- The Bush administration has been plunged into a major
political crisis following press reports that Bush was briefed on the danger
of a terrorist attack involving the hijacking of US airliners more than
a month before September 11. Despite the warning, delivered in an intelligence
briefing last August, the White House took no action to forestall the deadliest
terrorist action in US history, or to warn the public.
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- The revelations of the past 48 hours show, at the very
least, that the Bush administration has been concealing information for
the past eight months about the circumstances leading up to the terrorist
attacks which killed 3,000 people in New York City and Washington.
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- In the days after September 11, Bush administration officials
repeatedly characterized the suicide hijackings as a sneak attack for which
there had been "no warning." These statements are now exposed
as lies-a fact that inevitably raises the question of why the White House
sought to conceal the nature of the warnings it had received.
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- The cover-up began to come apart last week, with the
report on CBS News Wednesday night that Bush had received a CIA briefing
on August 6, five weeks before the attack on the World Trade Center, which
suggested that an airplane hijacking by terrorists linked to Osama bin
Laden was an imminent possibility. This prompted an explosion of reporting
and commentary in the media Thursday and Friday, and demands for a full-scale
congressional inquiry from House and Senate Democratic leaders, as well
as sections of the Republican Party.
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- Congressional critics took particular note of the coincidence
of the August 6 briefing and two FBI reports, one from the Phoenix, Arizona
office July 10, the other from Minneapolis August 13, which focused attention
on suspicions that Al Qaeda operatives were using US flight schools to
gain expertise required to hijack airplanes. The July 10 memo urged a nationwide
screening of flight schools and cited possible links to Osama bin Laden.
The Minneapolis FBI agents reported the detention of Zaccarias Moussaoui,
the French-Moroccan immigrant who wanted to learn how to fly a Boeing 747,
but not take off or land. One email from a Minneapolis FBI agent described
Moussaoui as someone who might fly a jumbo jet into the World Trade Center.
Both reports were ignored by FBI headquarters.
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- Several senators, Republicans as well as Democrats, said
the revelations about advance warnings raised the issue of whether the
September 11 attacks could have prevented, saving thousands of lives. Senator
John McCain, Arizona Republican and former candidate for the Republican
presidential nomination, said, "There were two separate FBI reports
plus a CIA warning, none of which were coordinated. The question is, if
all three had been connected, would that have led to more vigorous activity?"
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- McCain said that he and Senator Joseph Lieberman, the
Democratic vice presidential candidate in 2000, would push for legislation
to create an independent bipartisan commission to investigate what the
government knew and did in the period leading up to September 11. The Bush
administration has vociferously opposed such an investigation, claiming
that it would disrupt the ongoing war in Afghanistan and the next stage
of the "war on terrorism."
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- Lies and bullying
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- The Bush administration's response to the latest revelations
is consistent with its posture ever since September 11, a combination of
lies and bullying. The lies came from National Security Adviser Condoleezza
Rice, press spokesman Ari Fleischer, and other White House aides. The bullying
came from Republicans in Congress-who characteristically accused Bush's
critics of virtual treason-and especially from Vice President Richard Cheney.
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- At a fundraising dinner in New York City, Cheney made
an extraordinary warning to "my Democratic friends in Congress."
Cheney said, "They need to be very cautious not to seek political
advantage by making incendiary suggestions, as were made by some today,
that the White House had advance information that would have prevented
the tragic attacks of 9/11." He called such criticism "thoroughly
irresponsible ... in time of war."
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- Cheney also demanded a gag rule for any congressional
investigation into September 11. "It must protect sensitive sources
and methods, yet must be devoid of leaks, and it must avoid sensational
and outrageous commentary," he said. Reiterating the White House line
that any serious probe of the events surrounding the September 11 attacks
would be tantamount to giving "aid andcomfort" to the enemy,
he went on to declare, "Perhaps most important, an investigation must
not interfere with the ongoing efforts to prevent the next attack, because,
without a doubt, a very real threat of another perhaps more devastating
attack still exists."
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- The official line from the White House is that it will
cooperate with a joint House-Senate intelligence committee probe that is
slated to begin holding hearings next month. But press reports have cited
complaints from Congress that the administration is refusing to fully cooperate,
and to date the White House has rejected calls for it to turn over the
text of the August 6 CIA briefing paper, as well as the memos from the
FBI offices in Phoenix and Minneapolis.
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- The attempts by White House aides to defend Bush's performance
have only made matters worse. Contradiction has been piled upon contradiction,
raising the inevitable question: what is the administration trying to hide?
