<tr> <td background="http://www.bushlies.net/consoles/10/images/cn_left_back.gif" height="20"><img src="consoles/10/images/cn_left_back.gif" width="8" height="20"></td> <td width="20%" align="center" valign="middle" height="20" background="http://www.bushlies.net/267//images/cn_back.jpg"> 9-11 & Tax Lies <tr> <td><img src="http://www.bushlies.net/consoles/10/images/cn_corner04.gif" width="8" height="8"></td> <td colspan="5" background="http://www.bushlies.net/consoles/10/images/cn_bot_back.gif" height="8"><img src="http://www.bushlies.net/267//images/spacer.gif" width="1" height="1"></td> <td align="right"><img src="http://www.bushlies.net/consoles/10/images/cn_corner03.gif" width="8" height="8"></td> </tr> </table> </td> Lies A - Z       9-11 & TAX LIES SEPTEMBER 11TH LIES  LIES:  FACTS: (UPDATED!) In November 2002, as he appointed Henry Kissinger to be chairman of the independent 9-11 Commission, President Bush declared, "we must uncover every detail and learn every lesson of September the 11th."   At that time, Bush also said that the "investigation should carefully examine all the evidence and follow all the facts, wherever they may lead." The Bush administration has stonewalled both the joint Congressional committee and the 9-11 Commission to the point that the Commission's Republican chairman has been forced to issue subpoenas.  With respect to the Presidential Daily Briefings sought by the Commission, the administration will only permit them to be viewed by a small portion of the Commission and reserves the right to edit them beforehand.  Vietnam war hero and former Senator Max Cleeland condemned the restrictions as unconscionable.  Commission member Timothy Roemer complained, "our members may see only two or three paragraphs out of a nine-page report."  The administration has limited the number of commission.   Among other things, the administration has (i) withheld intelligence warnings the White House reviewed before 9/11, (ii) refused to say whether certain pre-9/11 intelligence warnings-including a July 2001 report noting that Osama bin Laden was poised to launch a "spectacular" attack "designed to inflict mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests"-were shared with Bush and what he did in response, if he had received them; (iii) claimed that Bush's awareness of these warnings (not the warnings themselves) was classified information-an argument unprecedented in the modern history of national security secrets; and (iv) withheld FAA documents relating to tracking of the hijacked airliners on 9-11.   Bush also refused to let the congressional inquiry release the portion of its final report that concerned connections between the 9/11 hijackers and Saudi citizens or officials.  (7)   After the attacks, Ari Fleischer stated that the President had no warnings of an attack and President Bush explained "[n]ever [in] anybody's thought processes . . . did we ever think that the evil doers would fly not one but four commercial aircraft into precious US targets . . . never."   Bush received an August 6, 2001 memo entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." which mentioned bin Laden's desire to strike the US possibly using hijacked airplanes.  The CIA warned that bin Laden will launch an attack against the US and/or Israel in the coming weeks that "will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against US facilities or interests."    The Bush administration prevented the release of details of the August 6th briefing in the report issued by the Joint Congressional Committee investigating the 9-11 attack.   Also that summer intelligence reports indicated that (i) Middle Eastern terrorists were planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack "American and Israeli symbols which stand out"; (ii) there was a threat to assassinate Bush at the July 2001 G-8 summit using an airplane stuffed with explosives; (iii) al-Qaeda was planning an attack using multiple airplane hijackings; and (iv) that bin Laden was in advanced stages of executing a significant operation within the US.   In February 2001, the Hart-Rudman report warned that "mass-casualty terrorism directed against the U.S. homeland was of serious and growing concern" and that the US was woefully unprepared for a "catastrophic" domestic terrorist attack.   Intelligence reports from 1998 indicated that Bin Laden had a plot involving explosive laden aircraft in the New York and D.C. areas while a 2000 report mentioned that possible Bin Laden targets included the Statue of Liberty, skyscrapers and nuclear power plants.  (1)   Similarly, in 1994 Algerians hijacked an Air France airliner with the intention to fly it into the Eiffel Tower; in 1995 Philippine authorities uncovered an al Qaeda plot to fly a plane into CIA headquarters; and there were al Qaeda plots in 1996 and 1997 to fly a plane from outside the US into the White House and World Trade Center.  (4)  The National Reconnaissance Office had scheduled an exercise in which a small corporate jet would crash into an office tower following equipment failure for the morning of September 11th.  (6)     After CBS broke the story about the August 6th memo, Condoleezza Rice contended that the "overwhelming bulk of the evidence was that this was an attack that was likely to take place overseas."   The August 6th memo refers to bin Laden's desire to strike in the US. (1) Bush repeatedly has claimed to have watched the first airplane striking the World Trade Center on TV just before entering a classroom at a Florida elementary school and thought "'there's one terrible pilot.' And I said, 'It must have been a horrible accident.' But I was whisked off there - I didn't have much time to think about it.  And I was sitting in the classroom, and Andy Card, my Chief of Staff, who is sitting over here, walked in and said, `A second plane has hit the tower, America is under attack"   This is impossible since there was no live coverage of the first plane crash and no video emerged until the following day.  (3)  After September 11th, Condoleezza Rice denied attending a transition briefing in which Clinton NSC Advisor Sandy Berger warned that "the Bush administration would spend more time on terrorism in general, and on al Qaeda specifically, than any other subject."  Rice's spokesperson said she recalled no briefing where Berger was present.   Rice spoke with a New York Times reporter after the briefing who then reported that "Berger met with his successor, Condoleezza Rice, and gave her a warning.  According to both of them, he said that the war on terrorism - and particularly Mr. bin Laden's brand of it - would consume far more of her time than she had ever imagined."    The Bush administration ignored this warning, focusing on Star Wars and restructuring the military instead.  In fact, Rumsfeld threatened a veto when Congress proposed to shift $0.6 billion from Star Wars to counter-terror programs. (5)    Under pressure from the White House, the Environmental Protection Agency assured the public that the New York City air was safe to breathe a week after 9-11. "I am glad to reassure the people of New York and Washington, D.C. that their air is safe to breath[e] and their water is safe to drink."  Christie Todd Whitman in EPA Press Release  9/18/01.   The EPA omitted warnings about potential health effects from airborne dust containing asbestos, lead, glass fibers and concrete.  For example Air particulates in Manhattan one month after the attack were at higher levels than the Kuwaiti oil fires.   In addition, the EPA claim that the air was safe to breathe was done without any monitoring data to support it. The White House edited a draft EPA release (9/13) that EPA was "testing terrorized sites for environmental hazards" to EPA "reassures public about environmental hazards."  Another press release (9/16) was edited from "[r]ecent samples of dust . . . on Water Street show higher levels of asbestos" to "[n]ew samples confirm . . . ambient air quality meets OSHA standards."   The White House refused to talk with the EPA Inspector General investigating these claims.  (2) Sources: (1) The Left Coaster 07.14.03, Waterman - UPI 07.23.03, Priest - Washington Post 07.25.03, Dean - Findlaw.com 07.29.03, Ridgeway - Village Voice 07.31.03, Franken - Lies And The Liars Who Tell Them; (2) DemocracyNow.org 08.12.03, Heilprin - Washington Post 08.23.03, Noah - Slate 09.05.03, Meyers - NBC  News 09.03.03; (3) Schorrow - Boston Herald 10.22.02; (4) Plotz - Slate 09.10.03; (5) Franken - Lies and The Liars Who Tell Them, (6) Lumpkin - Associated Press 10.28.03; (7) The Daily Mis-Lead 10.27.03, Corn - BushLies.com, The Daily Mis-Lead 11.17.03.   THE BIG LIE: BUSH'S TAX GIVEAWAY THE BIG 10 LIES:   FACTS: #1  In 2000 and 2001 Bush promised that Social Security Funds would remain in a lockbox and that "we can proceed with tax relief without fear of budget deficits even if the economy softens" since his budget projections are "cautious and conservative".    This is a classic case of The Big Lie and fuzzy math.  The simple truth is that, due to Bush's $1.35 trillion giveaway, a $236 billion budget surplus has been wasted and we face a projected record deficit of $307 billion in 2004.  Bush's 2004 budget will increase the national debt by $2-3 trillion and require that the government use the entire Social Security surplus to fund its deficits.  (1)    #2    President Bush claimed that he requested his 2001 tax cuts because of the recession.   Bush's 2001 tax cuts are virtually identical to the tax package he campaigned on for more than a year during the end of the Clinton boom.  (11)    #3  As the budget deficit emerged, Bush assured us that the deficits would be "small and temporary" while repeatedly claiming that during the 2000 campaign he said he would allow the federal budget to go into deficit in times of war, recession or national emergency, but never imagined he would have a "trifecta".  When asked to identify when this occurred, the Bush administration claims it was during a 2000 Chicago campaign stop.     Bush never made such a statement in Chicago nor anywhere else during the 2000 campaign.  In fact, these three caveats on deficits were stated on several occasions by Vice President Gore.  (2)   Bush's attempt to pin the deficit on the war also is a misstatement, since the cost of the Bush tax cuts is three times the cost of the response to 9-11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  (2)   #4 Faced with growing deficits, President Bush and Glenn Hubbard, the chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, now claim that deficits do not matter and have no impact on interest rates.     As recent as 2002 the President said, "I'm mindful of what overspending can mean to interest rates or expectations of interest rates."  As for Hubbard, the 2002 edition of his textbook "Money, the Financial System and the Economy" not only states that higher deficits increase interest rates but also provides a formula to calculate the increase in interest rates per dollar increase in spending or tax cuts.    In fact, in July 2003 interest rates on 10-year U.S. Treasuries jumped from 3.1% to almost 4%.  Leading Treasury Secretary Snow to call the deficit "worrisome" and express concern that federal borrowing would crowd out private investment.    The International Monetary Fund concluded that Bush's fiscal policies "will make it more difficult to cope with the aging of the baby boom generation and will eventually crowd out investment and erode US productivity growth"; and called for the US to put in place a "credible fiscal framework" with the objective of balancing the budget.  (3)   #5 In 2003, Bush offers a "stimulus package" that calls for $670 billion in additional tax cuts.  Vice President Cheney argues the tax cuts are necessary to prevent a double dip recession.   Even the Bush friendly Economist rejects the notion that the $670 billion Bush plan is a "stimulus package."  "Even by the Bush team's own numbers, this is not an efficient short-term stimulus package: it pumps only around $100 billion of the tax cuts into the economy over the next year.  And most of the money goes to richer Americans, whom economists reckon are less likely to spend the additional cash than poorer ones."  (4)   (UPDATED!) #6 Both Bush and Ari Fleischer proclaimed that a report by Blue-Chip economist concluded that the economy would grow by 3.3 percent in 2003 if the President's tax proposals were adopted.   Bush also claimed that the tax cuts would create 344,000 new jobs per month and that it would result in increased incomes and living standards "for American workers".     No such report exists. (5) As of September 30, 2003, there has only been a net gain of 57,000 jobs since the 2003 tax cuts became effective, while the economy lost a net of 2.75 million jobs since passage of the 2001 tax cuts.  In addition, real wages have declined 1.2% on Bush's watch.  (10)   #7 Bush and the Republicans claim that the 2003 tax cut proposal benefits all Americans and that ninety-two million Americans will receive an average of almost $1,100.               (UPDATED!)  #8 The 2003 tax cuts will help reduce the deficit because the resulting economic growth will offset tax losses. When the deficit for FYE 2003 was reported below projections at $374 billion, White House aides claimed that the deficit was on a "downward path."   Nearly one-third (31%) of all taxpayers, would receive nothing and 64 million taxpayers (nearly half [48%]) would get less than $100.  The average taxpayer (i.e., taxpayers in the middle fifth 20%) would only get $289 under this proposal.  In contrast, the top 1% of taxpayers would get $30,127 while those earning more than $1 million would get according nearly $90,200.(6)   The Congressional Budget Office (headed by a former Bush White House supply-sider) found that even under the more favorable "dynamic scoring" methodology the tax cuts would result in more than $1 trillion in deficits over the next five years alone and that the economic stimulus claims asserted by the White House were "not obvious."    The Comptroller General found the administration's claim that the tax cuts would help reduce the federal deficit to be "flat false."  In order to balance the budget by 2013, the government would have to either (i) raise income taxes by 27 percent and cutting social security spending by 60 percent and defense spending by 73 percent or (ii) cutting all programs except for defense, homeland security, social security and Medicare by 40 percent.   The Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation found that the tax cuts would have minimal effects initially and then the positive effects "are eventually likely to be outweighed by a reduction in national savings due to increasing federal deficits."  The Committee also predicted job growth of between 230,000 to 90,000 jobs during the first five years, with no growth or job losses in the next five years. (7)  The $374 billion deficit does not include $87 billion for Iraq, $400 million for Medicare, $500 billion for increased defense spending and $1.8 trillion to make the "temporary" tax cuts permanent.  (9)     #9 The Bush administration repeatedly low-balled budget projections in order to persuade Congress to pass its tax cuts in 2001 and 2003.  The Bush administration's projection for FYE 2003 have been as follows:   April 2001: $334 billion surplus Feb. 2002:  $80 billion deficit Feb. 2003:  $304 billion deficit   In July 2003, the Bush administration announced that the deficit will reach $455 billion for FYE 2003.  