Can a lone 23-year old battle an empire - and win? Outside of Star Wars or the Brothers Grimm? Maybe. Here is a pen-mightier-than-sword, truth-stranger-than-fiction tale from real life 2002.
A young researcher’s first book bids to trip up an unscrupulous military-industrial complex. He uncovers its Achilles Heel, a secret it can’t survive in the open, one too terrible to even mention on TV.
In The War on Freedom, he calls for a full, independent investigation of all the evidence pointing to - a high-level military intelligence plot behind the destruction of 9/11.
His fact-filled documentary is the first book to dare ask the awful but logical question: was 9/11 another Pearl Harbor or Gulf of Tonkin? Buttressed by 735 footnotes, the book painstakingly maps the connections between the Bushes, bin Ladens, CIA, "intelligence failures," arms and oil deals, and the secret world of psychological warfare and pseudo-terror.
More than an exposé, this work by political scientist Nafeez Ahmed, director of a British think tank, is also the first analysis of today's geopolitics to hit the target. It reveals a key point others miss: how a cynical foreign policy fosters fundamentalism and propagates the "historic clash" with "Islamic terrorists."
The motives: to "justify" wars for strategic resources and markets, which our superpower can win with laughable ease, extending the global reach of a private clique to world dominance - and concealing a "homeland" agenda of corruption, social injustice, and assaults on hallowed freedoms.
Whatever happens to the world after 9/11, your view of it will never be the same after an encounter with Nafeez’ writings. We hope to hear more of this new voice for a new century.
The War on Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked, by Nafeez M. Ahmed. Paperback, 400 pages, ISBN 0-930852-40-0.
NEW POSTING AS AT 26 APRIL 2004
I had this email arrive to day. Only now we see the issiue of why the interceptor planes were grounded. You could have read about these issues so long ago when the 'WAR ON FREEDOM' was published. It is alleged that the interceptor planes were ordered to stay put and when they were ordered up they came from a far distant air base. Something shonky here I would say!!
By PHILIP SHENON
NEW YORK TIMES
Published: April 25, 2004
WASHINGTON, April 24 The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks is expected to offer sharp criticism of the Pentagon's domestic air-defense command in its final report, according to commission officials who said they believed that quicker military action might have prevented a hijacked passenger plane from crashing into the Pentagon itself.
While other officials stressed that the panel had not reached any final conclusions on the performance of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad, or whether the Pentagon attack could have been prevented, they said that Norad's failure to defend Washington and New York City on Sept. 11, 2001, would be subjected to intensive scrutiny at the remaining public hearings of the 10-member commission. The panel is in the final weeks of its investigation.
Norad has previously acknowledged that if jet fighters had scrambled faster on Sept. 11, they might have been able to reach American Airlines Flight 77 before it crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m., more than 50 minutes after the first hijacked plane struck the World Trade Center in New York. A total of 184 people were killed in the Pentagon attack, including the 59 aboard the hijacked plane.
The panel's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, said in an interview that there had been no formal deliberations by the commission about how to judge Norad's performance and said that he was waiting to be briefed on the findings of the panel's investigators.
The commission's executive director, Philip D. Zelikow, said in an interview on Saturday that his investigators had reached no conclusion on whether the plane could have been stopped before striking the Pentagon. "Any inference that the commission is preparing to reach any such conclusion is false and terribly misleading," he said.
Other commission officials said the timeline presented to them by Norad suggested that there might have been time to launch jet fighters that could have intercepted and possibly shot down Flight 77.
In testimony last May at a preliminary hearing on Norad's performance, Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold, a retired Norad commander, acknowledged that if fighters had been scrambled faster, they could have reached the airliner, a Boeing 757.
"I believe that'd be true," General Arnold said in response to questions from Mr. Kean. "It would have to happen very fast. But I believe that to be true." He noted that pilots at that moment had no authority to shoot down a passenger plane but said "it is certainly physically possible that they could have gotten into the area."
The commission is trying to establish a detailed timeline of how and when military pilots reporting to Norad were informed on Sept. 11 that President Bush had given the extraordinary order that allowed them to shoot down passenger planes.
Norad officers have said previously that they did not learn of the order until about 10:10 a.m., a few minutes after the last of the four hijacked jets crashed into a field in rural Pennsylvania. But White House officials have suggested that the order was made earlier in the morning and should have been communicated immediately to pilots.
The commission has repeatedly complained that Norad, a joint American-Canadian military command created in 1958 to defend airspace over North America from Soviet missiles and bombers, has been uncooperative in the commission's investigation.
In November, the commission issued a subpoena to the Pentagon after learning that a variety of pertinent documents, tapes and other evidence from Norad had not been turned over to the panel. The only other federal agency subpoenaed by the commission was the Federal Aviation Administration, which is under scrutiny by the panel for air-safety lapses related to its communications with Norad on Sept. 11.
A spokesman for Norad's headquarters in Colorado Springs, Lt. Col. Roberto Garza, insisted that Norad had fully cooperated with the commission, although he said he could not discuss issues that are now before the panel. "If we speak, we speak to the commission," he said.
