http://www.antiwar.com/orig/wokusch.php?articleid=3553
Following the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the ensuing
cover-up,
President Roosevelt's chief of staff reportedly told other
officers,
"Gentlemen,
this goes to the grave with us."
The parallels with
9/11 are stunning.
------------ article follows:
Infamy: Pearl
Harbor, 9/11 and the Coming Outrage
by Heather Wokusch
Three years after 9/11, we still have no real clarity about
"whodunit" – and if history is any indication, it could be decades
before the truth is finally revealed.
But the Armageddon dreams of our nation's leaders mandate a more
urgent timeframe.
Were 19 hijackers armed with box cutters really responsible for the
WTC/Pentagon carnage? Seems increasingly implausible, as does the
administration's claim of no prior knowledge. Remember
Bush's
comment about watching the first airplane hit the WTC before the
second airplane even made impact? What video feed does he have
anyway? The rest of us sure didn't see that live on our TVs.
As sick as it seems, it wouldn't be the first time a U.S.
administration has furthered its own political ambitions through
attacks on American citizens.
Take Pearl Harbor. The official story (long ago discredited, yet
still touted in Hollywood B-movies) was that Japanese forces caught
the U.S. totally off guard when they brutally attacked on Dec. 7,
1941.
It was probably a lie. Many historians believe that members of
Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration actually knew about the
impending assault, and just let the carnage roll in order to get the
U.S. public primed for war with Japan.
In his 1982 book
Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath, Pulitzer-prize
winner John Toland reveals that almost everything the Japanese were
planning to do "was known to the United States" on the morning of
the attack, via intercepted messages never communicated to
commanders at Pearl Harbor. He cites the case of U.S.
counterintelligence translator Dorothy Edgers, who uncovered
critical Japanese messages days before the assault, including "a
scheme of signals regarding the movement and exact position of
warships and carriers in Pearl Harbor." But Edgers' boss, Alwin
Kramer, seemed "more annoyed than electrified" at the discovery and
ordered her to "run along home." Unbeknownst to Edgers, Kramer was
part of the subterfuge.
We all know what happened next. Japanese bombs rained down on the
U.S. naval vessels and aircraft poised like sitting ducks at Pearl
Harbor, and the ensuing bloodbath left over 2,400 U.S. service
members and civilians dead. The following day, Congress voted
overwhelmingly to give FDR all of the resources he wanted to wage
war with Japan.
The parallels with 9/11
are stunning.
Today's Edgers is
Sibel
Edmonds, a former FBI translator who was fired in March 2002
after exposing corruption at a critical FBI counterintelligence
unit. Among Edmonds' charges: supervisors covered for a colleague
who was smuggling sensitive documents out of FBI headquarters in
order to protect contacts in "semi-legit" organizations. When
Edmonds started speaking out about this stunning breach of national
security, Attorney General John Ashcroft slapped her with a gag
order.
Even worse, Bush's 9/11 Commission didn't address any of Edmonds'
accusations, including her closed-door testimony that in April 2001,
a long-term FBI informant had revealed "Osama Bin Laden was planning
a major terrorist attack in the United States, targeting 4-5 major
cities," and that
"the attack was going to involve airplanes."
You've got to
wonder – if the 9/11 Commission left out that crucial tidbit,
then what else did it fail to mention?
But the whole inquiry was a farce from the start. Appointing
Henry Kissinger
(notorious for covering up U.S. involvement with murderous South
American dictatorships)
as chairman was the first clue. Replacing him with former New
Jersey governor Thomas Kean was the second.
According to the
Fortune
magazine of Jan. 22, 2003,
"Kean appears to have a
bizarre link to the very terror network he's investigating –
al-Qaeda." Kean is
a director of petroleum giant Amerada Hess, which in 1998 formed a
joint venture – known as Delta Hess – with Delta Oil, a Saudi
Arabian company, to develop oil fields in Azerbaijan. One of Delta's
backers is Khalid bin Mahfouz, a shadowy Saudi patriarch married to
one of Osama bin Laden's sisters. Mahfouz, who is suspected of
funding charities linked to al-Qaeda, is even named as a defendant
in a lawsuit filed by families of Sept. 11 victims."
For the record, bin Mahfouz denies bin Laden is his brother-in-law
and also denies ever having had ownership interest in Delta Oil.