Without the Bush tax cuts, however, the deficit would be $278 billion.  By 2011, these tax cuts will have cost $3.7 trillion.   The $455 billion estimate is deceptive, however, since (i) it does not even include the costs of U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan which exceed $4 billion per month; but (ii) it does include the Social Security surplus.  Without the Social Security surplus, the deficit would total $614 billion plus the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan operations.  (8)    #10   On April 24, 2003, Bush campaigned to make permanent all aspects of his 2001 tax plan stating that while Congress adopted his plan "the problem is they responded with a phased-in program.  They said tax relief was important and tax relief should be robust, but they phased it in over a number of years - three years in some cases, five years in others and seven years.  Listen, all I'm asking Congress to do is to take the tax relief package they've already passed, accelerate it to this year so that we can get this economy started and people can find work."     President Bush requested that the tax cuts be phased in over five year, both when he first offered the plan in 1999 and when he submitted it to Congress in February 2001, in order to minimize the total costs of the tax cuts.  In essence, Bush sold a discounted version of his plan for political reasons, but now wants Americans to pay full price.  (11) Sources:  (1) New York Times 02.04.03, McKenna - Globe and Mail 02.04.03, Conrad & Spratt - Washington Post 02.04.03; (2) New Republic 07.01.02, Washington Post 07.02.02, Alter - Newsweek 07.28.03; (3) New Republic 01.13.03, 01.20.03, Editors - Los Angeles Times 07.17.03, Harding - Financial Times 08.07.03; (4) L.A. Times 11.11.03, Economist 11.11.03, (5) Toedtman - Newsday 02.23.03, (6) Citizens for Tax Justice (http://www.cjt.org), The New Republic - 02.10.03, (7) New York Times 04.06.03, Washington Post 05.14.03, The Bush Economic Record: Will Short-Term Gain Lead to Long-Term Prosperity or Long-Term Pain; (8) Weisman - Washington Post 07.16.03, Editors - Washington Post 07.16.03,  Editors - New York Times 07.17.03; Krugman - New York Times 07.18.03, Los Angeles Times 10.07.03 (9) Minneapolis Star Tribune 10.23.03;  (10)  The Daily Mis-Lead 10.03.03, The Daily Mis-Lead  11.05.03; (11) Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, War Tax Cuts and the Deficit 07.08.03.   Caught on Film: The Bush Credibility Gap In addition, in February 2003 Congressional Democrats began to press this case, launching a campaign on the Bush "credibility gap" on budget matters.     Click Here to View     OTHER TAX LIES   LIE:  In May 2003, President Bush signed into law tax cut legislation which excluded low and moderate income families from the expanded child tax credit.  The White House promised to address this omission.  FACT: It has been over six months since the White House's promise and no action has been taken to date.   (Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee)  See Running Clock On Failure to Address Child Tax Credit:  http://www.dscc.org/welcome/   LIE:  During the campaign, Bush claimed that the "vast majority" of the tax cuts go the "those at the bottom end of the economic ladder FACT: The bottom sixty percentile received only 12.6 percent of the proposed tax cut, while the top one percent would receive almost half.  (Franken - Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, Corn - The Nation 10.13.03)   LIE: The Bush administration reported a $158 billion deficit for 2002 by reporting expenses when paid not when incurred.   FACT: Had the Bush administration used accrual method of accounting as recommended by Federal Reserve Chairman Greenspan, the 2002 deficit would increase by 230% to $365 billion.   LIE: The Bush administration promised in late 2002 to repeal the loophole that allows US companies who incorporate off-shore in order to avoid taxes to receive contracts from the Homeland Security Department.   FACT: Bush has not taken any action on this issue.  (Ackerman - Newsweek 07.28.03)   LIE:  In light of his promise to keep Social Security in a lock box, the Bush administration promised to preserve surpluses "at least the size of the Social Security surplus" as a "threshold condition of public finance."   FACT: Bush's 2004 budget requires the government to use the entire Social Security surplus to fund deficits over the next ten years.  (Conrad & Spratt - Washington Post 02.04.03)   LIE:  The "tax relief I propose will give 23 million small-business owners an average tax cut of $2,042 this year."   FACT:  Most small businesses will get a tax break of less than $500 and nearly 25% will get nothing.  "The average is more than $2,000 only because a small number of very wealthy businessmen will get huge cuts."  (Krugman - New York Times 01.21.03)   LIE: "To keep farms in the family, we are going to get rid of the death tax." FACT:  The American Farm Bureau Federation could not cite a single example of a farm lost because of estate taxes.  Only the richest two percent pay estate taxes.  (New York Times 04.08.01)

