Mr Meacher also suggested the Americans might have failed to prevent 11 September as it gave a pretext for military action.

...Mr Meacher was environment minister until three months ago and has already spoken out in opposition to the war describing the case for it as an "uncertain fantasy".

Writing in the Guardian newspaper, Mr Meacher said the 11 September attacks gave an invaluable excuse for attacking Afghanistan.

And he said the US Government intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power because of its need for further secure oil supplies.

Complete Michael Meacher Text

Guardian -Saturday September 6, 2003

This war on terrorism is bogus

The 9/11 attacks gave the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure its global domination

Michael Meacher

Massive attention has now been given - and rightly so - to the reasons why Britain went to war against Iraq. But far too little attention has focused on why the US went to war, and that throws light on British motives too. The conventional explanation is that after the Twin Towers were hit, retaliation against al-Qaida bases in Afghanistan was a natural first step in launching a global war against terrorism. Then, because Saddam Hussein was alleged by the US and UK governments to retain weapons of mass destruction, the war could be extended to Iraq as well. However this theory does not fit all the facts. The truth may be a great deal murkier.

We now know that a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), Jeb Bush (George Bush's younger brother) and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences, was written in September 2000 by the neoconservative think tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says "while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document attributed to Wolfowitz and Libby which said the US must "discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role". It refers to key allies such as the UK as "the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership". It describes peacekeeping missions as "demanding American political leadership rather than that of the UN". It says "even should Saddam pass from the scene", US bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently... as "Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has". It spotlights China for "regime change", saying "it is time to increase the presence of American forces in SE Asia".

The document also calls for the creation of "US space forces" to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent "enemies" using the internet against the US. It also hints that the US may consider developing biological weapons "that can target specific genotypes [and] may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool".

Finally - written a year before 9/11 - it pinpoints North Korea, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes, and says their existence justifies the creation of a "worldwide command and control system". This is a blueprint for US world domination. But before it is dismissed as an agenda for rightwing fantasists, it is clear it provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis. This can be seen in several ways.

First, it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11. It is known that at least 11 countries provided advance warning to the US of the 9/11 attacks. Two senior Mossad experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation (Daily Telegraph, September 16 2001). The list they provided included the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested.

It had been known as early as 1996 that there were plans to hit Washington targets with aeroplanes. Then in 1999 a US national intelligence council report noted that "al-Qaida suicide bombers could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House".

Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their visas in Saudi Arabia. Michael Springman, the former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, has stated that since 1987 the CIA had been illicitly issuing visas to unqualified applicants from the Middle East and bringing them to the US for training in terrorism for the Afghan war in collaboration with Bin Laden (BBC, November 6 2001). It seems this operation continued after the Afghan war for other purposes. It is also reported that five of the hijackers received training at secure US military installations in the 1990s (Newsweek, September 15 2001).

Instructive leads prior to 9/11 were not followed up. French Moroccan flight student Zacarias Moussaoui (now thought to be the 20th hijacker) was arrested in August 2001 after an instructor reported he showed a suspicious interest in learning how to steer large airliners. When US agents learned from French intelligence he had radical Islamist ties, they sought a warrant to search his computer, which contained clues to the September 11 mission (Times, November 3 2001). But they were turned down by the FBI. One agent wrote, a month before 9/11, that Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers (Newsweek, May 20 2002).

All of this makes it all the more astonishing - on the war on terrorism perspective - that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself. The first hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from the US Andrews airforce base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not? There were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9/11. Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft (AP, August 13 2002). It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate.

Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority? The former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has said: "The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defence of incompetence."

Nor is the US response after 9/11 any better. No serious attempt has ever been made to catch Bin Laden. In late September and early October 2001, leaders of Pakistan's two Islamist parties negotiated Bin Laden's extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for 9/11. However, a US official said, significantly, that "casting our objectives too narrowly" risked "a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr Bin Laden was captured". The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that "the goal has never been to get Bin Laden" (AP, April 5 2002). The whistleblowing FBI agent Robert Wright told ABC News (December 19 2002) that FBI headquarters wanted no arrests. And in November 2001 the US airforce complained it had had al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to attack because they did not receive permission quickly enough (Time Magazine, May 13 2002). None of this assembled evidence, all of which comes from sources already in the public domain, is compatible with the idea of a real, determined war on terrorism.

