May 30, 2003
Go Ask Alice
The hearings of the commission mandated to investigate 911 are more like Alice in Wonderland than anything yet to come from this designer fascist state. The hearings are perjury proof, for one thing. The testimony is not sworn. The people being interviewed are not under oath. Okay. Ex-Governor Tom Kean, chairing the commission, said Thursday that "we are finders of fact, not triers of fact." Okay, but if the information is not subject to some sort of rigorous process, it can never rise to the level of fact. Tom Flocco attended the hearings and posted a report at TomFlocco.com.Commissioner and Council of Foreign Relations member Jamie Gorelick told Flocco,"I think we'll be able to determine whether they [witnesses] are telling the truth without swearing them in ... we'll certainly do our best to find out."
In spite of the fact that there was no pressure on anyone to even tell a plausible story, no one cross examining to challenge inconsistencies in the stories, some amazing admissions were made. The official story is so abysmally embarassing for the defense establishment you can only imagine how bad the information is that they are hiding with the absurd cover story.
According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, "Members of the panel said they were stunned that high-level government officials weren't aware of intelligence reports about a possible terrorist attack, especially in light of previous attempts by hijackers overseas to use airplanes as weapons, including a thwarted plot to fly a plane into the Eiffel Tower in Paris... Maj. Gen. Craig McKinley, commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command Continental United States Region, told the panel that the nation's air defense system was not prepared to respond to hijacked domestic flights at that time.'Our mission was at that time, not designed to take internal FAA radar data . . . it was to look outward as a Cold War vestige primarily developed during the Cold War to protect against Soviet long range bomber penetration of our intercept zone.'"
Of course it's a lie. Imagine the head of air defense for the whole country being only prepared to defend against a country that hadn't even existed for a decade. As if the military has never even considered the military challenges of the post-Soviet period. As if they just took a holiday after the fall of the Soviet Union. There is plenty of documentation showing that this is a blatant lie, that the probability of passenger airplanes being used as weapons was a quite familiar idea in intelligence and military circles. Information about it was even available in mainstream press sources. There is no way on earth the head of air defenses for the entire United States was -- as he maintains -- completely unaware of such a possibility.
(For listings of some of that evidence see From the Wilderness and "What did they know and when did they know it?")
Elaborate measures were taken to protect Bush against the explicit threat of Al Qaida using passenger planes as weapons at the G8 summit in Italy in summer 2001. And the story was reported in the mainstream press. Yet the US military wants us to believe that it was still trained exclusively on the Soviet threat.
See more on the hearings from Voice of America . Here are some more items of interest.
Blair is facing a revolt as the US admits there may not have been any WMDs. See the Guardian. The attack on journalists in the Palestine hotel "avoidable" but "not deliberate", a journalism watchdog association says. See Yahoo. A movie made by another one of those "ex-White House insider"s is coming out, designed to create a mythological leader out of Bush portrayed on 911. See the Globe & Mail. "In a Gadda-da-Vida We Trust", Maureen Dowd speculates that the administration may reap a harvest of cynicism from a generation that is now quite squarely in their corner. See the New York Times Trust in media keeps slipping. Now only 36% believe the media get the facts straight, down from 54% in 1989, up from 32% in December 2000, right after the Bush-media coup. Polls showing huge numbers believing Iraq attacked the WTC are enough of an indictment to prove that the media have utterly failed at their job of informing the public on important (life-and-death) matters. And that includes USA Today, that reported the story. Microsoft's online magazine Slate and NPR, have joined forces in what is being called a "win win situation" because both appeal to the same "consumers of news". It has been called the "first programming collaboration NPR has had with a commercial outlet in its 33-year history." However, Exxon has been more than a silent partner when it comes to messages that may be damaging to its interest. See Chicago. A New York Times reporter was forced out in the post-Jayson Blair frenzy at the Times. See CNN. With the purchase of some fantastically expensive technology, public school students in Akron will be fingerprinted for getting lunches now. See Ohio.com. Kucinich is shaping his candidacy as the anti-Bush. I like it! Yeah! See the Sacramento Bee. Thom Hartmann says, It's Easy: To Win an Election, Control the Voting Machines. See Bushwatch. The US' Case for war is now blown apart. See the Independent. According to a study by Amnesty International, the so-called War on Terror makes world worse in many ways. See Alternet. Eloquent and appropriately passionate, see "Bad Weather Over America" in the Boston Globe A Canadian writer thinks Americans are more gullible than Canadians and thinks Bush, who went AWOL in real life, pretending to be a soldier, would have been laughed off the ship. See The Toronto Star And finally, in a recent (ridiculous) poll, Clinton came in as the third best president, after Lincoln and Kennedy. One bad thing. Tied with him was George W (for "war"). George's daddy was only chosen as "the best" by 2 percent of those questioned. See USA Today.