... Link

Jan 03, 2004 By Michael C. Ruppert

FTW has stressed that events in the five years following September 11th 2001 would determine the course of human history for the next five hundred years. In looking at the tectonic pressures building during a presidential election year -- as driven by the emerging reality of Peak Oil and Gas -- it now appears that, of those five years, 2004 may well be marked by some of the greatest political, economic and military changes in history. Much of this upheaval will have been caused by the success of independent journalists, researchers, activists, courts, and congress in challenging the actions of the US Empire at home and abroad since 9/11 and holding it accountable for its own statements, actions and documents.

This brings to mind the proverb, "Be careful of what you pray for. You just might get it." This beast is dangerous now and signs are abundant, from the unrealized terror scares over the holidays, to the re-emergence of Mad Cow disease, to a suddenly renewed government interest in anthrax, that nothing is beyond the pale if the beast is threatened. Even the Washington Post's David Rothkopf planted seeds on November 24th when he suggested that a terrorist attack might "disrupt" the 2004 presidential elections. We should not be surprised.

With attacks on US and coalition troops in Iraq having intensified since the December 14 "capture" of Saddam Hussein and with the US losing the peace in Afghanistan, as attested in a recent report from the Council on Foreign Relations, it appears that some major distractions are going to be needed to keep the American economic and political machine operating. A December 28th story in the Post revealed that the rate of US casualties in Iraq had doubled in the four month period from September through the end of the year. There was to be no post-Saddam dividend on that account.

It's an open question whether the customary economic moves to grow the economy in advance of an election are not going to reveal some of the darker aspects of Peak Oil and Gas before the election even gets here. As the US, Chinese and European economies expand (China's is exploding), so does energy consumption. It is a deadly game to increase oil and gas use now and risk more blackouts and price spikes before next November.

A strong breeze is hitting the house of cards.

The success of challenges to the US version of 9/11 and to the fraudulent intelligence justifying last March's invasion of Iraq has put some major obstacles in front of Wall Street's and Washington's post-9/11 agenda. In the context of a presidential election year those obstacles will be of primary concern to the Bush administration as it seeks to hold on to its position as CEO of an emerging New World Order, and it must do everything possible to remove or neutralize all of them before then.

It is for that reason that Thomas Kean, the Republican chair of the so-called Independent Commission investigating 9/11, chose on December 17th to advance a modified limited hangout saying that the attacks could have been prevented had it not been for incompetence and intelligence failures on the part of middle managers. The timing of that announcement, just four days after the "capture" of Saddam Hussein, was a weak attempt to bury unresolved questions about 9/11 in boosted Bush approval ratings. The fact that Kean decided to make his announcement after having subpoenaed FAA records of Air Force and government actions on 9/11, but before receiving them; and after agreeing to the tepid compromise of reviewing partial extracts of George Bush's pre-9/11 intelligence briefs, but before seeing them, is ample evidence of his political motive. Investigative bodies rarely pass public judgment before reviewing the evidence.

If backed into a corner, the neocons and the global economic system which committed its support to them in 2000 will likely resort to extreme and draconian measures which may mark the end of the façade of American democracy. 2004 is going to be a very dangerous year. The major challenges faced by the Bush administration are both legal and self-created. They reflect inevitable challenges to positions adopted and statements made by the neocons since the US embarked on a course of infinite war for oil. They call to mind another old adage once expressed by a recovering alcoholic who said, "If you don't tell a lie, you don't have to remember what you said". The Bush administration is walking an unraveling tightrope.

Cheney's Energy Task Force

FTW has long maintained that the deepest and darkest secrets of 9/11 lay buried in the records of Vice President Cheney's National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG) which concluded its work and published a report admitting critical shortages in energy supplies in May of 2001. While those admissions were vague --- and located almost exclusively in buried sections of the report not mentioned in executive summaries or press accounts --- they clearly indicated that a major national priority was the acquisition of new sources of hydrocarbon energy against a backdrop of ever-decreasing domestic production.

Shortly after the report was submitted, a battle ensued between the House Government Reform Committee and Democrat Henry Waxman over the records of who had met with the panel and what had been discussed. While much of the early attention was focused on the participation of corporations like Enron, ExxonMobil and BP, FTW asserted that the real secrets had to do with the task force's awareness of peaking world oil and gas supplies and looming impacts on human civilization. Since the task force had been paid for with taxpayer money, Congress rightly felt that the public had a right to know who had been invited and what had been discussed.

Initial suits by the Government Accounting Office (GAO) and citizen groups including Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club affirmed the constitutional right (imperative) of Congress and the people to have access to the files. An initial ruling in US District Court agreed and the US Court of Appeals declined to intervene after a White House appeal. As a result, a very incomplete set of records was released by agencies that assisted the task force while the White House itself, arguing executive privilege, has steadfastly refused to reveal a single page of its records.

