9/11 Fifth Anniversary: Discuss Our Leaders' Versions of What They Did That Morning - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

host · 09-10-2006, 01:58 PM

Quote:

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/054...y,70685,6.html
Open and Shut
Four years later, we still have ten big questions
by Jarrett Murphy
December 5th, 2005 6:30 PM

On Monday, December 5, the 9-11 Public Discourse Project—a private group formed by 9-11 Commission members after their official mandate lapsed in 2004—held a wrap-up press briefing in Washington, signaling the last gasp of official inquiries into the attacks four years ago. The National Institute of Standards and Technology also recently completed its final report on the twin towers. Already gathering dust are a Federal Emergency Management Agency study, the joint inquiry by Congress, the McKinsey reports on New York City's emergency response, probes by federal inspectors general, and other efforts to resolve the myriad doubts about the hijackings.

Some questions can't be answered: People who lost loved ones will never know exactly how the end came, if it hurt, what the final thoughts and words were. But other questions are more tractable. Here are 10 of them:

1. Where was the "National Command Authority"?

There has never been a true accounting of why the nation's leaders were out of the loop for so long that morning. George W. Bush and his aides even have told different versions of how the president was actually informed of the first plane striking: The president claimed erroneously that he saw it on TV, while chief of staff Andrew Card said it was Karl Rove who told the president. According to the official version, after Rove told Bush, the president talked to then national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice. She told him about the crash but apparently did not know about the reported hijacking of American Airlines Flight 11, which military air defenses learned about 17 minutes earlier.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was informed of the second plane hitting the WTC—yes, the second plane—during his intelligence briefing but continued the briefing and was at his desk when Flight 77 struck the Pentagon.

Together, the president and secretary of defense are the National Command Authority that is supposed to lead the country in the case of military emergency. But Bush didn't get in touch with Rumsfeld until after 10 a.m., around the time the fourth and final plane crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. When Bush was criticized days after 9-11 for failing to return to Washington until more than 10 hours after the first attack, the White House claimed there had been a threat ("real and credible," in flack Ari Fleischer's words) to Air Force One. There was none. All the 9-11 Commission says of this phantom threat is that it was the product of "a misunderstood communication."

2. Who gave the order to try to shoot the planes down?

The commission is noticeably vague on this point. The official version says Dick Cheney told the military a little past 10 a.m. to shoot down a threatening plane, claiming that the president had given his approval for the order. But while a few people in the White House bunker noted a call between Cheney and Bush moments earlier, only Rice says she heard Cheney bring up the shoot-down order. Despite the fact that people at both ends of the call were taking notes, the commission found that "there is no documentary evidence of this call." Meanwhile, some of the fighter jets in the air over D.C. received no orders to shoot down planes, while other military aircraft got the OK from the Secret Service to fly "weapons free," which means they had wide authority to take out suspicious aircraft.

Since the military was given little or no notice about the planes, maybe it doesn't matter who authorized a shoot-down. But the record is unclear. Neither Cheney nor Bush testified under oath before the 9-11 panel, in public or private. .......

Quote:

President Meets with Displaced Workers in Florida Town Hall Meeting
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...011204-17.html

"Q Hi, Mr. President. I want to say, they haven't won. I got in my car today, and I'm in the same building with you, speaking to you. They have not won.
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much.
Q And would you say hello to my son Jordan, and my daughter Patricia.
THE PRESIDENT: Jordan and who?
Q Patricia.
THE PRESIDENT: Hi, Patricia; how are you? How old is Patricia?
Q Five, and Jordan is in 3rd grade. And Jordan has a question, if I could
give him the microphone.
THE PRESIDENT: You bet. Your mother is relaying the Mike to you, Jordan.
Q One thing, Mr. President, is that you have no idea how much you've done for
this country. And another thing is that, how did you feel when you heard
about the terrorist attack? (Applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you, Jordan. Well, Jordan, you're not going to believe what state I was in when I heard about the terrorist attack. I was in Florida. And my Chief of Staff, Andy Card -- actually, I was in a classroom talking about a reading program that works. I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower -- the TV was obviously on. And I used to fly, myself, and I said, well, there's one terrible pilot. I said, it must have been a horrible accident. But I was whisked off there, I didn't have much time to think about it. And I was sitting in the classroom, and Andy Card, my Chief of Staff, who is sitting over here, walked in and said, "A second plane has hit the tower, America is under attack." And, Jordan, I wasn't sure what to think at first. You know, I grew up in a period of time where the idea of America being under attack never entered my mind -- just like your Daddy's and Mother's mind probably. And I started thinking hard in that very brief period of time about what it meant to be under attack. I knew that when I got all of the facts that we were under attack, there would be hell to pay for attacking America. (Applause.

The POTUS does not [sit] outside the classroom "waiting to go in...", he does not "wait" for anyone....they wait for him. An especially odd statement, considering that "this" president is always first through the door; there is a recent news photo of him jumping ahead of Vincente Fox, and he tried to muscle his way ahead of Clinton, throught the doorway at the Clinton Presidential library, on the day of it's dedication.

There was no "TV" that "was obviously on", in the "hallway" that Bush was not "waiting in", and there was no broadcast, at the time that he stated, that televised what he told the child at the December, 2001 town meeting, the he, Bush, could have watched to see the airliner crash into WTC1....

....and a month later, Bush repeated this impossible to believe (IMO) "story":

Quote:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0020105-3.html
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
January 5, 2002

President Holds Town Hall Forum on Economy in California 

......THE PRESIDENT:......Go ahead and yell it out. If I don't like the question, I'll just change it. (Laughter.)

Q Mr. President, I'm a Navy chaplain, serving with the Marines in 29 Palms, California. I am also honored to have you as my Commander-in-Chief.

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. (Applause.)

Q My question is very simple: How can we, as pastors, pray specifically for you and your family? (Applause.)

THE PRESIDENT: Well, first -- thank you. I have -- first of all, I believe in the power of prayer. (Applause.) And I have felt the prayers of the American people for me and my family. I have. And I want to thank all of you who have prayed. People say, well, how do you know? I say, well, I can just feel it. I can't describe it very well, but I feel comforted by the prayer.

I think the thing that -- the prayer that I would like America is to ask for is to pray for God's protection for our land and our people, to pray against -- that there's a shield of protection, so that if the evil ones try to hit us again, that we've done everything we can, physically, and that there is a spiritual shield that protects the country. (Applause.)

Do you have a question. Come on underneath. The man's got a question.

Q First of all, I'm very impressed in how you handled the situation on September 11th. (Applause.)

THE PRESIDENT: That's plenty. (Applause.) No. Thank you.

Q What was the first thing that went through your head when you heard that a plane crashed into the first building?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes. Well, I was sitting in a schoolhouse in Florida. I had gone down to tell my little brother what to do, and -- just kidding, Jeb. (Laughter.) And -- it's the mother in me. (Laughter.) Anyway, I was in the midst of learning about a reading program that works. I'm a big believer in basic education, and it starts with making sure every child learns to read. And therefore, we need to focus on the science of reading, not what may feel good or sound good when it comes to teaching children to read. (Applause.) I'm just getting a plug in for my reading initiative.

Anyway, I was sitting there, and my Chief of Staff -- well, first of all, when we walked into the classroom, I had seen this plane fly into the first building. There was a TV set on. And you know, I thought it was pilot error and I was amazed that anybody could make such a terrible mistake. And something was wrong with the plane, or -- anyway, I'm sitting there, listening to the briefing, and Andy Card came and said, "America is under attack."

And in the meantime, this teacher was going on about the curriculum, and I was thinking about what it meant for America to be under attack. It was an amazing thought. But I made up my mind that if America was under attack, we'd get them. (Applause.) I wasn't interested in lawyers, I wasn't interested in a bunch of debate. I was interested in finding out who did it and bringing them to justice. I also knew that they would try to hide, and anybody who provided haven, help, food, would be held accountable by the United States of America. (Applause.)

Anyway, it was an interesting day.......

....and VP Dick Cheney's version of what he was doing, on the morning of 9/11, televised jusr 5 days after the 9/11 attacks:

Quote:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/vicepresid...p20010916.html
Camp David, Maryland
September 16, 2001

The Vice President appears on Meet the Press with Tim Russert

......MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to the events of Tuesday. Where were you when you first learned a plane had struck the World Trade Center?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I was in my office Tuesday morning. Monday, I had been in Kentucky, and the president had been in the White House. Tuesday, our roles were sort of reversed. He was in Florida, and I was in the White House Tuesday morning. And a little before 9, my speechwriter came in. We were going to go over some speeches coming up. And my secretary called in just as we were starting to meet just before 9:00 and said an airplane had hit the World Trade Center, and that was the first one that went in. So we turned on the television and watched for a few minutes, and then actually saw the second plane hit the World Trade Center. And the--as soon as that second plane showed up, that's what triggered the thought: terrorism, that this was an attack...

MR. RUSSERT: You sensed it immediately, "This is deliberate"?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Yeah. Then I convened in my office. Condi Rice came down. Her office is right near mine there in the West Wing.

MR. RUSSERT: The national security adviser.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: National security adviser, my chief of staff, Scooter Libby, Mary Matalin, who works for me, convened in my office, and we started talking about getting the Counterterrorism Task Force up and operating. I talked with the president. I'd given word to Andy Card's staff, who is right next door, to get hold of Andy and/or the president and that I wanted to talk to him as soon as they could hook it up. This call came in, and the president knew at this point about that. We discussed a statement that he might make, and the first statement he made describing this as an act of apparent terrorism flowed out of those conversations. While I was there, over the next several minutes, watching developments on the television and as we started to get organized to figure out what to do, my Secret Service agents came in and, under these circumstances, they just move. They don't say "sir" or ask politely. They came in and said, "Sir, we have to leave immediately," and grabbed me and...

MR. RUSSERT: Literally grabbed you and moved you?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Yeah. And, you know, your feet touch the floor periodically. But they're bigger than I am, and they hoisted me up and moved me very rapidly down the hallway, down some stairs, through some doors and down some more stairs into an underground facility under the White House, and, as a matter of fact, it's a corridor, locked at both ends, and they did that because they had received a report that an airplane was headed for the White House.

MR. RUSSERT: This is Flight 77, which had left Dulles.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Which turned out to be Flight 77. It left Dulles, flown west towards Ohio, been captured by the terrorists. They turned off the transponder, which led to a later report that a plane had gone down in Ohio, but it really hadn't. Of course, then they turned back and headed back towards Washington. As best we can tell, they came initially at the White House and...

MR. RUSSERT: The plane actually circled the White House?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Didn't circle it, but was headed on a track into it. The Secret Service has an arrangement with the F.A.A. They had open lines after the World Trade Center was...

MR. RUSSERT: Tracking it by radar.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: And when it entered the danger zone and looked like it was headed for the White House was when they grabbed me and evacuated me to the basement. The plane obviously didn't hit the White House. It turned away and, we think, flew a circle and came back in and then hit the Pentagon. And that's what the radar track looks like. The result of that--once I got down into the shelter, the first thing I did--there's a secure phone there. First thing I did was pick up the telephone and call the president again, who was still down in Florida, at that point, and strongly urged him to delay his return.

MR. RUSSERT: You told him to stay away from Washington.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: I said, `Delay your return. We don't know what's going on here, but it looks like, you know, we've been targeted.'

MR. RUSSERT: Why did you make that judgment?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, it goes to--you know, sort of my basic role as vice president is to worry about presidential succession. And my job, above all other things, is to be prepared to take over if something happens to the president. But over the years from my time with President Ford, as secretary of Defense, on the Intel Committee and so forth, I've been involved in a number of programs that were aimed at ensuring presidential succession. We did a lot of planning during the Cold War, Tim, with respect to the possibility of a nuclear incident. And one of the key requirements always is to protect the presidency. It's not about George Bush or Dick Cheney. It's about the occupant in the office.

And one of the things that we did later on that day were tied directly to guaranteeing presidential succession, and that our enemies, whoever they might be, could not decapitate the federal government and leave us leaderless in a moment of crisis. That's why, for example, when we have a State of the Union speech and we've got the entire government assembled--the president, vice president, congressional leaders, Cabinet and so forth--we always leave a Cabinet member out. He's always taken to a secure location and set up there in case something should happen in the House chambers so we still have a president. .......

......VICE PRES. CHENEY: We evacuated Speaker Hastert to a secure facility, and later, the rest of the congressional leadership. I also ordered the evacuation of Cabinet members. And so we sent Tommy Thompson, Ann Veneman, Gale Norton also up to a secure facility. And in the days since, we've always maintained to say--I've spent a good deal of my time up at Camp David since the president returned to the White House just so we weren't both together in the same place so we could ensure the survival of the government.

The president was on Air Force One. We received a threat to Air Force One--came through the Secret Service...

