BY RAISA PAGES (Granma International staff writer)

AS a U.S. soldier died in the faraway mountains of Afghanistan – while supposedly
fighting terrorism and having been sent by the person who appropriated the leadership
in the fight against that evil – that same President George W. Bush was attending
a banquet in Miami with the hemisphere’s most notorious terrorists.
 

Bush is the presidential candidate who had received the most money from the
Miami mafia — over $114,000 USD for one single campaign — followed by his father,
who accumulated more than $165,000 on three occasions. He’s now looking for
money from the same sources for his brother Jeb.
 
At a moment when he should have been re-examining his questionable anti-terrorist
policies, the U.S. leader was dining with members of the Cuban American National
Foundation (CANF) who helped him take over the White House through fraudulent
elections.

The U.S. president participated in a fund-raising dinner ($25,000 a head) for
his brother, Governor Jeb Bush, who hopes to be reelected in Florida. This was
after speaking at a rally of his faithful supporters, in which he promised exactly
what his audience wanted to hear: a new, more open, more aggressive escalation
of the United States’ “Cuba policy.” In doing so, he ignored the opinion of
the majority of the American people and the criteria of legislators from both
houses of Congress who oppose the blockade of the island.

During a panel discussion televised throughout the island on May 20, National
Assembly President Ricardo AlarcСn – who is very knowledgeable on U.S. policy
– explained with apparent sarcasm that in his speech, Bush had had the nerve
to say that Cuban elections are fraudulent — perhaps thinking that the people
of the United States and Miami had forgotten the months they spent without knowing
who their own president would be.

The purpose of the panel discussion was to examine the statements made by the
U.S. leader in Washington and Miami that very day.

Referring to an executive summary of a U.S. Civil Rights Commission report,
AlarcСn stated that the main conclusion reached by the investigation into the
2000 Florida elections was that racism was rampant. The vast majority of the
thousands of citizens who were not allowed to vote in that state, because their
names were not on the voting lists or because they were prevented from entering
the polling booths, were black.

The Miami banquet was held at the home of a Cuban-American, so that Bush, his
brother, and Otto Reich (U.S. assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere
affairs) could share a meal with such arch-terrorists as Orlando Bosch, self-confessed
author of the attack on a Cuban passenger plane in 1976; plus Dionisio SuАrez
Esquivel and Virgilio Pablo Romero. These last two were sentenced for murdering
former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and his assistant Ronnie Moffit
on a Washington DC street. SЗarez Esquivel and Virgilio Pablo Romero were released
from a Florida prison last year, thanks to an executive order. 

Bush showed his audacity by taking part and speaking at a 2001 rally at which
the main promoters and signatories of a so-called declaration of principles
were present in the audience and on the speakers’ platform. In the declaration,
Orlando Bosch, Alberto HernАndez and some of their buddies confirmed that they
would continue to carry out violence and terrorism against Cuba, using all means
of struggle. Such words in the mouths of those people smell of dynamite.

Five Cubans are in prison in the United States after receiving outrageously
long sentences, precisely for having done what U.S. figures such as Bush, prosecutors
and federal authorities have been unable to do: fight the terrorism against
Cuba that is organized in the United States and that goes unpunished, highlighted
AlarcСn. He added that this violence also causes the deaths of U.S. citizens
like Ronnie Moffit.

He called attention to a paragraph in the sentencing hearing for RenИ GonzАlez,
who received a sentence of 15 years — the shortest of the excessive prison terms.
At the prosecutor’s request, Judge Lenard included in her sentencing an additional
special condition of supervised probation, forbidding RenИ to visit specific
places that are known to be frequented by terrorist groups, or to meet with
members of organizations that urge violence or are involved in organized crime.
 

AlarcСn emphasized that those words mean that terrorists meet openly and publicly
in Miami, and the warning to RenИ was, “Watch out, don’t mess with our friends.”
 

He added that the paragraph explicitly acknowledges that terrorist groups exist,
but action is not taken against them, only against those who had the courage
and heroism to infiltrate such groups in an attempt to frustrate their plans.
 

CIA REPORT ANNOUNCED A ‘SEPTEMBER 11’
What else did the White House know?

BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD (Special for Granma International)

IN the hours following the catastrophic attacks of September 11, 2001, White
House spokesperson Ari Fleischer appeared before the national and international
press and categorically affirmed that George W. Bush had never received any
warning of the imminence of this sort of terrorist act.

After waiting eight months and for reasons as yet unknown, the same spokesperson
has revealed that there were indeed warnings, in the form of a top secret CIA
report, to the effect that Osama bin Laden had the clear intention to stage
attacks within the United States by means of airplanes. It is now appropriate
to ask: what else did the White House know?

