blogged about this topic all the time back in early 2002, when this blog was new. (It began in January 2002, so I don't have any archives of my writing from the time of the actual 9/11/2001 events.) And as usual, my interest in the events has been in little-known aspects of it, non-mainstream reporting, etc. I haven't compiled many of my 9/11-related blog entries, since most of them were things of the moment, and of no long term use.  Occasionally though, I saw and mentioned an article that did what the mainstream press didn't dare, and those are collected on this page.

More recent additions are on top.

October 28, 2003

In other news, the 9/11 commission is finally getting really sick of BushCo stonewalling and refusing to cooperate.

The chairman of the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks says that the White House is continuing to withhold several highly classified intelligence documents from the panel and that he is prepared to subpoena the documents if they are not turned over within weeks.

The chairman, Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, also said in an interview on Friday that he believed the bipartisan 10-member commission would soon be forced to issue subpoenas to other executive branch agencies because of continuing delays by the Bush administration in providing documents and other evidence needed by the panel.

It's enough to make you wonder what they're trying to hard to hide, isn't it?

On that topic, here's the latest Toles cartoon, which I enjoyed both for the joke, and for the commentary on the Bush Administration's attitude towards uncomfortable truths in general.

September 15, 2003

With the two year anniversary of the 9/11 events just passed, it's surprising how many major questions remain unanswered.  Many of them are being hindered by the Bush Administration's continual stonewalling and delaying and underfunding of the official congressional task force investigation into the 9/11 events, but a lot of others look to me like things that newspapers and news magazines/TV shows should be all over.  Isn't that what journalists are supposed to do?  Investigate things?

A list of 11 topics with extensive news story links from all of them can be read on the Unanswered Questions website, and there are 20 shorter questions in this excellent article from the Philadelphia Daily News.  I'll quote a few:

2. Why did Attorney General John Ashcroft and some Pentagon officials cancel commercial-airline trips before Sept. 11?

On July 26, 2001 - 47 days before the Sept. 11 attacks - CBS News reported that Ashcroft was flying expensive charters rather than commercial flights because of a "threat assessment" by the FBI. CBS said, "Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term." Newsweek later reported that on Sept. 10, 2001, "a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns."

Did either Ashcroft or the Pentagon have advance information about a 9/11-style attack and, if so, why wasn't this shared with the American public?

 

7. Why did President Bush continue reading a story to Florida grade-schoolers for nearly a half-hour during the worst attack on America in its history?

In arguably the greatest understatement in U.S. history, Bush told a questioner at a California town-hall meeting in January 2002 that 9/11 "was an interesting day." Interesting, indeed. In the two years since the attacks, questions have only grown about the president's bizarre behavior that morning, when he was informed in a Sarasota classroom that America was under attack.

"I couldn't stop watching the president sitting there, listening to second-graders, while my husband was burning in a building," World Trade Center widow Lorie van Auken, a leader of relatives of Sept. 11 victims who have raised questions about the attacks, told Gail Sheehy in the New York Observer.

 

8. How did Flight 93 crash in western Pennsylvania?

Based solely on circumstantial evidence from several cell-phone calls made by passengers, most of the public and the mainstream media have come to believe that the plane crashed because of a struggle between the passengers and the hijackers.

Meanwhile, the FBI reportedly has enough hard information about what really happened on Flight 93 to have worked up a flight-simulation video. But that video, the cockpit audio recording and the hard data from the other "black box," the flight data recorder, is still top secret.

 

13. Why did the Bush administration lie about dangerously high levels of toxins and hazardous particles after the WTC collapse?

Because apparently some White House officials felt that the health of the American economy and Wall Street was more important than the health of New York City residents who lived nearby. For example, on Sept. 16, 2001, a draft press release from the Environmental Protection Agency said: "Recent samples of dust gathered by OSHA on Water Street showed higher levels of asbestos in EPA tests." That was deleted and replaced with this: "The new samples confirm previous reports that ambient air quality meets OSHA standards and consequently is not a cause for public concern."

A key figure in the changes was the head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, who - you can't make this stuff up - is a lawyer who formerly represented the asbestos industry.

At least we can all rest assured that our democratic government will investigate ceaselessly until they have the answers, and will immediately share them with their constituents, the American people, putting the vital interests of we citizens above any political or big business considerations. *snort*

Sorry, but I almost managed to say that with a straight face.  I don't know how politicians do it.  Probably it gets easier when you have no soul.

September 11, 2003

I'd say something meaningful about the second year 9/11 anniversary, but what's to say?  Some well-funded and organized terrorists took advantage of lax airplane security and the sheep mentality of crowds of civilians to hijack some planes, which they then crashed into the WTC and the Pentagon, and lots of people died.  Sure it was horrible and sad and all of that, but what's to say today?  The terrorists were in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and financed largely from Saudi Arabia.  The US has since invaded Afghanistan and then left before doing a damn thing to stabilize the country which has allowed Al Quida to reform in many areas of the country. The US then wandered over to Iraq for no clear reason (well, there were a lot of stated reasons, it's just that most of them have since proved to be lies) and invaded there, killing off thousands of Iraqis, hundreds of US troops, and transferring billions of tax dollars from US citizens to US military contractors.

Oh, and greatly exacerbating terrorism world wide in the process, while the US has been made slightly safer (this is arguable) at tremendous cost to civic rights and individual privacy.

May the dead rest in peace. Amen.

If you believe in that sort of thing.

May 13, 2003

This first one is quite juicy, and I hope it gets huge play in the media.  However since the driving forces of the media now are mostly very right wing, and this is not an issue they want to talk about, I suspect it will die a surprisingly-quiet death.

