A Casual Mention of 9/11 by the Chicago Tribune

Unlike the Kennedy assassination, which came as such a stunning shock to the nation, at a time when Americans were far less cynical about their government, at a time when there were three broadcast networks and no Internet where people could collect contemporaneous reporting and then form timelines, like that of Paul Thompson, 9/11 and the surrounding events have been recorded and a simple presentation of what we do know for sure can only lead to the conclusion that those responsible for 9/11 are not all in the borderland of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

There were not just a few warnings. There were hundreds of them. George Tenet was running around with his "hair on fire," asking for special meetings with Condi Rice, which he and Richard Clarke received, yet nothing was done.

Condi Rice is a proven liar when she says no one could have imagined that anyone would use planes as flying bombs. There was already one such plot that was busted up by the Clinton administration, coming from the Pacific. There were also a warning, from the government of Egypt about Al Qaeda wanting to hit the G-8 conference in Genoa in June of 2001 with a plane. She had to have known about that warning since Bush and the American delegation slept on a U.S. naval vessel off the coast of Italy for the duration of the conference, so why could she not imagine such a scenario?

Admittedly some of the statements and ramblings of the 9/11 truth movement are so far out there as to make anyone who doesn't believe the official conspiracy theory seem like a nutcase. That is, exactly, what some of it is designed to do.

You can count on it. Every time there is public doubt emerging about the official story of some big event or the other, there are the 'disinformationists" who put out stories and scenarios that hardly anyone would believe, when the truth is far more simple, but every bit as criminal.

When one studies Thompson's timeline and, the 9/11 Commission report, there are far to many coincidences and too many unanswered questions for the official story to be true. Just ask any ordinary detective on any police force in America how he or she feels about coincidences and unanswered questions, and then consider that there are ennough of both in the 9/11 investigation to choak a goat.

Many people in our government knew that Osama and his merry band of religious nutcases were planning to hit the U.S.. Some took full advantage of that knowledge and not only allowed it to happen, but probably encouraged it with intel provided to Al Qaeda, either through a certain CIA agent whom the French claim visited Osama in his hospital suite, at the American hospital in Dubai in July of 2001, after there was a "presidential finding" on his head or, perhaps, through FBI agents who knew about several of the hijackers, who were residing in the U.S, long before 9/11. That Intel may have included the fact that there were going to be airforce exercises on 9/11/01, so that no one could tell what was real and what was just part of the exercise. There would be confusion all around on such a day.

Of course, the biggest coincidence of all is found in the words of the PNAC document. After having spelled out the Neocon vision of re-making the middle east in great detail, the authors lamented the fact that their goals would take a very long time to acomplish, unless there was some catalysing event, a new Pearl Harbor, for example.

We now know, that there already existed plans for the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq long before 9/11/01. We also know that the very first cabinet meeting was almost completely consumed with the "need for regime change in Iraq. Bush said, OK. just find me a way to do it." Well, someone did just that, with the aid of the ever helpful Osama bin Laden.

Did Bush know? Probably not, in a formal way. No one said to the president or sent a memo stating that there was going to be an attack on the U.S. and that all security would be stood down in order to allow it to happen. Plausible deniability is a concept well known to the Bushes, both 41 and 42. Did he realize what had happened on the morning of the Pet Goat? Probably. He is no where near as stupid as he would have us believe.

Did Cheney know? I believe that he did. As a matter of fact, I believe that that was what he was doing all those months before 9/11/01. He was the man Bush put in charge of counter-terrorism and yet not one meeting was held about that until days before 9/11. Instead, he was busy, I believe, with terrorism.

Is there any other V.P. in history who had his own foreign policy and Intel/National Security staff, rivaling that of the president? And they were in place long before 9/11. Dick Cheney was in no way ignorant of the warnings coming from all over the place, all summer long.

The people of NYC, those in the Pentagon, which were very few, and the people aboard those planes are collateral damage in the Global War on Terror. Without their horrific deaths there would be no war. Almost nothing that has happened since 9/11 would have been possible without it. Not the war, not the whole-sale gutting of the constitution, not the imperial presidency and a rapidly growing police state, not even a second Bush term would have been possible were it not for 9/11 and that other terrorist activity called the anthrax attacks, which goes little mentioned, while it probably made more ordinary people fear for their personal safety than the events of 9/11 did.

Is this administration complicit in the events of 9/11 and the anthrax attacks? I believe that some members of it are. Others who are complicit are far from known household names. They are probably ex-Intel types or rogue Intel and Military people, but there are very few of them...VERY FEW, and some may not have known what the others were doing, until it was too late. There is no way of knowing how many of them are still alive. As I said, they are anonymous and no one, except their family and friends, would care much about their untimely demises, let alone connect their deaths to 9/11.

