FBI, Bush ignore terrorist
warnings
Brandon Moeller
Oops. Looks like Mr. Mueller and the rest
of the FBI could have known about the whole terrorist ploy before it transpired
that fateful day in
September.
So what should be done about it? Well,
it's an interesting topic out there on the wires and in the editorial pages
of American newspapers.
Mr. Mueller, after it was revealed that
his agency did not perform at 110 percent prior to that horrific day nine
months ago, enacted a new public
relations persona of openness, admitting
Wednesday that his agency has "to do a better job." Mr. Mueller said that
"red flags" and "dots that
should have been connected" existed, according
to Kevin Johnson in USA Today.
It took an internal whistle blower for
the American people to come anywhere near the truth. Not only did the FBI
not forewarn us of a terrorist plot
it could have uncovered prior to it happening,
but it also refused to admit its error. It took a 21-year veteran female
Special Agent and Chief
Division Counsel of the agency to finally
spill the news that Mueller was lying to us.
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd celebrated
the heroic female whistle blower Coleen Rowley in a recent column. Dowd
wrote that
President Bush should request, "Bring
me the head of Osama bin Laden. Or Bob Mueller."
But if you ask me, I think the mainstream
mass media also failed the American people when it comes to disseminating
the information we
should have known before and after Sept.
11. One of the first questions that should have been asked after the attack
on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon should have been "How
much did we know?"
The American press had the power to answer
this question, but it didn't do it in a timely fashion. But it's not only
the fault of the tremendously
increasing mass media oligopoly.
What the Bush Administration did know is
that bin Laden and the Al-Qaida network were said to have been behind the
1993 World Trade
Center bombing, the embassy bombings in
Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. This didn't
stop Bush from
wanting to do business with the Taliban,
offering them a "carpet of gold" if they would go against bin Laden and
allow the building of an oil
pipeline in Afghanistan.
Remember the few days following Sept. 11
when people were stranded across the country because flights were stopped
for a few days? The
media forgot to monitor the skies after
reporting them closed: One flight got out of the country thanks to the
Bush administration. That flight
picked up the relatives of bin Laden and
flew them outside of America before the FBI or CIA or any law enforcement
group could interview them
and ask them what they knew.
In the Sunday Washington Post, James Bamford
suggests that maybe the FBI and CIA aren't the only national agencies that
should be under
the microscope and given a test to find
if they know a terrorist when they see one. The National Security Agency,
Bamford argues, should have
been able to smell a terrorist that "set
up shop literally right under its nose."
For the events of Sept. 11, to have happened,
there is a large list of people to blame for not preparing and forewarning
the American people.
Mindlessly playing the blame game dilutes
the key issues of importance in undermining future attacks. The first step
is for the American people
to know exactly what is going on around
them: and how their leaders are behaving and in the case of Sept. 11, failing
them.
