Gold9472
02-02-2007, 10:09 AM
9/11: The Case Isn't Closed
http://www.alternet.org/story/45726/
By Sander Hicks, AlterNet. Posted February 2, 2007.
Editor's note: The role of the alternative press is to offer perspectives that the commercial media won't touch. Having run a number of articles critical of the "9/11 Truth Movement" by Matt Taibbi, Joshua Holland, Matthew Rothschild and others, we asked Sander Hicks, a prominent voice within the movement, to share his perspective. For more of Sanders' views, see his book "The Big Wedding: 9/11, The Whistle-Blowers, and the Cover-Up."
No matter what you believe about who was responsible for 9/11, and how it went down, we're all amazed at how much political capital the events of that day produced for this administration: A bipartisan consensus on torture; an era of permanent war; detentions without trial; "no fly" lists for activists; the Bill of Rights gone with the wind, and a cowed professional media willing to self-censor and suppress pertinent information. The 9/11 "America Attacked" story has distracted us from the natural outrage we should feel over illegal wiretaps, stolen elections, hundreds of billions of dollars missing at the Pentagon, war profiteering, Enron and Cheney's secret energy policy.
But with Bush's popularity at a record low, a Zogby poll shows that over 40 percent of Americans now think there has been a "coverup" around 9/11. A more recent poll conducted at the Scripps-Howard/University of Ohio found more than a third of those asked said it was likely that "people in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East."
So, it's probably no surprise that the propaganda mills of the State Department have recently been cranking out attack websites, targeting 9/11 skepticism. And it's not a shocker that the normal channels of media have followed suit (Time, New York Times, etc.) What's weird is how similar the attacks sound in the hallowed halls of "respectable" left political opinion. A recent column on AlterNet by the Progressive's Matthew Rothschild matched the recent bromides of Counterpunch's Alexander Cockburn. In both pieces, the way 9/11 has been questioned was attacked, with no alternatives suggested. Instead, questioning 9/11 at all was belittled with sweeping generalizations.
What happened to critical thinking? I thought "the Left" believed that the system's power is based on lies, exploitation and a media controlled by its own culture of overly cautious professionalism. The Left should be leading this 9/11 movement, not taking potshots from outside. Unfortunately, some of the movement's theories, like "the towers came down through a controlled demolition" sound esoteric at first blush. The "No Plane Hit the Pentagon" theory is a loose thread in a maze going nowhere.
The Left has no right to ignore or insult people for trying to assemble the puzzle that is 9/11.
Consider some of the pieces:
Assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage is a figure bloodied by his work in Iran/Contra. He and then-CIA Director George Tenet had extensive meetings in Pakistan with President Musharraf in the spring of 2001, according to the Asia Times.
Then, Pakistan's top spy, Mahmood Ahmad, visited Washington for a week, taking meetings with top State Department people like Tenet and Mark Grossman, under secretary of state for political affairs. The Pakistani press reported, "ISI Chief Lt-Gen Mahmood's weeklong presence in Washington has triggered speculation about the agenda of his mysterious meetings at the Pentagon and National Security Council." Did they know that Ahmad had wired over $100,000 to Mohamed Atta, through U.K. national Saeed Sheikh in the summer of 2001? (Facts all confirmed, quietly, by the FBI investigation in Pakistan, and, partially, in the Wall Street Journal.)
That means that our top people at the State Department enjoyed only a few degrees of separation from 9/11's lead hijacker, Mohamed Atta. Here's the real kicker: As this story first broke in the Times of India, in October 2001, instead of retaliating, the United States gave Pakistan $3 billion in U.S. aid. Ahmad was allowed to quietly resign.
Bob Graham, D-Fla., who sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, would later tell PBS's Gwen Ifill: "I think there is very compelling evidence that at least some of the terrorists were assisted not just in financing -- although that was part of it -- by a sovereign foreign government and that we have been derelict in our duty to track that down, make the further case, or find the evidence that would indicate that that is not true."