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- Bush himself did not help matters when he appeared before
a group of congressional Republicans and declared that if he had been aware
of the plans of the hijackers, he would have used the "full force
and fury of the United States military to stop it." For all the bombast,
Bush did not attempt to explain why, given the warning of a possible hijacking,
nothing was done to mobilize air defense jets in the period after August
6. No US-based fighter jets were on alert September 11, according to the
Air Force, and those which did respond to the hijackings did not reach
New York City and Washington until after the hijacked jets had hit their
targets.
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- At her press conference Thursday, Condoleeza Rice was
visibly fumbling in her explanation of the August 6 briefing and the overall
record of the Bush administration in the period leading up to September
11. The national security adviser said the danger reported was a hijacking
to take hostages, not turn the plane into a suicide weapon. She said, "I
don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an
airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and
slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a
missile."
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- This claim is simply not credible, on a number of levels.
The FBI office in Minneapolis, for one, warned precisely of such an attack.
Moreover, there is a considerable history, now stretching back a half dozen
years, of efforts by terrorists linked to Al Qaeda plotting to hijack airplanes
to use as suicide weapons. One such hijacking took place in France in 1994,
and a similar effort was broken up by Philippine police in 1995, with the
organizer turned over to the US for interrogation.
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- There is the example of the G-8 conference at Genoa,
which took place July 20-22, 2001. After warnings from a number of sources,
including Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a close US ally, that a hijacked
airplane filled with explosives might be crashed into the conference building,
the Italian authorities deployed anti-aircraft guns around the site and
banned local flights.
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- Throughout the summit, Bush spent his nights on a US
navy warship in the harbor, because of security concerns. Yet Rice claims
that two weeks later, when the President's daily briefing contained a warning
that Al Qaeda was targeting US airplanes for hijacking, no one considered
the possibility that the planes could be used as flying bombs.
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- Rice's claim does not square with the overall record
of the Al Qaeda organization. As one analyst, Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings
Institution, told the Boston Globe, "'The idea that Al Qaeda was going
to use a routine hijacking tactic, as the White House has argued, never
made sense. It's an organization that sought to kill large numbers of people
dating back a decade.... Anybody who thought that Al Qaeda might hijack
a plane should have immediately deduced that they would try to kill anyone
on board, which means that the classic tactic of dealing with hijacking
should have been recognized as inapplicable.'"
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- Even if one accepts the White House assertion that it
could not have imagined a hijack-bombing, the fact that it admits having
been alerted to the danger of a hijacking of any kind raises questions
with damning implications. If the Bush administration had taken any serious
measures to prevent a typical hijacking, those measures would also have
stopped the suicide bombers.
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- But despite the warning delivered August 6, there was
no increased security on the part of the airlines. The 19 hijackers boarded
planes without hindrance on September 11, many of them paying cash for
first-class, one-way tickets. This, despite the fact that several of the
hijackers were under federal surveillance or being sought by the FBI, including
Mohammed Atta, the alleged ringleader, and Hani Hanjour, believed to be
the pilot of one of the hijacked jets.
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- Rice claimed that the warning of a possible hijacking
had been very general, and based on only a single report, from British
intelligence, dating back to 1998. But as one Democrat, ranking House Intelligence
Committee member Nancy Pelosi, observed, "The questions are: What
were the changed circumstances on August 7 [sic] that prompted the intelligence
community to bring to the direct attention of the president information
from three old reports on possible terrorist activity? And after raising
the issue to such a high level, what actions, if any, were considered appropriate
in light of this information?"
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- Mere "incompetence" cannot explain September
11
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- The media and some Democrats and Republicans in Congress
have begun to raise questions about the conduct of the administration,
and particularly US intelligence agencies, in the months leading up to
the September 11 attacks. This is a marked shift after eight months of
uncritical support for the "war on terrorism" and servile praise
for Bush personally.
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- The sudden barrage of public criticism remains confined
within narrow limits, however. There are charges that US intelligence agencies
and the Bush administration responded with slowness, incompetence or outright
indifference to clear threats of terrorist attacks on American targets.
But there has been no questioning of Bush's overall policy of military
intervention in Central Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere. And none of
Bush's official or media critics has raised the most fundamental issue:
that the inaction before September 11 was deliberate, that the US government
welcomed the impending terrorist attack as a convenient pretext for the
launching of a long-planned campaign of American military aggression.
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- >From this standpoint, the most important of the week's
revelations was the report by NBC News that Bush had on his desk September
9-two days before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon-a
National Security Presidential Directive outlining in detail a worldwide
campaign of military, diplomatic and intelligence action targeting Osama
bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organization, including the delivery of an ultimatum
to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, backed by the threat of war.
