9/11 Food for Thought

This pointer and commentary from Carol Wolman come from the inbox. The following views are hers and writer John Kaminski’s. I am still mulling over the matter. What do you think?

John Kaminski summarizes the evidence that 9-11 was an inside job, although the last part, suggesting that the Mossad was involved, is more speculative. If, as now seems likely, the Bush administration had a hand in the plane attacks on 9-11, they may have been hoping that the shock would lead to a Bush dictatorship.

Here’s a possible scenario. Flight 93, which the passengers forced down in Pennsylvania, was headed toward Washington, DC. We’re not sure what it targeted, and the administration put out a story that it was aimed at the White House. The plotters captured in Europe told a different story.

BERLIN – The U.S. Capitol was the target of hijacked United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed Sept. 11 in rural Pennsylvania, two of the plotters reportedly have told the Arab Al-Jazeera satellite TV channel.

Flight 93 crashed at 10:10 am. The Capitol was not evacuated until 10:45. If flight 93 had reached its destination, many members of Congress would have been killed, and their place of work destroyed. With Congress out of the picture, Bush would have had no opposition, since the US Supreme Court was complicit in putting him in office, and he felt secure about its support.

However, flight 93 did not hit the Capitol. So a backup plan went into effect. A week after 9-11, deadly anthrax spores originating from a US bioweapons lab at Fort Detrick were mailed to key Democratic leaders in the Senate- Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy.

Four anonymous letters bearing anthrax spores were postmarked here on Sept. 18 and Oct. 9, 2001. Two of them, addressed to then-Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) and then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), contained weapons-grade anthrax that spewed through the envelopes and infected postal workers here and in Washington. Two Washington postal workers died of inhalation anthrax, and five more workers — two at Brentwood and two here — survived the usually deadly disease but have been unable to return to work.

The first anthrax death, Bob Stevens, occurred about 3 weeks after 9-11. Do you remember? The nation was doubly terrorized, and for a while we were afraid to open our mail. No one knew if more attacks would follow.

If the CDC and the USPS had not been on the ball, Phase 2 of the attack on Congress might have killed many senators and their staff. As it was, the Senate office buildings had to be evacuated and quarantined, and constituents were unable to reach their senators for several months.

However, Congress continued to function. So the fallback plan went into effect. With the nation still reeling from the two-pronged terrorist attacks, and Senators scattered all over DC, Congress was stampeded into passing the Patriot Act on October 26th, 2001, essentially suspending key parts of the US Constitution.

Still, the slim Senate Democratic majority, under Daschle’s leadership, continued to be a problem for the Bush administration. The final blow to an independent legislative branch came from the “accidental” death of Paul Wellstone just before the 2002 election. He was carrying the torch of liberal opposition to the Patriot Act and Bush warmongering. His death, plus rigged voting machines, clinched the conquest of the Senate by the Repugs. By that time, given the triple threat to their lives, most Democratic legislators were too terrorized to mount much opposition to the Bush dictatorship.

Now, two plus years later, we’re emerging from the repeated terrorist shocks and starting to think straight again. Here’s the Kaminski article.

An excerpt:

When top Bush administration officials immediately and in unison
denied knowing that jetliners could be used to attack American landmarks
right after 9/11, a number of alert reporters immediately pointed out
that this very subject had been under government study for almost a
decade. And when U.S. officials immediately released a list of the
alleged hijackers, the lie was immediately visible to those with eyes to
see: how could they deny knowing this possibility of a massive jetliner
attack existed, yet be able to name the alleged hijackers almost
instantly because these individuals had been under surveillance for
months?

If they could name the alleged hijackers, then they couldn’t deny
knowing the possibility of using planes as weapons existed, could they?

As astonishing events unfolded after the tragedy – the hasty passage
of the Patriot Act (approved by Congress despite virtually no one in
Congress reading it before voting for it), which nullified large
portions of the U.S. Constitution; constant “terror alerts” about which
no evidence was ever produced; the war against Afghanistan which was
claimed to be a response to 9/11 yet was planned long before 9/11; and
the war against Iraq, which was waged because that nation supposedly
threatened America with weapons of mass destruction (which have never
and will never be found, unless planted) and had ties to that mystery
terror group called al-Qaeda (since proven to be lies) – many more
millions of Americans began to understand that the new peril they were
in was not from some shadowy worldwide terror group but from
unscrupulous demagogues in Washington who would invent any story – and
kill any number of people – in order to improve the fortunes of the very
military/industrial power brokers who illegally brought them to power in
the first place.

In the mind of these many more millions of Americans, a new
syllogism began to take shape: if they lied about why they went to war
in Afghanistan and they lied about why they went to war in Iraq, how
stupid would Americans have to be to believe what they said about 9/11?

And yet, through two years of intense flag waving, during which most
Americans were too terrified to say anything critical of those who were
ostensibly protecting us from this new wave of worldwide terror, the
lies became cast in stone. The media, owned by the same shameful
specimens who own the weapons making companies, refused to even
entertain the notion that the U.S. government could tell blatant lies to
its own people, never mind murder thousands of them in one day.

Worse, what passed for the political opposition was afraid to even
whisper what was becoming obvious in the minds of so many Americans with
functioning brains – that the initial signs of a deliberate air defense
standdown, the phony mythology about Muslim hijackers, the funny way all
those buildings in New York happened to fall, the tiny hole in the
Pentagon that was supposedly caused by a giant airliner, and the
curiously comatose behavior of our president when the nation he was
supposed to be leading was under dire attack – that 9/11 bore a
multitude of evidential suggestions that it was an inside job, executed
to give right-wing crazies a better shot at looting the treasury of
their own country in a variety of ways. This scenario has now obviously
come to pass.

Much to think about and consider, n’est-ce pas? Especially now that the terror alert has been raised from yellow to orange: “Information indicates that extremists abroad [ — Osama bin Laden, natch — ] are anticipating near-term attacks that they believe will rival or exceed the scope and impact of those we experienced in New York, at the Pentagon, and in Pennsylvania more than two years ago,” Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said in a statement released before his news conference on the announcement.

If what Kaminski says is true, it is the government we must fear. Of course, I fear Bush & Co. anyway. Contrary to the views of some right-wingers, I don’t hate Bush personally; I don’t hate anyone. I have no wish to accuse him of something so vile as being involved — even indirectly — with the horrors that occurred two years ago. But given his involvement in equally vile activities overseas, his administration’s dismantling of civil liberties here, and his ongoing quest to keep certain American citizens unequal under secular law … I recommend that we stay on high alert and keep our eyes and ears open where the government is concerned. Whether or not its representatives were part of the September 11 atrocities, it is still clear that the US government and its selected leader are NOT on the side of humanity or decency or justice. Complicit in 9/11 or not, Bush & Co. is a clear and present danger.