The catalogue of evidence does, however, fall into place when set against the PNAC blueprint. From this it seems that the so-called "war on terrorism" is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives. Indeed Tony Blair himself hinted at this when he said to the Commons liaison committee: "To be truthful about it, there was no way we could have got the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened on September 11" (Times, July 17 2002). Similarly Rumsfeld was so determined to obtain a rationale for an attack on Iraq that on 10 separate occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to 9/11; the CIA repeatedly came back empty-handed (Time Magazine, May 13 2002).

In fact, 9/11 offered an extremely convenient pretext to put the PNAC plan into action. The evidence again is quite clear that plans for military action against Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before 9/11. A report prepared for the US government from the Baker Institute of Public Policy stated in April 2001 that "the US remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma. Iraq remains a destabilising influence to... the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East". Submitted to Vice-President Cheney's energy task group, the report recommended that because this was an unacceptable risk to the US, "military intervention" was necessary (Sunday Herald, October 6 2002).

Similar evidence exists in regard to Afghanistan. The BBC reported (September 18 2001) that Niaz Niak, a former Pakistan foreign secretary, was told by senior American officials at a meeting in Berlin in mid-July 2001 that "military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October". Until July 2001 the US government saw the Taliban regime as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of hydrocarbon pipelines from the oil and gas fields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. But, confronted with the Taliban's refusal to accept US conditions, the US representatives told them "either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs" (Inter Press Service, November 15 2001).

Given this background, it is not surprising that some have seen the US failure to avert the 9/11 attacks as creating an invaluable pretext for attacking Afghanistan in a war that had clearly already been well planned in advance. There is a possible precedent for this. The US national archives reveal that President Roosevelt used exactly this approach in relation to Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. Some advance warning of the attacks was received, but the information never reached the US fleet. The ensuing national outrage persuaded a reluctant US public to join the second world war. Similarly the PNAC blueprint of September 2000 states that the process of transforming the US into "tomorrow's dominant force" is likely to be a long one in the absence of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor". The 9/11 attacks allowed the US to press the "go" button for a strategy in accordance with the PNAC agenda which it would otherwise have been politically impossible to implement.

The overriding motivation for this political smokescreen is that the US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies. By 2010 the Muslim world will control as much as 60% of the world's oil production and, even more importantly, 95% of remaining global oil export capacity. As demand is increasing, so supply is decreasing, continually since the 1960s.

This is leading to increasing dependence on foreign oil supplies for both the US and the UK. The US, which in 1990 produced domestically 57% of its total energy demand, is predicted to produce only 39% of its needs by 2010. A DTI minister has admitted that the UK could be facing "severe" gas shortages by 2005. The UK government has confirmed that 70% of our electricity will come from gas by 2020, and 90% of that will be imported. In that context it should be noted that Iraq has 110 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves in addition to its oil.

A report from the commission on America's national interests in July 2000 noted that the most promising new source of world supplies was the Caspian region, and this would relieve US dependence on Saudi Arabia. To diversify supply routes from the Caspian, one pipeline would run westward via Azerbaijan and Georgia to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Another would extend eastwards through Afghanistan and Pakistan and terminate near the Indian border. This would rescue Enron's beleaguered power plant at Dabhol on India's west coast, in which Enron had sunk $3bn investment and whose economic survival was dependent on access to cheap gas.

Nor has the UK been disinterested in this scramble for the remaining world supplies of hydrocarbons, and this may partly explain British participation in US military actions. Lord Browne, chief executive of BP, warned Washington not to carve up Iraq for its own oil companies in the aftermath of war (Guardian, October 30 2002). And when a British foreign minister met Gadaffi in his desert tent in August 2002, it was said that "the UK does not want to lose out to other European nations already jostling for advantage when it comes to potentially lucrative oil contracts" with Libya (BBC Online, August 10 2002).

The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the "global war on terrorism" has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project. Is collusion in this myth and junior participation in this project really a proper aspiration for British foreign policy? If there was ever need to justify a more objective British stance, driven by our own independent goals, this whole depressing saga surely provides all the evidence needed for a radical change of course.

Michael Meacher MP was environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003

meacherm@parliament.uk

Former UK Minister Michael Meacher Charges Bush Administration ...
Muslim WakeUp!, United Arab Emirates - 6 minutes ago
In a startling article in today's Guardian, Michael Meacher, member of British
Parliament and for the last six years, until his resignation three months ago ...