MR. RUSSERT: A credible threat to Air Force One. You're convinced of that.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: I'm convinced of that. Now, you know, it may have been phoned in by a crank, but in the midst of what was going on, there was no way to know that. I think it was a credible threat, enough for the Secret Service to bring it to me. Once I left that immediate shelter, after I talked to the president, urged him to stay away for now, well, I went down into what's call a PEOC, the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, and there, I had Norm Mineta...

MR. RUSSERT: Secretary of Transportation.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: ...secretary of Transportation, access to the FAA. I had Condi Rice with me and several of my key staff people. We had access, secured communications with Air Force One, with the secretary of Defense over in the Pentagon. We had also the secure videoconference that ties together the White House, CIA, State, Justice, Defense--a very useful and valuable facility. We have the counterterrorism task force up on that net. And so I was in a position to be able to see all the stuff coming in, receive reports and then make decisions in terms of acting with it.

But when I arrived there within a short order, we had word the Pentagon's been hit. We had word the State Department had been bombed, that a car bomb had gone off at the State Department. Turned out not to be true, but we didn't know that at the time. We had a report that Norm had provided that there were six airplanes that might have been hijacked, and that's what we started working off of, was that list of six.

Now we could account for two of them in New York. The third one we didn't know what had happened to it. It turned out it had hit the Pentagon. But the first reports on the Pentagon attack suggested a helicopter, and then later, a private jet, and it was only after we got ahold of some eyewitnesses that we knew it was an American Airlines flight. So then we had three planes accounted for, but we still have had three outstanding.

We had reports of planes down in Ohio, turned out not to be true; down in Pennsylvania; turned out that was true. And all of that--excuse me--added with the report of a perspective attack on Air Force One itself, we'd have been absolute fools not to go into button down mode, make sure we had successors evacuated, make sure the president was safe and secure. Offutt was a good location for that purpose, and also the president...

MR. RUSSERT: In Nebraska.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: In Nebraska.....

Mr. Cheney's televised account of Sept. 16, 2001, disclosed that "The Secret Service has an arrangement with the F.A.A. They had open lines after the World Trade Center was..."....to me, this makes President Bush's account of what he was thinking and doing, in the 20 minutes between the time that he "watched" the plane hit the first tower "on TV", and when his COS, Andrew Card, whispered in his air "that America was under attack", even more incredible.

Another curiousity is that Norman Mineta, in sworn testimony, contradicted Cheney's account of when Cheney arrived at the PEOC, by at least 30 minutes:

Quote:

http://www.9-11commission.gov/archiv...2003-05-23.htm
MR. MINETA: I didn't know about the order to shoot down. I arrived at the PEOC at about 9:20 a.m. And the president was in Florida, and I believe he was on his way to Louisiana at that point when the conversation that went on between the vice president and the president and the staff that the president had with him.

MR. ROEMER: So when you arrived at 9:20, how much longer was it before you overheard the conversation between the young man and the vice president saying, "Does the order still stand?"

MR. MINETA: Probably about five or six minutes.

MR. ROEMER: So about 9:25 or 9:26. And your inference was that the vice president snapped his head around and said, "Yes, the order still stands." Why did you infer that that was a shoot-down? .......

Norman Mineta's 9/11 Commission testimony was not included in the final report:

Quote:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_Commission_Report
.......The Report did not include key testimony by secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta which describes the situation in the Presidential Emergency Operating Center with vice president Cheney as American Airlines flight 77 approached the Pentagon on 9/11/01: "There was a young man who had come in and said to the vice president, "The plane is 50 miles out. The plane is 30 miles out." And when it got down to, "The plane is 10 miles out," the young man also said to the vice president, "Do the orders still stand?" And the vice president turned and whipped his neck around and said, "Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?" Well, at the time I didn't know what all that meant. And--" Yet despite such a detailed description of the events that day, the only mention of Mineta in the Commission Report is on p. 326, that Mineta was part of a group that met with Bush at the end of September 11 to review the events of the day.[9]....

Quote:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5233007/
9/11 commission staff statement No. 17
The text as submitted to the National Commission
on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States

Updated: 10:17 a.m. ET June 17, 2004

Improvising a Homeland Defense

Staff Statement No. 17

United 93 and the Shootdown Order.......

..........There is conflicting evidence as to when the Vice President arrived in the shelter conference room. We have concluded, after reviewing all the available evidence, that the Vice President arrived in the shelter conference room shortly before 10:00, perhaps at 9:58.

............In most cases the chain of command in authorizing the use of force runs from the President to the Secretary of Defense and from the Secretary to the combatant commander. The President apparently spoke to Secretary Rumsfeld briefly sometime after 10:00, but no one can recall any content beyond a general request to alert forces. The President and the Secretary did not discuss the use of force against hijacked airliners in this conversation.

The Secretary did not become part of the chain of command for those orders to engage until he arrived in the NMCC. At 10:39, the Vice President tried to bring the Secretary up to date as both participated in the Air Threat Conference:

Vice President: There’s been at least three instances here where we’ve had reports of aircraft approaching Washington—a couple were confirmed hijack. And, pursuant to the President’s instructions I gave authorization for them to be taken out. Hello?

SecDef: Yes, I understand. Who did you give that direction to?

Vice President: It was passed from here through the operations center at the White House, from the [shelter].

SecDef: OK, let me ask the question here. Has that directive been transmitted to the aircraft?

Vice President: Yes, it has.

SecDef: So we’ve got a couple of aircraft up there that have those instructions at the present time?

Vice President: That is correct. And it’s my understanding they’ve already taken a couple of aircraft out.

SecDef: We can’t confirm that. We’re told that one aircraft is down but we do not have a pilot report that they did it.

As this exchange shows, Secretary Rumsfeld was not involved when the shoot down order was first passed on the Air Threat Conference. After the Pentagon was hit, Secretary Rumsfeld went to the parking lot to assist with rescue efforts. He arrived in the National Military Command Center shortly before 10:30. He told us he was just gaining situational awareness when he spoke with the Vice President, and that his primary concern was ensuring that the pilots had a clear understanding of their rules of engagement.

The Vice President was mistaken in his belief that shoot down authorization had been passed to the pilots flying at NORAD’s direction. By 10:45 there was, however, another set of fighters circling Washington that had entirely different rules of engagement. These fighters, part of the 113th Wing of the DC Air National Guard, launched out of Andrews Air Force Base based on information passed to them by the Secret Service. The first of the Andrews fighters was airborne at 10:38.

General Wherley—the commander of the 113th Wing—reached out to the Secret Service after hearing second hand reports that it wanted fighters airborne. A Secret Service agent had a phone in each ear, one to Wherley and one to a fellow agent at the White House, relaying instructions that the White House agent said he was getting from the Vice President. The guidance for Wherley was to send up the aircraft, with orders to protect the White House and take out any aircraft that threatens the Capitol. General Wherley translated this in military terms to “weapons free,” which means the decision to shoot rests in the cockpit, or in this case the cockpit of the lead pilot. He passed these instructions to the pilots that launched at 10:42 and afterward.

Thus, while the fighter pilots under NORAD direction who had scrambled out of Langley never received any type of engagement order, the Andrews pilots were operating under “weapons free”—a permissive rule of engagement. The President and the Vice President told us they had not been aware that fighters had been scrambled out of Andrews, at the request of the Secret Service and outside of the military chain of command.

Reflections on United 93

Had it not crashed in Pennsylvania at 10:03, we estimate that United 93 could not have reached Washington, DC any earlier than 10:13, and most probably would have arrived before 10:23. We examined the military’s ability to intercept it.

There was only one set of fighters orbiting Washington, DC during this timeframe—the Langley F-16s. They were armed and under NORAD's control.

But the Langley pilots were never briefed about the reason they were scrambled. As the lead pilot explained, "I reverted to the Russian threat…I’m thinking cruise missile threat from the sea. You know you look down and see the Pentagon burning and I thought the bastards snuck one by us. . . . [Y]ou couldn’t see any airplanes, and no one told us anything.” The pilots knew their mission was to identify and divert aircraft flying within a certain radius of Washington, but did not know that the threat came from hijacked commercial airliners.

Also, NEADS did not know where United 93 was when it first heard about the hijacking from FAA at 10:07. Presumably FAA would have provided the information, but we do not know how long it would have taken, nor how long it would have taken NEADS to find and track the target on its own equipment.

Once the target was known and identified, NEADS needed orders to pass to the pilots. Shoot down authority was first communicated to NEADS at 10:31. Given the clear attack on the United States, it is also possible—though unlikely—that NORAD commanders could have ordered the shoot down without the authorization communicated by the Vice President.

NORAD officials have maintained that they would have intercepted and shot down United 93. We are not so sure. We are sure that the nation owes a debt to the passengers of United 93. Their actions saved the lives of countless others, and may have saved either the U.S. Capitol or the White House from destruction.

The details of what happened on the morning of September 11 are complex. But the details play out a simple theme. NORAD and the FAA were unprepared for the type of attacks launched against the United States on September 11, 2001. They struggled, under difficult circumstances, to improvise a homeland defense against an unprecedented challenge they had never encountered and had never trained to meet.

Quote:

http://web.archive.org/web/200302131...moments_2.html
Sept. 11 Scramble
A Plane Hits the Pentagon; Bush Takes Flight; Others Give Orders From Bunkers

Sept. 14 —(2002) As President Bush told Americans the crash of two jets into New York's World Trade Center appeared to be the work of terrorists, the Secret Service was springing into action at the White House.

Just after 9 a.m. ET on Sept. 11, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney was in his West Wing office when two or three agents came in and told him "Sir, you have to come with us," according to David Bohrer, a White House photographer who was there.

One of the agents "put his hand on the back of my belt, grabbed me by the shoulder and sort of propelled me down the hallway," Cheney said.

They took him into an underground bunker known as PEOC, the President's Emergency Operations Center.

"It's got blast doors on each end," Cheney said. "There's a secure phone there as well as a television set."......

.........."As I was trying to find all of the principals," Rice said, "the Secret Service came in and said, 'You have to leave now for the bunker. The vice president's already there. There may be a plane headed for the White House. There are a lot of planes in the air that are not responding properly.'"

‘We Just Lost the Bogey’

Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta already was in the bunker.

"Someone came in and said, 'Mr. Vice President, there's a plane out 50 miles,'" Mineta said.

Mineta conferred with Federal Aviation Administration Deputy Chief Monte Belger.

"I said … 'Monte, what do you have?'" Mineta said. "He said, 'Well, we're watching this target on the radar, but the transponder's been turned off, so we have no identification.'"

As the plane got closer, air officials had picked up enough information to believe the unidentified plane was headed toward Washington, perhaps toward Ronald Reagan National Airport, near the Pentagon.

At 9:30 a.m. ET, at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, F-16 fighter pilots scrambled into the air 105 miles — or 12 minutes — south of Washington.

"Our supervisor picked up our line to the White House," said Danielle O'Brien, an air traffic controller at an FAA facility near Washington's Dulles Airport, "and started relaying to them the information: 'We have an unidentified, very fast-moving aircraft inbound toward your vicinity, eight miles west, seven miles west.' And it went, '6, 5, 4.'"

"Pretty soon, he said, 'Uh oh, we just lost the bogey,' meaning the target went off the screen," Mineta said. "So I said, 'Well, where is it?' And he said, 'Well, we're not really sure.'"

‘Bang, the Airplane Hits the Building’.....

David Bohrer, in the ABC quote attributed to him in the preceding Sept. 14, 2002 articles, as well as US Transportation Secretary, Norman Mineta, both place Cheney's evacuation from the White House to the PEOC, at least 30 minutes before the time that Cheney, and the 9/11 Commission report, say that it happened:

Quote:

.........MR. MINETA: I didn't know about the order to shoot down. I arrived at the PEOC at about 9:20 a.m. And the president was in Florida, and I believe he was on his way to Louisiana at that point when the conversation that went on between the vice president and the president and the staff that the president had with him.

MR. ROEMER: So when you arrived at 9:20, how much longer was it before you overheard the conversation between the young man and the vice president saying, "Does the order still stand?"

MR. MINETA: Probably about five or six minutes.

MR. ROEMER: So about 9:25 or 9:26. And your inference was that the vice president snapped his head around and said, "Yes, the order still stands." Why did you infer that that was a shoot-down? ..........

So....what "gives", here? The 9/11 Commission investigated the 9/11 attacks, and issued it's report. Why all the confusion, and statements from "the leaders" that contradict "reality" and other sworn testimony of government officials. Would it not be a priority of our "leadership" to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. Why would they want to leave contradictions "on the table", that could predictably, add fuel to "conspiracy theories" .

Five years later, why doesn't the president and the vice-president do the brief, and probably nearly effortless....."work" of laying the ambiguities in their statements and actions on 9/11, to rest.....once and for all, by holding a joint news conference, with Mr. Runsfeld and Norman Mineta, to answer our questions, and clear our confusion....that they've caused....up...once and for all.....for the historical record, and to confirm that our trust, in them.... is warranted!

