Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [94]
I’ve got some other problems with The 9/11 Commission Report. It makes no mention that a secret Pentagon project called Able Danger had identified four of the hijackers a whole year before the attacks. Two unit whistleblowers confirmed that. The authorizing orders said Able Danger’s purpose was to “manipulate, degrade and destroy al-Qaeda.” First the commission said its members weren’t informed about this, then it later acknowledged that they were. The commission also failed to mention Condoleezza Rice being warned about al-Qaeda’s plotting by then-CIA Director George Tenet during the summer of 2001.
So is this another whitewash like the Warren Commission? The 9/11 Commission politely informs us that “conspiracy theories play a peculiar role in American discourse. Whenever there is a particularly surprising, traumatic, and influential moment in our history, people are left with unsettling questions.” As an example, they go on to cite “conspiracy theorists [who] propagate outrageous notions that Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA, or some shadowy secret society of the rich and powerful.” Outrageous notions? I find it outrageous that these commissions allow themselves to become part of the cover-up.
I want to believe that bin Laden and al-Qaeda were responsible for the 9/11 attacks, but now I have doubts. If they were responsible, I am beginning to think it was not without some knowledge of those impending attacks on our side. There are historical precedents for this occurring. Some evidence exists that FDR and Churchill were privy to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but needed a catalyst to bring America into World War Two. In recent years, we’ve learned two startling and very alarming things from declassified information. In 1962, Operation Northwoods was a plan drawn up by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The idea was to stage terror attacks—including the use of hijacked airplanes—and, if necessary, kill American citizens and then blame it on Castro’s Cuba to justify our invading the island.
Then there was the famous Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964. We were told that American ships were attacked by the North Vietnamese. Now we know that the incident was manufactured by the CIA and Pentagon in order to gain support for escalating the Vietnam War. If the United States government was prepared to stage such a gargantuan event in leading our nation to war then, why would they refrain from doing so again today? Might we look at this as a trend, going into these wars under false pretenses?
A think tank called the Project for the New American Century, composed mainly of right-wing ideologues, wrote a report pre-9/11 titled Building America’s Defenses. It promoted a vast expansion of the military budget, along with intervention plans to make us an empire. The document contains this line: “The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”
Is that what 9/11 was? The 9/11 Commission Report states that “the Bush administration had repeatedly tied the Iraq War to September 11th. . . . The panel finds no al-Qaeda-Iraq tie.” Bush then did some backpedaling, saying: “This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam [Hussein] and al-Qaeda. We did say there were numerous contacts. . . .” That reference was to alleged meetings between bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence in Sudan back in the mid-nineties, information obtained during torture of an unreliable source, according to the book Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, by Michael Isikoff and David Corn.
It also turns out that another link exists between Saddam Hussein and