Too Many 9/11 Commission Questions Still Unanswered?

I'm glad I'm not the only one not afraid to continue to point out the great deceptions of those in our time in powerful elective positions, and the circumstances under which Van Jones has become a martyr for the cause of truth and justice. After all, aren't we a nation praised universally for our famous Constitutional rights to free speech, assembly (and, previously, habeas corpus)? And aren't the people's opinions cited below patriots with personal reputations equal to the Cheney/Bush junta's (if not much more so)?

I wonder sometimes if it hasn't struck most people operating at the top levels of our government that no one in the U.S. foreign service is being taken seriously by any countries any more? The rest of the world is now going about its business without much input from the U.S. This must really make for interesting political jaunts today (remember Ms. Condi's exercises in preaching erroneous history?).

The oddest part is that the loudly braying debunkers of the true history (and they call the actual experts "conspiracists,") have absolutely no technical credentials to inform their opinions.

One final comment (and I know I'm blithering now, but this is so important to the future of the U.S. that I can't stop myself): I still believe that the clever idiots who thought up this nightmare scenario never thought anyone outside of their charmed circle was smart enough or bold enough to hold them to account. (Dick Cheney does now though - witness his tortured appearances on TV recently).

Will we ever return to being a country of laws and not of (bad) men? (Emphasis marks and some judicious (I hope) editing were inserted - Ed.)

Too Many 9/11 Commission Questions Still Unanswered

When Pandora's Box is finally fully opened on the deceptions and abuses of power by the Cheney/Bush administration ~ the 9/11 conspiracy and coverup will stand alone as the most treasonous act in American history. Here are 40 experts, including Commission members, who share their misgivings about the 9/11 Commission and the questions left unanswered.

The resignation Sunday of longtime Bay Area activist Van Jones as a White House environmental adviser left many progressives, including myself, rightfully angry at the Obama administration for crumbling to conservative criticism of Jones' controversial past comments and actions ~ particularly regarding 9/11. Jones resigned amid a furor over his signature on a 2004 petition rightfully questioning the government's actions around the Sept.11, 2001 terrorist attacks. A petition that I and many other Progressive leaders proudly signed and still support. As Gandhi once said ~ An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because very few choose to see or acknowledge it. So let's set the record straight, Van Jones was not alone in his misgivings about the government's actions around the 9/11 attacks and most certainly its response ~ as alluded to in the obviously deeply flawed 9/11 Commission Report. Some recent facts ~ “More than one-quarter of all footnotes in the 9/11 Report refer to CIA interrogations of al Qaeda operatives subjected to the now-controversial interrogation techniques ( torture ),” writes former NBC producer Robert Windrem in The Daily Beast. “In fact, information derived from the interrogations was central to the 9/11 Report’s most critical chapters, those on the planning and execution of the attacks.” Approximately 60% of the 9/11 commissioners have publicly stated that the government agreed not to tell the truth about 9/11 and that the Pentagon was involved in deliberate deception about their response to the attack according to the Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/01/AR2006080101300.html

Here are 40 experts, including the Chairman, 9/11 Commission, Thomas H. Kean, Former Governor of New Jersey and Vice Chairman, 9/11 Commission, Lee Hamilton, Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Homeland Security Advisory Council ~ sounding off in short quotes about their misgivings with the 9/11 Commission and the far too many questions that are still UNANSWERED.

(Summarized from www.patriotsquestion911.com.)

Senator Max Cleland – Former member of the 9/11 Commission, resigned in December 2003 "I, as a member of the [9/11] Commission, cannot look any American in the eye . . . It is a national scandal... this White House wants to cover [9/11] up."