US may have let 9/11 attacks to happen: Ex-UK minister
Hindustan Times, India - 17 minutes ago
Writing in The Guardian, former Environment Minister Michael Meacher said America's
air defense response was inexplicably slow the morning four hijacked ...
       'US may have deliberately allowed Sept. 9/11' - The Hindu
       Former British minister: Iraq war due to US bid to control oil - Albawaba Middle East News
       US bent on world domination' - ITV
       BBC News - Guardian

The Plan

Were Neo-Conservatives’ 1998 Memos a Blueprint for Iraq War? ABCNEWS.com -March 10

Years before George W. Bush entered the White House, and years before the Sept. 11 attacks set the direction of his presidency, a group of influential neo-conservatives hatched a plan to get Saddam Hussein out of power.

The group, the Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, was founded in 1997. Among its supporters were three Republican former officials who were sitting out the Democratic presidency of Bill Clinton: Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz.

In open letters to Clinton and GOP congressional leaders the next year, the group called for "the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power" and a shift toward a more assertive U.S. policy in the Middle East, including the use of force if necessary to unseat Saddam.

And in a report just before the 2000 election that would bring Bush to power, the group predicted that the shift would come about slowly, unless there were "some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor."

That event came on Sept. 11, 2001. By that time, Cheney was vice president, Rumsfeld was secretary of defense, and Wolfowitz his deputy at the Pentagon.

The next morning — before it was even clear who was behind the attacks — Rumsfeld insisted at a Cabinet meeting that Saddam's Iraq should be "a principal target of the first round of terrorism," according to Bob Woodward's book Bush At War.

What started as a theory in 1997 was now on its way to becoming official U.S. foreign policy.

Some critics of the Bush administration's foreign policy, especially in Europe, have portrayed PNAC as, in the words of Scotland's Sunday Herald, "a secret blueprint for U.S. global domination."

The group was never secret about its aims. In its 1998 open letter to Clinton, the group openly advocated unilateral U.S. action against Iraq because "we can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition" to enforce the inspections regime.

"The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power," they wrote, foreshadowing the debate currently under way in the United Nations.

Of the 18 people who signed the letter, 10 are now in the Bush administration. As well as Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, they include Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage; John Bolton, who is undersecretary of state for disarmament; and Zalmay Khalilzad, the White House liaison to the Iraqi opposition. Other signatories include William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine, and Richard Perle, chairman of the advisory Defense Science Board.

..."Before 9/11, this group ... could not win over the president to this extravagant image of what foreign policy required," said Ian Lustick, a Middle East expert at the University of Pennsylvania. "After 9/11, it was able to benefit from the gigantic eruption of political capital, combined with the supply of military preponderance in the hands of the president. And this small group, therefore, was able to gain direct contact and even control, now, of the White House."

Like other critics, Lustick paints PNAC in conspiratorial tones: "This group, what I call the tom-tom beaters, have set an agenda and have made the president feel that he has to live up to their definitions of manliness, their definitions of success and fear, their definitions of failure."

Hollinger/Perle(PNAC) paper Insult Meacher

Daily Telegraph -07/09

...The gist of Mr Meacher's conclusion is that the US government was prepared to see thousands of its citizens murdered to provide a convenient excuse for a series of conquering wars. This is a most novel theory. We look forward to more articles by him: "Aliens: why they choose to live among us" or "The cabal of jealous starlets who killed Marilyn Monroe" and "The coded Confederate message in the Gettysburg Address."

Reuters -September 6, 2003

...Short, a maverick with a track record of speaking her mind, accused Blair and his chief aide Alastair Campbell, who quit a week ago, of effectively mounting a coup in the party, imposing their own policies by bludgeoning their opponents and lying.

"We have a prime minister so focused on presentation that there is inadequate consideration of the merits of policy.

"And beneath the smiling demeanor, a ruthlessness that is accompanied by a lack of respect for proper procedure, and a willingness to be "economical with the actuality," she wrote. "The cabinet has not functioned as a decision-making body since 1997."

Her attack followed an accusation by former Environment Minister Michael Meacher, who left the cabinet in June, in an article on Saturday that the United States had known about the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington but done nothing to prevent them as they were a perfect pretext for embarking on a long-planned war to get access to oil.

