been, Iran (or Libya or Cuba) attacks America! Yet when it comes to September 11th, have you ever seen the headline, have you ever heard a newscaster, has one of your appointees ever uttered these words: "Saudi Arabia attacked the United States"?

Of course you haven't. And so the question must be asked: Why not? Why, when Congress releases its own investigation into September 11th, do you, Mr. Bush, censor twenty-eight pages that deal with the Saudis' role in the attack? What is behind your apparent refusal to look at the one country that seems to be producing the "terrorists" that have killed our citizens? Why are you so busy protecting the Saudis when you should be protecting us?

Two nights after the attacks, according to a New Yorker article written by Elsa Walsh, you went out on the Truman Balcony of the White House to relax and smoke a cigar. It had been a horrific forty-eight hours, and you needed to wind down. In that private moment, you asked one close friend to join you. As he entered the White House, the two of you embraced, and then you took him out to the balcony, where he had a drink that you offered him. The two of you then lit up your cigars and stared out across the Ellipse toward the Washington Monument. You told him that if the United States couldn't get any Al Qaeda operatives who may have been involved in the attack to cooperate, "we'll hand them over to you." It was an offer that I am sure he appreciated. After all, he was your good friend "Bandar Bush," the prince from Saudi Arabia. As the smoke from the ashes still billowed through the air over Manhattan and Arlington, the smoke from the Saudi prince's cigar wafted through the balmy night air of Washington, D.C., with you, George W. Bush, by his side.

Excerpted from "Dude, Where's My Country?" by Michael Moore. (c) 2003 by Michael Moore. With permission of Warner Books Inc. All rights reserved.

(October 7, 2003)

Sorry if I disrupted your thread! You know, I had posted about the engine article before, but nobody read it. I ran out of steam trying to keep the Pentagon thread going.

bc

posted 10-23-2003 09:33 AM            

I don't see him as iniquitous (which is evil with evil intent and knowledge) so much as a goofy sort who listens and believes everything he's briefed about and everything he's told because he trusts his cronies and fails to think for himself. He's too stupid to take a step back and think about moral issues, fundamental values inherent in our social/democratic structure, and he's a born and bred elitist within a family of elitists who have also ruled. But instead of excelling academically, which could at least have proven that the young man had the ability to read and comprehend, possibly write and think, he was the happy-go-lucky addicted one in the family dynamic. The one who went AWOL, who as lately told in a book, flew small air craft while drunk, partied and failed to study in school and got everything handed to him without earning any of it whatsoever. When I write this I can't help but think about the kings of England and their inability to perceive the whole picture of society -- from the peasants through the merchants and clergy as worthy of justice and fairness. When the literacy level and awareness level increased, people rebelled and the French Revolution and the American Revolution was born. Liberty was the cry of the common man!

Now, it's so uncannily similar, but sped up in time, laws and justice dismantled before our very eyes instead of old unfair laws simply held in check by the elite. And this little king, who overtly stated he would love to have inherited a dictatorship (kingship) reverts back to the days of Elizabethan and Edwardian imperialism not even knowing and realizing WHAT it is he's actually promoting in reference to history or future ramifications on all world peoples!

He is the perfect puppet, more so than Reagan, who at least read the papers daily on his own! And his ignorant wife is living her fairytale White House existence in stupidity as well. I see them as pitiful examples of world leadership -- quite the opposite of the cogent and quite-aware previous duo who could charm other world leaders while handling domestic affairs to benefit the workers and the government coffers. Bush is an embarrassment and a danger to our very society in conjunction with his appointed team of evil and iniquitous daddy's-choice greed and power mongers and authors of death.

It's sad and angering at the same time -- to see the sneering Cheney behind every word, the controlling Rove and Wolfy propping up every Rumsfeld/Colin Powell speech and controlling every CIA action. Disgusting to realize that 9/11 sacrificed lives for oil as lives for oil are sacrificed every day in Iraq!!!

Wake up blinded and ignorant souls! Wake up from your stupor and do everything in your power to get these vermin out of office! If the fear-base, anger-based, and emotionally clouded citizens of this country do not wake up -- the world and our nation are headed for destruction and suffering beyond anything we've seen in our short lives!

Thanks for letting me vent!

bc

posted 10-23-2003 10:09 AM            

I don't agree with Mike Moore on every issue, but at least he is speaking out against Bush.

