Hey, it's only a string of coincidences...

[Guest guest]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all & address=104\

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>

> By " Minstrel Boy "

>

>

> Since most of the arguments made here around the

> events of 9/11 are of

> the LIHOP/MIHOP variety, I thought I'd walk a mile

> in the

> coincidentalists' shoes, and lay out the argument

> for coincidence.

>

> Happy coincidenting!

>

>

> That intelligence agencies, politicians and

> terrorists have conducted

> criminal business together is well established, but

> BCCI and Iran/Contra

> were a long time ago, so there’s no need to rehash

> all that.

>

> That Jonathan Bush’s Riggs Bank has been found

> guilty of laundering

> terrorist funds and fined a record setting $25

> million is embarrassing,

> surely, but to draw sinister conclusions is foolish.

>

> That Marvin Bush sat on the board of the

> Kuwaiti-owned company which

> provided electronic security to the World Trade

> Centre, Dulles Airport

> and United Airlines means nothing.

>

> That George Bush found success as a businessman only

> after the

> investment of Osama’s brother Salem and Osama’s

> brother-in-law and al

> Qaeda financier Khalid bin Mahfouz is just a

> one-in-a-million fluke.

>

> That Osama bin Laden is known to have been an asset

> of US foreign policy

> in no way implies he still is. That al Qaeda was

> active in Kosovo on the

> same side as NATO merely demonstrates that nothing

> is black and white.

>

> The claims of Michael Springman, State Department

> veteran of the Jeddah

> visa bureau, that the CIA ran the office and issued

> visas to al Qaeda

> members to receive training in the United States,

> are merely sour grapes

> because he was fired for making such wild

> accusations.

>

> That so many in the Bush White House had expressed

> the need for a " new

> Pearl Harbor " before their militarist ambitions

> could be fulfilled means

> nothing more than being in the right place at the

> right time.

>

> That in May of 2001, Dick Cheney took upon himself

> the job of

> co-ordinating a response to domestic terror attacks

> even as he was

> crafting the administration’s energy policy,

> circumventing the

> established infrastructure and ignoring the

> recommendations of the

> Hart-Rudman report, merely shows the VP to be a “can

> do” sort of guy.

>

> That the standing order for shooting down hijacked

> aircraft was altered

> on June 1, 2001, taking discretion away from field

> commanders and

> placing it solely in the hands of the Secretary of

> Defense, is simply

> poor planning and unfortunate timing. Fortunately

> the error has been

> corrected, since the order was reversed shortly

> after 9/11.

>

> That Dave Frasca of the FBI’s Radical Fundamentalist

> Unit received a

> promotion after quashing multiple, urgent requests

> for investigations

> into al Qaeda assets training at flight schools in

> the summer of 2001

> does appear odd, but I’m sure there must have been a

> good reason for it.

>

> That over the summer of 2001 Washington received

> many urgent,

> senior-level warnings from foreign intelligence

> agencies of impending

> terror attacks using hijacked aircraft and did

> nothing, demonstrates the

> pressing need for a new Intelligence Czar.

>

> That former lead counsel for the House David

> Schippers says he’d taken

> to John Ashcroft’s office specific warnings he’d

> learned from FBI agents

> in New York of an impending attack – even naming the

> proposed dates,

> names of the hijackers and the targets – and that

> the investigations had

> been stymied and the agents threatened, proves

> nothing but David

> Schipper’s need for attention.

>

> That George Bush had plans to invade Afghanistan on

> his desk before 9/11

> demonstrates only the value of being prepared.

>

> The suggestion that securing a pipeline across

> Afghanistan figured into

> the White House’s calculations is as ludicrous as

> the assertion that oil

> played a part in determining war in Iraq.

>

> That Afghanistan is once again the world’s principal

> heroin producer is

> an unfortunate reality, but to claim the CIA is

> still actively involved

> in the narcotics trade is to presume bad faith on

> the part of the agency.

>

> Mahmood Ahmed, chief of Pakistan’s ISI, must not

> have authorized an al

> Qaeda payment of $100,000 to Mohammed Atta days

> before the attacks, and

> was not meeting with senior Washington officials

> over the week of 9/11,

> because I didn’t read anything about it in the

> official report.

>

> George HW Bush and Dick Cheney spent the evening of

> September 10 in the

> Oval Office, it’s true, but they were just old

> colleagues catching up.

>

> That FEMA arrived in New York on Sept 10 to prepare

> for a scheduled

> biowarfare drill is a lucky twist of fate.

>

> Newsweek’s report that senior Pentagon officials

> cancelled flights on

> Sept 10 for the following day on account of security

> concerns is only

> newsworthy because of what happened the following

> morning.

>

> That Mohamed Atta attended the International

> Officer's School at Maxwell

> Air Force Base, that Abdulaziz Alomari attended

> Brooks Air Force Base

> Aerospace Medical School, that Saeed Alghamdi

> attended the Defense

> Language Institute in Monterey merely shows it’s a

> small world, after all.

