Reply #123: Who's in Charge Here? | Gail Sheehy, Mother Jones, 7/22/04

[Stephanie]

Who's in Charge Here?

What the 9-11 Commission Report does not explain is why, on the morning of September 11, 2001, President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and other top officials were essentially missing in action.

By Gail Sheehy
July 22, 2004

<snip>

Even before the 2000 presidential election, Rumsfeld commissioned a “blueprint for maintaining global U.S. pre-eminence” along with his future deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and future-Vice President Cheney, as well as President Bush’s brother, Florida governor Jeb Bush. The plan shows that Bush intended to take military control of Persian Gulf oil, whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power, and intended to retain control of the region even if there was no threat.

The report, written by the neo-conservative think tank Project for the New American Century, also advocated “regime change” in China, North Korea, Libya, Syria, and Iran. An unnamed British member of Parliament was quoted as saying of the report: “This is a blueprint for U.S. domination--a new world order of their making.” The report also complained that the changes it recommended were likely to take a long time, “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” In the summer of 2001, when security agencies were regularly warning of a catastrophic attack by Al Qaeda, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s office “sponsored a study of ancient empires—Macedonia, Rome, the Mongols—to figure out how they maintained dominance,” according to the New York Times.

Hours after the 9/11 attacks, Rumsfeld was given information that three of the names on the airplane passenger manifests were suspected al-Qaeda operatives. The notes he composed at the time asserted that he wanted the “best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. at same time. Not only UBL. Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.” He presented the idea to Bush the next day. Counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke later wrote in his book Against All Enemies, “At first I was incredulous that we were talking about something other than getting Al Qaeda. Then I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq.”

Shortly after 9/11, Rumsfeld set up “a small team of defense officials outside regular intelligence channels to focus on unearthing details about Iraqi ties with al-Qaeda and other terrorist networks.” In May, 2002, Time reported that “Rumsfeld has been so determined to find a rationale for an attack that on 10 separate occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to the terror attacks of September 11. The intelligence agency repeatedly came back empty-handed.”

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