| THIS IS A READ-ONLY ARCHIVE FROM THE SORABJI.COM MESSAGE BOARDS (1995-2016). |
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A joint intelligence committee -- formed by House and Senate members -- heard testimony from the lead investigator into the failure by U.S. intelligence and law enforcement to anticipate and prevent the simultaneous hijackings of four planes by skilled terrorists. The committee also heard from two representatives of victims' families. It was the first public meeting of a panel that has been meeting in secret for months. Eleanor Hill, the senior staffer in charge of leading the investigation, detailed a series of warnings that had been noted by intelligence and law enforcement sources that al Qaida and Osama bin Laden had a serious interest in a major attack on American territory. But Hill also noted that the context of much of these warnings didn't necessarily lend itself to specific or immediate action because the sources were not always credible or the reports were vague. "While one could not, as a result (of this context), give too much credence to some individual reports, the totality of this information in this body of reporting clearly reiterated a consistent and critically important theme: Osama bin Laden's intent to launch terrorist attacks inside the United States," Hill told the panel. She also detailed the specific content of some internal intelligence briefings, although the Bush administration has forbidden the panel from releasing the identity of the officials who actually received the briefings, which have since been declassified. "A briefing prepared for senior government officials at the beginning of July 2001 contained the following language," Hill said. "'Based on a review of all-source reporting over the last five months, we believe that (Osama bin Laden) will launch a significant terrorist attack against U.S. and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning.'" On May 17 of this year, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice told a reporter: "I don't think anybody could have predicted these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center ... that they would try and use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile." Hill's investigation on behalf of Congress appears to have found that this wasn't the case, at least not in general terms. "We ... asked the question: Did the intelligence community have any information in its possession prior to Sept. 11, 2001, indicating that terrorists were contemplating using airplanes as a weapon?" she said. "Based upon our review to date of the requested information, we believe that the intelligence committee was aware of the potential for this type of a terrorist attack, but did not produce any specific assessments of the likelihood that terrorists would use airplanes as a weapon." One such indication was an unidentified source, who arrived at the FBI's Newark field office, and told of a plot by al Qaida to hijack a 747 and fly it to Afghanistan. The source claimed to have been trained in hijacking and small arms combat at an Afghan or Pakistani training camp. Upon his return to the U.S., he was told to link up with five or six other plotters. Their instruction was to "use all necessary force to take control of the plane, because there would be pilots among the hijackers." "Although the individual passed an FBI polygraph, the FBI was never able to verify any aspect of his story or identify his contact in the United States," Hill's report says. Despite finding dozens of instances where the U.S. intelligence community failed to "connect the dots" of reports that could have forewarned of an attack, Hill emphatically places the blame for the acts on the terrorists, and the credit for succeeding in the operation on the hatred of the United States and the terrorists' competence, much more than any failure by intelligence or law enforcement agencies. "The (intelligence) community made mistakes prior to Sept. 11 and the problems that led to those mistakes need to be addressed and fixed," she said. "On the other hand, the vengeance and inhumanity that we saw that day were not afterthoughts for Osama bin Laden and others like him. The responsibility for (the attacks) remains squarely on the shoulders of the terrorists who planned and participated in the attacks." Source The last paragraph perfectly reflects my thoughts on this matter. |
Paul Dundes Wolfowitz - Deputy Secretary, Department of Defense Richard Perle - Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy. Ari Fleischer - White House Press Secretary Josh Bolten - Deputy Chief of Staff Ken Melman - White House Political Director Jay Lefkowitz - Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of the Domestic Policy Council David Frum - Speechwriter Brad Blakeman - White House Director of Scheduling Dov Zakheim - Undersecretary of Defense (Controller) I. Lewis Libby - Chief of Staff to the Vice President Adam Goldman - White House Liaison to the Jewish Community Chris Gersten - Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, Administration for Children and Families at HHS Elliott Abrams - Director of the National Security Council's Office for Democracy, Human Rights ( !!! ) and International Operations Mark D. Weinberg - Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Public Affairs Douglas Feith - Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michael Chertoff - Head of the Justice Department's criminal division Daniel Kurtzer - Ambassador to Israel ( !!! ) Cliff Sobel - Ambassador to the Netherlands Stuart Bernstein - Ambassador to Denmark Nancy Brinker - Ambassador to Hungary Frank Lavin - Ambassador to Singapore Ron Weiser - Ambassador to Slovakia Mel Sembler - Ambassador to Italy Martin Silverstein - Ambassador to Uruguay |
I did a lookup on "Group of the Martyr Ebenezer Scrooge" and found a lot of returns. And, well, check Page 15 of this PDF out |
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The problem is not propaganda but the relentless control of the kind of things we think about Brian Eno Sunday August 17, 2003 The Observer When I first visited Russia, in 1986, I made friends with a musician whose father had been Brezhnev's personal doctor. One day we were talking about life during 'the period of stagnation' - the Brezhnev era. 'It must have been strange being so completely immersed in propaganda,' I said. 