Willravel · 09-10-2006, 02:38 PM

Hopefully no one who has even a passing interest in politics takes the 9/11 report seriously. Whether liberal or conservative, whether 9/11 conspiracy theorist or not, whether a Bush supporter or not, we can all see that the comission was a joke in the worst possible way. It was theatre put on for the shallow entertainment of the masses to satiate a well wetted apetite for justice; or more accurately vengence. That hunger for justice remains because their show was so poorly put together (perhaps they should have consulted with J.J. Abrahms before submitting the final script). The taste for vengence has been replaced by apathy due to ongoing war and fear. It really seemed on the surface to be a perfect plan, but the holes are so large and numerous that when reading through the damned report, I fear falling through it into nothingness.

Historical records have suffered. While a multitude of books seeking the truth have come out, I've read more than a few social studies text books lately that give horrible misinformation for our children to ignore in overcrowded classrooms. While a few of our children might hold tight to the little information that we have (maybe host should publish his memoirs sooner then later), the masses will dully think back to the day when Iraq blew up the twin towers and was the source of global terrorism, and how we lost tens of thousands of troops trying to win back our dignity. They will think back to when we destroyed Iran for developing nuclear weapons. When we stoped the drug regeims in Venesuela by burning the country to the ground. How we brought democracy to so many countries, only to have us take it away. Stories from uncles and fathers that serve in the Second Gulf War will be the foundation of everything from entertaining movies to alcoholism and PTSD.

This is our legacy.

politicophile · 09-10-2006, 03:07 PM

Sorry Will, I didn't get the memo on that one. Why was the 9/11 commission a joke?

Willravel · 09-10-2006, 03:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by politicophile

Sorry Will, I didn't get the memo on that one. Why was the 9/11 commission a joke?

I like your avatar.

1) MASSIVE bias. Philip Zelikow was appointed by Bush, serving on his Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, spent at least 3 years on King George I's National Security Council, and co-wrote a book with Condaleeeeeza (I can never spell her name right). Thomas Kean served on the the Board of Directors of the National Endowment for Democracy, a long-time conduit of CIA covert operations internationally. Kean has links to Saudi Arabian investors who supported George W. and Osama bin Laden (such as Khalid bin Mahfouz). Kean is or was on the boards of Pepsi Bottling, Amerada Hess, UnitedHealth Group, CIT Group and Aramark. Freddy Fielding worked for several Bush fund raisers, and is a lobiest for Spirit and United Airlines. Slade Gorton (arch enemy to the Teen Titans) has many close ties to Boeing - the producers of the planes supposedly used on 9/11 - and his legal firm represents several major airlines, such as Delta. James Thompson is the HEAD of a firm that now lobbies for American Airlines, and has represented United. Richard Ben-Veniste represents Boing and United Airlines. Maxy "Dollar Sign" Cleland, the former US Senator, has recieved over $300,000 from the airline industry - and he resigned from the commission. Lee Hamilton is on numerous advisory boards, such as CIA, the Bush Homeland Security Advisory Council, and the US Army. Tim Roemer represents Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Jamie Gorelick's firm HAS AGREED TO REPRESENT PRINCE MOHOMMED AL FAISAL IN THE SUIT BY THE 9/11 FAMILIES!!! Al Faisel is widely accepted as being connected to the financing for 9/11.

2) White House bullshit. Neither Bush nor Cheney had to take an oath before restifying, they JOINTLY testified, the testimony cannot be recorded or transcribed (and no one would be in the room while they gave testimony?). Afterwards, Cheney went on a duck hunting trip and accedentally shot the Constitution. He managed to hit several amendments, our nations dignity, and our international reputation.

3) Highly suspicous Pentagon info. For well voer 2 years following the attacks, officials from NORAD and the FAA provided inaccurate information about the response to the hijackings in testimony and media appearances. Authorities said that the US Air defences (if you can call them that) had reacted quickly! They were so fast that they flew right past the 747 that was about to hit the Pentagon. They even said that the jets had been scrambled in response to the hijackings and they were ready to shoot down flight 93 (the real Flight 93, not the one from the movie) if it threatened Washington D.C. Of course the commission found some tapes from NORAD and other evidence that the military never had any of the hijacked airliners in its sights and at one point chased a phantom aircraft -- American Airlines Flight 11 -- long after it had crashed into the World Trade Center. Yozwer!! Even though the commission really tried with the FAA and NORAD, basically all the information they got is suspect, and is generaly considered to be ridiculous and stupid (not just by me).

4) The budget of The Blair Witch Project. The Challenger disaster investigation got about $50,000,000. 7 people died. IT WAS REALLY SAD, of course, but 7 people died. The 9/11 Commission was promised $3,000,000 by King George the Dubbuyuh. The Commission had to ask for an additional $8,000,000.

I have more, but let me know if these work for you.

host · 09-10-2006, 04:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by politicophile

Sorry Will, I didn't get the memo on that one. Why was the 9/11 commission a joke?

Okay....??? Why do you think that the 9/11 commission "left out" the tesitmony of a "key" official....Norman Mineta, in a report about a hijacking by terrorists of important transportation assets, that brought the air tranpsortation system to a complete halt, (except for the white house arranged flights of Saudi nationals), and accelerated the bankruptcies, that followed....in less than five years, of all of the largest US passenger airline companies....Mineta's sworn testimony to the committee was well publicized in the news, when he appeared before that commission and gave it.

Why did the commission accept the demands of the POTUS and the VP to limit it's questioning of both of them to a joint, private appearance, before only a select few members of the entire commission, that was not conducted while they were sworn to tell the truth.

Why did the commission not examine, in depth, and report on President Bush's two ridiculous statements about "watching the first plane, on TV", crashing into WTC1, before Bush went into an elementary school classroom, to sit for at least 22 minutes, including seven minutes after Andrew Card whispered to him. "on camera" that a second airliner had crashed into WTC2, at a bout 9:15 am. ? Both of Bush's statements about what he was doing and thinking, were lifted from and linked to whitehouse gov web pages.

Cheney's statement, to Tim Russert, on Sept. 16, 2001, that "The Secret Service has an arrangement with the F.A.A. They had open lines after the World Trade Center was...", lifted and linked from the whitehouse gov site, as well, makes a convincing case that Bush knew before he left his motorcade, to go into the Sarasota elementary school, that a large plane had crashed into WTC1, since it happened at 8:48 am, and that there were FAA reports received from Boston TRACON, as early as 8:20 am, that a possible airliner hijacking was being investigated.

The 9/11 Commission left all of these contradictions, and a close examination of Bush and Cheney's behavior that morning, versus their public statements, and the contradictory statement of Mineta and the white house photographer, David Bohrer, and the testimony of Richard Clark as to the timeline of Cheney's arrival and actions in the PEOC, "open". Mineta's testimony was omitted from the final report, and Cheney's disclosure about what information chanel the secret service had access to...and when, contradicted what Bush did.....spend 20 plus minutes in a grade school classroom versus, what he said, and said that he thought and did.

At the least, why was there no commission examination of what the secret service knew, before and during the time Bush was in that classroom, and until he left Sarasota on AF1, when the SS knew it, what it told Bush about the attack on the WTC and the airline hijackings, and when it found out, and when and what it told Bush. Why was Bush kept for more than 30 minutes, after the first airliner crash, in a school, surrounded by young students and their teachers? The commission should have examined and reported on what else Bush was told between 8:20 am and 9:50 am on 9/11, who told him, when they told him, and who told them, and when....before the told Bush, or a member of his entourage.

Was there ever a time when you were curious about any of these things, these "gaps" in the commission's investigating, and in it's report, politicophile.....or are you incurious about Bush's peculiar statements, and his behavior at the school, during the attacks and shortly afterward?

I have always been told, that in any criminal investigation, you "follow the money". What then, can we make of this, from the 9/11 commission report?

Quote:

http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Ch5.htm

......To date, the U.S. government has not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9/11 attacks. Ultimately the question is of little practical significance. Al Qaeda had many avenues of funding. If a particular funding source had dried up, al Qaeda could have easily tapped a different source or diverted funds from another project to fund an operation that cost $400,000-$500,000 over nearly two years.

The Funding of the 9/11 Plot
As noted above, the 9/11 plotters spent somewhere between $400,000 and $500,000 to plan and conduct their attack.......

******On edit, I have to add the documentation of these amazing contradictions as to what we have been told:*****************

Quote:

http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/speeches/speech041902.htm
Robert S. Mueller, III, Director, FBI
Commonwealth Club of California
San Francisco, CA
April 19, 2002

........The hijackers also left no paper trail. In our investigation, we have not uncovered a single piece of paper – either here in the U.S. or in the treasure trove of information that has turned up in Afghanistan and elsewhere – that mentioned any aspect of the September 11th plot. The hijackers had no computers, no laptops, no storage media of any kind. They used hundreds of different pay phones and cell phones, often with prepaid calling cards that are extremely difficult to trace. And they made sure that all the money sent to them to fund their attacks was wired in small amounts to avoid detection............

Mueller seems to be contradicted in the next two news excerpts:

Quote:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,34711,00.html
Bin Laden Goes 'No-Tech' to Thwart U.S. Intelligence Agents
Thursday, September 20, 2001
Associated Press

.......In March 2000, the CIA has warned about terrorist organizations using secure Internet communications. CIA Director George Tenet told the Senate then that several terrorist groups, including bin Laden's al-Qaida, "are using computerized files, e-mail and encryption to support their operations."

"Terrorists also are embracing the opportunities offered by recent leaps in information technology," Tenet said. .......

Quote:

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstra...fAl%20Qaeda%20
JAMES RISEN and DAVID JOHNSTON
WASHINGTON, March 5
A Nation Challenged: The Terrorist
New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Mar 6, 2002. pg. A.1
Newly detected Internet traffic among Al Qaeda followers, including intercepted e-mail messages, indicates that elements of the terror network may be trying to regroup in remote sanctuaries in Pakistan near the Afghan border, government officials say.

United States officials said they had discovered the existence of new Web sites and Internet communications that appeared to be part of a concerted Al Qaeda effort to reconstitute the group and re-establish communications after the war in Afghanistan.

Senior counterterrorism officials said that Al Qaeda's effort to rebuild itself outside Afghanistan appeared to rely heavily on the Internet for communications among highly mobile operatives, who often check their messages in public Internet cafes around the world, making them difficult to track.

American officials said the new communications traffic was a serious concern because they feared that Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden's network, could use its sophisticated Internet ability to launch new terror attacks against the United States.

At least some of the cyberspace activity can be traced back to Pakistan, said a senior law enforcement official.

Some of the activity appeared to come from villages in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan, along the Afghan border, a remote and sometimes lawless region......

......United States intelligence has also tracked e-mail traffic that counterterrorism analysts said they believed showed efforts to re-establish communications between some members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan and operatives around the world. Some of the e-mail can be traced to border regions of Pakistan, where some Al Qaeda members may be operating under the protection of local tribal leaders.......

.......In the investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks, investigators found that the hijackers communicated with each other in hundreds of e-mail messages often sent from public places like Kinko's or public libraries.

So far, there is no sign of Mr. bin Laden or other top Al Qaeda leaders communicating with their followers........

You asked a question, policticophile, that shows that you are not incurious,
so I'll ask you.....doesn't the last example, by itself, with icing on the cake of incredulity, provided by my other points and examples, defend the idea that some harbor, that the 9/11 commission's report was "a joke"? The terms that it granted in exchange for the right for some of it's members the privelege of a Q&A in a brief, joint appearance by Bush and Cheney, where no notes taken by the few commission members allowed to attend, could leave the room without white house approval, speaks in support of willravel's statement, as the "final report" itself, does, as well........

politicophile · 09-10-2006, 04:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Host

Why do you think that the 9/11 commission "left out" the tesitmony of a "key" official....Norman Mineta...?

I imagine that they either correctly decided that the testimony by Mineta was not worth including in the report or they made an error and left out relevant information from the report. Hard to say, really. Do you have reason to believe that Minetas comments were important and should have been included?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Host

Why did the commission accept the demands of the POTUS and the VP to limit it's questioning of both of them to a joint, private appearance, before only a select few members of the entire commission, that was not conducted while they were sworn to tell the truth.

An error on the commission's part, clearly. There is no good reason, from my perspective, why the President should have received this special treatment. I share your disapproval of this presidential exemption from any meaningful testimony, but remain unconvinced that it is a sign of a vast 9/11 conspiracy involving the President and members of the 9/11 commission, as you seem to be implying.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Host

Why did the commission not examine, in depth, and report on President Bush's two ridiculous statements about "watching the first plane, on TV", crashing into WTC1, before Bush went into an elementary school classroom, to sit for at least 22 minutes, including seven minutes after Andrew Card whispered to him. "on camera" that a second airliner had crashed into WTC2, at a bout 9:15 am. ? Both of Bush's statements about what he was doing and thinking, were lifted from and linked to whitehouse gov web pages.

