I'll stay "old school". It's my opinion and I'm sticking to it. There is alot of blame to be dispersed. Bush gets his share.
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NEW YORK (CNN) -- The body of John P. O'Neill, a former assistant director of the FBI and an expert on terrorism, was recovered...from the rubble of the World Trade Center.
O'Neill had recently retired from the FBI and had just taken over security for the World Trade Center, said New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik.
"That Tuesday was his first or second day on the job," Kerik said...in an interview with CNN's Larry King Live. . "He was going to go into One World Trade, the tower one, and when the strike came he went into the second tower in an attempt to help people get out of the building and he died there. We found his body today."
O'Neill, 50, was the chief of international terrorism operations for the FBI. He supervised on-site investigations of the bombing by terrorists of the USS Cole in Yemen last year, and the 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
A 1996 article published in the Van Impe Intelligence Briefing quoted O'Neill as saying, "No longer is it just the fear of being attacked by international terrorist organizations -- attacks against Americans and American interests overseas. A lot of these groups now have the capability and the support infrastructure in the United States to attack us here if they choose to do so."
In a 1997 speech to a meeting of the National Strategy Forum in Chicago, he called Afghanistan's conflict with Russia "a major watershed event" in terrorism.
Aided by the United States, Afghanistan "beat one of the largest standing armies in the world at that time, which gave them a buoyed sense of success and that they could take on other countries like the U.S. and be likewise successful," he said.
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TODAY'S LETTER
The LA Times chief Business writer, James Flannigan, apparently got ahead of the script a couple of months ago when he wrote that the completion of the war against the Taliban would bring the benefit of a new oil pipeline through the country, carrying vast Caspian Sea reserves to free markets. I don't believe he's revisited the issue, and with good reason: the Bush administration has been working desperately to de-link oil and Afghanistan in the American public's mind. Reminiscent of Karl Rove's media machinations that produced the now-debunked allegations of Bill Clinton trashing the White House and Air Force One, in recent weeks we've been seeing a full frontal assault by the kept media trying to pin blame for 9/11 on Clinton. But the truth is out there and has become impossible to ignore - for two days now, CNN's Paula Zahn has featured 'Bin Laden, The Forbidden Truth,' by French authors Jean-Charles Brisard and Guilaume Dasquie, who conducted extensive interviews with John O'Neill, the FBI counter-terrorism head who had been in charge of investigating bin Laden. In these interviews, O'Neill revealed that the Bush administration shut down almost all terrorism investigations, for the linked purposes of protecting bin Laden's Saudi sponsors, and because the administration was negotiating with the Taliban to build an oil pipeline through Afghanistan. O'Neill quit the FBI in disgust; meanwhile the negotiations with the Taliban came to an impasse, ending with an implicit declaration of war against the Taliban. "Either accept our carpet of gold, or we will bury you under a carpet of bombs," is the direct quote from American representative Tom Simons.... --Kent Southard
Note: The Simons quote was reported by Brisard, according to Julio Godoy. --Politex |
