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You're right, Osama hadn't declared it his mission in life (and in all 'good' Muslims') to kill all Americans several years before 9/11.
It's all a ruse. Wag the dog or something.
This war on terrorism is bogus
The 9/11 attacks gave the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure its global domination
Massive attention has now been given - and rightly so - to the reasons why Britain went to war against Iraq. But far too little attention has focused on why the US went to war, and that throws light on British motives too. The conventional explanation is that after the Twin Towers were hit, retaliation against al-Qaida bases in Afghanistan was a natural first step in launching a global war against terrorism. Then, because Saddam Hussein was alleged by the US and UK governments to retain weapons of mass destruction, the war could be extended to Iraq as well. However this theory does not fit all the facts. The truth may be a great deal murkier. We now know that a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana was drawn up for Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), Jeb Bush (George Bush's younger brother) and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The do ent, en led Rebuilding America's Defences, was written in September 2000 by the neoconservative think tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
- Michael Meacher
- The Guardian,
- Saturday September 6 2003
The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says "while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."
The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier do ent attributed to Wolfowitz and Libby which said the US must "discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role". It refers to key allies such as the UK as "the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership". It describes peacekeeping missions as "demanding American political leadership rather than that of the UN". It says "even should Saddam pass from the scene", US bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently... as "Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has". It spotlights China for "regime change", saying "it is time to increase the presence of American forces in SE Asia".
The do ent also calls for the creation of "US space forces" to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent "enemies" using the internet against the US. It also hints that the US may consider developing biological weapons "that can target specific genotypes [and] may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool".
Finally - written a year before 9/11 - it pinpoints North Korea, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes, and says their existence justifies the creation of a "worldwide command and control system". This is a blueprint for US world domination. But before it is dismissed as an agenda for rightwing fantasists, it is clear it provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis. This can be seen in several ways.
First, it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11. It is known that at least 11 countries provided advance warning to the US of the 9/11 attacks. Two senior Mossad experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation (Daily Telegraph, September 16 2001). The list they provided included the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested.
It had been known as early as 1996 that there were plans to hit Washington targets with aeroplanes. Then in 1999 a US national intelligence council report noted that "al-Qaida suicide bombers could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House".
Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their visas in Saudi Arabia. Michael Springman, the former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, has stated that since 1987 the CIA had been illicitly issuing visas to unqualified applicants from the Middle East and bringing them to the US for training in terrorism for the Afghan war in collaboration with Bin Laden (BBC, November 6 2001). It seems this operation continued after the Afghan war for other purposes. It is also reported that five of the hijackers received training at secure US military installations in the 1990s (Newsweek, September 15 2001).
Instructive leads prior to 9/11 were not followed up. French Moroccan flight student Zacarias Moussaoui (now thought to be the 20th hijacker) was arrested in August 2001 after an instructor reported he showed a su ious interest in learning how to steer large airliners. When US agents learned from French intelligence he had radical Islamist ties, they sought a warrant to search his computer, which contained clues to the September 11 mission (Times, November 3 2001). But they were turned down by the FBI. One agent wrote, a month before 9/11, that Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers (Newsweek, May 20 2002).
All of this makes it all the more astonishing - on the war on terrorism perspective - that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself. The first hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from the US Andrews airforce base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not? There were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9/11. Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase su ious aircraft (AP, August 13 2002). It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate.
Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority? The former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has said: "The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defence of incompetence."
Nor is the US response after 9/11 any better. No serious attempt has ever been made to catch Bin Laden. In late September and early October 2001, leaders of Pakistan's two Islamist parties negotiated Bin Laden's extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for 9/11. However, a US official said, significantly, that "casting our objectives too narrowly" risked "a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr Bin Laden was captured". The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that "the goal has never been to get Bin Laden" (AP, April 5 2002). The whistleblowing FBI agent Robert Wright told ABC News (December 19 2002) that FBI headquarters wanted no arrests. And in November 2001 the US airforce complained it had had al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to attack because they did not receive permission quickly enough (Time Magazine, May 13 2002). None of this assembled evidence, all of which comes from sources already in the public domain, is compatible with the idea of a real, determined war on terrorism.
