WP: Al Qaeda May Have Delayed 9/11 Attack

[kskiska]

Commission Finds Evidence Pointing To Earlier Date

Tuesday, June 15, 2004; Page A01

The independent commission probing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has found evidence suggesting the attacks were intended to be carried out in May or June of that year, but were postponed by al Qaeda leaders because lead hijacker Mohamed Atta was not ready, according to sources privy to the panel's findings.

New evidence gathered by the commission, including information obtained from U.S.-held detainees, indicates that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, mastermind of the attacks, persuaded al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to postpone the attacks by several months because of the organizational problems, according to the sources, who declined to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the commission's investigation.

That scenario would mark a dramatic revision of the commonly understood narrative of the Sept. 11 attacks and contrasts sharply with prevailing theories of FBI agents investigating the plot. Until now, federal investigators have said the evidence indicates that the attacks were likely planned for a narrow time frame around Sept. 11. If there had been an alternate date, investigators have said, it was probably later in the year.

The possible date postponement is included in a draft report that has been circulated among government and commission officials in recent days, and is expected to be among the topics discussed during a Wednesday hearing focusing on the origins and execution of the Sept. 11 plot. The panel, which is preparing to release its final report in late July, is expected to issue a separate report on Thursday exploring whether U.S. fighter jets may have been able to intercept American Airlines Flight 77 before it struck the Pentagon if they had been dispatched more quickly, according to ccommission sources.

more…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41841-2004Jun14.html

[gumby]

1. Maybe

the attack was delayed to the date when all military aircraft would be tied up in an exercise scenario about hijacked aircraft attacking this country.

Or maybe it was just because "Mohamed Atta was not ready."

Whatever.

[Minstrel Boy]

2. Right. Whatever.

The answer won't be forthcoming from the "independent" commission.

[LiberalFighter]

8. It was scheduled for gw*s return from vacation

[Bozvotros]

3. Slowly, inexorably the attack date will be moved backwards....

....until it finally lands on Clinton's watch and then the full blame can be laid on his shoulders instead of Monkey boy. Eventually the date will come to be known as 9/11/2000 and Clinton will be remembered as the President who diddled some comely intern while the towers fell.

[Beaker]

6. they'd never let it out that it was originally intended to happen during..

Clinton's term in office, even if that were the case.

it would make it appear that the terrorists were more afraid of Bill Clinton than lil'w.

[KoKo]

12. I hate to admit it, but that was my first thought, too. To push it on

Clinton saying we were so weak after 8 years of Clinton that Chimp didn't have time to fix everything before we were attacked.

Sheesh! How much more open can they be in this "blame the Clenis" stuff.

[Stephanie]

4. I've always thought the timing was because of the sentencing

They were sentencing some terrorists that week in lower Manhattan. I forget - Embassy bombers?

[SOS]

5. Gore Vidal

believes that September 11 was specifically chosen due to the final defeat of the Moslem armies at the gates of Vienna on 9-11-1683.
Long memories. Imagine how long Bush's attack on Iraq will haunt the US.

[HuckleB]

7. There's no evidence of such symbolism being a part of their plans.

I really don't think they would care. I mean, what date were they defeated at the gates of Vienna in 1529? Why not use that date? Vidal is grasping at straws to make conversation. It's a waste of time. Blah. Blah. Blah.

[markses]

9. Absurd

9/11 was chosen because it was the best date for all the tickets, with the right kind of flights, from reasonably useful airports, on the right kind plane model. Not that difficult.

This nonsense about "long memories" borders on racism.

[mike1963]

13. I disagree it "borders on racism"...rather it indicates a culture that is

amenable to remembering and learning from history...something we here in the west have yet to grasp.

[missile_bender]

24. Choosing 9-11 as the date

has always bothered me. It is an American psychology, not an Arab one. Obviously this can be debated, but I will never believe an Arab came up with this date because of that. An Arab may understand it, but woulod never feel the psychological impact. An American came up with this date for the attack. Yeah, tin-foil time.

[Gimel]

10. They're catching up

This was in reports two years ago. The planned date was August 20 or 21, if I remember correctly.

[daleo]

11. They had to wait until someone could find a book Bush could read

It took until September, but the finally found "My Pet Goat". Then, showtime.