On December 15, 2003, as reported by the Associated Press, the US Supreme Court announced that it would make a ruling in the case sometime in July 2004, just three months shy of the presidential election. This presents a real problem for the Bush administration. Legally, there is little to sustain its obviously illegal actions. And presenting the American people with another politically-tainted Supreme Court ruling just months before the election could easily rekindle debate over the Court's illegal Bush v. Gore ruling which stopped the Florida recount in 2000.

Aside from reminding the Court through widespread publication of stories about the pending decision there is little the American people can do to influence the outcome. However, the Court is already feeling enough pressure as a multitude of Bush administration extralegal positions come under increasing fire and close public scrutiny. In order for the machine to continue to function it must protect the value of the American brand name as reflected by its ability to convince large portions of the populace that the system still works. While the American people may not fully understand the implications of a Supreme Court ruling favoring the Bush administration in this case, the lawyers who make the system work and journalists who report on it most certainly will.

This is the ultimate high-stakes, must-win decision for the administration in the coming year. Full disclosure of Cheney's records would enable publications like FTW to once and for all answer for the American people and the world the single biggest question about 9/11, "What would motivate them to do such a horrible thing? What could have been so important?" In a criminal trial for murder this would be one of the three basic elements required for a conviction: the motive. The method and opportunity have already been established.

911-Related Terror Prosecutions

Only one person in the entire world has been convicted of anything connected to the attacks of 9/11. Very few people have ever heard of Mounir el-Motassadeq who was arrested in Germany in November 2001 and, according to a December 16 Wall Street Journal report, convicted this year as an accessory to 3,066 murders. His conviction is about to be overturned solely as a result of the failure of a related German prosecution. That case failed recently because the US refused to produce a key witness who might have offered exonerating testimony, Ramzi bin al-Shibh.

Bin al-Shibh, reportedly captured in Pakistan a year to the day after the attacks, has been elevated to the status of principal planner in the 9/11 legend. Like one of the other alleged key planners, Khalid Shaikh Muhammad (KSM), he has yet to make a single public appearance while reams of convenient confessions from him and KSM are released by the US government to support its unsupportable version of events. Bin al-Shibh is reportedly being held at Guantanamo, outside the reach of media, lawyers and the Constitution. The credibility risk to the US government, as it spins a tangled web of conflicting data, is that at some point, in order to maintain any credibility at all, it will have to produce real and verifiable statements from those it holds in custody. It must produce the witnesses themselves, and in the flesh.

On December 11, 2003 the German trial of a second person charged with complicity in the 9/11 attacks, Abdelghani Mzoudi, collapsed when a statement from bin al-Shibh was presented to the court exonerating Mzoudi from any knowledge of the 9/11attacks. The statement made its way into court after German intelligence defied a US request to keep the statement out of court and obeyed German law which -- like US law -- demands that any exculpatory evidence be disclosed during trial. According to stories in The Guardian and The New York Times, German intelligence had had the exculpatory material in hand before Mzoudi's trial began.. This leaves open the question of why the US government had sought to illegally suppress evidence demonstrating Mzoudi's innocence.

The answer is clear. The US needs a 9/11 conviction, any 9/11 conviction, desperately.

The German judge who dismissed Mzoudi's case opened the door for an immediate appeal and reversal in the case of Motassadeq who, like Mzoudi, was connected with members of Mohammed Atta's Hamburg cell. Both men are Moroccans and both had sought bin al-Shibh's testimony in their defense. That access had repeatedly been denied to Motassadeq's attorneys. In an omen for future 9/11 prosecutions - if they ever happen - Judge Klaus Ruhle said, as reported in the Times on December 12, "that while he had strong doubts about the reliability of the evidence, he could not properly evaluate it without testimony from bin al-Shibh."

This leaves open the additional possibility that in order to avoid future and more dangerous exposures of its own criminal conduct, the US government created the bin al-Shibh testimony in order to prevent Mzoudi's trial from exposing even more glaring defects in the US-created 9/11 legend after it became clear that German courts were not going to yield to John Ashcroft's wishes.

In a very revealing passage at the end of its report the Times' Desmond Butler seemed to acknowledge lingering worldwide questions about whether KSM and bin al-Shibh had ever actually been taken into custody. He wrote, " According to the police's letter to the court, the witness presumed to be Mr. bin al-Shibh made his statement last month."

If Motassadeq's conviction is overturned, renewed examination of bin al-Shibh's role in 9/11 and subsequent "capture" could risk exposure of other lies about 9/11. This is especially true with regard to the deliberately confused identity of the "paymaster" for the attacks, Omar Saeed Sheikh, and the man who ordered him to transfer $100,000 to Mohammed Atta just weeks before 9/11 -- then-Pakistani intelligence chief General Mahmud Ahmad. Ahmad was known to have close ties to CIA Director George Tenet and was in Washington during the week of the attacks, meeting with Tenet, senior members of the Bush administration and key congressional leaders like House Intelligence Chair Porter Goss and Senate Intelligence Chair Bob Graham.

