ZGram - May 20, 2002 - "Raimondo: America Awakens"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

=1FZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

May 20, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Please, folks - for the record:

If I run somebody else's essays, news pieces or op-eds, it does not 
mean that I agree with everything or that I endorse a particular 
slant or line.  It simply means that I am doing what I have done 
since January 1, 1996 - practically every day, come rain or shine:  I 
have given my readers a feel for where this "Clash of Civilizations" 
war-like-any-other-war is heading.

The big story over the weekend was, of course, that the White House 
story about not having a clue about the 9/11 threat fell apart with 
the May 16 CBS release.  Now it's again a media feeding frenzy, with 
stories breaking everywhere.  Here is the clearest summary of this 
development that I could find, written by antiwar's Justin Raimondo 
at www.antiwar.com -

Regarding the above, I DON'T agree with Raimondo that the Israelis 
were simply spying to kind of help the US intelligence out! 
Nonsense!  It seems to me the Israelis had their fingers in the 
cookie jar, and now it has slammed shut, and they've gotten stuck.

Happy hunting, Sherlock Holmes's!  Conspiracy-prone Revisionists have 
done it for decades, and as they say, all roads will lead to ... ?! 
Rome???

[START]

Behind the Headlines
by Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com

May 20, 2002

AMERICA AWAKES
=46rom its post-9/11 sleep

Howard Kurtz characterized the abruptness of the sea-change that has 
taken place regarding the great mystery of 9/11. "In a single day," 
he wrote in Friday's Washington Post, "the capital's media climate 
has been transformed," going from wide-eyed acceptance of whatever 
guff government officials had to dish out to relentless disdain for 
their every utterance:

"Reporters pounded White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and national 
security adviser Condoleezza Rice at briefings yesterday, skepticism 
and even indignation in their voices, as they demanded detailed 
explanations. It was, in short, far different from the tone of 
flag-bedecked networks after the Sept. 11 attacks, when President 
Bush, riding a wave of popularity and patriotism, was treated with 
deference by the media. Indeed, the administration likely never faced 
a more hostile press corps than yesterday."

It all started on Wednesday night, when CBS News broke the story: 
pre-9/11, President Bush had been briefed on the possibility of a 
massive terrorist attack in the US involving airplane hijackings:

"President Bush was told in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks 
that Osama bin Laden's terrorist network might hijack U.S. passenger 
planes - information which prompted the administration to issue an 
alert to federal agencies - but not the American public."

In an August 6 intelligence memo entitled "Bin Laden Determined to 
Strike in U.S.," the President had been informed of the threat of 
airline hijackings planned by Al Qaeda. This admission was in marked 
contrast to the line handed out by National Security advisor 
Condolezza Rice, who had earlier indicated that the administration 
had been primarily focused on threats to overseas American targets. 
The floodgates were opened, and a series of stunning news reports 
soon inundated the global media:

It turns out that, two months before the attack, the Phoenix office 
of the FBI had written a memo warning explicitly about Arab students 
enrolled at a local flight school - the same one where Hani Hanjour, 
one of the 9/11 hijackers, had trained. The memo named Bin Laden as 
the possible locus of a hijacking plot.

And it just so happened that the draft of a plan to go after Al Qaeda 
had been completed on September 10 - but that the President hadn't 
yet seen it before Bin Laden struck first.

As if to underscore the utter haplessness of our leaders, a September 
1999 government report was unearthed: written by Rex A. Hudson and 
prepared under the auspices of the Federal Research Division, the 
report gave explicit warning of the suicide attack, eerily presaging 
both the method and the target:

"Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaida's Martyrdom Battalion could 
crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) 
into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence 
Agency (CIA), or the White House."

It didn't help matters much for the Bushies that people were 
remembering John Ashcroft's decision to stop flying commercial, last 
summer, in an entirely new light. As a helpful reminder, Antiwar.com 
posted a July 26 CBS News report, "Ashcroft Flying High," which noted 
that our Attorney General was now traveling exclusively by chartered 
jet, because:

"'There was a threat assessment and there are guidelines. He is 
acting under the guidelines,' an FBI spokesman said. Neither the FBI 
nor the Justice Department, however, would identify what the threat 
was, when it was detected or who made it."

Poor Ari Fleischer could hardly fend off Helen "Doubting" Thomas, 
before he was confronted with ABC correspondent Terry Moran, who 
demanded to know "Why didn't [Bush] level with the American people 
about what he knew?" Putting it in more immediate terms, Ron Fournier 
of the Associated Press asked Ms. Rice:

"Shouldn't the American public have known these facts before they got 
on planes in the summer and fall of last year?"

Now, in all fairness, the Democrats are circling the President as 
election season approaches, and there is every indication that this 
is fast becoming a partisan issue. Yet, in this questioning 
atmosphere, the Democrats are raising some important points. House 
Democratic leader Richard Gephardt has it exactly right:

"We need to know what people knew, and when they knew it and what 
they did about it. I don't know what the facts are."

