Coleen's Blog - Archived Entry

"Rumsfield, in his testimony on Tuesday, expressed skepticism that killing bin Laden would have done anything to prevent the attacks on September 11th..."
CNN.com March 24, 2004

Hopefully this statement will foil any plans the Bush administration may have had to pull bin Laden out of a cave in the weeks before the presidential election.

How is the Cheney/Bush re-election campaign planning on rigging the election this time? Too little too late, Florida's banned voter purging. Iraq's a bloody quagmire. I believe Cheney will wait until after the throne is secured to start invading another country. That leaves one of the worst possibilities: another terrorist attack in the US. Americans embraced Bush as a competent leader after 9/11 and we trusted his leadership so much, we handed over our civil liberties. Now that he's in the same fix his dad was in twelve years ago, looking down the barrel of a one-term reign, he's got to be planning something.

There is no doubt that Bush benefited from the 9/11 attacks, both in polls and policy. The questions I weigh regarding September 11th 2001 are: Did the Bush administration plan these attacks or did they let them happen? I'm encouraged that a national committee is examining the latter possibility. My pessimism tells me this is a "lessons-learned" review on Bush and CO.'s terms that will result in a scapegoat - probably the FBI will be cited for negligence. My hope however is that the American public will finally see Bush and Co. as the rest of the world does: a wealthy band of corporate crooks who profit off of mass murder. Let's connect the dots between profit, murder and crooks in the White House:

-Halliburton has an estimated 18 billion dollars worth of government contracts in Iraq (that no other company was allowed to bid for) and Cheney, Halliburton's CEO from 1995 until he joined George W. Bush's presidential ticket in 2000, is still receiving paychecks from them.

-"Pentagon auditors in December said that a Halliburton subsidiary, Kellog, Brown and Root....may have overcharged the US by as much as $61 million dollars from last May to the end of December...for the cost of fuel it was importing from Turkey....The fuel contract is now under investigation by the US Justice Department" (Simpson, Glenn. "At Center of Halliburton Uproar, Little Known Kuwaiti Company" The Wall Street Journal, April 14, 2004, pg. 1)

-646 American soldiers have already died and U.N. study calculates that 100,000 Iraqi civilians will die during the coming war, plus 400,000 after the war.

Can similar dirty tactics be connected to September 11th?

The August 6th memo proves that Bush had more than "vague" warnings of the attack. This is not the only warning that circulated Washington. A few months after 9/11 I saw on CNN footage from July 2001 which featured a Congresswoman (Feinstein, Boxer?) stating that there is evidence of a terrorist attack on American soil in the next three months and that plans may include hijacking planes to use as bombs. My greatest wish is to find this clip again (Jon Stewart - help!) and juxtapose it with Rice's claim of "vague evidence" so that folks will have to contend with the fact the Bush had a timeline, method and defined location and failed to act.

Even when the attack was underway, military forces did not act as they should and as they have in the past:

October 25, 1999 – The jet carrying golfer Payne Stewart from Florida to Texas flies off course. Air traffic controllers alert the military, who send F-16s to intercept the flight. Response time: 21 minutes

July 16, 2002 – A group of entertainers from India on a flight to New York become excited at seeing the New York City skyline. Flight attendants alert authorities, and F-16s intercept the flight and escort it to the runway. Response time: 17 minutes

September 11, 2001 - Only after both of the World Trade Center towers had been hit and a third hijacked plane was known to be heading towards Washington DC did the US military dispatch fighter jets to patrol the skies of our Capitol, called in from Langley Air Force base, 130 miles away. The D.C. Air Guard is located at Andrews Air Force Base, less than ten miles from the Pentagon Elapsed time of hijackings: *** 1 hour 42 minutes ***

Personally, I'll never forget seeing the World Trade Center Towers engulfed in flames and minutes later a brown man's face looming on the screen and fingered as the culprit. If the attack was a surprise, how did they have a suspect before the towers even fell? It was certainly jumping to conclusions considering the last terrorist attack in the US was perpetrated by a white boy with US citizenship. Even more curious is that on September 11th, 12 members of the bin Laden family were allowed to charter a jet (when all flight traffic was grounded) and returned to Saudi Arabi before being questioned by the FBI.

How does one reconcile all of these elements without suspecting foul play?

I know it's too much to ask of even the most liberal person to believe that the home of the brave is led by sociopaths who would kill their own people to further their agenda. Maybe it's outrageous to think another terrorist attack will happen in the coming months, but Cheney is already warning us another attack may be coming.

Who knows? Maybe we'll get lucky and the neo-cons will stick to planting evidence or better yet, good ol' fashion mud-slinging.