They Knew...

They lied about it then and they’re lying about it still

September 15, 2004
by Rob Lafferty

Condaleeza Rice, national security advisor to President Bush, spoke out publicly back in 2002 about the failure to protect the country from attack during the months prior to September 11, 2001, saying, “I don't think anybody could have predicted that...they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.”

Despite her claim of ignorance which borders on incompetence, Rice and many others knew much more than they are willing to admit.

Rice had been given a dozen warnings of such a plan, including one from 1999 saying that “suicide bomber(s) belonging to al Qaeda’s Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft...into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA or the White House.”

Rice also traveled with President Bush to the G-8 Summit in Italy in July 2001, where she and the president were directly told that “Islamic terrorists might attempt to kill world leaders by crashing an airliner” into the summit.

When confronted during the 9/11 Commission in January, 2004, Rice sorrowfully claimed that she “misspoke” and that she “regretted” her earlier denials. But in a March 22, 2004 commentary in the Washington Post, she went back to the lie and claimed once again, “We received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles.”

She certainly knew that buildings could be targets of terrorism – after all, the World Trade Center was bombed once before, and the Oklahoma City bombing proved that any symbolic building could be a target. She knew that airplanes could be flown by suicidal pilots into targets, because she’s intelligent and understands the meaning of the word “kamikaze”.

She knew. And as part of her job, that’s the kind of thing she was supposed to know.

Other well-placed people knew that a commercial airplane that summer wasn’t a safe place to be. Attorney General John Ashcroft certainly knew, because he stopped flying commercial in late July “in response to unspecified threats” the FBI had received from an undisclosed source.

George Bush knew last summer that two senior White House staff members had committed felonies when they deliberately disclosed the name of an undercover CIA officer, Valerie Plame, to members of the press. He knows they did it to discredit and punish her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador who criticized the official rationale for invading Iraq.

Bush is on record as saying. “There are a lot of senior White House officials. We may never know who the leakers are.” Yet he knows exactly who they are.

Half a dozen reporters – including Robert Novak, the only one to take the bait and publish the name – also know who the leakers are. They were given Plame’s name; they were part of the ‘leaking’, and they are hiding the identity of people who committed felonies in order to protect the old journalistic principle of never revealing a confidential source.

Bush didn’t order any kind of internal investigation into those crimes. He’s been content to let the Justice Department interview his people during their year-long, unfinished investigation.

Two of his close advisors violated national security by breaking the law and putting lives in danger, committing the kind of acts that Bush’s father once described as treason - yet Bush has said that he won’t ask anyone if they did such a thing.

He doesn’t need to ask. He already knows who they are.

The intelligence community and the administration knew that there were no ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq. UN inspectors kept saying that there were no nuclear, chemical or biological weapons of any consequence and no active programs for acquiring them. That’s why there’s been no serious effort to find weapons sites since the invasion.

But the CIA provided speculation and information from unreliable sources anyway, knowing that it would be used to justify an invasion that would cost US soldiers their lives. Now the CIA plans to release their final report on the lack of weapons next month. That report will feature speculation as to what weaponry Iraq might have been able to acquire if the US had not invaded.

Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld knew that the US military would defeat any Iraqi army units that challenged the invasion. They knew that ten years of bombings, economic sanctions, equipment losses and human desertions had destroyed most of Iraq’s military capability. In fact, most of the world knew that as a simple truth.

Cheney and Rumsfeld also knew that thousands of innocent civilians would die during their planned bombing campaign of “Shock and Awe” against a nearly nonexistent military.

They bombed the people of Iraq anyway, and showed the world pictures of “laser-guided surgical strikes” that succeeded. The bombs that went astray and the destruction they caused also were fully recorded – they just weren’t shown to anyone.

A decade ago, the top executives of Halliburton, which at that time included Cheney, knew quite well that doing any business with Iraq and Iran was illegal for a US-based company. They also knew that a foreign-based subsidiary could legally do that kind of trade with “Axis Of Evil” countries. So they rented an office on a Caribbean island to serve as a front, while they set up the real base of operations in several smaller Middle Eastern countries.

They knew that when the truth came out, they could always say that it was a legal arrangement, and that people would continue to accept Halliburton’s belief that there is no room for morality in a business decision.

When Cheney was planning his first national energy policy conference, he knew that folks would be outraged to learn who he was inviting into the discussion. The whole administration knew that the truth would be unpopular, so they fought all the way to the Supreme Court to keep those identities secret.

They’ve succeeded for now – but one day the truth will be known, and America will see that a man who George Bush describes as “my good friend” Kenneth ‘Kenny Boy’ Lay, was helping to decide the policies of the nation while committing multiple felonies against its citizens at the same time.

Rumsfeld and many others knew that despicable things were being done to people in US “detention centers” around the world, but they didn’t really care about those human’s rights. As long as prisoners were labeled as “enemy combatants” then abuse, torture and even murder were just another set of interrogation tools.

Bush knew that breathing the air in New York City near Ground Zero in the weeks following the collapse of the twin towers was hazardous to people’s health. He made sure that the EPA issued an air quality statement on September 18, 2001, even though it “did not have sufficient data or analyses to make the statement,” according to a EPA internal report last year. The White House “convinced the EPA to add several reassuring statements and delete certain cautionary ones,” the report stated.

A UC Davis study showed that many tons of concrete, glass, furniture, carpets, insulation, computers, and papers burned until December of 2001. The study said samples from Ground Zero found four types of particles listed by the EPA as being likely to harm human health: fine metals that can damage lungs; sulfuric acid that attacks lung cells; fine, undissolvable particles of glass that travel through the lungs to the bloodstream and heart; and cancer-causing organic matter.

Bush himself lied about the safety of the area in public statements and made sure that the EPA backed up his lie, just to reassure people and to make certain that business got back to its usual pattern as quickly as possible.

There are some things that the President and his top advisors honestly don’t know. Rice doesn’t know how it feels to be under fire in deadly combat. Neither Cheney nor Rumsfeld have never watched a friend die in their arms from bullet wounds. Bush has never heard the sounds a person can make while groping blindly around for a leg that was just blown off.

George W. Bush, who obviously enjoys calling himself a “War President”, doesn’t know about the hell of combat because, along with most of the senior members of his administration, he avoided it when his turn came to serve. And he claims to have forgotten what he was doing during the second half of his National Guard period of service, or where he was doing it.

He could look it up in his records, but certain critical ones from Texas have been “inadvertently destroyed”. That’s one way to describe the effect on at least two thousand American soldiers and civilians, plus untold thousands of Iraqis – their lives have been destroyed, inadvertently or not.

None of those deaths had to happen. If the president had spoken the truth, most of the people who died on 9/11 and are dying today in Iraq would be alive. Most of the soldiers who are coming home with health problems would still be whole individuals. And people who spent time working near Ground Zero would not have health-related time bombs ticking away in their bodies today.

But the truth is not in George W. Bush, or in his cronies and henchmen.