SECTION ONE
sm
COLUMN
SEVENTY-THREE, JULY 1, 2002
(Copyright © 2002 Al Aronowitz)
A VERY SAD STORY
Are the CIA and the FBI bosses falling on
their swords to protect our unelected President?
The
international press has already labeled George W. Bush a simpleton and---despite
a stern Bushie demand for patriotism that even made CBS's respected anchor
man, Dan Rather, admit he shrank from asking tough questions---other American
journalists have begun to use other synonyms for simpleton. [See Molly Ivans?
BUT HE's OUR WACKO.]
Now
comes news of specific tipoffs to our costly intelligence agencies that should
have warned the brave leader of our country exactly what Osama bin Laden's
maniacs had in mind. But the bosses at the FBI and the CIA have quickly stepped
up to the plate to deny that George W. Bush's ears were ever sullied with such
inside dirt.
"It
was all our fault," the FBI and the CIA tell us.
Everyone
in Washington knows that everyone in Washington is full of shit. And so
Washington is asking:
WHAT DID BUSH KNOW AND WHEN DID HE KNOW IT?
'the way I see it," comments one
D.C. insider, "if there is any kind of evidence that is made public (no matter
how small) that Bush had prior knowledge of the attacks and that thousands may
perish, our country would face the biggest political scandal in its small
history. This would dwarf both the Watergate and the Lewinski affair. Lets face
it, people would be horrified. And Bush would not only lose his presidency, but
he might even face criminal charges. I have a feeling we have an open can of
worms here."
When
Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) called for an investigation and asked a similar
question---?What did this administration know and when did it know
it??---the Bushies responded with a verbal assassination. When Democratic
Senate leader Tom Daschle criticized Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney accused
Daschle of being unpatriotic. Cheney, of course, is the man who lied to the
Senate about selling crucial equipment to Saddam Hussein when Cheney was
president of the Halliburton drilling supply company. But then our vice
president has a habit of talking out the side of his mouth. Or haven't you
noticed?
Presidents
have lied to us before. For example, only recently has it been learned that
Lyndon Johnson lied to us. His lie was that an American Navy ship was attacked
in the Gulf of Tonkin and that lie led to America's involvement in the Vietnam
War, an unwinnable conflict that cost the lives of some 58,000 of our young men.
Johnson needed a provocation to get us into that war. Did Bush lie to us because
he needed a provocation to invade Afghanistan in Big Oil's behalf?
Bush
wraps himself up in red, white and blue patriotism as if he were a gift under
the White House Christmas tree on July Fourth. But what's becoming increasingly clear is that those patriotic wrappings
contain a package as empty as his campaign promises. In other words, this
nation's unelected President does not love America so much as he loves Big
Oil, Big Business and Big profits. It is to them, not to our country, that
George W. Bush dedicates his patriotism. After all, it was Big Oil, Big Business
and Big profits that were largely responsible for installing him in the White
House.
Will
we ever know the truth? Not if the Bushies can help it. They have succeeded in
shrouding their administration within an impenetrable cloak of wartime secrecy.
No, we can't know the names of the Enron people who helped the vice president
determine the administration's energy plan because it's none of our goddamn
business. No, we can't let you know what dirty tricks Attorney General
Ashcroft is playing on us for the same reason. Suddenly, everything has become
none of our goddamn business.
Well, everyone knows that secrets are the tools of tyranny and we begin to wonder if this war on terror was staged just so we could be tyrannized. Or should we shrink from asking tough question as Dan Rather did so as not to be
Is
it unpatriotic
of me to ask
these questions?
accused
of being unpatriotic? For example, I know an air force vet who can't
understand why fighter jets weren't scrambled to head off the hijacked
airliners long before they hit the World Trade Center or the Pentaqon. He
insists there was sufficient time and advance radar warning.
And why do the Bushies continue
to resist demands for the establishment of a commission of inquiry to
investigate the September 11 attack? Recent revelations that our expensive
intelligence agencies had more than enough evidence to know what the bin Laden
gang was up to leave us wondering.