>

> That Mohammed Atta dressed like a Mafioso, had a

> stripper girlfriend,

> smuggled drugs, was already a licensed pilot when he

> entered the US,

> enjoyed pork chops, drank to excess and did cocaine,

> was closer to

> Europeans than Arabs in Florida, and included the

> names of defence

> contractors on his email list, proves how dangerous

> the radical

> fundamentalist Muslim can be.

>

> That 43 lbs of heroin was found on board the Lear

> Jet owned by Wally

> Hilliard, the owner of Atta’s flight school, just

> three weeks after Atta

> enrolled – the biggest seizure ever in Central

> Florida – was just one of

> those things.

>

> That Hilliard’s plane had made 30-round trips to

> Venezuela with the same

> passengers who always paid cash, that the plane had

> been supplied by a

> pair of drug smugglers who had also outfitted CIA

> drug runner Barry

> Seal, and that 9/11 commissioner Richard ben-Veniste

> had been Seal’s

> attorney before Seal’s murder, shows nothing but the

> lengths to which

> conspiracists will go to draw sinister conclusions.

>

> Reports of insider trading on 9/11 are false,

> because the SEC

> investigated and found only respectable investors

> who will remain

> nameless involved, and no terrorists, so any

> profit-taking was merely

> coincidental.

>

> That Hani Hanjour, the pilot of Flight 77, was so

> incompetent he could

> not fly a Cessna in August, but in September managed

> to fly a 767 at

> excessive speed into a spiraling, 270-degree descent

> and a level impact

> of the first floor of the Pentagon, on the only side

> that was virtually

> empty and had been hardened to withstand a terrorist

> attack, merely

> demonstrates that people can do almost anything once

> they set their

> minds to it.

>

> That Mohammed Atta left a uniform, a will, his

> driver's license and a

> video " how to fly planes " in his rental car at the

> airport means he had

> other things on his mind.

>

> The very mention of Israelis with links to

> military-intelligence having

> been arrested on Sept 11 videotaping and celebrating

> the attacks, and of

> a warning of impending attacks delivered to the

> Israeli company Odigo

> two hours before the first plane hit, is the vilest

> kind of

> anti-Semitism and should not be dignified with a

> response. That the

> stories were also reported in the Israeli media is a

> sad display of

> self-hatred among certain elements of the Jewish

> Left.

>

> That multiple military wargames and simulations were

> underway the

> morning of 9/11 – one simulating the crash of a

> plane into a building;

> another, a life-fly simulation of multiple

> hijackings – and took many

> interceptors away from the eastern seaboard and

> confused field

> commanders as to which was a real hijacked aircraft

> and which was a

> hoax, was a tragic coincidence, but no less a

> coincidence.

>

> That the National Military Command Center ops

> director asked a

> newly-qualified substitute to stand his watch at

> 8:30 am on Sept. 11 is

> nothing more than bad timing.

>

> That the black boxes were either never found or were

> unrecoverable was a

> first for these particular boxes, but there's a

> first time for everything.

>

> That a recording made Sept 11 of air traffic

> controllers’ detailing the

> events of the day, was destroyed by an FAA official

> who crushed it in

> his hand, cut the tape into little pieces and

> dropped them in different

> trash cans around the building, is just one of those

> things.

>

> That the FBI knew precisely which Florida flight

> schools to descend upon

> hours after the attacks should make every American

> safer to know their

> federal agents are on the ball.

>

> To insinuate evil motive from the mercy flights of

> bin Laden family

> members and Saudi royals after 9/11 shows the

> sickness of the

> conspiratorial mindset.

>

> Le Figaro’s report in October 2001, known to have

> originated with French

> intelligence, that two CIA agents met Osama bin

> Laden in a Dubai

> hospital in July 2001, proves again the perfidy of

> the French.

>

> That the tape in which bin Laden claims

> responsibility for the attacks

> was released by the State Department after having

> been found

> providentially by US forces in Afghanistan, and

> depicts a fattened Osama

> with a broader face and a flatter nose, proves Osama

> masterminded 9/11.

>

> That the White House went on Cipro September 11

> shows the

> foresightedness of America’s emergency response.

>

> That the anthrax was mailed to perceived liberal

> media and the

> Democratic leadership demonstrates only the

> perversity of the terrorist

> psyche.

>

> That the anthrax attacks appeared to silence

> opponents of the Patriot

> Act only shows that appearances can be deceiving.

>

> That the Ames-strain anthrax was found to have

> originated at Fort

> Detrick, and was beyond the capability of all but a

> few labs to refine,

> underscores the importance of allowing the

> investigation to continue

> without the distraction of absurd conspiracy

> theories.

>

> Sibel Edmonds is an attention-seeking nutcase. And

> since John Ashcroft

> has gagged her and classified her public testimony,

> we should speak no

> more of her.

>

> But most of all, remember: there are no secrets,

> governments would never

> accept civilian casualties for geostrategic gain,

> and conspiracies are

> for the weak-minded and gullible.