Senator Mark Dayton ~ Member, Senate Committee on Armed Services and Homeland Security "[NORAD] lied to the American people, they lied to Congress and they lied to your 9/11 Commission . . . the most gross incompetence and dereliction of responsibility and negligence"Congressman Ron Paul - Vice Chairman of the Oversight and Investigations subcommittee "the [9/11] investigations that have been done so far as more or less cover-up and no real explanation"

Congressman Curt Weldon - "[9/11 Commission] there's something very sinister going on here. . . something desperately wrong . . . . This involved what is right now the covering up of information that led to the deaths of 3,000 people"

Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney - Member of the House Armed Services Committee "the [9/11] Commission ran up against obstruction by the administration and non-cooperation from government agencies . . . the errors and omissions immediately jumped out at us"

Director of the FBI, Louis Freeh – "[9/11 Commission] findings - raises serious challenges to the commission's credibility and, if the facts prove out, might just render the commission historically insignificant itself" Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, Paul Craig Roberts, PhD - "Distinguished national and international scientists and scholars present massive evidence that the 9/11 Commission Report is a hoax and that the 9/11 "terrorist attack" has been manipulated to serve a hegemonic agenda in the Middle East . . . . We know that it is strictly impossible for any building, much less steel columned buildings, to "pancake" at free fall speed. Therefore, it is a non-controversial fact that the official explanation of the collapse of the WTC buildings is false"

Assistant Secretary of Housing, Catherine Austin Fitts - "Regarding 9/11" The official story could not possibly have happened... It’s not possible. It’s not operationally feasible... The Commission was a whitewash."

U.S. Army Intelligence officer, Federal Prosecutor, Office of Special Investigations, U.S. Department of Justice, John Loftus ~ "The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defence of incompetence"

Foreign Service Officer, George Kenney - "I cannot believe, much as I might like to, the standard account of 9/11"

Foreign Service Officer, J. Michael Springman - "Fifteen of the nineteen people who allegedly flew airplanes into buildings in the United States got their visas from the same CIA Consulate at Jeddah"

Deputy Attorney General, State of Pennsylvania, Philip J. Berg, Esquire - "The official story of what actually took place on 9/11 is a lie."

Major General U.S. Army, Commanding General of U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, Albert Stubblebine ~ "I look at the hole in the Pentagon and I look at the size of an airplane that was supposed to have hit the Pentagon. And I said, ‘The plane does not fit in that hole’. So what did hit the Pentagon?"

Col. Ronald D. Ray, U.S. Marine Corps – Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Deputy Director of Field Operations for the U.S. Marine Corps Historical Center - "I'm astounded that the conspiracy theory advanced by the administration could in fact be true and the evidence does not seem to suggest that's accurate"

Col. Robert Bowman, U.S. Air Force, Director of Advanced Space Programs, PhD Aeronautics and Nuclear Engineering -"the official 9/11 story is impossible .. There is a cover up .. high levels of our government don't want us to know what happened .. highly placed individuals in the administration .. Dick Cheney .. the very kindest thing we can say about George W Bush .. is high treason and conspiracy to commit murder "

Col. George Nelson, U.S. Air Force, aircraft accident investigator ~ "I never witnessed nor even heard of an aircraft loss, where the wreckage was accessible, that prevented investigators from finding enough hard evidence to positively identify the make, model, and specific registration number of the aircraft - and in most cases the precise cause of the accident. . . . The government alleges that four wide-body airliners crashed on the morning of September 11, 2001, resulting in the deaths of more than 3,000 human beings, yet not one piece of hard aircraft evidence has been produced in an attempt to positively identify any of the four aircraft. On the contrary, it seems only that all potential evidence was deliberately kept hidden from view . . . with all the evidence readilty available at the Pentagon crash site, any unbiased rational investigator could only conclude that a Boeing 757 did not fly into the Pentagon as alleged. Similarly, with all the evidence available at the Pennsylvania crash site, it was most doubtful that a passenger airliner caused the obvious hole in the ground and certainly not the Boeing 757 as alleged . . . the most heinous conspiracy in our country's history" Major Douglas Rokke, PhD, U.S. Army ~ "Regarding the impact at the Pentagon on 9/11/2001 "when you look at the damage, it was obviously a missile."

