they knew-senior member of the ruling British Labour Party

WSWS : News & Analysis : North America

Meacher: terrorism a pretext for conquest

British official charges US "stood down" on 9/11

By Bill Vann
8 September 2003

A senior member of the ruling British Labour Party has charged that
the Bush administration had advance knowledge of the September 11, 2001
terrorist
attacks and allowed them to take place in order to further
longstanding plans for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Michael Meacher, who until he was removed in a cabinet reshuffle
last June served as Blair's environment minister, wrote an article
published in the
September 6 issue of the Guardian
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1036571,00.html]
entitled "The war on terrorism is bogus: the 9/11
attacks gave the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure its
global domination."

Citing the failure of the US military and intelligence apparatus to
either act on numerous warnings of impending attacks or to respond in
timely manner when
four passenger airliners were hijacked simultaneously on September
11 itself, Meacher writes: "Was this inaction simply the result of key
people disregarding
or being ignorant of the evidence? Or could US air security
operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so,
why, and on whose
authority?"

The article prompted an angry response from the US Embassy in
London, which issued a statement declaring that Meacher's "assertions
that the US
government knowingly stood by while terrorists killed some 3,000
innocents in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia would be monstrous, and
monstrously
offensive, if they came from someone serious or credible."

For its part, major US media outlets blacked out any reference to
Meacher's explosive charges.

The claim that Meacher is not "serious or credible" has no
foundation. He is not a back-bench maverick or a member of what the
right-wing British press
likes to refer to as the "loony left." On the contrary, he was the
Labour Party's most experienced cabinet minister, having served in
Parliament for 33 years,
holding various cabinet posts going back to the Wilson and Callaghan
administrations in the 1970s. He served in Blair's cabinet as
environment minister for
six years until he was removed in June amid the mounting crisis of
the Labour government over the Iraq war. He played a prominent role in
the negotiation
of the Kyoto accords on the environment and was long considered a
contender for the position of Labour Party leader.

That someone with these political connections charges in print that
elements within the US administration knew that a terrorist attack was
coming on
September 11 and allowed it to happen to further their war plans
represents an extremely dangerous development for the Bush White House.
He speaks not
just for himself. The thesis he advances is indicative of what is
assumed and is being said behind the scenes among much wider circles
within the sole major
government to have backed Washington in its invasion of Iraq.

It is doubtless that the article was motivated by the deepening
crisis of the Blair government itself over the exposure of the lies it
used to promote the Iraq
war. With continuing revelations from within the government's own
intelligence agencies about the fabrication of evidence against Iraq,
recent polls have
shown a majority of Briton's in favor of Blair's resignation.

The questions Meacher raises have never been answered by anyone in
the US government. On the eve of the second anniversary of the September
11 terrorist
attacks, the American public knows almost nothing more about what
happened that day-and how it was allowed to happen-than it knew two
years ago. The
Bush White House has made every effort to derail or stonewall any
independent investigation into these tragic events. To this day, no one
has explained how
suspected terrorists, under the surveillance of the FBI and the CIA,
were allowed to enter the US, commandeer commercial aircraft and fly
them unhindered
until striking their targets.

Meacher's article pursues many of the same themes that have been
raised over the past two years by the World Socialist Web Site
concerning the way the
September 11 events were seized upon by the Bush government to drive
forward its longstanding plans for military aggression, as well as the
ample evidence
that the government was repeatedly warned about the impending
attacks, yet failed to take even routine actions to counter them.

Meacher rejects the official explanation that the successive US wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq represented Washington's response to the attacks
on the Pentagon
and New York City's Twin Towers, declaring, "The truth may be a
great deal murkier."

He begins by citing a document issued in 2000 by the right-wing
Washington think tank, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), an
outfit that
served as the Republican administration's national security
establishment-in-waiting until its ideas could be implemented following
the installation of Bush as
president in 2001.

Entitled, "Rebuilding America's Defenses," the central plans of this
document were incorporated directly into Bush's "National Security
Strategy of the
United States" issued in September 2001, which advanced the strategy
of "preventive war."

Describing the document as a "blueprint for the creation of a global
Pax Americana," Meacher writes: "The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended
to take
military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein
was in power. It says 'while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides
justification, the
need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf
transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

The document, he notes, includes the warning that it would be
difficult to win public support for a military campaign to transform the
US into "tomorrow's
dominant force" without "some catastrophic and catalyzing event-like
a new Pearl Harbor." With September 11, the administration had just such
an event:
"The 9/11 attacks allowed the US to press the 'go' button for a
strategy in accordance with the PNAC agenda which it would otherwise
have been politically
impossible to implement."

Having established the political motive for welcoming some form of
terrorist provocation on US soil, Meacher goes on to raise substantive
questions about
the official US response to the ample warnings of impending acts of
terrorism as well as to the attacks themselves. He carefully documents
each of his charges
with specific references to reports that appeared in the mainstream
media.

