Liberal Repercussion

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/12/17/eveningnews/printable589137.shtml

9/11 Chair: Attack Was Preventable
NEW YORK, Dec. 17, 2003


For the first time, the chairman of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks is saying publicly that 9/11 could have and should have been prevented, reports CBS News Correspondent Randall Pinkston.

"This is a very, very important part of history and we've got to tell it right," said Thomas Kean.

"As you read the report, you're going to have a pretty clear idea what wasn't done and what should have been done," he said. "This was not something that had to happen."

Appointed by the Bush administration, Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, is now pointing fingers inside the administration and laying blame.

"There are people that, if I was doing the job, would certainly not be in the position they were in at that time because they failed. They simply failed," Kean said.

To find out who failed and why, the commission has navigated a political landmine, threatening a subpoena to gain access to the president's top-secret daily briefs. Those documents may shed light on one of the most controversial assertions of the Bush administration – that there was never any thought given to the idea that terrorists might fly an airplane into a building.

"I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile," said national security adviser Condoleeza Rice on May 16, 2002.

"How is it possible we have a national security advisor coming out and saying we had no idea they could use planes as weapons when we had FBI records from 1991 stating that this is a possibility," said Kristen Breitweiser, one of four New Jersey widows who lobbied Congress and the president to appoint the commission.

The widows want to know why various government agencies didn't connect the dots before Sept. 11, such as warnings from FBI offices in Minnesota and Arizona about suspicious student pilots.

"If you were to tell me that two years after the murder of my husband that we wouldn't have one question answered, I wouldn't believe it," Breitweiser said.

Kean admits the commission also has more questions than answers.

Asked whether we should at least know if people sitting in the decision-making spots on that critical day are still in those positions, Kean said, "Yes, the answer is yes. And we will."

Kean promises major revelations in public testimony beginning next month from top officials in the FBI, CIA, Defense Department, National Security Agency and, maybe, President Bush and former President Clinton.

posted by Rei Toei @ 6:27 p.m.

THE LIE WON'T STAND

Bush Administration Explanations for Pre-9-11 Warnings Fail the Smell Test

Warnings Received From Heads of State, Allied Intelligence Services Specifically
Warned of Attacks by Hijackers

Insider Trading Also Clearly Warned of Attacks

by Michael C. Ruppert

© Copyright 2002, From The Wilderness Publications, Www.copvcia.com. All Rights Reserved.
May Be Reprinted, Distributed Or Posted On An Internet Web Site For Non-profit Purposes Only.

Source In FTW Reportage, We Discovered The Word suicide Was Not Contained In Warnings To The Bush
Administration From Russian Intelligence. Although The Word suicide Was Not In The Story By Izvestia, The Fact
Remains 25 Pilots Training For Hijack Missions And Attacks In The U.S. Could Have Meant Nothing Other Than
Suicide Missions.]

May 16, 2002, 19:00 PDT (FTW) -- Never in the history of scandals involving the United
States government has an attempt to conceal criminal conduct by an administration
been more transparently dishonest or more easily exposed. On May 15 White House
Press Secretary Ari Fleischer -- while making the startling admission that President Bush
received CIA and FBI intelligence briefings in August indicating Osama bin Laden might
be planning hijackings -- told major news sources including CBS News, "All appropriate
action was taken based on the threat information we had," Fleischer said. "The
president did not -- not -- receive information about the use of airplanes as missiles by
suicide bombers."

In other statements Fleischer told the press, "The president was also provided
information about bin Laden wanting to engage in hijacking in the traditional pre-9-11
sense, not for the use of suicide bombing, not for the use of an airplane as a missile."
According to a May 16 story by the New York Times, "Mr. Fleischer said the information
given to the president in Texas , had prompted the administration to put
law enforcement agencies on alert."

Every major position taken by an administration in full retreat and on the defensive can
be easily deconstructed and shown to be false.

For more than seven months FTW has been documenting specific warnings received by
the U.S. government from both foreign intelligence services and, in one case, from
Russian President Vladimir Putin, indicating commercial airliners were going to be used by
terrorists to attack -- among other things -- the World Trade Center in the week of
Sept. 9. In order for Fleischer's statement to be credible he would have to assert then
that George W. Bush either ignored or was not informed of a direct warning from a head
of state and also from the German intelligence service, the BND.

As reported in the German daily Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung (FAZ)
Http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/F_a_zeitung_story.html on Sept. 14, the BND warned both the CIA and Israel in June that
Middle Eastern terrorists were "planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons
to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture." The story specifically
referred to an electronic eavesdropping system known as Echelon, wherein a number of
countries tap cell phone and electronic communications in partner countries and then
pool the information. The BND warnings were also passed to the United Kingdom.

No known denial by the BND of the accuracy of this story exists, and the FAZ report
indicates the information was received directly from BND sources.

