William Arkin breaks another important story entitled "What the 9/11 Plotter Tells Us" this morning on his blog Early Warning (Washington Post).
http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/...
Some highlights:
1. There was no 20th hijacker.
2. Other than the 19 hijackers who perished on 9/11, there were no other "cells" of jihadists within the United States, nor were any planned.
3. KSM used only the internet -- chat sessions, more specifically -- to remain in contact with the 19 hijackers (never the telephone) and communicated in code extensively.
4. "Except for two hijackers who needed assistance in settling in America, hijackers were told to stay away from mosques and American Muslims."
5. It was Mohammed Atta -- not OBL and not KSM -- who picked the date and targets of the attack.
6. A second "wave" of attacks were in the embryonic stage, projected to occur in the "distant future."
Go to the following link for the archive of the KSM trial documents:
http://www.rcfp.org/...
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was apprehended in Pakistan in March 2003, long after the Patriot Act has been passed and long after some 1500 or so Muslims were rounded up in the U.S. Clearly, it took time to wring the details out of KSM, but we now have proof that after KSM's arrest Bush continued to approve torture, rendition, indefinite detention, wiretapping, domestic spying, calls for renewal of the Patriot Act, and any number of other reprehensible acts in the name of national security when the evidence he had in hand refuted the need for such draconian tactics. Recall all the color-coded terror alerts prior to the 2004 election, designed to instill fear in the American people to the point of paranoia, to further his plan for re-election?
Furthermore, Bush and his entire administration continue to this day to perpetuate the myth of the 20th hijacker. I have lost count of the number of individuals so labeled.
Buried deep surreptiously deep in the bowels of today's Washington Post, I consider this headline-worthy, BIG NEWS, and I highly recommend that everyone reading this post go to the original blog entry, cut and paste, and send it along to everyone you know in advance of tomorrow's censure hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Because clearly, the Bush-approved domestic spying on our phone calls, in particular, and our internet use and our anti-war demonstrations -- not to mention the torture, extraordinary renditions and indefinite detention -- were and are unnecessary in light of this information we now have in hand.
UPDATE: Reading Bill Arkin's report, it is abundantly clear why Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft/Gonzales, et al., have campaigned nonstop to prevent public trials of alleged Al Qaeda and Taliban "detainees," arguing the point that as Commander-in-Chief Bush has the authority to designate tribunals in their stead -- fighting all the way to the Supreme Court, often on the most specious grounds -- and why they refuse access to the detainees by any domestic and/or international human rights groups. It would have blown their whole raison etre for the renewal of the Patriot Act, limiting our citizens' constitutional rights, et cetera, and as well it would have ruined the entire premise encompassed in the Republican's 2004 campaigns: Only Republicans are strong on national security. Only Republicans can protect you.
Perhaps we should all go back and review the BBC's documentary entitled The Power of Nightmares, still available on the web, which basically made the point that the Bush and Blair administrations were amping up the rhetoric on the threat of terrorism to an unjustifiable level.
Be that as it may, Bush's war in Iraq has unequivocally and exponentially expanded the threat on a worldwide basis. I do not believe it can be argued that the number of terrorist incidents have decreased since March 2003. On the contrary, are they not now some three times more brutual and more frequent? Should we suffer another major attack within our shores rather than at some foreign location, as in the past, we will have Bush and the Neocons to "thank."