Another clear instance of the President failing to act as a responsible commander-in-chief. There is no justification for his slow reaction to the news. That said, what would have been the purpose of including this in the report? "This commission has decided that the President's reaction time was at least six minutes and thirty seconds slower than it should have been. Had he reacted faster, the terrorist attacks would not have been affected in any way. But damn, seven minutes is a long time." Sure, they could have noted the President's improper hesitation, but I fail to see how this is relevant to an investigation of the attacks themselves.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Host

Cheney's statement, to Tim Russert, on Sept. 16, 2001, that "The Secret Service has an arrangement with the F.A.A. They had open lines after the World Trade Center was...", lifted and linked from the whitehouse gov site, as well, makes a convincing case that Bush knew before he left his motorcade, to go into the Sarasota elementary school, that a large plane had crashed into WTC1, since it happened at 8:48 am, and that there were FAA reports received from Boston TRACON, as early as 8:20 am, that a possible airliner hijacking was being investigated.

The President was informed that there had been a severe plane crash. His chosen response was to continue with his day as planned. What do you think would have been a more appropriate reaction? Should he have immediately dropped everything to hold a press conference about an isolated plane crash? My sources say no.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Host

Was there ever a time when you were curious about any of these things, these "gaps" in the commission's investigating, and in it's report, politicophile.....or are you incurious about Bush's peculiar statements, and his behavior at the school, during the attacks and shortly afterward?

As I said above, there were mistakes made both by the commission and by the President himself. This is extremely evident to anyone who has studied the facts. What I do not see from this mistakes, however, is a pattern that leads me to believe there was a coverup undertaken that the commission was careful not to disturb.

I see errors, ommissions, and inappropriate conduct. I do not see conspiracy, Presidential criminality, or willful deception. How about you?

Willravel · 09-10-2006, 05:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by politicophile

I see errors, ommissions, and inappropriate conduct. I do not see conspiracy, Presidential criminality, or willful deception. How about you?

Errors don't really bring to mind conspiracies. Omissions and innapropriate conduct sure do. Omissions, specifically the ones from the FAA and NORAD, and also the editing out of the money trail....unacceptable.

Also, what about the President and Vice President not being sworn to tell the truth? Doesn't that suggest willful deception (and thus Presdential criminality, and thus some sort of conspiracy)?

roachboy · 09-10-2006, 06:17 PM

i have not devoted particular attention to this set of problems...i dunno why...but anyway, i have thought that the entire organization that carried out the trade center attacks was on the planes. nothing requires any bigger group be involved, does it? but this is purely because it makes sense logically to me...if the organization came into being to do the attacks or something like it--was made up of people who maybe hadn't carried out an action, say---there'd be no hope of stopping them because (unless somebody really fucked up) there'd be nothing in particular to look for.
whence the idea that the u.s. has been in a war on ghosts for 5 years.

is this still a possibility, given what folk understand to have happened?

ratbastid · 09-10-2006, 06:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by politicophile

I share your disapproval of this presidential exemption from any meaningful testimony, but remain unconvinced that it is a sign of a vast 9/11 conspiracy involving the President and members of the 9/11 commission, as you seem to be implying.

There are few phrases more dangerous than "as you seem to be implying." He said the 9/11 Commission was a joke. He didn't say anything about vast conspiracies.

Putting outrageous statements in others' mouths is an Ann Coulteresque strategy that is as ugly and thuggish as it is ineffective. I recommend you refrain.

politicophile · 09-10-2006, 07:18 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ratbastid

There are few phrases more dangerous than "as you seem to be implying." He said the 9/11 Commission was a joke. He didn't say anything about vast conspiracies.

Putting outrageous statements in others' mouths is an Ann Coulteresque strategy that is as ugly and thuggish as it is ineffective. I recommend you refrain.

You must have skipped over post #4. Also look at #7. Will said several things in #4 that implied he believed there was some sort of 9/11 conspiracy. I stated in no uncertain terms that I thought he was implying such a conspiracy and he responded with #7. Isn't the entire point of Host's thread to say that the numbers don't add up, that some pieces of the puzzle are being intentionally hidden, that there is a *gasp* conspiracy trying to prevent a comprehensive report of 9/11 from ever being created?

My Ann Coulter porn must be distracting me from the content of the thread, 'cause I thought I was squarely in the middle of "We-need-to-find-out-what Bush-actually-knew-on-9/11-and-when-he-knew-it" Land. Talk dirty to me, Ann!

Willravel · 09-10-2006, 07:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by politicophile

You must have skipped over post #4. Also look at #7. Will said several things in #4 that implied he believed there was some sort of 9/11 conspiracy. I stated in no uncertain terms that I thought he was implying such a conspiracy and he responded with #7. Isn't the entire point of Host's thread to say that the numbers don't add up, that some pieces of the puzzle are being intentionally hidden, that there is a *gasp* conspiracy trying to prevent a comprehensive report of 9/11 from ever being created?

My Ann Coulter porn must be distracting me from the content of the thread, 'cause I thought I was squarely in the middle of "We-need-to-find-out-what Bush-actually-knew-on-9/11-and-when-he-knew-it" Land. Talk dirty to me, Ann!

I'm beginning to think we should stop using the word conspiracy, because it seems that some people equate the word conspiracy with the definition "untrue thing...". Conspiracies are real, and they happen every day. Every time you buy gas, every time you buy a Big Mac, you are supporting companies involved in conspiracies. They are commonplace, and have nothing to do with anal probing, mind reading aliens. If the president found out that a money trail from 9/11 lead right back to some of his buddies in Saudi Arabia, do you think he'd be shouting it from the rooftops?

Politicophile, I posted facts. Host posted facts. Do you have any disagreement over the facts? Do you think the 9/11 Commission investigation was a joke? Or do you take their corrupt, limited, and vague findings as being all that's necessary?

Ch'i · 09-10-2006, 08:08 PM

You know, if they're going to lie they should at least get there stories strait.

Quote:

Originally Posted by politicophile
...that some pieces of the puzzle are being intentionally hidden, that there is a *gasp* conspiracy trying to prevent a comprehensive report of 9/11 from ever being created?

I'm inclined to agree with willravel politicophile. Host stated facts, as did willravel. Throwing around "gasps" and conspiracy the way you are seems to me like an attempt to avoid confronting the facts that have already been set before you. Definition of conspiracy: Conspiracy: A secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful. Just because the term may have gained a typical interpretation doesn't make it incredible. Its gained this negative connotation because it is normally placed in the light you currently see it in by those who attempt to refute the allogations. I'm not saying every conspiracy has been correct, mearly stating that you should not be so closed minded to its actual definition.

Dilbert1234567 · 09-10-2006, 08:19 PM

Seriously, cover ups don’t work, someone always talks, look at Watergate, there were very few people involved in that one, and you would need several hundred, if not thousands of people to orchestrate the 9/11 conspiracy, some one would have talked.

Ch'i · 09-10-2006, 08:22 PM

Quote:

some one would have talked.

So your saying that because they haven't slipped up, which they have, that proves there is no cover up?

ASU2003 · 09-10-2006, 08:32 PM

And if someone does speak out, unless they have actual proof (like video tape confessions), no one will listen to them and they will be thought to be just another conspiracy theorist.

I could be paid off for the right price. Make it look like I won the lottery for $10 million or so. And I would never talk about my involvement in that project again. But, they might have me located in WTC #7, and the dead don't talk.

Willravel · 09-10-2006, 08:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dilbert1234567

Seriously, cover ups don’t work, someone always talks, look at Watergate, there were very few people involved in that one, and you would need several hundred, if not thousands of people to orchestrate the 9/11 conspiracy, some one would have talked.

Whoa, whoa, I was talking about the 9/11 Commission Report and the report alone. Everything I stated above is backable by evidence. I'm not talking about collapsing buildings in here. We can save that for the other thread.

And seriously, I can name in 5 seconds 5 conspiracies that you may not be aware of and I can prove they exist (later). Ready?

1) The assasination of Julius Caesar.
2) The Dreyfus Affair.
3) Panama.
4) The Suez Crisis.
5) Iran Contra.

You'll just have to trust that took 5 seconds, but those are REAL conspiracies, some of the remained covered up for generations.

Sun Tzu · 09-10-2006, 09:09 PM

While questionable scenarios happened before, the public’s acceptance or general complacent mindset on the Warren Commission's conclusion set the trend for things to come.

host · 09-10-2006, 09:13 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

i have not devoted particular attention to this set of problems...i dunno why...but anyway, i have thought that the entire organization that carried out the trade center attacks was on the planes.....

......is this still a possibility, given what folk understand to have happened?

Yes, of course it is "still possible"....but it is ridiculously unfair to the American people, and especially to the victims of 9/11 and their survivors, that president Bush, VP Cheney, other federal government officials and military officers, and the members of the 9/11 Commission, could not have, at the very least, learned the lesson of history well enough, to avoid what we can observe after only five years....on....is the legacy of their speech, actions, decisions, and determinations, not so much during the historic, watershed event, but...alarmingly....afterwards. Attribute it to ego or pride, at the least, that none of them resigned, if they could not make the tough decision to be frank with us, or, in the case of the 9/11 Commission members, or say....in the circumstances of Norman Mineta....resign...rather than be part of another
"probe", like the one 40 years ago, that is "too full of holes. It's sad, frustrating, and completely avoidable, IMO, that this had to happen, this time, too...or it's a criminal cover up and a conspiracy, on some level.

Quote:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/...le584668.shtml
40 Years Later: Who Killed JFK?
NEW YORK, Nov. 21, 2003(CBS) This story was written by CBSNews.com's Jarrett Murphy
Saturday is the 40th anniversary of the death of President Kennedy and the 40th birthday of the greatest whodunit in American history — the genesis of an unrelenting debate over the motive of the president's killer.

Or killers.

Indeed, the notion that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in killing the president might be the ultimate "conspiracy theory" because it is one that most Americans believe. A 1998 CBS News poll found that only 10 percent of respondents felt Oswald acted alone. Seventy-four percent believed there was a cover-up. Recent polls suggest that this is still the way Americans feel.

Speculation over "what really happened" in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963 is a national institution. Hundreds of books, films, television specials and websites have sifted through the minutiae of assassination evidence, suspicion and intrigue. Words like "magic bullet" and "grassy knoll" are part of the vernacular. Theorists have fingered suspects from the Mafia to the Cubans to the CIA to Lyndon Johnson and the Federal Reserve.

According to longtime Clinton aide Webster Hubbell's memoir, President Clinton told his trusted ally and Justice Department appointee there were two things he wanted found out: whether there were UFOs, and who killed JFK. In the past year, U.S. newspapers have mentioned Oswald 760 times — more than twice as frequently as either Sirhan Sirhan or James Earl Ray, the men who murdered Sen. Robert Kennedy and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., respectively.

As fascinating as the debate over who killed the president is another question: Why does the shooting 40 years ago still captivate?

James Fetzer, a professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota (Duluth) who claims proof of a conspiracy, believes the killing of Mr. Kennedy still interests Americans — in part — because of the glamour and mystique projected by the president and first lady.

A more important reason, he said, is that the story told by the Warren Commission — the official government probe of the president's killing — was simply too full of holes.......

Maybe it's just me.....I was a 10 year old, sixth grader, sitting in music class, when the school principal announced the news over the school intercom, that Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. That weekend, our b & w TV was not working, and I missed the live telecast of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Oswald.

This time.....on 9/11....I was just 80 blocks away, and the first airliner flew just a few blocks west of where I was standing, 18 floors up, on WEA, near the Hudson River.....probably less than a minute before it plowed into WTC1.

I sat and watched the TV coverage, over several days. I marveled at how contradictory and inaccurate the "live" and "near live", news reports of live victim recoveries, that I was watching on TV, turned out to be. I watched a telecast of a small group of injured firemen, being led into St. Vincent's hospital, after their reported "rescue" from a buried NYFD battalion commander's GMC suburban, where they were "discovered" and then dug out and rescued from the vehicle, buried under debris at ground zero....for two days. Hours later, the report was revised...the firemen in the video were rescuers who had fallen through a void in the ruins, and were pulled out to safety by fellow rescuers.

Here, in the home of all of the HQ's and broadcast centers of the major US news media, they had the most advanced equipment and communications, a vast pool of reporters and support staff, and they couldn't get a story taking place on their doorstep, right the first time....it made me wonder, since then, how accurate any initial reports are from foreign correspondents or in any "war time" news coverage.

In early november, 2001, I had an opportunity to move to an apartment located just 3 blocks from ground zero, with a close view of the site from the roof of the apartment building. I lived there for three months, and I wondered, on Christmas day, 2001, as I walked past the site, why they were still working 24 hours per day...even on Christmas, to remove the debris and recover the human remains at the site....the huge Weeks Marine crane dumping debris into the barges at the pier on the left side of this May, 2001
photo. WTC1 is in this photo, 3 blocks to the soutwest.
Pier 25 is below the yellow brick building (Stuyvesant High School).

