British official charges US “stood down” on 9/11

[RBHam]

British official charges US “stood down” on 9/11
By Bill Vann, wsws.org
8 September 2003

Excerpt:
That someone with these political connections charges in print that elements within the US administration knew that a terrorist attack was coming on September 11 and allowed it to happen to further their war plans represents an extremely dangerous development for the Bush White House. He speaks not just for himself. The thesis he advances is indicative of what is assumed and is being said behind the scenes among much wider circles within the sole major government to have backed Washington in its invasion of Iraq.

It is doubtless that the article was motivated by the deepening crisis of the Blair government itself over the exposure of the lies it used to promote the Iraq war. With continuing revelations from within the government’s own intelligence agencies about the fabrication of evidence against Iraq, recent polls have shown a majority of Briton’s in favor of Blair’s resignation.

The questions Meacher raises have never been answered by anyone in the US government. On the eve of the second anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the American public knows almost nothing more about what happened that day—and how it was allowed to happen—than it knew two years ago. The Bush White House has made every effort to derail or stonewall any independent investigation into these tragic events. To this day, no one has explained how suspected terrorists, under the surveillance of the FBI and the CIA, were allowed to enter the US, commandeer commercial aircraft and fly them unhindered until striking their targets.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/sep2003/meac-s08.shtml

[RBHam]

1. This war on terrorism is bogus

The 9/11 attacks gave the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure its global domination

Michael Meacher
Saturday September 6, 2003
The Guardian

Excerpt:
All of this makes it all the more astonishing - on the war on terrorism perspective - that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself. The first hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from the US Andrews airforce base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not? There were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9/11. Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft (AP, August 13 2002). It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0%2C3604%2C1036571%2C00.html

[J B]

2. Legal requirement or not...

The guy just plain is not in a position to know what really happened with NORAD and the US' air defense system.

None of us are.

[arcane1]

3. we all know what did NOT happen! Two words:

Payne Stewart

[ChompySnack]

5. Well...

We are in a position to know what *should* have happened and didn't. Nobody is answering those questions. That is the point of the article and discussion. Now you can move on to the next level of questioning/understanding, I hope.

[tom_paine]

6. True, J B, but it's nice that people are now considering the possibility

Even if Corporate TV Pravda won't allow such questioning within the Televised Curtain of the Amerikan Empire.

Of course, once what's Behind the Televised Curtain of the Amerikan Empire becomes so wildly out of joint with even simple basic common decency or journalistic standards, then Amerika will indeed be viewed around the world as the Orwellian-Totalitarian-Free-Market-Stalinist Soviet that we are rushing headlong towards...

So, it is less a matter of what Meecher knows specifically, but he knows something is fishy in the same way we knew Stalin and Brezhnev lied all the time...AND their Lapdog Commie Media.

Of course, now that Lapdog Commie Media is looking more and more like a crude template for Corporate TV Pravda.

[RC]

7. However, this person has position and is using known facts to ask.

questions that should have been ask on the afternoon of september 11, 2001.

[Abe Linkman]

4. That the 9/11 attacks were not U.S. supported MIHOP is bogus

A bogus war on terrorism was made possible by a bogus attack on U.S. sovereignty. 9/11 is only one of the latest, dating back to every war the U.S. has been involved in during the past 100+ years. (Korea might be the exception to that. WW First might be, also)

[hang a left]

10. Please Let this see the light

of day on this side of the Atlantic.

[RBHam]

11. Truthout has it:

http://truthout.org/docs_03/090703A.shtml

[RBHam]

8. There are none so blind as those who will not see.

It still amazes me how this subject is so furiously ignored. It's coming up to the second anniversary of BushCo's Reichstag fire and still the general public is being blatantly lied to and manipulated by the Bush Junta and their lapdog ennablers in the political establishment and the mainstream media.

Even a cursory examination of the events surrounding 9-11 raises many disturbing issues that are not "allowed" to be discussed because to do so would go "beyond the pale". The issue has been shaped so that any deviation from the "official story" is deemed "un-American"..that is, "heretical"...