The article by inference accused Blair of at best naivety in his unflinching support of President Bush in his invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq.

Ex ministro britannico su 11 settembre

Indymedia Italy -Sunday September 07, 2003

Former Labour cabinet minister Michael Meacher, writing in the Guardian, has become the first public official to suggest the Bush administration may have allowed 9/11 to happen in furtherance of its global agenda. After reviewing the controversial blueprint for world domination drawn up by the neoconservative clique around Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz which predated Bush’s election, Meacher raises the same questions that have previously been raised in the alternative press and, in a more fragmentary way, in commercial outlets like the Daily Telegraph and Newsweek. These concern the advance notifications of an impending attack sent to the US by the Mossad and other intelligence agencies, the refusal of the FBI and CIA to act against suspicious activity in the US despite the advice of their agents, the puzzling delay in scrambling fighter aircraft to intercept the hijacked airliners on the morning of September 11, and the subsequent apparent dithering in the search for bin Laden. Meacher’s allegations, predictably, have stirred up a firestorm of controversy and are being curtly dismissed as nonsensical conspiracy theory by British and US officials.

ITV Interview with Michael Meacher

ITV -September 6

ITV News presenter Andrew Harvey spoke to former minister Michael Meacher about his misgivings on American foreign policy.

MM: American foreign policy has been driven, in my view, over the last few years much less by the global war on terror than by a neo-Conservative blueprint for US world domination. That is very clear. The document Rebuilding America's Defences is three years old and if you look at what has actually happened, it follows that very closely. What I am saying about 9/11 is that it was of course an utterly dreadful and terrible atrocity. But it provided the Americans with a very convenient pretext for launching a war against Afghanistan and Iraq which the evidence shows that they were already planning well in advance.

AH: You do quote that, you suggest that the American forces stood by while that attack took place.

MM: I did not say that, it is absolutely not my view.

AH: Well, as this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding or being ignorant of the evidence?

MM: I ask questions. I literally do not know the answers to all of these matters and my view is we need much further investigation, we need a new Congressional investigation that is much more thorough than the last one. There are legitimate issues that I don't purport to answer. But I have laid out the factual evidence, I think in greater detail than ever before. And first of all, before 9/11 there is no question that intelligence was not pursued as systematically as it might have been. 11 countries had given detailed intelligence to the United States, including the UK, there was detailed evidence about cells of terrorists. They found the 20th hijacker, Zacharias Moussaoui, they asked to examine his computer, it was stopped by the FBI. How do you explain all that?

AH: When you posed those questions, did you think about the effects those words would have on the 3,000 people who died on September 11?

MM: I am acutely aware of that. I am acutely aware that after this terrible atrocity people, families who lost their loved ones do not want to have any other explanation that that it was an act of terror that could not have been prevented. But I also think that these are questions that have been in the public domain and that I am not the first to ask them. There are no new facts in my article; it is all gathered from facts in the public domain. We do, as a mature nation, have to face up to difficult and uncomfortable facts.

AH: To quote another part of your article, you say the overriding motivation is that the US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies. If there was a conspiracy, was the UK part of it?

MM: I have never said that there was a conspiracy. I reject that. I am a cock-up kind of person and I think that is what actually happened. When this terrible atrocity happened, they realised that they had an opportunity to use it to their own advantage. I don't think it was a conspiracy. With regard to the UK, clearly we were clearly allied with the US but my article is about US motives, not the UK's.

AH: You say we share the same motives over hydrocarbon supplies.

MM: I am saying that for us, as for the Americans, supplies are getting less. But I am not saying that we were in on any planning or anything like that. It is true that there is a crunch in world oil supplies, they are going to run out in the next 20 years or so. It is already getting pretty short. There are two areas of the world which as far as we know have the biggest remaining oil supplies. They are Afghanistan and the Middle East, and of course Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait. That was what the Gulf War was about and that's what the latest Iraq war was about.

AH: What you have done is take bits of evidence and put them together without ever saying that you have built an edifice. But that edifice is taking shape in your article. Is that your own theory, or has someone else suggested it?

MM: No. It all comes from the collection of data that I have been doing meticulously. It comes from websites across the world. I have had help with this research, that is perfectly true, but I have been very careful not to make allegations because I genuinely believe that we don't know all the answers. Why were no planes on the day itself put into the air for an hour and a half after the Pentagon knew that a hijack had taken place, when there is a routine intercept procedure which is always operated when an airliner goes off course? It had operated 67 times in the last year. On this particular day it did not operate. Why?