"First, it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to
pre-empt the events of 9/11," writes the British Parliament member. "It
is known that at least 11
countries provided advance warning to the US of the 9/11 attacks.
Two senior Mossad experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to
alert the CIA and
FBI to a cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation
(Daily Telegraph, September 16, 2001). The list they provided included
the names of four
of the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested."

Against the Bush administration's repeated claims that no one had
ever contemplated the use of hijacked airplanes to carry out terrorist
attacks, Meacher cites
1996 and 1999 intelligence reports that warned precisely of such a
threat.

He also raises the question of whether US intelligence had
undisclosed connections with those alleged to have organized the
hijacking, dating back to the war
against the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan. "Fifteen of the
9/11 hijackers obtained their visas in Saudi Arabia," Meacher writes.
"Michael Springman,
the former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, has stated
that since 1987 the CIA has been illicitly issuing visas to unqualified
applicants from the
Middle East and bringing them to the US for training in terrorism
for the Afghan war in conjunction with Bin Laden (BBC, November 6,
2001). It seems
this operation continued after the Afghan war for other purposes. It
is also reported that five of the hijackers received training at secure
US military
installations in the 1990s (Newsweek, September 15, 2001)."

The British Labourite points to the well-known decision of the FBI
in Washington to suppress an investigation into Zacarias Moussaoui (now
dubbed the 20th
hijacker by US prosecutors) despite a warning from a local agent
that he could be part of a plot to crash a plane into the Twin Towers.

Meacher goes on to review the unexplained delay in US air security
responding to the hijackings: "The first hijacking was suspected not
later than 8:20 a.m.,
and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10:06
a.m.," he writes. "Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to
investigate from the US Andrews
Air Force Base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the
third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9:38 a.m. Why not? There were
standard FAA intercept
procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9/11. Between September 2000
and June 2001 the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions
to chase
suspicious aircraft (AP, Aug. 13, 2002). It is a US legal
requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight
plan, fighter planes are sent up
to investigate."

All of which leads Meacher to pose his question: who ordered the US
national security apparatus to "stand down"?

He further points to extensive evidence of the relative US
indifference to pursuing Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the
September 11 attacks,
quoting one US official as saying that his capture could result in a
"premature collapse of our international effort."

Meacher argues that Washington's "'war on terrorism' is being used
largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical
objectives."

"In fact, 9/11 offered an extremely convenient pretext to put the
PNAC plan into action," he writes. "The evidence is quite clear that
plans for military action
against Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before 9/11." He
points to a September 18, 2001 BBC report that US officials warned
Pakistan in July
2001-two months before the terrorist attacks-that US "military
action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October."

Meacher comments: "Given this background, it is not surprising that
some have seen the US failure to avert the 9/11 attacks as creating an
invaluable pretext
for attacking Afghanistan, in a war that had clearly already been
well planned in advance." He suggests that there is a precedent for the
Bush administration's
inaction on September 11 in the similar failure of President
Roosevelt to heed warnings of an impending Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor, an event that fueled
sufficient public outrage to achieve his administration's goal of
bringing the US into the Second World War.

The former environment minister argues that motivation for both the
Afghanistan and Iraq wars was to seize control of strategic sources of
oil and natural gas
in both the Caspian and Persian Gulf regions.

Meacher concludes: "The conclusion of all this analysis must surely
be that the 'global war on terrorism' has the hallmarks of a political
myth propagated to
pave the way for a wholly different agenda-the US goal of world
hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies
required to drive
the whole project. Is this myth and junior participation in this
project really a proper aspiration for British foreign policy?"

None of the information provided by Meacher is new; it has merely
been concealed from the broad public. Increasingly bitter divisions
within ruling circles,
both in the US and Britain, have brought it to the surface.

The former cabinet minister speaks for sections of the British
ruling elite who support distancing London's policy from that of the
Bush administration. Their
hand has been considerably strengthened by the mounting catastrophe
confronting the US military occupation of Iraq as well as the deep
crisis facing Blair,
the principal proponent of unconditional British support for US
strategic aims.

The unraveling of the Blair government's fabrication of evidence
about alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction has opened a Pandora's
box for the Bush
administration. The exposure of one set of lies has opened the door
to renewed questions about all of the conspiracies and provocations
carried out by the
gang of criminals that have seized control of the White House.

The Bush administration has exploited the tragedy of September 11 as
the justification for launching two wars in the space of a year and a
half and for
carrying out far-reaching attacks on both the democratic rights and
social conditions of the American people. At the same time it has acted
ruthlessly to
suppress any serious investigation into the 9/11 attacks. As the
Meacher article indicates, the administration's ability to continue this
cover-up is being fatally
undermined by its own growing political crisis.

-- -Kraig Grady
North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island
http://www.anaphoria.com
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