I lived in the dark building, in the middle right of the photo, at the stern of the boat. From my living room window, I watched the WTC debris filled barges "tugged" away to Fresh Kills, Staten Island:
<img src="http://www.wirednewyork.com/parks/battery_park/images/battery_park_woolworth_20may.jpg">

Quote:

http://www.stuypa.org/environment/stuyinpress.htm
.........From NY Times 13 September 2001:

A boy at Stuyvesant High School watched from a window of the school library as people fell or jumped to their deaths from the burning twin towers a few blocks south. A classmate standing next to him crossed himself every time a body catapulted into empty air. And the boy, who is Jewish, wished that he could do something, if only to make such symbolic gestures himself. �

Yesterday, parents across the country were struggling to help their children make sense of an act that was beyond the experience of most adults, let alone children. But the children most traumatized were probably those at schools like Public School 234 and Stuyvesant, just a few blocks north of the World Trade Center�.

..., the student at Stuyvesant who watched the bodies fall and wished he could cross himself, went to Central Park with friends yesterday to try to forget. "These children have images in their brains that are pretty intense," his mother, Atina, said. "You wonder, what are the consequences?"

In OCt., 2001, before I moved there, I heard an account of 9/11 morning at Stuyvesant High, from the father of a student. The father was the brother of my firend, who alerted me to the opportunity to sublet that apartment.
I think that all of us, especially the students at Stuyvesant High who watched bodies falling from the towers, and then ran for their own lives, out of their school and through the debris clouds of the collapsing towers are owed an honest explanation. The evidence indicates strongly, that we haven't gotten one.

Quote:

Originally Posted by politicophile

I imagine that they either correctly decided that the testimony by Mineta was not worth including in the report or they made an error and left out relevant information from the report. Hard to say, really. Do you have reason to believe that Minetas comments were important and should have been included?

An error on the commission's part, clearly. There is no good reason, from my perspective, why the President should have received this special treatment. I share your disapproval of this presidential exemption from any meaningful testimony, but remain unconvinced that it is a sign of a vast 9/11 conspiracy involving the President and members of the 9/11 commission, as you seem to be implying.

Another clear instance of the President failing to act as a responsible commander-in-chief. There is no justification for his slow reaction to the news. That said, what would have been the purpose of including this in the report? "This commission has decided that the President's reaction time was at least six minutes and thirty seconds slower than it should have been. Had he reacted faster, the terrorist attacks would not have been affected in any way. But damn, seven minutes is a long time." Sure, they could have noted the President's improper hesitation, but I fail to see how this is relevant to an investigation of the attacks themselves.

The President was informed that there had been a severe plane crash. His chosen response was to continue with his day as planned. What do you think would have been a more appropriate reaction? Should he have immediately dropped everything to hold a press conference about an isolated plane crash? My sources say no.

As I said above, there were mistakes made both by the commission and by the President himself. This is extremely evident to anyone who has studied the facts. What I do not see from this mistakes, however, is a pattern that leads me to believe there was a coverup undertaken that the commission was careful not to disturb.

I see errors, ommissions, and inappropriate conduct. I do not see conspiracy, Presidential criminality, or willful deception. How about you?

I see at the least, willful deception.....why did the president go into the elemenrary school....?

Quote:

http://www.911timeline.net/
.......15) 8:20 a.m.: American Airlines Flight 77 a Boeing 757-223 with a maximum capacity of 200 passengers and 11,489 gallons of fuel, lifts off from Dulles International Airport about 30 miles west of Washington D.C. and the Pentagon, bound for Los Angeles International Airport in Los Angeles, California. Take-off was scheduled for 8:01. There are supposed to be 64 victims on board, yet when you add up the official death manifest list that was published on CNN.com, there are only 56 victims.

16) 8:21 a.m.: Betty Ong, a flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11, calls Vanessa Minter at American Airlines reservations from the seatback phone. "She said two flight attendants had been stabbed, one was on oxygen," said the manager on duty. "A passenger had his throat slashed and looked dead and they had gotten into the cockpit." She identifies the seats of the hijackers and confirms that the plane is descending.

17) 8:22 a.m.: Amy Sweeney another flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11, calls American Airlines ground manager Michael Woodward and speaks calmly to him until the plane crashes.

18) 8:24:38 a.m.: The pilot of American Airlines Flight 11, John Ogonowski, or one of the hijackers activates the talk-back button, enabling Boston air traffic controllers to hear a hijacker say to the passengers: "We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you will be OK. We are returning to the airport. Nobody move." Apparently, one of the hijackers confused the aircraft's radio with its public-address system. Air traffic control responds, "Who's trying to call me?"

19) 8:24:57 a.m. from American Airlines Flight 11, "Everything will be OK. If you try to make any moves, you'll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet."

20) 8:25 a.m.: Boston air traffic control notified several air traffic control centers that a hijack is in progress with American Airlines Flight 11. Boston air traffic control first lost communication with American Airlines Flight 11 more than 11 minutes ago. What took them so long to start to implement procedure? Why didn’t they also notify North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) at this time? ........

.....21) 8:26 a.m.: American Airlines Flight 11 is heading westnorthwest, its location is between Albany and Lake George, New York, when it suddenly makes a 100 degree turn to the south and starts heading directly toward New York City. American Airlines Flight 11 finds the Hudson River and follows it all the way south till it impacts the north side of the North Tower of the WTC.

Almost 40 miles north of the WTC on the Hudson River is by far the number one terrorist target in the United States, Indian Point and its 3 nuclear power stations, 2 of which are online. These 3 nuclear stations have accumulated 65 years worth of stockpiled highly radioactive waste. Indian Point is only 24 miles north of the New York City border. It is surrounded by the densest concentration of population in the United States, the northeast corridor. Why did American Airlines Flight 11 fly directly over the number one terrorist target in the United States, Indian Point nuclear power stations, and not hit it? (See 8:39 a.m. # 28)

22) 8:32 a.m.: Bush’s motorcade leaves The Colony Beach and Tennis Resort on Longboat Key, Florida for Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota.

23) 8:33:59 a.m.: Another transmission from American Airlines Flight 11, "Nobody move please. We are going back to the airport. Don't try to make any stupid moves."

24) 8:36 a.m.: Flight attendant Betty Ong on American Airlines Flight 11 reports that the plane tilts all the way on one side and then becomes horizontal again. Flight attendant Amy Sweeney also reports on her phone that the plane has begun a rapid descent.

25) 8:36 a.m.: A NORAD spokesman, Major Mike Snyder, has been reported to have said, that the FAA notified NORAD of a hijacked aircraft, American Airlines Flight 11, about 10 minutes before it impacted into the World Trade Center.

http://www.attackonamerica.net/didhi...airdefense.htm

26) 8:37 a.m.: Flight controllers ask the United Airlines Flight 175 pilots to look for the lost American Airlines Flight 11, about 10 miles to the south. They respond that they can see it. They are told to keep away from it. This incident is not included in The New York Times flight controller transcript. Why?

27) 8:38 a.m.: Boston air traffic center notifies NORAD that American Airlines Flight 11 has been hijacked.

28) 8:39 a.m. American Airlines Flight 11 flies directly over the number one terrorist target in the United States, Indian Point nuclear power stations. Indian Point has 3 nuclear power stations (1 is offline and the other 2 have been online since 1973 and 1976), which are only 24 miles north of New York City. .........

........29) 8:40 a.m. Nasty and Duff are the code names of the two F-15 pilots from the 102nd Fighter Wing of the Otis Air National Guard Base in Falmouth, Massachusetts who would scramble after United Airlines Flight 175. Nasty says that at this time, a colleague tells him that a flight out of Boston has been hijacked, and to be on alert. They put on their flight gear and get ready.

30) 8:40 a.m.: The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) notifies NORAD that American Airlines Flight 11 has been hijacked. Even NORAD officially admitted that the FAA told them about the hijacking of American Airlines Flight 11 at 8:40.

NORAD Press Release: http://StandDown.net/NORADSeptember1...essRelease.htm

AP Article On NORAD PR: http://www.AttackOnAmerica.net/8MinutesAway.htm

31) 8:41:32 a.m.: United Airlines Flight 175 last communication with the New York air traffic control: We figured we'd wait to go to your center. We heard a suspicious transmission on our departure from BOS [Boston] sounds like someone keyed the mike and said everyone stay in your seats.

32) 8:42 a.m.: United Airlines Flight 93 a Boeing 757-222 with a maximum capacity of 200 passengers and 11,489 gallons of fuel, lifts off from Newark International Airport in Newark, New Jersey bound for San Francisco International Airport, San Francisco, California. Take-off was scheduled for 8:01. There are supposed to be 44 victims on board, yet when you add up the official death manifest list that was published on CNN.com, there are only 33 victims.

33) 8:42 a.m.: An air traffic controller says of United Airlines Flight 175, looks like he's heading southbound but there's no transponder no nothing and no one's talking to him.

34) 8:43 a.m.: The FAA notifies NORAD that United Airlines Flight 175 has been hijacked. NORAD has officially admitted that the FAA told them about the hijacking of United Airlines Flight 175 at 8:43.

35) 8:44 a.m.: Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, talking about terrorism at the Pentagon says, "Let me tell you, I’ve been around the block a few times. There will be another event."He then repeats it for emphasis, there will be another event."

36) 8:46 a.m.: NORAD orders the 102nd Fighter Wing of the Otis Air National Guard Base in Falmouth, Massachusetts to scramble two of their F-15 fighters. This is from the 102nd Fighter Wing's mission statement of September 11, 2001. "Our aircraft and their crews are on continuous 24-hour, 365-day alert to guard our skies. The 102nd Fighter Wing's area of responsibility includes over 500,000 square miles, 90 million people, and the major industrial centers of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C."

NORAD, by their own account, held on to this most vital information of these two hijacking for at least 6 minutes before ordering Otis to scramble. NORAD may have held on to the vital information of American Airlines Flight 11 for perhaps 8 minutes, maybe 10 minutes (see 8:36 a.m. # 25 statement by NORAD spokesman, Major Mike Snyder), possibly up to 26 minutes (see 8:20 a.m. # 14 American Airlines Flight 11 transponder signal stopped transmitting its IFF beacon signal) and let us not forget that the last transmission of American Airlines Flight 11 with Boston air traffic control occurred at 8:13:31, so maybe NORAD had over 32 minutes before they notified Otis to scramble their two F-15’s.

How could NORAD possibly hold on to the 8:40 information of the American Airlines Flight 11 hijacking, and not immediately scrambled Otis? How could NORAD possibly hold on to the 8:43 information of the United Airlines Flight 175 hijacking, and not have immediately scrambled Otis? How could NORAD, by their own account, hold on to the most vital information of both of these hijackings for three and six full minutes before notifying Otis to scramble?

NORAD Press Release: http://StandDown.net/NORADSeptember1...essRelease.htm

AP Article On NORAD PR: http://www.AttackOnAmerica.net/8MinutesAway.htm

Two New York Times articles apologetically describing this:

Pentagon Tracked Deadly Jet But Found No Way to Stop It
http://www.attackonamerica.net/penta...deadlyjet.html

Chronology of Plane Crashes: Orders, at the Time of Impact
http://www.attackonamerica.net/order...eofimpact.html

37) 8:46:26 a.m.: American Airlines Flight 11 impacts the north side of the North Tower (1 World Trade Center) of the WTC between the 94th and 98th floors. American Airlines Flight 11 was flying at a speed of 490 miles per hour (MPH). .......

.......38) 8:46 a.m.: United Airlines Flight 175 transponder signal stops transmitting IFF beacon signal.

39) 8:47 a.m.: NORAD informed of American Airlines Flight 11 striking the World Trade Center.

40) 8:47 a.m.: NYC Fire Battalion Chief Joe Pfeiffer from the 7th Battalion puts out an emergency call stating that American Airlines Flight 11 impacting the north side of the North Tower (1 World Trade Center) was no accident. The plane's impact was clearly a deliberate attack an intentional act of mass death and devastation.

As the small video crew (who shot the only video of American Airlines Flight 11 impacting the WTC – the fireman video) and firemen that had eye-witnessed the first plane hit the WTC were racing to the location, Chief Pfeiffer sounded red alerts over the radio and phone; specifically stating that what they witnessed was a "direct attack" and that the airliner was clearly being directed straight at the WTC and the incident was definitely not any kind of accident.

41) 8:48 a.m.: The first news reports appear on TV and radio that a plane may have crashed into the WTC.

42) 8:49 a.m.: United Airlines Flight 175 now deviates from its assigned flight path.

43) 8:50 a.m.: Rich Miles, a manager of United Airlines Chicago system operations center, receives a call from a mechanic at an airline maintenance center in San Francisco that takes in-flight calls from flight attendants about broken items. The mechanic says a female flight attendant from United Airlines Flight 175 just called and said, "Oh my God. The crew has been killed; a flight attendant has been stabbed. We've been hijacked." Then the line went dead.

44) 8:50:51 a.m.: American Airlines Flight 77 last radio communication, about 285 miles west of the Pentagon.

45) 8:51 a.m.: Bush arrives at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida for a photo op with 16 second graders. He is there to promote his administration's new bill on education.

