9/11: Criminal Incompetence

9/11: Criminal Incompetence and Ass-Covering by the Bush Administration: 14 Facts Which Show Criminal Negligence and Ass-Covering

On this eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, we would like to take a look back at what went wrong.

While the Bush administration tried to make its response to 9/11 its crowning achievement, the truth is that they acted with criminal incompetence and ass-covering.

(1) The U.S. is at least partly responsible for creating Al Qaeda.  For example, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser admitted on CNN that we organized and supported Bin Laden and the other originators of “Al Qaeda” in the 1970s to fight the Soviets.

Professor of strategy at the Naval War College and former National Security Agency intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer John R. Schindler documents, the U.S. supported Bin Laden and other Al Qaeda terrorists in Bosnia.

(2) The chair of the 9/11 Commission said that the attack was preventable.  It is thoroughly-documented that an attack such as 9/11 was entirely foreseeable.  Specifically, Al Qaeda flying planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon was something which American military and intelligence services – and our allies – knew could happen.

(3) U.S. intelligence services have repeatedly infiltrated Al Qaeda and related groups, but then idiotically failed to stop them.  For example – as the New York Times, CBS News and others reported – the FBI informant involved in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center begged the FBI to substitute fake bomb power for real explosives, but his FBI handler moronically let real explosives be used.

Similarly – as reported by Newsweek, the New York Times and others – an FBI informant hosted and rented a room to 2 of the 9/11 hijackers while they were in the U.S., but then stupidly failed to stop them.

Indeed, former counter-terrorism boss Richard Clarke theorizes that top CIA brass tried to recruit the hijackers and turn them to our side, but were unsuccessful. And – when they realized had failed – they covered up their tracks so that the FBI would not investigate their illegal CIA activities , “malfeasance and misfeasance”, on U.S. soil.

In other words, our intelligence services’ attempts to infiltrate and work with people inside of terrorist cells was horribly botched; and they did a horrible job of stopping terrorist attacks once they were set in motion.

(4) Dick Cheney was in charge of all of America’s counter-terrorism exercises, activities and responses on 9/11. See this Department of State announcement and this CNN article.  As such, at least part of the blame for failing to stop the attacks is on his shoulders.

(5) The Energy Task Force chaired by Dick Cheney prior to 9/11 collected maps of Iraqi oil, Saudi and United Arab Emerates fields and potential suitors for that oil. And you might have heard that the oil bigs attended the Task Force meetings.

According to the New Yorker – a secret document written by the National Security Council (NSC) on February 3, 2001 directed NSC staff to cooperate fully with  the Energy Task Force as it considered the “melding” of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy:

“The review of operational policies towards rogue states,” such as Iraq, and “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields”.

It is difficult to brush off Cheney’s Energy Task Force’s examination of arab oil maps as a harmless comparison of American energy policy with known oil reserves because the NSC explicitly linked the Task Force, oil, and regime change.

The above-linked New Yorker article quotes a former senior director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian affairs at the NSC said:

If this little group was discussing geostrategic plans for oil, it puts the issue of war in the context of the captains of the oil industry sitting down with Cheney and laying grand, global plans.

See also this essay.

Is that why idiot Cheney – the guy in charge of all terror protection efforts before and on 9/11 – failed to effectively respond to 9/11 with normal air defense?  Was he too busy pining over Iraqi oil maps to pay any attention?

(6)  The military – under the idiot Vice President’s command that day – didn’t scramble enough fighter jets, and then scrambled jets far over the Atlantic Ocean, in what Senator Mark Dayton called:

The most gross incompetence and dereliction of responsibility and negligence that I’ve ever, under those extreme circumstances, witnessed in the public sector.

Cheney – and the other people in charge of anti-terror response that day – screwed up big time.

But just like the bank CEOs who are rewarded for causing the financial crisis by being given bailouts and subsidies and breaks, the military and intelligence officials who dropped the ball that day have been promoted. As Time reported:

They have basically promoted the exact same people who have presided over the … failure,” says a former Justice Department official, “and those individuals took the same thinking with them.

As the Washington Post reported, no one from the  CIA, FBI or NSA has been reprimanded, punished, or fired for the events of 9/11.

The same is true for the military personnel on watch that day. For example, General Myers, who was Acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on September 11th, was quickly confirmed as Chairman two weeks later. General Ralph Eberhart, Commander in Chief of NORAD at the time of the attack, was promoted to head the new “Northern Command” a year after the attack.

Just as with the financial crisis, no one has been punished, and the people who screwed up have been allowed to fail upwards.

(7) On the day of 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney initiated Continuity of Government Plans that ended America’s constitutional form of government (at least for some undetermined period of time.)

