...(continues from the book)
Michael Meacher had been a close associate of Tony Blair and one of the most prominent leaders of New Labour. He was a member of Parliament, and from May 1997 to June 2003, he had been the Environment Minister of Britain. Other members of the Blair cabinet, such as the former Overseas Development Minister, Claire Short, had quit over the Iraq adventure. Meacher was more courageous and more radical: he called into question the
heart of the myth which the Bush administration wanted to foist off on the world.
Meacher wrote:
First, it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the
events of 9/11. It is known that at least 11 countries provided advance
warning to the US of the 9/11 attacks. Two senior Mossad experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the C?A and F?I to a cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation (Daily Telegraph, September 16, 2001). The list they provided included the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested.
It had been known as early as 1996 that there were plans to hit
Washington targets with aeroplanes. Then in 1999 a US national
intelligence council report noted that “al-Qaida suicide bo?bers could
crash-land an aircraft packed with high explo?ives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the C?A, or the White House.”
Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their visas in Saudi Arabia. Michael Springman, the former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, has stated that since 1987 the C?A had been illicitly issuing visas to unqualified applicants from the Middle East and bringing them to the US for training in terrorism for the Afghan war in collaboration with Bin Laden (BBC, November 6, 2001). It seems this operation continued after the Afghan war for other purposes. It is also reported that five of the hijackers received training at secure US military installations in the 1990s (Newsweek, September 15, 2001).
Instructive leads prior to 9/11 were not followed up. French Moroccan
flight student Zacarias Moussaoui (now thought to be the 20th hijacker)
was arrested in August 2001 after an instructor reported he showed a
suspicious interest in learning how to steer large airliners. When US
agents learned from French intelligence he had radical Islamist ties, they sought a warrant to search his computer, which contained clues to the September 11 mission (Times, November 3, 2001). But they were turned down by the F?I. One agent wrote, a month before 9/11, that Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers (Newsweek, May 20, 2002).
All of this makes it all the more astonishing - on the war on terrorism
perspective - that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself. The first hijacking was suspected at no later than 8.20 AM, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06 AM. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from US Andrews Air Force base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 AM. Why not? There were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9/11. Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft (AP, August 13, 2002). It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate.
Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being
ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority? The former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has said: “The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the C?A or F?I to assert a defence of incompetence.”
Nor is the US response after 9/11 any better. No serious attempt has ever been made to catch Bin Laden. In late September and early October 2001, leaders of Pakistan's two Islamist parties negotiated Bin Laden's extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for 9/11. However, a US official said, significantly, that “casting our objectives too narrowly” risked “a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr. Bin Laden was captured.” The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that “the goal has never been to get Bin Laden” (AP, April 5, 2002). The whistleblowing F?I agent Robert Wright told ABC News (December 19, 2002) that F?I headquarters wanted no arrests. And in November 2001 the US airforce complained it had had al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to attack because they did not receive permission quickly enough (Time Magazine, May 13,
2002).
None of this assembled evidence, all of which comes from sources already in the public domain, is compatible with the idea of a real, determined war on terrorism. (Michael Meacher, “This war on terrorism is bogus.” The Guardian, September 6, 2003)
and another paragraph :
They (comission) also began to notice that the F?I continued to lie systematically, and in the process they became aware of some of the anomalies in the government story. Two of the accused hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, had been known to US
intelligence agencies well before 9/11, and important facts about them had been languishing unused in federal files for 15 months. As the JICI discovered, these two persons had had extensive dealings with a longtime FBI counterterrorism informant based in California. The case was very suspicious.
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Topic: Hunt The Boeing!! (Read 5327 times)