by Michael C. Ruppert, Global Research:
Never in the history of scandals involving the United States government has an attempt to conceal criminal conduct by an administration been more transparently dishonest or more easily exposed.
Michael C. Ruppert image right
On May 15 [2002] White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer — while making the startling admission that President Bush received CIA and FBI intelligence briefings in August 2001 indicating Osama bin Laden might be planning hijackings — told major news sources including CBS News,
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
“All appropriate action was taken based on the threat information we had,” Fleischer said. “The president did not — not — receive information about the use of airplanes as missiles by suicide bombers.”
In other statements Fleischer told the press,
“The president was also provided information about bin Laden wanting to engage in hijacking in the traditional pre-9-11 sense, not for the use of suicide bombing, not for the use of an airplane as a missile.”
According to a May 16, 2002 story by the New York Times,
“Mr. Fleischer said the information given to the president in Texas [last August 2001], had prompted the administration to put law enforcement agencies on alert.”
Every major position taken by an administration in full retreat and on the defensive can be easily deconstructed and shown to be false.
For more than seven months FTW [Michael Ruppert’s Website] has been documenting specific warnings received by the U.S. government from both foreign intelligence services and, in one case, from Russian President Vladimir Putin, indicating commercial airliners were going to be used by terrorists to attack — among other things — the World Trade Center in the week of Sept. 9. [2001]
In order for Fleischer’s statement to be credible he would have to assert then that George W. Bush either ignored or was not informed of a direct warning from a head of state and also from the German intelligence service, the BND.
As reported in the German daily Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung (FAZ) on Sept. 14,
The BND [Germany’s Intelligence Agency] warned both the CIA and Israel in June [2001] that Middle Eastern terrorists were
“planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture.”
The story specifically referred to an electronic eavesdropping system known as Echelon, wherein a number of countries tap cell phone and electronic communications in partner countries and then pool the information. The BND warnings were also passed on to the United Kingdom.
No known denial by the BND pertaining to the accuracy of this story exists, and the FAZ report indicates the information was received directly from BND sources.
According to a Sept. 14 [2001] report in the Internet newswire online. ie, German police, monitoring the phone calls of a jailed Iranian man, learned the man was telephoning U.S. intelligence agencies last summer to warn of an imminent attack on the World Trade Center in the week of Sept. 9. German officials confirmed the calls to the U.S. government for the story but refused to discuss additional details.
According to a story in Izvestia on Sept. 12 [2001], Russian intelligence warned the U.S. last summer that as many as 25 suicide pilots were training for suicide missions involving the crashing of airliners into important targets.
In an MSNBC interview on Sept. 15, Russian President Putin stated he had ordered Russian intelligence to warn the U.S. government “in the strongest possible terms” of imminent assaults on airports and government buildings before the attacks on Sept. 11. No credible information has emerged from any source indicating that Putin omitted the above information when issuing the warning.
Many other direct warnings were received by the U.S. government and have been documented in FTW’s 9-11 timeline located at this site.
These stories give the immediate lie to Fleischer’s statements that Bush had no inkling of airliners being used as weapons.
But there is more.
In 1996 — as reported by the German paper Die Welt on Dec. 6, and by Agence France Presse on Dec. 7 — Western intelligence services, including the CIA, learned after arrests in the Philippines that Al Qaeda operatives had planned to crash commercial airliners into the Twin Towers. Details of the plan, as reported by a number of American press outlets, were found on a computer seized during the arrests. The plan was called “Operation Bojinka.” Details of the plot were disclosed publicly in 1997 in the New York trial of Ramsi Youssef for his involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
