Dick Cheney's own domestic-propaganda agent, the jailbird ex-New York Times reporter Judith Miller, always had amazing "luck" when it came to covering the White House's terror wars.
Now it turns out she had something else -- something that 3,000 Americans who died on Sept. 11, 2001, would've surely appreciated: Judith Miller says she had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks.
In an interview published today by AlterNet, Miller claims her intelligence and White House sources (anonymous, of course) told her in July 2001 that an Al Qaeda attack on America was imminent.
The information was reportedly based on the now-familiar "chatter" that followed the bombing of the USS Cole the previous October, Miller claims.
It was never published -- not specific enough, she says.
Questions unanswered by the AlterNet report are why should anyone believe anything Miller writes or says, and why is an independent media site suddenly promoting the story of a proven liar and White House propaganda agent.
Once again, it doesn't make sense
Miller offers very little to back up her claims and seems -- as usual -- coldly disinterested in the horrible fate of the actual people who were murdered on that day.
She even parrots the bizarre response of Bush himself upon learning of the World Trade Center attacks. Miller tells AlterNet that her initial response to seeing that gaping, smoking hole in the tower full of people was: "Gosh! That was a pretty big space for a Cessna or something to have gotten into that building."
Gosh, indeed.
But the strangest part of her questionable revelations -- seemingly timed to coincide with the Pentagon's tardy and suspicious release of two vague surveillance camera footage of the explosion and the White House's increasingly desperate defense of the NSA wiretapping/phone records scandal -- is her story of the "Al Qaeda operatives" overheard through (of course) surveillance by U.S. intelligence agencies.
"The incident that had gotten everyone's attention was a conversation between two members of Al Qaeda. And they had been talking to one another, supposedly expressing disappointment that the United States had not chosen to retaliate more seriously against what had happened to the Cole," Miller tells AlterNet.
"And one Al Qaeda operative was overheard saying to the other, 'Don't worry; we're planning something so big now that the U.S. will have to respond.'"
What?
"I thought it was a very good story," she continues.
It's a weird story, at least.
After nearly five years of the "War on Terror" and enough crimes, scandals and outrages to end the presidency of anyone not lucky enough to be wrapped in the bloody flag of 9/11, America is now supposed to believe the goal of "the terrorists" wasn't to kill us because they hate our freedoms, nor to avenge the Medieval Crusades, nor to destroy Israel, reclaim Spain for some nonexistent Caliphate, stop women from wearing bikinis nor any of the other dozen ever-changing "Why Do They Hate Us?" reasons used to justify the absolute worst American policies in this country's long history.
Instead, according to Judith Miller's new claims, the Sept. 11 attacks were designed to make sure America destroyed the countries where the terror attacks were allegedly planned. The entire fantastic 9/11 hijacking-bombing horror was to make sure the United States blew up anybody who might've had a part in it, along with everybody who had the bad luck of living in the same Muslim part of the world. It was Islamic fundamentalism saying "Please kill me" to the United States.
That "Al Qaeda" chatter of "something so big now that the U.S. will have to respond" does sound remarkably like another shadowy group's plans, however -- a neo-con pro-war group that includes Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, "Scooter" Libby and John Bolton on its membership list. In a report titled "Rebuilding America's Defenses" (PDF) that was published by the think tank in September 2000, the group writes:
"Further, the process of [military] transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor."
Always in the 'right place'
When the fake-terrorist anthrax attacks hit a shaken nation just a week after 9/11, Miller just happened to have a new book about anthrax attacks (published on Sept. 10, 2001) -- and she conveniently had some (fake) anthrax mailed to her at the Times.
When Cheney's office planned its operation to blow the cover of CIA agent Valerie Plame and discredit her husband Joe Wilson for being skeptical about the planned Iraq invasion, Judith Miller was sitting in the White House office of Cheney's top henchman, the now-indicted "Scooter" Libby.
When the White House needed an important "liberal newspaper" to promote the made-up story about the United States catching shipments of nuclear-weapons materials allegedly headed to Saddam Hussein's military, Judith Miller put the propaganda on the front page.
And when a gangster named Ahmed Chalabi had been chosen by the White House to run the "new and improved" Iraq, his longtime friend Judith Miller repeated his every lie in the pages of the New York Times.
Experience you can't trust
It was all just a replay of her propaganda work for the first Bush administration's Iraq War.
As the U.S. buildup to the 1991 war began, Miller had a new job at the Times that was ideal for spreading the White House line: The newspaper had made her the "Persian Gulf special correspondent" in October 1990.
To capitalize on the coming war while simultaneously demonizing a Middle Eastern leader who had been a staunch ally of the United States until the mysterious Kuwait crisis, Miller had a quickie paperback published, "Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf."
Her co-author was the loathsome Laurie Mylroie, a neo-con disciple of the War on Terror's primary figures including the aforementioned "Scooter" Libby, Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton. Both Mylroie and Miller were clients of the same public relations firm that represents a cabal of neo-con think-tank figures who push for constant Middle Eastern war with their books, articles and media appearances.
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