marcosolo, 28. Dezember 2004 um 19:59:04 MEZ

Rumsfeld liefert Material für Verschwörungstheoretiker

spiegel online, 28.12.2004

Neuer Ärger für US-Verteidigungsminister Rumsfeld: Bei seiner überraschenden Weihnachts-Visite in Bagdad unterlief dem umstrittenen Pentagon-Chef ein peinlicher Ausrutscher. Mit einer Bemerkung gab er Verschwörungstheoretikern Munition, die an der offiziell erklärten Absturzursache des UA-Flugs 93 in Pennsylvania am 11.9.2001 zweifeln.

Washington - Der Patzer unterlief Donald Rumsfeld auf seiner überraschenden Reise am Weihnachtsabend nach Bagdad. Vor Begleitern und Journalisten redete er unter anderem auch über den United-Airlines-Flug 93 am 11. September 2001. Die Maschine war nach einem heftigen Kampf im Cockpit von den Terroristen selbst zum Absturz gebracht worden.

Rumsfeld dagegen sprach von den "Leuten, die New York angegriffen haben und das Flugzeug über Pennsylvania abgeschossen haben."

Ein Sprecher des Pentagon beeilte sich laut CNN, den Passus umgehend als Versprecher Rumsfelds abzutun. Zu spät: In den Verschwörer-Foren im Internet wurde Rumsfelds Bemerkung bereits heftig debattiert. "War es ein Ausrutscher? War es ein Irrtum? Oder war es die Wahrheit, die schließlich drei Jahre nach der Tragödie die Öffentlichkeit erreicht?", schrieb etwa ein Diskutant im WorldNetDaily.com.

Bis heute gibt es viele, die sich mit der Erklärung für den Absturz über Shanksville in Pennsylvania nicht abfinden wollen. Die offizielle und durch Telefonanrufe der Passagiere gestützte Darstellung lautet, dass Reisende an Bord der Maschine das Cockpit gestürmt hatten, um die Entführer zu überwältigen. Diese hatten daraufhin die Maschine zum Absturz gebracht.

In einer Erklärung der US-Regierung kurz nach den Terror-Attacken hatte es geheißen, keine der von Terroristen entführten Maschinen sei abgeschossen worden - obwohl eine Erlaubnis des Präsidenten dafür vorlag.

Die Verschwörungs-Anhänger verweisen nun erneut darauf, dass es kurz nach den Angriffen mehrere Augenzeugenberichte aus Shanksville gegeben habe, die alle von einem zweiten, militärisch aussehenden Flugzeug nahe der entführten Maschine berichtet hatten.

Die Berichte wurden nie bestätigt und auch im Flugzeugwrack wurden keinerlei Indizien für einen Abschuss gefunden.

ms: hier habt Ihr eifrigen Befürworter der offiziellen Theorie nun einen schrecklichen Recherchierfehler begangen. Dann zeigt mir doch bitte das Flugzeugwrack. Das ist ja gerade das Hauptproblem. Es gab kein Wrack. Da waren nur kleine Trümmerstücke, die an sich nicht an ein Flugzeug erinnerten. Nehmt die Fährte endlich auf und brecht das Schweigen.................

 

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marcosolo, 19. Februar 2004 um 22:56:07 MEZ

9/11 commission - Under The Bright Lights

David Corn, Washington editor of The Nation, is the author of The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (Crown Publishers).

George W. Bush has finally agreed to be interviewed by the independent 9/11 commission. Well, sort of. The White House says he will only meet with a limited number of the commission's 10 members. After the commission asked to talk privately to Bush-and to Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton and Al Gore-White House press secretary Scott McClellan on Feb. 13 said that his boss had "agreed to the request." But the following day an unnamed White House official said that Bush was not planning on meeting with the entire commission, which includes five Republicans and five Democrats.