46) 8:52 a.m.: Two F-15 Eagles have scrambled and are airborne from the 102nd Fighter Wing of Otis Air National Guard Base in Falmouth, Massachusetts. An F-15 has a top speed of 1875+ MPH. According to NORAD, Otis is 153 miles eastnortheast of the WTC.

47) 8:53 a.m.: A flight controller says to other airplanes in the sky about United Airlines Flight 175, "We may have a hijack. We have some problems over here right now."..........

........49) 8:56 a.m.: American Airlines Flight 77 transponder signal stops.

50) 8:56 a.m.: American Airlines Flight 77 goes off course and starts making a 180 degree turn over southern Ohio / northeastern Kentucky.

51) 8:57 a.m. The FAA formally notified the military that American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the WTC. Until then, the two F-15’s fighters from Otis did not know the plane had crashed -- Yet at 8:47 a.m. NORAD had been notified. Why does it take over 10 minutes to inform the two F-15’s of this, especially when United Airlines Flight 175 is headed directly for New York City?

52) 8:59 a.m.: American Airlines Flight 77 completes its 180 degree turn over southern Ohio / northeastern Kentucky and starts heading directly back to Washington D.C. and The Pentagon, 330 miles away.

53) 9:00 a.m.: United Airlines systems operations transmitted a system wide message, warning its pilots of a potential "cockpit intrusion". United Airlines Flight 93, flying over Pennsylvania replies "Confirmed".

54) 9:00 a.m.: Last radar reading on United Airlines Flight 175 is observed at an altitude of 18,000 feet, descending, with a ground speed of 480 knots.

55) 9:00 a.m. The FAA starts contacting all airliners to warn them of the hijacking.

56) 9:00 a.m.: The Pentagon moves its alert status up one notch from normal to Alpha. It stays on Alpha until after American Airlines Flight 77 hits the Pentagon.

57) 9:01 a.m.: Bush later makes the following statement. "And I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower -- the TV was obviously on, and I used to fly myself, and I said, 'There's one terrible pilot.' And I said, 'It must have been a horrible accident.' But I was whisked off from there -- I didn't have much time to think about it." Bush could not have possibly seen the first plane (American Airlines Flight 11) hit the WTC, because the only video showing this was not shown on television till later in the day. So how could he have possibly seen and said this?

58) 9:02:54 a.m.: United Airlines Flight 175 impacts the south side of the South Tower of the WTC between the 78th and 84th floors at a speed of over 500 MPH. Parts of the plane including an engine leave the building from its north side, to be found on the ground up to six blocks away. .............

.........59) 9:03 a.m.: Boston air traffic control center halts traffic from its airports to all New York area airspace.

60) 9:05 a.m.: Andrew Card walks up to Bush while he is listening to a Goat Story with 16 second graders in Sandra Kay Daniels’s class at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida. Card whispers in his ear "A second plane has hit the World Trade Center. America is under attack." Bush (commander-and-chief?) keeps listening to this Goat Story with these children for at least 7 minutes, and perhaps as long as 18 minutes. Why didn't he excuse himself from these children right away, and immediately address this national emergency, is totally unexplainable.

There is no way this should have happened. What of course should have happened, was as soon as the secret service found out about United Airlines Flight 175 impacting the WTC (now knowing it was a "terrorist" act), they would have immediatly grabbed Bush and brought him to an undisclosed location. There is no way the secret service leaves Bush in a place (Emma E. Booker Elementary School) where everyone knows he is. Stand Down...........

.........73) 9:23 a.m.: Bush talks privately with Cheney, his National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller and Governor George Pataki of New York. Why does Bush wait from 9:05 (when Andrew Card tells him of United Airlines Flight 175 hitting the WTC) till 9:23 to finally call? He still does not give the authority to the fighters to shoot down any hostile airliners. What is he waiting for?.........

.........83) 9:30 a m.: Bush, speaking to the nation from Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, says the country has suffered an "apparent terrorist attack" and "a national tragedy." He would chase down, "those folks who committed this act." Bush also said, "Terrorism against our nation will not stand." It was an echo of "This will not stand," the words his father, George H. W. Bush, had used a few days after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990-in Bush's opinion, one of his father's finest moments.

Also, during this address to the country Bush promised a full investigation into the attack. Well here we are one year later and there is still no investigation. Matter of fact he has done everything in his power so there will not be any investigation into 911. Why?

This address to the country should have been said at least 15 to 20 minutes earlier. But of course he had much more important business to attend to, he was listening to the Goat Story with the 16 second graders from 9:05 till at least 9:12 and possibly as long as 9:23. Watch the video of Bush addressing the country from Emma E. Booker Elementary School.

http://www.AttackOnAmerica.net/BushA...okerSchool.mov .........

politicophile, I am vunerable to the criticism that I "have too much invested in this, to be objective"....whatever that means in this "study" of what went down, vs. what they've told us.

The timeline, above, combined with this.....which indicates that the secret service knew everything that FAA knew, shortly after the 8:47 am impact on WTC1,

Quote:

......MR. RUSSERT: The plane actually circled the White House?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Didn't circle it, but was headed on a track into it. The Secret Service has an arrangement with the F.A.A. They had open lines after the World Trade Center was..........

.....and certainly....by the time Andrew Card whispered in Bush's ear at 9:05 in the classroom.....and the knowledge that Bush was the sole authority on whether to issue a "shoot down" order to interceptor fighter pilots of other flights that FAA couldn't account for....at 9:05....after news of 2 airliner strikes on the WTC.....Bush's still "unclarified" explanation....twice repeated and still displayed on the White House website.....persuades me that your assessment, is not arrived at after a full accounting, and weighing, of the record of that morning....coupled with Bush's later....odd comments about watching it at the school, on TV.....before.... he went into the classroom.

hiredgun · 09-10-2006, 09:21 PM

Host: I just want to point out that the last few pieces of information (concerning technology) aren't necessarily contradictory. A few reports say that al-Qaeda is using advanced technology (a fact so banal that I'd be surprised if it weren't true). Another specifically mentions emails and encryption. Then another says that they left no paper trail, and didn't own laptops. This jives with another report you quote which says that they used public computers to communicate.

Where's the contradiction?

Ustwo · 09-10-2006, 10:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ratbastid

There are few phrases more dangerous than "as you seem to be implying." He said the 9/11 Commission was a joke. He didn't say anything about vast conspiracies.

Putting outrageous statements in others' mouths is an Ann Coulteresque strategy that is as ugly and thuggish as it is ineffective. I recommend you refrain.

But will does think its a vast conspiracy so I dont' know why you issue a pointless harsh warning when it is indeed true.

In other words why get on the guys case when a vast conspiracy is EXACTLY what will thinks 9/11 was?

He should refain from observing the obvious?

Nice tie in will Ann Coulter though, that was very nicely done if a bit cliche as of late.

Ch'i · 09-10-2006, 11:07 PM

Quote:

But will does think its a vast conspiracy so I dont' know why you issue a pointless harsh warning when it is indeed true.

In other words why get on the guys case when a vast conspiracy is EXACTLY what will thinks 9/11 was?

Who cares, he's not bringing it up in this thread. Seems like a rather weak attempt at your usual antagonistic standing.
I'm also glad you helped reinforce my point on how "conspiracy" is usually used now. If you replaced "conspiracy" every time its been used in this thread with "a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful" you're argument would mean something much different. Which is funny because that's what conspiracy means. Drop the conotation.

UsTwo, I dare you to point out any "conspiracy" (the way you mean it) in this thread.

host · 09-10-2006, 11:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hiredgun

Host: I just want to point out that the last few pieces of information (concerning technology) aren't necessarily contradictory. A few reports say that al-Qaeda is using advanced technology (a fact so banal that I'd be surprised if it weren't true). Another specifically mentions emails and encryption. Then another says that they left no paper trail, and didn't own laptops. This jives with another report you quote which says that they used public computers to communicate.

Where's the contradiction?

Mueller repeated his April, 2002 coimments, a month later. in a senate hearing:

Quote:

http://www.fbi.gov/congress/congress...ller050802.htm

......... While here, the hijackers did all they could to stay below our radar. They contacted no known terrorist sympathizers. They committed no egregious crimes. They blended into the woodwork.

The hijackers also apparently left no paper trail. In our investigation, we have not yet uncovered a single piece of paper –– either here in the U.S. or in the treasure trove of information that has turned up in Afghanistan and elsewhere –– that mentioned any aspect of the September 11th plot. As best we can determine, the actual hijackers had no computers, no laptops, no storage media of any kind. They used hundreds of different pay phones and cell phones, often with prepaid calling cards that are extremely difficult to trace. And they made sure that all the money sent to them to fund their attacks was wired in small amounts to avoid detection.

In short, the terrorists managed to exploit loopholes and vulnerabilities in our systems, to stay out of sight, and to not let anyone know what they were up to beyond a very closed circle. The patient, skilled and exploitive approach used by the hijackers means our prevention efforts must be massive, globally collaborative and supported by ample technology and analytical capacity. It means that the information possessed by every agency - - both here and abroad, both federal and local - - must go into the multi-agency prevention mix and be acted upon. ............

Quote:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...001169,00.html
From the Magazine | Terrorism
When Terror Hides Online
By ADAM COHEN

Posted Monday, Nov. 12, 2001

..........It's no secret that bin Laden's terrorist army is Internet savvy. Hijacking ringleader Mohamed Atta made his reservations on Americanairlines.com Some of his confederates seem to have communicated through Yahoo e-mail. And cell members went online to research the chemical-dispersing powers of crop dusters..........

Quote:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/waronterro...558371,00.html
How the plotters slipped US net

Spy networks failed to detect email and satellite conversations used to plot the attack on the US - and now America wants to know what went wrong, reports Duncan Campbell

Special report: Terrorism in the US

Thursday September 27, 2001
The Guardian

.....This month's attacks have provided the first, tragic, test of who was right about the net, encryption and terrorism. The answers, so far as they are known, were given last Tuesday by the FBI at a Washington briefing. FBI assistant director Ron Dick, head of the US National Infrastructure Protection Centre, told reporters that the hijackers had used the net, and "used it well".

FBI investigators had been able to locate hundreds of email communications, sent 30 to 45 days before the attack. Records had been obtained from internet service providers and from public libraries. The messages, in both English and Arabic, were sent within the US and internationally. They had been sent from personal computers or from public sites such as libraries. They used a variety of ISPs, including accounts on Hotmail.

According to the FBI, the conspirators had not used encryption or concealment methods. Once found, the emails could be openly read............

Quote:

http://archives.cnn.com/2002/LAW/09/...ter/index.html
FBI explains missing Moussaoui e-mail

September 4, 2002 Posted: 5:30 PM EDT (2130 GMT)

......."The FBI has discovered that the 19 hijackers also made use of Kinko's computers in other cities to gain access to the Internet," FBI Agent Bridget Lawler said in an affidavit............

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...&notFound=true
Hijackers May Have Accessed Computers at Public Libraries
Authorities Investigating Possible Internet Communications

By Sue Anne Pressley and Justin Blum
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, September 17, 2001; Page A04

MIAMI, Sept. 16 -- Investigators are looking into the possibility some of the suspected hijackers in last week's deadly attacks on Washington and New York may have communicated with each other by using computers at public libraries.

At least one South Florida librarian has told authorities she recognized the name of a suspected terrorist on one of her computer sign-in sheets after the FBI released the list of hijackers' names Friday.

Library officials in Fairfax County also said today FBI agents Thursday requested the computer lab sign-in lists from the Sherwood Regional Library in the Mount Vernon area. Agents picked up copies of the computer logs from July 1 to Sept. 13, which included approximately 50 pages, according to branch manager Liz Promen.

In Delray Beach, Fla., librarian Kathleen Hensman said Mohald Alshehri, who is listed as a hijacker, and another Middle Eastern man came into the library within the past month wanting to use a computer with Internet access. She said the men appeared to be on edge and watched her to see whether she was monitoring their use.

"It just stood out in my mind, their behavior and the name," said Hensman, 41, who heads the reference department. "It's a public facility -- what can we do? I feel saddened that we were part of this in a way."

Public library officials say the use of computers with Internet access, which affords clients the option of logging into chat rooms and exchanging private messages, is a controversial issue in the library industry, and that policies on patron use and the amount of privacy allowed differ from place to place. In Fairfax County, after marking lab sign-in lists, patrons can work at a computer without logging on.

The Delray Beach library is near where several of the suspects reportedly stayed in the weeks leading up to the attacks. Hensman said it was Alshehri who affixed his name to the computer-use sign-up sheet.

"I asked them, 'Do you need an Internet computer?' One said yes," Hensman recalled.

She said the two men sat down at one of the computers with a screen shielded by a privacy protector.

"They were looking up at me and down at the computer," she said. "They wanted to be aware of what I was doing."

The two men used the computer for an hour, then were joined by a third man. She described the three as in their twenties, Middle Eastern and "good-looking."

