http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/911-co...
September 23, 2010, 7:04 PM
9/11 Conspiracy Theory Not as Popular as Ahmadinejad Says
By ROBERT MACKEY
this was my comment posted in their "comments" section, which might or might not be accepted:
There's good claims and bad claims about 9/11 complicity.
There's no doubt that Al-Qaeda did the attacks.
There's also no doubt that US allies provided ample warnings to the Bush Cheney White House about who, what, where and when the attacks would happen.
Britain, France, Germany, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, Russia and other countries provided critical warnings in the weeks and months before 9/11. Some of the warnings were very specific.
The notorious footage of "President" Bush reading to second graders while told of the attacks shows that he was not really the Commander in Chief. If he was really the CINC he would have immediately excused himself from the silly photo-op and investigated what was happening with the air defenses, how many planes were involved, etc. There wasn't even a warning issued to the people in the South Tower when the Air Force realized a second plane was headed to the WTC.
FBI agents were tracking the flight schools that the terrorists trained at, especially the Minnesota school where the school called the FBI to warn about one of their students who was acting suspiciously. The FBI agents tried to get a warrant to search the student's computer after he was arrested (August 2001) but they were not given permission to do that until after 9/11 happened. Obstruction of justice is still against the law.
There's also a less documented operation called "Able Danger" involving military intelligence that reportedly tracked some of the terrorists before 9/11. The allegations about Able Danger were not mentioned in the 9/11 Commission report.
The Commission Report also did not mention why the CIA was conducting a "plane into building" exercise during the attacks at the National Reconnaissance Office near Dulles Airport. This information was revealed by the CIA itself in the summer of 2002, announced via the Associated Press. Sorry if I find it hard to believe that was just a coincidence.
There are a bunch of fake claims about complicity, my favorite is the nonsense that the plane crashes supposedly did not actually happen. The "no plane hit Pentagon" hoax was first floated by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in an interview with Parade Magazine on October 12, 2001. The Pentagon later claimed it was a transcription error, but they didn't correct the alleged error in the online transcript on the Pentagon's website. Disinformation is a clever way to sabotage investigations of scandals, and 9/11 probably has more of this than any other malfeasance. But it's more fun for the media to focus on the never ending litany of nonsense claims about faked plane crashes and controlled demolition, instead of investigating sober claims about suppressed warnings and overlapping wargames.