According to Fleischer, the document presented to the president in August 2001,
was entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike the U.S.” In its Saturday, May
18 edition, The Washington Post corrected the official: the real title was “Bin
Laden Determined to Strike in the United States.” Did the nuance escape the
spokesperson’s attention?

U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice had stated that the report primarily
described threats directed at U.S. targets abroad. But sources from The Washington
Post noted that, on the contrary, the CIA information pointed to danger within
U.S. territory.

To date, Fleischer is contending that the White House did not know what the
Al-Qaeda conspirators were proposing to do with the planes they were going to
hijack.

In Washington, the White House revelation has unleashed a bombardment of questions
and intense inquiry related to the Bush administration’s attitude, unprecedented
since the tragic events.

Likewise, it has prompted concerns over the various pieces of information that
signal grave negligence within the security agencies, in addition to a general
lack of coordination of their activities.

The shocking aspects include:

• A memorandum addressed to the highest levels of the FBI by an agent in Phoenix,
Arizona, noted months ago that Bin Laden could be utilizing flight schools for
training his terrorists and recommended an urgent check of all students of Middle
Eastern origin in flying schools.

• The above-mentioned document was never passed on to FBI investigators in Minnesota,
who had located one Zacarias Moussaoui, a Franco-Moroccan student pilot suspected
of being part of an Al-Qaeda conspiracy.

• In August 2001 the CIA alerted the FBI that two men linked to Bin Laden’s
organization were in U.S. territory. The information was not followed up and
Khalid Al-Midharn and Nawaq Alhazmi remained in San Diego until September 11,
when they took part in the Pentagon attack.

However, the most shocking information concerns a report prepared by the National
Intelligence Council, affiliated with the CIA, which warned — as far back as
1999! — that terrorists linked to Bin Laden could hijack aircraft in a scenario
almost identical to that of the September 11 attack.

“Suicide bombers belonging to Al-Qaeda’s martyrdom battalion could crash-land
an aircraft packed with high explosives [C-4 and Semtex]... into the Pentagon,
the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, or the White House,” affirms
the report entitled “The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism.”

The report documented known cases of such conspiracies, including a plot by
Al-Qaeda agents and drawn up in 1995, discovered in Manila in a computer belonging
to Ramzi Youssef, a terrorist convicted in the United States for the 1993 bombing
of the World Trade Center.

This report totally contradicts a statement made by Condoleezza Rice on Thursday,
May 16: “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would
take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and
slam it into the Pentagon,” she stated innocently. “I don’t think anybody could
have predicted that these peopleј would try to use an airplane as a missile,
a hijacked airplane as a missile.”

The New York Times pointed out that Bush’s sudden confession clarifies certain
things. The CIA warning to the White House explains why Bush’s aides were so
sure that Bin Laden had been behind the attacks, almost as soon as they occurred.
Months ago, one of those responsible for the crucial White House decisions on
September 11 affirmed that they were never had any real doubt.

Outside of the “establishment” press, various news items continue to appear
in alternative websites, like www.indymedia.org, which recall a series of previously
published news items that were not afforded much space by the press agencies:
 

The German intelligence service, BND, warned the CIA and Israel that “terrorists
from the Middle East were planning to hijack commercial planes to use them as
weapons to attack major symbols of U.S. and Israeli culture,” (Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, September 14, 2001).

In August 2001, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his intelligence services
to advise the U.S. government “in the strongest possible terms” of an imminent
attack on airports and government buildings. (MS-NBC).

Graver still, other sources affirm that the Justice Department refused to issue
the warrant FBI agents had requested to check computerized material on suspect
Zacarias Moussaoui. After the attacks, in that source they were to find information
directly linked to the attacks.

Finally, other websites are trying to link the whole combination of events to
a conspiracy by U.S. oil magnates — connected to the Bush family — in order
to gain access to the Kazakhstan oilfields via Afghanistan.

They note, for example, how ExxonMobil, Texaco, Unocal, BP Amoco, Shell and
the infamous Enron had invested billions of dollars in Kazakhstan to assure
oil extraction rights in that region, and how, unable to reach an agreement
with the Talibans, they urgently needed a change of government in Afghanistan.
 

The “spontaneous” White House confession — perhaps provoked by Senator Bob Graham
s latest inquiries into the issue — has definitively cracked the “untouchable”
status that George W. Bush had acquired as a result of the September 11 events.
>From now on, the unelected president has a lot to answer for.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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