Capt. Russ Wittenberg, U.S. Air Force, fighter pilot, commercial pilot flying 707, 720, 727, 737, 747, 757, 767, and 777 ’s. Had previously flown Flight 93, which impacted in Pennsylvania, and Flight 175, the second plane to hit the WTC ~"The government story they handed us about 9/11 is total B.S. plain and simple...[Regarding Flight 77]"The airplane could not have flown at those speeds which they said it did without going into what they call a high speed stall. The airplane won’t go that fast if you start pulling those high G maneuvers at those bank angles... The vehicle that hit the Pentagon was not Flight 77"

Lt. Col. Karen U. Kwiatkowski, PhD, U.S. Air Force, Office of the Secretary of Defense, staff of the Director of the National Security Agency ~ "It is as a scientist that I have the most trouble with the official government conspiracy theory, mainly because it does not satisfy the rules of probability or physics. The collapses of the World Trade Center buildings clearly violate the laws of probability and physics . . . . There was a dearth of visible debris on the relatively unmarked Pentagon, where I stood only minutes after the impact. Beyond this strange absence of airliner debris, there was no sign of the kind of damage one would expect from the impact of a large airliner... this visible evidence or lack thereof may also have been apparent to the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who in an unfortunate slip of the tongue referred to the aircraft that slamed into the Pentagon as a ' missile ' . . . . I saw nothing of significance at the point of contact ~ no airplane metal or cargo debris was blowing on the lawn in front of the damaged building as smoke billowed from within the Pentagon . . . . all of us staring at the Pentagon that morning were indeed looking for such debris, but what we expected was not evident . . . the same is true with regard to the damage we expected . . . but I did not see this kind of damage. Rather, the facade had a rather small hole, no larger than 20 feet in diameter. Although this facade later collapsed, it remained standing for 30 0r 40 minutes, with the roof remaining relatively straight . . . . The scene, in short, was not what I would have expected from a strike by a large jetliner. It was, however, exactly what one would have expected if a missile had struck the Pentagon"

Senior Military Affairs Journalist at the Naval Postgraduate School, Barbara Honegger, MS ~ "The US military, not al Qaeda, had the sustained access weeks before 9/11 to also plant controlled demolition charges throughout the superstructures of WTC 1 and WTC 2, and in WTC 7, which brought down all three buildings on 9/11 . . . A US military plane, not one piloted by al Qaeda, performed the highly skilled, high−speed 270−degree dive towards the Pentagon that Air Traffic Controllers on 9/11 were sure was a military plane as they watched it on their screens. Only a military aircraft, not a civilian plane flown by al Qaeda, would have given off the "Friendly" signal needed to disable the Pentagon’s anti−aircraft missile batteries as it approached the building . . . Only the US military, not al Qaeda, had the ability to break all of its Standard Operating Procedures to paralyze its own emergency response system"

Capt. Gregory M. Zeigler, PhD, U.S. Army, U.S. Army Intelligence Officer ~ "I knew from September 18, 2001, that the official story about 9/11 was false. ... [A]nomalies poured in rapidly: the hijackers' names appearing in none of the published flight passenger lists, BBC reports of stolen identities of the alleged hijackers or the alleged hijackers being found alive, the obvious demolitions of WTC 1 and 2...and WTC7...not hit by an airplane...the lack of identifiable Boeing 757 wreckage at the Pentagon"

Capt. Eric H. May, U.S. Army, Intelligence officer ~ "I view the 911 event . . . as a matter that implies either...A) passive participation by the Bush White House through a deliberate stand-down or B) active execution of a plot by rogue elements of government, starting with the White House itself, in creating a spectacle of destruction that would lead the United States into an invasion of the Middle East"

Former Chairman, National Intelligence Estimates, CIA, responsible for preparing the President’ Daily Brief, U.S. Army Intelligence Officer, Raymond L. McGovern ~ "I think at simplest terms, there’s a cover-up. The 9/11 report is a joke . . . just as Hitler in 1933 cynically exploited the burning of the parliament building, the Reichstag, this is exactly what our President did in exploiting 9/11 . . . making a war of aggression on a country that he knew had nothing to do with 9/11 . . . that’s certainly an impeachable offense . . . . But compelling evidence for an even more disturbing conclusion: that the 9/11 attacks were themselves orchestrated by this administration precisely so they could be thus exploited."

