British MP, foreign Environment Minister on PNAC and 9/11

MP Michael Meacher, writing in The Guardian, says the Project for the New American Century's manifesto "Rebuilding America's Defenses" provides a better explanation for the events before, during, and after the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center than does the story being promulgated by the Bush and Blair regimes.

Using published stories from a variety of news media, Meacher shows that the Bush administration ignored or actively quashed specific, credible warnings of the attack to come; failed to mobilize legally required responses to the hijackings in progress; and in the ensuing months, repeatedly passed up opportunities to bring Osama bin Laden to justice.

The first hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am. 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 am. 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, August 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.

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 former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has said: "The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defense of incompetence."

Meacher points out how all of this dovetails with the PNAC's plans for world domination, from the plans (dating back to the '90s) to invade and occupy Iraq even if Saddam Hussein were no longer in power, to their lament that their plans would be a hard sell lacking a latter-day Pearl Harbor attack.

The Bush administration, of course, denies everything (well, duh), saying the allegations "would be monstrous, and monstrously offensive, if they came from someone serious or credible." Apparently, a Member of Parliament and six-year Minister in the government that has been Bush's closest ally in the global war on terrorism is not considered serious or credible, nor is the whole "of this assembled evidence, all of which comes from sources already in the public domain."

Of course the administration could presumably put an end to such talk by encouraging and cooperating with a bipartisan investigation into what really happened two years ago. Such an inquiry is essential, if only to clear the