In last Saturday’s debate Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio made the
ridiculous statement that George W. Bush has kept America safe. Rubio went so far as to say “thank God Al Gore
wasn’t President on 9-11.”
That statement demonstrates a lack of knowledge of recent
history and shows the degree to which the American people’s brains have
atrophied from the 24 hour disinformation and lies that pass for journalism in
America.
To quote Vice
President Henry Wallace:
The
American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of
truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every
fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use
every opportunity to impugn democracy.
They
use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism. They
cultivate hate and distrust of both Britain and Russia. They claim to be
super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the
Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly
and vested interest.
Their
final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture
political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the
market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection…
Democracy
to crush fascism internally must demonstrate its capacity to "make the
trains run on time." It must develop the ability to keep people fully
employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings
first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to
violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial
oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels…
If the truth be told, had Al Gore had been inaugurated after
winning the popular vote in the 2000 election there would not have been a 9-11. So let us take the punch bowl away from the drunk
politicians, get out the black coffee and have a dose of reality and a
fact-based evaluation of what lead up to the 9-11 attacks. From Public Citizen:
Excerpt:
Delay, Dilute and Discard: How the Airline Industry and the FAA Have
Stymied Aviation Security Recommendations
Congress will soon enact
legislation to improve aviation security. This legislation may allow the
Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to manage new and existing authority for
assuring aviation security. This new Public Citizen report reveals why that
would be a bad idea. In recent years, the
airline industry and the FAA have combined to stall, scale back and ignore
specific security recommendations made by a 1996 presidential commission.
In addition, the airline industry
may have forestalled more action on the part of Congress and the White House through its aggressive lobbying and
campaign contributions most of which have come in the form of unlimited
"soft money" contributions to political party leaders.
Through an extensive investigation
of the FAA rulemaking process and a careful examination of the docket for
proposed rules Public Citizen’s report exposes the following about the industry
s and FAA s roles in delaying, diluting and discarding security improvements:
·
The 1996 presidential commission (created after
the TWA 800 crash and known as the Gore Commission after its chairman, then Vice President Al Gore) recommended
reasonable, affordable improvements.
Yet
the FAA has spent the last five years converting some of these recommendations
into watered-down rules more favorable to the industry…
·
The Gore
Commission recommended several measures to improve screening company
performance, including a national job grade structure for screeners, meaningful
measures to reduce high turnover rates and reward screeners for good
performance, and for the airlines to hire screening companies on the basis of
performance, not the lowest bid.
But the proposed FAA rule did not
require any of these measures and would allow airlines to still hire the lowest
bidder, regardless of how abysmal their track record.
·
The Gore
Commission called for criminal background and FBI fingerprint checks for all airport screeners and all
airport and airline employees with access to secure areas.
The FAA s final rule largely
ignored the commission s recommendations by not requiring such checks; it only
instituted job history checks for screeners.
These job history checks, the FAA
estimated, would lead to criminal background investigations on only 63 of the
16,996 new screeners in 1999.
·
The Gore
Commission called for greater scrutiny of checked baggage, including a
system to make sure checked bags
"matched" passengers onboard.
The industry objected to bag matching and the FAA discarded the Gore
proposal as too costly even though the Gore Commission said cost should not be
the determining factor in rulemaking.
Furthermore, an FAA-funded study by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) professor showed that bag matching would only cause an average delay of
seven minutes on 14 percent of flights and cost 25 cents to 52 cents per passenger.
The airlines often objected to the
security recommendations on the basis of cost. One airline even complained
about increased photocopying costs.
In 2000, the top nine airlines and
their trade association, the Air Transport Association (ATA), spent $16.6
million lobbying the federal government in the year 2000.
The same group spent $62.9 million lobbying the federal government
from 1997 through 2000, the period when the federal government was trying
to convert Gore Commission recommendations to regulations.
Had Congress enacted the Gore Commission’s recommendations,
it is possible the 9-11 attacks would have never happened. Then there was the bipartisan Hart Rudman
Commission’s two and a half year study that the Bush Administration
rejected. From Jake Tapper September 12,2001:
Excerpt:
Commission warned Bush
But White House passed on
recommendations by a bipartisan, Defense department-ordered commission on
domestic terrorism.
By Jake Tapper
Sept. 12, 2001 | WASHINGTON -- They
went to great pains not to sound as though they were telling the president
"We told you so."
But on Wednesday, two former senators,
the bipartisan co-chairs of a Defense Department-chartered commission on
national security, spoke with something between frustration and regret about how White House officials failed to embrace
any of the recommendations to prevent acts of domestic terrorism delivered
earlier this year.