Gephardt, who exemplifies the troglodyte faction of the Democratic 
party, is probably not all that familiar with the Internet, and so we 
can understand if not forgive his ignorance. For the CBS story was 
hardly the first indication that US officials had some indication 
that a massive terrorist assault was about to take place on American 
soil.

In the days following the attack, Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine 
Zeitung was reporting that US and Israeli intelligence had picked up 
indications via Echelon months in advance, and that the British were 
also in the loop. And if you really want to go waaaay back in the 
archives, check out this 1998 item reported by Matt Drudge:

"The Laden scare also is being felt domestically, intelligence 
sources tell Time they have evidence that bin Laden may be planning 
his boldest move yet - a strike on Washington or possibly New York 
City in an eye-for-an-eye retaliation. 'We've hit his headquarters, 
now he hits ours,' a State [sic] tells Time=8A

"Developing=8A."

That story developed, alright - and it is still developing. So let's 
keep googling this subject, and see what we come up with=8A.

Aha! Here's a hot clue from the September 16 [UK] Telegraph:

"Israeli intelligence officials say that they warned their 
counterparts in the United States last month that large-scale 
terrorist attacks on highly visible targets on the American mainland 
were imminent=8A.

"The Telegraph has learnt that two senior experts with Mossad, the 
Israeli military intelligence service, were sent to Washington in 
August to alert the CIA and FBI to the existence of a cell of as many 
of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation."

Gee, just in time for the fabled August 6 memo, which the government 
still, as of this writing [May 18], refuses to make public. What a =8A 
coincidence?

Amid the wave of "revisionist" thinking on what happened in the 
months prior to 9/11, and the new focus on who knew what when, our 
intrepid congressional investigators are bound to stumble across what 
I call the story of the century and others dismiss as an unproven 
conspiracy theory. The story of Israel's massive spy operation in the 
US, which seems to break in waves that occur every few months, has 
broken yet again, this time in Salon - and it has never been more 
relevant.

Although I was the first to raise the possibility of an Israeli 
connection to the events of 9/11, the story was soon taken up by 
others, first of all by Carl Cameron, of Fox News. Cameron's 
four-part series on Israel's underground army of covert agents in the 
US showed that the Mossad had the methods, the means, and the motive 
to acquire foreknowledge of the attacks. The Israelis had infiltrated 
platoons of intelligence agents into the U.S., including explosives 
and electronic interception experts, under the guise of "art 
students" selling artwork door-to-door. In the months prior to 9/11, 
these aspiring "artists" were apparently very busy. Cameron concludes:

"There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9-11 
attacks, but investigators suspect that the Israelis may have 
gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared 
it. A highly placed investigator said there are -quote - 'tie-ins.' 
But when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them, 
saying, - quote - 'evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is 
classified.'"

Cameron's sources told him that this information is "classified" - 
but enough has already leaked out to give us some perspective, and a 
sense of the context in which 9/11 occurred. As we draw closer to the 
9/11 enigma, attention is now focused on the crucial months prior to 
the worst terrorist attack in American history - a time when Israel 
was conducting a massive spy operation in the U.S. In light of recent 
revelations, including the leaking of crucial government documents, 
the confluence of these two events begins to make all too much sense=8A.

To begin with, 9/11 was not entirely a "surprise attack," as we were 
led to believe, but was anticipated - in some detail - by US 
officials, including the President. If and when the August memo is 
released in its entirety, the source of that information is bound to 
be revealed - and this is no doubt one reason for the 
administration's resistance to making it public. For the trail leads 
directly to the Israelis, whose intelligence service was doing what 
ours should have been doing all along: watching the terrorists in our 
midst.

Naturally, the Mossad has an alibi. For the Telegraph further 
indicates that the information they provided wasn't very helpful:

"'They had no specific information about what was being planned but 
linked the plot to Osama bin Laden and told the Americans that there 
were strong grounds for suspecting Iraqi involvement,' said a senior 
Israeli security official."

Now that the Iraqi connection has been debunked and discredited, it 
is time to take the investigation in a new and heretofore unexpected 
direction. I still can confidently state that, in spite of the new 
revelations, Cynthia McKinney's leftoid conspiracy theory - Bush 
knew, and let 9/11 happen in order to enrich his friends in the 
Carlyle Group (and, incidentally, start a world war) - is pure hokum. 
Bush and his subordinates are telling the truth - of course they 
didn't know when and where the attack would come. The question is: 
who was in a position to know? Certainly not the incompetents in 
Washington. The Israelis, however, came to Washington full of vague 
warnings - but what did they really know, and how did they come to 
know it?

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[END]

=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D

Thought for the Day:

"The night approaches, bringing dread...
Is it so awesome?  Ask the dead."

(Lloyd Hartley)