I don't agree with Ron Paul on every issue, but I support him as a right wing Libertarian.

I think you dislike Moore because of his gun stance. I could dislike him on his animal rights stance, and stance on Mumia Abu Jahmal. It's the same with Wesley Clark. Kosovo and Waco alone would make me cringe. In your own words, we have to look beyond the Left-Right Paradigm.

posted 10-23-2003 10:31 AM            

Alex jones for President!!!!!!

http://www.infowars.com/matrix.htm

posted 10-23-2003 10:40 AM            

You see, the ones that have the most to say about Bush (Alex Jones, Dennis Kucinich, Helen Thomas, etc) are painted as kooks.

posted 10-23-2003 08:02 PM            

We have to support whoever goes against Bush, because anybody would be better, even by a little.

I think you are very clueless when anything relates tp politics. You hate Bush so much your willing to blame him for everything. I bet if you search you'll find some internet news on how Bush has left destruction since before he was even born, and I bet its true also, yes really!

posted 10-24-2003 04:54 PM            

Swamp isn't the only one who sees Bush (and that means his whole cabinet and various appointees) as opposed in ethics, foreign policy, environmental policy, social programs policy, corporate protectionism, along with an elitist cluelessness to the Democratic Party platform. For you to think that Gore and his cabinet would NOT have handled any of these affairs differently -- BLOWS MY MIND !!!!!

Along with most academics, science institution organizations, economic pundits, writers and authors and investigative journalists of intelligence and openmindedness, Swampie is in good company.

He doesn't hate -- he knows who is dismanteling our civil rights, ruining our environment, running our country into debt, creating animosity toward Americans around the world, killing innocents and our own military personnel, filling their own personal and corporate coffers with millions of dollars, forcing us taxpayers to pay the bill for an ill conceived and bloody occupation and giving the highest income earners and corporations a big break --- the Bushites!

Any Democrat, and that means a lot at this point --- is better! Argue with even those who don't know the full story like Michael Moore, Arianna Huffington, Molly Ivins, Noam Chomsky, Greg Palast, William Rivers Pitt and see what they say!

Swampgas is full of passion for America and you should see it and be proud that people care enough to research and take time to know the truth!

You need to read more, Professor! That's funny, I thought professors did just that. Hmmm. I guess I'm mistaken.

bc

posted 10-25-2003 06:40 PM            

October 26, 2003
Administration Faces Supoenas From 9/11 Panel
By PHILIP SHENON

ADISON, N.J., Oct. 25 — The chairman of the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks says that the White House is continuing to withhold several highly classified intelligence documents from the panel and that he is prepared to subpoena the documents if they are not turned over within weeks.

The chairman, Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, also said in an interview on Friday that he believed the bipartisan 10-member commission would soon be forced to issue subpoenas to other executive branch agencies because of continuing delays by the Bush administration in providing documents and other evidence needed by the panel.

"Any document that has to do with this investigation cannot be beyond our reach," Mr. Kean said on Friday in his first explicit public warning to the White House that it risked a subpoena and a politically damaging courtroom showdown with the commission over access to the documents, including Oval Office intelligence reports that reached President Bush's desk in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.

"I will not stand for it," Mr. Kean said in the interview in his offices here at Drew University, where he has been president since 1990.

"That means that we will use every tool at our command to get hold of every document."

He said that while he had not directly threatened a subpoena in his recent conversations with the White House legal counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, "it's always on the table, because they know that Congress in their wisdom gave us the power to subpoena, to use it if necessary."

A White House spokeswoman, Ashley Snee, said that the White House believed it was being fully cooperative with the commission, which is known formally as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. She said that it hoped to meet all of the panel's demands for documents.

Mr. Kean suggested that he understood the concerns of the White House about the sensitivity of the documents at issue, saying that they were the sort of Oval Office intelligence reports that were so sensitive and highly classified that they had never been provided to Congress or to other outside investigators.

"These are documents that only two or three people would normally have access to," he said. "To make those available to an outside group is something that no other president has done in our history.

"But I've argued very strongly with the White House that we are unique, that we are not the Congress, that these arguments about presidential privilege do not apply in the case of our commission," he said.

"Anything that has to do with 9/11, we have to see it — anything. There are a lot of theories about 9/11, and as long as there is any document out there that bears on any of those theories, we're going to leave questions unanswered. And we cannot leave questions unanswered."

