Bush administration refuses to cooperate with Joint Inquiry's
investigation concerning 9/11 attacks. |
New evidence that US government suppressed September 11 warnings
By Patrick Martin
27 May 2002
A detailed letter from a top FBI official in Minneapolis, sent last Wednesday
(May 22, 2001) to FBI headquarters and to the US Senate, has provided
major new evidence that high-level government officials deliberately
turned
a blind eye to advance warnings of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
The letter, portions of which have been leaked to the media, has set
off a new round of public criticism of the Bush administration in both
the media and official Washington. - read article
I wonder if those blank pages
covered the aiding and abetting of the primary suspect family's escape
from this
country
back
to Saudi
Arabia, by Duh-bya's administration over agencies' objections -
as reported in the weeks after the attacks. But now it seems the story
has changed a bit, although the white house is now copping to allowing
key witnesses to leave town, some from the Bureau are claiming it was
with their blessings - yet another soldier falls on the sword.
White House agreed to whisk Saudis away after 9/11
Senator criticizes airlift
By Eric Lichtblau (NYT)
Thursday, September 4, 2003
WASHINGTON: Top White House officials personally approved the evacuation
of dozens of influential Saudis, including relatives of Osama bin Laden,
from the United States in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks
when most flights were still grounded, according to a former White House
adviser.
Richard Clarke, who ran the White House crisis team after the attacks
but has since left the Bush administration, said he agreed to the extraordinary
plan because the Federal Bureau of Investigation assured him that the
departing Saudis were not linked to terrorism. The White House feared
that the Saudis could face "retribution" for the hijackings,
Clarke said.
The fact that relatives of bin Laden and other Saudis had been rushed
out of the country became public soon after the Sept. 11 attacks. But
questions have lingered about the circumstances of their departure, and
Clarke's statements provided the first acknowledgment that the White
House had any direct involvement in the plan and that senior administration
officials had personally signed off on it.
Clarke made his remarks in an article in Vanity Fair magazine
published Thursday, and amplified them Wednesday in an interview and
congressional
testimony. The White House had no comment on his statements.
The disclosure came just weeks after the classified portion of a congressional
report on the Sept. 11 attacks suggested that Saudi Arabia had financial
links to the hijackers. Clarke's comments are likely to fuel accusations
that the United States has gone soft on the Saudis because of diplomatic
concerns.
Senator Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, seized on Clarke's comments
to call on the White House to conduct an investigation into the hasty
departures of about 140 Saudis in the days after the attacks.
Schumer said in an interview that he suspected some of the Saudis who
were allowed to leave, particularly two relatives of bin Laden who he
said had links to terrorist groups themselves, could have shed light
on the events of Sept. 11.
"
This is just another example of our country coddling the Saudis,"'
Schumer said. "It's almost as if we didn't want to find out what
links existed."
While FBI officials would not discuss details of the case, they said
that in the days immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks bureau agents
interviewed the adult relatives of bin Laden, members of a rich Saudi
family, before the White House cleared them to leave. Bin Laden is said
to be estranged from his family.
"
We did everything that needed to be done," said John Iannarelli,
a bureau spokesman. "There's nothing to indicate that any of these
people had any information that could have assisted us, and no one was
accorded any additional courtesies that wouldn't have been accorded anyone
else."
But Vanity Fair quotes Dale Watson, the former head of counterterrorism
at the FBI, as saying that the departing Saudis "were not subject
to serious interviews or interrogations."
Watson could not be reached
for comment.
The article depicts an elaborate but hurried evacuation, with private
planes picking up Saudis from 10 U.S. cities. Some aviation and bureau
officials said they had been upset by the operation because the government
had not yet lifted flight restrictions for the general public, but said
they had not had the power to stop it, the article says.
Clarke, who left the White House in February, said in an interview that
he was driven by concern for the safety of the Saudis after the hijackings. "We
were concerned, just as the Saudis were concerned, that the Saudis and
other Middle Easterners would be targeted for retribution," he said.
He called the current criticism of the evacuation "a tempest in
a teapot," adding that he had told the bureau to hold anyone it
had suspicions about, and that the FBI had said it had not held anyone.
Schumer said in a letter to the White House Wednesday that the Saudis
appeared to have had "a free pass" despite possible knowledge
about the attacks.