The catalogue of evidence does, however, fall into place when set against the PNAC blueprint. From this it seems that the so-called "war on terrorism" is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives. Indeed Tony Blair himself hinted at this when he said to the Commons liaison committee: "To be truthful about it, there was no way we could have got the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened on September 11" (Times, July 17 2002). Similarly Rumsfeld was so determined to obtain a rationale for an attack on Iraq that on 10 separate occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to 9/11; the CIA repeatedly came back empty-handed (Time Magazine, May 13 2002).
In fact, 9/11 offered an extremely convenient pretext to put the PNAC plan into action. The evidence again is quite clear that plans for military action against Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before 9/11. A report prepared for the US government from the Baker Ins ute of Public Policy stated in April 2001 that "the US remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma. Iraq remains a destabilising influence to... the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East". Submitted to Vice-President Cheney's energy task group, the report recommended that because this was an unacceptable risk to the US, "military intervention" was necessary (Sunday Herald, October 6 2002).
Similar evidence exists in regard to Afghanistan. The BBC reported (September 18 2001) that Niaz Niak, a former Pakistan foreign secretary, was told by senior American officials at a meeting in Berlin in mid-July 2001 that "military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October". Until July 2001 the US government saw the Taliban regime as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of hydrocarbon pipelines from the oil and gas fields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. But, confronted with the Taliban's refusal to accept US conditions, the US representatives told them "either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs" (Inter Press Service, November 15 2001).
Given this background, it is not surprising that some have seen the US failure to avert the 9/11 attacks as creating an invaluable pretext for attacking Afghanistan in a war that had clearly already been well planned in advance. There is a possible precedent for this. The US national archives reveal that President Roosevelt used exactly this approach in relation to Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. Some advance warning of the attacks was received, but the information never reached the US fleet. The ensuing national outrage persuaded a reluctant US public to join the second world war.
Similarly the PNAC blueprint of September 2000 states that the process of transforming the US into "tomorrow's dominant force" is likely to be a long one in the absence of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor". The 9/11 attacks allowed the US to press the "go" button for a strategy in accordance with the PNAC agenda which it would otherwise have been politically impossible to implement.
The overriding motivation for this political smokescreen is that the US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies. By 2010 the Muslim world will control as much as 60% of the world's oil production and, even more importantly, 95% of remaining global oil export capacity. As demand is increasing, so supply is decreasing, continually since the 1960s.
This is leading to increasing dependence on foreign oil supplies for both the US and the UK. The US, which in 1990 produced domestically 57% of its total energy demand, is predicted to produce only 39% of its needs by 2010. A DTI minister has admitted that the UK could be facing "severe" gas shortages by 2005. The UK government has confirmed that 70% of our electricity will come from gas by 2020, and 90% of that will be imported. In that context it should be noted that Iraq has 110 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves in addition to its oil.
A report from the commission on America's national interests in July 2000 noted that the most promising new source of world supplies was the Caspian region, and this would relieve US dependence on Saudi Arabia. To diversify supply routes from the Caspian, one pipeline would run westward via Azerbaijan and Georgia to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Another would extend eastwards through Afghanistan and Pakistan and terminate near the Indian border. This would rescue Enron's beleaguered power plant at Dabhol on India's west coast, in which Enron had sunk $3bn investment and whose economic survival was dependent on access to cheap gas.
Nor has the UK been disinterested in this scramble for the remaining world supplies of hydrocarbons, and this may partly explain British participation in US military actions. Lord Browne, chief executive of BP, warned Washington not to carve up Iraq for its own oil companies in the aftermath of war (Guardian, October 30 2002). And when a British foreign minister met Gadaffi in his desert tent in August 2002, it was said that "the UK does not want to lose out to other European nations already jostling for advantage when it comes to potentially lucrative oil contracts" with Libya (BBC Online, August 10 2002).
The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the "global war on terrorism" has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project. Is collusion in this myth and junior participation in this project really a proper aspiration for British foreign policy? If there was ever need to justify a more objective British stance, driven by our own independent goals, this whole depressing saga surely provides all the evidence needed for a radical change of course.
