UNITED STATES NEWS DIGEST
LaRouche: President Bush Had No Pre-Knowledge of Sept. 11Because al-Qaeda Didn't Do It!
During his May 28 international webcast, Democratic Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche was asked about the charges that President Bush was alerted during August to what became the Sept. 11 attacks. LaRouche declared that the entire story is a "fraud," being put forward by a bunch of "Democratic fakers." President Bush could not have known that al-Qaeda was about to carry out an attack, he said, because it was not al-Qaeda who organized the attack. It was not in al-Qaeda's capability to launch the Sept. 11 operation, which was, in fact, an attempted coup d'etat against the U.S. government, the Bush Administration, and President Bush himself.
To say that the President had access to information that al-Qaeda was about to attack, "is a lie," LaRouche said. There was a general security threat to the United States in August of 2001, which he himself was involved in monitoring, but it had nothing to do with al-Qaeda.
LaRouche elaborated:
"I don't care how many times people have said, 'al-Qaeda did it,' or 'it came from Osama bin Laden,' it did not happen. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda did not have the capability of even beginning to do what happened to the United States on Sept. 11.
"So, you say you had information they were going to do it, just because you now wish to say they did it, it doesn't mean it's true. There is no truth to the official story about Osama bin Laden's being the author of what happened in New York and Washington, D.C. on Sept. 11. Nor has any government official, of any government ever presented the slightest whiff of credible evidence, or plausible evidence, to show that! No proof has ever been submitted! So, the government is around, bombing the world, and no proof has been submitted, that the alleged perpetrator actually did it! That's your FBI at work for you. 'We're going to convict him anyway. Why bother with proof?' That kind of mentality.
"So, the President did not have any such information. No one gave him such information. He didn't miss the boat on anything. What you have, is, you have a couple of Democratic fakers, who've gotten into the act, of the Joe Lieberman type, who're trying to spin this into a story of the incompetence of the President, who didn't know what was going on. Nobody knew what was going on, except the perpetrators! This was a highly sophisticated, military-type operation, which had been in preparation for a year to two years; highly planned; could not have been done by any of the so-called alleged perpetrators.
"You have to ask yourself a question: All the planes were scheduled to go in the air, at the same time, about the same time. From Dulles and from Boston. Why didn't they hit Washington first? Look at the movements. Some of this on the Internetreports of this stuff, in the declassified section, of the exact routes of these planes, and what time they were supposed to take off; how they maneuvered; how the maneuvers were coordinated. These planes each made a turn, after the previously assigned plane had made its hit! Why'd they hit New York towers? Because, whoever did it, intended to blame Arabs, tied to al-Qaeda, for it. See, what would have happened, if they had hit Washington first? They probably would have gotten the Vice President and probably the Secretary of Defense. What did they do, by hitting New York first? Well, remember in New York, there was a big agricultural fertilizer bomb, was put in the basement of one of the Twin Towers, in New York? There was a trial, up there; some people went to jail; this guy, who was tied to al-Qaedathis sheikh, who had been a U.S. assettied to al-Qaeda, was indicted and convicted in the process? So, by hitting the Twin Towers first, you pin the tail on the donkey of al-Qaedaat least in the minds of all paranoid Americans, of which there is an abundant supply; including, probably, the President, who is not exactly the sharpest intelligence agent in the world.
"So, there was no basis for it. So, why does somebody come out and say they have evidence? The evidence is, a secret operation, which nobody expected, hit. But, we had a great number of things, on which there were many reports floating around, and I was involved in some of this stuff: reports of security threats to New York and other places, associated with a terrorist component of the same people who ran Seattle, Genoa, and so forth. They were about to hit Washington in a way, which I said was a national security threat. So, I said, we have to look at this thing, when this kind of planningand we looked at the way this thing was being covered up, the way this was being put in place: This was big. No responsible government would allow that to happen. An open plan for virtual insurrectionary state of affairs, in Washington, D.C., the nation's capital? What government in the world would let that happen? Would not intervene to head it off, before it happened? But they weren't doing it!
"And, that was the big scandal. Sure, the President was briefed. Almost everyone, probably everybody in the Washington, D.C. police department was briefed on that one! Every police department and sheriff's department was briefed on that one! Of course there were reports all over the place. But, did it have anything to do with the story that's being told, about the claims made by the Democrats? Was there ever any proof that al-Qaeda was involved? Never. No proof has ever been submitted, and none could be submitted. Not conclusive: Because al-Qaeda couldn't have done it. It's not within their capability."
