American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [93]
After Pearl Harbor, General Martin Short and some admirals were fired because of their alleged negligence. After 9/11, not a single employee at the FAA or NORAD got punished. In fact, all the major military men involved received promotions. They included General Richard Myers, who was named Chairman of the Joint Chiefs on October 1.
The way I see it, with all the advance warnings about a terrorist attack, a fair number of Bush’s team should have gotten the axe. Except, right up to the president himself, it was all about denial. Here was Bush in 2004: “Had I had any inkling whatsoever that the people were going to fly airplanes into buildings, we would have moved heaven and earth to save the country.” Here was Rumsfeld, testifying before the 9/11 Commission: “I knew of no intelligence during the six-plus months leading up to September 11 to indicate terrorists would hijack commercial airlines, use them as missiles to fly into the Pentagon or the World Trade Center towers.” And here was Condoleezza Rice: “This kind of analysis about the use of airplanes as weapons actually was never briefed to us.”27
Oh really? What about the intelligence briefing Bush received on August 6, 2001, that was headed “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” and even mentioned possible hijackings.28 Or Condi Rice being warned about al-Qaeda’s plotting by then-CIA Director George Tenet on July 10, 2001, but brushing him off.29 The 9/11 Commission was aware of this, but decided to leave it out if their report. The CIA’s counterintelligence chief, J. Cofer Black, later “felt there were things the commission wanted to know about and things they didn’t want to know about.”30 Rice responded: “What I am quite certain of is that I would remember if I was told, as this account apparently says, that there was about to be an attack in the United States, and the idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible.”31 Seems she stammered over her words a little.
These were far from the only warnings. Israel sent two senior agents of the Mossad to Washington in August 2001 to “alert the CIA and FBI to the existence of a cell of as many as 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation.”32 Eight months before the attacks, French intelligence warned the U.S. in nine different reports about “Airplane Hijacking Plans by Radical Islamists” connected to bin Laden and the Taliban.33 FBI agents working out of the Minneapolis and Phoenix offices tried to alert their superiors. Dr. Parke Godfrey, an associate professor of computer science at Toronto’s York University, said under oath in a New York courtroom that a longtime associate of his, Susan Lindauer, warned him several times and as late as August 2001 “that we expected a major attack on the southern part of Manhattan, and that the attack would encompass the World Trade Center,” an attack “that would involve airplanes and possibly a nuclear weapon.” Lindauer, who says she was a CIA asset, claimed to have made an attempt to inform John Ashcroft at the Justice Department, who referred her to the Office of Counter-Terrorism.34
Which brings us to the whole question of the 19 alleged hijackers. Did you ever wonder how our government came up with their identities so fast? Even before the last plane crashed, the FBI was telling counterterrorism official Richard Clarke they had a list of the names.35 It took two years to get indictments on the Lockerbie bombing, but not this time! Except, on September 16, one of the supposed hijackers walked into the consulate in Saudi Arabia—he was actually a pilot for Saudi Airlines. On September 22, one of the Flight 11 hijackers announced he was alive and well. Two more Saudi pilots did the same thing the next day. On September 27, CBS found hijacker Hamzi (Flight 77) working for an oil refinery in Saudi Arabia. No matter. All these guys are still on the list today as being among the perpetrators.36
What evidence do we have then? Two days after the attacks, our government said it was clear-cut that Osama bin Laden was