The 9/11 Commission
LIES A SIXTH GRADER WOULD NOT ACCEPT
by Michael C. Ruppert
The critical interaction in any criminal investigation of a major crime is between the detective and the suspect. It is the detective's mission to get the suspect to trip up and make statements which can then be presented in court to discredit the suspect, break down his alibis, and prove the suspect's criminal knowledge and intent. Courts and the legal system don't care what non-involved parties speculate or argue about with each other. They weren't part of the crime. They weren't there and their thoughts become hearsay or irrelevant. The only thing that matters in court is what the detective can get the suspect to state on the record which can then be corroborated or disproved. That is called direct evidence.
For independent investigators challenging the government's position on the attacks of 9/11/01, from the start our best gambit has been to maneuver the government and key officials into tripping themselves up publicly in a way that can be understood by the American people as easily as watching an episode of NYPD Blue. No expert witnesses are needed. No scientific evidence needs to be presented or debated. The suspect lied. And if the suspect lied then the suspect's story is not true. And if the suspect's story is not true then the suspect is, in all probability, guilty as hell or withholding material evidence of someone else's guilt.
The hardest work involved in this process is to expose the lie in a way that the suspect cannot ignore or escape. It is much easier then to go from an admitted lie to proof of guilt and confession.
Perhaps Andy Sipowicz should have been on the September 11th Commission as Condoleezza Rice hung herself today. There certainly was no one there willing to do the job that he could have done without breaking a sweat.
On no less than seven different occasions in today's long-awaited testimony before the September 11th Commission, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice insisted that there was no specific advance knowledge as to the time, place and method of the attacks, and that there was no warning of a domestic internal threat from Al Qaeda throughout the spring and summer of 2001. With these sworn statements the biggest vulnerability of the Bush administration in its criminal complicity for those attacks lies exposed and fully on the record. Ladies and gentlemen, what you witnessed today, on every major network, was perjury – a felony. We will prove that here. But compared to the crimes of murder, conspiracy and treason it was perhaps maybe too small a crime for the major media to notice. It was not too big a crime, however, for the American people and the victim families of 9/11 to notice. The revolution may not be televised. But it may have begun as a result of what was televised today.
Another crime was revealed when Democratic commission member Richard Ben Veniste said, “We agree”, as Rice asserted that there were no specific threats inside the United States before 9/11. The so-called independent commission has no intention of fulfilling its mandate. Ben Veniste's use of the word “we” was the only time where any commissioner spoke for the entire panel and Ben Veniste is neither the Chair nor the Vice Chair of the commission. What prompted him to speak for the entire panel? As FTW has said from the commission's inception, everything that we have witnessed thus far has been stage-managed drama intended to convince the American people that substantive answers to 9-11 have been obtained as a result of a difficult process.
This is an insulting load of bull.
One (of many) Presidential Daily (Intelligence) Briefs (PDBs), dated August 6th 2001, and a frequent theme in Rice's Q&A -- titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside US” -- is only the barest tip of a criminal iceberg. Rice's position that it was a speculative paper was beneath disingenuous and belied by the title itself. The commission's intense focus on that PDB alone, to the exclusion of many other more damning unclassified and available records, is an indication of its deliberate unwillingness to confront Rice or the administration on the simplest points that reveal the administration's guilt. Rice's impish smile, when asked several times if the PDB would be declassified, betrayed the convenient roadblock now accepted by panel and witness as something that will never come to light -- as if it were the only piece of evidence remaining to be explored. The big “What if?”
It is not. Forget the PDB. Let's just start with the open and unclassified public record.
IS CBS NEWS CLASSIFIED MATERIAL?
Consider one CBS news story from July 26, 2001 in which it was reported:
"In response to inquiries from CBS News over why Ashcroft was traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines, the Justice Department cited what it called a "threat assessment" by the FBI, and said Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term.
There was a threat assessment and there are guidelines. He is acting under the guidelines,"…
The CBS news story is not classified and it was referring to trips made inside the Continental U.S. by the Attorney General. Therefore, Rice's statement is false on its face and while the Americans who died on 9-11 were left exposed and unprotected, the Attorney General reacted to an Al Qaeda threat in complete contradiction to Rice's sworn testimony. That question wasn't even asked today.
The totality of available and non-classified information is both infinitely more incriminating and more disturbing, and we will look at some of it below.
RICE REVEALS MORE THAN SHE SUSPECTS
In her opening remarks Condoleezza Rice stated, “During this period, the Vice President, Director Tenet, and members of my staff called senior foreign officials requesting that they increase their intelligence assistance and report to us any relevant threat information.”
In the wake of 9/11, as FTW began documenting a number of direct and very specific warnings received by the United States government, a number of press stories and TV commentaries reported that these warnings had never “trickled up” to the White House or senior management level because they had been received at lower levels. Rice's statement bypasses and nullifies that excuse in much the same way that it was impossible for Rice, Cheney and the senior White House staff to assert that they were not aware of the 2002 report from former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, indicating that documents purporting to show that Iraq was attempting to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger were forgeries. It was Cheney's office which had dispatched Wilson in the first place.
It is beyond ludicrous, beyond “systemic” failure, beyond “connecting the dots”, to assume that a high priority request from the White House would have been ignored by lower levels of the national security apparatus, or that a mechanism did not exist for foreign intelligence services to get their information before the right eyes.
In repeating, ad nauseum, her assertion that “If we had had specific information as to the time and place of the attacks, we would have moved heaven and earth to prevent them”, Rice played the administration's poker hand, bluffing to end with not even a pair of deuces to back her up.
WE DON'T NEED NO STINKING PDBs!
In this section FTW will review some of its reporting on documented foreign warnings received by the administration before 9/11. And this writer will also disclose portions of his new book, The Truth and Lies of 9/11 – America's Descent into Fascism at the End of the Age of Oil, (scheduled for release this summer) for the first time publicly.
Although our first reports of specific warnings of an Al Qaeda threat inside the US were published within two weeks of the attacks, our best compendium of those warnings was published on April 22, 2002. That story, Briefing Paper: The Case for Bush Administration Advance Knowledge of 9/11 Attacks, is located at fromthewilderness.com.
In that article we wrote:
As reported in the respected German daily Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung (FAZ) on Sept. 13, the German intelligence service, the BND, warned both the CIA and Israel in June of 2001 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 story indicates that the information was received directly from BND sources.
According to a Sept. 14 report in the Internet newswire online.ie, German police, monitoring the phone calls of a jailed Iranian man, learned the man was telephoning USG intelligence agencies last summer to warn of an imminent attack on the WTC in the week of Sept. 9. German officials confirmed the calls to the USG for the story but refused to discuss additional details.
In August 2000 French intelligence sources confirmed a man recently arrested in Boston by the FBI was an Islamic militant and a key member of Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network. The FBI knew the man had been taking flying lessons at the time of his arrest and was in possession of technical information on Boeing aircraft and flight manuals, as reported by Reuters on Sept. 13.
According to a story in Izvestia on Sept. 12, Russian intelligence warned the USG 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 Vladimir Putin stated he had ordered Russian intelligence to warn the USG "in the strongest possible terms" of imminent assaults on airports and government buildings before the attacks on Sept. 11.
Conclusion: From just these five press stories, then, the USG had received credible advance warnings, some from heads of state, that commercial aircraft would be hijacked by as many as 25 hijackers at airports, with Boston a strong candidate, during the week of Sept. 9…
No known preventive measures were taken.
INSIDER TRADING......
Article too long; all the news that fits, doesn't...Rat
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