nicky g
09-10-2003, 01:09 PM
Just to show that I'm an open-minded fellow, and that the Guardian isn't a total left-wing conspiracy/propaganda rag, here's a response article from one of its weekly columnists (which Michael Meacher, the author of the article Chris posted, is not) criticising Meacher's article. But just because I can't stand the author of the response, beneath it is a letter from a reader querying some of his assertions.
Has Meacher completely lost the plot? (http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1038215,00.html)
David Aaronovitch
Has Meacher completely lost the plot?
Tuesday September 9, 2003
The Guardian
"In a startling allegation," the Hindu of India told its many readers last Saturday, "a former British minister has said the US may have deliberately allowed the events of September 11 2001, so that it could have a pretext to attack Afghanistan and Iraq." The wires ran the story from Wellington to San Francisco. It was an "incredible piece", one happy blogger chortled, showing that conspiracy theories have "finally hit (the) mainstream media". In this case the "mainstream" was us here at the Guardian.
Made into a rough chronology of cause and effect, the argument from Michael Meacher, the minister in question, went like this:
1. The Americans (and the Brits, but not, it seems, the French or the Germans) are running out of oil and gas, and the Muslims have got lots.
2. A few years back, some neocons devised a plan to get their hands on the oil, etc, so as to be able to dominate the world.
3. Trouble was, they couldn't go ahead with the plan unless public opinion was mobilised, as it was at Pearl Harbor in 1941. Which, by the way, President Roosevelt knew all about, but decided not to stop so that he could have a war.
4. Subsequently, the Bush administration and its agencies did "little or nothing" to stop the plotters of 9/11 and - when their operation was under way - little or nothing to bring it to a halt.
5. After September 11, the Bushites forgot all about terrorism and Bin Laden and concentrated on invading places that had oil and gas.
6. So, "the 'global war on terrorism' has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for... the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies."
The oil and PNAC arguments in points one and two are so complex and recondite that I'll begin at about point three, in which the US may create a pretext for attacks. "There is a possible precedent for this," says Meacher, "The US national archives reveal that President Roosevelt used exactly this approach in relation to Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. Some advance warning of the attacks was received, but the information never reached the US fleet."
US national archives "reveal" no such thing. Or rather, they reveal it to a select few people, but not to most historians. This may not be the place to talk about Japanese signals received in 1940/41 and not successfully decoded until 1946, but to state as fact that the President of the US (and former under-secretary of the navy) connived at an attack that sunk a large proportion of his own Pacific fleet, is to go well beyond the known facts. Which is where M cheerfully went.
However, armed with this non-precedent, Meacher then argues that "the 9/11 attacks allowed the US to press the 'go' button... which it would otherwise have been politically impossible to implement".
But how to organise the necessary casus belli? "First, it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11." And then, says Meacher, it was "astonishing that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself". He goes on, "The first hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from the US Andrews airforce base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not?"
Unfortunately, this is all rubbish. Six minutes after the notification of the first hijacking, at 8.44am, fighters were ordered to be scrambled from Otis Base in Massachusetts. Two minutes later the first plane struck the World Trade Center. Another 16 minutes on, the second plane struck. Twenty-three minutes on and the third plane was notified as having been hijacked en route from Dulles airport. Another two minutes later fighters were scrambled from Langley (not Andrews), but arrived over Washington two minutes after Flight 77 struck the Pentagon. Nor was this lateness unprecedented. A year earlier F16s had failed to intercept a Cessna light aircraft that deviated from course, and buzzed the White House.
But watch Meacher build. It's a classic of its kind. "Was this inaction," he asks, "simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority?"
This is conspiracy 101. Say something is a fact which isn't. Then ask questions, rising up through incompetence, gradually to mal-intention, and then - abruptly - demand who might be behind it all. Cui Bono, my dear friends?
After the hijackings came the war that wasn't. "No serious attempt," charged Meacher, "has ever been made to catch Bin Laden." And he adds that, "The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that 'the goal has never been to get Bin Laden' ".
The following is from the press conference where that quote originated. General Myers is taxed with the embarrassing fact of Bin Laden being still extant. He makes Meacher's quote and then continues:
"Obviously that (the capture of BL) is desirable... the fact that we've been able to disrupt operations, get a lot of the people just under him and maybe just a little bit further down, has had some impact on their operations... So we're going to keep the hunt on. Finding one person, as we've talked about before, is a very difficult prospect, but we will keep trying."