Skip forward to Feb. 15, 2006. Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer gave a 48-page statement to the House Armed Services Committee, in which he stated, unequivocally, that his Defense Intelligence operation, Able Danger, identified Mohamed Atta as a major terrorist back in year 2000. But Shaffer and his team of "the 'best and brightest' military operators" were prevented from sharing this information with the FBI. According to Shaffer, during a crucial meeting the group's Pentagon supervisors and attorneys from the Special Operations Command in early 2000, the Able Danger team was ordered to cover Atta's mugshot with a yellow sticky note. Military lawyers at the Pentagon claimed it was to protect the rights of "U.S. Persons."
Some progressives are turned off to the Able Danger story, since it was the pet obsession of recently defeated congressman "Crazy" Curt Weldon, R-Pa., the "patriot" who planned a clandestine trip to personally dig through Iraq in order to find the WMD's for Bush's White House. And the Department of Defense inspector general recently issued a report claiming that the Able Danger operation never identified Atta. But author Peter Lance (an Emmy-award winning reporter, formerly with ABC), author of "Triple Cross: How bin Laden's Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI -- and Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him," calls the Pentagon IG report a "whitewash … set out to prove a predetermined thesis: that these decorated military officers had somehow lied and risked their careers by exaggerating Able Danger's findings." Rather, Lance confirms that Shaffer, and his colleague, Navy Capt. Scott Phillpott, "found links to 9/11 hijackers, Atta, [Khalid] al-Midhar and [Nawaf] al-Hazmi as connections between al Qaeda and the New York-based cell of [the blind Sheikh] Omar Abdel Rahman."
When the critics focus on the wacky theories and not on careful, moderate, serious authors like Lance, it's a strategy to frame the debate. It steers the argument from going after the real meat of 9/11: the history of U.S. foreign policy in strategic alliances with radical Islam.
Specifically, there are a set of troubling connections between the 9/11 terrorists and the U.S. State Department, the Pakistani ISI (old friends of the CIA from working together creating Afghani Mujahadeen during the Russian occupation), the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate, the Pentagon, Maxwell Air Force Base and the Muslim Brotherhood.
End Part I
http://www.alternet.org/story/45726/
By Sander Hicks, AlterNet. Posted February 2, 2007.
Editor's note: The role of the alternative press is to offer perspectives that the commercial media won't touch. Having run a number of articles critical of the "9/11 Truth Movement" by Matt Taibbi, Joshua Holland, Matthew Rothschild and others, we asked Sander Hicks, a prominent voice within the movement, to share his perspective. For more of Sanders' views, see his book "The Big Wedding: 9/11, The Whistle-Blowers, and the Cover-Up."
No matter what you believe about who was responsible for 9/11, and how it went down, we're all amazed at how much political capital the events of that day produced for this administration: A bipartisan consensus on torture; an era of permanent war; detentions without trial; "no fly" lists for activists; the Bill of Rights gone with the wind, and a cowed professional media willing to self-censor and suppress pertinent information. The 9/11 "America Attacked" story has distracted us from the natural outrage we should feel over illegal wiretaps, stolen elections, hundreds of billions of dollars missing at the Pentagon, war profiteering, Enron and Cheney's secret energy policy.
But with Bush's popularity at a record low, a Zogby poll shows that over 40 percent of Americans now think there has been a "coverup" around 9/11. A more recent poll conducted at the Scripps-Howard/University of Ohio found more than a third of those asked said it was likely that "people in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East."
So, it's probably no surprise that the propaganda mills of the State Department have recently been cranking out attack websites, targeting 9/11 skepticism. And it's not a shocker that the normal channels of media have followed suit (Time, New York Times, etc.) What's weird is how similar the attacks sound in the hallowed halls of "respectable" left political opinion. A recent column on AlterNet by the Progressive's Matthew Rothschild matched the recent bromides of Counterpunch's Alexander Cockburn. In both pieces, the way 9/11 has been questioned was attacked, with no alternatives suggested. Instead, questioning 9/11 at all was belittled with sweeping generalizations.
