9/11 Timeline (beginning in 1979) site

crazy.

I guess I could have given this thread a jazzier title. I've skimmed through a lot more of this timeline since first posting the link, and to me it seems like an impressive collection of unanswered questions. But all in all, yes, I think Bush (or whoever calls the shots in his administration) knew in advance, more or less what was going to happen, and when; or at least enough of that to prevent it; or could have found out easily if it hadn't intentionally covered its eyes.

A lot of "coincidences".

The problem with that, Al, is that hindsight is 20/20. It's hard to imagine that Bush would just allow a few thousand people (well, Americans) to die and allow a gazillion dollars of property damage no matter how much financial and political advantage it gave him. I dunno, it's hard for me to be quite that cynical. (That he has taken advantage of the situation, yes, that I can believe.)

You honestly believe that Bush mandates policy, tactics, and stategery?

But Girolamo, how would allowing 9/11 to go forward serve the interests of any (American) behind-the-scenes masterminds? Unless they're not acting even remotely in the interest of anything "American," and are exclusively doing the wishes of foreigners. (As Bush admittedly often seems to, with his policies.) Which I suppose may be a possibility, but the dots are far from connected.

It sure does look like that plane over PA was shot down, though.

I mean, how would the CIA, NSA, usual nefarious suspects benefit from 9/11?

Indeed, hasn't their turf been shaken up, and their credibility severely called into question, as a result? (I realize I may be missing the 'big picture.')

The neo-cons are not nationalists. That's the cover. They're warlords.

the notion that the relationship between neocons and the pentagon or neocons and the cia has at any point been anything other than extremely adversarial is incredibly ignorant and absurd.

And the main implication of that timeline site is that the failures of N0RAD on 9/11 were so extreme as to be more than mere "failures." This means that a fair number of civilian flight control and air-defense military people would have to be intimately involved in manufacturing those "slow response times."

Or, perhaps, just N0RAD, lying about the times they were notified about various events by the air-traffic controllers (as the timeline suggests many times). But my point is, what's the command/control stucture of N0RAD? A theory like this has to take into account a lot of military involvement in the cover-up, not just a few phone calls from a Bush administration neocon.

I mean, how would the CIA, NSA, usual nefarious suspects benefit from 9/11?

-- Sam J. (xp75hid0...), October 2nd, 2003.

It was not for their benefit . It was for the benefit of Papa bushes pet project HOMELAND Securities. Before the 9/11 it was just a (privately funded) paranoid boys club, for guy's like Rush Limbaugh to think about all the crazy things that countries world wide would might use to attack the US. Now they are the leading security agency.

The look on Bush's face when he was told about the attacks (in the middle of reading a book to schoolchildren) is enough for me to believe that he had no prior knowledge. He looked like he wanted to crawl under the covers and curl into the fetal position.

What motivation? See: Project for the New American Century (hardly ever mentioned here by anyone other than Momus, judging by the search I did).

realizing you've had a beer with a member of the PNAC in his house - classic or dud?

or rather, mildly unsettling or very disturbing?

Which one?

From www.villagevoice.com:

Mondo Washington
by James Ridgeway
Timeline of Tragedy
Picking up the pieces of 9-11, putting them in order, trying to make sense
April 20th, 2004 12:25 PM

WASHINGTON, D.C.—From his outpost on New Zealand's South Island, overlooking the stormy Tasman Sea, Paul Thompson, a young American, might seem like the most unlikely of detectives trying to sort through the historical debris of another hemisphere.

But this former California environmental activist is one of a handful of freelance, unpaid, amateur sleuths who have become a 9-11 Information Central—what amounts to an intelligence apparatus aimed at pinning down what the Bush administration knew and didn't know about 9-11, before and after the attacks. The results of this sleuthing often find their way to the 9-11 families, and in particular, to the by now mythic Jersey Girls, as the leaders of the survivors' families have come to be called.