Zacariahs Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, jailed in Minnesota shortly before 9/11, was made famous by the legendary Rowley Memorandum, written by the FBI's Minneapolis legal affairs agent Coleen Rowley, TIME Magazine's Woman of the Year in 2002. In her memo she described deliberate, heavy-handed and successful attempts by FBI headquarters personnel, including Radical Fundamentalist Unit chief David Frasca, to suppress an investigation that might have prevented the attacks. As time has passed it has become apparent that details in the Rowley memorandum have become enshrined - as noted by one researcher - as "holy scripture" about 9/11. But what if some of those details were part of a fabricated legend made more credible by Rowley's protestations? For an excellent analysis of this scenario please see There's Something About Omar: Truth, Lies, and the Legend of 9/11 by Chaim Kupferberg at: www.globalresearch.ca .

Since his incarceration and the filing of charges against him, Moussaoui has repeatedly sought the testimony of Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, Mustafa Ahmed Hawsawi and bin al-Shibh. As in the above cases the US government has refused to allow depositions or the questioning of witnesses that might exonerate him. A US district court eventually ordered the witnesses to be produced and depositions to be taken. As a result, Moussaoui's prosecution stalled while John Ashcroft's Department of Justice appealed to a higher court for a ruling which is not likely to come down in Ashcroft's favor.

Given the outcome in the German trials it is extremely likely that going into the November election the Bush administration will not have a single 9/11-related conviction to show the American public; a fact which will surely be mentioned by the Democratic nominee and noted in the press.

Two additional recent US court decisions have further impaired the administration's ability to keep a lid on the lies of 9/11 and seriously compounded the above problems. On December 20, the AP reported that, in two separate Appeals Court rulings, it had been decided that the US could not keep detainees held in Guantanamo Cuba indefinitely outside the US legal system (i.e. the public eye) and that American citizens like alleged dirty-bomb suspect Jose Padilla could not be denied constitutional protections because they were allegedly "enemy combatants" being held outside US territory.

The result of the first ruling is to guarantee an inevitable point in time when the US government will have to produce Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, bin al-Shibh and other key figures in the 9/11 legend for public inspection. FTW has not a single doubt that the government's credibility will undeniably collapse at that moment if even the most basic questions are asked by the world's press and defense lawyers with an IQ higher than that of a baked potato.

The result of all these precedents would make it impossible for the government to successfully maintain the credibility of its accounts of 9/11.

Saddam Hussein

What were they thinking?

Assuming that it is the real Saddam Hussein that was officially taken into custody on December 14 th FTW cannot conceive of a single scenario in which the US government will ever let him come to trial. The world will not accept a secret trial.

The New York Times wrote on December 17th, "The trial of Saddam Hussein must do several things at once. It must educate Iraqis and the world about the nature of his regime, adhere to the highest international standards of fairness, and provide a mechanism for appropriate punishment. The best way to achieve those goals is by creating a tribunal inside Iraq under United Nations authority, staffed by Iraqi and international judges and prosecutors."

But the dilemma faced by the US was made clear by the Agence France Presse which wrote on December 20th, "Controversial French lawyer Jacques Verges says he is willing to defend Saddam Hussein in court and, if he can, bring world leaders to the witness stand, in what could be a huge embarrassment for the United States, France and other countries.

"?He insisted that 'all Western heads of state,' from the time of the 1980-1988 Iraq-Iran war to the latest Iraq conflict, should take the stand when the imprisoned former Iraqi officials go on trial? 'When we reprove the use of certain weapons (we need to know) who sold these weapons,' he said about Iraq 's past purchase of arms from France, Britain, the United States and Russia."

Joe Conason of The New York Observer observed on Dec 22nd that, " An obvious prospective witness is Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who acted as a special envoy to Baghdad during the early 1980's. On a courtroom easel, Saddam might display the famous December 1983 photograph of him shaking hands with Mr. Rumsfeld, who acknowledges that the United States knew Iraq was using chemical weapons. If his forces were using Tabun, mustard gas, and other forbidden poisons, he might ask, why did Washington restore diplomatic relations with Baghdad in November 1984?

There are many problems with the details of Saddam's convenient capture at a time when Bush popularity was sinking. A number of world papers from Britain to Australia have noted that Kurdish rebel groups laid claim to Saddam's capture before US sources released an official story. The Kurdish stories are credible but do not reveal the date of capture which might account for the former Iraqi dictator's disheveled appearance.

