In
the months prior to 9/11 a flurry
of activity
by Israeli
intelligence agents in the U.S. signaled that something
big was going on – but the FBI, the CIA, and the myriad
of federal agencies charged with protecting this country from
terrorism hadn't a clue. Now, why is that?
The
answer is hidden in the fog of prevarications, obfuscation,
and lame excuses cooked up by our government to explain the
unexplainable: how and why did a conspiracy years in the
making elude the intelligence chieftains of the American
security apparatus? Now the U.S. government, under tremendous
pressure from the families of the victims of 9/11, has yielded
and agreed
to an inquiry into why and how 9/11 happened.
Let
the cover-up begin!
The
10-member commission will have 18 months to come up with newer,
bigger, and better excuses for why our protectors fell asleep
at the wheel. The "National Commission on Terrorist Attacks
Upon the United States" (NatComTAUUS) will consist of
"nationally recognized American citizens," the New
York Times informs us, "with broad experience in
national security affairs and law enforcement." They
can't be currently in office, since the idea is to mimic what
a real citizens' commission (or a grand jury) might look like
by limiting membership to "private" individuals,"
but former office-holders are naturally the leading candidates.
With
a chairman hand-picked by the White House, and limited subpoena
power, the commission is born crippled, and is further disabled
by the powerful influence of Senator John McCain, who has
been sucking up to the families and posing as their great
champion. But McCain who gets to choose one of the
commissioners, the swing vote in a bipartisan group
is only interested in fodder for his perpetual war on the
White House, and in paving the way for a possible presidential
run in 2004. If anyone thinks he is going to allow the 9/11
commission to examine what happened in the crucial months
and weeks prior to the terrorist attacks, they are deluding
themselves.
Another
agitator for the creation of this phony commission has been
Senator Joseph Lieberman, who has the same sort of political
motives. Like McCain, he perhaps has a few other items on
his private agenda that might conflict with a desire to actually
discover the answer to the crucial question regarding 9/11:
what happened that allowed a ragtag band of Islamo-wackos
to hijack four airliners and ram them – practically simultaneously—into
the two most visible symbols of American power? In spite of
previous anti-terrorist studies, safeguards, and innumerable
warnings, the alarm system was clearly turned off that day
– but by whose hand?
One
of my old right-wing favorites, a tract that turned up everywhere
you looked back in the 1960s, was called None
Dare Call It Treason, and that about sums up the atmosphere
surrounding the creation of the NatComTAUUS. The aura of something
very rotten in the state of our intelligence and law enforcement
agencies at the federal level permeates the air so thickly
that it is a veritable soup, and the distinguished commissioners
are going to have to use an awful lot of air freshener to
drown the stink out in a fine mist of flowery rhetoric.
Coleen
Rowley is a veteran FBI agent whose bombshell
memo drew attention to official obstructionism that blocked
an effective investigation into the terror cells in our midst.
Her thinly-veiled implication of treason in high places leaps
off the page at the reader:
"During
the early aftermath of September 11th, when I happened
to be recounting the pre-September 11th events
concerning the Moussaoui investigation to other FBI personnel
in other divisions or in FBIHQ, almost everyone's first question
was "Why? Why would an FBI agent(s) deliberately sabotage
a case? (I know I shouldn't be flippant about this, but jokes
were actually made that the key FBIHQ personnel had to be
spies or moles, like Robert Hansen, who were actually working
for Osama Bin Laden to have so undercut Minneapolis' effort.)"
Rowley
backs off immediately from drawing the obvious conclusion,
or even considering the option that treason is indeed the
reason. Instead, we are told that caution is built-in to any
"hierarchical" organization, such as the FBI, and
that "career enhancement" means going along to get
along. And, of course, the failure is attributed to "recent
extreme public and congressional criticism/oversight,"
which prejudiced the agency against taking any "aggressive"
action. But this is clearly nonsense, for surely the desire
for "career enhancement" would lead to the exact
opposite of over-caution: after all, getting the bad guys
would seem to be the surest career-enhancer. Unless, of course,
somebody was protecting them – or, at least, protecting secrets
deemed central to our national security.