The researchers are in many ways similar to the team Scott Armstrong, the former Washington Post reporter, recruited in the mid 1980s to uncover the roots of Reagan's secret Iran-Contra deals. The National Security Archive, making extensive use of the the Freedom of Information Act, soon established itself as the lead independent investigatory body, and today stands as a major independent research operation in the nation's capital.

At the hub of the 9-11 research is Thompson's intricate timeline on the website of the Center for Cooperative Research (cooperativeresearch.org). As of April 19, the crisply written timeline consists of 1,382 items, beginning with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and running up to the present. In addition to the basic, annotated chronology, there are offshoot timelines for each of the four flights that day, along with a minute-by-minute recounting of President Bush's activities on 9-11. Still other timelines delve into official "lies" from 1979 forward.

Thompson, now in his thirties, grew up in Northern California, attended Stanford, and then moved to New Zealand. A self-described "typical mainstream California Democrat" and former environmental activist who worked on trying to save the rain forests in Borneo, Thompson has pieced together his chronology from myriad sources across the globe. He has pored over 5,000 articles and reports so far and spends most of each day on the project, reading hundreds of incoming e-mails and trolling the Web himself. Among the juiciest items to date:

The ongoing saga of Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, and its dealings with its veritable appendages, the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Entries in Thompson's chronology include a press report of bin Laden's visit to a Pakistan medical clinic the day before 9-11 and records of a large money transfer from the ISI chief to Mohammad Atta, one of the hijackers later identified by U.S. officials.

The extensive list of foreign intelligence services that warned U.S. officials to get ready for an attack: Afghanistan, Argentina, Britain, Cayman Islands, Egypt, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Morocco, and Russia. Thompson notes, "Yet the two countries in the best position to know about the 9-11 plot—Saudi Arabia and Pakistan—apparently didn't give any warning at all."

The reported, but apparently forgotten, tips handed on to U.S. intelligence agencies by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, from spying that appears to have been done by Mossad from inside the United States. Because Thompson has taken pains to attribute his timeline entries mostly to mainstream press accounts, he says, he hasn't been attacked as a conspiracy monger, to which he adds, "I am a bit surprised." As for the Jersey Girls, Thompson says he has never met them and doesn't often travel to the East Coast.

Thompson's timeline entries go into a database run by a Chico, California, anthropologist named Derek Mitchell, who has made them the focus of his Center for Cooperative Research site. In addition to Thompson's timeline, the center puts up the work of a handful of other researchers, including Mitchell's own timeline on the Iraq war and one called "History of U.S. Interventions," by Michael Bevin. Mitchell's aim is to keep the entries as neutrally written and as well sourced as he can.

A third player in this unpaid, freelance 9-11 research is Allan Duncan, a former New Jersey cop and social worker living in New Hope, Pennsylvania. At the request of the families, Duncan has been exploring not only the security alerts issued in New York City before 9-11, but also the role of the FBI-NYPD Joint Terrorism Task Force in issuing "threat assessments conducted at the World Trade Center and security heightened at the WTC, which was then called off on September 10, 2001." These topics may well figure prominently at the 9-11 Commission hearing scheduled for mid May in New York City.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Additional reporting: Alicia Ng

(Incidentally, I'm feeling a lot more agnostic about whether or not Bush knew in advance about the 9/11 attacks. A lot of the intelligence not being followed up on can be explaiend by the general hands-off policy toward Saudi elites, something Bush demanded to an extreme degree. But that doesn't explain everything.)

thanks again for the link. the mini-timeline for "advance info; time" remains one of the more disturbing pages i've seen on the internet. partly for the spooky way trauma seems to create really suspicious memories for people (third graders warning of the attacks? arabs in vans?), partly for those bizarre stock market allegations and the weird stories about the mossad. and the way all of these things recur, it's like ufos or something - too crazy to be completely dismissed outright.

in fact the bit about the mossad at the end sounds 100% as crazy and unlikely as the bit about the pakistani students - i have to wonder whether to lose faith in abc news or in the rational and orderly universe.