Meacher: I am just asking questions
The British MP Michael Meacher appears to be backing down a bit from his fantastic allegations. In this ITV interview with Andrew Harvey, he says he is just asking questions.
AH: You do quote that, you suggest that the American forces stood by while that attack took place.
MM: I did not say that, it is absolutely not my view.
AH: Well, as this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding or being ignorant of the evidence?
MM: I ask questions. I literally do not know the answers to all of these matters and my view is we need much further investigation, we need a new Congressional investigation that is much more thorough than the last one. There are legitimate issues that I don't purport to answer.
That is not a very accurate description of what he did in his letter. His questions are more of the type "have you stopped beating your wife," a fallacy known as complex question. In the original Guardian letter, he makes a number of claims that are not correct, and based on these claims he asks what he calls 'just questions.'
Here are a number of Meacher's unproven and false assertions:
I am sure there exists operational plans for an attack on virtually any place on the planet somewhere in the Pentagon. Geopolitical situations can change virtually overnight, so I expect no less. The US had already, under Clinton, launched missile strikes on Afghanistan, so obviously it was in its sights.
But what Meacher claims, is that specific plans and intentions for a September attack on Afghanistan existed before 9/11. He has, by his own admission, relied on various Internet pages to "research" the issue, and he repeats allegations which have been long debunked, that the US had given the Taliban an ultimatum to accept a pipeline through their country or else. The sources he relies on are, to put it mildly, not very credible.
I have debunked that assertion solidly here. While he is somewhat truthful with facts (if deceptive by omission) in his Guardian letter, in the ITV interview he is outright lying:
Why were no planes on the day itself put into the air for an hour and a half after the Pentagon knew that a hijack had taken place, when there is a routine intercept procedure which is always operated when an airliner goes off course? It had operated 67 times in the last year. On this particular day it did not operate. Why?
As we have seen, fighter planes were scrambled, immediately after NORAD was made aware of the hijackings, but it was too late to intercept the airliners. The Guardian letter shows that Meacher is somewhat aware of the actual facts, yet choose to use deceptive wording to mislead his audience (this is evident in other news sources' interpretation of his article, where they say no fighters whatsoever was scrambled before the Pentagon was hit, a direct lie).
If Meacher wants to implicate NORAD in the massive neocon conspiracy, he should perhaps be aware that the person in actual command of NORAD's Cheyenne Mountain HQ on 9/11-01 was Canadian Brig. Gen. Jim Hunter. But I am sure Meacher can implicate Canada in the big bad conspiracy, too.
By very disingenious use of selective quotations, Meacher makes it look like the US did not want to capture Bin Laden. That is a rather absurd proposition. If you look beyond the short quotations he shares with his readers, you will see that rather than being an indication that the US did not want Bin Laden dead or alive, it shows the US commanders in the war on terror realised that they needed to do more than capture one man. Here is one example of Meacher's dishonesty:
The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that "the goal has never been to get Bin Laden" (AP, April 5 2002).
Now, here is the q & a session with General Myers in context, and we can see how deceptive and dishonest MP Meacher is:
Hunt: The Big Question for General Myers: One embarrassment for the U.S. has been that, in almost seven months after 9/11, we still haven't captured Osama bin Laden. With the apprehension this week of one of his top lieutenants, have we gotten enough information to be any closer to maybe finally getting bin Laden?
Myers: Well, if you remember, if we go back to the beginning of this segment, the goal has never been to get bin Laden. Obviously, that's desirable.
Interesting, I just read a piece by some analysts that said you may not want to go after the top people in these organizations. You may have more effect by going after the middlemen, because they're harder to replace. I don't know if that's true, or not, and clearly we would like to eventually get bin Laden.
But I think the fact that we've been able to disrupt operations, get a lot of the people just under him and maybe just a little bit further down, has had some impact on their operations. We know have disrupted, you know, four, five, six, seven active operations that they had planned and probably more that we don't know about.
So we're going to keep the hunt on. Finding one person, as we've talked about before, is a very difficult prospect, but we will keep trying.
Obviously, Myers is not supporting Meacher's crazy conspiracy idea, he is simply pointing out that the war on terror has a much broader scope than catching one man. Note that Meacher conveniently left out Gen. Myers folliowing sentence.
4:30:48 PM 
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