· Michael Meacher MP was environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003
[email protected]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2003/sep/06/september11.iraq
- guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
==================
I expect the PNAC crowd are fully capable of putting a bullet through Obama if he tries to withdraw from Iraq.
SA, Koweit, Iraq occupied so far, Iran is clearly next on the menu.
Islamofascism? GMAFB
Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan are all nothing but hydrocarbon grabs to enrich the US/UK energy companies, no matter what the price is. The higher the price, the better for the $Bs/quarter in profits for the oilcos.
You're right, Osama hadn't declared it his mission in life (and in all 'good' Muslims') to kill all Americans several years before 9/11.
It's all a ruse. Wag the dog or something.
I got some "LOOSE CHANGE" for yout too, get the out of here with that conspiracy bull .
the article makes much more sense than your responses.
keep trying.
The neo- s/PNAC wanted Iraq and Iran in 90s, and totally ignored terrorists Jan-Sep 01.
9/11, a pinprick on the American economy, was the welcome pretext for head to start his bogus wars and open-ended occupations.
the war on terror is totally bogus.
Here you go - ... read this.
MP Michael Meacher's crackpot conspiracy theories
Michael Meacher, British Member of Parliament, and until recently environment minister in Tony Blair's government, added a lot of credibility to conspiracy theories about the 9/11-01 terrorist attacks on the USA, more than hinting that the Bush government and the neocons deliberately allowed these attacks to happen as an excuse for starting a global war on terror, in reality just a grab for oil.
Over a few days, I posted a number of detailed rebuttals and debunkings of Michael Meacher's absurd, monstrous and factually dishonest claims.
This is a collection of my blog postings on the subject, in chronological order from first to last.
British MP pushes conspiracy theory over 9/11
Michael Meacher, who was environment minister in the UK until June this year, and is a member of the parliament for Labour, is arguing that the US government allowed al-Qaeda to murder 3000+ of its citizens to provide the evil neo-conservatives with the excuse to wage war for oil.
Meacher seems to be a frequent reader of conspiracy web pages, and he pushes a lot of the typical nonsense that have been pushed by conspiracy theorists for decades, and which has been debunked many times.
Given this background, it is not surprising that some have seen the US failure to avert the 9/11 attacks as creating an invaluable pretext for attacking Afghanistan in a war that had clearly already been well planned in advance. There is a possible precedent for this. The US national archives reveal that President Roosevelt used exactly this approach in relation to Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. Some advance warning of the attacks was received, but the information never reached the US fleet. The ensuing national outrage persuaded a reluctant US public to join the second world war. Similarly the PNAC blueprint of September 2000 states that the process of transforming the US into "tomorrow's dominant force" is likely to be a long one in the absence of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor". The 9/11 attacks allowed the US to press the "go" button for a strategy in accordance with the PNAC agenda which it would otherwise have been politically impossible to implement.
The claim that Roosevelt knew about Pearl Harbour in advance is a common theme of conspiracy theories, but is not supported by evidence and certainly not accepted by well-renowed historians. The same claim has been made about Churchill, and is debunked e.g. here.
Conspiracy theoriests, and that include Islamists as well as neo-nazis, often make the comparison between Pearl Harbour and 9/11 using very similar arguments.
Meacher draws a lot of anger already, but I expect a lot more will be hurled his way when the Americans wake up this morning. He uses a lot of quotations that only seemingly support his cause, and some appear to be taken out of context. I'll be back with more.
Update: a detailed debunking of the fighter plane claim here.
Update 2: more detailed debunking, showing Meacher's dishonesty and misquotations, as well as his weasel-worded backtracking, here.
Update 3: So where did Michael Meacher get his wacky conspiracy theories from? Look here.
9/11 conspiracy theories debunked
Here is an essential page with an index of articles debunking various versions of the 9/11 conspiracy theories that float around.
Spinsanity's oil conspiracy redux should be compulsive reading for MP turned conspiracy nut Michael Meacher.
9/11 conspiracy: why were no fighters scrambled
A lot of conspiracy theorists have argued that no fighters were scrambled to intercept the hijacked airliners on 9/11-01. In fact, fighters were dispatched, but too late to reach any of the planes. Michael Meacher is at least reasonably well updated on these facts, so to build a case he begins with a very deceptive presentation of the facts.