According to a Sept. 14 report in the Internet newswire online.ie,
Http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/wW3/
Online_ie_story.html German police, monitoring the phone calls of a jailed Iranian man,
learned the man was telephoning U.S. intelligence agencies last summer to warn of an
imminent attack on the World Trade Center in the week of Sept. 9. German officials
confirmed the calls to the U.S. government for the story but refused to discuss
additional details.

According to a story in Izvestia on Sept. 12 Http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/
Izvestia_story_pic.html, Russian intelligence warned the U.S. last summer that as many as 25
pilots were training for missions involving the crashing of airliners into important targets.

In an MSNBC interview on Sept. 15, Russian President Putin stated he had ordered
Russian intelligence to warn the U.S. government "in the strongest possible terms" of
imminent assaults on airports and government buildings before the attacks on Sept. 11.
No credible information has emerged from any source indicating that Putin omitted the
above information when issuing the warning.

Many other direct warnings were received by the U.S. government and have been
documented in FTW's 9-11 timeline located at: Http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3
/02_11_02_lucy.html.

These stories give the immediate lie to Fleischer's statements that Bush had no inkling
of airliners being used as weapons.

But there is more.

In 1996 -- as reported by the German paper Die Welt on Dec. 6, and by Agence France
Presse on Dec. 7 -- Western intelligence services, including the CIA, learned after
arrests in the Philippines that Al Qaeda operatives had planned to crash commercial
airliners into the Twin Towers. Details of the plan, as reported by a number of American
press outlets, were found on a computer seized during the arrests. The plan was called
"Operation Bojinka." Details of the plot were disclosed publicly in 1997 in the New York
trial of Ramsi Youssef for his involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

FBI MEMOS TRIGGER WHITE HOUSE BACKSTEPPING

In "traditional" hijackings the hijackers have no need or desire to learn how to fly.

As reported by the New York Times, CNN and the Washington Post (among others) the
events leading to Fleischer's statements were the recent disclosure of FBI memoranda
originated by field agents in Arizona and Minnesota that warned of a possible hijack
attempt by bin Laden's followers. In both cases the suspects were taking flight lessons.

According to Newsweek and the New York Times, FBI agents in Phoenix submitted a
classified memorandum in July naming Osama bin Laden and tracking the activities of
possible Middle Eastern terrorist suspects who had enrolled in local flight schools. The
memo, according to the Times, stated bin Laden's followers "could use the schools to
train for terror operations." The information in the Phoenix memo was not shared with
FBI field agents in Minnesota who had uncovered other startling evidence.

Just days before the attacks in early-September, FBI agents in Minnesota wrote notes
that subsequently became included in an internal FBI document warning that accused
terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui "might be planning on flying something into the World Trade
Center." A story from the May 20 issue of Newsweek by Michael Isikoff described how a
local flight instructor had reported Moussaoui had "showed a suspicious interest in
learning how to steer large airliners...The agents were 'in a frenzy,
absolutely convinced he was planning to so something with a plane.'"

A multitude of sources have reported the FBI agents requested a warrant to search
Moussaoui's personal computer but were denied by Attorney General John Ashcroft's
Justice Department. After the 9-11 attacks the computer was seized and found to
contain information directly related to the World Trade Center attacks.

This apparent lack of support from within the administration is consistent with reports
released last fall by the BBC's Gregg Palast showing that in January 2001 the Bush
Administration had issued direct orders to the FBI to curtail investigations of two of
Osama bin Laden's relatives, Omar and Abdullah bin Laden. The two bin Ladens had
been connected to possible terrorist activities and were living in Falls Church, Va., near
CIA headquarters.

APPROPRIATE WARNINGS?

Fleischer's statement that adequate warnings had been given to appropriate federal
agencies falls flat on its face. Two of the most "appropriate" agencies would have been
the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the U.S. Air Force and Air National Guard.

As documented by researchers like Jared Israel at www.tenc.net, it has been standard
FAA procedure for more than 25 years to scramble U.S. fighters to intercept -- not
shoot down -- any errant or non-responsive aircraft under FAA control. This protocol is
even more stringent in the case of a hijacking. Yet, Vice President Dick Cheney and
others have stated publicly there were no fighters available in some cases, and there
was no heightened state of alert on Sept. 11. For 50 minutes on 9-11, in direct
contravention of established policy, no fighters were scrambled to intercept two
outstanding hijacked airliners even though it was known attacks were in progress.

Given the above information, it would have been an obvious move to have placed
fighter aircraft on a heightened state of alert in this time period. This unresponsiveness
stands in contrast to the fact that, in October 1999 at a time when there was no
heightened alert, the ill-fated Lear Jet occupied by golfer Payne Stewart had an F-16
fighter and an A-10 attack aircraft flying beside it within minutes of losing radio contact
and veering off course.

INSIDER TRADING

FTW has spent months on this important story that proves foreknowledge of the
attacks by people who also profited from them. This was a glaring warning signal, since
such trades ran the risk of being detected by intelligence agencies that routinely
monitor all market activity in real time.