While Mr. Kean said he was barred by an agreement with the White House from describing the Oval Office documents at issue in any detail — he said the White House was "quite nervous" about any public hint at their contents — other commission officials said they included the detailed daily intelligence reports that were provided to Mr. Bush in the weeks leading up to Sept. 11. The reports are known within the White House as the Presidential Daily Briefing.

Despite the threat of a subpoena and his warning of the possibility of a court battle over the documents, Mr. Kean said he maintained a good relationship with Mr. Gonzales and others at the White House, and that he was still hopeful that the White House would produce all of the classified material demanded by the panel without a subpoena.

"We've been very successful in getting a lot of materials that I don't think anybody has ever seen before," he said of his earlier dealings with the White House. "Within the legal constraints that they seem to have, they've been fully cooperative. But we're not going to be satisfied until we get every document that we need."

Last year, the White House confirmed news reports that President Bush received a written intelligence report in August 2001, the month before the attacks, that Al Qaeda might try to hijack American passenger planes.

Ms. Snee, the White House spokeswoman, said, "The president has stated a clear policy of support for the commission's work and, at the direction of the president, the executive branch has dedicated tremendous resources to support the commission, including providing over two million pages of documents."

After months of stating that it believed subpoenas to the executive branch would not be necessary, the commission voted unanimously this month to issue its first subpoena to the Federal Aviation Administration after determining that the F.A.A. had withheld dozens of boxes of documents involving the Sept. 11 attacks.

The subpoena appeared to be a turning point for the commission and for Mr. Kean, a moderate Republican known for his independence. In a statement on Oct. 15, the commission said it was re-examining "its general policy of relying on document requests rather than subpoenas" as a result of the issues with the F.A.A.

The commission, which has a membership that is equally divided among Republicans and Democrats, was created by Congress last year over the initial opposition of the White House. The law creating the panel requires that it complete its work by next May, a deadline that commission members say may be impossible to meet because of the Bush administration's delays in turning over many documents.

Mr. Kean's comments on Friday came as another member of the commission, Max Cleland, the former Democratic senator from Georgia, became the first panel member to say publicly that the commission could not complete its work by its May 2004 deadline and the first to accuse the White House of withholding classified information from the panel for purely political reasons.

"It's obvious that the White House wants to run out the clock here," he said in an interview in Washington. "It's Halloween, and we're still in negotiations with some assistant White House counsel about getting these documents — it's disgusting."

He said that the White House and President Bush's re-election campaign had reason to fear what the commission was uncovering in its investigation of intelligence and law enforcement failures before Sept. 11. "As each day goes by, we learn that this government knew a whole lot more about these terrorists before Sept. 11 than it has ever admitted."

Interviews with several other members of the commission show that Mr. Kean's concerns are widely shared on the panel, and that the concern is bipartisan.

Slade Gorton, a Republican member of the panel who served in the Senate from Washington from 1982 to 2000, said that he was startled by the "indifference" of some executive branch agencies in making material available to the commission. "This lack of cooperation, if it extends anywhere else, is going to make it very difficult" for the commission to finish its work by next May, he said.

Timothy J. Roemer, president of the Center for National Policy in Washington and a former Democratic member of the House from Indiana, said that "our May deadline may, in fact, be jeopardized — many of us are frustrated that we're still dealing with questions about document access when we should be sinking our teeth into hearings and to making recommendations for the future."

Congress would need to approve an extension if the panel requested one, a potentially difficult proposition given the reluctance of the White House and many senior Republican lawmakers to see the commission created in the first place.

"If the families of the victims weighed in — and heavily, as they did before — then we'd have a chance of succeeding," said Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who was an important sponsor of the legislation creating the commission. He said that, given the "obfuscation" of the administration in meeting document requests, he was ready to pursue an extension "if the commission feels it can't get its work done."

________________________________

Professor, you, like many who refuse to read, to look around and use common sense, insist on personally chopping others down.

FYI, I didn't assume you were a real "professor" silly, just making a sarcastic point!

