Reply #43: Bernard Weiner, Counterpunch, and LIHOP [View All]

[Melinda]

From Counterpunch.org:

By early 2001 and into the Summer, warnings were pouring in to U.S. intelligence and military agencies from Jordan, Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, Israel, and other Middle East and South Asian intelligence sources, along with Russia and Britain and the Phillipines, saying that a major attack on the U.S. mainland was in the works, involving the use of airplanes as weapons of mass destruction.

Indeed, in June and July of 2001, the alerts started to be explicit that air attacks were about to go down in the U.S.; even local FBI offices in Phoenix and Minneapolis began passing warnings up the line about Middle Eastern men acting suspiciously at flight schools. In July, Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial airliners and traveled only by private plane, and Bush, after but a few months in office, announced he was going to ground, spending the month of August on his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Cheney disappeared from view, and our guess is that he was coordinating the overall, post-attack strategy.

Under this scenario, in mid-Summer 2001, Bush&Co. decided this was it. Bin Laden unknowingly was going to deliver them the gift of terrorism, and they were going to run with it as far and as fast and as hard as they could. The various post-attack scenarios had been worked out, the so-called USA Patriot Act -- which contained various police-state eviscerations of the Constitution -- was polished and prepared for a rush-job (with no hearings) through a post-attack Congress, the war plans against the Taliban in Afghanistan were readied and rolled out, the air-base countries around Afghanistan were brought onboard, and so on. All during the Summer of 2001.

<snip>

Much, much more and yeah - put me down for a definite LIHOP....

http://www.counterpunch.org/weiner0601.html