The Myth of the "pre-911/post-911" Hijacking Dichotomy Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit The Myth of the "pre-911/post-911" Hijacking Dichotomy by Peter Bell Well, I see the as-yet-unindicted co-conspirators with George are up and about, explaining how there is some sort of huge conceptual gulf about what a hijacked plane could do that we passed over sometime in the morning of September 11, 2001. This is a blatant lie, but they're repeating it so very earnestly. So let's do a somewhat chronological take on what I know of why this is true. In the mid-1970s, a group of people hijacked a US flight after smuggling guns and grenades aboard. They ordered the captain to fly the jetliner to the vicinity of the Oak Ridge nuclear facility in Tennessee, and threatened to force the plane to crash into it. The plane ultimately flew to Cuba, where the hijackers were arrested and Cuba and the US enacted the only extradition agreement between them currently in force -- one covering hijackers. So as of 25 years ago, common criminals had figured out there was more you could do with a plane than hold the passengers hostage. In the mid-1990s, I've heard in recent days, the French uncovered a conspiracy to fly a plane into the Eiffel Tower. In the Philippines, folks associated with the group thaty made the unsuccessful first attempt to level the World Trade Center had a variety of other ideas. One of them was that flying a plane into CIA headquarters at Langley would be useful. Both of these plots were known to US intel agencies. The military groupie and bad novelist Tom Clancy, author of "The Hunt for Red October," hangs out with and is widely read by folks in the intel and military communities. They worked with him to some extent on "Hunt" and often write jacket blurbs for his books. One of Clancy's novels catapults his Ryan character to the Presidency through deus, or rather wacky Japanese fellow, ex machina -- the climax of one of his novels is a Japanese passenger jet making an unexpected entrance at a State of the Union address, thereby eliminating most of the Constitutional succession order and ushering in a Good Period in Clancy's mind, in which the CIA gets to openly assume the presidency. Clancy's a deeply disturbed individual, but that's not the point -- the point is, a whole lot of people read that book. Okay, coming into the era around 9-11. We have someone at the Arizona Field Office wondering if there are Al Qaida types doing aircraft flight training in the US, and we have agents in Minnesota finally questioning Zacarias Moussaoui after his flight instructors begged them to -- and one of the ways the flight instructor finally got the FBI involved was to paint them a mental picture of what you could do by flying a plane into a building, according to today's Washington Post. According to today's NY Times, the FBI already had a picture of this; it was a scenario outlined in a report they wrote in 1999. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was aware of this; as of last fall, they considered the effect of flying a plane into a reactor in publicly available material. Now, once the FBI had started questioning Moussaoui, the French got wind of it and warned them in no uncertain terms that the fact that he'd been apprehended in the US was in itself something that smart people would consider threatening. The sales reps from Fabulous, But Incompetent, however, were apparently more interested in how large the French market for their support undergarments might be than in, oh, say, relaying the warning back to DC. So, when Ari Fleischer and Condi Rice get on the Tee-Vee, and Donald Rumsfeld goes on the Limbaugh show (I guess to soothe the more conspiratorially minded on the right, who like to listen to Limbaugh during the hours when the shortwave reception isn't too good yet) to talk about "well, there's hijacking, and then there's hijacking," they're lying through their fucking teeth. Since these are God-fearing folks, this is probably why you don't see them doing outdoor shots when they're saying this shit; the Almighty could reach down with a bolt from the blue and apply a little corrective. A lot of people had conceived of using a plane in an attack on a building, pre-911. Common criminals were looking into it in 1972. Bad novelists were writing about it in the mid-'90s. French security was seeing plots to try it then, and Muslim extremists were confessing that they were considering trying it against the CIA. The FBI was doing analyses of the tactic. So, what are we likely to get out of all this? From the early spin the spooks are laying down, the problem is that we don't let the FBI and the CIA work together enough, and then we also cut the various state and local donut humpers out of the loop. So, what do we need to fix all this? Fire the time-servers at the FBI and set up an internal mailing list that they're all required to read and post to? No. What will help us most, we're told, is a red squad on steroids. A red squad that may well levitate old J. Edgar right out of his grave, pogo'ing back into town on the stiffie it produces. A red squad that can collate everything from what bumper stickers Deputy Dawg sees on your car, to the contents of your email, to the take from tons of satellites shipped in daily through the NRO. Buying the lies on the "dichotomy" between "pre-911" and "post-911" hijacks is just the down payment on that donut bill, boys and girls. But hey -- if you don't decide to *make* the down payment, maybe we can keep 'em from coming after us for the vig. ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytcov-05.18.02-00:47:28-15069