Ed,

The reason I have not focused on prior knowledge of 9-11 and the conspirators by the intelligence agencies -- which all indicators show they could or should have had -- is that it will be impossible to show what someone knew/concluded from the indicators unless they admit it.

Thus, the issue, I felt, would be turned into an "intelligence failure", which it now has been. And that slippery slope leads us right down the path to more funding, consolidation and powers for the very intelligence agencies who created the situation or the conditions for it.

I have instead focused on what they did or did not do after 9:05 am when everyone knew what was happening. That is their achilles heel and nobody is touching the subject. FBI informers and Iran Contra pilots lived with the people accused of these crimes, they made themselves excessively visible, and there were many indicators that "planes into buildings" was part of their plans and scenarios. In fact, Bush's trip to the Genoa summit explicitly protected him from just that threat.

Some people, like SF Mayor Willie Brown and former Secretary of State George Schultz, were warned not to fly that day. Others, like Rumsfeld and Cheney declared publicly about a month before that they were not taking any more commercial flights. In 1998 the head of security of the Pentagon told me that they had radar and video on the roof of the building watching for incoming planes.

I won't believe the racist legend that all the Jews in the Twin Towers took the day off because they were forewarned. I doubt that all the Palestinians or Arab youth or families were warned, but it may be the case that in some Mosques a hint was given. Hard to keep such a secret, though. Palestinians and Middle Eastern people died in the buildings, too. There is no universal animosity or hatred of the US in those communities. There are Islamic fundamentalists just like there are Christian fundamentalists.

I still don't think we know who really conducted the 9-11 operation. It was a very sophisticated covert operation, requiring high-level piloting skills, and an equally sophisticated cover story and false sponsorship. We can speculate that the US planned it, or that our own covert operations led up to the capability and likelihood of it, but we don't need to speculate to show that some at a very high level broke all procedures in DC and let it come.

Even if we accord it all to foreign powers, complete surprise, and incompetence or intelligence failure, the response to the events is still 100% wrong. A child's fantasy is not always predictive foreknowledge, even when it comes true. Two in a row are good odds, I have to admit, if the case. Some children have clairvoyance, some get advance notice.

I was quoted in Steamshovel Press about my reaction to the bombing of the Murtaugh building the day it happened. I said it was not foreign terrorists because it had no political significance. I said foreign terrorists would have targeted the Twin Towers or a building in DC. That's just common sense, not foreknowledge. I get priority of prediction without being a member of the Taliban or having inside information.

I said in a talk in 1996 called "Are You Scared Yet?" that domestic terrorism scenarios would increase and be used as the basis to go towards martial law and a new "war without enemies". What we see here mirrors the European "strategy of tension" scenarios and the more recent developments in Peru.

Until we realize that security is the daughter not the mother of freedom, we will head the wrong way. Mike Ruppert recently wrote to discount the blind "optimism" of those who fruitlessly follow the past assassinations, predicting that nothing can be done by exposing this system's lies. I have never been naive enough for that sort of "beg the system to reform itself" kind of optimism, nor cheap enough to adopt the cynicism that paralyzes political organizing and action. They can absorb anything but real democracy itself, and that is the only way out of this Orwellian nightmare path we are being dragged down.

I am not hopeless, and I refuse to blame the victims. I have always felt that for serious researchers the Kennedy assassination was a rosetta stone that unlocked the larger picture if we wanted to see it. No use chasing ephemera or bullets in my view, but a good deal of use in deciphering Oswald and those who moved him. And even more use in forcing the system to start releasing records on contested cases. Drive any wedge that gets sap flowing is my view.

Post-knowledge after 9/11 is damning enough, and I hope some of us on the progressive side of history will begin to take up the struggle to show its meaning to ordinary folks. Not to scandalize, but to lay a foundation for ending secrecy and creating real democracy and the information flow that is its lifeblood.

Afterwards a Pentagon spokesman said "We had no mechanism" to defend the building. It is not the Pentagon but the American people who have no mechanism to defend themselves by expressing popular will in a direct way. I don't need a "representative", nor does anyone else in the modern era. I need open media and full debate on issues, open schools and education, referendums and direct allocation of tax. With that, none of this would be happening, or not for long.

Like Jefferson, I think that the people as a whole are the only safe repository of state power, and as Washington thought, the only proper source for deciding policy. Practicing democracy between wars is like being a vegetarian between meals. We don't need parties and representatives, we need empowerment and information.

Rights, which are conceptual in nature and expandable by definition, arise not from their recording on documents or recognition by the powers that be, but are "inalienable" and inherent in practice and by use. If rights are not asserted and used, then they are "alienable". If new rights are not envisioned and expanded by each generation, then we are trapped in the past.

Our task is no different from the early American revolutionaries, only our paths and methods to get there. Guns don't protect rights, the ability to define political situations does.

So, here we all are at the crossroads. White House press secretary Ari Fleischer says that anyone who compares Administration officials in America to Nazis or Adolph Hitler is "beyond the pale". But if we are not in a comparable position to the German people circa 1939, with Poland invaded already, a world war in the making and a holocaust looming, I don't know a better analogy.

Bush asks for the power to carry out "pre-emptive" war against any country perceived to be a threat. We are told the war may last 60 years, and it "will not end in our lifetime". The attack on Afghanistan alone destabilized at least four other countries and nearly precipitated nuclear war. Bush tells the UN that they must either resolve the situation in Iraq to our liking or we will step past them into war. I've always been "beyond the pale" anyway, but I know fascism when I see it. Hope you can make it to Dallas.

Thanks - JJ