On that same day, a national state of emergency was declared … and that state of emergency has continuously been in effect up to today. … even though U.S. military and intelligence officials say that the threat from Al Qaeda is now almost entirely non-existent.

(8) Many of the draconian “national security programs” – such as the Patriot Act, spying on Americans and indefinite detention – overtly approved after 9/11 had actually been implemented or planned before 9/11.  September 11th was used as an excuse to ramp up these programs.

These programs were approved during the Bush administration … but were never terminated by the Obama administration.  In fact, while Obama is a nicer and smarter guy than Bush, top constitutional law professors say that Obama has actually expanded these programs. And top national security experts say that these programs actually harm our national security and increase the threat from terrorism.  See this and this.

(9)  The Bush administration immediately used the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to carry out decades-old neoconservative plans to implement regime change throughout the Middle East and North Africa.  And see this,

(10) The Bush administration pretended that Saddam Hussein had a hand in 9/11 …  one of the two main justifications for that war.

(11) Allegedly,  Saddam offered to leave Iraq – and the Taliban offered to turn over Bin Laden – in order to prevent U.S. invasion.  But the U.S. turned down the offers and invaded anyway.

We can’t get the bad guys using peaceful means, now can we?  We have a war to fight!

(12) In contrast, other governments that might actually have sponsored the attacks have been let off scot-free … and have even been given huge amounts of financial support.

(13) As the 9/11 Commission itself notes, as part of its ass-covering efforts, the Bush administration engaged in criminal obstruction of justice.

There are numerous examples of obstruction of justice into the 9/11 investigation, including:

• The chairs of both the 9/11 Commission and the Official Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 said that Soviet-style government “minders” obstructed the investigation into 9/11 by intimidating witnesses

• The 9/11 Commissioners concluded that officials from the Pentagon lied to the Commission, and considered recommending criminal charges for such false statements

• The tape of interviews of air traffic controllers on-duty on 9/11 was intentionally destroyed by crushing the cassette by hand, cutting the tape into little pieces, and then dropping the pieces in different trash cans around the building as shown by this NY Times article (summary version is free; full version is pay-per-view) and by this article from the Chicago Sun-Times

• As reported by ACLU, FireDogLake, RawStory and many others, declassified documents shows that Senior Bush administration officials sternly cautioned the 9/11 Commission against probing too deeply into the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001

Moreover, the CIA videotaped the interrogation of 9/11 suspects, falsely told the 9/11 Commission that there were no videotapes or other records of the interrogations, and then illegally destroyed all of the tapes and transcripts of the interrogations.

9/11 Commission co-chairs Thomas Keane and Lee Hamilton wrote:

Those who knew about those videotapes — and did not tell us about them — obstructed our investigation.

This is particularly disturbing because the torture methods used were specially-targeted at producing false confessions.  And according to NBC News:

• Much of the 9/11 Commission Report was based upon the testimony of people who were tortured

• At least four of the people whose interrogation figured in the 9/11 Commission Report have claimed that they told interrogators information as a way to stop being “tortured.”

• One of the Commission’s main sources of information was tortured until he agreed to sign a confession that he was NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO READ

• The 9/11 Commission itself doubted the accuracy of the torture confessions, and yet kept their doubts to themselves

The 9/11 Commissioners publicly expressed anger at certain cover ups and obstructions of justice:

• The Commission’s co-chairs said that the CIA (and likely the White House) “obstructed our investigation”

• 9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerrey said that “There are ample reasons to suspect that there may be some alternative to what we outlined in our version . . . We didn’t have access . . . .”

• 9/11 Commissioner Timothy Roemer said “We were extremely frustrated with the false statements we were getting”

• 9/11 Commissioner Max Cleland resigned from the Commission, stating: “It is a national scandal”; “This investigation is now compromised”; and “One of these days we will have to get the full story because the 9-11 issue is so important to America. But this White House wants to cover it up”

• The Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission (John Farmer) – who led the 9/11 staff’s inquiry – said “At some level of the government, at some point in time…there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened“. He also said “I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described …. The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years…. This is not spin. This is not true.”

And the Co-Chair of the official Congressional Inquiry Into 9/11 – and former head of the Senate Intelligence Committee – has called for a new 9/11 investigation.

(14)  The American government – like many other governments – has long spun accidents and intelligence failures as justifications for war propaganda.   Unscrupulous Americans – just like dishonest people all over the world – have long used deception as a basis for war.

Whatever the details of the screw-ups on 9/11, the Bush administration used the attacks as a justification to promote their agenda.  And – instead of changing the agenda – Obama has continued it.