Ted Rall
The Truth About Sept. 11
Sun Sep 15 04:25:11 2002
208.152.73.112

The Truth About Sept. 11
By Ted Rall, AlterNet
September 11, 2002
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=13864

One year has passed since Sept. 11. Yet we, the American people, still
don't know exactly what happened. There are still no plans for a public
investigation of how more than 3,000 Americans lost their lives, of what
could have been done to prevent the attacks or reduce their impact.

Secrecy has been the watchword of the obsessively inscrutable Bush
Administration. So preoccupied is the Administration with keeping the
people's business away from the people that, rather than spark a
national discussion of what went wrong and what we could do better,
these public servants are asking members of Congress to take
lie-detector tests -- to find out who's been leaking plans to attack Iraq.

Without a doubt, military intelligence requires secrecy. But there is no
conceivable national security interest in keeping Americans in the dark
about Sept. 11. A crisis whose first few weeks were marked by
patriotic unity rapidly devolved into a divisive "war on terrorism" marked
by opportunistic assaults on the Bill of Rights, old-fashioned oil wars
and a cynical neo-McCarthyism whereby those who questioned Bush
and the Republican Party were smeared as "anti-American." United We
Stand bumper stickers aside, the terrorists have skillfully turned us
against each other: citizen against immigrant, Republican against
Democrat, Christian against Muslim. Secrecy only deepens those
divisions.

To hell with closed-door Congressional hearings. America needs a full,
open, publicly televised investigation into 9/11, and it needed it last
October. Using the post-JFK assassination Warren Commission as a
model is a start, though that panel's lack of openness fed conspiracy
theories that continue to cause Americans to distrust their government
four decades later. The best way to avoid alienating the public from its
public servants is to keep an investigation 100-percent transparent.

During times of crisis both the electorate and the elected forget that this
country belongs to the people. As American citizens and taxpayers,
therefore, we deserve -- and should demand -- honest answers to the
following still-unanswered questions:

Before The Attacks

What did Bush know and when did he know it? A few months ago it
was revealed that, while vacationing in Crawford, Texas on Aug. 6,
2001, Bush had received an "analytical report" warning from National
Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice that a terrorist attack was imminent.
What was the exact nature of that warning? How detailed was it?
Should Bush have cut short his vacation and headed back to
Washington? The administration has stonewalled on this issue, but they
can allay suspicions of a September Surprise only by coming clean now
about the briefings he received before 9/11.

Did Echelon cough up the 9-10 warnings? The National Security
Agency acknowledges that it "intercepted" two messages (one said
"tomorrow is zero hour") from terrorists indicating that the next day,
Sept. 11, would be the date of a major attack. Unfortunately, those
messages weren't processed and evaluated until it was too late, on Sept.
12. The NSA maintains a sophisticated voice- and keyword-recognition
computer system called Echelon. A former NSA director told the
French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur that Echelon uses automation
to monitor every phone call, fax transmission, email and wire transfer in
the world. Did the 9-10 warning come from Echelon? Is Echelon being
used to monitor ordinary Americans? Is there any way to speed up the
rate at which the NSA processes important intercepts?

The September Surprise

Why didn't our Air Force shoot down the hijacked planes? Air
traffic controllers lost contact with all four aircraft within minutes of
takeoff. Two were off course and ignored controllers for more than an
hour and a half, yet the mightiest air defense network in the world failed
to prevent the suicide bombers from striking their targets. Did
overworked air traffic controllers fail to notice the errant planes? How
long did it take them to get the word to military authorities? Did a
bureaucratically inept Air Force fail to react quickly enough?

Why were only 12 jets patrolling U.S. airspace? According to The
New York Times, only 12 Air Force National Guard planes, most of
them on the ground, were assigned to patrol the entire continental
United States at the time of the attacks. Whose judgment determined
that this level of protection was adequate? What would happen in the
event of a nuclear first strike against the U.S.? Would an increased
budget have increased that number, and what is our current field
strength?

What is American policy concerning hijackings? Had an Air Force
jet successfully intercepted one of the doomed flights, would its pilot
have been ordered to shoot it down? If so, would that order have had
to come from the President, or would a lower-ranked official be
sufficient? If a shooting were authorized, would it ever be implemented
over a densely populated area? Passengers need to know where they
stand before they board a plane.

Was United Flight 93 shot down over Pennsylvania? The Pentagon
has neither denied shooting down Flight 93 nor confirmed that its heroic
passengers caused the flight to crash while trying to wrest its controls
from the hijackers. The flight was airborne some two and a half hours
before crashing outside Shanksville, leading many to speculate that it
was fired upon to protect the White House or other likely targets in
Washington. It seems unlikely that a cockpit voice recording of a
struggle between passengers and jihadis exists; if it did, why not release
such an inspiring artifact to a public hungry for inspiration? All 9/11 flight
information, including any Flight 93 recordings, ought to be given to the
media. And it's time for the military to indicate whether or not it, rather
than the passengers, brought down the jet.

