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In 2001, an anonymous White House source leaked top-secret NSA intelligence to reporter Judith Miller that Al Qaida was planning a major attack on the United States. But the story never made it into the paper…."I said, 'Why are you doing this? Why are you giving this to me?' and he said, 'I just can't get my headquarters to pay attention to me, but I know that if it's from the New York Times, they're going to give it a good read and ask me questions about it.' And there's also this genuine concern about how, if only the president shared the sense of panic and concern that they did, more would be done to try and protect the country."
Rory O’Connor Interviews Judith Miller on The 9/11 Story That Got Away, AlterNet, 5-18-06 NOTE: You should also read O’Connor’s follow up story, The Burial of The Story That Got Away (5-25-06)
Four years ago, when the taboo against calling George W. Bush a liar was even stronger than it is today, the national news media bought into the Bush administration’s spin that the President did nothing to bail out his Enron benefactors, including Kenneth Lay.
Bush supposedly refused to intervene, despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Enron had poured into his political coffers. That refusal purportedly showed the high ethical standards that set Bush apart from lesser politicians.
Bush’s defenders will probably reprise that storyline now that former Enron Chairman Lay and former Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Skilling stand convicted of conspiracy and fraud in the plundering of the onetime energy-trading giant. But the reality is that the Bush-can’t-be-bought spin was never true.
Robert Parry, Bush's Enron Lies (5-26-06)
Ugly truths, like mass graves, sometimes re-surface to the ruin of those that hid them.
Now that the scope and impact of the Bush-Cheney administration's post-9/11 blunders -- including the debacle in Iraq, the escape of Bin Laden, Zawahiri and Mullah Omar, the loss of US prestige around the world, the fracturing of the Western Alliance, the Crayola crayon hoax of “terrorist threat levels,” the attempted demolition of the CIA, FEMA and other vital resources, etc. -- have begun to hit home, are we getting any closer to the time when the 9/11 files will be re-opened, and the ugliest truth, the Forbidden Truth of alleged pre-9/11 negligence will finally be explored openly, thoroughly and unflinchingly?
A Zogby poll, sponsored by 911Truth.org, reveals that the US populace is, once again, way ahead of the political establishment and the mainstream news media: 42% believe there has indeed been a cover up, with 10% unsure, and 45% think ‘Congress or an International Tribunal should re-investigate the attacks, including whether any US government officials consciously allowed or helped facilitate their success,’ with 8% unsure. ( Zogby, 5-24-06) This scientifically conducted survey indicates that a majority of those polled are not satisfied with the answers that have been given up to this point.
Here is some context on how we got here, i.e., on what did and didn’t happen in the time before 9/11. It is context that the US mainstream news media (predictably), the opposition party leadership (disgracefully), and the 9/11 Commission (tragically), have refused to offer you. (And, no, I am not referring to questions about what really happened at the Pentagon, or what really happened to WTC Building #7, etc. You don’t have to go there. Those questions are even, to some extent, a distraction. I am referring to what didn’t happen at the White House.)
On 9/11/01, Al Qaeda dealt the USA a savage blow. The three-pronged attack slaughtered thousands of innocents, delivered a severe economic blow, and provided Bush-Cheney with the rationale it desperately needed to force its radical agenda upon the political establishment and the populace.
At the time, the “conventional wisdom” (which would, of course, be more aptly termed “convenient half-truths”) was that “the world changed on 9/11.” The world didn’t change that awful morning. The attack was simply an escalation in an ongoing struggle with Al Qaeda. The day and the hour might have been a surprised, but the attack itself was no surprise.
Several weeks earlier, on 8-6-01, Harriet Miers (yes, her) handed George W. Bush a Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) titled “Al Qaeda Determined to Strike in The U.S.” It mentioned airplane high-jacking. But Bush did nothing.
Indeed, the “Decider” and his minions, led by Dick Cheney, had largely undone the work of the Clinton-Gore administration’s national security team.
They halted the “principles meetings,” which had been established to overcome the already-identified problem of stove-piping within the federal government’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
They ignored the admonitions of Clinton-Gore national security adviser Sandy Berger and Counterterrorism Czar Richard Clarke to keep the crushing of Al Qaeda as the USA’s most urgent national security action item.
They dismissed the warnings and urgent recommendations of former Sens. Gary Hart (D-CO) and Warren Rudman (R-NH), whose truly bi-partisan commission had been empowered by Clinton-Gore to present a comprehensive strategy for real homeland security.
They had their new Ambassador to Yemen tell FBI counterterrorism expert, John P. O’Neill, to back off his investigation of the attack on the US Cole. In the summer of 2001, the frustrated O’Neill resigned, and took a job as security director for the WTC, only to perish at Ground Zero on 9/11.
Remember, too, that Zacarias Moussaoui had already been arrested. And, as we know from FBI whistleblower Colleen Rawley, dedicated field agents, working the case with diligence, could not get the attention of Beltwayistan.
Both the US mainstream news media and the opposition party abdicated their responsibility to explore the implications of these facts. They wimped out, and deferred to the 9/11 Commission. The 9/11 Commission, in turn, dispersed and diluted these facts in the footnotes, and in the voluminous mass of its final report, instead of aggregating them, connecting them, and highlighting them in the lead paragraphs of its executive summary, i.e., instead of speaking truth to power, which is what the grieving survivors of the slaughtered innocents deserved.
There has been no accountability for 9/11. Bin Laden, Zawahiri and Mullah Omar are still alive. The Bush-Cheney national insecurity team, that looked the other way, is still in power. And adding inexcusable insult to profound injury, the Bush-Cheney administration and the Republican-controlled US Congress have not even followed through on the 9/11 Commission recommendations.
On the bright side, there are signs of life in the USA.
In a recent interview, Al Gore spoke candidly, for the first time, about the aftermath of presidential election of 2000, which plunged the nation and the world into this horrific alternate timeline: Does he, like many Democrats, think the election was stolen? Gore pauses a long time and stares into the middle distance. “There may come a time when I speak on that,” Gore says, “but it’s not now; I need more time to frame it carefully if I do.” Gore sighs. “In our system, there’s no intermediate step between a definitive Supreme Court decision and violent revolution.” (New York Magazine, 5-17-06
And, in another important development, Ken Lay was convicted of fraud and conspiracy and faces 20 to 30 years in jail. Remember, it was "Kenny Boy" who flew George Bush around the country in an Enron plane during the 2000 campaign, financed the battle over Florida's disputed electoral votes, got assigned his own desk at the White House, and looked over maps of Middle East oil fields with Dick Cheney during those secret “energy plan” meetings.
Hopefully, the Forbidden Truths (yes, there are more than one) are going to be dug up.
Richard Power is the founder of GS(3) Intelligence and http://www.wordsofpower.net. His work focuses on the inter-related issues of security, sustainability and spirit, and how to overcome the challenges of terrorism, cyber crime, global warming, health emergencies, natural disasters, etc. You can reach him via e-mail: richardpower@wordsofpower.net. For more information, go to http://www.wordsofpower.net/
geopolitics, terrorism, Iraq, Bush, Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, 911, Millennium Goals, Energy Security,