"
I find it hard to believe that two days after 9/11, the FBI would even
know what questions to ask and who to ask it of," Schumer said in
an interview. The New York Times
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In
the aftermath the justice department has been detaining people as suspected
links to bin Laden and al Qaeda on the grounds that their names were
just too damn hard for Ashcroft to pronounce. But it was proper for
this same administration to aide the bin Laden family, with links to
Bush family money, and while air space was still secured, in a quick
and quiet get-away over the objections of the FBI.
I wonder if the blank spaces
included intelligence from investigations showing that months prior
to 9/11, the Bush administration threatened to carpet bomb Afghanistan
if they wouldn't do oil business with them.
"either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you
under a carpet of bombs"
Word of an October attack
on Afghanistan was passed around by diplomats as early as the July
of 2001. And documents concerning the threat by Bush to the Taliban
were found in the hands of Al Qaeda, suggesting they were ahead
of the curve on pre-emptive strike strategy.
"The BBC reported (September 18 2001) that Niaz Niak, a former Pakistan
foreign secretary, was told by senior American officials at a meeting
in Berlin in mid-July 2001 that "military action against Afghanistan
would go ahead by the middle of October".
I couldn't find anywhere in
the Joint Inquiry's recommendations concerning dangers Bush and company
constantly expose us to by their reckless threats to countries world-wide.
Memo - RE; annihilation - to whom it
may concern - Attention we are going
to blow-up your whole country, make it inhabitable, wipe your civilization
off the map. Stay-tuned to CNN
for further details.
What else might
or should have been contained in those blank pages of the Joint Inquiry's
report. I doubt the information we are looking for is found there;
"The president made clear that henceforth we the people
would not know what our own troops and spooks were up to, and his attorney
general urged U.S. government departments not to grant requests filed
under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Despite the will of Congress and the public, and the force
of precedent (Pearl Harbor, JFK's assassination), the oilmen at the top
have so intently blocked such an inquiry into 9/11 that you'd think they
must be hiding something. 'There's just this general philosophical orientation
- one GOP staffer told Newsweek - that the less the world knows
the better'.
On 9/11, meanwhile, Gov. Jeb Bush declared a state of emergency
in Florida - and never lifted it, a gambit that enabled the suspension
of the state's quite liberal sunshine laws. Thus did the president's
brother manage to erect a further barrier to anyone investigating what
had happened on Election Day 2000 in the Sunshine State." - Miller
What
are the questions still looming, and where are the cries for their
answers. Well certainly the victims families are still asking but not
receiving much response -
Cost of probing Bill Clinton's sex life:
$65 million.
Cost of probing the Columbia shuttle disaster: $50 million.*
Funds assigned to independent Sept. 11 panel: $3 million.**
What questions
could the balance of this $3 million answer?
FOREKNOWLEDGE AND DECEPTION: WHY DID THE
WHITE HOUSE CLAIM "NO
ONE IMAGINED" THAT HIJACKED PLANES COULD BE USED IN KAMIKAZE ATTACKS?
Hell even a high school kid envisioned such a scenario
in 1999- One of the Columbine shooters was reported to have considered
hi-jacking an airliner and crashing it into some building in New York
city.
What did U.S. authorities know and when did they know it? Eight months
after the attacks, on May 15, 2002, the White House confessed that George
W. Bush had received a limited but ultimately useless warning prior to
Sept. 11th. This prompted spectacular headlines screaming that "BUSH
KNEW." The revelations centered on a Presidential Daily Briefing
(PDB) delivered to Bush personally by CIA director George Tenet on Aug.
6, 2001, while Bush was vacationing at his Crawford ranch. The title
of this 10-page document has been released: "BIN LADEN DETERMINED
TO STRIKE U.S." Tenet reported warnings that terrorists connected
to Osama Bin Laden were planning to hijack passenger planes in the United
States.
Given such high-level warnings, why didn't the U.S. government take
measures such as placing U.S. air defenses on alert and informing airports,
airlines and law enforcement authorities of the need to be especially
vigilant?
One line of defense was presented by national security adviser Condoleeza
Rice on the day after the revelations, at the White House press conference
of May 16, 2002. She said that vague warnings would have caused panic
and crippled the U.S. air transportation system, without enhancing security
in any meaningful way.
Derrill Bodley, who lost his daughter in the attacks, raised a moral
objection to Rice's argument at a press conference a few weeks later: "I
have a big question in my mind whenever government officials denigrate
the value of human life and well-being when comparing it to the value
of a system. Yet this is exactly the comparison that was made by Condoleeza
Rice in a press conference on May 16th when she said, 'You would have
risked shutting down the American civil aviation system with such generalized
information.'"
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