FEMA TO THE RESCUE?
The WTC was considered such a prime terrorist target, the Twin Towers are pictured framed in cross-hairs on the cover of FEMA’s Urban Rescue Manual. On Sept. 10, a Federal Emergency Management Urban Rescue Team reportedly arrived in New York City. Two days later, FEMA official Tom Kennedy told Dan Rather, “We’re currently one of the first teams that was deployed to support the City of New York in this disaster. We arrived on late Monday night and went right into action on Tuesday morning.”

In the ensuing furor, FEMA hushed Kennedy, saying the rescue team leader was “confused” on dates that no small unit commander could possibly forget. Even if Kennedy had somehow “forgotten” that he had been engaged in historic action on the morning of his interview with Rather, FEMA’s revised story would have made his men the last team in – not the first – hardly bragging material on national TV.

CALL THE AIR FORCE
No one expected jumbo jets to start jumping into buildings. But scope-scanning air traffic controllers are trained to instantly query the slightest discrepancy in assigned altitude or heading.
Written procedures specify that the North American Air Defense command be notified immediately. Poised on runways to launch within minutes, armed alert jets routinely intercept stray aircraft whose pilots or radios have failed. So where was NORAD when four big bogies made drastic departures from flight plans and airways as rigidly regulated as embedded tracks in the sky?
US northeastern air defense is spearheaded by the 102nd Fighter Wing at Cape Cod. Specifically tasked with intercepting hijacked airliners, two “ready alert” aircraft are kept on ’round the clock standby at the Otis Air National Guard base - armed, fueled and ready to launch. Otis is 185 flying miles from Manhattan.

The Federal Aviation Administration says it alerted NORAD to the first hijackings at 8:38. The general in charge of North American Air Defense did not explain why, 18 minutes later, a pair of F-15s was scrambled from Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod 179 miles away, when closer “ready alert” aircraft could have intervened.

Ordered to keep their speed down to an airliner’s crawl – and denied permission to accelerate to 1,875 mph over the Atlantic Ocean – Otis’ Mach 2-plus fighters were 70 miles from Manhattan when the South Tower was struck. Two F-16s from Langley, Virginia arrived overhead 20 minutes after the Pentagon was hit.

Myers never mentioned that just 10 miles away, armed fighters were ready to launch. Tasked with defending the nation’s capitol against terrorist attacks, Andrews AFB boasts the 121st Fighter Squadron equipped with F-16s, and the 321st Marine Fighter Attack Squadron flying F/A-18s. Two “ready alert” jets are ready to intercept bogies 24-hours a day.

But someone ordered the Andrews jets held on the ground. None of the fighters flying routine missions up and down the eastern seaboard were vectored to intercept Flight 175…

At 9:55, Cheney reached Air Force One, recommending that Bush authorize the military to shoot down any rogue airliners. “You bet,” Bush replied.

Moments later a military aide approached the vice president. “There is a plane 80 miles out,” he said.

“There is a fighter in the area. Should we engage?”

Cheney replied instantly, “Yes.”

Within minutes, there was a report that a plane had gone down in Pennsylvania. Bush asked, “Did we shoot it down or did it crash?”

From Chapter 2:

Within hours of deadly strikes over three states, counter terrorism experts expressed amazement bordering on professional admiration for the military precision of attacks which marked at least six airliners for near-simultaneous hijacking and kamikaze crashes.

Box-cutters were found on two flights diverted to Canada. As the Globe & Mail reported on June 13, 2002, a French Canadian general serving as deputy commander of NORAD on Sept. 11 suspects “there might have been more than just the four aircraft involved.”

According to the Globe, when a Los Angeles-bound flight was grounded by emergency FAA orders at New York’s John F. Kennedy airport that fateful morning, “three Middle-Eastern passengers angrily demanded that the flight proceed and then were kicked off the plane, vanishing before police showed up. United Airlines Flight 23 was bound for the West Coast and full of fuel.”

Among the “identified” hijackers, just who were these Arab aces whose names and photos were plastered worldwide across newspaper front pages and TV screens within days of the attacks? It turns out that one of the 19 “hijackers” had died the year before. At least six are still alive!

• Outraged Saudi airlines pilot al-Omari wants to know why he was reported as a dead hijacker in the American media…

• Flight 93 “hijacker” al-Ghamdi – who also saw his name and picture flashed worldwide - is still flying for Tunis air…

• A fourth hijacker named by the FBI, Ameer Bukhari, died in a small plane crash the previous year.

• Accused of flying Flight 77 into the Pentagon, oilman Salem al-Hazmi, 26, had just returned to work in Yanbou after a holiday in Saudi Arabia, when the real hijackers struck…

• An embarrassed CNN later issued yet another correction, reporting that accused deceased hijacker “Adnan Bukhari is still in Florida” – and had been cleared by authorities of any connection with 911.

