I have long believed that the key to fighting the War Party is demolishing its central myth: the outlandish idea that the 19 Arab hijackers, all on their own, and managing to avoid detection for years, somehow humbled the mightiest superpower on earth.
...Somewhere in the chain of command there was a bottleneck, and this raises two questions: where – and why?
It seems logical to assign the task of the nation's security from terrorist attacks to the National Security Advisor, but Condi, as made clear in her testimony, is not taking responsibility. Whether the bottleneck was located in her office, or originated further down the federal hierarchy, answering the question of why is the ostensible purpose of the 9/11 Commission – which is charged with discovering how this vast "intelligence failure" occurred, and how to prevent it from ever happening again. But what if there was no failure involved here, but instead a great success: a concerted effort to divert attention away from Al Qaeda (and toward Iraq) that succeeded – with crucial inside help provided by operatives working in the upper and mid-level echelons of the US government.
As the focus of the Commission's investigations zeroes in on the crucial months and weeks prior to 9/11, Sibel Edmonds, a 32-year-old former translator at the National Security Agency, has her turn in the spotlight. She has been trying to direct the attention of government officials and Congress to her explosive contentions. Edmonds says that a cabal of spies, associated with Turkish intelligence, was working inside the NSA listening station, where electronic messages and other sorts of "chatter" are picked up, sifted, and translated, and that they tried to recruit her. They wanted her to refrain from translating certain taped phone conversations and other surveillance, and threatened her when she refused. In an affidavit filed with the Senate Intelligence Committee, Ms. Edmonds testified that "investigations are being compromised, incorrect or misleading translations are being sent to agents in the field. Translations are being blocked and circumvented."
The NSA is the eyes and ears of the US government as it surveys the world, and its own back yard, assessing threats and preparing to respond. But if foreign agents have penetrated the system, then decision-makers are deliberately blinkered, flailing about in the dark, deaf, dumb, and blind. Just as we were on the eve of 9/11, when two crucial messages were picked up:
"The match is about to begin."
And:
"Tomorrow is zero hour."
These bits of "chatter" were given low priority and left untranslated until September 12. Given what we now know about the threat level at that point, how can such a "glitch" be explained?
...Somewhere in the chain of command there was a bottleneck, and this raises two questions: where – and why?
It seems logical to assign the task of the nation's security from terrorist attacks to the National Security Advisor, but Condi, as made clear in her testimony, is not taking responsibility. Whether the bottleneck was located in her office, or originated further down the federal hierarchy, answering the question of why is the ostensible purpose of the 9/11 Commission – which is charged with discovering how this vast "intelligence failure" occurred, and how to prevent it from ever happening again. But what if there was no failure involved here, but instead a great success: a concerted effort to divert attention away from Al Qaeda (and toward Iraq) that succeeded – with crucial inside help provided by operatives working in the upper and mid-level echelons of the US government.
As the focus of the Commission's investigations zeroes in on the crucial months and weeks prior to 9/11, Sibel Edmonds, a 32-year-old former translator at the National Security Agency, has her turn in the spotlight. She has been trying to direct the attention of government officials and Congress to her explosive contentions. Edmonds says that a cabal of spies, associated with Turkish intelligence, was working inside the NSA listening station, where electronic messages and other sorts of "chatter" are picked up, sifted, and translated, and that they tried to recruit her. They wanted her to refrain from translating certain taped phone conversations and other surveillance, and threatened her when she refused. In an affidavit filed with the Senate Intelligence Committee, Ms. Edmonds testified that "investigations are being compromised, incorrect or misleading translations are being sent to agents in the field. Translations are being blocked and circumvented."
The NSA is the eyes and ears of the US government as it surveys the world, and its own back yard, assessing threats and preparing to respond. But if foreign agents have penetrated the system, then decision-makers are deliberately blinkered, flailing about in the dark, deaf, dumb, and blind. Just as we were on the eve of 9/11, when two crucial messages were picked up:
"The match is about to begin."
And:
"Tomorrow is zero hour."
These bits of "chatter" were given low priority and left untranslated until September 12. Given what we now know about the threat level at that point, how can such a "glitch" be explained?
Given what we know about Ahmed Chalabi's phony intelligence fed to our warhawks, the "failure" begins more and more to look like a question of being duped.
I might have to reassess my conviction that the warhawks themselves, with DoubleDumb at the helm, are complicit in the WTC attacks in their efforts to create a scenario of perpetual war to fill their personal coffers and greed for power. An alternative is that, in their greedy desires, they were easy marks for cleverer plotters.
Either way, the losers are the people of the world (and the world itself), because the whole mess still works to the benefit of the warmongers, no matter which side of the game they are playing on.
(More about Sibel Edmonds.)
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