Do you think that Meacher gives an adequate account of Myers' words here? And don't you seem to recall, over the past two years, an awful lot of chasing around the Tora Bora and through Pakistan, shoot-outs in various cities and captures of senior Bin Laden aides? Or is that all just some cunning smokescreen, to obscure the serious folk getting on with laying pipelines?
Questioned on ITN on Saturday Meacher denied that he was a conspiracy theorist, citing the "I'm only raising questions" defence. His information, he said, "comes from the collection of data that I have been doing meticulously. It comes from websites across the world."
The ones that suggest that the American agencies wanted an attack, so deliberately ignored the activities of terrorists in the US, and stood down their own air defences, in order to allow the worst terrorist atrocity in history to take place - all to secure oil and gas supplies. This act of treachery was accomplished with the complicity of military people, politicians and civil servants of all ranks, some of whose family members were on the planes and in the buildings.
I grant that Iraq has made us all a little mad. On either side of the argument many of us struggle to maintain our composure. Even so, I do not know what is more depressing: that a former long-serving minister should repeat this bizarre nonsense without checking it; that, yesterday, twice as many readers should be published supporting this garbage as those criticising it; or that one letter should claim that Meacher has simply said what "many have always known". Ugh! To give credibility to this stuff is bad enough, to "know" it is truly scary.
END
Letter (http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,3604,1038871,00.html)
In his attack on Michael Meacher, David Aaronovitch writes: "Six minutes after the notification of the first hijacking, at 8.44am, fighters were ordered to be scrambled from Otis base in Massachusetts." He fails to mention that the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Norad and Vice-president Cheney all admitted right after 9/11 that "no planes were scrabbled prior to the Pentagon crash".
Later, the US Air Force maintained that in fact two F15s had been scrambled from Otis. The question then arises as to why they did not intercept the second hijacked plane, Flight 175, which crashed into the south tower at 9:03am. It should have taken the Otis F15s about six minutes to get to Manhattan.
Aaronovitch adds: "Another two minutes later, fighters were scrambled from Langley (not Andrews), but arrived over Washington two minutes after Flight 77 struck the Pentagon." But it was 45 minutes after air traffic controllers had lost contact with Flight 77 that it crashed into the Pentagon, at least 40 minutes after they knew it had been hijacked. And why from Langley, 130 miles from Washington, instead of from Andrews, only 10 miles away? Many of us have had such questions since that terrible day.
Joseph Guerra
Trofa, Portugal
Has Meacher completely lost the plot? (http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1038215,00.html)
David Aaronovitch
Has Meacher completely lost the plot?
Tuesday September 9, 2003
The Guardian
"In a startling allegation," the Hindu of India told its many readers last Saturday, "a former British minister has said the US may have deliberately allowed the events of September 11 2001, so that it could have a pretext to attack Afghanistan and Iraq." The wires ran the story from Wellington to San Francisco. It was an "incredible piece", one happy blogger chortled, showing that conspiracy theories have "finally hit (the) mainstream media". In this case the "mainstream" was us here at the Guardian.
Made into a rough chronology of cause and effect, the argument from Michael Meacher, the minister in question, went like this:
1. The Americans (and the Brits, but not, it seems, the French or the Germans) are running out of oil and gas, and the Muslims have got lots.
2. A few years back, some neocons devised a plan to get their hands on the oil, etc, so as to be able to dominate the world.
3. Trouble was, they couldn't go ahead with the plan unless public opinion was mobilised, as it was at Pearl Harbor in 1941. Which, by the way, President Roosevelt knew all about, but decided not to stop so that he could have a war.
4. Subsequently, the Bush administration and its agencies did "little or nothing" to stop the plotters of 9/11 and - when their operation was under way - little or nothing to bring it to a halt.
5. After September 11, the Bushites forgot all about terrorism and Bin Laden and concentrated on invading places that had oil and gas.
6. So, "the 'global war on terrorism' has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for... the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies."
The oil and PNAC arguments in points one and two are so complex and recondite that I'll begin at about point three, in which the US may create a pretext for attacks. "There is a possible precedent for this," says Meacher, "The US national archives reveal that President Roosevelt used exactly this approach in relation to Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. Some advance warning of the attacks was received, but the information never reached the US fleet."
US national archives "reveal" no such thing. Or rather, they reveal it to a select few people, but not to most historians. This may not be the place to talk about Japanese signals received in 1940/41 and not successfully decoded until 1946, but to state as fact that the President of the US (and former under-secretary of the navy) connived at an attack that sunk a large proportion of his own Pacific fleet, is to go well beyond the known facts. Which is where M cheerfully went.