Why didn't federal law require reinforced cockpit doors? This
common-sense proposal had been adopted by carriers in other
countries years earlier, but not in the United States. Did the airlines
lobby against the move because of increased costs? If so, which
airlines? And which federal officials and/or members of Congress are
criminally responsible for jeopardizing the safety of the flying public for
the sake of a few bucks?

Who locked the roof doors at the World Trade Center? During the
1993 World Trade Center bombing, hundreds of workers escaped
smoke by going to the roofs. On Sept. 11 hundreds died when they
went up dozens of flights of stairs only to find those same roof doors
locked. Why did city fire officials order those doors locked between
1993 and 2001, and more importantly, why didn't they post notices
through the World Trade Center complex to advise that roof doors
would no longer be unlocked? Prosecutions may be in order for criminal
negligence.

Who skimped on FDNY communications? Scores of New York
firefighters died in the stairwells of the World Trade Center after they'd
been ordered to evacuate the buildings -- because they couldn't hear
those orders on their antiquated radio system. The fire department had
requested up-to-date equipment years earlier. Which city officials
refused to allocate the necessary funding, causing firefighters to die
needlessly? Do the FDNY and other urban fire departments now have
better communications?

How much asbestos was released by the World Trade Center
collapse? World Trade was one-third completed when builders
stopped using asbestos fire retardant, which means that the equivalent of
four normal-width 60-story skyscrapers full of a banned carcinogen was
pulverized and released in a cloud that blanketed lower Manhattan and
Brooklyn. The Environmental Protection Agency has never come clean
on what may eventually become known as America's Chernobyl, but
New Yorkers deserve to know the full extent of their exposure.

Why was the Pentagon so vulnerable? Not only did Defense
Department employees perish at the Pentagon, the attack revealed that
even the headquarters of American military power can be successfully
targeted. Does the Pentagon have a surface-to-air missile system that
could avert similar catastrophes in the future? If not, one should be
constructed.

What about the other knives? After American planes were grounded,
investigators found box cutters attached under seats on Delta flights out
of Boston's Logan airport and from Atlanta bound for Brussels. Was
anyone ever arrested in connection with would-be hijackings of these
other flights? What were the intended targets of those aborted
hijackings? Were those box cutters, and those on the four hijacked
flights, placed there by personnel who service aircraft ("These look like
an inside job," a U.S. official told Time magazine) or were they
smuggled aboard through lax security checkpoints by would-be
hijackers?

Were there other plots? American officials have questioned thousands
of individuals in connection with 9/11. Have they uncovered other
schemes intended for that day, or for later on?

Aftermath: The War on Terrorism

Did anyone take responsibility or make demands? It's difficult to
imagine that the group that carried out an act as expensive and carefully
planned as 9/11 chose not to claim credit for it. Furthermore, terrorist
organizations typically make demands -- requests for changes in policy,
say, or the release of political prisoners. Secretary of State Colin Powell
initially promised to provide proof of Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda
group's leading role as instigators of 9/11, but has since reneged on that
pledge. Moreover, that assertion doesn't fit bin Laden's known
methods; rather than plan or carry out operations himself, he usually
agrees to fully or partially fund plots conceived and executed by other
Islamist groups. If the Bush Administration received communiqués from
a group or groups claiming responsibility for 9/11, Americans need to
know that.

When did the U.S. decide to invade Afghanistan? As recently as
April 2001, the Bush administration funneled millions of dollars in aid to
the Taliban in order to reward the hardline Islamic regime for virtually
eliminating opium production. By June, however, relations had cooled
noticeably and invasion plans were being prepared. Would we have
invaded Afghanistan if Sept. 11 hadn't happened? Were there any
discussions between future U.S. puppet Hamid Karzai and the Bush
administration before or immediately after 9/11?

Where was Osama bin Laden on 9/11? Afghans told reporters that
bin Laden and his entourage fled Afghanistan for Kashmir on Sept. 10,
yet military officials were saying as late as January that the world's most
wanted man was holed up in the Tora Bora region. Did the U.S. really
know where Osama was on 9/11, and if so, where was he? Why
weren't American commandos inserted into Afghanistan or Pakistan in
order to apprehend him? If the U.S. knew that he had left Afghanistan,
is this why it refused to negotiate with the Taliban for his extradition?

How many civilians died in Afghanistan? Perhaps the most
deliberately underreported story of 2001-2002 was the number of
Afghan civilians killed by American bombs, missiles, mines and bullets.
(Estimates begin at CNN's conservative 3,500.) While the Pentagon's
argument that it is difficult to track these things from satellites and
high-flying planes rings true, there's no doubt that they know more than
they care to admit. We deserve to know how many innocent people our
tax dollars have killed, and how many of their relatives now have reason
to despise America.

Is the government spying on American citizens? Not only is the
federal government asking postal workers and meter readers to report
on anything unusual they see in our homes, anecdotal evidence suggests
that opponents of administration policy are being targeted for wiretaps

• The Truth About Sept. 11 (Cont'd) — Ted Rall, Sun Sep 15 04:35
• George Bush Sr. and 9/11 — David Howard, Sun Sep 15 13:11
• Caspian Sea Oil and Natural Gas Export Routes — Researcher, Mon Sep 16 00:46