I was a liberal since high school, through college and beyond, and I know what I think, and I know what I see. I don't listen to any "line." I think and weigh with discernment before I believe in anything or any theory! Took me a long time to even accept the chemtrails thing, but eventually the evidence weighs in! I look out my windows and see it! AS far as 9/11 -- the evidence is piling and not as yet complete, however, the Pentagon is the most suspicious along with the various points many of us have made on the WTC towers. Sorry, CHAAAAHLY, thinking and open souls are the true patriots! Always were, always will be! Try it sometime, you might like it!

bc

posted 10-25-2003 06:56 PM            

quote:

---

Anti Bush isn't good enough Swamp. The only difference between what Bush does and what Clinton or Gore could have accomplished is the Republican constituency would have yelled a heck of a lot louder at the anti-Patriot draconian Patriot Act if it had been tried by the likes of a democrat. Does that mean that it would have been any better? NO! Just more opposition publically. The globalists would have still pushed their NWO agenda. We need true constitutionalist, and they will only be elected and effective when more people wake up to the left/right paradigm lie that is such a national distraction.
By saying anyone but Bush you are playing into that paradigm. I know you know better.

---

I have to jump in here! We don't have time to dismantle the system right now! The PNAC cabal will continue to push its agenda if we don't get a Dem in to stop the drive! Yes, you're right in the long run -- but we don't have time! The election is coming soon and a third party or a change in the whole system is OUT of THE QUESTION ! Theoretically, you're right! However, the reality is that the Dems have a chance and anyone else doesn't! PERIOD! Please face the facts and get on the bandwagon to get the neocons out!
Dems are not neocons, although yes, they probably don't know the downside of the WB and the World Trade situation but I do know one thing, many of them want corporate accountability world wide and tighter reigns on off-shore productivity and taxation. Dems are in favor of workers domestically and in all U.S. owned companies around the world to be treated fairly and with human dignity. Dems are in favor of environmental responsibility for all corporations as well. We won't even mention social programs and taxation -- total opposites!

As far as the Patriot Act -- I truly doubt that any Democratic White House would have jumped so fervently and immediately on the fascist bandwagon that the neocons pushed down the steep hill of dismantling our hard-won civil rights!

And 9/11? Huh!

We could "if" and "surmise" all we want, but that's my firm and educated opinion!

NO TIME!

Argue if you want, but the world is boiling and we need the calm minds of restraint, peace-mindedness, and credible diplomacy if we are to turn the tides of war, greed, and fascism!

bc

posted 10-25-2003 07:20 PM            

From The New York Times Best-seller:
See No Evil
What Bush Didn't (Want To) Know About 9/11

Greg Palast is an award-winning investigative reporter for BBC Television’s Newsnight and The Observer of London. His most recent book is The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: An Investigative Reporter Exposes The Truth About Globalization, Corporate Cons and High-Finance Fraudsters, published by Plume, an imprint of The Penguin Group.

This article is excerpted from the updated American edition of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, and is reprinted with permission.

Did Our President Spike The Investigation Of Bin Laden?
On my BBC television show, Newsnight, an American journalist confessed that, since the 9/11 attacks, U.S. reporters are simply too afraid to ask the uncomfortable questions that could kill careers: "It's an obscene comparison, but there was a time in South Africa when people would put flaming tires around people's necks if they dissented. In some ways, the fear is that you will be neck-laced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck," Dan Rather said. Without his makeup, Rather looked drawn, old and defeated in confessing that he too had given in. "It's that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions and to continue to bore in on the tough questions so often."

Investigators were ordered to "back off" from any inquiries into Saudi Arabian financing of terror networks.

Silence as patriotism? My producers at Newsnight and editors at The Guardian were not so constrained. So I was assigned to fly home to Ground Zero and ask the necessary question that could not, in the early days after the attack, leave the lips of American reporters: How did it happen that the CIA, FBI, Defense Intelligence Agency and our other extravagantly funded spooks could neither prevent nor learn in advance about the most deadly attack on America since Pearl Harbor? The answer was as unpleasant as the question. If U.S. intelligence agencies did not see the attack coming it was because they were told not to look. Why? From inside the agencies were obtained statements and documents indicating that the Bush administration blocked key investigations into allegations that top Saudi Arabian royals and some members of the bin Laden family, not just Osama, funded and supported Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.

The reports I did based on this information won the California State University School of Journalism's Project Censored Award in 2002. It's not the kind of prize you want to win -- it's given to crucial stories that were effectively banned from U.S. airwaves and papers.3 I don't want any misunderstanding here, so I must emphasize what we did not find: We uncovered no information, none whatsoever, that George W. Bush had any advance knowledge of the plan to attack the World Trade Center on 9/11, nor, heaven forbid, any involvement in the attack.

