Letters to the Editor
bloomsbury
Published Letters: 361 Editor's Choice: 5
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Stalin was an amateur
[Read the article: Arraigning the 9/11 suspects, Guantánamo-style]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]These people put Stalin in the shade. Even Stalin couldn't have come up with the devilishly devious invention of a button which a guard watches over and which is pushed whenever the defendants in this case begin to say something the Bush Administration doesn't want them to broadcast to the media who are not allowed in the court but are held captive in another room (God, how they love putting people in small rooms and putting words in their mouths). One defendant began to talk about psychotropic drugs he had been given. The button was pushed. Any mention of torture has a similar effect.The media gnash their teeth with frustration- and so on. Like some farce written by the Marx brothers. 'A night at the Politburo' perhaps. These trials are making American justice an international joke. And how can anyone possibly take any of it seriously? One of the reasons why I can only see these trials as the Bush administration wanting to find someone else guilty of the 9/11 attacks (preferably people they've executed thereby hitting them with the silence that never ends, namely death)is because of things like this:
When the FBI put together the list of hijackers from the 9/11 attacks they faced a dilemma. Sometimes the names of the hijackers on the various flights didn’t yield a pilot. It didn’t matter if the pilot in question was a rank amateur with hardly any flying hours as long as it could be said that they had some training in how to pilot a plane. The list the FBI put together was allegedly found in a suitcase which Mohammed Atta had obligingly taken with him to Portland, Maine (for reasons the FBI has never been able to explain) where it escaped immolation on any of the planes. This was extremely convenient for the FBI because this suitcase not only contained all manner of terrorist paraphernalia, such as manuals, but also had United Airlines uniforms and a list of all of Atta’s alleged accomplices in the attacks. Why a terrorist would be so helpful to the FBI has never been explained. In April 2006, a former FBI agent explained that the baggage, being at the airport in Portland, Maine, and not on the fatal flight was the sole source for the names the FBI put on its list of hijackers. Why am I not entitled to feel deeply sceptical about these trials and the claims of the defendants' involvement in 9/11? Anyone who looked at the story of Ziad Jarrah, who was supposedly a hijacker on United 93, would come to the conclusion that this story is so full of holes that only a magic button can allow them to hold these show trials at all. Ziad Jarrah spent his entire school life as a boarder at CHRISTIAN schools in Lebananon even though he was a Moslem. He had a common law wife he was about to set up house with. Two days before 9/11 he phoned a cousin in Lebanon and said he was coming home for the cousin's wedding in mid-September and had bought a suit for the occasion. His name is not on the passenger list for flight 93 and he is nowhere to be seen on CCTV footage from the airport, either before 9/11 or on 9/11. Not only that, but in spite of the fact that 93 is supposed to have crashed into the ground in Shanksville and completely evaporated, the FBI has Jarrah's Lebanese passport and his American visa! What no one has is any evidence Jarrah was on the plane. There is also no evidence that Mohammed Atta was on that plane or any of the planes.Funny that. When I see this circus in Guantanamo Bay I just laugh. It's like a movie made by a European expressionist director, but clumsy. So clumsy.
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tell the whole story
[Read the article: Arraigning the 9/11 suspects, Guantánamo-style]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The fact is KSM was a CIA asset. He's the man who passed on the $300,000 plus wired to Mohammed Atta by the head of the Pakistani Secret Service (ISI) from WASHINGTON DC where he just happened to be in the week leading up to 9/11. Daniel Pearl was investigating links between the ISI and the Taliban and 'Al Qaeda': the Taliban was, in fact, created by the ISI, a close ally of the CIA. The ISI/CIA are the people keeping Musharraf in power in Pakistan.Daniel Pearl didn't know the whole story (so he didn't know his investigation would eventually lead back to the CIA) and certain people wanted to make absolutely certain that no one else knew the whole story either.The story of 9/11 is like the curate's egg: excellent in parts. It's the parts that aren't so excellent that these ridiculous trials are meant to conceal. The military lawyers are completely fed up with all of this and feel they're being dragged through the mud for someone else's political agenda. They're right.