OK, I am kidding around, but it makes about as much sense as a lot of the official story. They sure were lucky that they picked a day when there would be a NORAD exercise about terrorism with aircraft. Lucky, lucky, lucky.

[nolabels]

14. U.S. Media's Dirty Little Secret

http://www.newtopiamagazine.net/content/issue17/oped/911.php
The Explosion of the 9-11 Truth Movement -- U.S. Media's Dirty Little Secret

by Bill Douglas, Co-Founder - "National 911Visibility.org"
A mass movement and a mountain of disturbing evidence has been growing beneath the radar of U.S. media. The U.S. media (including alternative media) has done an extraordinarily superhuman job of "hearing" "seeing" and "speaking no evil." However many researchers, ordinary citizens, and journalists began to smell something rotten . . . not in Denmark . . . but rather, right here in the good ol' US of A.


Protestor, Kansas City, Mo

A mass movement and a mountain of disturbing evidence has been growing beneath the radar of U.S. media. The U.S. media (including alternative media) has done an extraordinarily superhuman job of "hearing" "seeing" and "speaking no evil." However, almost immediately after 9-11-2001's horrendous attacks on New York and Washington D.C., many researchers, ordinary citizens, and journalists began to smell something rotten . . . not in Denmark . . . but rather, right here in the good ol' US of A.

This movement's early roots began when many people scratched their heads in wonder at "how 4 commercial jet liners could fly hijacked for nearly an hour and a half the morning of 9-11, without any Air Force fighter interceptor jets turning a wheel until it was too late," as stated by acclaimed Canadian TV journalist, Barry Zwicker. Zwicker's powerful documentary "The Great Deception," which suggests top Bush Admin. officials were likely complicit in the 9-11 attacks, aired on Canada's Vision TV network which is viewed by millions of Canadians. Unfortunately Americans in the U.S. have been "protected" from viewing this critical documentary.

Researchers, like Zwicker and others, quickly learned that in 2001 before the 9-11 attacks 62 aircraft had been intercepted by Air Force fighter interceptor jets, and usually within 10 to 15 minutes of going off course. <http://septembereleventh.org/airdefense.php> Yet bizarrely, on 9-11 four commercial jets were hijacked off course for about one and a half hours before the last one crashed into the most highly protected building in the world (the Pentagon). . . yet no interceptor jet intercepted it in all that time. Alarm bells went off with citizens across the U.S. and the world. A number of people including former NYPD detective, Frank Serpico (played by Al Pacino in the movie about his life as an NYPD whistleblower exposing corruption at the New York Police Department), began to express a suspicion of the "official 9-11 story" during a whistleblower awards ceremony nationally televised on C-SPAN.

Then other issues came to light regarding 9-11, and foreknowledge of the attacks. For example, a former Los Angeles Police Detective named Michael Ruppert noted that outrageously high volumes of insider trading on United and American Airlines stocks prior to 9-11, (reported on by CBS, Bloomberg and other financial papers) actually had some strange ties to the Central Intelligence Agency. 9/11-related insider trading was worldwide. It occurred on markets in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Chicago, New York, London and Berlin. Estimates of the total amount of insider trades have ranged from the hundred of millions (CBS), to the billions (Ernst Weltke – Chief of the Bundesbank), to the tens of billions (Andreas von Bülow, former German cabinet minister).
(snip)

[paulthompson]

15. a couple of points

One, this makes the Bush failure to stop 9/11 that much greater, because there was a big surge of warnings in the early spring. They claimed these were red herrings, but now (maybe) it turns out those could have been leads to the 9/11 attack too.

Two, the Bush admin can't keep their story straight. Check out this story, said to be based on the interrogation of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, just as this new story is:

http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/english/0,1518,271523,00.html

In that, the 9/11 plot is said to be named Porsche 911 from the very beginning, showing that the date was set very far in advance. The propaganda around 9/11 is so pathetic.

[wickerwoman]

16. Well, we know they did some test runs.

Wasn't James Woods the actor who flew the same Boston-LAX flight on August 11, 2001 and reported complaining to the stewardess and an FBI agent about very suspicious Middle Eastern men? He later identified Mohammed Atta as one of them. They're probably taking evidence of the test runs and using them to show Bush couldn't have been prepared.

