9-11 COMMISSION RAISES MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS
When the Kean Commission--a.k.a. the 9-11 Commission--came to New York City
in May, members of the NY 9-11 TRUTH movement came out to try to make the
bureaucrats squirm. Family members of 9-11 victims--including Ellen
Mariani, the 9-11 widow who has refused to file a claim with the official
compensation fund so that she can sue the federal government for failing to
stop the attack--were on hand at the New School auditorium where the public
hearings were held, periodically holding up signs reading "LIES" during
testimony.
Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani took the opportunity to grandstand about how
his Office of Emergency Management--whose bunker on the 23rd floor of 7
World Trade Center was ironically destroyed on 9-11--rose to the crisis.
The Spring 2003 edition of Lower Manhattan's venerable anarchist sporadical
The Shadow, which hit the streets just after the hearings, ran a story on
the spectacle by Nicolas Levis, "9/11 Truth Movement Calls Out Kean
Commission." Writes Levis:
"Even Giuliani blanched at the obsequiousness... One after the next, the
commissioners took turns praising Giuliani's leadership and lobbing
softballs. When Giuliani for the umpteenth time mentioned how well his
agencies had communicated amongst themselves, the families' section broke
out in chants 'talk about the radios!' They were referring to the
well-known technical failures of the Fire Department's radio system."
One activist was escorted from the premises by security after standing up
to demand the panel investigate whether emergency fuel for Giuliani's
bunker below WTC 7 ignited, causing the building to collapse. Others stood
up to demand answers on why the metal from Ground Zero was shipped straight
to Asian scrappers. But Levis writes: "As soon as the hall had quieted
down, Giuliani and the commission returned to the script, acting as though
nothing had happened. The 'testimony' by former Mayor Giuliani was more of
a testimonial to the Giuliani myth than testimony."
Mainstream coverage was hardly more reassuring, if one took time to read
between the lines. A June 1 report in Newsday, "Details from the disaster,"
portrayed the hearings as shedding light--for instance, on the question of
why no helicopter rescue was attempted of people trapped in the upper
stories of the towers, above the destroyed floors. The article noted that
about a dozen were evacuated from the roof by air following the 1993
bombing. But on 9-11--when there was no other conceivable means out for
those above the flames--the doors to the roof were locked. Officer James
Ciccone of the NYPD Aviation Unit told the Commission: "The heat actually
made it difficult for us to hold the helicopters because it would interfere
with the rotor system." Giuliani told the Commission that he asked Fire
Chief of Department Peter Ganci (who would be killed in the collapse of the
south tower) whether a helicopter rescue was feasible. Said Giuliani: "And
Pete pointed to a big flame that was shooting out of the north tower at the
time. And he said to me, 'My guys can save everybody below the fire. But I
can't put a helicopter above the fire." Yet a photo accompanying the piece
actually shows a police helicopter hovering directly over the smoking north
tower on the morning of 9-11!
If Giuliani got a free ride from the Commission, some observers fear that
the same may be true of Bush and the bin Laden family. In a June 1 New York
Times editorial, Craig Unger, author of "House of Bush, House of Saud: The
Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties,"
writes:
"Americans who think the 9/11 commission is going to answer all the crucial
questions about the terrorist attacks are likely to be sorely
disappointed--especially if they're interested in the secret evacuation of
Saudis by plane that began just after Sept. 11. We knew that 15 out of 19
hijackers were Saudis. We knew that Osama bin Laden, a Saudi, was behind
9/11. Yet we did not conduct a police-style investigation of the departing
Saudis, of whom two dozen were members. of the bin Laden family. That is
not to say that they were complicit in the attacks. Unfortunately, though,
we may never know the real story. The investigative panel has already
concluded that there is 'no credible evidence that any chartered flights of
Saudi Arabian nationals departed the United States before the reopening of
national airspace.' But the real point is that there were still some
restrictions on American airspace when the Saudi flights began.
"In addition, new evidence shows that the evacuation involved more than the
departure of 142 Saudis on six charter flights that the commission is
investigating. According to newly released documents, 160 Saudis left the
United States on 55 flights immediately after 9/11--making a total of about
300 people who left with the apparent approval of the Bush administration,
far more than has been reported before. The records were released by the
Department of Homeland Security in response to a Freedom of Information Act
request filed by Judicial Watch, a conservative, nonpartisan watchdog group
in Washington. The vast majority of the newly disclosed flights were
commercial airline flights, not charters, often carrying just two or three
Saudi passengers. They originated from more than 20 cities, including
Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit and Houston....
