that the terrorists may not have been "a cohesive group," as one involved official put it, before they started training and working together on this operation. "These guys look like a pickup basketball team," he said.
I'm taking Atta; he looks like he's got ball. Hell, for all we know, the feds may have played them at the local Y at lunchtime. I dee-ed up against a guy once at a Y with fuckin elbows in the paint who definitely fit the bill of terrorist. No blood no foul, he whined. I says to him, Let's take it outside.
George Tenet was made the scapegoat for "not knowing" (although later information will show he knew of plans and had passed them on to Bush's NSC). But Bush's Secretary of State, Colin Powell, decided to rehearse (it seems) the bullshit he would pull on February 3, 2003, before the UN to justify invading Iraq. Hersh again quotes a Justice Department figure who tells him,
"These people are not necessarily all from bin Laden," a Justice Department official told me. "We're still running a lot of stuff out," he said, adding that the F.B.I. has been inundated with leads. On September 23rd [20001], Secretary of State Colin Powell told a television interviewer that "we will put before the world, the American people, a persuasive case" showing that bin Laden was responsible for the attacks. But the widely anticipated white paper could not be published, the Justice Department official said, for lack of hard facts. "There was not enough to make a sale."
Sure, he then had two years to find some smoke to put in the gun, but he was ready to jump the gun, and kill Babylonians in the Cradle of Civilization. Now, ain't that some 'tang.
Supposedly, former NSA head and Congressional liar James Clapper said, "correctly," according to good bud Admiral James Stavridis, being interviewed by conservative online journal Cipher Brief about his new book, 2034, about the end of the world, "that 9/11 was not only a failure of intelligence, it was a failure of imagination. We weren't able to imagine where we were headed." Like Hersh cites above, US officials thought the attacks were "brilliant," and was the Operation that got away -- namely, Northwoods, some conspiracy aficionados say. (I'll bet Allende got a good sniff of the playbook, wot?)
Sometimes all you can do is just shake your head slowly and mosey on along to the Chomsky lecture -- if for no other reason than to say to attended one. I once had beer at the student lounge at MIT. Hey, look at me.
Another film I re-watched, and which had still-significant oomph, was Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911, the title of which is a takeoff of Ray Bradbury's sci-fi novel Fahrenheit 451, the temperature at which Secret Service, FBI and CIA documents began to burn inside WTC 7, or anywhere else -- and nobody could save those documents, up went the valorous flames. Who's to say those docos didn't contain the physics of how that Magic Bullet worked on 11/22/63. (Just snarkin') Of course, like that Bradbury story, in the end, there were only a small group of people left who 'knew' about books and their contents, and who gathered down by the river reciting what was lost -- kind of like some conspiracy theorists I know, chased there by the fearist element and their helicopters. Everybody else just made love in front of their smart TVs, Big Brother, no doubt, gollywobbledoodling all day to the action. Sure, you laugh, but Ed Snowden described such activity in LOVEINT. Is nothing sacred? You get to moon like Tony Perkins through a peephole at my girlfriend in the shower, you mofo?
Fahrenheit 911 is depressingly still relevant. Moore makes points that can't be denied and/or haven't been sufficiently answered. Especially germane is the still unanswered question of why the bin Laden family and other Saudis were allowed to fly out of America a few days after 9/11 without even being interviewed, while ordinary Americans were grounded. As far as Chomsky is concerned, the attack by Saudis, our longstanding allies, is evidence that 9/11 was not an inside job, reasoning that we could just as easily have concocted a story that Iraqi hijackers did da deed. But the US government didn't so concoct. Instead, they protected the Saudis, even to the extent of redacted their suspected involvement, as laid out in the infamous 28 pages of testimony left out of the public release of what happened on 9/11. By all rights, and according to what GW Bush said about 'smoking them out' later, then the Kingdom should have our first stop on the crusade against Terror . We shoulda rocked the Kaaba, some theorists say, rocked the kaaba. But Sunni heaven wasn't our first boots to ground destination for the lads of liberty, notes Chomsky.
What do I think? I dunno. My conspiratorial side says, Sure the f*ckers did it. Why wouldn't they, when they kill others overseas every day and by lethal drugs and poverty and cops and economic insecurity at home. My fearist side says, No way, Jose. We've not yet gone that mad. We would never let the military stage a soft coup in order to lock us down. But I dunno, I'm mostly with Chomsky, not because I'm genius material, but because he looks like a sweet old man who wouldn't lie. And he hasn't been lying for a long time. And also, I like George Carlin. His shtick just before 9/11, "I Kinda Like it When a Lotta People Die, " is relevant. Here he trashes a culture that pretends to be humanistic and exceptional but spends all its time, seemingly, either at war (pretty much non-stop since we dropped the smoking mushroom cloud on that kamikaze culture) or guaranteeing that the mass of men lead miserable lives, debt slaves, with only a stint in the military as a way out of poverty and social pressure. If we were happy, we wouldn't have 425 million guns floating around. We kneejerk to his words -- thay that's awful --because we're thoughtless hypocrites. Thank goodness we have standup comedians to set us straight.
Educate yourself, Chomsky always says. That's the way out of ignorance and manipulation. Or expect more rain. Like that Umbrella Man.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
2
1