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., on Sunday accused the Bush administration of engaging in a "cover-up" of intelligence failures before and after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks to shield it from embarrassment, and said the war with Iraq has allowed alQaida and other terrorist groups to become a greater threat to Americans than ever before.

Graham, a presidential candidate and former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, also accused the administration of jeopardizing the safety of Americans by blocking the release of a landmark congressional report on the government failures that preceded the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. And he said the White House has withheld from the public important information about the continued existence of terrorist cells in the United States -- including some with ties to foreign governments that the United States has been afraid to go after.

Graham said he was basing his accusations on classified information he has received as a ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and as a leader of last year's joint congressional inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks.

Graham said the joint inquiry report was completed more than five months ago and provides very detailed information on "the buildup to Sept. 11." It also raises policy questions as to whether "those lessons have been applied since."

I think that blaming this all on the Bush Administration is factually true, but that support for not looking into things too hard is widespead.  Most citizens want to look forwards and move on, and not dwell on past mistakes.  And not even admit that there were mistakes, and especially not that we did anything to bring 9/11 upon ourselves.  That's meant culturally, but more literally in this case, in terms of ignoring obvious security issues which were then exploited. People don't even seem to want to know about which government agencies screwed up so badly on that day, failing to react quickly to the threats once there were confirmed hijacked planes.

Another iffy subject is that 4th plane that crashed in a field near Pittsburgh, which the government has never really confirmed or denied shooting down, though it was hours after the other crashes.  Yes we have the stories of passengers rushing the cockpit from numerous people who were on cell phones during it, but it's never been made clear if and when and why the plane actually crashed.

Can you imagine the horrible irony of things if, after being so slow to respond that they didn't do anything to stop the planes from hitting the Pentagon and WTC #2, it comes out that the air defense finally did shoot down a plane -- the one that the passengers were just about to retake control of from the terrorists?  I have no idea if this is true; just speculating.  But I really would like to know, and get the full reports released so we'd know for sure, about that and a lot of other things.

May 12, 2003

I strongly recommend that you read this article about the events of 9/11. This isn't about the hijackers, or the roots of terrorism, or why America did or did not deserve it, or anything like that. It's basically apolitical, and focuses entirely on what Bush knew, when he knew it, and how he reacted.  The information is gathered from hundreds (literally, every sentence has 2 or 3 news article links) of articles and newspaper accounts of things, interviews with the principles, etc. It's really astonishing the amount of research that went into it.

And it's also astonishing since what actually happened is so very different from what the general perception is.  The section on rewriting history a year later is especially interesting. Some of the most interesting facts, most of which I'd never heard about before or were not much reported on.

¤ Air traffic controllers first strongly suspected a plane had been hijacked at 8:13am, but didn't notify NORAD for at least 30 minutes.

¤ The first plane hit the WTC at 8:46am, and was all over the media by 8:50, before Bush even arrived at the school.  It's patently absurd to suggest he wasn't told about it then, and many articles say that he was.  Many of the reporters at the school knew about it from their cell phones.

¤ Bush later said he saw the first plane hit on live TV, which is even more patently absurd, since there was no live coverage of the first plane hitting, though tons of the 2nd plane.  I mean duh, it's not like the networks had cameras pointing at the WTC that morning before any planes crashed. The only footage of the first WTC plane was aired many hours later, since various tourists had been pointing at the WTC when the plane came in.

¤ Despite the fact that Bush's location was well known and had been publicized (and was therefore an easy target for terrorist attack), he adhered almost precisely to his initial schedule, and continued reading along with the children for at least 10 minutes after being told that the 2nd plane had hit the WTC.

¤ He and many others have lied related alternate versions of this since then, but there is video of the events that anyone can watch online.

¤ Fighter escort was not provided for Air Force One for something like two hours longer than it should have been, for no known reason.

¤ Afterwards, various stories about direct threats on Air Force One were invented to make Bush's scurrying around the country all day seem more justified.

The article doesn't draw any conclusions; just presents the info for you to make up your own mind about, which I liked about it.

The weirdest thing about that days' events is the apparent lack of worry about Bush's welfare.  He was a sitting duck in the school for the longest time, then slow to get to Air Force One, then had no fighter escort once in the air.  You're left to choose between three unpalatable options:

1. Whoever was really in charge knew in advance that Bush wasn't in any danger.
2. Cheney or whoever was really in charge overruled Bush's onsite security, leaving him in potential harm's way since they hoped Bush would be killed by terrorist attack.
3. Almost everyone involved is grossly-incompetent.

I guess I'm going with #3, but the sheer amount of blunders around Bush, compared to the speedy competence shown in other areas, really makes you wonder.

The bigger issue is why the major media is so afraid to cover this subject?  It's not as if 9/11 is a minor footnote; it's the pivotal event in the US and world in the last decade, given the wars and international turmoil it has led to.  Why do we get 24 hour in-depth reports on every celebrity crime, reporters interviewing the junior high school teachers of someone who knew someone who knew someone who knew the victim, but there aren't 20 page investigations of the sequence of events on 9/11 every month in every news magazine?  Why isn't 60 Minutes beating this horse to death twice a week?

In the changed political climate after 9/11, few have dared raise challenging questions about Bush's actions. A journalist who said Bush was "flying around the country like a scared child, seeking refuge in his mother's bed after having a nightmare" and another who said Bush "skedaddled" were fired. [Washington Post, 9/29/01 (B)] We should have a concise record of where President Bush was throughout the day the US was attacked, but we do not.

Oh. Well that answers that question, then.

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