National Intelligence Officer and Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis, William Christison ~ "there is persuasive evidence that the events of September did not unfold as the Bush administration and the 9/11 Commission would have us believe. … An airliner almost certainly did not hit The Pentagon. … The North and South Towers of the World Trade Center almost certainly did not collapse and fall to earth because hijacked aircraft hit them...this all was totally an inside job . . . I have since decided that . . . at least some elements in this US government had contributed in some way or other to causing 9/11 to happen or at least allowing it to happen . . . . The reason that the two towers in New York actually collapsed and fell all the way to the ground was controlled explosions rather than just being hit by two airplanes. . . . All of the characteristics of these demolitions show that they almost had to have been controlled explosions. . . . I think you almost have to look at the 9/11 Commission Report as a joke and not a serious piece of analysis at all . . . . It's a monstrous crime"

U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer, case officer CIA. Robert David Steele ~ "I am forced to conclude that there is sufficient evidence to indict (not necessarily convict) Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and others...This is, without question, the most important modern reference on state-sponsored terrorism, and also the reference that most pointedly suggests that select rogue elements within the US Government, most likely led by Dick Cheney with the assistance of George Tenet, Buzzy Kronguard, and others close to the Wall Street gangs, are the most guilty of state-sponsored terrorism . . . . I'm absolutely certain that WTC 7 was brought down by controlled demolition and that as far as I'm concerned means that this case has not been properly investigated. There's no way that building could have come down without controlled demolition"

CIA Case Officer, Specialist in the Middle East, Directorate of Operations, Awarded Career Intelligence Medal, Robert Baer ~ "Regarding the opinion there was an aspect of 'inside job' to 9/11 within the U.S.government, "There is that possibility, the evidence points at it."

Counter-terrorism expert in the Security Division of the federal Aviation Administration. Team leader of the FAA's Red (Terrorism) Team in the Federal Air Marshall program, Coast Guard officer, Bogdan Dzakovic ~ "At worst, I think the 9/11 Commission Report is treasonous."

Minister of Justice, West Germany, Horst Ehmke, PhD - "Terrorists could not have carried out such an operation with four hijacked planes without the support of a secret service."

State Secretary, Federal Ministry of Defense, West Germany, Andreas von Buelow, PhD - "The official story is so inadequate and far-fetched that there must be another one...This is unthinkable, without years-long support from secret apparatuses of the state and industry."