Why had American intelligence
failed so miserably when foreign intelligence agencies seemed to have so much
better knowledge? And why was the American military so well prepared for our
eventual invasion of Afghanistan? There are too many unanswered questions.
Doesn't America deserve an explanation?
We have an email from John
Horne (johnehorne@hotmail.com), who
complains of evasiveness in the official White House transcript of National
Security Advisor Condaleezza Rice's address to the media in defense of her
boss? lack of action following reports that the FBI ignored specific warnings
before the WTC attack. Twenty-one paragraphs from the bottom, Horne writes, the
official transcript states:
"Q Dr. Rice, are you aware of the reports at the time that -- was in Washington on September 11th, and on September $100,000 was wired to Pakistan to this group here in this area? While he was here meeting with you or anybody in the administration??
In his email Horne insists, 'the two dashes are normally included in transcripts to indicate a pause, but Dr Rice clearly understands the question that is being asked, hence her reply:
"?DR. RICE: I have not seen that report, and he was certainly not meeting with me."?
Do the the two dashes represent a pause, as Horne says, or do they represent a lapse by whomever transcribed Dr. Rice's address? Or do they represent an omission, as Horne would like to think? According to the audio version of Dr. Rice's address, the two dashes represent the following words:
"... ISI chief?
The ISI is the Pakistani Intelligence Service, then headed by Lt. General Mahmud Ahmad. In SECTION TWO of COLUMN SEVENTY you'll find the following paragraphs:
The CIA continues to maintain an unhealthy alliance with the ISI, the organization that groomed bin Laden and the Taliban. Last September, the head of the ISI, General Mahmud Ahmed, was fired by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf for his pro-Taliban leanings and reportedly after the U.S. government presented Musharraf with disturbing intelligence linking the general to the terrorist hijackers.
General Ahmed was in Washington, DC on the morning of September 11 meeting with CIA and State Department officials as the hijacked planes slammed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Later, both the Northern Alliance spokesman in Washington, Haron Amin, and Indian intelligence, in an apparent leak to The Times of India, confirmed that General Ahmed ordered a Pakistani-born British citizen and known terrorist named Ahmed Umar Sheik [now under arrest as one of the kidnappers responsible for the murder of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl] to wire $100,000 from Pakistan to the U.S. bank account of Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker.
SECTION
TWO of COLUMN SEVENTY tells a story
that implies George W. Bush and his CIA did indeed know of the impending Arab
attack but were willing to sacrifice
the WTC and its occupants because Big Oil needed a provocation for America to
invade Afghanistan. Why? So Big Oil could build its Trans-Afghan pipeline.
On September 11, according to newspaper reports, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was supposed to fly to New York, but Israeli Intelligence told him not to go. These reports opened the floodgates for the notoriously hyperbolic Arab propaganda machine, which reported that Sharon told 6,000 Jews not to go to work at the WTC that day---a report obviously as preposterous as Ibn Saud telling 6000 Moslems the same. However, the notoriously anti-Israel Arab "Street" and anti-Semites everywhere continue to cling to this fabrication as truthful fact. See Thomas L. Friedman's column.
Anyway, if Israeli
Intelligence was onto something, the callous killer cowboys at the core of
America's CIA must have known something, too.
And what did Dr. Rice
know? Big Oil has rewarded her allegiance by naming a tanker after her, the SS
Condoleezza Rice.
In its original report, The Times of India starts out:
India helped FBI trace ISI-terrorist links
by MANOJ JOSHI
12 October 2001
'THE TIMES OF INDIA'
NEW DELHI: While the Pakistani Inter Services Public Relations claimed
that former ISI director-general Lt.General Mahmud Ahmad sought retirement after
being superseded on Monday, the truth is more shocking.
Top sources confirmed here on Tuesday, that the general lost his job because of the "evidence" India produced to show his links to one of the suicide bombers that wrecked the World Trade Centre. The US authorities sought his removal after confirming the fact that $100,000 were wired to WTC hijacker Mohammed Atta from Pakistan by Ahmad Umar Sheikh [Now being held as one of the murders of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl at the instance of General Mahmud.
For more of The Times of India report, click on http://www.timesofindia.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=1454238160. ##
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