• In Dakar on Sept. 21, the Wal Fadjri newspaper reported that a seventh suspect – Amer Kamfar – “was in fact an alive pilot in Arabia.”…

• According to the BBC, Khalid al-Mihdhar may also still be alive…

Alleged Pentagon plane crasher Hani Hanjour had been out to the Maryland Freeway Airport trying to rent a Cessna to sharpen his suicidal skills. According to the Prince George’s Journal, “Marcel Bernard, the chief flight instructor at the airport, said the man named Hani Hanjour went into the air in a Cessna 172 with instructors from the airport three times beginning the second week of August.”

Bernard said that Hanjour held an April 1999-issued pilot’s license showing hundreds of hours logged. But he repeatedly flubbed his “check-ride” - a quick flight around the pattern to make sure an unknown renter can get the plane off and back on the runway without cracking up. After three sessions, white-knuckled instructors felt this Egyptian pilot was too incompetent to fly solo.

Hanjour also trained for a few months in Scottsdale, Arizona back in 1996 - but washed out when instructors there felt he was too incompetent to fly.

What about the other alleged Arab aces? Mohammed Atta, alleged hijacker of flight 11 and Marwanal al-Shehhi, alleged hijacker of flight 175 supposedly struck the World Trade Center towers while juggling their fears and a pair of unwieldy jets at rooftop altitudes intolerant of the slightest mistake.

Where did they learn to do this? According to the Washington Post, both pilots took hundreds of hours of flying lessons at two Florida flight schools: Huffman and Jones Aviation. This is enough flight instruction to earn a commercial ticket and an instrument rating. Yet, these flyboys couldn’t find the ground with both hands.

Atta and al-Shehhi were not the only alleged terrorists who had trouble stretching their wings. Nawaq al-Hazmi and Khaid al-Mihdhar are alleged to have flown Flight 77. Both jet jockeys briefly attended a San Diego fight school, where they also washed out because of their limited English and incompetence at the controls.

Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar visited the San Diego airfield last spring seeking flying lessons. Instructors who love flying try hard to encourage slow students. But after just two flying lessons, their shaken instructors said “no more,” and advised al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar to quit. “Their English was horrible, and their mechanical skills were even worse,” one instructor told the Washington Post. “It was like they had hardly even ever driven a car.”

From Chapter 4:

In promising worldwide retribution though “Infinite Justice”, President George Bush jabbed Middle Eastern sensitivity to Western insensitivities. In scandalized Arab eyes, “Infinite Justice” is a sacred act reserved only for Allah.

Bush immediately compounded his blunder by calling for a “crusade”. Many Arabs read this as the continuation of historic Christian assaults on their loved ones and holy places, reacting viscerally to this reminder of atrocities committed by cross-waving armies relentlessly raping, murdering and pillaging the world’s oldest civilization.

“Crusades” is a trigger-word etched deep in Arab DNA. It conjures the horrors of 1099, when a Catholic mob shouting, “It’s God’s will” sacked the Holy City of Jerusalem - and slaughtered 30,000 Muslims sheltering in the Mosque of al-Aqsa…

I visited this region on a personal peace mission in less than happy circumstances. In Amman, as SCUD missiles arced overhead into nearby Tel Aviv, I was taken into a Palestinian teenager’s bare plaster room plastered with posters of “resistance fighters”. Music tapes playing on his battered boombox gave voice to the anguish and anger of a displaced people. My heart sank before his plight and his fervor.

Islamic law requires the faithful Muslim to retaliate for the wrongful slaying of the innocent - unless an acceptable apology and reparations are made. Echoing that stern injunction, Old Testament law commands “an eye for an eye” - until everyone goes blind.
Washington’s dalliance with the Taliban has also unsettled many of America’s friends…

White House toleration of Taliban terror began in 1994, when the United States and Pakistan decided to install a stable regime in Afghanistan to safeguard the Unocal pipeline project. As the San Francisco Chronicle chronicled, “Impressed by the ruthlessness and willingness of the then-emerging Taliban to cut a pipeline deal, the State Department and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency agreed to funnel arms and funding to the Taliban in their war against the ethnically Tajik Northern Alliance.”

It was a “crude” deal, especially for more than half the population of Afghanistan - including 500,000 war widows - “saved” from Soviet emancipation and now forced to live under the Taliban’s murderous misogyny.

Immediately after the Taliban took Kabul in 1996, Unocal entertained its ruthless leaders in Houston. As Pilger learned, the oil company “offered them a generous cut of the profits of the oil and gas pumped through a pipeline that the Americans wanted to build from Soviet central Asia through Afghanistan.”

A US diplomat patiently parlayed to Pilger that Afghanistan would become an American oil colony - featuring huge profits for the West, no democracy, and the legal persecution of women, who could be beaten for laughing in public and other “immodesties”.