President of Italy, Francesco Cossiga ~ "[9/11] could not be accomplished without infiltrations in the radar and flight security personnel." General Leonid Ivashov, Chief of Staff, Russian armed forces, Ministry of Defense ~ "Only secret services and their current chiefs – or those retired but still having influence inside the state organizations – have the ability to plan, organize and conduct an operation [9/11] of such magnitude . . . . Osama bin Laden and "Al Qaeda" cannot be the organizers nor the performers of the September 11 attacks. They do not have the necessary organization, resources or leaders." Foreign Minister of Egypt, Mohamed Hassanein Heikal ~ "Bin Laden does not have the capabilities for an operation [9/11] of this magnitude. When I hear Bush talking about al-Qaida as if it was Nazi Germany or the communist party of the Soviet Union, I laugh because I know what is there. Bin Laden has been under surveillance for years: every telephone call was monitored and al-Qaida has been penetrated by American intelligence, Pakistani intelligence, Saudi intelligence, Egyptian intelligence. They could not have kept secret an operation that required such a degree of organisation and sophistication." Chief of Staff, Pakistani Army, General Mirza Aslam Beg ~ "The information which is now coming up, goes to prove that involvement by the ‘rogue elements’ of the U.S. military and intelligence organization is getting more obvious. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda definitely do not have the knowhow and the capability to launch such operations involving such high precision coordination, based on information and expertise." European Parliament, Committee on Security and Defense, Giulietto Chiesa ~ regarding 9-11 "Billions of people were given only one explanation . . . which is entirely false....everyone who dares to question it is treated as if he was a fool." French Army Intelligence and artillery officer, Col. Pierre-Henri Bunel, Expert in the effects of artillery weapons and explosives ~ Regarding Department of Defense photos of the Pentagon on 9/11 "Image of the impact on the Pentagon is very instructive as to the nature of the explosion.... It corresponds to a detonation of an explosive with high energetic power. The explosion does not correspond to a deflagration of kerosene . . . suggests a single engine flying vehicle much smaller in size than an airliner . . . resembles the effects of anti-concrete hollow charges that I have been able to observe on a number of battlefields . . . lead me therefore to think that the detonation that struck the building was that of a high-powered hollow charge used to destroy hardened buildings and carried by an aerial vehicle, a missile." Safety Engineer and accident Analyst, National Safety Technology Authority, Finland, Heikki Kurttila, PhD ~ "Conclusion: The observed collapse time of WTC 7 was 6.5 seconds. That is only half a second longer than it would have taken for the top of the building to fall to the ground in a vacuum, and half a second shorter than the falling time of an apple when air resistance is taken into account. . . . The great speed of the collapse and the low value of the resistance factor strongly suggest controlled demolition. Counter-Terrorism Officer, MI5 (Britain), David Shayler – regarding 9-11 "The available evidence indicates that people in key positions in the FBI, the State Department, the CIA and so on were not loyal to the Constitution; that they saw an opportunity in plans laid down by genuine Islamic terrorists to carry out an operation that would shock the world and would therefore justify U.S. adventurism in the middle East, particularly in Afghanistan and Iraq." Chairman, 9/11 Commission, Thomas H. Kean, Former Governor of New Jersey - "FAA and NORAD officials advanced an account of 9/11 that was untrue...We, to this day, don't know why NORAD told us what they told us...It was just so far from the truth." Vice Chairman, 9/11 Commission, Lee Hamilton, Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Homeland Security Advisory Council ~ "we got started late; we had a very short time frame . . . we did not have enough money . . . . We had a lot of people strongly opposed to what we did. We had a lot of trouble getting access to documents and to people. ... So there were all kinds of reasons we thought we were set up to fail" 9/11 Commissioner, Timothy J. Roemer, PhD, Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence - "that panel members so distrusted testimony from Pentagon officials that they referred their concerns to the Pentagon's inspector general. . . . We were extremely frustrated with the false statements we were getting" Senior Counsel, 9/11 Commission, John J. Farmer, Jr., Former Attorney General, NJ, Former Commissioner of the State Commission of Investigations ~ Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon's initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public "I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described . . . The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years" It was Carl Sagan who wrote of the Bamboozle Effect which seems to have affected many Americans ~ "One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge , even to ourselves, that we’ve been so credulous." But the 9/11 truth will eventually surface and the truth always goes through three stages as will the eventual unmasking of the 9/11 cover up ~ First ~ it is ridiculed. Second ~ it is violently opposed. Third ~ It is accepted as being self evident and we are daily drawing closer to stage three . Allen L Roland http://blogs.salon.com/0002255/2009/09/08.html

I've never been credulous about this pile of too-obvious lies - obvious to anyone who was trying to figure out how something this world-destroying could have happened. Case rested. Suzan _______________

Who Is To Blame?

Is it over yet? Have we once again been suckered into a commemoration of the most shameful event ever perpetrated against our citizenry with scarcely no public attempt at understanding its genesis, gleefully exuberant praise for the participants in the vengeance orgy that sprang full blown from it and blame for the hard-truth exposers on the fringes, all of which ultimately (shamefully) is used (over and over again) as a "sort of backdrop for political" theatre? Michael Chertoff and Condi Rice were guest speakers. I'm puzzled about their relevance at this time as they are plainly both members of an administration that didn't protect the victims. I guess we're to understand (mutely) that they are still trying?

The annual homeland security report card compiled by New York Sen. Chuck Schumer is, as usual, a compendium of national failure. Border security, port security, mass transit security—even aviation security—still fail to meet the most common-sense recommendations of the multitude of commissions and committees that studied what went wrong that awful day. We are still forcing people to take off their shoes at airports, but not inspecting cargo that gets shoved into the hold.

