"Failure and Crime Are Not the Same" (FTW)

[Beam Me Up]

A "From the Wilderness" critique of Posner's Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11

Failure and Crime Are Not the Same:
9/11's Limited Hangouts

by Jamey Hecht, PhD

<snip>
Here in the "Homeland," what flowed from 9/11 is the newly expanded American infrastructure of fiscally disastrous militarism and unconstitutional domestic repression. Every major budgetary and policy consequence of the attacks seems like the fulfilled dream of one or another megalomaniac. For instance, I think of the Patriot Act as John Ashcroft's sweet slice of the post-9/11 pie. The Central Intelligence Agency got billions of dollars and the key to the statutory "shackles" of the Church Committee - and the Constitution - that had bound its hands. Rumsfeld's Defense Department and its arms merchants got an ocean of new money.(14) Bush got some respect and a mandate. Cheney got his reconstruction contracts. In your mind's eye you can see them all, at some point in the late 1990's, sitting in a circle with a copy of Brzezinski open on the table.(15) But some of this can't be proven yet, and almost none of it can be officially acknowledged. So Posner's country needs him again.

The flap copy on Why America Slept begins this way: "After an eighteen-month investigation that uncovered explosive new evidence through interviews and in classified documents, Gerald Posner reveals much previously undisclosed information." There follows a list of eight bulleted points that qualify as "explosive new evidence." Here are two(16):

-- the identity of two countries that might have had foreknowledge that a terrorist attack was scheduled for September 11 on U.S. soil
-- the devastating consequences of the crippling rivalry between the CIA and FBI as the United States moved unwittingly toward 9/11

As for the "identity" of Posner's "two countries," consider the following matters of public record. The German newspaper Die Zeit published a story arguing that "a few weeks before the attacks, Israeli intelligence gave US authorities a list with names of suspects who were staying in the US for the purpose of preparing attacks."(17) Pakistani intelligence had to have known, since its chief was the man who wired $100,000 US dollars to Mohammad Atta the day before the attacks.(18) Mike Ruppert's From the Wilderness article of April 22, 2002 inventoried these crucial foreknowledge stories(19):

·      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 Izveztia 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.

As Kyle Hence of 9/11 Citizen's Watch and Unanswered Questions points out,

Fox News, March 5, 2002: "US law enforcement authorities knew as early as 1995 that Middle Eastern men were training at American flight schools and had discussed crashing planes into federal buildings, according to documents and interviews with American and Filipino authorities." (T)his information came out during questioning of Ramsey Yousef by Filipino authorities in 1995 and during his trial for the 1993 WTC bombing. (20)

Posner frames the 9/11 question to include just two countries instead of any larger number (I've cited six, but there are more). Then he calls his information "new" and "explosive," when it is in fact old and well established. The lesson is this: no matter what you hear about 9/11, don't get too upset, because any information that claims to make an unpleasantly big difference will rapidly fizzle into the incompetence theory.(21) Now let's examine his claim that the "crippling rivalry between the CIA and FBI" was the problem.

More

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/112203_failure_crime.html

[Terwilliger]

1. Gerald Posner...the man behind Case Closed

Writes about why the JFK case is all done and gone, and now tells us about 9/11...anybody see a pattern here?