A conspiracy to cover up said incompetence, I knew that was coming 12 September 2001 and said so on this list.
But there is incompetence, and then there is incompetence. All the self-serving, self-contradicting energizer bunnies sent out by the Bush regime have attempted to replace any attempts to get at what happened or to explain what happened with bold action and rhetoric because, let's face it, 9-11 happened on their watch.
If you want to play Sherlock Holmes, you have to ask yourself, what changed when the Bush people took over? Actually, the changes that allowed 9-11 to happen seem to have come late in the last Clinton administration. Again, my theory, if you can call it that, is it had something to do with the US military and intelligence machines gearing up for an anti-Hussein campaign. This issue seemed to have dogged Clinton and then Gore with the hawkish Democrats and of course the Republicans, especially key figures in the Senate. The choice of Leiberman as VP candidate starts to make even more sinister sense. And there was McCain running as anti-establishment, when he as president would have pursued an anti-Hussein campaign without Powell in the way.
I think there may well be a connection with putting together real military training for the anti-Hussein campaign (which had been gearing up since at least 1998) and the 9-11 perps. The Saudis don't really back playboy criminal Chalabi and his farcical Iraqi National Congress, nor do they want gungho Shiite Islamists backed by Iran leading the charge to oust Hussein. So it might well be the case that certain elements across the military and intelligence of the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Egypt and even Syria were nurturing 'Sunni Islamist assets'. A strong version of the theory simply says, the Saudis were preparing their own people to get in on the overthrow of Hussein to keep the Iran-backed Shiites under control. But these people turned out to have a different agenda. This might well have included pilot training and training overseas for Arabs from SA and Egypt. The point of getting familiarization training in the US and other places would be for experienced pilots to learn quickly how to operate certain types of aircraft. It does seem to be the case that at least with three of the planes on 9-11, highly skilled pilots were at the controls.
There seems to be a lot of strange things going on in Prague, too. It was Chalabi and the INC who made strong claims about Atta, one of the 9-11 perps, meeting an Iraqi intelligence officer/diplomat. Some Czechs are sticking with the account that says Atta did meet with the Iraqi agent/diplomat. Some accounts say that Atta's last trip to the US was from Prague. However, the Prague offices of Iraq diplomacy/intelligence also appear to have been severely affected by a defection of the predecessor of that diplomat who met with Atta. The previous guy went to the UK where he informed MI6 and INC about things like pilot training for Islamists in Iraq. Also, this defector detailed plans to blow up the radio station in Prague that the US had set up for propaganda broadcasts to Iraq (which would explain, supposedly, why he left Prague with 150,000 USD).
What really needs to be investigated is just why it was so easy for the 9-11 perps to get their travel papers and visas in Jeddah. Afterall, it was people working for the US who issued the visas. The problems that the State Dept. whistleblower--Springman or Springmann, his name seems to havealmost as many variations as some of the 9-11 perps--is pointing out now go back to a different campaign the CIA and the Saudis were helping to run, the one where they managed 'Islamist assets' to go to Afghanistan and then for the Persian Gulf War (and then Bosnia, Kosovo, and Chechnya, too).
One question is: Springman might well be pointing out what happened to allow the 9-11 perps passage out of the Saudi police state in order to get training abroad (CIA or DoD interference with visa procedures), but it doesn't seem plausible that these people went abroad for training so as to deploy to Afghanistan. I believe the big push was on for a quick campaign against Hussein, a veritable blitzkreig. This in part helps to explain how the US had so much war materiel ready to go for deployment in Afghanistan, since so much of what was used against the Taliban and Al Qaeda there fits with the type of campaign that was being (and still is being) planned for the coming war against Iraq.
Who is specifically pursuing that Jeddah visa and travel papers issue? Just who did pilot the airplanes on 9-11 and how can we account for their combat pilot skills?
Charles Jannuzi
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