I think these facts speak for themselves. We experience another occasion wrought with tremendous emotion for great dramatic impact, but nothing really relevant has been done to ensure that another of similar consequence will not soon occur. I can't stop thinking about the comments in the section below this essay:

Who are the 9/11 worldwide Truthers and why do their stories sound so reasonable? Once all of US leaders were on board and complicit in blaming Muslim Terrorists for this massacre, the War on Terrorism flowed smoothly afterward. Once one accepts a catestrophic lie of this magnitude, the other Big Lies are much easier. The War on Terrorism was instituted in a Jerusalem conference in 1979 attended by Bush senior, Sharon, and assorted American and Israeli neocons. It’s statement of purpose was written by Wolfowitz in 1992, rejected, incorporated in PNAC in 1998, and implemented by the Bushites, with Dem support. And now McCain and Obama are going to commemorate where it all started. A moving ceremony, with four pauses where the planes hit the two towers and their collapse. Ignoring the collapse of the third tower where no planes hit, in the customary, mainstream way. Barbarism can have mo more fitting and sentimental rite. Hats off, everyone! Hats off to violence, greed and oppression and the authorized delusion that legitimates them.

Now all of the above may not be true. But enough of it seems reasonable that when confronted with the truthiness from the Bush/Cheney administration's viewpoint (like that the administration has kept the the U.S. "safe" since 9/11), I weigh them both and find the official version wanting. So, please pardon me if I go with the theory that seems true to me. Even more to the point about today's fraudulent celebration are the "What if's?" of 9/11. Try to imagine the better world that we would be living in if the predetermined response to 9/11 wasn't the invasion of both Afghanistan and Iraq. And how about all of those disturbing facts (that you probably didn't know) about 9/11? And then a little later in the day, I begin to read this article from The Asia Times:

Dear, sweet Laura Bush told the biggest, baldest lie at last week's Republican National Convention. "Let's not forget," the first lady said, "President [George W] Bush has kept the American people safe." Mrs Bush, your husband and his administration did not keep the American people safe. On September 11, 2001, nearly 3,000 people died, and more than 6,000 were injured as al-Qaeda hijackers crashed commercial aircraft into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon outside Washington. The Bush people act as if someone else was in charge when it happened. It's the greatest political mystery of the 21st century, perhaps in American history: how have the Republicans avoided responsibility for 9/11? How can they keep claiming the deadliest attacks on the American mainland as a badge of honor, rather than a stain on their record? Mrs Bush's whopper is one of three big lies that the Republicans keep telling on national security related to 9/11. The assault on the truth has gone on for seven years, and last week's convention video of the disaster suggests it will continue. Meanwhile, Democrats remain afraid to say the Bush administration has no clothes on when it comes to national security lest they be accused of politicizing 9/11, while Republicans keep flaunting the tragedy for partisan gain. The Bush administration's steadfast refusal to take any responsibility for the attacks is absolutely mind-blowing. No appointee was fired for the most glaring national security cock-up since Pearl Harbor, if not the British torching of the White House in 1814. Then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice contends no one anticipated terrorists using airplanes to hit skyscrapers, even though the Federal Bureau of Investigation analyzed the possibility in 1991. For her incompetence and lack of candor, she was promoted to secretary of state. As with other massive failures to anticipate, Hurricane Katrina and administering Iraq, the Bush administration believes its appointees are always "doin' a great job". In truth, failures at the highest levels of the national security and intelligence communities set the stage of 9/11, but the Bush administration won't admit it, and no one has ever been held accountable. After bragging that it has kept America safe, Republicans then boast that America hasn't been hit again. At the convention, Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain talked about a second attack "that many thought was inevitable", even though no credible plot for further attacks has been found. While it's true there's hasn't been a strike on the American homeland since 9/11, taking bows for that is based on faulty logic. As Bill Clinton might say, it depends on how you define "again". The same folks who say the US hasn't been hit again frequently contend the Iraq occupation lets the US fight the terrorists over there instead of fighting them in America. Never mind that were no international terrorists in Iraq before the US invasion, or the implicit suggestion of using American soldiers as sacrificial lambs to keep the bad guys away from the main flock. By the over-there logic, the US has been hit 4,152 times and counting since 9/11 in Iraq alone. Some may argue that the US has been hit in other senses, such as the erosion of constitutional rights at home and standing in the world (see lie number 3). Anyone who goes through US airport security, tries sending money overseas, or applies for a student visa with a name like Muhammad will see that the hits just keep coming. But the biggest lie in contending that the US hasn't been hit again since 9/11 is that the US did, in fact, get hit again on 9/11. Those attacks weren't a first strike by an unknown foe but the highlight of a series of attacks by a dedicated enemy. Al-Qaeda's war on the US began at the World Trade Center in 1993 with an attempt to blow up the Twin Towers with a truck bomb in the garage. Al-Qaeda went on to bomb the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000. But when they entered office, the Bush people downgraded the Clinton administration's fight against al-Qaeda that included cruise missile attacks on targets in Somalia and Afghanistan. The Bush people demoted the chief counter-terrorism adviser to the National Security Council. Condoleezza Rice, and reportedly George W Bush, saw the August 2001 national security briefing memorandum entitled "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States" and dismissed it. "It wasn't something that we felt we needed to do anything about," Rice told the 9/11 Commission. So America got hit again, in the very same spot where al-Qaeda first struck. Remember that old expression: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. The final national security lie linked to 9/11 is the one that matters most now. The Republicans claim that America is safer now because of the invasion of Iraq. That's wrong by several measures. Bush's two top reasons for the invasion were to destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and end its support for international terrorism. Both premises turned out to be false. Since Saddam Hussein's Iraq posed no threat to the US, overthrowing his government had negligible direct impact on American national security. But invasion under the doctrine of preventive war in defiance of international institutions and under false pretences, plus the deployment of more than 150,000 troops for more than five years has wrought far-reaching national security harm. The Iraq invasion distracted the US military and the world from the real fight against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. It also pre-empted providing Afghanistan with the political and infrastructure foundations needed to create a modern nation. Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden remains at large, and al-Qaeda has orchestrated attacks on London, Madrid and beyond that have taken hundreds of lives. The Iraq invasion - a unilateral attack on a Muslim majority country - has served as al-Qaeda's best recruiting tool. It's given terrorists of all stripes a training ground, just as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan did for Osama bin Laden's generation. But you don't have to be a jihadi or even a Muslim to have lost respect for America over the Iraq debacle. After enjoying virtually the entire world's goodwill after 9/11, polls showed America's standing in the world plummeted after the Iraq invasion. Favorable ratings are only recovering now because the Bush administration is approaching its end. It's impossible to calculate the impact of that tide of anti-Americanism in areas from the value of the US dollar to the potential Einsteins and their parents who have decided against moving to Bush's America. It hasn't just been ordinary people who've noticed America is different since 9/11. Nations and their leaders have tacked in the wake of Iraq. Bush's "axis of evil" designee North Korea has become a nuclear-armed international outlaw, with the capacity to strike America's closest Asia allies, and perhaps even US territory. Iran, the third member of the "Axis", has realized that when a superpower says it will wage pre-emptive war, nuclear arms are the only meaningful defense. With America overstretched and distracted by Iraq and bogged down in Afghanistan, Russia is reasserting its ambitions. It's using its energy resources and armed forces against its neighbors, echoing the bygone days of the Soviet Union. Other local bullies are watching with interest, realizing that the US lacks the resources to counter military adventurism. Facing a nuclear North Korea and an aggressive Russia, in debt to China, reviled in much of the world, and still fighting two wars half a world away from home, there's no way America is safer now than it was in March 2003 - when the US invaded Iraq. Unless, that is, you accept September 11, 2001, as an example of keeping America safe.

I think the Russia/Georgia situation is more subtly explained as a Georgian attack on it's breakaway provinces, which earned for it a Russian poke in the eye, than the Asia Times essay does above, but I can see their point. Why shouldn't the world get even more dangerous when the mighty U.S. is tied down in wars that have been billed (by the U.S.!) to last for as long as 20+ more years? And why does it seem that everyone who speaks the truth has already moved out or is in the process of moving out of the country? (And how many people have you spoken with lately who evince the same aspirations?) And then there are the costs of the misery inflicted on Iraq and the future costs to the U.S. taxpayers who can't relocate to Dubai a la Halliburton. And finally, the best question of this or any political season "Did Al-Qaeda Succeed?"