All of this makes it all the more astonishing - on the war on terrorism perspective - that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself. The first hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from the US Andrews airforce base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not? There were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9/11. Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase su ious aircraft (AP, August 13 2002). It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate.
Note how Meacher concentrates on a single airport, and only on the plane that hit Pentagon outside Washington DC. A casual reader will be given the impression that no fighters were scrambled anywhere, which is false. If you look at this timeline of the events on that fateful day, you can easily see how his above presentation is deceptive.
It is true that NORAD was warned about the hijacking of the flights that hit the World Trade Center, both taking off from Boston, long before dispatching aircraft near Washington DC. But that is beside the point, as at that time there was no known threat to the capital area, only to New York.
--8:38 a.m.: Boston air traffic center notifies NORAD that American Airlines flight 11 has been hijacked.
--8:43 a.m.: FAA notifies NORAD that United Airlines flight 175 has been hijacked.
--8:44 a.m.: Otis Air National Guard Base in Mass. orders to fighters scrambled.
--8:46 a.m.: American Airlines flight 11 strikes the World Trade Center's north tower.
At this time, flight 77 has just left Dulles in DC (8:22), and is probably not yet hijacked. So why should craft then have been dispatched around Washington DC? That happens some time later.
--9:25 a.m.: FAA notifies NORAD that United flight 77 may have been hijacked.
--9:27 a.m.: (approximate time) NORAD orders jets scrambled from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia to head to intercept United Airlines flight 77.
--9:35 a.m.: Three F-16 Fighting Falcons take off from Langley AFB headed toward Washington area.
--9:37 a.m.: American Airlines flight 77 is lost from radar screens.
--9:38 a.m.: American Airlines flight 77 strikes the Pentagon.
As we can see, there was too short a warning to intercept the flight that hit the Pentagon. Ten minutes after the plane hit the building, F16s were in place over the capital. At this time, nobody knew how many hijacked planes were in the air.
Indeed, in his deceptive account Meacher trusts the reader to be unaware of the exact timeline, and he makes it sound like there was a several hour delay from a plane was hijacked until any fighters were even scrambled. Meacher is also inaccurate with his times.
Based on this deceptive presentation, he starts speculating:
Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority?
As we have seen, it was not a particularly long delay from NORAD was notified until fighters were in the air. As we all know, unfortunately there was little chance of intercepting the hijacked planes (and if fighters did intercept, the only option would have been to shoot the commercial airliners down, a very uncomfortable idea indeed, and no doubt one that conspiracy nuts would have a field day with).
Meacher jumps from his own distortions into atrocious speculations. Is he seriously arguing that people at air traffic centers, NORAD itself, members of the air force have been ordered by top members of the Bush adminstration to "step down" the defences? Is he further thinking that after 3000+ of their countrymen are brutally murdered, the hundreds of people, dedicated to their jobs and their country, would keep mum about the worst and most murderous conspiracy ever on American soil, and all for the sake of oil contracts and a pipeline?
There is a saying, two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead. Grand conspiracy theories all rely on potentially dangerous information being kept hidden by hundreds of people, few of whom would have any personal interest in keeping the facts hidden in the first place.
'Loony tunes'
The Telegraph has an opinion piece poking some well-deserved fun at Michael Meacher's accusations that the US government let 9/11 happen to launch a phony war on terror:
The gist of Mr Meacher's conclusion is that the US government was prepared to see thousands of its citizens murdered to provide a convenient excuse for a series of conquering wars. This is a most novel theory. We look forward to more articles by him: "Aliens: why they choose to live among us" or "The cabal of jealous starlets who killed Marilyn Monroe" and "The coded Confederate message in the Gettysburg Address."
We are holding our breaths.
Btw, unfortunately the polician who now lends his credibility to these crazy conspiracy theories is a well-respected ex-minister with a long career in Labour.
Meacher: I am just asking questions
The British MP Michael Meacher appears to be backing down a bit from his fantastic allegations. In this ITV interview with Andrew Harvey, he says he is just asking questions.