Ashcroft Scraps Post-Cointelpro FBI Guidelines
During the past week, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller, have announced sweeping changes in FBI and Justice Department operations, which throw out virtually all of the reforms made in the wake of the exposures of Cointelpro operations and the widespread violations of Constitutional rights which were rampant in the 1950s and '60s.
However, this is not just a throwback to the 1960s. Today's changes take place under conditions of global financial collapse, the crumbling of the Bush Administration's policies in all directions, and the establishment of the U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), which Lyndon LaRouche has described as "a preparation for the Pentagon to cross the Potomac one morning, to place the Attorney General and his minions in power, reducing the President himself to a ceremonial, or even lesser figure in the configuration."
Ashcroft and Mueller held a press conference on May 29 to announce a reorganization of the FBI, in which the Bureau's top two priorities are now to be: (1) to protect the United States from terrorist attack, and (2) protect the United States against foreign intelligence operations and espionage. Law enforcement and prosecution of crimes are no longer matters of priority for the FBI.
At the press briefing, Ashcroft announced wholesale revision of the Attorney General's guidelines governing FBI investigations. Under the new guidelines, FBI agents will be free to monitor religious and political organizations, libraries, and Internet chat roomsamong other activities traditionally protected by the First Amendment.
In the wake of the Church Committee and Pike Committee Congressional hearings in the 1970s on abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies, guidelines were adopted which, at least in principle, barred the FBI or other agencies from monitoring such activities unless there was reason to believe that Federal laws were being violated, or were about to be violated. Under the changes announced May 29, all such restrictions have apparently been lifted.
In the press conference, Ashcroft said that, from the first moments after the Sept. 11 attacks, "We understood that the mission of American justice and law enforcement had changed," and that from that point on, "The prevention of terrorist attacks became the central goal of the law enforcement and national security mission of the Federal Bureau of Investigation."
FBI agents "are frustrated because many of our own internal restrictions have hampered our ability to fight terrorism, Ashcroft said, blaming "the current investigative guidelines" for contributing to this.
"Beginning in the 1970s, guidelines were developed to inform agents of the circumstances under which investigations could be opened, to inform agents of the permissible scope of the investigations, and to inform them of the techniques that could be used and the objectives that should be pursued," Ashcroft continued, and then stated, incredibly: "These guidelines provide limitations and guidance over and above all the requirements and safeguards imposed by the Constitution, so that these are additional restrictions other than Constitutional ones, and they're beyond the legal framework established by the Federal statutes enacted by the Congress."
The fact is that the guidelines were promulgated because the Congress and the courts had found massive Constitutional violations by the FBI and other agencies, and the FBI and Justice Department would have been faced with legislative restrictions had they not "voluntarilary" imposed the guidelines themselves.
SEC Probes Accounting Fraud at Halliburton, Other Firms
According to a variety of sources of May 29 (Bloomberg, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is probing accounting fraud at Halliburton and Deloitte & Touche. Meanwhile, the chief of Dynegy Corporation has resigned in the midst of an SEC probe of his company.
*Halliburton, the world's second-largest provider of services to oil and natural-gas companies, said the SEC has launched a preliminary investigation of its practice of counting as revenue cost overruns on disputed construction projects, even before the customer agreed to pay for the overruns. Halliburton expects to receive a formal request for documents or a subpoena, in the next few days. The change in policy was adopted in 1998, (under then-CEO Dick Cheney, who is now Vice President of the United States), when the company's shares fell 43% and it posted a $14.7 million net loss, amid falling oil and gas prices.
*The SEC is investigating Deloitte & Touche, the firm that audited Adelphia Communications' books and appears to have been the auditor for entities controlled by the Rigas family (Rigas was the former CEO of Adelphia), which received $2.3 billion from Adelphia. Deloitte, it seems, never informed Adelphia's audit committee that the family was using the company's credit lines to buy Adelphia stock.
Deloitte also faces a trial in Britain, brought by bondholders seeking $300 million in penalties, for its role as auditor for Barings Bank, which collapsed in 1995.
Moves to Resuscitate D.C. General Hospital?
"Resuscitating D.C. General?" is the headline of the front-page feature story in the latest issue of the Washington Business Journal, reporting that the Doctors Community Healthcare Corp. has hired two consulting firms "to study whether it makes sense to open a new full-service hospital at the site of D.C. General Hospital, which city officials closed just a year ago."
This move by the DCHC privateers comes just as the city's "Master Plan" for the D.C. General site is up for consideration by the D.C. City Council, and as one or more Council members are known to be considering submitting a bill to require a hospital on the site before any other "redevelopment" can take place.