However, armed with this non-precedent, Meacher then argues that "the 9/11 attacks allowed the US to press the 'go' button... which it would otherwise have been politically impossible to implement".
But how to organise the necessary casus belli? "First, it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11." And then, says Meacher, it was "astonishing that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself". He goes on, "The first hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from the US Andrews airforce base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not?"
Unfortunately, this is all rubbish. Six minutes after the notification of the first hijacking, at 8.44am, fighters were ordered to be scrambled from Otis Base in Massachusetts. Two minutes later the first plane struck the World Trade Center. Another 16 minutes on, the second plane struck. Twenty-three minutes on and the third plane was notified as having been hijacked en route from Dulles airport. Another two minutes later fighters were scrambled from Langley (not Andrews), but arrived over Washington two minutes after Flight 77 struck the Pentagon. Nor was this lateness unprecedented. A year earlier F16s had failed to intercept a Cessna light aircraft that deviated from course, and buzzed the White House.
But watch Meacher build. It's a classic of its kind. "Was this inaction," he asks, "simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority?"
This is conspiracy 101. Say something is a fact which isn't. Then ask questions, rising up through incompetence, gradually to mal-intention, and then - abruptly - demand who might be behind it all. Cui Bono, my dear friends?
After the hijackings came the war that wasn't. "No serious attempt," charged Meacher, "has ever been made to catch Bin Laden." And he adds that, "The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that 'the goal has never been to get Bin Laden' ".
The following is from the press conference where that quote originated. General Myers is taxed with the embarrassing fact of Bin Laden being still extant. He makes Meacher's quote and then continues:
"Obviously that (the capture of BL) is desirable... the fact that we've been able to disrupt operations, get a lot of the people just under him and maybe just a little bit further down, has had some impact on their operations... So we're going to keep the hunt on. Finding one person, as we've talked about before, is a very difficult prospect, but we will keep trying."
Do you think that Meacher gives an adequate account of Myers' words here? And don't you seem to recall, over the past two years, an awful lot of chasing around the Tora Bora and through Pakistan, shoot-outs in various cities and captures of senior Bin Laden aides? Or is that all just some cunning smokescreen, to obscure the serious folk getting on with laying pipelines?
Questioned on ITN on Saturday Meacher denied that he was a conspiracy theorist, citing the "I'm only raising questions" defence. His information, he said, "comes from the collection of data that I have been doing meticulously. It comes from websites across the world."
The ones that suggest that the American agencies wanted an attack, so deliberately ignored the activities of terrorists in the US, and stood down their own air defences, in order to allow the worst terrorist atrocity in history to take place - all to secure oil and gas supplies. This act of treachery was accomplished with the complicity of military people, politicians and civil servants of all ranks, some of whose family members were on the planes and in the buildings.
I grant that Iraq has made us all a little mad. On either side of the argument many of us struggle to maintain our composure. Even so, I do not know what is more depressing: that a former long-serving minister should repeat this bizarre nonsense without checking it; that, yesterday, twice as many readers should be published supporting this garbage as those criticising it; or that one letter should claim that Meacher has simply said what "many have always known". Ugh! To give credibility to this stuff is bad enough, to "know" it is truly scary.
END
Letter (http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,3604,1038871,00.html)
In his attack on Michael Meacher, David Aaronovitch writes: "Six minutes after the notification of the first hijacking, at 8.44am, fighters were ordered to be scrambled from Otis base in Massachusetts." He fails to mention that the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Norad and Vice-president Cheney all admitted right after 9/11 that "no planes were scrabbled prior to the Pentagon crash".
Later, the US Air Force maintained that in fact two F15s had been scrambled from Otis. The question then arises as to why they did not intercept the second hijacked plane, Flight 175, which crashed into the south tower at 9:03am. It should have taken the Otis F15s about six minutes to get to Manhattan.
Aaronovitch adds: "Another two minutes later, fighters were scrambled from Langley (not Andrews), but arrived over Washington two minutes after Flight 77 struck the Pentagon." But it was 45 minutes after air traffic controllers had lost contact with Flight 77 that it crashed into the Pentagon, at least 40 minutes after they knew it had been hijacked. And why from Langley, 130 miles from Washington, instead of from Andrews, only 10 miles away? Many of us have had such questions since that terrible day.
Joseph Guerra
Trofa, Portugal