This was hardly surprising, given Bush's history with the panel. He first opposed creating a commission to investigate what went wrong before and on 9/11. Then, as political pressure mounted, he went along-but only after winning the right to name the head of the commission. For that slot he selected Henry Kissinger, the poster boy for government secrecy. Kissinger ended up turning down the appointment to avoid having to name the clients of his international consulting firm. (What a patriot!) Bush then anointed Thomas Kean, a former moderate Republican governor from New Jersey. And several weeks ago when the commission, which has been facing a May 2004 deadline for the completion of its work, requested two additional months, the Bush White House said no. Once again, it retreated in the face of opposition-particularly from the 9/11 family members. (Still, the House Republican leadership says it is dead-set against any extension, and the committee can only obtain extra time if Congress passes the appropriate legislation.)

It's understandable that Bush is not eager to appear before the entire commission. It does contain several feisty members-most notably, former Rep. Timothy Roemer and former Sen. Bob Kerrey, both Democrats. More importantly, there are several obvious questions that could cause Bush to squirm. Here is an abbreviated list:

Mr. President, as the joint inquiry into 9/11 conducted by the House and Senate intelligence committees first noted, in early July 2001, U.S. intelligence officers prepared a warning that read:

Based on a review of all-source reporting over the last five months, we believe that UBL [Usama bin Laden] will launch a significant terrorist attack against U.S. and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning."

The joint inquiry's final report noted that this warning had been handed to "senior government officials." But it didn't specify who saw it because your administration claims that the names of the recipients are classified information. Yet committee sources have told journalists (including David Corn) that this briefing did reach the Oval Office. Did you see this briefing? Did your national security adviser Condoleezza Rice see it? What, if anything, did you or your national security team do in response? Did you take it seriously? Did you order any action? And why wouldn't you let the American public know who received this warning? Don't American citizens have the right to know?

In May 2002, the public learned that an Aug. 6, 2001, highly classified intelligence report prepared for you included references to bin Laden and his desire to hijack airplanes. In the media maelstrom that ensued, Rice told reporters that this President's Daily Brief contained only information about bin Laden's methods of operation from a historical perspective and referred to no specific warnings. Your administration refused to release this PDB to the congressional intelligence committees. But the committees managed to find a source in the intelligence community who informed them that "a closely held intelligence report" in August 2001 (read: this particular PDB) said that bin Laden was seeking to conduct attacks within the United States, that Al Qaeda maintained a support structure here, and that information obtained in May 2001 indicated that a group of bin Laden supporters were planning attacks in the United States with explosives. This was dramatically different from Rice's characterization of the PDB as including only the same-old/same-old. Did she mislead the public about it? And how did you react to this information? Was anything done in response to it?

After 9/11, you said, "No one could have conceivably imagined suicide bombers burrowing into our society and then emerging all in the same day to fly their aircraft-fly U.S. aircraft into buildings full of innocent people, and show no remorse." Yet since the mid-1990s, U.S. intelligence had collected reports noting that Al Qaeda was interested in precisely this type of attack. One example of many: in 1999, a public report prepared for the National Intelligence Council, an affiliate of the CIA, by the research division of the Library of Congress noted, "Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaida's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft... into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House." Before 9/11, were you unaware that such a threat did exist? After 9/11, did anyone tell that the U.S. had previously received intelligence suggesting Al Qaeda might try to hijack airplanes and slam them into American targets (including your temporary home)? Also after 9/11, did you ever inquire why these intelligence reports were never acted upon-that is, why there were no contingency plans created for defending the United States from such an assault?

Richard Clarke, who handled counter-terrorism at the National Security Council during the Clinton years and during the first few months of your administration, devised a comprehensive plan to "roll back" Al Qaeda. Yet your national security team ignored it. Why was that? Were your aides so put off by the previous administration that they wanted nothing to do with any national security ideas developed before you entered the White House? In the first half of 2001, how much pressure did you place on your aides to develop their own plan for dealing with Al Qaeda?

