Home > Maureen Dowd of the New York Times Misleads About 9/11

Maureen Dowd of the New York Times Misleads About 9/11

by Open-Publishing - Wednesday 7 September 2005
11 comments

Attack-Terrorism Secret Services USA

Michael P. Wright —
Norman, Oklahoma, USA
mpwright9@aol.com

Maureen Dowd is a columnist for the illustrious New York Times, a newspaper which
is thought to be a fountain of wisdom. About 9/11 she really doesn’t have a clue.

Dowd writes about the New Orleans catastrophe in her column of September 3, 2005. She correctly denounces Bush for his lame response. Then she turns to 9/11. She writes:

"Who on earth could have known that Osama bin Laden wanted to attack us by flying planes into buildings? Any official who bothered to read the trellis of pre-9/11 intelligence briefs."

The problem is that Dowd has obviously not carefully read those intelligence briefs herself. The most prominent CIA briefing before 9/11 was its memo of August 6, 2001. This was declassified and made public by the 9/11 Commission in April 2004. It did not warn of suicide crashes into buildings. It incorporated the expectation that, if any airliners were hijacked, they would be landed for political demands and negotiations over hostages.

I have never seen any discussion of this important distinction by American media commentators, since the memo was made public. It is repeatedly overlooked. The document is online at a George Washington University website:

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB...

It says:

"We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat
reporting, such as that from a [deleted] service in 1998 saying that Bin Laden
wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of ’Blind Sheikh’ Omar Abdel
Rahman and other U.S.-held extremists."

My suspicion is that the inner circle of the CIA allowed the 9/11 plot to go forward. Not expecting crashes into buildings, they were planning to overwhelm the
terrorists at the last minute with a sting operation, and it blew back int their faces.
I have no interest in defending George Bush, but he is not primarily responsible for enabling 9/11 to happen. In order to pursue wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he took advantage of it after it happened.

In order to locate responsbilility for 9/11 properly, one must study the inner circle of the CIA in 2001. Its members were George Tenet, his mentor and patron David Boren, and another top CIA agent named David Edger. Tenet has been the object of some scrutiny, but both the mass media and the 9/11 Commission have neglected the task of investigating the trio.

Boren, who has been close to Tenet since 1987, became president of the University of Oklahoma in 1994, after resigning from the U.S. Senate. In the summer of 2001, he brought Edger to the campus as a "visiting professor." On the morning of the 9/11 attack, Boren and Tenet were having breakfast together in a Washington hotel.

Dowd’s blunder is only one of many made by the American media. Another prominent example is shown by CNN’s bogus "stranger on the bus" story used to account for the fact that Nick Berg’s University of Oklahoma computer network ID was found on the laptop of Zacarias Moussaoui. Go here for a discussion of this misleading CNN report:

http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php...

Here is a summary of my 9/11 investigation, which focuses on the Boren-Tenet-Edger trio:

http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php...

Forum posts

  • Why don’t we pick nits???? This declassified report was just one of 12 that warned about 9/11 and the plane hijacking possibility. You sir are the one who misleads people.

    • REPLY FROM MICHAEL WRIGHT.

      Please give specific citations for the other eleven which you claim gave warnings, and provide links if possible. Further, inform us of which reports (1) warned specifically of suicide crashes into buildings and (2) reached the President’s desk. The prominent report from which I quote, and to which I give a link, is the CIA’s Presidential Daily Briefing.

    • They are cited in the 9/11 Commission data. If you can not find them there you should do a Google search for the links.