FBI Document 199I
What we did discover was serious enough. To begin with, from less-than-happy FBI agents we obtained an interesting document, some 30 pages long, marked "SECRET." I've reproduced a couple of pages here (figure 2.1). Note the designation "199I" -- that's FBI-speak for "national security matter." According to insiders, FBI agents had wanted to check into two members of the bin Laden family, Abdullah and Omar, but were told to stay away by superiors -- until September 13, 2001. By then, Abdullah and Omar were long gone from the United States.

Why no investigation of the brothers bin Laden? The Bush administration's line is the Binladdins (a more common spelling of the Arabic name) are good folk. Osama's the Black Sheep, supposedly cut off from his Saudi kin. But the official line notwithstanding, some FBI agents believed the family had some gray sheep worth questioning -- especially these two working with the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), which the file labels "a suspected terrorist organization."

Let's be careful here: WAMY may be completely innocent. The FBI targets lots of innocents, too many in fact, but there were plenty of signs that the WAMY crew deserved the organization's scrutiny. WAMY, funded from Riyadh by royal charities, sponsors soccer teams and educational seminars. But in their Florida summer camp, besides the usual arts and crafts for the kiddies, youngsters received a pep talk on what were presented as the good Islamic practices of hostage-taking and suicide killings. (We at BBC obtained a video tape of one of these rap sessions.) WAMY literature was found in the apartment of one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, praising "heroes" who killed unarmed Jews at worship.

No matter how vile WAMY's indoctrination chats, they are none of the FBI's business. Recruitment for terror, however, is. Before 9/11, the governments of India and the Philippines tied WAMY to groups staging murderous attacks on civilians. Following our broadcast on BBC, the Dutch secret service stated that WAMY, "support(ed) violent activity." In 2002, The Wall Street Journal's Glenn Simpson made public a report by Bosnia's government that a charity with Abdullah bin Laden on its board had channeled money to Chechen guerrillas. Two of the 9/11 hijackers used an address on the same street as WAMY's office in Falls Church, Virginia.

The "Back-Off" Directive and the Islamic Bomb
Despite these tantalizing facts, Abdullah and his operations were A-OK with the FBI chiefs, if not their working agents. Just a dumb SNAFU? Not according to a top-level CIA operative who spoke with us on condition of strictest anonymity. After Bush took office, he said, "there was a major policy shift" at the National Security Agency. Investigators were ordered to "back off" from any inquiries into Saudi Arabian financing of terror networks, especially if they touched on Saudi royals and their retainers. That put the bin Ladens, a family worth a reported $12 billion and a virtual arm of the Saudi royal household, off-limits for investigation. Osama was the exception; he remained a wanted man, but agents could not look too closely at how he filled his piggy bank. The key rule of any investigation, "follow the money," was now violated, and investigations -- at least before 9/11 -- began to die.

And there was a lot to investigate -- or in the case of the CIA and FBI under Bush -- a lot to ignore. Through well-known international arms dealers (I'm sorry, but in this business, sinners are better sources than saints) our team was tipped off to a meeting of Saudi billionaires at the Hotel Royale Monceau in Paris in May 1996 with the financial representative of Osama bin Laden's network. The Saudis, including a key Saudi prince joined by Muslim and non-Muslim gun traffickers, met to determine who would pay how much to Osama. This was not so much an act of support but of protection -- a payoff to keep the mad bomber away from Saudi Arabia.

The crucial question here is that, if I could learn about this meeting, how did the CIA miss it? In fact, since the first edition of this book, other sources have disclosed that the meeting was monitored by French intelligence. Since U.S. intelligence was thus likely informed, the question becomes why didn't the government immediately move against the Saudis?

I probed our CIA contact for specifics of investigations that were hampered by orders to back off of the Saudis. He told us that far bigger fish got away than WAMY. The Khan Laboratories investigation had been effectively put on hold.

You may never have heard of Khan Laboratories, but if this planet blows to pieces this year, it will likely be thanks to Khan Labs' creating nuclear warheads for Pakistan's military. Because investigators had been tracking the funding for this so-called "Islamic Bomb" back to Saudi Arabia, under Bush security restrictions, the inquiry was stymied. (The restrictions were lifted, the agent told me without a hint of dark humor, on 9/11.)4

Clinton Closed an Eye
True-blue Democrats may want to skip the next paragraphs. If President Bush put the kibosh on investigations of Saudi funding of terror and nuclear bomb programs, this was merely taking a policy of Bill Clinton one step further.

