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Oil for Fire
From the New York Times: Four in 9/11 Plot Are Called Tied to Qaeda in ’00
More than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, a small, highly classified military intelligence unit identified Mohammed Atta and three other future hijackers as likely members of a cell of Al Qaeda operating in the United States, according to a former defense intelligence official and a Republican member of Congress.
In the summer of 2000, the military team, known as Able Danger, prepared a chart that included visa photographs of the four men and recommended to the military’s Special Operations Command that the information be shared with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the congressman, Representative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, and the former intelligence official said Monday.
The recommendation was rejected and the information was not shared, they said, …
Rep. Weldon is a crazy wingnut, who wants to march to Teheran tomorrow. So the above report may very well be bullshit (it’s the NYT after all) and part of his agenda.
But assuming for a second that the above report is true, some questions come up.
What else did the SOC and the Pentagon knew before 9/11 and what else was not shared? Was the Commanding General, U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center, Fort Bragg, N.C. involved? Was the idea of an "catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor" (pdf) relevant for that decision ?
Conspiracy theorists – oil for your fire.
Always, always, always with Federal bureaucracy assume incompetence before conspiracy. Always.
yes. otherwise the con artists, crooks, and opportunists wouldn’t be getting away w/ these type of things. but it still doesn’t hurt to throw up some interference, stonewalling, & plenty of disinformation just to cover your tracks.
If Peak Oil is coming, “patriotic” enthusiasm for military adventures aimed at securing energy supplies can, and could, be depended on, with or without a major catastrophe like 9/11.
my not-so-wild speculative take is that 911 was not orchestrated in order to secure the backing of the u.s. citizenry for any geopolitical agenda, although it was quite certain that enlistments would increase. rather, 911 played to a wider audience, recruiting a coalition of nation-states who would otherwise have little interest in assisting the u.s. to exert its hegemony in afghanistan, iraq, & other strategic targets (esp w/ peak oil around the corner), and most of whom were decidedly lined up against the u.s./u.k. sanctions/war on the people of iraq anyway. the crazies may be insane, but they ain’t dumb. no way the u.s. could pull these last two invasions off entirely on its own. in 1991, other nations carried most of the financial costs of that aggression, in addition to providing boots on the ground & whatnot.
whether mihop or lihop (like the ’93 wtc bombing), to the ruling class, the people of this nation are irrelevant outside of their roles as taxpayers. the all-clear signal in the streets of nyc right after 11 sept is evidence of that much.
I am sure that it would be comforting to believe that there was a grand conspiracy behind the 9/11 attacks, for much the same reason that some find it comforting to believe that the “flypaper strategy” actually makes them safer — both suggest that there is a finite supply of clever bad people in the world, and that if we can only eliminate them, the world will become a better place.
i don’t think the two examples go together, or at least draw the conclusion proffered. for one, i don’t know any reasonable person who doesn’t understand that this is a systemic problem w/ the rampant smash-and-grab corruption currently underway. getting rid of a few bad apples will not eliminate the incentive for the next bushel. granted, some of the worms involved have been around since nixon, but does anyone seriously argue that this is strictly a personnel problem? the flypaper strategy is transparently obvious cover for an agenda aimed at controlling a prized territory. that some may be misled over this is only a reflection on the knowledge gap between them & those actively pursing their agenda. the same can be said for the events surrounding 911. this knowledge gap can take on many levels and tangents in this latter case. while there indeed may be those who feel comforted by the idea that certain conspirators are at work here, others are not so comforted by the knowledge that imperialists, in their insatiable quest for capitalist expansion, will stop at nothing to justify their efforts to control raw material supplies & profits, and how incapable of seeing this so many people remain. not to single out anyone in particular at this moment, but it does a great disservice to the pursuit of bridging that knowledge gap (as stiglitz said “some people know more than others”) in the struggle for justice & a saner human vision of ourselves when people derisively fall back on the phrase “conspiracy theory” as a slur, or something fringe & tin-foily. meanwhile, we ignore the conspirings of the likes of PNAC, or the ADVANCE Democracy Act, legislation to “commit United States foreign policy to the challenge of achieving universal democracy”, or “full spectrum dominance”… surely there’s a grand conspiracy there? our invasion of afghanistan & iraq are part of those efforts, both in rhetoric & action.
think big. if we don’t look critically into our past, we will have no future.
Posted by: b real | Aug 10 2005 5:37 utc | 40
@ Jassalasca Jape
I hope you won’t withdraw from the discussion, even though I cast my lot with the
“conspiracy theorists”. Your critique is cogent and obviously sincere, and will,
I hope, give rise to further discussion, a real give and take that motivates all of us
to reconsider our “given hypotheses”. Reaching conclusions about historical events
is not, (perhaps unfortunately), like reaching conclusion in the exact sciences since
we can’t re-run experiments or design new ones to test our hypotheses. We can
attempt to accumulate and order the available data (e.g. establish a timeline) and
search for new, relevant, and credible sources.
Those of us who are not professional historians will probably never feel the thrill of,
say, a Robert Caro who after years of archival
research finally found a brief thank-you note from Lyndon Johnson confirming
(to Caro’s exacting standards) that Johnson had indeed directed the secret funding of other
senatorial candidates by Texas oil-millionaire slush funds and thus vindicating what had
thereto been merely “malicious conjecture” and “conspiratorial hearsay” regarding Johnson’s
emergence as Senate majority leader. Furthermore, all of us are well aware
that even the accumulation of “documentation” on recent history if anything but a linear
progression since sophisticated attempts to create false trails and red herrings
are very definitely part of the problem, as I suspect you will readily concede.
For that reason, any attempt to make sense of what
has happened and reach tentative conclusions about the most likely explanation is necessarily
going to involve some “cherry picking”. I agree that it should also accept a certain number
of “loose ends” that don’t fit the conjectural overall picture. I thoroughly agree that it
is simplistic to think that
there is a finite supply of clever bad people in the world,
and that if we can only eliminate them, the world will become a better place.
Nevertheless an institutional analysis of pro-war coalitions and challenge to
official received opinion seems not to be
without value. Proposing alternative hypotheses and submitting them to reasoned
discussion seems to me an act of civic virtue, although, like all such acts it can looses
such heat and furor of impassioned debate as to generate ire, despair and
withdrawal.
One of the great strengths of MOA is that it is a community of people who are anxious
to discuss the world around them,state their views with passion, but also listen to what
others have to say even when the contrapositions spring from a vastly different
ideological font. The last thing that I would want
would be for Remembering Giap to adopt my incoherent libertarian anarchism, or for
all of us to march in conspiratorial lockstep. What I do hope for is that this
community will
“hold” in the sense that all of us will continue to learn and to grow in our “wisdom” in
by gradually coming to understand “where the others are coming from” and being able
to come to terms with and internalize “contradictory hypotheses”, by sharing that
“pood of salt” that the Russians say one should consume before expressing a view.
With so much official deceit to burn away, I find great consolation is that sharing that
salt.
Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Aug 10 2005 6:45 utc | 42
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