The insider trading involves the placement of large numbers of "put" options on stocks
of companies directly affected by the Sept. 11 attacks. They include United Air Lines,
American Air Lines, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, AXA Reinsurance, Munich Reinsurance
and Swiss Reinsurance. Put options are a leveraged bet that a stock's price will fall
dramatically.

As CBS news noted on Sept. 26, the peak of trading activity occurred just before the
attacks. There was a jump in United Air Lines put options 90 times (not 90 percent)
above normal between Sept. 6 and Sept.10, and 285 times higher than average on
Sept. 6. Numbers for other affected stocks were equally alarming. It is uncontested
that only United and American stocks had this level of put buying before the attacks.
No other airlines were affected.

A May 13 story by the Washington Times' Insight Magazine attempted to explain the
insider trading by stating higher numbers of put options had been placed on United and
American stocks earlier in 2001. By relying only on the numbers of put options, Insight
asserted that there was nothing unusual about the pre-9-11 trades.

However, FTW has contacted several experienced traders and reviewed existing
documentation from financial experts, which indicate the alarm for insider trading is to
look for any "imbalance" between the level of put options (a bet that a stock's price will
fall) and the level of call options (a bet that a stock's price will rise). It is a significant
imbalance in puts vs. calls that indicates criminal insider trading. The Insight piece did
not address this point.

Several traders have stated that in a fairly flat market with high trading volumes, it has
been a routine procedure for experienced traders to place roughly equal numbers of
puts and calls on various stocks in order to generate a paper cash flow. They were
quick to point out that by September, the market had gone into sharp decline and
trading volumes were way down. Thus, lower numbers of put options did not mean that
everything was normal. They stressed it was the imbalance in put-to-call ratios that
signaled the insider trading. investigation of this trading activity and hopes to have a more comprehensive report
within 4-6 weeks].

Part of the problem in Insight's research stems from the fact that since Sept. 11, there
has been no transparency from either the government or the financial sector on how
the trades worked or how the markets tracked them. Secrecy is everywhere. Telephone
calls have not been returned, and the government refuses to divulge any information
about probes it admits are still ongoing. But simplistic dismissals from sources quoted in
the Insight story contradict not only other evidence, but statements made by financial
experts and major news sources just after the attacks.

"This could very well be insider trading at the worst, most horrific, most evil use you've
ever seen in your entire life...This would be one of the most extraordinary coincidences
in the history of mankind if it was a coincidence," said Dylan Ratigan of Bloomberg
Business News, interviewed Sept. 20 on Good Morning Texas.

"'I saw put-call numbers higher than I've ever seen in 10 years of following the markets,
particularly the options markets,' said John Kinnucan, principal of Broadband Research,
as quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle," reported the Montreal Gazette on Sept. 19.

To quote 60 Minutes from Sept. 19, "Sources tell CBS News that the afternoon before
the attack, alarm bells were sounding over unusual trading in the U.S. stock options
market."

Assertions that the reported number of puts involved were not abnormal also failed to
analyze highly intricate shell games that involve the movement of put options to
markets outside the U.S. or hidden in what traders refer to as "net positions." Serious
financial experts have indicated the profits from insider trading could have been in the
billions. Andreas von Bulow, a former member of the German parliament responsible for
oversight of Germany's intelligence services, estimated the worldwide amount at $15
billion, according to Tagesspiegel on Jan. 13. Other experts have estimated the amount
at $12 billion. CBS News gave a conservative estimate of $100 million.

A hasty conclusion reached by many is the insider trades were placed by bin Laden and
his associates. Such a notion is flatly contradicted by the now absolute certainty that
such insider trades would have -- and apparently did -- set off alarm bells. It makes
little sense to argue bin Laden et al would have risked compromising at the last minute
an operation planned in total secrecy for at least four years.

Also lacking credibility is the argument that many of the trades were what some brokers
described as inconsequential amounts valued at $1 million or $2 million. This does not
address the possibility that U.S. intelligence officials decided in a few cases to make a
quick profit from attacks they knew were going to succeed. As distasteful as it may
seem, this explanation is far more credible than an assumption that bin Laden made the
trades himself and risked the exposure of what the world has been led to believe was
his life's "masterpiece."

For more information on 9-11 insider trading please visit www.copvcia.com.

The explanations offered by the Bush Administration over the last 48 hours will not
withstand even the slightest scrutiny if a major press organization asks any question
about the warnings received from credible foreign government sources and heads of
state. Other questions must inevitably follow that will implode an oil dictatorship whose
sins and crimes are exposed and just waiting for someone to pick them up and run with
them.

posted by Rei Toei @ 6:26 p.m.

By now, it is widely known that Saddam was purportedly found in a "spider hole." I mean, WTF. That sounds a lot like more b.s. Or a snake hole or a rabbit hole or whatever. The language of this information is meant to manipulate my thinking about the capture, and that irritates me.

posted by Rei Toei @ 4:12 p.m.

Greg Palast's new page is GORGEOUS.

How many assholes are suing this man now for telling the truth?

http://www.gregpalast.com/index.cfm

posted by Rei Toei @ 3:55 p.m.