It
is going to be hard, however, for the NatComTAUUS to conduct
a complete whitewash as long as Americans have access to the
foreign press. Although our own media has yet to cover the
most recent revelations about the crucial period leading up
to 9/11, German
and British reporters have uncovered the extent to which the
hijackers were closely monitored by the Mossad during their
sojourn in the U.S. Die
Zeit, a respected German weekly, and the BBC,
among others, have carried the story. I reported all this
in a previous
column that I will not repeat here except to say this:
Israeli
agents, picked up by the U.S. authorities in the weeks prior
to and after 9/11, lived "Next
Door to Mohammed Atta," as the headline in Die
Zeit put it, and had them under surveillance 24/7:
"Not
until after the attacks of September 11 did the consequences
of the spy ring become clear. Apparently the agents were not
interested in military or industrial facilities, but were
shadowing a number of suspects, who were later involved in
the terrorist attacks against the US. According to a report
of the French intelligence agency that Die Zeit examined,
"according to the FBI, Arab terrorists and suspected
terror cells lived in Phoenix, Arizona, as well as in Miami
and Hollywood, Florida from December 2000 to April 2001 in
direct proximity to the Israeli spy cells."
The
Israelis have an alibi. They
say they warned us – but that wasn't until August, and
even then the warning was nonspecific. They also handed over
a list of 19 suspected terrorists, Atta and his associates,
but this somehow never made it into the right hands until
it was too late.
What
did they know, and when did they know it?
Will
the NatComTAUUS even attempt to answer this question? Absolutely
not. Our government is committed to the lie that this is all
an "urban
myth," and that any implication of Israeli foreknowledge
of 9/11 is "anti-Semitism" akin to the
frenetic ravings of the "poet" Amiri Baraka.
Political correctness demands that any examination of Israel's
role in an event that gave it tremendous political and diplomatic
leverage is impermissible. And it sure helps to have clowns
like Baraka around to delegitimize an impartial fact-oriented
inquiry.
We've
been covering
the story of the Israeli-9/11 connection since November of
last year, and I have watched it snowball from a mere
suspicion on my part, at first, into a near-certainty as the
evidence accumulated. For the past year, you've read about
it, not only in this space, but in the "mainstream"
outlets that investigated the
Israeli "art student" spy operation, and eventually
uncovered its strange synchronicity with the Islamist terrorist
apparatus that executed the 9/11 attacks.
I'm
proud that Antiwar.com played a catalytic role in giving the
pioneering efforts of Carl Cameron, of Fox News, Christopher
Ketcham, and John
Sugg, among others, a much wider circulation, and now
it's time to push it even further. What is needed is a grassroots
movement to demand that the aforementioned commission take
up the question of Israel's role in 9/11.
Not
that a commission controlled by the political parties will
ever agree to any such demand but agitation around
this issue will underscore what's wrong with the commission.
The fix is in, and the truth will not even be approached by
this claque of political appointees—in spite of purported
closed testimony before a committee of Congress detailing
Mossad activities in this country related to the 9/11 investigation.
But why not?
The
power of the Israeli lobby, while considerable, could hardly
quash conclusive evidence that the Israelis knew key details
of the 9/11 plot in advance and somehow neglected to tell
us. Somebody high up is covering his ass, and, while this
is admittedly speculation, the following theory fits into
the known facts.
If
we assume that American intelligence and federal law enforcement
agents really did obey strictures against domestic
spying – a huge assumption – as they aver, then it is logical
to assume they would try to figure out some way around it.
What better way than to subcontract out to the Israelis? After
all, what are friends for, anyway: a little mutual back-scratching
is nothing between those who enjoy a "special relationship."
The problem is, maybe the subcontractors didn't follow their
contract to the letter, and might have even had their own
agenda – one that didn't necessarily coincide with the best
interests and safety of the United States.
What
started out as a routine effort by government officials to
get around the barriers imposed by legislated guidelines ended
up as the biggest intelligence failure in American history
– and, by the way, a turning point in that history.
The
9/11 attacks unleashed a wave of hatred against any and all
Muslims that had the effect of aligning the U.S. with Israel
against the entire Arab world. The U.S. is now moving to do
in the Middle East at large what the Israelis have done in
miniature in the West Bank and Gaza. The conquest and occupation
of Iraq will soon be followed by other wars of "liberation."
The overthrow of the regional governments, one by one, will
either be engineered by a "revolution" in
the Panamanian tradition (i.e. one bought and paid for
by the U.S.) or, in the event of a shortage of suitable Quislings,
achieved by outright conquest and subsequent occupation. These
wars will last until a vast MacArthur Regency is established
by American force of arms, from Cairo to Kabul, and southward
to Yemen, and the oil-rich fields of the Saudi peninsula.
