10-12-2018, 05:09 AM
Thanks Peter. I'm gaining a greater idea of 9/11 actually was by going back over and over the events of the years prior. And, every time you find something of interest, something else of interest seems linked to it.
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad's THE ROAD TO IRAQ is a great, overlooked volume I've read recently. Ahmad has blogged for THE NATION and the book was published by Edinburgh University Press. PDF copies of it are floating around. It's a study of the neoconservatives and their efforts and rationale in starting the Iraq war. One tremulous Amazon review accuses the book of being conspiratorial. It is, and it really feels like Ahmad is giving the reader just enough info to join the dots without stepping across the lines that would sever his University book contract. Bin Laden appears nowhere in the index. I've read it twice, will be reading it a third time, and suspect I now prefer it to Peter Dale Scott's THE ROAD TO 9/11.
Speaking of guys called Ahmad, the research movement needs to have another, closer look at Ahmad Chalabi and the tight group of shadow defence industry neocons that were supporting him in Washington throughout the 90's. When Chalabi first appeared on 60 MINUTES in the early 90's, Jules Kroll of Kroll Associates was the guy who appeared onscreen to tell the world all about him, cheering for the establishment of the future Iraqi National Congress. In the 2008 biography of Chalabi, Wolfowitz is also noted as taking a strong interest in the guy from the get go. Kroll Associates had been hired around this time by the Kuwaiti government to track Iraqi assets, with Brian Jenkins the deputy chairman of Kroll while they did so.
Midway through the Chalabi biography, the book tells the breathless story of how Chalabi raced to the airport one evening, was late, caught an essential flight by barging past the check-in gate and miraculously sweet talking the air crew staff, and then was lucky to avoid the flight he would have had to catch the very next morning if he'd missed that one - Flight 77 with Hani Hanjour. This is a story told by Chalabi himself, with nothing else I've seen supporting it, but it appears in his biography. So why is a guy who was an associate of Wolfowitz, Perle, Woolsey and Kroll, and who was agitating for regime change in Iraq for years, spreading what I presume is a self-serving fiction about his activities on the day before and the day of 9/11? The Menarchik Pentagon study was preceded the year earlier by Wolfowitz's Defense Planning Guidance, and the interest in Chalabi from the neocons heats up around this period.
Also worth a read - EMBEDDED EXPERTISE AND THE NEW TERRORISM. They also note the St Andrews link to terrorism studies - one section is titled 'The RAND-St Andrews Nexus'.
https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/IMG/pdf/e...orisme.pdf
If someone was mapping a chronology of the buildup to what eventually happened, one key point is Rumsfeld returning to RAND in the mid 90's with Brian Jenkins as a terrorism advisor, just before Jenkins goes on to serve as a member of the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security.
I don't have the title at hand as I type but one participant in some of these longwinded terrorism conferences edits a book around the year 2000 on a different subject - American empire, and basically how it will be a great thing if America expands its powers to benevolently control trouble spots throughout the world in the very near future, much like the Romans did when they managed an empire many centuries earlier. I see that one as calming the horses and riders so they don't get spooked right before the big race.
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad's THE ROAD TO IRAQ is a great, overlooked volume I've read recently. Ahmad has blogged for THE NATION and the book was published by Edinburgh University Press. PDF copies of it are floating around. It's a study of the neoconservatives and their efforts and rationale in starting the Iraq war. One tremulous Amazon review accuses the book of being conspiratorial. It is, and it really feels like Ahmad is giving the reader just enough info to join the dots without stepping across the lines that would sever his University book contract. Bin Laden appears nowhere in the index. I've read it twice, will be reading it a third time, and suspect I now prefer it to Peter Dale Scott's THE ROAD TO 9/11.
Speaking of guys called Ahmad, the research movement needs to have another, closer look at Ahmad Chalabi and the tight group of shadow defence industry neocons that were supporting him in Washington throughout the 90's. When Chalabi first appeared on 60 MINUTES in the early 90's, Jules Kroll of Kroll Associates was the guy who appeared onscreen to tell the world all about him, cheering for the establishment of the future Iraqi National Congress. In the 2008 biography of Chalabi, Wolfowitz is also noted as taking a strong interest in the guy from the get go. Kroll Associates had been hired around this time by the Kuwaiti government to track Iraqi assets, with Brian Jenkins the deputy chairman of Kroll while they did so.
Midway through the Chalabi biography, the book tells the breathless story of how Chalabi raced to the airport one evening, was late, caught an essential flight by barging past the check-in gate and miraculously sweet talking the air crew staff, and then was lucky to avoid the flight he would have had to catch the very next morning if he'd missed that one - Flight 77 with Hani Hanjour. This is a story told by Chalabi himself, with nothing else I've seen supporting it, but it appears in his biography. So why is a guy who was an associate of Wolfowitz, Perle, Woolsey and Kroll, and who was agitating for regime change in Iraq for years, spreading what I presume is a self-serving fiction about his activities on the day before and the day of 9/11? The Menarchik Pentagon study was preceded the year earlier by Wolfowitz's Defense Planning Guidance, and the interest in Chalabi from the neocons heats up around this period.
Also worth a read - EMBEDDED EXPERTISE AND THE NEW TERRORISM. They also note the St Andrews link to terrorism studies - one section is titled 'The RAND-St Andrews Nexus'.
https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/IMG/pdf/e...orisme.pdf
If someone was mapping a chronology of the buildup to what eventually happened, one key point is Rumsfeld returning to RAND in the mid 90's with Brian Jenkins as a terrorism advisor, just before Jenkins goes on to serve as a member of the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security.
I don't have the title at hand as I type but one participant in some of these longwinded terrorism conferences edits a book around the year 2000 on a different subject - American empire, and basically how it will be a great thing if America expands its powers to benevolently control trouble spots throughout the world in the very near future, much like the Romans did when they managed an empire many centuries earlier. I see that one as calming the horses and riders so they don't get spooked right before the big race.