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BROUGHT
UP IN A BARN
Unfazed
by such matters as propriety, or good taste, I didn't
wait until the entire structure of the World Trade Center
had hit the ground before asking, on September 12, [2001],
"But
how could that be, when so many millions and so much rhetoric
has been expended in the war on terrorism? No expense was
spared, either in terms of tax dollars or basic civil liberties
and still it happened."
UNWRITTEN
ADDENDUM
Not
that I expect the grand and glorious Washington Post
to notice this column's lowly existence, and, besides, the
unwritten addendum to Kurtz's phrasing is "For five long months,
almost no one in Washington has wanted to gripe about
it out loud." Out here in the real world, however, it was
naturally the first thing out of many mouths as we stared
in shock and sheer amazement at the smoking ruin of the Pentagon:
"How in h*ll did that happen?"
And
just as naturally, that is the kind of question government
officials don't want to hear. Kurtz, to his great credit,
has started asking them anyway, which journalists should've
given voice to starting on Day Two of the post-9/11 era:
"How
is it that America was totally blindsided by the Sept. 11
attacks? Was it a massive intelligence failure? Were there
missed warning signs?"
SHELBY'S
ZINGER
If
CIA director George Tenet has his way, we'll never know: Tenet
declined to discuss any "details" on the opening day of the
Senate Intelligence Committee hearings on the subject, where
he got practically a free pass except for this zinger from
Senator Richard Shelby (R-Alabama):
"Why
were we utterly unaware of the planning and execution of the
Sept. 11 attacks? In other words, what went wrong?"
"Whatever
went wrong, Mr. Tenet said, it was not because of laziness
or lack of attention within the C.I.A.," reports the New
York Times. "'Intelligence will never give you 100 percent
predictive capability.'"
COUNT
ON IT
You
want 100 percent predictive capability? Okay, then, how's
about this: government officials responsible for the biggest
and deadliest intelligence failure in American history will
continue to evade, stonewall, and in effect take the fifth
when it comes to answering the key question relating to 9/11:
why did we fail to detect a plot that was years in the making,
in spite of billions spent on "anti-terrorism" programs? The
question will not be answered any time soon not in the next
50 years, at least and on that you can count 100 percent.
THE
MEANING OF FAILURE
An
intelligence failure? Oh, how can you say that? "The
director objected to the very word 'failure' in connection
with the intelligence-gathering ahead of the devastating surprise
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon," reports
the Times. "Failure means no focus, no attention,
no discipline,' Mr. Tenet said, waving his finger for emphasis.'"
Let
Tenet wave his finger where the sun don't shine: failure,
in this case, means 3,500 dead human beings buried in the
burning rubble of the World Trade Center and the beginning
of a war we may never see the end of. If that isn't an intelligence
failure, then what is? What's more, Tenet's definition of
failure not the inability to intercept threats, but the
failure to focus on them in the first place is distinctly
odd. Is he saying that they were paying attention,
and that they did know something was up prior to 9/11?
Which evokes an old phrase out of our dark Nixonian past:
What did they know and when did they know it?
BI-PARTISAN
WHITEWASH
As
Kurtz points out, Tenet skirted this and other essential questions,
and, instead, "warned of more terrorist attacks, always a
natural headline-grabber." News reports of the hearings confirm
the efficacy of this
strategy: most echoed his ominously vague warning about
the continuing threat of a terrorist attack on US territory,
(although not
in all cases). But Kurtz wants to know "how can we prevent
future attacks if we don't understand how we missed the last
one?"
Americans
outside the Washington Beltway would tend to agree with Kurtz
on that one, but the politicians apparently don't see it that
way. Vice President Cheney's
call to Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle must have
done the trick. Instead of being grilled, Tenet was treated
with great "deference," according to the Times, and
Kurtz concurs: "Carefully, gingerly, without Enron-like sensationalism,
lawmakers are trying to scrutinize this century's Pearl Harbor."
THE
CAMERON REPORTS
Why
such caution? This strange lack of investigative enthusiasm,
by the way, is not limited to lawmakers, but also includes
Kurtz's fellow journalists, who have shown remarkably little
interest in pursuing the biggest story of the past few decades.
