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Monday, February 20, 2006

A half-dozen questions about 9/11

Werther asks; no one answers. Here are his six questions:
  1. Who is Osama bin Laden, and where did he come from?
  2. When were Osama's last non-hostile links with the U.S. government?
  3. How did the President of United States React to the August 6 2001 Presidential Daily Brief?
  4. Who wrote the script for the rhetorical response to 9/11?
  5. Why did the mysterious anthrax attacks come and go like a wraith?
  6. Why did Osama bin Laden escape?
Read Werther's thoughts at Counterpunch. Here's an excerpt from question 5:
It was pure coincidence, perhaps, that the anthrax scare was at its height, producing psychosomatic illness symptoms among members of Congress and staffers, just as the USA PATRIOT Act was wending its way through the legislative process. This measure, which originated among the same Justice Department lawyers who legally opined that torture was wholesome, was rammed through the Congress after enactment of the authorization of the use of force in Afghanistan. Why is this sequence significant?

The then-majority leader of the U.S. Senate, Tom Daschle, wrote a curious op-ed in the Washington Post four years after the events just described. [8]. In attempting to refute the administration's allegation that it had been granted plenary wiretap powers in the Afghanistan authorization, he stated that he and his Senatorial confreres explicitly rejected an administration proposal to authorize an effective state of war within the borders of the United States itself.

Given the administration's repeatedly demonstrated refusal to accept any limitation on its powers, it is logical that the rebuff on the war powers authorization was followed by the prompt submittal of the Justice Department's draft of the PATRIOT Act, containing many of the domestic authorities the Bush White House had sought in the use of force legislation. How doubly coincidental that two of the limited number of addressees of the threat letters should have been the offices of Daschle himself, and Sen. Patrick Leahy, then-chairman of the committee of jurisdiction over the PATRIOT Act.