Great articles by Pepe Escobar in Asia Times

[scottxyz]

This guy's a great writer, in the Asia Times... love that overseas English-speaking press!

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FD08Aa01.html

This whole affair is not about whether Clarke committed "perjury"; whether Rice was really up to her job; or whether George W Bush knew something and then "forgot" about it. The families of September 11 victims, US public opinion, the demonized Islamic world, the whole world for that matter, all everybody wants to know is what really happened on September 11. The only party that does not seem interested in getting to the bottom of it is the Bush administration. The official fable of 19 kamikaze Arabs turning Boeings into missiles with military precision, armed only with box cutters and a few flight lessons and directed from an Afghan cave by a satellite phone-shy bin Laden simply does not hold. The commission is not asking the really hard questions. Here are just a few - and they are far from being the most embarrassing.

1) The "stand down" order: Why, despite more than an hour's warning that an attack was happening, were no F-16s protecting US airspace? Documents easily available online reveal why the Pentagon could not act: because of bureaucracy. Why did the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) claim it took 25 minutes after the transponder was shut down to learn that Flight 11 - which hit World Trade Center Tower 1 - was hijacked? Why did fighters not take off from Andrews Air Force base just outside Washington to protect the Pentagon?

2) The pre-September 11 suspicious stock option trades in American Airlines and United Airlines were never fully investigated. Who profited?

etc

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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FD07Aa01.html

There are devastating cases of conflict of interest in the commission. Chairman Thomas Kean may be the most obvious. The US$1 trillion lawsuit filed in August 2002 by the families of the victims of September 11 includes two of Kean's business partners among the accused: Saudi billionaires Khalid bin Mahfouz (who is Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law, no less), and Mohammed Hussein al-Amoudi. They are key financial players behind al-Qaeda: Mahfouz transferred millions of dollars from a Saudi pension fund to bank accounts in London and New York linked with al-Qaeda. He is a former director of BCCI, the bank in the center of a notorious $12 billion bankruptcy scandal during the presidency of Bush senior.

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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FD09Ak02.html

On April 9, 2002, Saddam Hussein's statue in Firdaus Square in Baghdad was still enveloped, like a Christo installation, waiting to be unveiled in an official ceremony. On April 9, 2003, the statue was toppled by the US Army, and later replaced by a faceless figure symbolizing "liberation". On April 9, 2004, the faceless statue is plastered with photographs of "outlaw" Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.


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[Skittles]

1. it astounds me that to this day

our so-called "free press" has never demanded or researched the answers to these questions.