[oblivious]

17. If this story is true it was planned to piggyback on a govt training drill

THE GREAT 9/11 COINCIDENCE
Jon Rappoport
May 13, 2003

On August 22, 2002, the Associated Press ran a story about 9/11. "Agency planned drill for plane crash last Sept. 11."
"...one US intelligence agency was planning an exercise last Sept. 11 <2001> in which an errant aircraft crashed into one of its buildings."

www.nomorefakenews.com

Fake Jet Crash Was Planned On 9/11
Associated Press, New York Press, 23 August 2002

http://www.nypost.com/news/nationalnews/46834.htm

The U.S. Government, Not the Hijackers, 'Chose' the Date of the 9-11 Attacks

by Barbara Honegger

This brief sets forth the growing reasons to believe that the date for the attack was not 'chosen' by the hijackers at all, but that one of them learned that a counter-terror wargame/exercise simulating a scenario like the one that actually took place on 9-11 was planned for that morning, and then 'piggybacked' the "real thing" on top of it. Here are some of the critical 'burning data points':

http://www.911pi.com/honneger.htm

[dArKeR]

18. No, Bush Sr. in meeting with Bin Laden's brother was always the only date

There never was an earlier date. They're lying to us. Sept. 11 was chosen because Bin Laden knew his brother would be meeting with Bush. Bin Laden figured, wrongly, that the American press would investigate and publish where Bush Sr. was and then expose to the intelligent American citizens the corruption between the House of Saud and the House of Bush and how they together were exploiting the people of the Middle East and their resources. The intelligent American citizens and American Media (Whores) would demand Bush Junior be impeached because obviously this is a million times more serious offense than a President kissing a female consenting adult.

[nolabels]

19. The whole stupid commission was a butt cover exercise

http://www.cooperativeresearch.net/timeline/main/essayaninterestingday.html
An Interesting Day:
President Bush's Movements and Actions on 9/11


By Allan Wood and Paul Thompson
May 9, 2003

"It was an interesting day." - President Bush, recalling 9/11



Both images taken at 9:03 a.m.: Bush takes part in a meaningless photo-op, knowing full well the US is already under attack.

At approximately 8:48 a.m. on the morning of September 11, 2001, the first pictures of the burning World Trade Center were broadcast on live television. The news anchors, reporters, and viewers had little idea what had happened in lower Manhattan, but there were some people who did know. By that time, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the National Military Command Center, the Pentagon, the White House, the Secret Service, and Canada's Strategic Command all knew that three commercial airplanes had been hijacked. They knew that one plane had been flown deliberately into the World Trade Center's North Tower; a second plane was wildly off course and also heading toward Manhattan; and a third plane had abruptly turned around over Ohio and was flying back toward Washington, DC.
(snip)

[TLDHOME99]

20. This means that Bush had plenty of time to prevent it

And he didn't. Too busy concentrating on Iraq. Damn that CIA, they should have told him that Al Quaeda was a threat . . .(sarcasm)

[nolabels]

21. Must of been too busy looking for that slam dunk

Tenet the Fall guy? Sure took him a long time to fall, must of been some distance

http://www.happyvalleyasylum.com/ratched/archives/001070.php

July 14, 2003
Tenet plays fall guy

There are some excellent commentaries being published online regarding George Tenet's appearing to accept the blame for the false claim of Iraq seeking to buy African (Nigerian) uranium in the State of the Union speech Bush gave in January. Here's a few:

The Left Coaster: So Much For Letting Tenet Take the Fall

Time Magazine: A Question of Trust

Several good entries from Josh Marshall

John Hoke says Tenet didn't actually "fall on his sword"

Jo Fish at Democratic Veteran agrees with Hoke

Tenet's verbatim remarks on the subject

Update: a late addition is William Rivers Pitt's editorial on truthout from last Friday, analyzing both the evidence of Bush's deception and the results. It ain't pretty.
(snip)

Lots of links in there but, well you know x(

[TLDHOME99]

22. thanks for the great link, nolabels

I read most of it. You're right, it ain't pretty. I'll have to read the rest tonight . . . when I have more time.

:think:

[KayLaw]

23. Question

I know many people have wondered whether the month long vacations taken by Bush and Cheney were actually evacuations. This would figure into the articles about Ashcroft's refusal to use commercial planes that spring and those long vacations, wouldn't it,( assuming LIHOP )?

[NewYorkerfromMass]

25. But they didn't take them seriously the first time

or so they say upthread.
I think the increased "chatter" that summer convinced them otherwise.