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- The draft order, according to NBC, "outlined essentially
the same war plan that the White House, the CIA and the Pentagon put into
action after the September 11 attacks." It was prepared through a
process of consultation over many months, involving the Pentagon, CIA,
State Department and other security and intelligence agencies. In other
words, well before the terrorist hijackings, the Bush administration was
preparing to launch the military action that it later claimed was taken
only in response to the September 11 atrocity.
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- There is a basic contradiction in the account given by
the Bush administration. Rice and other spokesmen have presented a picture
of a government increasingly focused on the imminent threat of a major
terrorist attack within the United States. Moreover, as the NBC report
underscores, the administration was preparing to launch a military attack
against Al Qaeda and its alleged state supporters, the Taliban regime in
Afghanistan, an action certain to provoke retaliatory strikes. Yet nothing
was actually done to strengthen the defenses of American cities, civil
aviation, public buildings, or obvious targets like the World Trade Center-already
hit in 1993 by Islamic fundamentalist terrorists.
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- The extraordinary revelations about the FBI's handling
of the reports from Minnesota and Arizona do not permit an innocent explanation.
The top level of the FBI vetoed appeals for action that even then would
have seemed routine. Far more plausible than the strained attempts to explain
this as a "failure to connect the dots," is the likelihood that
a decision had been made, at high levels within the American state, to
allow an Al Qaeda hijacking to take place, in order to provide the occasion
for unleashing the military onslaught that was already in advanced stages
of planning.
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- If there is any truth in Rice's claims that "we
never imagined" hijackers using commercial jets as missiles, it may
be this: those at the highest levels of the state who ordered a security
"stand down" to provide a casus belli may not have anticipated
that the hijacking would end with the destruction of a New York skyscraper.
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- Anyone who considers it unthinkable that a US government
would condone the slaughter of its own citizens underestimates both the
ruthlessness of American imperialism and criminality of the Bush administration.
It would not be the first time a bourgeois government, bedeviled by contradictions
and crisis at home and abroad, sought to extricate itself by creating a
pretext for military action, hoping to grab resources and strategic advantage
overseas and whip up a patriotic consensus domestically. Certainly the
Bush administration was a government in crisis by the summer of 2001, having
lost control of the Senate to the Democrats and confronting the collapse
of the stock market bubble, soaring unemployment, a looming fiscal crisis,
and growing international opposition to its ham-fisted, unilateralist foreign
policy.
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- Every war waged by the United States over the past century
has been accompanied by provocations orchestrated by the US government
to stampede public opinion and give a "defensive" cover to military
aggression. The pattern is well-established, from the campaign over the
explosion of the battleship Maine, which ushered in the US war against
Spain in 1898, to the Gulf of Tonkin incident (Vietnam) and the Racak massacre,
the pretext for US intervention in Kosovo in 1999.
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- Fraud and provocation, moreover, are second nature to
the Bush administration. It was, after all, installed in office through
such means, in the theft of the 2000 presidential election and the anti-democratic
intervention of the right-wing majority on the US Supreme Court. Bush owes
his political rise to outright gangster elements in corporate America,
such as Enron. Internal Enron documents have now confirmed that former
Enron chairman, Kenneth Lay, the biggest financial backer of Bush's political
career, created a near-catastrophic electricity shortage in California,
potentially threatening the lives of thousands, in order to boost his company's
profits.
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- The deepening political crisis may well produce even
more startling revelations. The Washington Post reported Friday, almost
in passing, that at some point during the summer of 2001, the Bush administration
decided that for security reasons Attorney General John Ashcroft should
no longer travel on commercial airline flights-a far cry from the claim
that the warning of imminent terrorist hijackings was "general"
and "unspecific."
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- But no one can rely either on the American media or the
Democratic politicians in Congress to conduct a serious investigation into
the September 11 tragedy. Already the leading organs of the American press,
such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, have published editorials
declaring the reports of Bush's advance knowledge of September 11 to be
"overblown" (the Post) or an example of a typical Washington
"blame game" (the Times).
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- The World Socialist Web Site has been at the forefront
of the critical analysis and exposure of the September 11 attacks, warning
that the Bush administration and the media were deliberately concealing
from the American people the real circumstances of the terrorist action
and the imperialist objectives of the US war in Afghanistan. More than
four months ago, we published a four-part series entitled, "Was the
US government alerted to September 11 attack?"
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- This analysis is now being vindicated.
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- http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/may2002/bush-m18.shtml
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