And
all of this will have been achieved on the momentum of a single,
seminal event: the fury unleashed by 9/11, having leveled
the Arab world, may not be assuaged even then.
There
is only one sure way to demolish the War Party, which has
been in the ascendant since 9/11, and that is to demythologize
what happened that day. According to the soon-to-be-official
story, a bunch of really evil guys, who hated America for
stuff
like strip clubs, drunkenness, and prostitution, lived
among us for years, completely undetected – and then, suddenly,
out of the blue, ka-boom! The World Trade Center and
the Pentagon are reduced to cinders. The Devil made them do
it.
But
who watched them do it?
My
new book, due out from Verso Books next year, blows the lid
off this explosive story, and if you thought the intensity
of the recent barrage of attacks on Antiwar.com and this author
was surprising, then just wait until that little volume comes
out. In the newest
fount of neoconservative vituperations, the Sunday section
of the Boston Globe, Ronald
Radosh proclaimed yours truly the evil mastermind behind
the rise of a "red-brown" alliance against the Iraq
war. WorldNutDaily has been frothing
at the mouth about us lately, but they're not as coherent
(or as vicious) as Radosh, who made a special point of noting:
"As
for Israel, last week Raimondo continued to proclaim the myth
that 'Israel had foreknowledge of 9/11,' a claim that puts
his Web site in league with the most extreme anti-Semitic
canards coming from the Arab world, not to mention the poetry
of Amiri Baraka."
Is
Carl Cameron merely echoing the "poetry" of Baraka?
Is pro-Israel pro-war Fox News, the broadcast voice of the
conservative wing of the GOP, "in league with the most
extreme anti-Semitic canards coming from the Arab world"?
Salon, Le
Monde, Jane's
Intelligence, the wire services, Der Spiegel, Die
Zeit, the BBC – all are in on a Vast Anti-Semitic Conspiracy,
spreading "canards" in the clever guise of news
stories appearing in the mainstream media. Is this what we
are supposed to believe?
The
intensity of the recent attacks – see this
smear job by the wild
and crazy
Stephen
Schwartz, a.k.a. Suleyman
Amad, a.k.a. "Comrade
Sandalio"—means we're hitting our enemies where it
hurts.
It's
nice to be hated by the other side, but it's also important
to be loved by your friends. And that's where you come
in.
The
War Party is amply funded, of that you can be sure: all you
have to do is take a gander at the
tremendous resources made available to just one of our neoconservative
detractors, and you can see what we're up against. The
recently-formed "Committee
for the Liberation of Iraq" is being sponsored by
the very same people who pushed for the creation of this phony
9/11 commission: Senators McCain
and Lieberman. And you can bet the Committee, as a quasi-governmental
organization, will have considerable resources at its
disposal. They won't have to worry about their phone bill.
But
we do.
Our
last fundraising appeal garnered some $15,000 – a large sum,
on such short notice, but not enough to get us through the
end of the year. Unless we raise another $15,000 in rather
short order, we'll have to start cutting back our operations
by almost half.
It
isn't going to be pretty.
So
here's the deal. Every contribution of $250 and over by December
1 will get you an autographed copy of my forthcoming book,
The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection,
before it even hits bookstores outside the United Kingdom.
This
book is going to knock the socks off the myth of 9/11. It
has the potential to act as a catalyst, radically re-orienting
our view of 9/11 and ultimately leading to a re-thinking
of the American response.
Antiwar.com
had a hand in breaking this important story. Just as we led
the fight against the lies put out by the Clintonian wing
of the War Party during the Kosovo campaign, so we carry on
the fight against the Bush wing today. We are reaching millions
of readers around the world with our message of a peaceful
noninterventionist foreign policy as the American ideal, and
you don't want us to stop or even slow down
now. As the U.S. stands on the brink of the greatest foreign
policy disaster ever to befall this country – as we aspire
to the role of world hegemon – now is the time for our supporters
to come through.
Imagine
a world without Antiwar.com, and then – quick!
click here to
contribute.
Remember:
we have precious little time to reach our goal of $15,000.
Inside of a little over a month, the lights could begin to
go out. – while, over in the posh Washington headquarters
of the Committee for the "Liberation" of Iraq's
Assets, the lights will be burning late into the night.
Justin Raimondo
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