Who Knew?

[RBHam]

http://www.missoulanews.com/AE/News.asp?no=2858
Who knew?
by Mike Keefe-Feldman

New book examines possible White House role in 9/11 attacks

Three months after Sept. 11, 2001, I was substitute teaching a high school political science course. Because the students had finished the day’s lesson plan, we began talking about current events. When the talk turned to Sept. 11, a young girl in the class said that she thought that President Bush knew what was going to happen and let it happen anyway. I instantly responded that I thought it was far-fetched to think Bush had been somehow complicit in the events of Sept. 11. Steal an election? Maybe. But my mind was simply unable to ponder such a gruesome possibility. Yet it is just this possibility that Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed considers in The War on Freedom: How and Why America Was Attacked.

Despite the fact that Ahmed is the executive director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development in Brighton, UK, and despite the fact that his scholarship has been recommended as a resource by Harvard University, I was prepared for a presentation fit for the pages of some wacko Web site named something like www.santakilledjfk.org. But my skepticism was soon reigned in.

more...

[AliceWonderland]

1. Thanks for posting

The tone of this article makes me crazy, but it has good info. I have no patience anymore for people who feel the need to peg anyone who doesn't swallow everything in the paper as a wacko wailing about Santa killing JFK. I also loved this bit:

Ahmed presents information within the pages of his book cited from respected sources including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Wall Street Journal. But while the mainstream media has supplied pieces of the puzzle, it’s left to Ahmed to piece together the big picture.

Sure, find info in the mainstream press if possible, but part of the problem is legitimizing the corporate American mainstream press. Jeez, here at DU, you find out everything you need to know, from NORAD to yellow cake uranium, months ahead of what's allowed to be printed in the New York Times. If it ever gets printed.

Hissy fit aside, I need to pick up a copy of the Ahmed book.

[leftchick]

2. yep....This is where the buck stops....

<Ahmed goes after the White House with tenacity. He uses a Dick Cheney press conference in which Tim Russert asks Cheney what the most important decision President Bush had to make on Sept. 11 was. Cheney responded, “I suppose the toughest decision was the question of whether or not we would intercept incoming commercial aircraft…We decided to do it.” Ahmed pins Cheney down in an uncomfortable position here. Citing FAA regulations, Ahmed notes that hijacked planes are automatically to be intercepted by scramblers if they deviate from flight path and contact can’t be made. Thus, Ahmed writes, the decision to intercept aircraft shouldn’t have had anything to do with the White House, nor should it have been a “decision.” Ahmed concludes that Cheney’s statement indicates that the White House, not the FAA, was in control regarding scrambling on Sept. 11, making the White House responsible for standard operating procedure failure. Eerily then, Ahmed pieces together an argument that the White House took the authority to call the shots on Sept. 11 and then didn’t actually call any until well after the FAA was required to scramble planes.>

..... :grr:

[BeFree]

7. After the first tower...

After the first tower was hit, why wasn't the other one protected? There shoulda been ten AF fighter jets circling New York City and DC in the minutes after the first hit. The only explanation I can fathom is that 'They' didn't want the second tower, or DC, protected.

[nostamj]

8. not only that BUT

they allowed (even encouraged) the workers to return to their desks and their deaths. (including Kristen Breitwiser's husband)

100s would have survived if they had known what the WH knew. that it was a terrorist attack and NO accident.

[Minstrel Boy]

3. Ahmed's book is the one most likely to open minds

because his sources are largely "mainstream". (Just as Paul Thompson's exhaustive work is the premier 9/11 website.) As the reviewer suggests, the media has supplied many of the pieces, but they haven't put them together. I've given copies to friends, and essentially said read this, before you think I'm crazy.

A number of 9/11 books due out soon I'm looking forward to: Daniel Hopsicker's "Welcome to Terrorland" (Hopsicker is perhaps doing the best original investigative work on 9/11: http://www.madcowprod.com), "The New Pearl Harbor" by David Ray Griffin (http://www.interlinkbooks.com/New_Pearl_Harbor.html) and, in the summer, "The 9/11 Whistleblower's Guide:
Debunking the Official Story" by Sander Hicks and Allan Duncan (http://www.drenchkiss.com/whistleblowers.html).

Griffin's book is intriguing, because it's gained advance praise from eminent figures unassociated with "conspiracy theory", like Howard Zinn ("the most persuasive argument I have seen for further investigation of the Bush administration's relationship to that historic and troubling event") and theologian Rosemary Reuther ("demonstrates a high level of probability that the Bush adminsitration was complicit in allowing 9/11 to happen").

And something both Hopsicker's book and Hicks's and Duncan's promise more info on, about which I'm very curious: Jeb Bush's seizure of the terrorist pilots' records at Hoffman Aviation School, ordering them onto a government cargo plane to fly them out of the country.

[Uroboros]

4. NEW book?

I read it last year early last year; so it can't be THAT new :)

But it is a GREAT book; I recommend it

[RBHam]

5. I read it when it first came out...

The truth is in there, and any intrepid mainstream reporter could use it as a guide to blowing the whole scam wide open.

[ignatius]

6. I remember that Cheney interview, I have a hard copy

somewhere in my files that I printed because I was afraid it would be "scrubbed."

RB, you, Sterling, and Minstrel Boy should get together and write a book. You all always have fantastic posts. Thanks for printing this.