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None Dare Call It Treason?

More than incompetence - FBI agents thought HQ worked for Bin Laden...

by Robert Manis, The Manis Report, May 29, 2002

Make no mistake about it: 9-11 is a tremendous scandal whose edges have only started to unravel. When Rep. Cynthia McKinney first urged a Congressional investigation, she was ridiculed by the White House as speaking “from a grassy knoll in Roswell” invoking the specter of lunatic  conspiracy theorists.

But now FBI agent Colleen Rowley’s report that her supervisor altered her reports about “20th hijacker” Moussaoui, and the identification of that same supervisor as receiving the Phoenix memo about the Al Qaeda flight school links, shows either incredible incompetence or something more malevolent.

Add to it to the now confirmed reports that intelligence services of France, Germany, Great Britain, Russia all passed on warnings of multiple plane hijackings, and the incompetence theory becomes even more strained.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, “Agent Coleen Rowley, the chief lawyer in the Minneapolis field office, alleges that intelligence on Moussaoui provided by the French Government, which included information on his "activities connected with Osama bin Laden", was more than enough to obtain a warrant to search his  laptop computer in the weeks before the terrorist attacks.

"But requests for a warrant were thwarted by FBI supervisors in Washington, who seemed so  intent on ignoring the threat Moussaoui posed that some field agents speculated that key officials at FBI headquarters ‘had to be spies or moles ... working for Osama bin Laden’.”(May 28, 2002) (My Italics)

They may have been more correct than they knew.  Attorney General John Ashcroft has denied his use of a leased jet instead of commercial aviation was due to foreknowledge of 9-11, but rather a threat directed at him personally.  In fact, a CBS news report from July 26 2001, shows that the FBI “threat assessment” was “not directed at any Cabinet member”.

Several of the 19 hijackers were wanted by the FBI. One was picked up on September 10 by a State trooper who released him because that information had never been released to the states.

Other “coincidences” include Jeb Bush’s mobilizing of the Florida National Guard on September 8th, and an alleged FBI “raid” on Moslem websites on September 10th.

BBC’s Newsnight reporter Greg Palast has detailed how the Bush Administration slowed investigations into Osama bin Laden's activities throughout 2001 – So much so that counterterrorism expert John O’Neill resigned, only to die in the WTC attack. Palast also noted that twenty relatives of Osama were flown out of the country on Sept 12 by the Saudi Ambassador (the only non-military flight in the air) without being questioned.  This was justified by the Administration on the grounds that Osama was the “only bad one:” Nevertheless, Palast has shown in a BBC broadcast available on the Internet that three relatives lived next door to and were involved in an Islamic Charity named just weeks later as a terrorist organization.

Perhaps most damning when we look back now, is  the fact that the otherwise incompetent FBI was able to identify all 19 hijackers barely 48 hours after the attacks.  How could they have known this so quickly? There are only two reasonable explanations: [1] The FBI just listed all the Arabic named passengers on the four flights, or [2] they already knew who they were.  The first possibility would have been an egregious example of racial profiling, made worse by fact that they lied to the American people about the certainty of their information.  But the second possibility is even worse: that the FBI or their masters knew hijackings were to take place.  Perhaps they didn’t know the outcome of the hijacking, or perhaps they were told not to ask.

The "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh has been accused by many of treason, defined by law as “aiding or abetting the enemy”.  How ironic that it may be that the nation’s highest officials, for whatever ends, may have been guilty as well.