Following the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, Clinton hunted Osama with a passion -- but a passion circumscribed by the desire to protect the sheikdom sitting atop our oil lifeline. In 1994, a Saudi diplomat defected to the United States with 14,000 pages of documents from the kingdom's sealed file cabinets. This mother lode of intelligence included evidence of plans for the assassination of Saudi opponents living in the West and, tantalizingly, details of the $7 billion the Saudis gave to Saddam Hussein for his nuclear program -- the first attempt to build an Islamic Bomb. The Saudi government, according to the defector, Mohammed Al Khilewi, slipped Saddam the nuclear loot during the Reagan and Bush Sr. years when our own government still thought Saddam too marvelous for words. The thought was that he would only use the bomb to vaporize Iranians.

Clinton granted the Saudi defector asylum, but barred the FBI from looking at the documents. Al Khilewi's New York lawyer, Michael Wildes, told me he was stunned. Wildes handles some of America's most security-sensitive asylum cases. "We said [to the FBI], 'Here, take the documents! Go get some bad guys with them! We'll even pay for the photocopying!'" But the agents who came to his office had been ordered not to accept evidence of Saudi criminal activity, even on U.S. soil.

In 1997, the Canadians caught and extradited to America one of the Khobar Towers attackers. In 1999, Vernon Jordan's law firm stepped in and -- poof! -- the killer was shipped back to Saudi Arabia before he could reveal all he knew about Al Qaeda (valuable) and the Saudis (embarrassing). I reviewed, but was not permitted to take notes on, the alleged terrorist's debriefing by the FBI. To my admittedly inexpert eyes, there was enough on Al Qaeda to make him a source on terrorists worth holding on to. Not that he was set free -- he's in one of the kingdom's dungeons -- but his info is sealed up with him. The terrorist's extradition was "Clinton's." "Clinton's parting kiss to the Saudis," as one insider put it.

This make-a-sheik-happy policy of Clinton's may seem similar to Bush's, but the difference is significant. Where Clinton said, "Go slow," Bush policymakers said, "No go." The difference is between closing one eye and closing them both.

Blowback and Bush Sr.
Still, we are left with the question of why both Bush Jr. and Clinton would hold back disclosure of Saudi funding of terror. I got the first glimpse of an answer from Michael Springmann, who headed up the U.S. State Department's visa bureau in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, during the Reagan-Bush Sr. years. "In Saudi Arabia I was repeatedly ordered by high-level State Department officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants. These were, essentially, people who had no ties either to Saudi Arabia or to their own country. I complained bitterly at the time there." That was Springmann's mistake. He was one of those conscientious midlevel bureaucrats who did not realize that when he filed reports about rules violations he was jeopardizing the cover for a huge multicontinental intelligence operation aimed at the Soviets. Springmann assumed petty thievery: someone was taking bribes, selling visas; so he couldn't understand why his complaints about rule-breakers were "met with silence" at the Bureau of Diplomatic Security.

Springmann complained himself right out of a job. Now a lawyer, he has obtained more information on the questionable "engineers" with no engineering knowledge whom he was ordered to permit into the United States. "What I was protesting was, in reality, an effort to bring recruits, rounded up by Osama bin Laden, to the United States for terrorist training by the CIA. They would then be returned to Afghanistan to fight against the then-Soviets."

Clinton hunted Osama with a passion ... circumscribed by the desire to protect the sheikdom sitting atop our oil lifeline.

But then they turned their talents against the post-Soviet power: us. In the parlance of spook-world, this is called "blowback." Bin Laden and his bloody brethren were created in America's own Frankenstein factory. It would not do for the current president nor agency officials to dig back to find that some of the terrorists we are hunting today were trained and armed by the Reagan-Bush administration. And that's one of the problems for agents seeking to investigate groups like WAMY, or Abdullah bin Laden. WAMY literature that talks about that "compassionate young man Osama bin Laden" is likely to have been disseminated, if not written, by our very own government. If Abdullah's Bosnian-operated "charity" was funding Chechnyan guerrillas, it is only possible because the Clinton CIA gave the wink and nod to WAMY and other groups who were aiding Bosnian guerrillas when they were fighting Serbia, a U.S.-approved enemy. "What we're talking about," says national security expert Joe Trento, "is embarrassing, career-destroying blowback for intelligence officials." And, he could add, for the presidential father.

