Thomas Friedman made a confession

Averting further nightmares

By ABID ULLAH JAN

Published: March 28, 2004

Thomas Friedman made a confession in his March 28 column that despite
being the foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times, he didn't
listen to one second of the 9/11 hearings and didn't read one story
in the paper about them. In fact, no American is supposed to. The
reason for Thomas Friedman and the rest of Americans, however, is
different.

The reason for Friedman is the failure of his vision. Exposing
his new-cons mentality, Friedman says, “Lord knows,”
he didn’t do it out of “indifference to 9/11.”
He did it simply because he made up his “mind about that event
a long time ago” and now all the doors to further inquiry
are permanently shut. Muslims are responsible and they must pay
the price.

For the rest of the Americans, the 9/11 hearing is irrelevant because
it was not a failure of intelligence but their imagination. As the
pieces and bits exposed so far clearly show that there was perfect
intelligence available on many key pieces of 9/11, but the agencies
did not act. Americans now lack enough imagination to put those
pieces together and realize that some among them have so evil designs
to go to the extent of killing as many fellow Americans as they
could, for putting the blame on Muslims and paving the way for invasion
of Iraq and Afghanistan to begin with.

It is not that the intelligence could not prevent 9/11. It is that
the CIA and other sensitive organs of the state were accomplices
to the crime. The crime continues because the intelligence continues
to promote the official story and covers the fact that it was an
inside job.[1]

On February 25th, 2004, Alex Jones’ Prison Planet Radio programme
interviewed former Pentagon arms salesman Donn de Grand-Pre, author
of three books on 9/11, who organised a 72-hour non-stop symposium
by a group of military and civilian pilots in May 2003. They concluded
that the story told by the U.S. government about what happened on
Sept. 11, 2001 was improbable and unlikely. There were no hijackers
involved and the flight crews of the four passenger airliners involved
in the 9/11 tragedy had no control over their aircraft.

Earlier Andreas von Bulow, who was the federal Minister of Defense,
or the equivalent of the US Secretary of Defense, in the German
government since the 70s, told Alex Jones in an interview that 9/11
was the CIA’s job. This is the central theory of his book
that according to Reuters is the best seller in Germany. And he’s
not the only German minister who has said we are looking at world
fascism here and a powerful military industrial complex institution
engineering terror attacks to scare the world into submission.

Despite the fact that lies of unprecedented magnitude on part of
the US administration has led to the most horrible consequences,
a vast majority of Americans still finds it hard to imagine that
what they are being told about 9/11 on the mainstream media is not
true.

Despite an overwhelming amount of evidence unearthed by their fellow
Americans, such as Alex Jones and others, the majority is still
lost. The best they can think of is that the government knew but
it didn’t act in time to prevent the tragedy. They cannot
go one step further to think that there must be some reason that
warning memos of some intelligence officers were effectively ignored.
The reason could not be any other than the fact that the people
who could prevent it were part of the plan.

One can guess the lack of imagination on part of common Americans
from the “imaginative” dreams of their lead foreign
affairs correspondent. Friedman wants to wake up to see “10,000
Palestinian mothers marching on Hamas headquarters” to stop
resistance to occupation, rather than on Israel to end the occupation.

He wants to see Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia inviting
killer Ariel Sharon, neck deep in fresh and old Palestinian blood
“to his home in Riyadh to personally hand him” a peace
plan to which Sharon will respond only “by freezing Israeli
settlements as a good-will gesture.”

Did Bush Senior invite Saddam to his ranch in Taxes and offer him
what he wanted in return to his promise of not building any homes
for Iraqis in Kuwait until some unknown date when he would presumably
end his occupation of Kuwait? Instead Bush drew a “line in
the sand” and gave a deadline to end the occupation or face
the consequences. “No negotiations” has been the principle
all along.

Friedman wants to see Dick Cheney apologizing “to the U.N.
and all allies for being wrong about W.M.D. in Iraq,” but
then appealing “to join with the U.S. in an even more important
project — helping Iraqis build some kind of democratic framework.”
What a dream! Reading this confirms that the resistance to the American
led tyranny is far more imaginative than its advocates.

Does it sound sane that when Dick Chaney and company admit and
apologize for their historical lies, the world should not only forgive
them but also let them go ahead with “even more important
project” than the one that has taken, and continues to take,
thousands of lives?

Is Muslim blood so cheap that instead of facing prosecution for
taking thousands of innocent lives on the basis of lies, the killers
should be assisted in implementing the designs for which they deceived
the world in the first place?

With such kind of imagination and benevolent dreams for the perpetrators
of violence in the US and around the world, Americans will continue
to wake up into more horrible nightmares than 9/11. They have no
option but to identify and deal with the evil within to avert 9/11
like nightmares at home and Bali, Karbala, Istanbul and Madrid like
adventures abroad for gaining more support for perfecting neo-con’s
global tyranny.

Unlike Thomas Friedman’s confession to live with a mind “made
up a long ago,” the solution for averting further nightmares
lies only in keeping mind open to further inquiry, search for the
truth and the real culprits behind 9/11.

[1] With regard to the kind of information coming to fore and the
9/11 commission continuing to discuss non-issues, see
the kind of evidence the Americans have been overlooking.