Seven years on, three big 9/11 lies

[bemildred]

HONG KONG - Dear, sweet Laura Bush told the biggest, baldest lie at last week's Republican National Convention. "Let's not forget," the first lady said, "President Bush has kept the American people safe."

Mrs Bush, your husband and his administration did not keep the American people safe. On September 11, 2001, nearly 3,000 people died, and more than 6,000 were injured as al-Qaeda hijackers crashed commercial aircraft into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon outside Washington. The Bush people act as if someone else was in charge when it happened.

It's the greatest political mystery of the 21st century, perhaps in American history: how have the Republicans avoided responsibility for 9/11? How can they keep claiming the deadliest attacks on the American mainland as a badge of honor, rather than a stain on their record?

Mrs Bush's whopper is one of three big lies that the Republicans keep telling on national security related to 9/11. The assault on the truth has gone on for seven years, and last week's convention video of the disaster suggests it will continue. Meanwhile, Democrats remain afraid to say the Bush administration has no clothes on when it comes to national security lest they be accused of politicizing 9/11, while Republicans keep flaunting the tragedy for partisan gain.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JI11Ak01.html

[yurbud]

1. we were attacked by Bush allies the Saudis. Bush hasn't seen the need to have them attack us again

http://professorsmartass.blogspot.com/2008/05/appeaser-in-chief-bush-visits-911.html

[GliderGuider]

2. That's my take as well.

Try this for a speculative narrative that ties it all together:

The Saudi Peak - a Hypothesis about the Iraq War

The speculation of this article is that the real background of the Iraq war goes something like this:

• The Bush administration is composed primarily of oilmen. They are well aware of the Peak Oil theory.
  
• They are also aware of the risks that a decline in global oil production could pose to the world’s political and economic stability, especially if it is generally perceived to be the result of irreversible geological conditions (i.e. we start to realize that the world is running out of oil and there’s nothing we can do about it).
  
• The Bush administration and the Saudis are also well aware of the role Saudi Arabia plays as the linchpin of world oil production.
  
• The Bush administration and the Saudis are very good friends, and share intimate secrets like the actual state of Saudi oil production.
  
• In early 2001 the Saudis tell George and Dick that Ghawar has started to “water out”: the oil they are pumping up contains more and more of the water that they are using to force oil into the wells. This is a sure sign that the field is nearing the end of its useful life.
  
• This news triggers very loud alarm bells in Washington and Riyadh, because if Ghawar and overall Saudi production are about to decline this brings the risk of global instability that much closer.
  
• The two administrations decide they need to keep the imminence of Saudi oil decline out of the public consciousness for as long as possible. To do this they need to accomplish two things: mask the decline of Saudi Arabia, and make it appear as though any decline in Middle East production is due to above-ground factors.
  
• Fortunately, they have a ready target in Iraq. Saddam is vulnerable, he has lots of oil, and Iraqi oil production has been in chaos since Gulf War 1. And he controls the input end of the IPSA pipeline.
  
• At Cheney’s Energy Task Force meetings the plan is developed and western oil companies are brought into the picture. This ensures they will be onside and will not start asking awkward questions later about the provenance of Saudi oil.
  
• As a parallel effort, the Saudis agree to sponsor an attack on US soil to provide the Bush administration with the required “casus belli”. The Saudis recruit 15 of their own citizens to form the core of the September 11 attack team.
  
• Once the attack has taken place the march to war begins. It doesn’t matter how flimsy the excuses are, all that matters is that the progress of the plan cannot be derailed under any circumstances. No penetration of the ruse, however small, will be permitted. This determination results in the Wilson/Plame reprisal, the killing of Dr. David Kelly and possibly other killings like that of State Department WMD analyst John Kokal (http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/112003_kokal.html ). The real reason for the invasion must never be discovered.
  
• Iraq is duly invaded and Baghdad is captured. The Oil Ministry is the only facility to be secured because it’s the only one that matters to the plan.
  
• The meters in the southern oil fields are immediately shut off and sabotaged so nobody can tell how much oil is missing.
  
• The un-metered oil is redirected into the perfectly functional IPSA pipeline and enters Saudi Arabia.
  
• There are now two possibilities for what happens to the purloined oil:
  1. It arrives at the Saudi port of Yanbu where it is loaded onto tankers as legitimate Saudi oil, and shipped to international customers. There is a problem with this scenario, because the oil coming in from Iraq has a slightly different chemical signature from Saudi oil. This small difference would be noticed by customers, because the refineries need to know the characteristics of their feedstock very precisely.
  2. A more reasonable solution is that this oil is piped to refineries in Saudi Arabia and is used to satisfy domestic demand. The Saudi oil spared by this substitution is shipped out to customers, and no one is the wiser. This is both safer and easier than the first suggestion, because the stolen oil never leaves Saudi Arabia, and its disposition falls under the obscuring veil of Saudi secrecy. This also makes the case harder to prove, of course.
  
  
• The 1.7 million barrel per day volume of the IPSA pipeline and the timing of the rise seen in Saudi oil production in early 2004 fit the scenario perfectly.
  
• Any decline in overall Middle Eastern oil production can now be blamed on the civil war in Iraq, which has been either a blessing in disguise or a calculated part of the plan. The attacks on oil installations have also made it easy to disguise the disappearance of a full tanker-load-equivalent of oil every day.
  
• It was all going well, except that the decline in Saudi oil production exceeded everyone’s expectations. Even with the Iraqi subterfuge in place the decline of 800,000 barrels per day over the last year could not be masked.

[yurbud]

3. I remember the front page story on Saudi fields peaking--followed by panicked retraction later