'Ah, but there is the difference. We knew it was propaganda,' replied Sacha. That is the difference. Russian propaganda was so obvious that most Russians were able to ignore it. They took it for granted that the government operated in its own interests and any message coming from it was probably slanted - and they discounted it. In the West the calculated manipulation of public opinion to serve political and ideological interests is much more covert and therefore much more effective. Its greatest triumph is that we generally don't notice it - or laugh at the notion it even exists. We watch the democratic process taking place - heated debates in which we feel we could have a voice - and think that, because we have 'free' media, it would be hard for the Government to get away with anything very devious without someone calling them on it. It takes something as dramatic as the invasion of Iraq to make us look a bit more closely and ask: 'How did we get here?' How exactly did it come about that, in a world of Aids, global warming, 30-plus active wars, several famines, cloning, genetic engineering, and two billion people in poverty, practically the only thing we all talked about for a year was Iraq and Saddam Hussein? Was it really that big a problem? Or were we somehow manipulated into believing the Iraq issue was important and had to be fixed right now - even though a few months before few had mentioned it, and nothing had changed in the interim. In the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, it now seems clear that the shock of the attacks was exploited in America. According to Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber in their new book Weapons of Mass Deception , it was used to engineer a state of emergency that would justify an invasion of Iraq. Rampton and Stauber expose how news was fabricated and made to seem real. But they also demonstrate how a coalition of the willing - far-Right officials, neo-con think-tanks, insanely pugilistic media commentators and of course well-paid PR companies - worked together to pull off a sensational piece of intellectual dishonesty. Theirs is a study of modern propaganda. What occurs to me in reading their book is that the new American approach to social control is so much more sophisticated and pervasive that it really deserves a new name. It isn't just propaganda any more, it's 'prop-agenda '. It's not so much the control of what we think, but the control of what we think about. When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks'. (What else can the spat between the BBC and Alastair Campbell be but a prime example of this?) With the ground thus prepared, governments are happy if you then 'use the democratic process' to agree or disagree - for, after all, their intention is to mobilise enough headlines and conversation to make the whole thing seem real and urgent. The more emotional the debate, the better. Emotion creates reality, reality demands action. An example of this process is one highlighted by Rampton and Stauber which, more than any other, consolidated public and congressional approval for the 1991 Gulf war. We recall the horrifying stories, incessantly repeated, of babies in Kuwaiti hospitals ripped out of their incubators and left to die while the Iraqis shipped the incubators back to Baghdad - 312 babies, we were told. The story was brought to public attention by Nayirah, a 15-year-old 'nurse' who, it turned out later, was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US and a member of the Kuwaiti royal family. Nayirah had been tutored and rehearsed by the Hill & Knowlton PR agency (which in turn received $14 million from the American government for their work in promoting the war). Her story was entirely discredited within weeks but by then its purpose had been served: it had created an outraged and emotional mindset within America which overwhelmed rational discussion. As we are seeing now, the most recent Gulf war entailed many similar deceits: false linkages made between Saddam, al-Qaeda and 9/11, stories of ready-to-launch weapons that didn't exist, of nuclear programmes never embarked upon. As Rampton and Stauber show, many of these allegations were discredited as they were being made, not least by this newspaper, but nevertheless were retold. Throughout all this, the hired-gun PR companies were busy, preconditioning the emotional landscape. Their marketing talents were particularly useful in the large-scale manipulation of language that the campaign entailed. The Bushites realised, as all ideologues do, that words create realities, and that the right words can over whelm any chance of balanced discussion. Guided by the overtly imperial vision of the Project for a New American Century (whose members now form the core of the American administration), the PR companies helped finesse the language to create an atmosphere of simmering panic where American imperialism would come to seem not only acceptable but right, obvious, inevitable and even somehow kind. Aside from the incessant 'weapons of mass destruction', there were 'regime change' (military invasion), 'pre-emptive defence' (attacking a country that is not attacking you), 'critical regions' (countries we want to control), the 'axis of evil' (countries we want to attack), 'shock and awe' (massive obliteration) and 'the war on terror' (a hold-all excuse for projecting American military force anywhere). Meanwhile, US federal employees and military personnel were told to refer to the invasion as 'a war of liberation' and to the Iraqi paramilitaries as 'death squads', while the reliably sycophantic American TV networks spoke of 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' - just as the Pentagon asked them to - thus consolidating the supposition that Iraqi freedom was the point of the war. Anybody questioning the invasion was 'soft on terror' (liberal) or, in the case of the UN, 'in danger of losing its relevance'. When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it's done so I would recognise when I was being lied to. I hope writers such as Rampton and Stauber and others may have the same effect and help to emasculate the culture of spin and dissembling that is overtaking our political establishments. |
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"Cannistraro: Farouk Hijazi, who was the Iraqi ambassador in Turkey ... known through sources in Afghanistan, members of Osama's entourage let it be known that the meeting had taken place. "Reporter: Iraq's contacts with bin Laden go back some years, to at least 1994, when, according to one U.S. government source, Hijazi met him when bin Laden lived in Sudan. According to Cannistraro, Iraq invited bin Laden to live in Baghdad to be nearer to potential targets of terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. There is a wide gap between bin Laden's fundamentalism and Saddam Hussein's secular dictatorship. But some experts believe bin Laden might be tempted to live in Iraq because of his reported desire to obtain chemical or biological weapons. CIA Director George Tenet referred to that in recent testimony. ..." This from the San Jose Mercury News, Feb. 14, 1999: "U.S. intelligence officials are worried that a burgeoning alliance between terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein could make the fugitive Saudi's loose-knit organization much more dangerous ... In addition, the officials said, Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal is now in Iraq, as is a renowned Palestinian bomb designer, and both could make their expertise available to bin Laden." The report went on to note plans to attack America were made between Hussein and Saddam. Then there's this from Newsweek, Jan. 11, 1999: "U.S. sources say [Saddam] is reaching out to Islamic terrorists, including some who may be linked to Osama bin Laden. [Bin Laden was] calling for all-out war on Americans, using as his main pretext Washington's role in bombing and boycotting Iraq." |
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It's funny how so much overwhelming evidence seems to have been forgotten or deliberately covered up. Dating back less than three years before Sept. 11, 2001, there were hundreds of articles in the press, citing credible sources and intelligence analysts, all showing strong connections between the two U.S. enemies. |
Maybe it dodn't exist in the first place, and the media didn't run with it because there was no proof. Nah. That could never be the case. |