Interesting coincidence though that Hess severed ties with Delta
just three weeks before Kean was appointed to the 9/11 Commission.
Another interesting coincidence: 28 pages of the inquiry's final
report, covering "specific sources of foreign support for some of
the September 11 hijackers," were blanked out. According to an
official quoted in
The New Republic of Aug. 1, 2003, "There's a lot more in the
28 pages than money …
We're talking about a coordinated network that reaches right from
the hijackers to multiple places in the Saudi government."
Very murky indeed.
And a third interesting coincidence surrounds the deadly
anthrax-laced letters that hit the nation within weeks of 9/11.
While "shocked" administration members were quick to blame Osama bin
Laden and/or Saddam Hussein, they failed to mention one intriguing
point: claims that Bush's staff had started taking Cipro, an
anthrax-treatment drug,
weeks before the
attacks occurred.
According to the public-interest group Judicial Watch: "In
October 2001, press reports revealed that White House staff had been
on a regimen of the powerful antibiotic Cipro since the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks." Judicial Watch Chairman Larry Klayman
notes, "One doesn't
simply start taking a powerful antibiotic for no good reason. The
American people are entitled to know what the White House staffers
knew."
While the anthrax
attacks have never been solved, the Bush administration has had some
clear results: increased justification to reduce civil liberties, to
rev up bio-defense spending and to create more hysteria around the
need to invade Iraq.
The idea of using civilian casualties for political gain was
codified in Operation
Northwoods, a 1960s plan by top U.S. military brass to
orchestrate terrorism in American cities and blame it on Castro,
thereby creating public support for a war with Cuba.
More recently, the September 2000 neocon guidebook, "Rebuilding
America's Defenses," [.pdf]
claims "some
catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor" would
help speed up the process of transforming the U.S. into "tomorrow's
dominant force."
So it's no
surprise that over the past four years, we've learned to pay
attention when the Bush administration and its minions in the press
start dropping hints about the next big attack. They've most
recently floated the idea of a catastrophic October Surprise
assault, which they suggest could necessitate postponing the
election. One official warned, "I can tell you one thing, we
won't be like Spain," in an apparent reference to the
conservative ruling party's having lost power days after the Madrid
train bombings.
But Spain's election was a high-turnout, democratic contest in which
voters fair and square booted an unpopular, lying, warmongering
administration. Why can't U.S. voters have the same chance?
Another apparent option is a strike on Iran, maybe preceded by a
stateside assault blamed on Tehran.
A raving Washington Post
column from July 23, 2004
summed it up with:
"Did we invade the wrong country? One of the lessons being drawn
from the Sept. 11 report is that Iran was the real threat. It had
links to al-Qaeda, allowed some of the Sept. 11 hijackers to transit
and is today harboring al-Qaeda leaders. … If nothing is done, a
fanatical terrorist rregime openly dedicated to the destruction of
the 'Great Satan' will have both nuclear weapons and the terrorists
and missiles to deliver them. All that stands between us and that
is either revolution or preemptive strike."
Of course, the
recent Pentagon spy scandal (in which top-secret presidential policy
papers on Iran were reportedly leaked to Israeli officials) may put
a damper on this alternative. The scandal highlights the neocons'
power struggle with other administration members, and until that
battle is decided, there won't be consensus enough to invade Iran.
But if Israel does decide to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, then
chances are strong Bush will jump in too,
and we could be looking at
WWIII.
As a sidelight,
there's an interesting connection between the Pentagon spy
scandal and Sept. 11:
allegations that Israeli intelligence may have known about the 9/11
attacks in advance and not told the United States.
- In December 2001,
Fox News ran a four-part series suggesting that Israeli
intelligence may have had prior knowledge of the attack, through
its spying on Arabs in the United States. The series was quickly
yanked from the Fox web site, although a spokesman said,
"We stand by the story."
So where does all of this leave us on the third anniversary of 9/11?
With more questions than answers. Whodunit? Should we blame Osama
and the hijackers, Saudi funders, Israeli intelligence agents, the
Bush administration or some combination? And when will we ever
learn the truth?
Following the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the ensuing
cover-up, President Roosevelt's chief of staff reportedly told other
officers, "Gentlemen, this goes to the grave with us."
Unfortunately, today it seems that the president and his
staff are busily digging our graves in order to satisfy their own
grandiose power grabs.
This outrage must stop.
###