http://mujca.com/meyerreview.htm <http://mujca.com/meyerreview.htm>
Excerpt:
Rumsfeld spent 2000 and 2001 carrying around extra copies of Roberta
Wohlstetter's Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, praising the book to
the skies, and offering free copies to all and sundry. Wohlstetter's
book, while it ostensibly supports the official myth that Pearl Harbor
was a perfidious surprise attack, includes enough information to the
contrary to enlighten the discerning reader to the unspeakable but
implicitly acknowledged truth: The Roosevelt Administration provoked the
attacks, knew they were coming, and left thousands of sailors in harm's
way as an offering to the gods of war. Wohlstetter's book is a perfect
illustration of neocon doublespeak: Tell a vivid, simplistic,
emotionally-charged lie to the masses ("Perfidious surprise attack!
Heroic purple-fury response!") yet include as a subtle subtext the
unspeakable truth that only the elite are smart enough to discern and
strong enough to handle: "Roosevelt sacrificed thousands of American
lives to the greater good of getting the US into the war."
Rumsfeld wasn't the only 9/11 suspect hyping Wohlstetter's doublespeak.
9/11 Commissioner Timothy Roemer cited it at the Commission's very first
public hearing: "It (Pearl Harborand by implication 9/11) was
just a dramatic failure of a remarkably well-informed government to call
the next enemy move in a Cold War crisis...Today it might be some of the
same words. It wasn't a Cold War crisis and it wasn't the Japanese, but
it was al Qaeda." Commission Chair Thomas Kean and his fellow
Commissioner, CIA drug runner Barry Seal's lawyer Richard Ben-Veniste
"also drew on this deceptive comparison with Pearl Harbor" (7).
Meyer shows that FDR and his brain trust were not surprised or upset
after Pearl Harbor, butlike the Bush Administration and the CIA
after 9/11reacted as if they were overjoyed and relieved. The
Bush/CIA party commemorating (celebrating?) the 9/11 attacks was
apparently a cheerful affair: "At CIA headquarters in Langley, Bush
junior celebrated a kind of promotional party just two weeks after the
attacks, assuring the assembled CIA officials (including their boss
George Tenet): `September 11th is a sad memory, but it's a
memory...And I can't thank you enough on behalf of the American
people" (24). The official White House website story (p. 57) has to
be seen to be believed:
September 26th, 2001
President Thanks CIA
Remarks by the President to Employees of the CIA
Langley, Virginia
1:23 PM EDT
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you all very much. Well, George (Tenet), thank you
very much, and thanks for inviting me back. (Laughter.) There is no
question that I am in the hall of patriots, and I've come to say a
couple of things to you. First, thank you for your hard work. You know,
George and I have been spending a lot of quality time together.
(Laughter.) There's a reason. I've got a lot of confidence in him, and
I've got a lot of confidence in the CIA. (Applause.) And so should
America.
Meyer is to be congratulated for calling attention to the Bush-CIA
celebration of the 9/11 attacks. But that isn't the only evidence that
Bush and top CIA officials were overjoyed, not disturbed, by 9/11.
Griffin notes Rumsfeld's unseemly crowing and military-moneygrubbing on
the evening of 9/11 itself (The New Pearl Harbor, 99-100). But it gets
worse. The preface of veteran Middle East CIA agent Robert Baer's 2002
book See No Evil ends on an astonishing note: "The other day a reporter
friend told me that one of the highest-ranking CIA officials had said to
him, off the record, that when the dust finally clears, Americans will
see that September 11 was a triumph for the intelligence community, not
a failure." And in the October 6th, 2005 New York Times, a ex-top CIA
official claims that the intelligence community's handling of 9/11 was
not a failure, but something "good, positive, extraordinary." See:
http://mujca.com/orwell.htm <http://mujca.com/orwell.htm>
