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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
In essence you characterize the Qaeda attacks as a hack, in the computer security sense. That's an excellent analogy — as writers like Salon's Patrick Smith and others have observed, the attackers exploited a mindset rather than a particular security hole.
And if the September 2001 attacks were the only ones of their kind, that would probably be as far as anyone needed to think about them. But they weren't. Al Qaeda had been making plans to infiltrate the US in numbers, and coordinate the hijacking and crashing of multiple planes, for years before 2001 — and been caught every time.
Suppose you were brought in as a consultant to do a postmortem on a data security breach, and you discovered that the exploit in question had actually been patched as late as a few months before the intrusion — but the patch had somehow been uninstalled since then.
If you ask yourself the question: "who benefits?", and you ask it honestly, then the answer must be Islamic extremists.
It's hard to look at the last 7 years and accept that the Bush regime did not also benefit in any way from the World Trade Center attacks.
At the risk of stretching my analogy, suppose that the in-house security guy tells you that there was no way of knowing about the exploit, and refused to answer any questions about how the patch that used to be there had been removed — or whether there was any connection to the huge budget increase and sweeping new authority he was demanding to fight future intrusions.
At the very least, you'd have to consider the possibility that he was grossly negligent and attempting, with breathtaking audacity, to turn his own fuckup into an opportunity for self-advancement.
And you'd have to at least think about whether he'd been willfully negligent.
One person's position on one small fragment of that much larger series of events does not and cannot represent the full depth of the thinking and research behind the Truth movement.
Yes, there are some people attached to the movement who are knee-jerk reactive to anything government-issue, but these people do not actively contribute to furthering the movement. There are also a huge number of honest, intelligent, educated people who are putting a lot on the line to examine the aspects of the situation simply ignored by the government. And it is this group of people who are coming up with questions that the official account simply cannot answer.
You might want to begin by investigating the financial transactions relating to sales of airline stock in the week prior, or how the Pentagon was apparently in view of only one single video camera that day, or how a building such as WTC7 could fall without having been on fire or hit by any substantial bits of wreckage.
Sorry Farhad, I normally enjoy your column, but you clearly need to steer clear of topics like this until you've done more homework.
The Project for a New American Century, PNAC..
Their documentation explicitly pines for a "new Pearl Harbor" in order to bring America to a war footing and initiate moving toward their goals
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century
Within months of them assuming power, voila' they get a new Pearl Harbor.
Operation Northwoods was a plan to create false flag terrorist attacks in the US.. A plan concocted by the US Department of Defense during the Cuban missile crisis era.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
The Tom Clancy book "Executive Orders" has an airliner crashing into the Capitol building..
Then there is the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which was used as a reason to drastically increase American involvement in Vietnam.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_Incident
In 2005, it was revealed in an official NSA declassified report[2] that the Maddox first fired warning shots on the August 2 incident and that there may have been no North Vietnamese boats at the August 4 incident. The report said
[I]t is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night. [...] In truth, Hanoi's navy was engaged in nothing that night but the salvage of two of the boats damaged on 2 August.[3]
Then of course we have the Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq which we were absolutely assured that the government not only knew existed but that they knew just where they were..
I think we all know how that one turned out..
Niger yellowcake..
Jessica Lynch..
The list of government lies is almost literally endless..
Fool me once, shame on you.. Fool me twice shame on me..
And to top it all off we have the Anthrax mailer. Within mere hours we knew of all the 9/11 hijackers..
The Anthrax mailer? Six years later and nobody in the government gives the slightest damn.
It's interesting that the very first anthrax victim in the USA was employed by American Media Inc..
Then there is the matter of the Ctheney administration taking Cipro *before* the anthrax attacks..
One can be either a conspiracy theorist or a coincidence theorist..
This post is right off the top of my head and there are a great many more very strange things about what happened on 9/11/2001..
Look for yourself, I'm not even going to provide links, the bizarre goings on are easily found with teh google.
There's an old saying in the military: Once is happenstance, twice is circumstance, three times is enemy action..
We are way past three times..
Hurricane,et al., WTC 7 was severely damaged by falling debris and burned for close to eight hours before it collapsed. Not a single reputable structural engineer has come out in the last 6.5 years to question the collapse of WTC 7. What, are they all part of the conspiracy, too? Did Cheney go to all their houses and threaten to shotgun them if they spoke up?
The 9/11 "Truth" conspiracies all fail this simple test of logic: for it to have been a government plot, the number of people involved in the cover-up would have to be astronomical. This administration couldn't cover up the outing of a single obscure former CIA spook, and yet they are capable of pulling off the greatest feat of misdirection and planning in history? Please...
I am a die-hard liberal, Obama booster and Bush loather. I certainly think the administration used 9/11 to further their despicable agenda. But I can not for a single second entertain the idea that they could have set up 9/11. The idea is utterly and totally preposterous.
The Truthers would rather believe that the Government is an all-powerful Super Society that controls everything down to the last detail than admit the real truth: There is no single Government watching out for us, for good or evil. There is, rather, a loosely affiliated set of interconnected agencies, many with different agendas, all at each others throats for a bigger piece of the pie. And that's all.
The 9/11 attackers saw a loophole in our security mindset, they exploited it, and that's it. Nothing more sinister.
Isn't that scary enough?
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