On December 21, FTW received the following unsourced photograph in an email titled "From a friend in Saudi Arabia." The picture purports to show two US soldiers demonstrating how they lifted a Styrofoam block seal to Saddam's hiding place. The picture poses two problems for the US story. First, it clearly depicts ripened dates hanging from a tree branch. This ripening only occurs in the summer months and by December dates have either long since been harvested, rotted black on the branch or have fallen from the trees. Next to the dates is a line holding an unknown meat drying in the sun. Again, this is a process - according to Iraqi and Arab sources - which only occurs during the summer months.

A search of various news websites revealed that the photograph was an AP photo which - along with at least four others showing the ripened dates - is still posted on the CBS News website at: www.cbsnews.com Go to "The Capture of Saddam" and then click on "Photo Essays").

The AP photos dispel other rumors that Saddam had been trapped under a concrete block. AP close-ups of the block above clearly indicate that it is lightweight. This is supported by the less-than-aggressive hand grips used by the soldiers in the photograph. While it is possible that bricks had been placed on top of the foam seal, it remains true that if Saddam had been captured sometime earlier, he was held a prisoner in the spider hole while his captors occupied the Spartan farmhouse above.

The timing and manner of Hussein's capture defy logic. He can only be tried in public and even if convenient confessions from him, unsupported by video or sworn testimony, allow the US to locate planted weapons of mass destruction, the cards of this poker hand are going to have to be fully disclosed at some point. The Bush administration knows this and FTW concludes that even as it announced his capture, it also had decided that Saddam Hussein would never be tried in public or allowed to defend himself. This makes his capture an incredibly ominous event. Something big will have to happen to prevent the trial from taking place.

A Grand Jury Over The Plame/Wilson Case

Finally, a December 26th story in The Washington Post reported that a fourth prosecutor has been added to the Department of Justice team investigating who it was in the White House who leaked the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame to journalist Bob Novak last year. Plame is the wife of former US Ambassador Joseph Wilson who was dispatched on the orders of Dick Cheney to investigate documents purporting to show that Saddam Hussein had been attempting to purchase uranium from Niger. The documents were crude forgeries, yet President Bush mentioned them in his state-of-the-union address and much of his cabinet relied upon them to justify the Iraqi invasion even after Wilson had reported that they were fakes and the claims were false.

According to the Post story FBI sources have indicated that a grand jury may shortly be empanelled to investigate the case. If so, Bush administration problems will multiply as more and more of the evidence appears before a body over which John Ashcroft cannot exert complete control.

The Post story added that, "On Monday [Dec. 22] the Senate minority leader and the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services committee sent a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft demanding more information about the probe. 'We request that you provide us with an overall status of the investigation, including the number of people the Justice Department has interviewed, the number of briefings you have received, the general types of information you are briefed on, what conditions you have placed on the scope of these briefings to ensure the independence of this investigation, and whether you have discussed this case with senior administration officials outside the Justice Department?

"The Senators said that it is an apparent conflict of interest for Ashcroft to be briefed on the subject, and again requested a special counsel to prosecute the case?"

The Daschle-Levin letter apparently hit home. In a surprise announcement on December 30th - as reported on CNN - John Ashcroft announced that he had recused himself from any role in the investigation and that control of the case would pass to the US Attorney in Chicago, Patrick Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald's selection was apparently governed by nothing more than political concerns. But it should be noted that under US law, US Attorneys operate independently of the Attorney General. (See: www.fromthewilderness.com )

This development further weakens Bush's ability to control a legal powder keg that, like so many others, could topple his regime.

Of key interest in this investigation is a document which surfaced out of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the fact that there have been several mysterious deaths in that unit in recent months. (FTW is currently preparing a detailed subscriber-only investigation of the links between these developments, the deaths and the fact that the CIA and the Bush administration are in a feud just short of a "shooting war".)

If a grand jury is empanelled in this case it could - as was the case with the Watergate grand jury and Richard Nixon - spell the end of the Bush administration. The current regime has proven itself an inept manager of world affairs for the benefit of the financial system and offensive to most of the world's population. As FTW has said for a year, George W. Bush may be unbeatable in the election. He will certainly raise more money than all of his challengers and, if the three preceding years are any measure, he has demonstrated that he will go to any lengths to retain power. But that does not make him unstoppable. Richard Nixon believed that he was unstoppable and played a tough poker hand to the very end. The difference between Richard Nixon and George W. Bush is that Richard Nixon capitulated when he saw that further struggle would destroy the country.

Against the backdrop of Peak oil and Gas and what lies inevitably in our future, George W. Bush may see no similar grounds for restraint.

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