“We can live with that,” the diplomat said.

From Chapter 5:

the biggest prize sought by Washington remained direct access to GOD. Knowing no religious affiliation, calling for no compassion or restraint, this was the same god to which so many governments had sacrificed so many resources and so many lives:

• Guns
• Oil
• Drugs

Did someone say Kosovo? Focusing on faked footage to help sell a war to halt “ethnic cleansing”, Washington never mentioned Kosovo’s key oil links. At least not in captions to trick press photos showing “maltreated civilians” standing outside the fences of “prison camps” that were really refugee camps where they gratefully sought shelter.

When the US attacked Kosovo without UN sanction in the summer of 1999, Moscow moved to protect this key oil transshipment route. The daring nighttime storming of Pristina airport by ill-equipped Russian commandos effectively checkmated the NATO troops who followed. The Kremlin’s “Operation Shield” protected Russian interests as NATO unleashed an 11-week bombardment. In an all-too-familiar reprise of modern one-way warfare, eight-engine B-52s rained thousands of tons of bombs on Kosovo as NATO spokesman Jamie Shea boasted that the alliance was “knocking the stuffing out of Milosevic.”

Like previous tyrants targeted by American warplanes, Milosevic’s stuffing stayed remarkably intact while dazed civilian survivors wandered the ruins of their homes and shops. Polluted air and water from bombed petrochemical plants, as well as radioactive dust from depleted uranium munitions quickly turned no-longer-picturesque Kosovo into an ecological hell.

In a grim replay of “eco war” in the Persian Gulf, The Guardian called the bombing of Yugoslavia “in environmental terms, the dirtiest war the West has ever fought, a war which targets chemical factories and oil installations, which deploys radioactive weapons in towns and cities, in a war against everyone, civilians as well as combatants, the unborn as well as the living.”

On June 9, 1999, the UN Security Council declared that 27,000 NATO bombing raids had “a devastating impact on the environment, industry, employment, essential services and agriculture. Land, air, rivers, lakes and underground waters as well as the food chain and public health are affected.”

According to UN inspection team leader Pasi Rinne, the bombardment of Kosovo created severe “environmental hotspots” that posed “acute health risks” to the residents of four major cities.

A major UN concern was 30,000 depleted uranium (DU) shells fired into Kosovo. Each DU rounds unleash clouds of radioactive heavy metals that lodge in human lung tissue - and water supplies. The Nation also reported:

In Yugoslavia, NATO bombs obliterated dozens of industrial facilities - oil refineries, electrical transformers, chemical plants, a car factory - located along the Danube river and its tributaries. The strikes sent up plumes of noxious smoke and spilled hundreds of tons of hazardous chemicals into waterways…

The city of Pancevo, 10 miles outside Belgrade, suffered a Bhopal-type disaster when NATO planes incinerated a major petrochemical complex. A fertilizer factory, an oil refinery and a chemical plant burned for five days. As 80,000 tons of oil and 460 tons of dioxin-laden plastic turned into chemical warfare, rain the color of coal fell on this town of 80,000 people. One lethal chemical - a liver poison - was measured at 10,000 times above safe levels.

According to a grisly dispatch from Pancevo that ran in The Guardian last May, eating root vegetables is now banned because of soil contamination, dogs are coming down with a rare bone cancer, young people are reporting heart problems and about 100 of the emergency workers who rushed to the fire are ailing from permanent, disabling lung damage.

Just like the destruction of Iraq.

Just like the destruction of Vietnam…

In late June, more than two months before attacks on America provided a pretext for war, consultations between Secretary of State Collin Powel and the Russian and Indian foreign ministers reached a decision to invade Afghanistan.

In mid-July, during a UN-sponsored international Afghan-networking session in Berlin, former Pakistan Foreign Secretary Niaz Naik was told by senior American officials that military action would commence in Afghanistan before the snows began in mid-October. According to Naik, the Berlin discussions centered on “the formation of a government of national unity. If the Taliban had accepted this coalition, they would have immediately received international economic aid.”

That was the carrot.

The big fist came when US representative Tom Simons threatened the Taliban and Pakistan with “a military operation”. Former French spook-turned-author Jean-Charles Brisard recalled, “At one moment during the negotiations, the US representatives told the Taliban, ‘either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs’.”

…Washington said it would not drop its invasion plan - even if bin Laden were to be surrendered immediately by the Taliban.

…In the weeks leading up to Sept. 11, Whitehall placed 20,000 troops and a wing of attack aircraft in Oman within striking range of Afghanistan. Exercise “Saif Sareea II” sent what Whitehall termed the “largest armada since the Falklands War” steaming into the Gulf. The Harrier-carrying carrier Illustrious led the British naval force. Tomahawk cruise missiles from the submarines Triumph and Trafalgar would soon be winging into Afghanistan towns and cities.