Ten years after the neoconservatives laid out plans for permanent U.S. global dominance – and seven years after the brutal 9/11 attacks gave them the opening to carry out those plans – the neocons instead have guided the United States onto the shoals of a political/military disaster and the prospect of rapid decline. This grim result from the neocons’ overreach is an unstated subtext of the U.S. intelligence community’s project for assessing the world in 2025, a point 17 years into the future when the United States is likely to have lost its current world dominance, according to a preview offered by the government’s top intelligence analyst. Speaking at a Sept. 4 conference in Orlando, Florida, Thomas Fingar, chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said the United States might still be “the preeminent power” in 2025, but that “American dominance will be much diminished.” Further, Fingar projected that the United States would see the greatest declines in the most important areas of global influence, the economic and the cultural, while likely maintaining military supremacy, which would be of lesser importance. “The overwhelming dominance that the United States has enjoyed in the international system in military, political, economic, and arguably, cultural arenas is eroding and will erode at an accelerating pace with the partial exception of military,” Fingar said. “But part of the argument here is that by 15 years from now, the military dimension will remain the most preeminent [but] will be the least significant – or much less significant than it is now.” In other words, U.S. intelligence is looking toward a future in which the United States may serve as the world’s policeman, but without the more subtle and profitable influence that comes from economic, cultural and political strength – known as “soft power.” Though Fingar did not tie the “accelerating” erosion of American power to the policies of the neocons and the Bush administration, it is hard to avoid that conclusion. In 1998, the neocons were unveiling their Project for the New American Century with its vision of never-ending U.S. global dominance. When potential threats did arise, the neocons argued, the United States must react with “preemptive wars,” striking before a rival could pose a serious threat. After the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush embraced these neocon theories, vowing to not just exact revenge on the 9/11 perpetrators but to wage a “global war on terrorism” with the ultimate goal of eradicating “evil” itself. - - - - - - - So, after invading Afghanistan and blasting al-Qaeda base camps, Bush made a quick pivot toward Iraq to fulfill the neocon dream of eliminating Saddam Hussein, a longtime thorn in Washington's side. The U.S. occupation of Iraq also would establish an American military outpost “East of Suez,” projecting U.S. power into the region, guaranteeing access to its oil and protecting Israel from its Muslim neighbors. However, the neocons’ neocolonial strategy foundered on the rocks of Iraq’s violent resistance and sectarian warfare. More than five years into the conflict, about 140,000 American troops are tied down in Iraq while a force of about 30,000 U.S. troops finds itself facing worsening security in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders not only survived the U.S. retaliatory strikes after 9/11 but exploited the Bush administration’s obsession with Iraq to reestablish themselves inside Pakistan, a nuclear-armed country. The damage to U.S. interests also extends beyond the war zones. The military adventures are putting the U.S. government more than $1 trillion deeper into debt, drawing away resources that the United States desperately needs to retool its industries, develop alternative energy sources and improve its education, infrastructure and health care. Plus, the neocon hubris about American dominance has alienated much of the world’s population, squandering goodwill built up since World War II. Instead of the nation that established the Nuremberg principles and wrote the United Nations Charter, the United States is seen as the country of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and torture. In almost every corner of the globe – and especially in strategic regions such as Europe and the Middle East – respect for the United States as a beacon of political freedom and international progress has fallen to historic lows. While the rest of the world appears eager to get on with expanded commerce and technological competition, the United States looks like it can’t stop clumsily throwing its military weight around, amid chants of “USA, USA.” So, as U.S. intelligence continues work on its projections for 2025, the nation finds itself at a crossroads. It can give the neocons around John McCain another four-year lease on the White House – so they can keep doing what they’ve been doing – or the country can take another direction. As Fingar made clear in his Sept. 4 speech, the future of 2025 is not yet set in stone. It is only the intelligence community’s best estimate based on current dynamics. If those dynamics change, so can the future. Still, it appears that if al-Qaeda’s motive in attacking New York and Washington on 9/11 was to bait the United States into self-destructive actions in the Middle East and thus undermine America’s position in the world, bin Laden and his associates may have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

Suzan ______________________________________