"The passengers should have been questioned about any links to Osama bin
Laden, or his financing. We have long known that some faction of the Saudi
elite has helped funnel money to Islamist terrorists -inadvertently at
least. Prince Ahmed bin Salman, who has been accused of being an
intermediary between Al Qaeda and the House of Saud, boarded one of the
evacuation planes in Kentucky. Was he interrogated by the F.B.I. before he
left?"
While Unger himself makes no such claims, his work and that of other
researchers are pointed to by a growing legion of conspiracy theorists who
uphold a paradigm for understanding the 9-11 attacks that they call
"LIHOP." One conspiracy-watch web site, Library of Alexandria, explains it
thusly: "The basic idea is that LIHOP stands for 'Let It Happen On
Purpose.' In essence, we're dealing here with a theory that suggests the
United States federal government -- and very importantly, high level
members of the Bush Administration in particular -- were sufficiently
forewarned about the 9-11-2001 attacks that these attacks could have been
prevented. Furthermore these forewarnings were intentionally ignored, and
allowed to happen, in order to have an attack on the order of Pearl Harbor."
But activists who are obsessed with calling the federal government out on
its apparent 9-11 intelligence lapses should beware of playing into the
very hands of the Bush Administration--which is demanding a yet greater
unleashing of both global and domestic spying powers in the name of
fighting terrorism. The Shadow's front-page story by researcher Frank
Morales, "The CIA Comes Home to Roost," notes that the Joint Terrorism Task
Force Enhancement Act of 2003 (HR 3439), sponsored by Rep. Carolyn Maloney
(D-NY), contains a provision that would allow the deployment of CIA agents
to local police precincts nationwide--an historic change to the 1947
National Security Act which established the CIA and provided that agency
"shall have no police...or internal-security functions." Contacted by
members of the New York activist group Demilitarize the Police, Maloney's
office asserted that the most recent version of the bill "will not include
the CIA detail" to local police departments. Morales, however, writes that
the new language "accomplishes the same goal by sanctioning CIA domestic
operations anyway, only this time at the behest of the FBI."
This is particularly ominous in light of FBI director Robert Mueller's
credo that "there is a continuum between those who would express dissent
and those who would do a terrorist act." (San Jose Mercury News, Oct. 19,
2002)
And the distinction in the new Maloney bill may become entirely academic if
Bush goes ahead with his proposal to merge the FBI and CIA into a single
super-agency--a scheme already taking embryonic form. As a May 10 article
on the website of the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation notes
approvingly:
"The Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection (IAIP) directorate,
the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC), and the Terrorist Screening
Center (TSC) were all established in the wake of 9/11 to help 'connect
dots' and 'take down walls'... In his January 28, 2003, State of the Union
address, President Bush announced the creation of the TTIC as the single
source for the collection and analysis of all terrorism intelligence. The
TTIC began operation in May 2003 and was designed to close seams in the
terrorist threat-related intelligence process and to provide one
organization to gather, assess, and disseminate intelligence information.
The TTIC is an interagency organization that reports directly to the
Director of Central Intelligence. Another recently established initiative
is the TSC, an interagency staff responsible for consolidating,
deconflicting, and dispensing terrorist watch list information garnered
from numerous databases across a variety of agencies. Overseen by the
Director of the FBI, the TSC is also an interagency group that works in
conjunction with the TTIC. In addition, the TTIC, the FBI and CIA
counterterrorism units, and the FBI's National Joint Terrorism Task
Force--but not IAIP--are being collocated in one facility."
For more information...
On the Kean Commission:
See WW3 REPORT #93
On Ellen Mariani
See WW3 REPORT #95
On Giuliani's bunker:
See WW3 REPORT #13
On the FDNY radio snafu:
See WW3 REPORT #51
On the recycling of Ground Zero metal:
See WW 3 REPORT #s:
21
15
On CIA-NYPD connections:
See WW3 REPORT #s:
87,
73,
50
On the Terrorist Threat Integration Center:
(Bill Weinberg)
-------------
Special to WORLD WAR 3 REPORT, June 5, 2004
Reprinting permissible with attribution
WW3Report.com
Current Issue