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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (20617)	3/5/2002 9:52:16 AM
From: AlienTech	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 281500

>>A cultural inability to face the truth<< Whos?? Arabs or Americans?? >>>> I'm wondering whether we're using the wrong paradigm to understand 9-11. We've regarded it as a terrorist attack by people acting on strong religious and political feelings. Perhaps it would help to see it, at least in part, as an action by American organized crime. Consider the following: 1) the terrorists are supposed to have trained at flight schools at airports in South Florida. Is there an airport in South Florida that isn't used as an importation point for drugs? Does organized crime not use a lot of small planes that might be useful for the terrorists? (How was Atta allowed to abandon a plane on a runway at Miami International Airport without any report being made of this?); 2) the terrorists hung out in bars and strip clubs in South Florida and Las Vegas. Are these not likely owned by organized crime? Are the people who frequent such places more likely to be religious moslems or criminals-for-hire (remember that not all the terrorists may have known what was going to happen)?; 3) some of the buildings destroyed contained offices with irreplaceable evidence and documents on on-going high-level financial fraud cases; 4) the actual attacks all started at Logan Airport in Boston. Could organized crime have infiltrated the baggage handling/security of the airport for the purposes of drug smuggling (Boston is a noted centre of organized crime and the security in Logan was headed by a completely unqualified political appointee)?; 5) money was made, or at least attempted to be made, on foreknowledge of the attacks. This type of short-selling would be more in the line of organized criminals rather that religious fanatics; 6) mafia contractors and mafia-controlled unions built the WTC, and would have been aware of problems in construction due to the shoddy work they did; 7) could the suicide pilots, or some of them, devoted family men, have done what they did to protect their families and not out of religious fervour?; 8) the 15-year-old kid who crashed into the building in Florida was named Bishop. His real family name was Bishara, and his supposedly absent father is allegedly half-Lebanese Arab, half-Sicilian, wanted on drug charges, and allegedly involved in organized crime in Winchester, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. Could the kid's odd actions be a symbolic reaction of a very patriotic American on finding out possible family involvement in 9-11, not to mention a possible way of leaving clues for the authorities? (Remember that the convicted assassin of Robert Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan, was named Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, and may have been 'motivated' as he was heavily in debt on horse-race betting at mafia-operated Santa Anita Raceway.) 9) Is it just a coincidence that Bush has covered up the release of information concerning FBI investigations of organized crime in Boston?; 10) 'Whitey' Bulger, alleged head of organized crime in Boston, has been missing for some time, and some feel he may be in Nova Scotia. Might he or his representative have flown from Nova Scotia to a secluded airport a bit of a drive from Portland to meet with Atta and the other terrorist (the drive would explain the need for Atta to get gas)? All of these ideas probably amount to nothing. However, the implications of organized crime involvement in 9-11 are breathtaking: 1) to the extent that this was a crime operation and not a terrorist operation, so is reduced or eliminated Bush's excuse for his indefinite worldwide war on terrorism in the guise of attacking countries who 'harbour' terrorists (he might as well bomb Boston), and his need for massive defense expenditures; and 2) if the FBI is looking for terrorists when they should be looking for organized criminals, they will never solve the case. I'm not saying that terrorists weren't involved - they had access to money and to some pilots who were willing to martyr themselves. Religious terrorists and organized crime may have found common cause and realized they could help each other. Organized crime could handle the logistics of the operation in a way that is very difficult to explain if a small group of recent immigrants were the only people involved. We've been told from the outset by the American government that the 9-11 attacks were terrorist attacks by a group called al-Qaeda. We've even been given the name and identity of each one of the evil men on the four planes, and have accepted everything at face value. Other than the say-so of the FBI, do we really know anything about who these men were (remember early complaints from the Saudis that the names given to some of these men were the names of innocent people whose identities had been stolen) or what they were really up to? Just as an intellectual exercise, imagine that the 9-11 attacks were not terrorist attacks but were something else . . . . xymphora.blogspot.com

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (20617)	3/9/2002 1:52:16 AM
From: Doc Bones	Respond to of 281500

The fact that a majority of Islamic people believe that Arabs were not responsible the 9-11 attack, many blaming Mossad, is appalling and revealing. However, the sometimes eery effectiveness of Mossad, and its ability to play upon enemy superstitions, has left an impression. GG, Georgie Ann Geyer, fell afoul of this when she was a mideast correspondent. She writes in her autobiography, Buying the Night Flight, of flying to Beirut in 1973 to attend the funeral of a friend, Kemal Nasser, a poet and a spokesman for the PLO, who had been killed in an Israeli raid. While going through the airport she noticed headlines: "ISRAELI BLOND WOMAN LEADS COMMANDOS, BEAUTIFUL ISRAELI BLONDE SOUGHT." On the street she found herself surrounded, then taken into custody, by three young Palestinians. What scared me the most, I suppose, was how ignorant and how nervous they were. (I have always preferred pros; it is the amateurs who threaten the world.) There we sat, for hours, in this small back room. One chap trained his machine gun on me, when he wasn't twirling and playing with it. A young skinny one with glasses (the interrogator) went through my purse and looked over everything, half-assedly. Eventually officials in Beirut who knew her found out about her captivity and sprung her. She flew to Cyprus, then to Tel-Aviv, where she was interviewed about it on TV, then found herself feted, given flowers, and treated like a hero. Finally I asked "[Chicago] Daily News" Correspondent Jay Bushinky what was going on. "You don't seem to understand," he said, "They are not sure you aren't the Israeli Blonde who led the raid on Beirut." Later my friend Yehoshophat Harkabi, the foremost Arabist in Israel and the man who was intelligence chief during the Six-Day War, explained what I had been caught up in. "There was an 'Israeli blonde'," he said, "but it was a man in a blond wig. We never send women on these raids. And there was a reason." He paused. "In ancient times there are many stories about blonde Jewish women commanders against Arab armies--Judith, for instance. It is a bit of psychological warfare." Yes, I thought wryly as I left, a bit of psychological warfare that might have killed me! Adding insult to injury, her paper, The Chicago Daily News, infuriated her by rewriting the incident "into a caricature of sensationalism", with the page 1 Headline: OUR GIRL HELD BY GUERRILLAS. [Buying the Night Flight, U of Chi. Press, 2001, pp. 202-205] Doc