AH: You do quote that, you suggest that the American forces stood by while that attack took place.
MM: I did not say that, it is absolutely not my view.
AH: Well, as this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding or being ignorant of the evidence?
MM: I ask questions. I literally do not know the answers to all of these matters and my view is we need much further investigation, we need a new Congressional investigation that is much more thorough than the last one. There are legitimate issues that I don't purport to answer.
That is not a very accurate description of what he did in his letter. His questions are more of the type "have you stopped beating your wife," a fallacy known as complex question. In the original Guardian letter, he makes a number of claims that are not correct, and based on these claims he asks what he calls 'just questions.'
Here are a number of Meacher's unproven and false assertions:
The US had been planning an attack in Afghanistan at that time before 9/11, something which would only be possible if there was specific foreknowledge of the attacks.
I am sure there exists operational plans for an attack on virtually any place on the planet somewhere in the Pentagon. Geopolitical situations can change virtually overnight, so I expect no less. The US had already, under Clinton, launched missile strikes on Afghanistan, so obviously it was in its sights.
But what Meacher claims, is that specific plans and intentions for a September attack on Afghanistan existed before 9/11. He has, by his own admission, relied on various Internet pages to "research" the issue, and he repeats allegations which have been long debunked, that the US had given the Taliban an ultimatum to accept a pipeline through their country or else. The sources he relies on are, to put it mildly, not very credible.
That no fighter planes were scrambled on 9/11
I have debunked that assertion solidly here. While he is somewhat truthful with facts (if deceptive by omission) in his Guardian letter, in the ITV interview he is outright lying:
Why were no planes on the day itself put into the air for an hour and a half after the Pentagon knew that a hijack had taken place, when there is a routine intercept procedure which is always operated when an airliner goes off course? It had operated 67 times in the last year. On this particular day it did not operate. Why?
As we have seen, fighter planes were scrambled, immediately after NORAD was made aware of the hijackings, but it was too late to intercept the airliners. The Guardian letter shows that Meacher is somewhat aware of the actual facts, yet choose to use deceptive wording to mislead his audience (this is evident in other news sources' interpretation of his article, where they say no fighters whatsoever was scrambled before the Pentagon was hit, a direct lie).
If Meacher wants to implicate NORAD in the massive neocon conspiracy, he should perhaps be aware that the person in actual command of NORAD's Cheyenne Mountain HQ on 9/11-01 was Canadian Brig. Gen. Jim Hunter. But I am sure Meacher can implicate Canada in the big bad conspiracy, too.
That the US didn't want to kill Bin Laden
By very disingenious use of selective quotations, Meacher makes it look like the US did not want to capture Bin Laden. That is a rather absurd proposition. If you look beyond the short quotations he shares with his readers, you will see that rather than being an indication that the US did not want Bin Laden dead or alive, it shows the US commanders in the war on terror realised that they needed to do more than capture one man. Here is one example of Meacher's dishonesty:
The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that "the goal has never been to get Bin Laden" (AP, April 5 2002).
Now, here is the q & a session with General Myers in context, and we can see how deceptive and dishonest MP Meacher is:
Hunt: The Big Question for General Myers: One embarrassment for the U.S. has been that, in almost seven months after 9/11, we still haven't captured Osama bin Laden. With the apprehension this week of one of his top lieutenants, have we gotten enough information to be any closer to maybe finally getting bin Laden?
Myers: Well, if you remember, if we go back to the beginning of this segment, the goal has never been to get bin Laden. Obviously, that's desirable.
Interesting, I just read a piece by some analysts that said you may not want to go after the top people in these organizations. You may have more effect by going after the middlemen, because they're harder to replace. I don't know if that's true, or not, and clearly we would like to eventually get bin Laden.
But I think the fact that we've been able to disrupt operations, get a lot of the people just under him and maybe just a little bit further down, has had some impact on their operations. We know have disrupted, you know, four, five, six, seven active operations that they had planned and probably more that we don't know about.
So we're going to keep the hunt on. Finding one person, as we've talked about before, is a very difficult prospect, but we will keep trying.