Will it ever be proven? I believe it just may, this time. Before the Bush/Cheney disaster is over, Americans may have good motives not to just look the other way and pretend that our government is just not capable of such a dastardly act, even though we all know that such dastardly acts have been committed in the past.

by Mark Karlin
Editor and Publisher of Buzz Flash

May 12, 2008

As we take a reprieve from the 2008 elections for a day, we wanted to take note of a Chicago Tribune editorial that repeats the story of how Dick Cheney approved the shooting down of United Flight 93 on 9/11:

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, after planes had crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Vice President Dick Cheney was in the White House bunker and had to make a momentous recommendation to President Bush, who was in flight aboard Air Force One: that Bush authorize the military to shoot down any civilian airliners that might be hijacked and headed for other targets.

Bush concurred—and shortly after, the moment of truth arrived. A military aide approached Cheney: "There is a plane 80 miles out," he said. "There is a fighter in the area. Should we engage?" Cheney had thought through the complex implications of that question, had discussed it with his boss, and didn't hesitate to answer: "Yes." That plane was United Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania before fighter jets could reach it.

The account originally appeared in the Washington Post years ago and came up in other stories about the post 9/11 frenzy, but nothing much was made of it. (Although whether Bush really had any role in the decision remains open to question.) The mainstream media accepted the White House account that United Flight 93 crashed before it was shot down, even though once Cheney gave his approval to shoot it down, it would probably only take a brief time before it was executed.

We're not passing judgment upon whether Flight 93 should have been shot down or not. That is, indeed, a very difficult decision. But BuzzFlash was watching contemporaneous reports come in at the time, and the first wire service stories strongly indicated that it had been shot down based on witnesses in the area and the details that they provided.

It was only later that a heroic narrative emerged that included a line that became part of the standard Bush "American Spirit" of battle theme: "Let's roll."

BuzzFlash can't say conclusively that Flight 93 was shot down, as Cheney had directed, but it certainly looks that way.

We have often taken issue with the 9/11 Truth Movement because it takes the fact that there are many unanswered questions about 9/11 and tries to answer them with often bizarre speculation. 9/11 was not an inside job, but it was something that probably could have been prevented in August of 2001 if Bush and Rice had listened to a CIA warning about Al-Qaeda preparing hijackings in the U.S. But Bush and Rice did nothing -- absolutely nothing -- to put airports on a heightened security alert.

The reality is that the Bush White House covered up much about 9/11, including its own incompetence. How much we don't know. But we do know that -- if you recall -- Bush would only be interviewed by the 9/11 Commission (which was stacked with white-washers) with Cheney at his side, and with no notes or minutes taken, and with their not being sworn in under oath, and with the "interview" occurring in the Oval Office. That sort of scenario does not inspire a great deal of credibility.

The entire reign of manipulated fear that we have been living under since 9/11 goes back to George W. Bush's cavalier indifference (along with Rice's malfeasance) to clear alarms in 2001 about Al-Qaeda coming our way.

We bring this up today because the item about United Flight 93 emerged so casually in a Chicago Tribune May 12th editorial about the need for Vice Presidents who can stand the heat. (Of course, Bush was off in a Florida elementary school classroom for a long time reading "My Pet Goat" and waiting for his handlers, including Cheney and Rove, to tell him what to do.)

Like the JFK assassination, we may never know the truth about the circumstances surrounding 9/11. The shredders have long since done their work.

But the Tribune editorial reminded us that the likelihood that Flight 93 was shot down, given the first reports and the account of Cheney ordering it shot down, is quite high. Any U.S. government, whether Democratic or Republican, would probably not want to admit that it was responsible for blowing a commercial airliner with U.S. citizens aboard out of the sky.

So a heroic narrative was, it appears, crafted to cover up the reality of what happened. At the time, we speculated that Flight 93 may have been headed for the infamous Three-Mile Island nuclear plant, just a short air distance away from where it went down. Or it may have indeed been flying back with terrorist plans to crash the plane into Congress or the White House.

We'll never know.

But on a scale of 1 to 10, BuzzFlash would put it at an 8 likelihood that Flight 93 was indeed downed by an American missile.

This is one decision, probably the only one, that we can't begrudge Dick Cheney. (If the plane had crashed into Three-Mile Island and set off a nuclear reaction, the death toll could have been catastrophic.)

But perhaps from the next president, we can be treated as adults and told the truth.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


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