Reply #14: It's a bit uncanny how these fuckups come along just when needed [View All]

[JohnyCanuck]

to suit certain agendas. E.g.this particular fuckup boosts "Skeletor" Chertoff onto the nightly news shows where he loudly proclaims how this type of terrorist attack is exactly the type of thing he "predicted" was likely to happen and which his client's x-ray machines were just what was needed to prevent their re-occurrence. Except of course, as already pointed out, someone helped undie bomber slip around the existing security procedures in Amsterdam anyway, even though from his appearance and behavior he could as well have been carrying a placard on a stick, "Look at me; I am a terrorist."

Then of course there were the anthrax letter attacks on US politicians and media figures which conveniently came along to help keep the "lets go to war and bomb their terrorist asses" fever against Arabs and Muslims revved up to fever pitch. As I remember it, there was some speculation going on that these anthrax letters contained anthrax from none other than evil-dictator™ Saddam's store of deadly WMDs. That was long before it turned out to be from a highly secure US military lab of course.

Last week, I excerpted several of the Saddam-anthrax reports from ABC and Ross -- here and here -- but there are others. ABC aggressively promoted as its top story for days on end during that highly provocative period of time that -- and these are all quotes:

(a) "the anthrax in the tainted letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was laced with bentonite";

(b) bentonite is "a troubling chemical additive that authorities consider their first significant clue yet";

(c) "only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons";

(d) bentonite "is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program"; and,

(e) "the anthrax found in a letter to Senator Daschle is nearly identical to samples they recovered in Iraq in 1994" and "the anthrax spores found in the letter to Senator Daschle are almost identical in appearance to those they recovered in Iraq in 1994 when viewed under an electron microscope."

At different times, Ross attributed these claims to "three well-placed but separate sources" and, alternatively, to "at least four well-placed sources."

All of those factual claims -- each and every one of them, separately -- were completely false, demonstrably and unquestionably so. There is now no question about that. Yet neither ABC nor Ross have ever retracted, corrected, clarified, or explained these fraudulent reports -- reports which, as documented below, had an extremely serious impact on the views formed by Americans in those early, critical days about the relationship between the 9/11 attacks, the anthrax attacks and Iraq.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2007/04/09/abc_anthrax/

And of course there is that grand-daddy of all fuckups, 9/11 itself for which no one has been disciplined or fired even thought there were plenty of warnings flooding in from various corners of the world that a big terrorist attack was coming. Nevertheless the US military and intelligence agencies were still caught flat footed to the extent that the most powerful military in the world couldn't even defend it's own headquarters from being hit by a hijacked plane an hour after after the first planes were known to have been hijacked and 34 minutes after the 2nd WTC tower had been hit.

Yup fuckups all around. Now read my sig line.