AH: You see, when you phrase a question like that, isn't it naive to say that you are not making an allegation?

I don't think it is naive. I think it is the right thing to do. Politicians are not being chosen to impose their judgement on others. They are people who, I believe, should search out the facts and expose them, saying as I am not that Michael Meacher should make a decision on all of this, but that the relevant authorities should give their full answers. That is what I think needs to be done.

US `knowingly failed to intercept attacks'

Bangkokpost.com -Monday 08 September 2003

A former minister in Prime Minister Tony Blair's government has suggested the United States may have knowingly failed to intercept the Sept 11, 2001 attacks in order to provide a pretext for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Former environment minister Michael Meacher said America's air defence response was inexplicably slow the morning four hijacked passenger jets destroyed the World Trade Center and crashed into the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field, killing more than 3,000.

``Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence?'' he asked, referring to intelligence clues he said were ignored before the attacks.

``Or could air security operations have been deliberately stood down on Sept 11? If so, why, and on whose authority?''

'Muddle' caused 45 minute claim

Guardian -Monday September 8, 2003

The report by MPs and peers on the ISC is also expected to acquit the prime minister's outgoing communications director, Alastair Campbell, of "sexing up" the dossier published last September to make the case stronger for military intervention against Saddam Hussein. "For once in his life Alastair Campbell is not guilty," said one MP familiar with the issues.

That will not please Downing Street's most vociferous critics. This weekend two ministers who left the government after the war, Clare Short, who resigned, and Michael Meacher, who was dropped as environment minister, both raised the stakes still further.

Writing in the Independent on Sunday, Ms Short accused Tony Blair of "a smiling demeanour [and] a ruthlessness that is accompanied by a lack of respect for proper procedure". She said his "abuse of power" had made life "hell" for Dr David Kelly, the weapons expert whose suicide triggered the Hutton inquiry.

In the Guardian, Mr Meacher virtually accused the US of complicity in the 9/11 attacks to secure control of the world's fossil fuels.

SPIEGEL -September 6

Als hartnäckigste Verschwörungstheorie in Verbindung mit dem 11. September 2001 erweist sich "Hunt the Boeing": Die Pentagon-Attacke habe nie stattgefunden. Aber auch die "Lihop"-Version , kurz für "Let it happen on purpose", nach der der US-Geheimdienst von einer Attacke gewusst habe, diese aber nicht verhinderte, erfreut sich nach wie vor großer Beliebtheit.

30.05.2002

11. September: Der Verschwörungs- Theoretiker

Als US-Präsident George W. Bush kürzlich wegen möglichen Vorwissens des Terroranschlags unter Druck geriet, war Nico Haupt nicht im geringsten überrascht. Schließlich arbeitet der in New York lebende Deutsche seit dem 11. September an der Aufdeckung des vermeintlichen Regierungsplots. Von Carsten Volkery, New York

The Star South Africa - September 8, 2003

"...Short's attack followed a newspaper article on Saturday quoting former environment minister Michael Meacher, who left the cabinet in June.

He said there were some unanswered questions about why the US did not follow up intelligence leads about the September 11 attacks. Meacher questioned why the US failed to act after at least 11 countries warned of possible attacks.

Just say No

Indymedia Germany -07.09.2003

By Glen Meaden

I have never believed the official Bush story on 9-11. Then one may ask which one as the Bush administration has issued several contradictory versions of what really happened. However, now a former member of the poodle's cabinet Michael Meacher has came forth charging Bush with outright treason in allowing 9-11 to take place after receiving ample forewarning. Meacher continues with his charges of Bush sabotaging the efforts to bring to justice those responsible. I would like to say that I feel satisfied and vindicated by Meacher's charges. Nevertheless, I feel no comfort or satisfaction in being vindicated by someone high on the inside...

The document that Meacher was referring is entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses. The document was drawn up by the ultra conservative think tank; Project for the New American Century chaired by William Kristol. The document was drawn up for drawn up for Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush and Lewis Libby. All of which with the exception of brother Jeb are part of the current regime. Briefly, the document called for large increases in defense spending including nuclear weapons and the repositioning of America's military forces to respond to regions judged critical such as Southeast Asia and Southeast Europe. The document specifically names North Korea, Iraq, Iran and Libya as enemies of the United States.