What happened to critical thinking? I thought "the Left" believed that the system's power is based on lies, exploitation and a media controlled by its own culture of overly cautious professionalism. The Left should be leading this 9/11 movement, not taking potshots from outside. Unfortunately, some of the movement's theories, like "the towers came down through a controlled demolition" sound esoteric at first blush. The "No Plane Hit the Pentagon" theory is a loose thread in a maze going nowhere.
The Left has no right to ignore or insult people for trying to assemble the puzzle that is 9/11.
Consider some of the pieces:
Assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage is a figure bloodied by his work in Iran/Contra. He and then-CIA Director George Tenet had extensive meetings in Pakistan with President Musharraf in the spring of 2001, according to the Asia Times.
Then, Pakistan's top spy, Mahmood Ahmad, visited Washington for a week, taking meetings with top State Department people like Tenet and Mark Grossman, under secretary of state for political affairs. The Pakistani press reported, "ISI Chief Lt-Gen Mahmood's weeklong presence in Washington has triggered speculation about the agenda of his mysterious meetings at the Pentagon and National Security Council." Did they know that Ahmad had wired over $100,000 to Mohamed Atta, through U.K. national Saeed Sheikh in the summer of 2001? (Facts all confirmed, quietly, by the FBI investigation in Pakistan, and, partially, in the Wall Street Journal.)
That means that our top people at the State Department enjoyed only a few degrees of separation from 9/11's lead hijacker, Mohamed Atta. Here's the real kicker: As this story first broke in the Times of India, in October 2001, instead of retaliating, the United States gave Pakistan $3 billion in U.S. aid. Ahmad was allowed to quietly resign.
Bob Graham, D-Fla., who sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, would later tell PBS's Gwen Ifill: "I think there is very compelling evidence that at least some of the terrorists were assisted not just in financing -- although that was part of it -- by a sovereign foreign government and that we have been derelict in our duty to track that down, make the further case, or find the evidence that would indicate that that is not true."
Skip forward to Feb. 15, 2006. Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer gave a 48-page statement to the House Armed Services Committee, in which he stated, unequivocally, that his Defense Intelligence operation, Able Danger, identified Mohamed Atta as a major terrorist back in year 2000. But Shaffer and his team of "the 'best and brightest' military operators" were prevented from sharing this information with the FBI. According to Shaffer, during a crucial meeting the group's Pentagon supervisors and attorneys from the Special Operations Command in early 2000, the Able Danger team was ordered to cover Atta's mugshot with a yellow sticky note. Military lawyers at the Pentagon claimed it was to protect the rights of "U.S. Persons."
Some progressives are turned off to the Able Danger story, since it was the pet obsession of recently defeated congressman "Crazy" Curt Weldon, R-Pa., the "patriot" who planned a clandestine trip to personally dig through Iraq in order to find the WMD's for Bush's White House. And the Department of Defense inspector general recently issued a report claiming that the Able Danger operation never identified Atta. But author Peter Lance (an Emmy-award winning reporter, formerly with ABC), author of "Triple Cross: How bin Laden's Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI -- and Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him," calls the Pentagon IG report a "whitewash … set out to prove a predetermined thesis: that these decorated military officers had somehow lied and risked their careers by exaggerating Able Danger's findings." Rather, Lance confirms that Shaffer, and his colleague, Navy Capt. Scott Phillpott, "found links to 9/11 hijackers, Atta, [Khalid] al-Midhar and [Nawaf] al-Hazmi as connections between al Qaeda and the New York-based cell of [the blind Sheikh] Omar Abdel Rahman."
When the critics focus on the wacky theories and not on careful, moderate, serious authors like Lance, it's a strategy to frame the debate. It steers the argument from going after the real meat of 9/11: the history of U.S. foreign policy in strategic alliances with radical Islam.
Specifically, there are a set of troubling connections between the 9/11 terrorists and the U.S. State Department, the Pakistani ISI (old friends of the CIA from working together creating Afghani Mujahadeen during the Russian occupation), the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate, the Pentagon, Maxwell Air Force Base and the Muslim Brotherhood.
End Part I