by Will Bunch — Philadelphia Daily News — March 25, 2005 12:39 PM
It has been more than three and a half years since the terror attacks of Sept. 11. The main perpetrators have been ID’d by the government and died in the suicide assault, and key planner Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is also in custody.
Yet both the federal government and New York officials continue to block the public’s right to know more about what really happened that day — even though it’s the family members of the victims of the tragic attack now pleading for a fuller public account.
In blocking the free exchange of information, public officials are heavily damaging one of the key democratic values that the terrorists themselves so badly wanted to knock down on 9/11/01.
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An open letter to U.S. Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta regarding the omission of his 5/23/03 testimony to the 9/11 Commission in the Commission’s Final Report. That testimony included eyewitness accounting of events that occurred in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) the morning of 9/11/01. Additionally, as of the time of this letter, it appears that an effort has been made to conceal Secretary Mineta’s testimony from the public by editing it from video archives of the 5/23/03 hearing on the 9/11 Commission website (the testimony is not deleted from the .pdf and .html text archives).
March 23, 2005
Dear Secretary Mineta,
[...]
The omission of your testimony from the Final Report and editing of the video is not the only case of the 9/11 Commission tampering with public testimony records on its own web archive. As of this writing and for quite some time, General Major Larry Arnold and Colonel Alan Scott have been omitted from the archived agenda of the Commission hearing of the same day (5/23/03) as your testimony.
[...]
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Sure, the people with the 9/11 conspiracy theories are a little odd. But not everything they’re saying is entirely crazy.
By Steven T. Jones – San Francisco Bay Guardian (COVER STORY)
[...]
The Bush administration offered its conspiracy theory while the buildings were still ablaze, has done little since then to deviate from it – and has done almost nothing to prove its veracity beyond a shadow of a doubt.
[...]
You have to believe, in other words, that one of the most secretive and manipulative administrations in U.S. history is telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth about an event it has aggressively exploited to implement long-standing and far-reaching political plans, from the USA PATRIOT Act to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
[...]
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Dear WTC Families and Advocacy Groups:
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will hold a public meeting starting at 1 p.m. on April 5, 2005, at the Crowne Plaza Times Square Manhattan (1605 Broadway, Times Square B Room) in New York City to present the latest findings from its building and fire safety investigation of the World Trade Center (WTC) disaster of Sept. 11, 2001. WTC Lead Investigator Shyam Sunder will detail the final probable collapse sequence for the two WTC towers, updating the leading collapse hypothesis released last October. He also will discuss what has been learned from three projects within the WTC investigation (analysis of building and fire codes and practices; occupant behavior, egress, and emergency communications; and fire service technologies and guidelines).
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Conservative group forms alliance, urges Bush, Congress to modify sections of the anti-terrorism law
BY TOM BRUNE
WASHINGTON BUREAU
March 23, 2005
WASHINGTON – Conservative libertarians launched a campaign yesterday to persuade President George W. Bush and Congress to fix the sections of the anti-terrorism Patriot Act that they say intrude on privacy and harm civil liberties.
Long wary of the act’s enhanced police powers, the conservatives announced they had formed the organization Patriots for Checks and Balances with the liberal American Civil Liberties Union in time for hearings in the Republican-controlled Congress next month on whether it should renew 16 Patriot Act provisions that expire at year’s end.
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USA Today
March 21, 2005
One big loss for Zacarias Moussaoui. One huge loss for the Bill of Rights and the US Constitution. But then again the 9/11 Commission Report took the government’s word about its “classified interrogations” on faith, why shouldn’t Moussaoui and we? – Ed.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday rejected terrorism suspect Zacarias Moussaoui’s attempt to directly question three al-Qaeda prisoners and cleared the way for a trial of the only U.S. defendant charged in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks.
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Staten Island Advance – 3/22/05 – Letter to the Editor
EDITORIAL ON 9/11 COMMISSION RAISES MANY VEXING QUESTIONS
The editorial published in the Advance of Feb. 16, titled “No smoking gun,” prompts the following response:
Regarding the statement that the 9/11 Commission report does not reveal a “smoking gun,” the editorial writer is, of course, correct. This is exactly the conclusion expected by those who arranged the timing of the release and the content of the report. However, the editorialist ends the editorial with the plaintive question, how much more “classified” material was not released because of potential embarrassment to the Bush administration?
There are many questions regarding the relationship of Osama bin Laden and the bin Laden family and George W. Bush and the Bush family that need explaining.
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Tracking the Terror
How a web browser and a fascination with 9/11 turned Nelson-based author Paul Thompson into a world terrorism authority
by Kristen Matthew — The Sunday Star Times — March 13, 2005
[snip]
Then, in May 2002, it came out that President Bush had been warned about an
imminent act of terrorism, specifically in an August 2001 briefing titled
“Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.” The news galvanized Thompson.
[snip]
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By Karen J. Greenberg, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on March 16, 2005, Printed on March 17, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/21515/
On the eve of his departure from office, Attorney General John Ashcroft boasted, “The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved.” In this, he echoed a drumbeat of announcements by top officials who have repeatedly proclaimed that, when it came to the war on terror, the administration was succeeding in the courts as well as on the battlefield. As President Bush declared in a speech to the FBI Academy in September 2003, “We’ve thwarted terrorists in Buffalo and Seattle, in Portland, Detroit, North Carolina and Tampa, Florida.”
In fact, looked at with a cold eye, the administration’s record of convictions in terrorism cases is remarkably inconsequential. Although it is extremely difficult to obtain reliable information on such cases, the facts, as best we know them, are these: Of the 120 terrorism cases recorded on Findlaw, the major information source for legal cases of note, the initial major charges leveled have resulted in only two actual terrorism convictions – both in a single case, that of Richard Reid, the notorious shoe bomber.
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By: Greg Palast
Reporting for BBC Newsnight
03/17/05 – “BBC” – The Bush administration made plans for war and for Iraq’s oil before the 9/11 attacks sparking a policy battle between neo-cons and Big Oil, BBC’s Newsnight has revealed. Two years ago today – when President George Bush announced US, British and Allied forces would begin to bomb Baghdad – protestors claimed the US had a secret plan for Iraq’s oil once Saddam had been conquered.
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