Of the few leads we have, none have been followed up on. A
four-part series by Fox News reporter Carl Cameron on possible
Israeli foreknowledge of the 9/11 atrocity dropped into the
news ether and vanished literally. The first
report raised the possibility that nearly 200 Israelis
arrested in the US in the weeks prior to 9/11 were part of
a huge intelligence operation and then drew this stunning
conclusion:
"There
is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9-11
attacks,but investigators suspect that the Israelis may have
gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not
shared it. A highly placed investigator said there are quote
tie-ins.' But when asked for details, he flatly refused
to describe them, saying, quote "evidence linking these
Israelis to 9-11 is classified.'"
Subsequent
Fox News reports, detailing the incredible extent to which
Israeli intelligence has penetrated US communications and
security systems, were foreshadowed in Cameron's on-air dialogue
with Brit Hume as they discussed the implications of the initial
story:
HUME:
"Carl, what about this question of advanced knowledge of
what was going to happen on 9-11? How clear are investigators
that some Israeli agents may have known something?"
CAMERON:
"It's very explosive information, obviously, and there's a
great deal of evidence that they say they have collected
none of it necessarily conclusive. It's more when they put
it all together. A bigger question, they say, is how could
they not have known?"
PROTECT
WHISTLE-BLOWERS
At
the core of these "leaks" coming straight from law enforcement
sources is the allegation that Israeli intelligence operatives,
working under cover in the US, were hot on the trail of Al
Qaeda, doing what our own law enforcement and intelligence
agencies conspicuously failed to do. Is this the kind of thing
now being discussed behind closed doors in Senate chambers?
Inquiring minds want to know: and, what's more, they have
every right to know. Cameron reports that his sources,
in fear of their jobs, chose to remain anonymous. Let them
receive immunity from the Senate committee, and a guarantee
that there will be no retaliation as long as they tell all
they know for all the world to hear.
TERRORIST
INSIDER TRADING?
And
another thing: what about those big
profits made on "put options" and other complicated financial
devices, taken out against airline stocks, particularly American
and United, shortly before 9/11? Remember the
flurry of stories about terrorist
insider trading? It turned out that an inordinate number
of such options in which one bets bet that a stock will go
down were taken out against
certain 9/11-connected stocks in the hours before the
catastrophe. The pattern of these transactions strongly implied
some foreknowledge
of the horrific event, but the last time we heard about
the much-promised
SEC investigation was months ago and now the story has
gone down the Memory
Hole, along with the Fox News revelations.
CONSPIRACY
THEORIES
Not
a single Senator on the committee looking into 9/11 asked
a question relating to any of the above, nor will such an
inquiry ever be made at least, not in public. As to what
people are saying in private oh well, we all know how prone
the common people are to "conspiracy theories." But since
we're too sophisticated to believe anything of the kind, let's
all just move along, now, because there's nothing to see here
A
whole school of post-9/11 thought has grown up around the
proposition that the Wahabi sect of Islam amounts to a worldwide terrorist conspiracy
against America: the clear implication of this theory is that
the terrorist trail leads directly to Saudi Arabia, where
our closest Arab-Muslim allies in the region conceived and
planned the 9/11 attacks. While conservatives in
the US have taken out after the Saudis, in France the
publication of a book with this same thesis, written from
a
left perspective, has caused a trans-Atlantic sensation:
Bin Laden: The Forbidden
Truth accuses the Bush administration of de facto
complicity in the attacks, having turned
a blind eye to the subversion of their oil-rich Saudi friends
and corporate allies.
The
extravagant conspiracy theories of right-wing anti-Wahabists,
and the equally arcane "they did it to themselves" school
of thought, now fashionable on the French left (and the American
far left fringe),
seem improbable, at best. The few fragmentary facts we have
the Fox News leaks, and suspicious pre-9/11 financial shenanigans
point in a different direction entirely.
REMEMBER
PEARL HARBOR
The
Senate Intelligence Committee is indeed charged, as Howard
Kurtz put it, with scrutinizing "this century's Pearl Harbor."
That is turning out to be true in more ways than one. As the
cumulative investigation undertaken, over the years, by George Morgenstern,
John T. Flynn,
Harry Elmer Barnes,
and, most recently, Robert Stinnett,
has proved, the last century's Pearl Harbor was covered
up and shrouded in mystery from the beginning. It took 50
years before Stinnett, utilizing the Freedom
of Information Act, uncovered US government documents
that show what FDR knew, and when he knew it. Will we have
to wait half a century before we find out the truth this time around?
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