Moreover, the document Meacher referred to was written in September 2000 over a year before 9-11 indicating that the decision to invade Iraq was made at least a year before 9-11. Documents from Cheney's energy task force indicate that new bids for Iraqi oil fields were asked for six months before 9-11 confirming that the decision to invade Iraq was made before 9-11.

Perhaps the best summation of the type of thinking that went into this document is the following quotation from the document.

"And advanced forms of biological warfare that can "target" specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool."

In other words, the authors of this document are stating for the whole world that genocide is a useful political tool. Rather than employ nasty concentration camps as Hitler these authors are urging the development of a pathogen that would only attack the targeted race and that could be released from a distance.

Thus affording this group a plausible means of denial while allowing them to keep their hand clean from the actual killings. If the reader is somewhat shocked by that revelation, he should recall that the Bush family has had a long history of being associated with eugenics. Prescott Bush was a leader in the eugenic movement in America during the 1920s and 1930s. Moreover, Prescott lost his first race for congress over his past views of eugenics. The reader is also reminded that the Nuremberg Laws handed down by the Nazis setting the stage for the Holocaust came from America. Additionally George Bush senior has worked hard in the eugenics movement behind the scenes. He specifically targeted the third world. Junior is now following in his grandfather's and father's footsteps.

What Meacher has seen rise out of the ashes of 9-11 like a giant Phoenix is the birth of the Fourth Reich. Meacher now sees that the document, Rebuilding America's Defenses is a blueprint for future military adventurism by the Bush regime just as Mein Kamf served as a blueprint for the Nazi era.

Meacher: I am not accusing the US of 9/11 plot

Independent -08 September 2003

Michael Meacher, the former environment minister who sparked fury after suggesting the Bush administration may have purposely ignored warnings of the September 11 attacks yesterday said his views had been misrepresented, and that he had "not for a second suggested that the American government deliberately planned this."

Mr Meacher, who was a minister in the Blair Government for six years, provoked angry condemnation from the American government, after he hinted the US may have been hoping for such an attack. He also questioned whether "US air security operations were deliberately 'stood down' on 9/11."

The US government accused Mr Meacher of being "monstrously offensive" while Downing Street condemned his remarks in The Guardian.

But yesterday Mr Meacher said he "specifically and explicitly did not say this." He said he was "not a conspiracy theorist" and he did not believe September 11 was part of a US government plot.

Mr Meacher said the story posed a series of unanswered questions about the US's failure to act over September 11, which he thought should be investigated by Congress or a UK parliamentary committee. He said they did not reflect his personal view.

"I am not a conspiracy theorist or making accusations that America planned this. All I was saying is there are some unanswered questions about why they didn't follow up intelligence leads about September 11 from a number of sources," he said. "I am raising unanswered and legitimate questions."

Mr Meacher accused the press of stating as fact, and as his personal view, the issues he posed as questions in The Guardian, which was reproduced in The Mail on Sunday.

Mr Meacher questioned why the US failed to act after at least 11 countries warned of possible attacks.

Orlando Sentinel -Sep 7, 2003. pg. A.24

9-11 WAS PART OF U.S. PLOT, EX-BRITISH CABINET MINISTER SAYS ; THE FORMER OFFICIAL, WHO QUIT IN JUNE, SAID AMERICA'S GOAL IS WORLD DOMINATION.

[Michael Meacher] said a 1999 report by the national intelligence council warned that al-Qaeda suicide bombers could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives on the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA or the White House.

Meacher: terrorism a pretext for conquest
British official charges US “stood down” on 9/11

wsws.org -8 September 2003

By Bill Vann

For its part, major US media outlets blacked out any reference to Meacher’s explosive charges.

The claim that Meacher is not “serious or credible” has no foundation. He is not a back-bench maverick or a member of what the right-wing British press likes to refer to as the “loony left.” On the contrary, he was the Labour Party’s most experienced cabinet minister, having served in Parliament for 33 years, holding various cabinet posts going back to the Wilson and Callaghan administrations in the 1970s. He served in Blair’s cabinet as environment minister for six years until he was removed in June amid the mounting crisis of the Labour government over the Iraq war. He played a prominent role in the negotiation of the Kyoto accords on the environment and was long considered a contender for the position of Labour Party leader.