Bush administration officials told former Sens. Gary Hart, D-Colo.,
and Warren Rudman, R-N.H., that they preferred instead to put aside the
recommendations issued in the January report by the U.S. Commission on National
Security/21st Century.
Instead, the White House announced in May that it would have Vice
President Dick Cheney study the potential problem of domestic terrorism -- which the bipartisan group had already
spent two and a half years studying -- while assigning
responsibility for dealing with the issue to the Federal Emergency Management
Agency, headed by former Bush campaign manager Joe Allbaugh…
Before the White House decided to
go in its own direction, Congress seemed to be taking the commission's
suggestions seriously, according to Hart and Rudman. "Frankly, the White House shut it down…"
"We predicted it," Hart
says of Tuesday's horrific events. "We said Americans will likely die on
American soil, possibly in large numbers -- that's a quote (from the
commission's Phase One Report) from the fall of 1999…"
The bipartisan 14-member panel was
put together in 1998 by then-President Bill Clinton and then-House Speaker Newt
Gingrich, R-Ga., to make sweeping strategic recommendations on how the United
States could ensure its security in the 21st century.
The commission was supposed to
disband after issuing the report Jan. 31, but Hart and the other commission
members got a six-month extension to lobby for their recommendations.
Hart says he spent 90 minutes with
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and an hour with Secretary of State Colin
Powell lobbying for the White House to devote more attention to the imminent
dangers of terrorism and their specific, detailed recommendations for a major
change in the way the federal government approaches terrorism. He and Rudman briefed National Security
Advisor Condoleezza Rice on the commission's findings…
On April 3, before the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on
Terrorism and Technology, Hart sounded a
call of alarm, saying that an "urgent" need existed for a new
national security strategy, with an emphasis on intelligence gathering…
But in May, Bush announced his plan almost as if the Hart-Rudman Commission never
existed, as if it hadn't spent millions of dollars, "consulting with
experts, visiting 25 countries worldwide…
As for W. Bush keeping America safe don’t forget the August
8th Presidential Daily briefing that Richard Clarke hand delivered
to a vacationing George W. Bush at his Crawford “Ranch”. From History Commons’ Complete 911 Timeline:
Excerpt:
'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US' PDB:
August 4-30, 2001: Bush Nearly Sets Record for Longest Presidential
President Bush spends most of
August 2001 at his Crawford, Texas, ranch, nearly
setting a record for the longest presidential vacation. While it is billed a “working vacation,”
news organizations report that Bush is doing “nothing much” aside from his
regular daily intelligence briefings…
One such unusually long briefing at
the start of his trip is a warning that bin Laden is planning to attack in the
US (see August 6, 2001), but Bush spends
the rest of that day fishing. By the end of his trip, Bush has spent 42 percent of his presidency at vacation spots or en
route…
At the time, a poll shows that 55
percent of Americans say Bush is taking too much time off.
Vice President Cheney also spends the entire month in a remote location
in Wyoming…
Then there was the August 8 PDB presented to Bush by Richard
Clarke.
[I]n the summer of 2001, the
government ignored repeated warnings by the CIA, ignored, and didn’t do
anything to harden our border security, didn’t do anything to harden airport
country, didn’t do anything to engage local law enforcement, didn’t do anything
to round up INS and consular offices and say we have to shut this down, and didn’t
warn the American people…
The famous presidential daily
briefing on August 6, we say in the report that the briefing officers believed
that there was a considerable sense of urgency and it was current. So there was
a case to be made that wasn’t made…
[T]he memo left little doubt that
the hijacked airliners were intended for use as missiles and that intended
targets were to be inside the US.” It further states that, “now, as the
columnist Joe Conason points out in the current edition of the New York
Observer, ‘conspiracy’ begins to take over from ‘incompetence’ as a likely
explanation for the failure to heed—and then inform the public about—warnings
that might have averted the worst disaster in the nation’s history.”
Yep, the Bush Administration went from incompetency to
conspiracy, claiming who could have known that hijacked airliners could be used
as missiles.
Bush and Cheney were hell-bent on war in Iraq and would stop
at nothing to invade and destroy that country.
Any anti-war voices were immediately silenced, careers were destroyed
and bogus inflammatory charges brought against them by the Bush Administration. With a compliant media, every lie was aired
without verification.
Cheney would leak information to “reporters” like Judith
Miller and Bob Novak, who would then publish the lies as investigated
facts. Cheney’s people would then appear
on Sunday morning talk shows citing articles in their publications as his
source.
This lead to destroying the career of the deeply under cover
CIA agent Valarie Plame, whose husband refuted Cheney’s fabricated claim that
Saddam has acquired yellow cake from Niger.
