About the warnings

The draft of my pamphlet mentions the Bush administration’s lack of response to the warnings. The standard “debunker” response to this point is to say that the warnings weren’t specific enough to be actionable.

Patty Casazza, one of the “Jersey girls” who lobbied successfully for the creation of the 9/11 Commission, said at a conference in 2007 that she was approached by many whistleblowers, some of whom claimed to have known the exact date, the method, and the targets of the attack. Since we don’t know who these whistleblowers are, of course, we don’t know how credible they are. They aren’t among the 9/11 whistleblowers listed on Sibel Edmonds’ website, none of whom claimed to have had knowledge quite that specific. However, surely these whistleblowers should be interviewed as part of any real investigation. The 9/11 Commission ignored them, apparently.

As for the many, many other warnings that were received during what the 9/11 Commission report calls “The Summer of Threat,” during which “The system was blinking red” (Chapter 8), I don’t know enough about intelligence agencies and their procedures to know for sure what they would consider to be “actionable intelligence.” However, it’s clear that Bush himself ignored the overall trend of the warnings, in favor of his Iraq obsession.

As an aside: If indeed “9/11 was an inside job,” I would be inclined to suspect not Bush himself as the main culprit, but rather someone in either the CIA or the foreign policy establishment with a strong interest in Central Asia and its geopolitical role. If indeed “9/11 was an inside job,” I would be inclined to suspect that one of its main purposes might have been to convince Bush, as well as the American people, to devote more money and resources to projects in Central Asia. 9/11 did give the U.S. government a perfect excuse to put military bases in some former Soviet republics in Central Asia — surely a geostrategic prize, if the ultimate aim is to thwart Russia and China as possible rival superpowers. On the other hand, if Bush were the mastermind of 9/11, I would expect the blame to have been pinned more directly on Iraq.

This is all speculation, of course. No one really knows what really happened — except the culprits themselves, of course, whoever they might be.

What’s important here is these points: (1) warnings were indeed ignored, at least in a general sense, if not a more specific sense, and (2) the warnings — and the would-be whistleblowers who have not yet been heard — are still a topic worthy of investigation by some independent body with subpeona power.

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