Michael Parker's Journal

HOME

Wednesday, September 10, 2003

We're Not Out of this Yet, Reprise

Yesterday’s blog proved controversial, indeed, just like the Meacher article that spawned it. First, I must apologize for not being clear. I was intending sarcasm, especially in the first paragraph, but it didn't get percieved as such. Memo to self--work on sarcasm.

Second, I must give credit to my friend Shawn for introducing me to two of the articles I use in my blog today. Friends are truly great. Memo to self--buy Shawn a drink.

Shawn introduced me to a critical review of an article in the Guardian by David Aaronovich, titled Has Meacher Completely Lost the Plot?

Aaronovich’s response concentrates solely on a list of so-called factual problems of Meacher’s article. However, right off, I am much more willing to accept Meacher’s facts than Aaronovich’s because Meacher’s facts are backed up with sources. Aaronovich does not display sources to back up his facts.

Also, Aaronovich interestingly backs out of trying to prove Meacher incorrect on his first two points—One, the logical possibility that the US and Brits have gone to war because of the need for oil. And, two, the neocons created the PNAC and devised a plan that would allow them "to get their hands on the oil....[and] to be able to dominate the world."

Personally, here are the important points I feel Aaronovich failed to discuss:

1. The Saudi Arabia connection. Why was the CIA illicitly issuing visas to unqualified applicants from the Middle East? Why were five of the hijackers allowed to receive training at secure US military installations in the 1990s? Why were flight instruction leads not followed up? Why did the FBI refuse US Agents a warrant to search the computer of Moussaoui in August of 2001 even upon evidence from French intelligence that Moussaoui had ties to radical Islamist groups? All of these questions are compounded when the known evidence exists in the public domain that the US flew Saudi nationals and the families of Bin Laden out of the country after 9/11; and, that the Administration would not let the special 9/11 committee see the blacked out content of their report.

2. Evidence coming from 11 countries, as early as 1996, about the probability of a terrorist attack, some of them quite definitive about using airplanes and attacking the Pentagon and Washington D.C.

Meacher noted the following:

It had been known as early as 1996 that there were plans to hit Washington targets with aeroplanes. Then in 1999 a US national intelligence council report noted that "al-Qaida suicide bombers could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House."

And this:

The former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has said: "The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defence of incompetence."

3. The PNAC connection with failed talks with the Taliban in Afghanistan about allowing an oil pipeline. Also, the evidence in the PNAC document that states that an event as big as Pearl Harbor would be needed to get the national support to put this plan into action.

Different Strings had a relevant review of Aaronovich’s article. Though he does not feel that Bush has the brains to pull something of this magnitude and complexity off, based off their campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, he feels there are valid questions raised by Meacher that should be addressed. Here is the noteworthy conclusion to this fine blog:

While Meacher may well have gotten his information by reviewing websites, I think its important to note that the information itself is the product of the websites themselves or the people who run them, but are all from articles, originally published in the mainstream press, that were simply rebublished or quoted on the websites Meacher visited. In other words, Aaronovitch tries to make it sound like Meacher was getting his actual information from crackpots, when the information itself came from what most people consider to be reasonably reliable sources, even if they're published on sites run by crackpots.

As I said before, none of this means that Aaronovitch is necessarily wrong, just as the thorough source referencing Meacher provided doesn't automatically guarantee that he's right. I just think that Aaronovitch's article is perhaps a bit weak on which to base a denouncement of Meacher's article, lacking, as it does, any attempt to address the questions Meacher raised about the PNAC, the desire for oil being at the root of this whole escapade and America's imperial aims, and without further, sourceable information....

By the same token, however, I do think that there's a lot more that's going on behind the scene's - both in terms of actions and motivations - than we might even suspect, and I do think that there are a lot of questions that need to be answered. I'm trying to approach the whole thing cautiously, though, because I think this is far too important of an issue to just be lightly glossed over or embraced as the greatest (or worst, depending on how you're defining the terms) conspiracy in American history.

7:19:51 PM | COMMENT [] | TRACKBACK []