The Neocons and 9/11

[freedom fighter jh]

1. Paul Jay is right about the intent.

Robert Parry doesn't see any evidence that the Bush administration's failure to see 911 coming was caused by anything other than their insistence on focusing on Iraq.

Paul Jay raises the possibility that the Bush administration may have missed 911 deliberately, to get their "new Pearl Harbor."

There is evidence that the failure was deliberate in the administration response once 911 did happen. Secretary of State Colin Powell promised the public a report about Osama bin Laden but never delivered. Asked for a 911 investigation, Bush stalled for over a year and when Congress finally did investigate, he withheld a great deal of information. Bush and Cheney refused to testify to the commission separately; they needed each other there to make sure they got their story straight. Later, the NIST investigation of how the towers collapsed carefully avoided any real investigation of, well, how the towers collapsed -- it stopped looking at the point where the collapses began, the NIST team refused to look into the obvious possibility of explosives, and NIST engineer John Gross refused to acknowledge reports of molten steel at Ground Zero.

I think Parry misses it because he's looking only (at least as far as this interview goes) at what happened *before* 911. From that point of view, obsessive focus on Iraq in response to Neocon pressure could look pretty much the same as a deliberate refusal to see 911 coming.