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Tue 17 Nov, 2009 01:53 pm
Quote:THE LIES THEY TOLD
By JACOB HEILBRUNN
November 12, 2009
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Perhaps nothing perturbs Farmer more than the contention that high-ranking officials responded quickly and effectively to the revelation that Qaeda attacks were taking place. Nothing, Farmer indicates, could be further from the truth: President George W. Bush and other officials were mostly irrelevant during the hijackings; instead, it was the ground-level commanders who made operational decisions in an ad hoc fashion. The memoirs of the White House terrorism expert Richard Clarke, which Farmer credits with good faith, make it sound as though a dramatic video conference that Clarke led played a crucial role in organizing a response to the hijackings, but Farmer says that “this account does not square in any significant respect with what occurred that morning.”
...
Yet both Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney, Farmer says, provided palpably false versions that touted the military’s readiness to shoot down United 93 before it could hit Washington. Planes were never in place to intercept it. By the time the Northeast Air Defense Sector had been informed of the hijacking, United 93 had already crashed.
Farmer scrutinizes F.A.A. and Norad rec ords to provide irrefragable evidence that a day after a Sept. 17 White House briefing, both agencies suddenly altered their chronologies to produce a coherent timeline and story that “fit together nicely with the account provided publicly by Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz and Vice President Cheney.”
Farmer further observes that the Bush administration wrongly asserted that the chain of command functioned on 9/11; that President Bush issued an authorization to shoot down hijacked commercial flights; and that top officials at F.A.A. headquarters coordinated their actions with the military.
Farmer’s verdict: “History should record that whether through unprecedented administrative incompetence or orchestrated mendacity, the American people were misled about the nation’s response to the 9/11 attacks.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Heilbrunn-t.html?_r=2&scp=2&sq=sunday%20book%20review&st=cse
"Is it possible that the CIA would actually commit alleged war crimes " and the U.S. government would not hold the CIA and itself accountable in any way?
Is water wet?"
Quote:Nat Hentoff: Who needs trials? Kill terror suspects!
In October, during an interactive session with students in Pakistan, a female medical student praised Hillary Clinton for inspiring women, but then the same admirer asked the secretary of state how the United States justifies using those CIA remote-controlled Predator drone planes without sharing intelligence with the Pakistan military (The New York Times, Oct. 30). These airborne assassins kill civilians while targeting terror suspects in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Clinton refused comment on this expansive and lethal program, details of which are, of course, classified state secrets.
But another Pakistani woman flatly told Clinton that these drone devastations of suspected terrorist hideouts are like “executions without trials” (New York Daily News, Oct. 31).
The secretary of state’s blunt response about these sometimes-summary executions was: “There is a war going on.”
Predator concerns
On Oct. 27, as Agence France Press reported, our killer drones were confronted at the United Nations by Philip Alston, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions.
“My concern,” he said, “is that drones/Predators are being operated in a framework which may well violate international humanitarian law and international human rights law.”
Alston sent a strong message, without naming him, to President Obama: “We need the United States to be more upfront and say, ‘OK, we’re willing to discuss some aspects of this program,’ otherwise you have the really problematic bottom line that the CIA is running a program that is killing significant numbers of people and there is absolutely no accountability in terms of the relevant international laws” (AFP, Yahoo News, Oct. 27).
[read on at]
http://billingsgazette.com/news/opinion/editorial/columnists/nat_hentoff/article_5dbfd492-cf44-11de-86d4-001cc4c002e0.html
Free nations are peaceful nations. Free nations don't attack each other. Free nations don't develop weapons of mass destruction.
" George W. Bush
George, disassembling.
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