The Family Business
I still didn't have an answer to all my questions. We knew that Clinton and the Bushes were reluctant to discomfort the Saudis by unearthing their connections to terrorists -- but what made this new president take particular care to protect the Saudis, even to the point of stymying his own intelligence agencies?

The answers kept coming back: "Carlyle" and "Arbusto."

While some people have guardian angels, our president seems to have guardian sheiks. George W. was born with a silver oil well in his mouth; yet, despite the age of his family's money, his share was not anywhere near the pile it is now. This is a Texas oilman who seemed to drill nothing but dry holes. Yet he made the big time, not by striking oil, but by locating a gusher in the pockets of investors tied to Arabia who always seemed to appear to catch him as another one of his goofed-up business ventures was about to keel over. Dubya's Arbusto [Spanish for "shrub"] Oil was funded in 1977 by James R. Bath, among others, whose own money came from representing Sheikhs Salim bin Laden and Khalid bin Mahfouz. When Bush's exploration firm was about to give up the ghost in 1981, he was bought out at a suspiciously high premium by Philip Uzielli, a college roommate of James Baker III, who would become Bush Sr.'s secretary of state, as well as a business associate in a firm called Carlyle. In 1986, the Uzielli operation, Spectrum Oil, with Bush on board, was saved on surprisingly good terms by Harken Oil -- which would, within a year, receive a rich cash injection from Saudi Sheik Abdullah Bakhsh. When in 1990 Harken itself started to head south financially, Bahrain's government chose this Texas dry-land driller over Amoco to drill in the Persian Gulf. This surprising coup had nothing to do, we are told, with Dubya's daddy being, at the time, the president of the Free World.

Behind Carlyle is a private, invitation-only investment group whose holdings in the war industry make it effectively one of America's biggest defense contractors. For example, Carlyle owned United Technologies, the maker of our fighter jets. Carlyle has the distinction of claiming both of the presidents Bush as paid retainers. Dubya served on the board of Carlyle's Caterair airplane food company until it went bust. The senior Bush traveled to Saudi Arabia for Carlyle in 1999. The bin Ladens were among Carlyle's select backers until just after the 9/11 attacks, when the connection became impolitic. The company's chairman is Frank Carlucci, Bush Sr.'s former defense secretary. The average Carlyle partner has gained about $25 million in equity. Notably, Saudi Prince Al Waleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz employed Carlyle as his advisor in buying up 10 percent of Citicorp's preferred stock. The choice of Carlyle for the high-fee work was odd, as the group is not an investment bank. One would almost think the Saudi potentate wanted to enrich Carlyle's members.

Dan Rather, still in his confessional mode, told BBC, "One finds oneself saying, 'I know the right question, but you know what, this is not exactly the right time to ask it.' "

But I'll ask anyway. "Where does the Bush family business end and policy begin?"

In my opinion, much too much has been made of the bin Ladens's Carlyle connection to the Bushes. It would be absurd to say that President Bush spiked the investigation of the bin Laden family and Saudi funding of terrorists in return for packets of cash. The system is not so crude. Gentlemen of the club do not act that way. Rather, what's created is a prejudice, call it a disposition, to conclude that these smiling Gulf billionaires, whose associates made you and your family wealthy, are unlikely to have funded mass murder of Americans, despite the evidence.

Who Lost the War on Terror?
So who lost the War on Terror? Osama? From his point of view, he's made the celebrity cutthroats' Hall of Fame. Where is he? Don't ask Bush; our leader just changes the subject to Iraq. So we have the 82nd Airborne looking for Osama bin Laden among the camels in Afghanistan when, in all likelihood, the billionaire butcher -- now likely beardless -- is chillin' by the pool at the Ritz Carlton, knocking back a brewsky and laughing at us while two blonde Barbies massage his feet.

Bush failed to get Osama. But we did successfully eliminate the threat of Congresswoman McKinney -- you remember, the one who dared question ChoicePoint, the company that helped Katherine Harris eliminate Black voters.