That someone with these political connections charges in print that elements within the US administration knew that a terrorist attack was coming on September 11 and allowed it to happen to further their war plans represents an extremely dangerous development for the Bush White House. He speaks not just for himself. The thesis he advances is indicative of what is assumed and is being said behind the scenes among much wider circles within the sole major government to have backed Washington in its invasion of Iraq.

It is doubtless that the article was motivated by the deepening crisis of the Blair government itself over the exposure of the lies it used to promote the Iraq war. With continuing revelations from within the government’s own intelligence agencies about the fabrication of evidence against Iraq, recent polls have shown a majority of Briton’s in favor of Blair’s resignation.

Recent Member of Blair's Cabinet Accuses Bush of 9/11 Collusion - U.S. Media Silent

NYC Indymedia , Portland Indymedia

Michael Meacher, member of British Parliament and until 3 months ago the Environmental Minister has accused Bush of collusion in the Sept 11th 2001 attacks. Meacher resigned his post as Environment Minister because he opposed the conquest of Iraq. Last year Congresswomen Cynthia McKinney asked the question "what did the Bush Administration know?" and demanded an investigation. Now a former Cabinet level minister of this countries staunchest ally has in effect accused Bush of treason. Read his article that was published in the Guardian.

This story is making headlines around the world and the U.S. media is completely silent about it. A recent member of Tony Blair's own cabinet accuses Bush of complicity in the September 11th 2001 attacks and treason against his country and the U.S. media says nothing? That is exactly what has happened. Read More...

Not only has the U.S. corporate media ignored this story but one poster is pointing out that the Indymedia network in the U.S. is also saying nothing. Shame on indymedia (except pdx) for ignoring the 9.11 cover-up!

On the newswire: [ Meacher predicting Fourth Reich with his 9.11 accusations ]

Previous PDX features on the peoples investigation of 9/11:
[ 9.11 - What did the U.S. know, and when did it know it? | Why is the Indymedia network ignoring the call for a 9.11 investigation? | The People's Investigation of 9.11 |

The Cheshire Story - And after the American media was done, nothing was left but a grin.

By Bryan Zepp Jamieson -09/06/03

Back almost a year ago, there was a huge flap in the media over a remark made by the German Minister of Justice, Herta Daeubler-Gmelin. She was addressing a convention of trade unionists (try to imagine the US counterpart, John Ashcroft, talking to a union convention!), and was talking about whether George W. was mounting an offensive against Saddam Hussein in order to distract the public from his domestic problems. Hardly an outrageous conspiracy theory, one so popular with all sides of the political spectrum in America that a movie and a subsequent phrase, "Wag the Dog" has sprung up to describe it.

What created the huge flap is that Daeubler-Gmelin was quoted as saying, "That's a popular method. Even Hitler did that." The American media promptly started howling that she was comparing the sainted President to Adolf Hitler.

Of course, even if she had said that – she denies having done so – the fact it that both sides of the statement are true. It IS a popular method. "Wag the Dog" caught on in popular parlance for that very reason. And Hitler certainly used wag the dog to enhance his popularity and political standing. It doesn’t even really compare Putsch to Hitler; it just merely notes that both used the same political tactic as a commonplace. "EVEN Hitler did it."

That the US media would make such a big fuss about it was bizarre. CNN even had a poll about it, asking Americans what should be done about this German Justice Minister. Editorials demanded she resign. Talk show hosts bloviated for hours. Right wingers swore to humiliate all of Europe for this dastardly insult, a tactic that George is paying for now.

So when a recent member of the cabinet for Tony Blair came out and flat out accused the President of the United States of being complicit in the murders of 3,000 people, and of treason against his country, the American media must have gone right out of its mind with self-righteous rage, right?

Wrong.

Michael Meacher, who had been Britain’s Minister of the Environment until he resigned, in April, in protest over Tony Blair’s Iraq policies, wrote an opinion piece that unequivocally charges Putsch not only of foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, but of deliberately sabotaging efforts to find and punish those responsible in order to follow an agenda laid out a couple of years earlier by the same right wing coterie that make up much of his cabinet and staff.