One of the great tragedies of 9/11 is that the FBI had an active informant in San Diego who had numerous contacts in 2000 with two of the 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. And he may also have had more limited contact with a third hijacker, Hani Hanjour. In 2000, the CIA had information that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar-who had already been linked to terrorism-were or might be in the United States. Yet it had not placed them on a watch list for suspected terrorists or shared this information with the FBI. The intelligence committees reported, "What is clear... is that the informant's contacts with the hijackers, had they been capitalized on, would have given the San Diego FBI field office perhaps the intelligence community's best chance to unravel the September 11 plot. Given the CIA's failure to disseminate, in a timely manner, the intelligence information on...al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, that chance, unfortunately, never materialized." This was a major screw-up on the CIA's part. Yet in Feb. 2002, CIA chief George Tenet said 9/11 "was not the result of the failure of attention and discipline and focus." Given what it is known now, doesn't Tenet's remark seem terribly wrong? Why didn't you order any disciplinary action for those who failed at the CIA?

According to the intelligence committees' report, an FBI budget official said that counter-terrorism was not a priority for Attorney General John Ashcroft prior to 9/11, and the FBI faced pressure to cut its counter-terrorism program to satisfy Ashcroft's other priorities. Why wasn't that a firing offense?

Why did your administration insist on classifying the chapter on Saudi Arabia in the intelligence committees' final report? Republican and Democratic members of Congress urged you to release at least portions of it. So did the Saudi government. According to the final report, a July 2002 CIA cable included a CIA officer's concerns that persons associated with a foreign government-meaning Saudi Arabia-may have provided financial assistance to the hijackers. Doesn't the American public deserve to know if there was a Saudi connection?

The final report of the intelligence committees-which, of course, was approved by Republicans and Democrats, concluded:

The intelligence community failed to capitalize on both the individual and collective significance of available information.... As a result, the community missed opportunities to disrupt the September 11 plot by denying entry to or detaining would-be hijackers; to at least try to unravel the plot through surveillance and other investigative work within the United States; and, finally, to generate a heightened state of alert and thus harden the homeland against attack. No one will ever know what might have happened had more connections been drawn between these disparate pieces of information.... The important point is that the intelligence community, for a variety of reasons, did not bring together and fully appreciate a range of information that could have greatly enhanced its chances of uncovering and preventing Osama bin Laden's plan to attack the United States on September 11, 2001.

Did you ever hold anyone in the intelligence community accountable for this failure?

There is much to ask Bush. He may even have much to tell the commission. And 9/11 family members, historians and other citizens who desire a full accounting of what happened that horrific day can hope that the commission will make public the transcripts of its sessions with Clinton, Gore, Cheney and especially Bush. After all, with Bush running for re-election on his national security credentials, all of this is an essential part of that record.

 

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marcosolo, 12. Februar 2004 um 20:39:07 MEZ

11. SEPTEMBER

Clinton und Bush sollen vor Untersuchungskommission

Was wussten die amerikanischen Geheimdienste vor den Anschlägen vom 11. September. Das herauszufinden ist der Auftrag einer Untersuchungskommission des US-Kongresses. Das Gremium hofft nun auf die Kooperationsbereitschaft von Bill Clinton und George W. Bush.

Madison/USA - Die Kommission will in Kürze den US-Präsidenten und seinen Vorgänger befragen. Beide sollten öffentlich über mögliche Warnungen aussagen, die sie aus Geheimdienstkreisen vor den Anschlägen erhalten haben könnten, teilte der Kommissionsvorsitzende Thomas Kean heute mit. Das Gremium werde in den kommenden Woche entsprechende formelle Einladungen versenden.

Bushs und Clintons Kooperation sei entscheidend für die Arbeit der Kommission, sagte Kean der Tageszeitung "The Record of Bergen County" im US-Staat New Jersey. Man gehe nicht davon aus, dass beide sich zu einer öffentlichen Vernehmung bereit erklären würden, hoffe jedoch auf ihre Zustimmung zu einer Aussage hinter verschlossenen Türen. Clinton hat bereits sein Einverständnis signalisiert. Bush erklärte in einem NBC-Interview, er werde "vielleicht" aussagen. Laut Kean sollen auch Vizepräsident Dick Cheney und sein Vorgänger Al Gore befragt werden.

Die Untersuchungskommission wurde vom Kongress in Washington eingesetzt. Sie soll herausfinden, inwieweit die US-Regierung auf einen Terroranschlag dieses Ausmaßes vorbereitet war und Empfehlungen für die Zukunft abgeben.

 

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