Hensman said she called local police Saturday, and they said they would pass on the information to the FBI. As of late this afternoon, however, she said FBI agents had not contacted the library.

The Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale reported today that visitors to two other libraries in Hollywood, Fla., said they recalled seeing Mohamed Atta there. Authorities have identified Atta as one of the pilots who crashed into the World Trade Center Tuesday and have said he and several other suspects lived in the Hollywood area.

Betty Dejean, the assistant director of the Broward County libraries division, said today neither the FBI nor local law enforcement agencies had contacted library officials to ask about the hijackers' use of the computers. However, she said she could not release any information without a court order, citing Florida statutes.

Dejean said she had sent out a memo to staff members at the 37 Broward County branches, which include three in Hollywood, reminding employees they are not allowed to comment on books checked out by clients or on client computer use.

In Fairfax County, library officials said today none of the five men suspected in the Dulles hijacking possessed a library card. The suspects' names also do not appear on the logs, which library officials provided to The Washington Post, on the three days leading up to the attacks.

In Norman, Okla., where an alleged associate of the hijackers lived until he was arrested in August on a passport violation, public library official Andrew Peters said he had heard of no investigation involving the use of his system's computers. But he said Internet use is "a hot topic" in libraries.

"Some libraries do have it as policy that they allow privacy," said Peters, head of technology for the Pioneer library system, which comprises nine branches in three Oklahoma counties. "In our particular case, our policy is that use of libraries is a public space -- in the same way that we don't allow people to remove their clothes in public, we have our computers out visible, where anybody can see."

Fairfax library officials said the county has not installed filters that prevent people from viewing pornographic Web sites or accessing chat rooms.......

Mueller made two presentations, in April and May, 2002, where it seems fair to me....to point out that he deliberately misled his audeince that no trace of communications of the 9/11 hijackers were found. He gave the impression that he had no confirmation that the hijackers used somputers or the internet to communicate with each other, or with their overseers, if they indeed, had any......since the 9/11 Commission reported that it could not find out who financed their "terrorist" operation.

Mueller could have said that the hijackers were known to use computers....but not their own....to access the internet and use email....but he didn't either time he made essentially the same statement, I'm pointing out curious contradictory statements by officials that cloud determinations, instead of clarifying them. I see Mueller's statements as an example. It is not as strong as the Bush, Cheney, and the Mineta testimony conflict and omission from the 9/11 Commission report....but it does confuse, and he communicated it twice.....as Bush did with his "waiting to go into the classroom....watching the first plane on TV...."schtick"....wierd.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ustwo

But will does think its a vast conspiracy so I dont' know why you issue a pointless harsh warning when it is indeed true.

In other words why get on the guys case when a vast conspiracy is EXACTLY what will thinks 9/11 was?

He should refain from observing the obvious?

Nice tie in will Ann Coulter though, that was very nicely done if a bit cliche as of late.

In post #6, politicophile makes his "implying" statement, under a second quote box that contain comments attributed to me, not to willravel. It is clear that ratbastid was addressing that comment of politicophile's. Since that seems to be the case, and ratbastid has not posted a follow up, I thought it might be helpful to point out that ratbastid did not post about a comment that politicophile posted in reaction to anything that willravel had posted.

samcol · 09-11-2006, 03:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dilbert1234567

Seriously, cover ups don’t work, someone always talks, look at Watergate, there were very few people involved in that one, and you would need several hundred, if not thousands of people to orchestrate the 9/11 conspiracy, some one would have talked.

Former CIA agents, former Bush I, II, and Reagon administration officials have stated 9/11 looks like an inside job, but don't let that get in the way of believing it could never happen.

dc_dux · 09-11-2006, 03:44 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by willravel

Hopefully no one who has even a passing interest in politics takes the 9/11 report seriously. Whether liberal or conservative, whether 9/11 conspiracy theorist or not, whether a Bush supporter or not, we can all see that the comission was a joke in the worst possible way. It was theatre put on for the shallow entertainment of the masses to satiate a well wetted apetite for justice; or more accurately vengence.

I agree that many questions remain and there are gaping holes, but much was brought to light in the 9/11 Commission report that should provide lessons for the future.

Much more could probably have been learned if not for the limited "unsworn" testimony of Bush/Chaney, the unwillingness to pursue contradictions in testimony between Condi Rice and others in the WH national security/counter terrorism office, and the Commission's limited subpoena power (a majority of members was required to issue a subpoena; several were blocked by Repub appointed members) .

On the plus side, the Commission did make a series of strong and detailed recommendations for corrective action to prevent (or minimize the possiblity) of future attacks as well as actions needed for a more effective emergency response, which is were our attention should be focused.

Unfortunately, the 9/11 Public Discourse Project (the successor to the 9/11 Commission) provided a report card in Dec. 2005 on how well the recommendations were being implemented by the White House and Congress:

http://www.9-11pdp.org/press/2005-12-05_summary.pdf

It is not a very impressive record, but then again, their attention and money has been diverted to Iraq

Ustwo · 09-11-2006, 04:44 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ch'i

Who cares, he's not bringing it up in this thread. Seems like a rather weak attempt at your usual antagonistic standing.
I'm also glad you helped reinforce my point on how "conspiracy" is usually used now. If you replaced "conspiracy" every time its been used in this thread with "a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful" you're argument would mean something much different. Which is funny because that's what conspiracy means. Drop the conotation.

UsTwo, I dare you to point out any "conspiracy" (the way you mean it) in this thread.

Oh nozes, will you double dog dare me too!

Quote:

Hopefully no one who has even a passing interest in politics takes the 9/11 report seriously. Whether liberal or conservative, whether 9/11 conspiracy theorist or not, whether a Bush supporter or not, we can all see that the comission was a joke in the worst possible way. It was theatre put on for the shallow entertainment of the masses to satiate a well wetted apetite for justice; or more accurately vengence.

Sounds like it was false and done so on purpose, sounds like despite will talking about not being a "conspiracy theorist' it reeks of conspiracy theory. Any thinking person reading that is going to know wills bias and intent.

joke in the worst possible way

So ch'i my boy, what does that mean to you?

Edit:typed in 1 minute before leaving for work, it seems to imply that will is not a conspiracy theorist, which is of course false, he is. What intended was his idea that even if you are not a conspiracy theorist you should call the 9/11 commision report a joke.

Willravel · 09-11-2006, 06:18 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ustwo

Sounds like it was false and done so on purpose, sounds like despite will talking about not being a "conspiracy theorist' it reeks of conspiracy theory. Any thinking person reading that is going to know wills bias and intent.

joke in the worst possible way

So ch'i my boy, what does that mean to you?

Edit:typed in 1 minute before leaving for work, it seems to imply that will is not a conspiracy theorist, which is of course false, he is. What intended was his idea that even if you are not a conspiracy theorist you should call the 9/11 commision report a joke.

*Yawn* I'm still waiting for a response to the facts. I know I won't get one from you, so I'm not holding my breath. As I've said before, I'm not talking about falling buildings in here. I reserve that for the appropriate threads. I was asked a question, by Politicophile, about why I thought the 9/11 Commission was a joke. I posted facts backing up that ascertion. Those facts were never questioned. I can only assume that you've read post #4 and agree with all those points, and thus agree that the 9/11 Commission investigation and report are jokes.

roachboy · 09-11-2006, 08:06 AM

i want to explain my suspicion about this direction of thinking concerning the wtc attacks.
(suspicion in the sense of distance from...)

personal aside:
in the period immediately after 9/11/2001 i was focussed mostly on video loops and their role in structuring television coverage on the one hand and the emerging (simple-minded) narrative of cause/explanation on the other.

i remember very clearly walking through the student union at penn that afternoon and watching students gathered around huge television screens watching the loop over and over, saucer eyed as the university's therapy teams wandered about like some bizarre psychological swat operation.

it was surreal.

since then, i have been primarily interested in the narrative constructed to provide some sense of closure---and the function of repetition (of the loops within the loops, if you like) within that--in other words, the ideological fallout of the trade center in particular.

back to the matter at hand:
i have not kept particular track of problems concerning the actions of the political class as human beings on 9/11/2001 itself. maybe because i did not follow the same logic as other folks: i do not expect the state to protect me and so did not make any particular linkage between 9/11/2001 and the actions of politicians--or to their ex post facto statements about their actions. it did not seem terribly germaine.

the other reason is that i have assumed the scenario i asked about above--that the entire organization that planned the attacks was on the planes.

if that is true, then it follows that there really is nothing that could have been done to stop any of it.

further, if anything like that scenario was in fact the case, all of the subsequent "security" hysteria has been worthless in that no amount of it would enable the prevention of an attack--if that attack was mounted by a new group--or one constituted for a particular action. linking 9/11/2001 to already-extant groups seemed to me little more than a therapeutic exercise. whence the inane focus on bin laden.

given my assumption about the attack (which was easy enough to generate--if you were going to undertake such an action, how would you do it? it's a pretty straightforward question, really---thinking about it is instructive...) much of the thinking i see other folk pursuing seems to me built around a teleological fallacy--one which is central to the dominant narrative--a fallacy that refigures the past in the image of the present (in this case an event) and attributes false significance to that past.

this is why i haven't paid particular attention to the questions raised by the 9/11/2001 investigations: i cannot tell, and would not be able to tell, if by looking into this area i would find myself running in logical loops created by the teleological fallacy. i cannot--and would not--be able to tell whether my interpretation of particular actions or statements about action were being shaped by a prior assumption that these much be meaningful that has more to do with the logic i would import into the situation than with the situation.
in a similar way, as one viewing the videoloops and interacting with students who lost friends and relatives at the wtc in the days that followed 9/11/2001, i do not understand myself as being wholly outside the effects of something on the order of a collective trauma.

so i would also be unable to sort out my personal psychological investments that were being shaped by a teleological fallacy.

in a similar way, i cannot work out in many of the posts above what is going on at this level.

i do not doubt that others have asked questions on this order to themselves (maybe clearer versions of them, who knows)--so i wonder how they navigated them and what relation they see obtaining between these circuits of investment and what they find and why they find it in the actions of the bush people and subesequent statements about those actions.

i am curious about how folk have managed this problem

stevo · 09-11-2006, 08:28 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

the other reason is that i have assumed the scenario i asked about above--that the entire organization that planned the attacks was on the planes.

if that is true, then it follows that there really is nothing that could have been done to stop any of it.

further, if anything like that scenario was in fact the case, all of the subsequent "security" hysteria has been worthless in that no amount of it would enable the prevention of an attack--if that attack was mounted by a new group--or one constituted for a particular action. linking 9/11/2001 to already-extant groups seemed to me little more than a therapeutic exercise. whence the inane focus on bin laden.

Why do you assume things to be this way? What makes you believe there was no al-qaeda plot? Why do you think the only people involved in this attack were the 19 on the planes? What about the al-qaeda videos? What about bin laden's statements? Were the 19 terrorists on 9/11 related at all to the people who attempeted to bring down the towers 8 years prior?

roachboy · 09-11-2006, 08:43 AM

bin laden et al are unnecessary logically to explain the attacks.
they could VERY easily have been organized by a small group no-one was looking for.
and such an organization makes more sense.

again, think about it: if you were going to organize an action on that scale, how would you do it?

that bin laden et al would use the events to further their own political position is not a surprise. i see that as an attempt by al qeada to further its own political objectives.

the problem this scenario raises really is that there was no way to prevent the 9/11/2001 attacks and there is no way to prevent another one. a state can only prevent actions from groups it is looking for. it cannot prevent anything undertaken by groups that it is not looking for.

Ch'i · 09-11-2006, 01:27 PM

Hadn't considered that roachboy, thanks.

stevo · 09-12-2006, 04:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

bin laden et al are unnecessary logically to explain the attacks.
they could VERY easily have been organized by a small group no-one was looking for.
and such an organization makes more sense.

again, think about it: if you were going to organize an action on that scale, how would you do it?

that bin laden et al would use the events to further their own political position is not a surprise. i see that as an attempt by al qeada to further its own political objectives.

the problem this scenario raises really is that there was no way to prevent the 9/11/2001 attacks and there is no way to prevent another one. a state can only prevent actions from groups it is looking for. it cannot prevent anything undertaken by groups that it is not looking for.

So Kalid Sheik Muhammed, captured in pakistan shortly after the 9/11 whose just been transfered to gitmo is a patsy? a stooge? I understand that it could have been undertaken by no one other than the 19 hijackers, but just because it could have happened that way doesn't mean it did. For the 19 hijackers to have been the be-all and end-all in the attacks on 9/11 they would have had to have left there message somewhere? No? I would imagine there would be some evidence that points to them being independent of any other group. Instead they left it up to the survivors to tell the world why. It doesn't seem logical to me that 19 people would commit a terrorist act, kill themselves along with thousands others and not leave behind a message, but rely on an unrelated terrorist group - al qaeda to give explination and advance their own agenda.

roachboy · 09-12-2006, 06:37 AM

the message was the attack itself.
why do you think the wtc and pentagon were targets stevo?
what possible meaning would there be?

i dunno--seems pretty obvious to me.

