Things that should be kept OFF the back burner...

[King_Crimson]

and right up front! The following is from the March 29 article posted on the World Socialist Web Site:

<snip>

The World Socialist Web Site has long maintained that in analyzing the events of September 11, the LEAST plausible explanation is the official version of the Bush administration, propounded endlessly by the American media for two-and-one-half years: that 19 Al-Qaeda operatives entered the United States, hijacked four airplanes on the same day and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon-using suicide pilots trained at US flight schools-without any US agency having the slightest idea what the terrorists were doing.

Clarke's testimony confirms that the Al-Qaeda attacks were made possible by a virtual stand-down of the counter-terrorist preparations that had been in effect in the last years of the Clinton administration-certainly from the time of the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998.

What neither Clarke, nor his interrogators, nor the media have addressed is whether this stand-down was deliberate: i.e. that at some level of the US government, a decision was made to permit a terrorist attack to go forward in order to provide the necessary pretext for US military action in the Middle East and Central Asia, a step that, up until then was politically impossible.

<snip>

Another significant detail is Clarke's report that after his office had triggered a nationwide counter-terrorist alert during the summer of 2001, based on intelligence intercepts, it encountered pressure from the Pentagon, which said that military units on alert status were beginning to suffer from fatigue. The alert, which had included the Federal Aviation Agency, was eased by the end of August, two weeks before the 19 suicide hijackers boarded their flights. The timing suggests that those who dispatched the hijackers knew when security was being relaxed. What was their source of information?

The revelations of Richard Clarke provide further evidence that something far more sinister and ominous than incompetance or a failure "to connect the dots" was behind the governments failure to prevent the worst terrorist attack in US history!

more...www.wsws.org

I agree, something "FAR MORE SINISTER" indeed was at work that day...and STILL is!

[King_Crimson]

1. Could it be that Clarke may not be telling ALL he knows?

I missed this portion, and it DOES merit mention. Clarke said "You know, unfortunately, this country takes body bags and requires body bags sometimes to make really tough decisions about money and about governmental arrangements".

[mmonk]

2. He couldn't tell all even if he knew it

It had to go through the White House before the publisher. So he could only hint at things.

[King_Crimson]

3. I actually meant...

tell the commission.