Think You’re Safer with Bush?
You Might Want to Think Again

Before 9/11

• Two years before 9/11/01, a report for the National Intelligence Council prepared by the Library of Congress warned of possible suicide hijackings by terrorists, also reporting that terrorists had received pilot training in the U.S.

• Following the attack on the USS Cole, President Clinton developed and passed along to President Bush a comprehensive plan to counteract al Qaeda.  Bush ignored this, also ignoring the urgent warnings of his counter-terrorism advisor, until after 9/11.

• Richard Clarke, Paul O’Neill and other Bush administration insiders consistently report that Bush was obsessed with Saddam from the beginning of his administration although Iraq was not among 45 countries with al Qaeda cells named by the State Department.

• Many other warnings were ignored, including several from foreign intelligence agencies.  Airport security remained perfunctory, and contingency plans were obviously not in place.

On 9/11

• On 9/11/01, how could these events have happened?  Not just one aircraft but three reached their targets, over a period of more than an hour.  Where was NORAD?  What happened to the missile batteries protecting the Pentagon?  After all these warnings – and one only a month before – why was nobody prepared or even apparently awake?

Unanswered Puzzles: The 9/11 Timeline

Flight #

From

Departed  at

Possible hijack ID'd

Definite hijack ID'd

Time Crashed

Where Crashed

Time lapse from 8:21

Time lapse from HJ ID

---

AA 11

Boston

7:59

8:14

8:21

8:46

WTC N.

25 min.

---

UA 175

Boston

8:14

8:42

8:43

9:03

WTC S.

42 min

20 min.

---

AA 77

Dulles

8:20

8:46-8:56

9:25

9:38

Pentagon

1 hr 17 min

42 min.

---

UA 93

Newark

8:42

9:27

10:06

Rural Pa.

1 hr 45 min

39 min.

• The first hijack was identified as such at 8:21.  Standard protocol specifies that a commercial aircraft more than 15* off course and non-responsive will be intercepted by NORAD fighter aircraft as a possible hijack.  These are on 24 hour alert, can be scrambled
in 3 minutes, and can fly 1800 mph.  Off-course incidents occur some 100 times yearly, and a standard protocol is followed to direct pilots back on course.  The hijacked airliners should have been intercepted within about 10 minutes from nearby military airfields.

• Flight AA11 crashed into the north World Trade Center building at 8:46, but shoot down orders for any hijacked planes were reportedly not given until 9:56.

• Contact with Flight AA77 was lost about the time of the first (AA11) crash. Therefore, AA77 should have been identified as another probable hijack and located immediately.  But this flight was lost for over 30 minutes and not re-identified until approaching Washington, DC.

Since 9/11

• Bush declined three Pentagon-planned opportunities in 2002-03 to kill key terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi since Bush feared it would weaken his public case for invading Iraq.  Al-Zarqawi is now mentioned frequently as a prime U.S. target and the chief terrorist leader killing Americans in Iraq after fleeing from Afghanistan to Baghdad.

• Bin Laden and some 1,000 al Qaeda terrorists were allowed to escape at Tora Bora by “outsourcing” the search to Afghan warlords of questionable motives and reliability and by leaving one of three known escape routes unguarded.

• Only eight of 440 U.S. airports are equipped with state-of-the-art baggage screening machines with comprehensive detection capacities.  This would require $5 billion.  The Bush budget this year requests only $250 million, one-twentieth the funding needed.

• Some 100,000 shoulder-fired missiles are currently circulating on the world’s black market in weapons, accessible to terrorists.  Our entire commercial airline fleet could be protected by a $10 billion investment.  None are yet protected.

• Most of the world’s weapons-grade nuclear material remains vulnerable.  This is the greatest risk to the world today and could all be secured by a $30.5 billion investment.

• The Nunn-Lugar program has de-activated 6,000 nuclear warheads.  It needs another $2.5 billion to complete the job.  The Bush budget has allocated just $450 million, less than 20% of the funding needed.

• The Coast Guard estimates that $7.5 billion are needed to secure our seaports.  Bush has allocated only $500 million, one-fifteenth what is needed.

• Our many nuclear power plants and chemical production facilities remain without increased protection.

So where has the money been spent instead?  Iraq.  About $150 billion to date.

Iraq

• The evidence confirms that UN sanctions against Iraq and seven years of UN weapons inspections had been highly effective, and invasion was unnecessary for U.S. security.

• That’s why there were no WMDs.  Dick Cheney called this “the most intrusive system of arms control in history.”  Scott Ritter, UN weapons inspector in Iraq, testified widely that the Iraq WMD program had been fully dismantled and could not have been rebuilt under the sanctions regime and without detection.  A 2002 British government report concluded that “Iraq would not be able to produce a nuclear weapon” with sanctions in effect.

• The U.S. State Department estimated that Iraq spent $15 billion annually on weapons before the Gulf War.  Throughout the 1990s under UN sanctions, this dropped over 90% to an average of $1.4 billion annually, limited to conventional weapons.

• A new “smart” sanctions regime had been recently established to allow civilian imports to meet humanitarian needs while maintaining a strict arms embargo.

• The renewed UN inspections would have found no WMDs, proving that invasion was unnecessary.  This explains the Bush administration’s rush to war: they would have lost their “New Pearl Harbor” excuse to implement a long-held plan to seize Iraq, advocated by neoconservatives Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perls and Elliot Abrams – all occupying top positions in the Bush administration – since the 1990s.

• Thus, “9/11 changed everything” is a terrible, immensely costly lie, as is the rationale of liberating an oppressed people.  Dislodging Saddam was a plan based on an imperial vision of U.S. world domination, dating from the collapse of the Soviet union in 1989 leaving us as the world’s only superpower, that envisioned control of Iraq as essential to their geopolitical strategy (see their website posted in 1997, Project for the New American Century - www.newamericancentury.org/).  Of the many, many, many Bush lies, these are the most terrible and tragic.

And what has the Iraq invasion accomplished?

• The death of 1,200+ Americans and many more thousands of disabling injuries.

• The death of perhaps 100,000 Iraqis, mostly civilians, leaving enraged and grieving survivors who are undoubtedly among those now attacking American forces. This is five times the number killed in the Twin Towers – people innocent of the 9/11 attacks upon us.

• Chaos, violence, destruction, infrastructure collapse, massive unemployment, rampant crime and potential civil war in Iraq.

• A new hotbed of terrorists in Iraq where there were none before due to Saddam’s iron-fisted control and the rivalry between his secular government and Islamic fundamentalists like bin Laden for influence in the Arab world.

• The hostility – fierce among some – of the 1.3 billion Muslim world population, providing fertile recruiting ground for anti-American terrorists that has been well documented.  Immediately following 9/11, surveys by the Pew Research Center found a majority in Islamic countries sympathetic with the U.S. and opposed to bin Laden.  Today, these surveys find 95% hostile to the U.S. and a majority supportive of bin Laden.

Feel more secure with Bush, folks?
 

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Copyright 2004 Jack Dresser, Ph.D.