Rekna · 09-12-2006, 06:48 AM

I think Bin Laden et al were involved in the attacks roachboy. There is actually video of the hijackers meeting with Bin Laden.

Willravel · 09-12-2006, 07:07 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by stevo

So Kalid Sheik Muhammed, captured in pakistan shortly after the 9/11 whose just been transfered to gitmo is a patsy? a stooge? I understand that it could have been undertaken by no one other than the 19 hijackers, but just because it could have happened that way doesn't mean it did. For the 19 hijackers to have been the be-all and end-all in the attacks on 9/11 they would have had to have left there message somewhere? No? I would imagine there would be some evidence that points to them being independent of any other group. Instead they left it up to the survivors to tell the world why. It doesn't seem logical to me that 19 people would commit a terrorist act, kill themselves along with thousands others and not leave behind a message, but rely on an unrelated terrorist group - al qaeda to give explination and advance their own agenda.

Stevo you're talking about the same intelligence community that suggested WMDs and Iraq-al Qaeda links. Isn't it possible they have Sheik Muhammed by mistake? I mean he has committed other terrorist attacks, and intel coming from the terrorist networks has always been unreliable.

Also, we still don't have the confirmed identities of the hijackers. Osama might have been meeting with the suspected hijackers, but we don't know for sure. Many of the men the CIA accouse of being the 9/11 hijackers are still alive. To me that makes the whole list quite suspect.

roachboy · 09-12-2006, 07:09 AM

i am simply suspicious about the links between the attackers and al qeada.
it is not that i exclude the possibility--i just view claims about the link with a bit of suspicion.
it seems to me that the attacks were a self-evidently symbolic act that required no further elaboration--the symbols of american economic and military hegemoy (plus a field in pennsylvania).
it seems that bin laden et al moved symmetrically with the bush administration into the frame set by the narrative and that both have marketed the hell out of that.

the curious thing is that none of the narrative has to be true for the narrative to operate effectively. it seems to me that the story floated to "explain" the attacks were almost entirely about enabling a response of some kind, no matter how incoherent, first and then became a device to advance the administration's policies and the administration itself.

in the play "the man in the glass booth" the main character is a jewish guy who pretends to be eichmann and who is arrested as eichman and put on trial as eichman. in the context of his tesitmony, a question is asked concerning the appeal of fascism for "eichman" the response is: "he told us what it was that we were afraid of"

blktour · 09-12-2006, 07:46 AM

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...48835726&hl=en

this answered it all for me!

stevo · 09-12-2006, 08:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by blktour

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...48835726&hl=en

this answered it all for me!

great. glad to know we've got another "critical thinker"

politicophile · 09-12-2006, 09:58 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by blktour

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...48835726&hl=en

this answered it all for me!

Jesus H. Christ:

A whimsical rebuttal

NIST's response

Popular Mechanics had this to say

Point by point rebuttal of "Loose Change"

I never imagined I would use as non-academic a source as Maddox in tilted politics, but sometimes you have no choice but to fight fire with fire. The entire 9/11 conspiracy movement is a case of people believing something is true because they desperately want it to be. Alas, George Bush, the simpleminded nationalistic cowboy (according to our friends on the left), would never conspire to kill 3,000 innocent Americans. Seriously, step back for a moment and think about the kind of people who work in the Bush administration. Do you SERIOUSLY think a bunch of good ol' boys from Texas would murder thousands of Americans? What kind of outlandish straw man are you substituting for our President? There comes a time when we must all wake up and smell the coffee. There is no 9/11 conspiracy. Period.

Willravel · 09-12-2006, 10:14 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by politicophile

The entire 9/11 conspiracy movement is a case of people believing something is true because they desperately want it to be.

Like believing links exist between Iraq and the al Qaeda?

Pot, kettle, black.

politicophile · 09-12-2006, 10:19 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by willravel

Like believing links exist between Iraq and the al Qaeda?

Pot, kettle, black.

Yes! That is an excellent comparison. You and I agree that there was no connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. Why do we not agree about the lack of a connection between the Bush administration and the 9/11 hijackers?

09-10-2006, 03:07 PM	#3 (permalink)
politicophile Addict	Sorry Will, I didn't get the memo on that one. Why was the 9/11 commission a joke? __________________ The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

09-10-2006, 06:17 PM	#8 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	i have not devoted particular attention to this set of problems...i dunno why...but anyway, i have thought that the entire organization that carried out the trade center attacks was on the planes. nothing requires any bigger group be involved, does it? but this is purely because it makes sense logically to me...if the organization came into being to do the attacks or something like it--was made up of people who maybe hadn't carried out an action, say---there'd be no hope of stopping them because (unless somebody really fucked up) there'd be nothing in particular to look for. whence the idea that the u.s. has been in a war on ghosts for 5 years. is this still a possibility, given what folk understand to have happened? __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

09-10-2006, 08:19 PM	#13 (permalink)
Dilbert1234567 Devils Cabana Boy Location: Central Coast CA	Seriously, cover ups don’t work, someone always talks, look at Watergate, there were very few people involved in that one, and you would need several hundred, if not thousands of people to orchestrate the 9/11 conspiracy, some one would have talked. __________________ Donate Blood! "Love is not finding the perfect person, but learning to see an imperfect person perfectly." -Sam Keen

09-10-2006, 09:09 PM	#17 (permalink)
Sun Tzu Conspiracy Realist Location: The Event Horizon	While questionable scenarios happened before, the public’s acceptance or general complacent mindset on the Warren Commission's conclusion set the trend for things to come. __________________ *To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.- Stephen Hawking*

09-11-2006, 08:06 AM	#27 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	i want to explain my suspicion about this direction of thinking concerning the wtc attacks. (suspicion in the sense of distance from...) personal aside: in the period immediately after 9/11/2001 i was focussed mostly on video loops and their role in structuring television coverage on the one hand and the emerging (simple-minded) narrative of cause/explanation on the other. i remember very clearly walking through the student union at penn that afternoon and watching students gathered around huge television screens watching the loop over and over, saucer eyed as the university's therapy teams wandered about like some bizarre psychological swat operation. it was surreal. since then, i have been primarily interested in the narrative constructed to provide some sense of closure---and the function of repetition (of the loops within the loops, if you like) within that--in other words, the ideological fallout of the trade center in particular. back to the matter at hand: i have not kept particular track of problems concerning the actions of the political class as human beings on 9/11/2001 itself. maybe because i did not follow the same logic as other folks: i do not expect the state to protect me and so did not make any particular linkage between 9/11/2001 and the actions of politicians--or to their ex post facto statements about their actions. it did not seem terribly germaine. the other reason is that i have assumed the scenario i asked about above--that the entire organization that planned the attacks was on the planes. if that is true, then it follows that there really is nothing that could have been done to stop any of it. further, if anything like that scenario was in fact the case, all of the subsequent "security" hysteria has been worthless in that no amount of it would enable the prevention of an attack--if that attack was mounted by a new group--or one constituted for a particular action. linking 9/11/2001 to already-extant groups seemed to me little more than a therapeutic exercise. whence the inane focus on bin laden. given my assumption about the attack (which was easy enough to generate--if you were going to undertake such an action, how would you do it? it's a pretty straightforward question, really---thinking about it is instructive...) much of the thinking i see other folk pursuing seems to me built around a teleological fallacy--one which is central to the dominant narrative--a fallacy that refigures the past in the image of the present (in this case an event) and attributes false significance to that past. this is why i haven't paid particular attention to the questions raised by the 9/11/2001 investigations: i cannot tell, and would not be able to tell, if by looking into this area i would find myself running in logical loops created by the teleological fallacy. i cannot--and would not--be able to tell whether my interpretation of particular actions or statements about action were being shaped by a prior assumption that these much be meaningful that has more to do with the logic i would import into the situation than with the situation. in a similar way, as one viewing the videoloops and interacting with students who lost friends and relatives at the wtc in the days that followed 9/11/2001, i do not understand myself as being wholly outside the effects of something on the order of a collective trauma. so i would also be unable to sort out my personal psychological investments that were being shaped by a teleological fallacy. in a similar way, i cannot work out in many of the posts above what is going on at this level. i do not doubt that others have asked questions on this order to themselves (maybe clearer versions of them, who knows)--so i wonder how they navigated them and what relation they see obtaining between these circuits of investment and what they find and why they find it in the actions of the bush people and subesequent statements about those actions. i am curious about how folk have managed this problem __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

09-10-2006, 02:38 PM	#2 (permalink)
Willravel ... a sort of licensed troubleshooter.	Hopefully no one who has even a passing interest in politics takes the 9/11 report seriously. Whether liberal or conservative, whether 9/11 conspiracy theorist or not, whether a Bush supporter or not, we can all see that the comission was a joke in the worst possible way. It was theatre put on for the shallow entertainment of the masses to satiate a well wetted apetite for justice; or more accurately vengence. That hunger for justice remains because their show was so poorly put together (perhaps they should have consulted with J.J. Abrahms before submitting the final script). The taste for vengence has been replaced by apathy due to ongoing war and fear. It really seemed on the surface to be a perfect plan, but the holes are so large and numerous that when reading through the damned report, I fear falling through it into nothingness. Historical records have suffered. While a multitude of books seeking the truth have come out, I've read more than a few social studies text books lately that give horrible misinformation for our children to ignore in overcrowded classrooms. While a few of our children might hold tight to the little information that we have (maybe host should publish his memoirs sooner then later), the masses will dully think back to the day when Iraq blew up the twin towers and was the source of global terrorism, and how we lost tens of thousands of troops trying to win back our dignity. They will think back to when we destroyed Iran for developing nuclear weapons. When we stoped the drug regeims in Venesuela by burning the country to the ground. How we brought democracy to so many countries, only to have us take it away. Stories from uncles and fathers that serve in the Second Gulf War will be the foundation of everything from entertaining movies to alcoholism and PTSD. This is our legacy.

09-10-2006, 08:32 PM	#15 (permalink)
ASU2003 immoral minority Location: Back in Ohio	And if someone does speak out, unless they have actual proof (like video tape confessions), no one will listen to them and they will be thought to be just another conspiracy theorist. I could be paid off for the right price. Make it look like I won the lottery for $10 million or so. And I would never talk about my involvement in that project again. But, they might have me located in WTC #7, and the dead don't talk.

09-10-2006, 09:21 PM	#19 (permalink)
hiredgun Addict	Host: I just want to point out that the last few pieces of information (concerning technology) aren't necessarily contradictory. A few reports say that al-Qaeda is using advanced technology (a fact so banal that I'd be surprised if it weren't true). Another specifically mentions emails and encryption. Then another says that they left no paper trail, and didn't own laptops. This jives with another report you quote which says that they used public computers to communicate. Where's the contradiction?

09-11-2006, 08:43 AM	#29 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	bin laden et al are unnecessary logically to explain the attacks. they could VERY easily have been organized by a small group no-one was looking for. and such an organization makes more sense. again, think about it: if you were going to organize an action on that scale, how would you do it? that bin laden et al would use the events to further their own political position is not a surprise. i see that as an attempt by al qeada to further its own political objectives. the problem this scenario raises really is that there was no way to prevent the 9/11/2001 attacks and there is no way to prevent another one. a state can only prevent actions from groups it is looking for. it cannot prevent anything undertaken by groups that it is not looking for. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

09-11-2006, 01:27 PM	#30 (permalink)
Ch'i Artist of Life	Hadn't considered that roachboy, thanks.

09-12-2006, 06:37 AM	#32 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	the message was the attack itself. why do you think the wtc and pentagon were targets stevo? what possible meaning would there be? i dunno--seems pretty obvious to me. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

09-12-2006, 06:48 AM	#33 (permalink)
Rekna Junkie	I think Bin Laden et al were involved in the attacks roachboy. There is actually video of the hijackers meeting with Bin Laden.

09-12-2006, 07:09 AM	#35 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	i am simply suspicious about the links between the attackers and al qeada. it is not that i exclude the possibility--i just view claims about the link with a bit of suspicion. it seems to me that the attacks were a self-evidently symbolic act that required no further elaboration--the symbols of american economic and military hegemoy (plus a field in pennsylvania). it seems that bin laden et al moved symmetrically with the bush administration into the frame set by the narrative and that both have marketed the hell out of that. the curious thing is that none of the narrative has to be true for the narrative to operate effectively. it seems to me that the story floated to "explain" the attacks were almost entirely about enabling a response of some kind, no matter how incoherent, first and then became a device to advance the administration's policies and the administration itself. in the play "the man in the glass booth" the main character is a jewish guy who pretends to be eichmann and who is arrested as eichman and put on trial as eichman. in the context of his tesitmony, a question is asked concerning the appeal of fascism for "eichman" the response is: "he told us what it was that we were afraid of" __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

09-12-2006, 07:46 AM	#36 (permalink)
blktour Psycho Location: Anchorage, AK	http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...48835726&hl=en this answered it all for me!