Very convenient way of cutting off debate, eh?

I pray that there may still be time...

I doubt it, though. The majority of the American people seem to be committed to the comfort of denial and the easily summoned emotions of hatred and fear of the carefully media-constructed "evil others"...

Condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past over and over...

[RBHam]

9. kick

The fact that the former Environment Minister of the UK Gov't is accusing the Bush Administration of complicity in the 9-11 attacks should be known by every American.

Free Press anyone?

[proud patriot]

12. I agree

I sent this to friends

[gratuitous]

13. This "news" is, of course, old hat for us at DU

But I am dismayed that these conjectures, allegations, questions and surmises, posed by a highly placed government official have drawn no apparent notice from the popular media in the U.S. There are certainly some provocative possibilities suggested by all this, and it used to be part of the job of a journalist to track such things down.

Greg Palast will no doubt talk with a couple of people a couple of years from now, who will fill him in on how the editorial decision not to run this story was reached. And as usual, folks will deny that any such thing ever happened, or that Meacher wasn't a credible enough source, or that the management that was in place at the time is no longer running the paper or the station or the network, and so they can't be asked to atone for their predecessor's decision, can they?

[symbolman]

14. Take Back the Media

has this covered as well

http://www.takebackthemedia.com/meacher.html

[RBHam]

15. You guys rock!

keep it up. people like you give me some sort of hope...

[9215]

16. Another level of exposure has

been reached here IMO. This sets a more serious tone when officialdom is implying so strongly that Bush is a traitor.

The shit is going to tumble and Bush is going DOWN!!

[Stephanie]

17. 9/11 Widows getting louder too

Did you Kristen Breitweiser's review of DC 9/11 in Salon?

http://www.salon.com/ent/tv/feature/2003/09/08/dc911/print.html

<excerpt>It is understandable that so little time is actually devoted to the president's true actions on the morning of 9/11. Because to show the entire 23 minutes from 9:03 to 9:25 a.m., when President Bush, in reality, remained seated and listening to "second grade story-hour" while people like my husband were burning alive inside the World Trade Center towers, would run counter to Karl Rove's art direction and grand vision.

Remember the aircraft-carrier photo op? Bush is a man of action; in fact, he is an action hero. Except, of course, when it really counts, like in those early morning hours when this country was under attack and our commander in chief was drinking milk and eating cookies with second graders. Can you imagine one of those second-graders years from now when they are asked where they were on the morning of 9/11? They will simply say, "I was sitting with the president reading him a story."

It also confuses me that the filmmakers would allot so much time to the war posturing in Afghanistan because that, too, has been a failure. President Bush is quoted in the fictional drama as saying he will take Osama bin Laden "dead or alive." But, I'm sorry, have we captured him? And why so much time spent on this war plan anyway? I thought there was a copy of it on the president's desk the day before 9/11? So what's all the fuss about? Why all the Cabinet meetings with all the dignified speak?

The real Condoleezza Rice apparently didn't know planes could be used as weapons, but she is portrayed in the movie as a woman who knew an awful lot about bin Laden and al-Qaida by 8 p.m. on the evening of the attacks. The real FBI was caught flat-footed by bin Laden and the 19 hijackers, but in the movie they gather the names and photos of the hijackers very rapidly. I guess their "networking" problems, like Rice's bin Laden knowledge, got "cleaned up" by the evening of 9/11 in the movie version.

It's also interesting to watch the fictional versions of Ari Fleischer and Karen Hughes "strategizing" and "orchestrating" to make President Bush look like a strong leader. Who knew that it was such hard work to frame the president as an empathetic, strong and competent leader in the face of the nation's worst tragedy? Forgive my naiveté, but I never knew how meticulously planned the president's every single word and movement were. And if his words are that carefully and painfully chosen, just how did those 16 words get into his State of the Union address anyway? But I digress. <more>