From Chapter 6:

Clinton’s call to “streamline” the international drug flow meant cutting deals with the Kosovo Liberation Army. The KLA’s links to an extensive organized crime network headquartered in neighboring Albania attracted Armitage, as well as a Saudi businessman named Osama bin Laden…

A “Year 2000” report by the Center for Public Integrity suggests that drug money played a big part in Halliburton’s heyday under Cheney from 1995 to 2000…

Worldwide drug “pipelines” parallel physical pipelines supplying an equally profitable addiction through territory controlled by Halliburton’s main subsidiary, Brown & Root. Significantly, this heavy construction and oil service giant maintains major facilities in every drug-producing region in the world. Oil rigs located in international waters off the US coastline are especially convenient transshipment points for hard drugs being smuggled into the States.

From Chapter 7:

It turns out that a Saudi financier connected to bin Laden family businesses and investments recently formed Bioport. Their intention to become the exclusive supplier of America’s anthrax antidote was translated into a monopoly on anthrax vaccine just months before a major government contract was awarded for that same vaccine…

Bioport’s first shares were in fact held by Carlyle. Dubbed “the world’s largest war contractor” by the Wall Street Journal, this “investment club” counts among its sales staff and directors former CIA director Frank Carlucci, James Baker III and George Bush Sr.

From Chapter 10:

This is a haunted place. Entering a prison near the first town retaken by the Northern Alliance, journalists and Red Cross workers encountered “a horrific scene of carnage”. Nearly 800 Taliban prisoners lay slaughtered after a three-day massacre directed by US Special Forces and CIA operatives.

From the Center for Research on Globalization, Jerry White wrote that most of those killed died from US air strikes on the prison compound. “At least 30 bombing attacks were carried out by US warplanes and helicopter gunships, whose targets were pinpointed by Special Forces at the prison.”

Stunned witnesses stumbled across the dismembered corpses of hundreds of Taliban prisoners “strewn amidst the rubble and still burning buildings, the blasted parts of dozens of dead horses and bullet-raked vehicles.”

An Associated Press photographer found the corpses of 50 prisoners, executed with their hands tied behind their backs with black scarves. The dead were mostly Pakistanis, Chechens, Arabs and other non-Afghans who surrendered Nov. 24, after the Taliban’s northern stronghold fell to alliance militias.

According to the Times of London, resistance by panicked Taliban prisoners began only after CIA provocateurs shot and killed at least five unarmed POWs. German television footage showed alliance soldiers firing over the walls into the mass of prisoners inside.

The carnage ended when “US and British special forces set fire to oil poured into a shelter where three Taliban prisoners remained. A Northern Alliance tank then drove over the bodies of several Pakistani and Arab Taliban volunteers and fired three rounds at a range of 20 yards, obliterating the building and killing the last holdouts.”

The prisoners had been brought to the fortress under an agreement between the Taliban commander and Northern Alliance leader General Rashid Dostum to surrender the city. Dostum’s troops had just finished massacring Taliban prisoners in Kunduz - “stomping on faces of captured Taliban and shooting others as they lay wounded,” according to AP.

President George Bush had just finished saying he preferred to see Taliban prisoners killed…

In a media-tagged “terrorist” camp in the British Columbia interior, where armed native warriors prepared to defend their Shaman and their territory against imminent assault by heavily armed troops, their leader pointed to the campfire and told me he hoped such a heavy-handed response would “scatter the embers” of rebellion into the Canada-wide tinder of long-held aboriginal resentment and rage.

A spiritual man intent on reviving rituals of the Sundance, Wolverine was wearied by constant assaults on indigenous nations who had never ceded or surrendered more than a scrap of land in the entire province of British Columbia. When a CBC Radio reporter asked via radiotelephone, “What do you want, Wolverine?”, the self-styled leader responded with an exasperated, “Freedom!”

“Freedom from what?” the reporter persisted.

“Freedom from everything!” he shouted.

Going by the cheering in the radio room, Wolverine’s outburst summarized the sentiments of everyone in the camp. If picking up guns seemed sheer folly, the amateur warlord and his followers clung to the hope that provoking a police massacre of a small Shushwap band occupying ancestral lands at Gustafsen Lake would spark an uprising among First Nations across Canada.

Thankfully, their strategy was never tested. Though I would shortly be propelled into a harrowing contest for my honor and my life, I learned two important lessons from a siege I did not expect to survive:

1) People with grievances just want to be heard.

2) If such people are ignored, belittled or attacked - if they feel driven to pick up weapons in self-defense or to get attention - the attention they attract will focus on their firepower, at the cost of the issues that need to be heard.

Call him hero or misguided, Wolverine was no terrorist. He was also not very skilled at getting a message he felt passionately about into the hearts and minds of office-workers as far removed from First Nations realities as a Manhattanite is from Palestine or Kabul.