From Executive Intelligence Review:
Excerpt:
Worse Than Watergate
John Dean, Richard Nixon's White
House General Counsel, has denounced the Wilson-Plame affair as "worse
than Watergate." He is right. Not only did the Novak column, orchestrated
from the White House, end Valerie Plame's 20-year career as a CIA
"non-official cover" officer. The leak also exposed a longstanding
CIA proprietary company, Brewster Jennings & Associates, where Plame
worked.
The Boston- and Washington-based
front company had, since 1994, been tracking weapons of mass destruction,
through a network of agents and correspondents in a such dangerous places as
Iran, North Korea, Belarus, Israel, Pakistan, Libya, Serbia and Taiwan.
It is not known whether the CIA or
one of the Congressional intelligence oversight panels has done a full damage
assessment of the consequences of the Plame leak. But they are no doubt
extensive. It is one thing for a spy, like Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen, or
Jonathan Jay Pollard, to steal secrets jeopardizing the national security of
the United States on behalf of a foreign power.
It is another thing altogether, for
top officials of the White House to willfully leak the identity of an
undercover CIA officer, as an act of revenge or damage control, against a U.S. official
who came forward to reveal government chicanery in a matter as serious as the
Iraq War.
Plames long CIA career was destroyed by the Bush
Administration and it is unknown how many deaths resulted from that. Then there was the destruction of the career
and reputation of former weapons inspector Scott Ritter who also debunked the
Bush Administration claims that there were no weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq. From Information Clearing House:
Excerpt:
Former UN Weapons Inspector Charges Bush Launched Iraq War to Pursue
Agenda of 'Global Hegemony'
Interview with Scott Ritter, former
U.S. Marine and U.N. weapons inspector, conducted by Scott Harris: September
15, 2003.
As violence continued to consume
U.S.-occupied Iraq, President Bush addressed the nation on Sept. 7 to explain his
administration's policies there and request $87 billion for the pacification
and reconstruction of both Iraq and Afghanistan….
As he has many times before, the
president linked the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks against the U.S. to the toppled
regime of Saddam Hussein, despite the lack of any evidence connecting Iraq with
the al Qaeda network.
Scott Ritter is a former Marine
intelligence officer and U.N. weapons inspector who served in Iraq for seven
years before resigning in 1998. In the months before the U.S. invasion, Ritter
had publicly challenged the Bush administration's contention that Baghdad's
weapons systems posed a grave risk to the U.S and necessitated a war.
Scott Ritter: The president tried
to convince the American public that what is happening today circa September
2003 is a direct result of the events of September 11, 2001, as though there is
a continuum there, when in fact, the reality is there is no linkage between
Saddam Hussein's regime -- the one that we have overthrown -- and those who
perpetrated those horrific attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and
the other airplane that was hijacked and crashed in the hills of Pennsylvania.
This is not a war in Iraq that we
had to fight, it was very much an elective war, a war that the president elected to fight, and he did so under false pretense.
He told the American public that we were threatened by weapons of mass
destruction, this threat has yet to materialize.
It appears that his administration
exaggerated the case for war and now that we have troops deployed in harm's
way, we can't just simply cut and run. So we are in for the fight.
But the fight that's being fought
in Iraq is not a fight that would've been fought had we not invaded. If we
didn't invade Iraq, there wouldn't be a war against terror in Iraq, because Saddam Hussein's regime, as terrible as
it was, was the antithesis of an Islamic
fundamentalist anti-American regime….
What you need to do to answer that
question is dissect who populates the
senior most decision-making hierarchy positions in the Bush administration and
what motivates them. What is their stated ideology?
You will find that somewhere around 90 percent of these senior
positions are held by people who have an affiliation with the Project for a New
American Century, which is a neo-conservative thinktank and their ideology has
been stated clearly, several times in writing.
It's global hegemony. It's the United States of America imposing
its will, pre-emptively if necessary on the world, where we find our national
security to be at risk.
Donald Trump is correct, the Bush Administration lied, and
for Republican candidates to perpetuate the lies in a national presidential
campaign disqualifies them to hold the highest office in the land. Bush and Cheney should have been impeached
for their lies and brought before an international tribunal.
The 9-11 attacks were predicted that was the prophecy, and
the Bush Administration deliberately, knowingly ignored the warnings and
allowed the attacks on America to advance their neocon agenda. And that hegemony agenda has been continued
by the Obama Administration with the same people populating the pentagon and
State Department that populated Bush’s.
An all the while, the corrupt media empire of Rupert Murdock
perpetuates the silencing of anyone that dare say, Bush lied. Donald Trump has begun the discussion that
America has refused to have up until now.
Let’s get it all out there in the open and hold people accountable for
the savage world-wide devastation brought by the Project for a New American
Century.
No more sounds of silence.
By Patricia Baeten