Obviously, Myers is not supporting Meacher's crazy conspiracy idea, he is simply pointing out that the war on terror has a much broader scope than catching one man. Note that Meacher conveniently left out Gen. Myers folliowing sentence.
Conspiracy-nut Michael Meacher's probable source
I have good reasons to believe that this opinion piece in Toronto Star, by columnist Michele Landsberg, reveals who is the primary source of Michael Meacher's (picture) conspiracy theories as presented in the infamous letter in the Guardian. It is an interview and profile of environmentalist and veteran journalist Barrie Zwicker, who asks some of the same stupid loaded "questions" as Meacher.
For example, after seeing some propaganda video by the conspiracy theorist Zwicker, Landsberg asks this rhetorical question:
Why did the United States Air Force fail to scramble interceptor jets — in defiance of all long-standing rules and well-established practice — for almost two hours after it was known that an unprecedented four planes had been hijacked? [...]
Why did the two squadrons of fighter jets at Andrews Air Force base, 19 kilometres from Washington, not zoom into action to defend the White House, one of their primary tasks?
Do you recognize the argument? Meacher also had this obsession with Andrews Air Force base, and by asking rhetorical questions about this base only he made the impression no fighters were scrambled. Fellow blogger Flit debunked the Toronto Star article back in May.
As we have seen earlier, a fact easily available from a number of sources, fighters were scrambled, from Langley, not Andrews, immediately after flight 77 was reported hijacked, and those F-16s formed a combat air patrol (CAP) over the capital right after flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. Also, contrary to these conspiracy theorists' assertions, earlier the same day, fighters had been scrambled in the NY area in response to the hijackings there.
Flit explains why it's nonsensical to focus on Andrews:
The units at Andrews are actually the F-16s of 113 Wing, D.C. Air National Guard, a formation of part-time pilots obviously not at a high level of operational readiness. The interceptor units protecting Washington are at Langley AFB, which as noted above, fully participated in the D.C. defense on Sept. 11.
The conspiracy nuts have failed to do the most basic fact checking before starting to ask their loaded "questions."
Michael Meacher was, as you may remember, environment minister in Britain until quite recently. He is known for his "skepticism" to GM, among other things. The conspiracy nut Zwicker is also an environmentalist, which may explain why the British MP knew about his ideas and believed in them.
PS: Some more background and reactions on Michael Meacher here.
War for oil? Phooey!
You could no doubt build a case that US interests in the Gulf states, including Iraq, is closely related to its dependence on oil supplies. I doubt the west would care more about the Middle East than, say, Africa south of Sahara, if the region wasn't home to the largest oil reserves on Earth. That's economic reality for you.
Yet, radical leftists have a need to see oil everywhere. Even when the US, immediately after 9/11-01 launched a war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, many leftists desperately tried to spin some oil connection into it. Problem is, there is no oil in Afghanistan. The country is sadly lacking in resources that would interest the rest of the world, perhaps excepting opium.
That did not stop the conspiracy theorists. The reason for the war, they argue, is that that US wanted a gas pipeline through Afghanistan. The Taliban supposedly refused, so the CIA or the Neocons or the Illuminati or all three staged the terror attacks on WTC and Pentagon, and started a massive military operation to make it possible for Unocal to build a $3bn gas pipeline (the truly ignorant say "oil pipeline") from Turkmenistan to Pakistan.
Does that sound stupid enough?
Luckily, if you again meet anyone ignorant and crazy enough to believe this, you can merely point them to Ken Silverstein's brilliant debunking of the whole concept.
Thanks to Dave for finding this article for me again.
The Guardian debunks Michael Meacher on 9/11
I am pleasantly surprised to see that the Guardian, who printed MP Meacher's infamous conspiracy letter, has given David Aaronovitch the job to write a throrough trashing approproately led Has Meacher completely lost the plot?
He goes over quite a bit of the ground already covered in this blog and elsewhere, and shows exactly where Meacher got his "facts" wrong. Absolutely brilliant. One could be tempted to believe Aaronovitch reads Secular Blasphemy (j/k).
I didn't find a link to this article on the front page, though. Perhaps later.
Or you can read this one, from the same paper that pubished his article
David AaronovitchHas Meacher completely lost the plot?