Following our BBC broadcast and Guardian report in November 2001, McKinney cited our stories on the floor of Congress, calling for an investigation of the intelligence failures and policy prejudices you've just read here. She was labeled a traitor, a freak, a conspiracy nut and "a looney" -- the latter by her state's Democratic Senator, who led the mob in the political lynching of the uppity Black woman. The New York Times wrote, "She angered some Black voters by suggesting that President Bush might have known in advance about the September 11 attacks but had done nothing so his supporters could make money in war." The fact that she said no such thing doesn't matter; the Times is always more influential than the truth. Dan Rather had warned her, shut up, don't ask questions, and you can avoid the neck-lacing. She didn't and it cost her her seat in Congress.

McKinney's electoral corpse in the road silenced politicians, the media was mum, but some Americans still would not get in line. For them we have new laws to permit investigating citizens without warrants, and the label of terrorist fellow-traveler attached to groups from civil rights organizations to trade treaty protestors. Yet not one FBI or CIA agent told us, "If only we didn't have that pesky Bill of Rights, we would have nailed bin Laden." Not one said, "What we need is a new bureaucracy for Fatherland Security." Not one said we needed to jail everyone in the Midwest named "Ahmed." They had a single request: for George W. Bush's security henchmen to get their boot heels off agents' necks and remove the shield of immunity from the Saudis.

[Cynthia] McKinney's electoral corpse in the road silenced politicians, the media was mum, but some Americans still would not get in line.

That leaves one final, impertinent question. Who won? "The war on terror hasn't been decided yet, but a few winners are emerging," business magazine Forbes says cheerily. "Background checking services . . . are high up on the list of businesses that will benefit from [the] government proposal to beef up security in the world's largest economy . . . services provided by companies like... ChoicePoint Inc., would increase further when the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service steps up immigrant tracking."

On May 30, 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft released new Guidelines on General Crimes, Racketeering and Terrorism. Ashcroft authorizes the mining of private information from commercial databases on citizens even, says the Electronic Privacy Information Center with alarm, "where there is no suspicion of criminal conduct." And who is one of the biggest commercial database firms? ChoicePoint. Forget that FBI agents say this is a big waste and a distraction to their work -- ChoicePoint, having chosen our president for us, certainly knows what's best. They also want your blood: The administration is pushing for a national repository of DNA tags for each of us, a job already begun by Bode Technologies, a division of ChoicePoint. And if you have any complaints about this, just remember, they know where you live.

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FOOTNOTES

3 Not surprisingly, our story led the news in Europe. Our team was directed by BBC Newsnight producer Meirion Jones. We were joined by Guardian investigator David Pallister and editor David Leigh with invaluable assistance provided by the National Security News Service of Washington under the direction of spy-tracker Joe Trento.

4 Dr. A. Q. Kahn is the Dr. Strangelove of Pakistan, the "father" of their bomb and, says a former associate, a crusader for its testing... on humans. On April 25, 1998, Khan met at the Kushab Research Center with General Jehangir Karamat, then army chief of staff, to plan a possible preemptive nuclear strike on New Delhi, India. The Saudis lit a fuse under this demented scheme by telling Pakistan intelligence that Israel had shipped India warplanes in preparation for a conventional attack on Pakistan. We only know these details because a young researcher who claims he was at the meeting wrote a horrified letter threatening to make the plan to bomb India public, a threat which appears to have halted the scheme. After writing down his objections, the whistle-blower, Iftikhar Khan-Chaudhry, ran for his life to London, then to the USA, seeking asylum. Khan-Chaudry, when questioned, seemed to know too little to be the top nuclear physicist he claimed, and far too much about A. Q. Khan's bomb factory to be the tile company accountant Pakistan claims. Pakistan police, failing to arrest him, jailed, beat and raped his wife, suggesting they wanted him to keep secret something more interesting than bookkeeping methods. Whether his story was real or bogus, I can't possibly tell. The point is that intelligence agencies under Clinton, based on many other leads as well, were following up on the Saudi connection until the Bush team interfered.

Fig. 2.1. (Click here to read FBI documents: "Secret.")

The designation "199" means "national security matter." This is the first of over thirty pages of documentation obtained by BBC and the National Security News Service (Washington) indicating that the FBI was pulled off the trail of "ABL" (Abdullah bin Laden) -- until September 13, 2001. Abdullah is reportedly Osama's cousin, and should not be confused with another Abdullah, Osama's brother, a businessman in Boston.

Published: Feb 26 2003

____________