the 9/11 panel needs to expose this

[newdealer]

A great article from the American Prospect raised some provocative questions. Go to the link below to read the entire article.

"And it turns out that compared to Bush, Clinton was practically Wyatt Earp. In fact, the latest Post article suggests a whole new line of inquiry: Did Bush, at a key moment, dismantle the Clinton administration's increasingly effective anti-Al Qaeda apparatus (which, though hardly flawless, was far better than nothing)?"


www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2002/01/page-a-01-23.html

[teach1st]

1. Kick

An important read.

"(Bush's) attention to Iraq was commendable, as was the attention to China and other issues. But as we now know, the prioritization was all wrong. Bush should have been talking with submarine captains in the Indian Ocean and CIA chiefs along the Afghan-Pakistan border. He should have been memorizing Pervez Musharraf's name. And here's where we can easily imagine a Gore administration unhampered by these factors and capable of intervening before disaster struck.

Gore's foreign policy team would likely have been manned by Richard Holbrooke as secretary of state and Leon Fuerth as national security advisor. Both have demonstrated recently that they probably would have been immune to the two key factors which distracted the Bush team from the Al Qaeda threat: national missile defense and Saddam Hussein.

Holbrooke was pointing out that the dangers of Al Qaeda were more serious than those affected by missile defense long before 9/11. On a trip to Europe in the spring of 2001, the former ambassador called Bush's passion for missile defense "almost a religious matter." Robert Kagan, the conservative foreign policy writer deeply connected to and influential in the Bush administration, subsequently devoted a whole Washington Post column to mocking Holbrooke and questioning his loyalty. He quoted him sardonically: "'We have to ask ourselves,' Holbrooke exhorted the Europeans, 'in what way are we really threatened.' Osama bin Laden, he noted, has no missiles." "

[NewJeffCT]

2. great article

Al Franken would be proud... we need to get this out there.

[enough]

3. This has been driving me crazy since 9-11

How can it be that the worst terrorist attack on American soil is a a political PLUS for *Bush? Why is there no price paid for having this policy disaster (and security disaster) happen on his watch?

Maybe this is an opening, a way that the issue could be used in the campaign. Now that his "popularity" mystique seems to be cracking, maybe we can break the tabu against aggressively criticizing his administration's role in not preventing 9-11.

I hope the candidates will use this.

[teryang]

4. Complacency v. complicity

http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/121103Kupferberg/121103kupferberg.html

Truth, lies, and the legend of 9/11
Part 8 of 10 parts: The summer 2002 marketing plan: Khalid and Binalshibh In the spotlight

By Chaim Kupferberg

<...As for his choice for flight training, Atta and his comrades presciently chose to hone their skills within commuter distance of the CIA/military base that would later serve as Central Command for the War in Afghanistan...

...As an added bonus, two of Atta's fellow hijackers would also be set up with rental accommodations by the wife of the employee of a CIA-founded company. Gloria Irish, the wife of the tabloid Sun editor Michael Irish, rented a Delray Beach apartment to hijackers Marwan Al-Shehhi and Saeed Alghamdi. Perhaps it is a coincidence, but the very first victim of the post-9/11 anthrax attacks also happened to be a Sun photo editor by the name of Bob Stevens. And perhaps another peculiar coincidence, as reported in the St. Petersburg Times on October 15, 2001:

"Mike Irish, who, records show, is a licensed airplane pilot, several years ago was a member of the Civil Air Patrol based at a small-plane airport in Lantana, just north of Delray Beach, an official there told the Washington Post. One of the hijackers, Atta, reportedly rented a plane at that airport to practice flying for three days in August. Stevens, the Sun photo editor who died of anthrax Oct. 5, also lives in Lantana. But there is no indication whether Irish or Stevens ever crossed paths with Atta."

...American Media, Inc., the parent company which owns the Sun, the National Enquirer, and virtually all of the major American tabloids. American Media, Inc., (AMI) was founded in 1952 by Generoso Pope, a "former" CIA agent. In 1999, AMI made an aggressive grab for control of its major tabloid competitors. That year, AMI was bought by David Pecker and Evercore Partners, whose senior principal—Roger C. Altman—was a former vice-chairman of the Blackstone Group, co-founded by Peter Peterson, who is, incidentally, chairman of the influential Council On Foreign Relations (which establishes the mainstream media "consensus" on virtually all foreign policy issues). In October 2000, Blackstone purchased the mortgage on 7 World Trade Center. AIG, an insurer of the World Trade Center, announced—on July 30, 1998—a long-term agreement with Blackstone valued at $1.35 billion. That year, AIG—which has had a long-standing strategic relationship with Blackstone—acquired a 7 percent non-voting interest in Blackstone. <snip>

Kupferberg has written a series of brilliant analyses of the 911 legend. As he puts it, "...To anyone familiar with covert operations, the above item would perhaps set off alarm bells..."

He has been published on globalresearch.ca as well as the online journal. Just put his name in google to get links to all the exhaustive analysis of the 911 boondoggle.