The Guardian, Tuesday September 9 2003 Article history · Contact us Contact usClose Contact the Politics editor
[email protected] Report errors or inaccuracies: [email protected] Letters for publication should be sent to: [email protected] If you need help using the site: [email protected] Call the main Guardian and Observer switchboard:
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Advertising guide License/buy our content About this articleClose This article appeared in the Guardian on Tuesday September 09 2003 on p5 of the Comment & features section. It was last updated at 02:29 on September 09 2003. "In a startling allegation," the Hindu of India told its many readers last Saturday, "a former British minister has said the US may have deliberately allowed the events of September 11 2001, so that it could have a pretext to attack Afghanistan and Iraq." The wires ran the story from Wellington to San Francisco. It was an "incredible piece", one happy blogger chortled, showing that conspiracy theories have "finally hit (the) mainstream media". In this case the "mainstream" was us here at the Guardian.
Made into a rough chronology of cause and effect, the argument from Michael Meacher, the minister in question, went like this:
1. The Americans (and the Brits, but not, it seems, the French or the Germans) are running out of oil and gas, and the Muslims have got lots.
2. A few years back, some neocons devised a plan to get their hands on the oil, etc, so as to be able to dominate the world.
3. Trouble was, they couldn't go ahead with the plan unless public opinion was mobilised, as it was at Pearl Harbor in 1941. Which, by the way, President Roosevelt knew all about, but decided not to stop so that he could have a war.
4. Subsequently, the Bush administration and its agencies did "little or nothing" to stop the plotters of 9/11 and - when their operation was under way - little or nothing to bring it to a halt.
5. After September 11, the Bu es forgot all about terrorism and Bin Laden and concentrated on invading places that had oil and gas.
6. So, "the 'global war on terrorism' has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for... the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies."
The oil and PNAC arguments in points one and two are so complex and recondite that I'll begin at about point three, in which the US may create a pretext for attacks. "There is a possible precedent for this," says Meacher, "The US national archives reveal that President Roosevelt used exactly this approach in relation to Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. Some advance warning of the attacks was received, but the information never reached the US fleet."
US national archives "reveal" no such thing. Or rather, they reveal it to a select few people, but not to most historians. This may not be the place to talk about Japanese signals received in 1940/41 and not successfully decoded until 1946, but to state as fact that the President of the US (and former under-secretary of the navy) connived at an attack that sunk a large proportion of his own Pacific fleet, is to go well beyond the known facts. Which is where M cheerfully went.
However, armed with this non-precedent, Meacher then argues that "the 9/11 attacks allowed the US to press the 'go' button... which it would otherwise have been politically impossible to implement".
But how to organise the necessary casus belli? "First, it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11." And then, says Meacher, it was "astonishing that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself". He goes on, "The first hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from the US Andrews airforce base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not?"
Unfortunately, this is all rubbish. Six minutes after the notification of the first hijacking, at 8.44am, fighters were ordered to be scrambled from Otis Base in Massachusetts. Two minutes later the first plane struck the World Trade Center. Another 16 minutes on, the second plane struck. Twenty-three minutes on and the third plane was notified as having been hijacked en route from Dulles airport. Another two minutes later fighters were scrambled from Langley (not Andrews), but arrived over Washington two minutes after Flight 77 struck the Pentagon. Nor was this lateness unprecedented. A year earlier F16s had failed to intercept a Cessna light aircraft that deviated from course, and buzzed the White House.
But watch Meacher build. It's a classic of its kind. "Was this inaction," he asks, "simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority?"
This is conspiracy 101. Say something is a fact which isn't. Then ask questions, rising up through incompetence, gradually to mal-intention, and then - abruptly - demand who might be behind it all. Cui Bono, my dear friends?
After the hijackings came the war that wasn't. "No serious attempt," charged Meacher, "has ever been made to catch Bin Laden." And he adds that, "The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that 'the goal has never been to get Bin Laden' ".