Meacher is accusing the American President of treason. His charges, if true, could very literally result in Putsch facing a firing squad. He is accusing the President of the United States of being involved in permitting events to unfold that resulted in the deaths of 3,000 people. He is accusing Putsch of betraying the people of the United States, in order to carry out a crazed notion of "Pax Americana" that has, to date, resulted in tens of thousand of deaths, hundreds of thousands of injuries, hundreds of billions of dollars wasted, and – for America – nothing to show for it except a shattered economy, contempt and hatred from much of the world, a gestapo that supposedly is protecting Americans while in fact doing the opposite. This administration has left millions of people wondering if America has slipped into a fascist dictatorship.

That’s a bit more serious than noting that both Putsch and Hitler liked to play "wag the dog" games with the opinion polls.

Meacher isn’t even saying anything that millions of Americans and tens of millions of other people didn’t already suspect. Michael Ruppert, the "Cop V Cia" conspiracy theorist, had full page ads in most national newspapers over the past few weeks making similar allegations. Around the internet, questions about the slow response of the Air Force on 9/11, Putsch’s bizarre reactions and even more bizarre recollections ("That’s one bad pilot"), and of course, the unseemly way in which the administration has tried to block and stonewall investigations into 9/11, cumulating in the twenty-eight page deletion of the report that detailed Saudi Arabian links. Type in "9/11" on Google, and you’ll find thousands of websites that discuss these very matters in varying amounts of detail and with varying amounts of credibility. They range from the flaky right through to the utterly convincing.

I would have people email me or stop by my office and tell me flatly, "Bush knew something." These were often people who sighed and rolled their eyes when you mentioned "conspiracy." The net is full of conspiracy theorists. But as that Mel Gibson movie showed, just because you are into conspiracy theories doesn’t mean you’re wrong.

I went from "they knew something was coming" to deciding that the only thing the Administration didn’t expect that awful day was for the towers to actually COLLAPSE. I got my warning that the admin knew something was going to happen on 9/11/01 when, just twelve hours before the attack, the Guardian ran a story – one never mentioned afterward in any other place – that the Justice Department had raided and shut down hundreds of Moslem-oriented web sites over the previous 24 hours. I went to bed the night of 9/10 convinced that this would be the main story the next day. Of course, it wasn’t.

But in retrospect, it’s a lot more important than we thought.

How is it that a German minister can allegedly mention Putsch and Hitler in the same paragraph, not even comparing the two, and the American media goes into a feeding frenzy. But when someone of equal standing in England goes much further, accusing the American President of treason, murder, fraud, and conspiracy, that isn’t regarded as newsworthy? Especially when the former Minister is only stating what millions of American already believe, deep in their hearts: that 9/11 was PERMITTED to happen, and used in a cold and disgraceful manner by these bent moral cripples in the White House to further their own agenda of conquest and looting.

It’s now been ten hours since the London Guardian broke the story. It is a firestorm throughout all of Europe and in the Canadian press. Ten hours is an eternity in our era of satellites and microwave relays.

I just looked at CNN. They had nothing about it. Not even a poll asking about it.

The New York Times, that bastion of journalist integrity (sometimes) didn’t think it was newsworthy.

The LA Times, despite the advantage of an eight hour deadline gap, wasn’t quick enough on the draw.

The Washington Post had stories clucking over how freedom of the press was abridged in Russia still, but nothing about on the biggest story of the week in Europe.

Faux News I looked at just for comic relief. They had an article praising a movie that displays Putsch as brave and resolute and decisive on 9/11, but no mention of Meacher.

The Moonie Times exalted that Fearless Leader would be giving a rare address to the nation Sunday night, and implied that this was a deep honor for Putsch to bestow upon the American people. They forgot to mention Meacher, though.

The wire services, which can transmit breaking stories to thousands of papers around the world in mere seconds, had no mention of the story that is being headlined throughout Europe. Not AP, and not Reuters.

The Sacramento Bee had nothing. Nor did the SF Chronicle.

Nor did the Wall Street Urinal.

I didn’t bother checking CNBC. What Davis is wearing today has little bearing on whether Putsch betrayed America or not.

The biggest story of the year in England, and a huge story everywhere else.

And here, dead silence from the very same media that in recent years used to brag that it was what defended us from tyranny and enslavement through the truth. (Funny, you just don’t hear them claiming that any more.)

From all these places, hundreds of stories, many dealing with Europe, and Blair, and the middle east, and 9/11. Tons of information.

Many of them even look like real newspapers.