  • I am glad Michael Wright responsed to Maureen Dowd’s article about 9/11 and then her article about New Orleans. I lived in New Orleans from Aug 1977 til June 1980. New Orleans has a lot of great people but it is a city of greed, corruption, pleasure and beauty. When I was there the streets in many of the surrounding areas like Kenner where I lived, flooded at least twice each year. When it rains over 10 inches in a 24 hour period the pumps could not handle all that water. People were tired of the flooding but the local and state government did very little about it. The people could not trust the local government to spend money(local taxes) on the pumping system. Also when hurricanes threatened the area, it was time to party and prove you were stronger than the forces of nature. I was surprised at the arrogancy of the people to party at this time and especially all the wasted money for the Marti Gras parades. These parades would breed greed and corruption, yes there was a lot of fun.
    Maureen Dowd wrote on September 8 about "Katrina flooded nation, White House with reality" with the tongue of a serpent, smoothly moving on her belly ready to attack the highest authority. The pen is mightier than the sword and Maureen Dowd is full of bitterness and resentment. There is too much work to be done rather than placing the blame on the national level when the city and state are first responsible to its own people. Miss Dowd efforts need to be in help to bring unity and not spread strife by dividing the people with her poisoness words.
    I could say a lot more to Miss Dowd but her own words express her own character which shows very little respect for anyone. She needs to get above the situation and see the entire picture and then she will learn that many of her facts are wrong, pointed and corrupt.
    Ron Bodager, Lexington, KY

    • Your Bush talking points are almost word for word...congratulations.....the ugly truth will come out that the levees maintenance has been underfunded by the federal government for years and this was all forecasted including the tragedy that is unfolding today. While Bush diverted public resources for our infrastructure upkeep to start his wars for oil and who knows what else, our cities have deteriorated and it has all been studied and reported and the various agencies have cried out for years to the deaf ears of the politicians who are rolling the dice with the citizens lives. I know the truth hurts you Bush excuse makers, but this one is all documented in several places including the newspapers....ignorance is bliss, until they are caught being willfully ignorant like in these cases.

    • There is a grassroots movement beginning to pressure the government to bring our troops home now where we need them. There is still not enough boots on the ground to remove the dead and rotting carcuses in 3 states....the rats are eating them and the disease is going to be rampant, and there is no one to even remove the dead. The overworked crews who are there now have NO time to even begin to deal with the dead bodies strewn everywhere..........this is unacceptable.......

      EVERYONE E-MAIL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES (SKIP THE WHITE HOUSE THEY ARE OBLIVIOUS) AND DEMAND DON’T ASK, DEMAND THAT THE TROOPS BE BROUGHT HOME TO DO THE JOB WE ALL PAY THEM TO DO.

    • Bush is in his second and final term. What excuse are you going to use when Bush is gone? You think that Bush was the only one who reduced the budget for the levees? It’s been going on for years and during all those years the one constant has been that the democrats ruled Louisiana and New Orleans. In addition, even thought Bush had reduced the funding for the levees, the funding that he did give to the Corps to shore up the levees for flood control was larger than during the Clinton years. Also, you should ask what the democrats in Louisiana and New Orleans did with that money, because it certainly didn’t go towards levee improvements. Stop smoking the weed, you’ve only got half a brain left.

    • Louisiana politicians are not the ones who cut the federal budgets for the levees you moron, try getting some facts before you come here to excuse your Jesus Bush.

    • ...and you’re IQ seems to be on about the same level as your Bushy boy’s.

  • Read David Icke and get a clue first off, then realize Dowd writes circles around you and the only reason I even saw this page was because you were linked to her on google. bye

  • Actually, you’re missing the point, Michael. Ms. Dowd has a talent for boiling down the story. And in Mr. Bush’s case, he appears over the past six years to have closed himself off from the outside world and taken ill advice in going after Iraq for WMD. Yes, they had a nasty dictator for a leader, but then why not go after N. Korea instead if that was his only reasoning.

    I’m not laying blame on Bush for 9-11, but his disorganization of the offices below him have contributed to a total lack of communications. These changes have all taken place since his first (questionable) election win in 2000. And it is pretty hard to get around his neglect of duty in the recent New Orleans Gulf Coast event. It really shows just how closed off he is from the real world and how that contributes to a lack of communications within his own staff.

    Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not some extremist that says he is "evil." I’m sure he isn’t evil at all, but he is very out of touch with reality and has let his ego get in the way of decisions that end up affecting not only the US, but the rest of the world as well. While I believe his IQ range probably falls into the ‘normal’ category, he certainly isn’t in the upper echelon of presidential thinkers. I’m afraid his legacy will treat him unkind.