The following is from the press conference where that quote originated. General Myers is taxed with the embarrassing fact of Bin Laden being still extant. He makes Meacher's quote and then continues:
"Obviously that (the capture of BL) is desirable... the fact that we've been able to disrupt operations, get a lot of the people just under him and maybe just a little bit further down, has had some impact on their operations... So we're going to keep the hunt on. Finding one person, as we've talked about before, is a very difficult prospect, but we will keep trying."
Do you think that Meacher gives an adequate account of Myers' words here? And don't you seem to recall, over the past two years, an awful lot of chasing around the Tora Bora and through Pakistan, shoot-outs in various cities and captures of senior Bin Laden aides? Or is that all just some cunning smokescreen, to obscure the serious folk getting on with laying pipelines?
Questioned on ITN on Saturday Meacher denied that he was a conspiracy theorist, citing the "I'm only raising questions" defence. His information, he said, "comes from the collection of data that I have been doing meticulously. It comes from websites across the world."
The ones that suggest that the American agencies wanted an attack, so deliberately ignored the activities of terrorists in the US, and stood down their own air defences, in order to allow the worst terrorist atrocity in history to take place - all to secure oil and gas supplies. This act of treachery was accomplished with the complicity of military people, politicians and civil servants of all ranks, some of whose family members were on the planes and in the buildings.
I grant that Iraq has made us all a little mad. On either side of the argument many of us struggle to maintain our composure. Even so, I do not know what is more depressing: that a former long-serving minister should repeat this bizarre nonsense without checking it; that, yesterday, twice as many readers should be published supporting this garbage as those criticising it; or that one letter should claim that Meacher has simply said what "many have always known". Ugh! To give credibility to this stuff is bad enough, to "know" it is truly scary.
Look at me I can google and find stuff that suits my argument, yay me!!
Poor boutons, grasping at straws. Begging for help and pining
for others to join his cause. I am waiting for him to post a
link to a Terrorist website as proof his theories.
Look at all the threads from boutons today. Looks like someone spilled some water on the boutons bot today, it's going haywire.
I'm beginning to think the only good for loose change is to fire it at a liberal from a 10 guage shotgun!
He probably would but tin foil Dan beats him to it.
aggie and clanny dumping their ad-hominem in a thread because they have nothing to say after being owned by dubya and company for 7 years.
naive, ignorant sheeple, GFY
In regards to the Pearl Harbor statement from PNAC, Zbigniew Brzezinski made similar statements in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard. That book is about Brzk.’s opinion that the key to sufficiently controlling the world is controlling Eurasia, and the key to controlling Eurasia is controlling Central Asia. He gives a strategy about how the U.S. should and can prevent any rivals in the region like Iran, China or Russia from gaining an influential role in the region greater than the U.S.’s. But in his view, the problem is that the U.S. is democratic, and democratic societies basically don’t have the stomach to build and sustain global dominance, unless there is large external threat that threatens everybody’s well being – then they are willing to pay the price.
The at ude of the American public toward the external projection of American power has been much more ambivalent. The public supported America's engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
(TGC, pg. 24-25)
It is also a fact that America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America's power, especially its capacity for military intimidation. Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public's sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties, even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.
(TGC, pg. 35)
Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the cir stance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.
(TGC, pg. 211)
Brzk. is critic of the Iraq war, so I guess that move didn’t fit in with his strategy. Anyway, the point is that it’s hard to see any of these people shedding tears on 9/11 considering that it was exactly the kind of event that they needed to put their plans to work. And that’s the interesting part: there was a big split over Iraq in the foreign policy establishment, but before 9/11 both sides talked about a large external threat being necessary to unite the citizenry in support of their different plans. That doesn’t mean that it was an inside job, but even if the official story is 100% accurate that still means that much of the establishment got exactly what they were waiting for on that day, and that’s bad enough. And again, it’s not just the neo-cons; there are plenty of reports from the CFR by people who were against the Iraq invasion but generally agree with Brzk.’s views (basically that they need to run the world), but the neo-cons were the group that was in power at the time of the required Pearl Harbor style attack, so they got to implement their plan.
We'll see what happens if the people more in line with Brzk. get into power. Brzk. has allied himself with Obama, so we may get to see him make some more moves on the grand chessboard - and that's the only kind of change that you can count on.
You must really, really hate yourself for being an American.
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