WHAT REALLY HAPPENED ON 9/11?
RAY NOWOSIELSKI & JOHN DUFFY
I really felt I should promote this particular interview, because it matters.
WHAT REALLY HAPPENED ON 9/11?
Authors of The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark: The CIA, NSA, and the Crimes of the War on Terror.
I’ve said for years that Demetri Kofinas is the best prepared podcast host around. If you’re not listening to the Hidden Forces podcast, you should be (for the full paid 1 hour and 39 minute version, go here).
Especially with this interview (and his one the other day with ex-Senator Bob Kerrey), Demetri is on fire lately.
Below, Kofinas responds to this tweet:
Demetri Kofinas:
“I've never supported Donald Trump, but if anyone's been a threat to our republic, it's people like Dick Cheney and his co-conspirators like Rumsfeld, Feith, Wolfowitz, Pearl, and all the other members of the Bush admin (including Bush) who used the country's military to wage a war of aggression under false pretenses and without supermajority support by the UN Security Council.
They singlehandedly destroyed any hope that the United States could be seen as the security guarantor of an international, rules-based order because they were willing to break their own rules when it didn't suit them in their quest for empire.
The only reason that Cheney thinks his words carry any weight (other than the weight of their own hypocrisy) is that he was never held accountable for his actions, just like everybody else in his administration except, maybe, his Chief of Staff. This total lack of accountability is at the heart of our troubles today.
It is why we have Donald Trump in the first place. [Bingo!]
It's why his vicious attack on Jeb Bush and the Bush legacy in that February 6, 2016, debate in New Hampshire resonated with so many people. These "Republicans against Trump" need to smarten up. If they want to regain the support of Republican voters, they should start by purging themselves of people like Cheney, who are responsible for the mess we find ourselves in today. Then, they need to start addressing the real grievances of their base, not by attacking Trump, but by offering something better.”
What really went on with 9/11 is such an important topic, especially because so many horrible things came about in the name of avenging it, particularly the historically disastrous (undeclared) Iraq War, when Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 (and our invasion was planned before 9/11.)
It almost seems as if some neocons - like the Project for the New American Century, led by Bill Kristol - wanted something like 9/11 to happen.
This was from September 2000:
“Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”
Demetri posted several short clips, which are below. I added a few quotes I particularly noted below. If you’re intrigued, check out the entire interview.
Ray Nowosielski: “When we talk about odd stuff outside the narrative, there were a few categories, but it was like Paul Thompson had time-lined out the morning for all of the key participants in the White House, George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, and all this stuff. You started to see that there were moments when they seemingly could have sent up fighters, or could have responded better. And you got to remember afterwards, they're the tough guys who were going after the bad guys, and get out of our way, they were G.I Joe. So it's like if you could see that they really didn't respond very well on that morning, then they were completely mis-selling themselves to the public. So if you weren't with them politically, that was annoying.”
“If it were to be proven that these people who worked in the Bin Laden station at CIA knew about this, and had some other objective that was unclear at the moment, but that caused them to stop the FBI from doing its job to follow these terrorists in the United States, that would obviously be a thing that could potentially politically damage the CIA. That's putting it nicely. I mean, it could really see the CIA as it existed, dismantled, or at minimum, those parties face some serious consequences. So one can understand why the cover-up machine sort of starts as soon as 3000 die.”
“If the CIA were doing what we're alleging that they did and they had good intentions and they broke the law to follow those good intentions, and then afterwards they watched 3000 of their fellow countrymen die, any decent ethical set of people would basically face the consequences, would say this got out of our control and here's what happened. And now maybe I'm going to be fired or maybe I'm going to be prosecuted. It is what it is, but I'm going to stand by what happened and I'm going to come clean here. And none of these people, if what we're saying is correct ever did that.”
“But even worse, so cynical, they turned it so that they actually became empowered for a generation in charge of these agencies. And when we talk about the torture program, they were the people in charge of that.”
John Duffy: “This idea that the CIA would be illegally trying to infiltrate Al-Qaeda via Saudi proxies in the United States - you have to believe that they were doing that hoping, yes, to get inside information on whatever Al-Qaeda was up to, and maybe to be able to use that to disrupt, dismantle the network. And then obviously 9/11 happens. So somewhere in between there, there's a disconnect. Somewhere it goes from them thinking they can yes, control this, manipulate it, make it work for them to, uh-oh, it didn't work, and it blows up horrendously. And the question is, where do they recognize that this is not working and they need to do something about it?”
“It would be bad to go and try to get accountability where someone's really effed up and really cost people lives and things like that. The people at CIA's, Alec Station, there should have been accountability 100%. And like Ray's saying, if they had any damn integrity, they would've just fessed up to what they'd done.”
Kofinas: “There are parallels to the COVID-19 pandemic. There are parallels to the relationship between the National Institute of Health the Wuhan Institute of Virology and their gain-of function research to this story.”
“If you believe all of this, if this all makes sense, they could have easily prevented the attacks, easily.”
“We need to take the gloves off. We need to go and work in the shadows. That's what VP Dick Cheney had said. Remember, work in the shadows. We need to do enhanced interrogation. We need to waterboard and torture the shit out of people. How many times was it? I'm trying to remember now. Zubaydah or was it Moussaoui who got waterboarded 100 something times? I mean, the kind of stuff that was justified, the building of this giant surveillance state, all of that by telling the American people a story, which everyone believed.”
“So this is the part of the story, one of the parts of doing the research that I got physically ill this summer. Right? Because if you really could spend the time and read it, you can't help but get physically ill, especially if you were personally impacted in one way or another by 9/11, or you lived through it, because you really see, oh, this is like the clock is ticking. We have months now to go before the 9/11 attacks. You guys are sitting on critical information. And your concern is: How do you get this information out there so that the crime can be interrupted, this horrific act can be interrupted? And it's also unclear if he really understood exactly at this point what it was without compromising your own personal security, your own wellbeing. Right? So it was Tom's priority.
Again, if you believe all of this, as Richard Clark has said, Tom's priority was Tom Wilshire. Tenet's priority was George Tenet. Everybody that was involved in this what appears to have been a good faith effort to infiltrate Al-Qaeda and keep the United States safe. No one is saying that these guys had bad intentions when they did this, but what is clear is that once they began to see that the danger levels were rising, but that would be somehow implicated, at no point did they say, "You know what, I'm going to fall on sword. I'm going to do what is my duty." They wanted to protect themselves.”
Demetri Kofinas
This is an excellent summary from Demetri Kofinas:
I know someone who called Cheney a war criminal throughout the wars of the Bush Administration and is now thrilled that the Cheneys have endorsed Harris. It boggles the mind how much you can brainwash people who only get their “news” from the MSM, which has also done a complete reversal on the loathsome Cheneys.
I was working for the Senator when Kerrey was working on the 9/11 report. He called often and I spoke to him often. I always got the sense (and still do) that he was a decent guy and something was troubling him greatly. I know most of us in NYC believed something was not right. My sense is he also believed that. He and the Senator would have long conversations (the Senator who almost took the democratic nomination from Gore and who sat on the intelligence committee for 18 years). It’s crazy to me now that so few people question what happened that day. It has to be because they cannot face reality. One way or the other the gov’t sold us down the river that day.