The WBJ story cites Ana Raley, the president of DCHC's Greater Southeast Community Hospital, as saying that a small hospital with 120 to 200 beds is under consideration. "Everyone has an opinion about wanting a hospital there," Raley says.
However, District officials, such as City Administrator John Koskinen, say "we have no indication there's any more need for more hospital beds," adding, "If you look at the history of the past five years, that is not the history of a shortage of hospital beds."
"That's just nonsense," responds Council member David Catania. "That's the same crap they said last year when they were trying to close the hospital."
Catania says that the fact that DCHC is conducting a feasibility study, is a "pretty compelling statement" that a small hospital with a fully equipped emergency room is needed at the site, and he says that the ER now at D.C. General is "a joke."
At a hearing May 28 of the full District of Columbia Council, called to consider the "Master Plan" for the D.C. General site (which would demolish all the present hospital buildings, and put condos, parks, high-rise buildings, stores and office buildings in their place), LaRouche representatives presented Lyndon LaRouche's May 20 statement, "The Case for D.C. General Hospital," calling for a full-service general hospital which would be an integral component of a national health-care security program.
Study ShowsNot SurprisinglySkilled RNs Save More Lives
Skilled hospital nurses save more lives from deadly complications, than do the unskilled medical staffers who have increasingly replaced Registered Nurses, since the advent of "managed care" and Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs). According to a just-released study by the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers from Harvard and Vanderbilt Universities analyzed 6.2 million patients released from 799 hospitals in 11 states in 1997 (about 25% of all who were discharged nationwide). According to the May 30 Washington Post, the researchers compared the 25% of general medical and surgical patients who got the most nursing care, to the one-fourth who received the least. The nursing care was analyzed by the number of hours, and how many of those hours were provided by Registered Nurses (RNs)the most highly skilled, Licensed Practical Nurses (LPNs), and the least skilled, nursing aides.
As one might expect, the study found that patients with the greatest proportion of RN care, relative to LPNs and aides, were 9% less likely to suffer shock or cardiac arrest, or to get urinary tract infections. They also spent 5% less time in the the hospital; surgical patients with more hours of RN care were 6% less likely to die from pneumonia, shock, or cardiac arrest, upper gastrointestinal bleeding, blood poisoning, or clotting.
Zero health benefit was found from more care by either LPNs or aides, which, as the Post noted, "brings into question the cost-cutting practice at some hospitals of replacing RNs with less skilled nursing staff."
Lieberman's DLC Teams with 'Conservative Republicans' To Promote John 'TR' McCain, the Real Manchurian Candidate
Senator Joe Lieberman's Democratic Leadership Council, in the current issue of its magazine Blueprint, carries two pro-McCain articles by right-wing ideologuesMarshall Wittmann, of the Hudson Institute and its Bull Moose Party project, and Tod Lindberg, of the Hoover Institution and former editorial page editor of the Washington Times (1991-1998).
Both DLC pieces praise McCain as the new Teddy Roosevelt, and demand that President Bush copy TR and give up his echoes of President William McKinley. TR is portrayed, at some length, as a progressive hero, against the reactionary McKinley.
The Lindberg piece is blatantly fascist, praising McCain's "rogue state rollback" policy, praising the Ashcroft "Freedom Corps" (which includes the blockwatch and mass FBI-informants programs) as originally a McCain/DLC proposal, and demanding overwhelming government "energy" in our new taskfighting terrorism. In a 1999 article in the same DLC magazine, "conservative" leader Lindberg totally endorsed the "Third Way" and the DLC.
The Hudson Institute is a "conservative think-tank" sponsored by the Pulliam family of Indiana. Eugene Pulliam (grandfather of Dan Quayle) was a newspaper-man promoter of Teddy Roosevelt and J.P. Morgan against the McKinley wing of the Republican Party. He moved to Arizona, took over the Arizona Republic, and ruled the state in partnership with the Bronfman-generated mobtogether they created John McCain and other politicians there.
At the end of his piece, Wittmann warns President Bush as follows: "The war has brought out his [Bush's] inner TR, but he needs to leave his inner McKinley behind."
White House Not Pleased with Hollywood's Terror-Mongering
The White House is not pleased with Paramount Pictures' new nuclear-terror movie, "The Sum of All Fears," according to the online Drudge Report. The story line of the movie, which stars Morgan Freeman and Ben Affleck, was released May 31, and is based on a Tom Clancy potboiler, involves terrorists who, seeking to start World War III, explode a nuclear bomb during a sporting event in a Baltimore stadium. Among the movie's scenesa bleeding President being removed from his car by the Secret Service.
The Drudge Report says a senior Bush Administration official believes the movie crosses over the line of civic responsibility and commerce. "The President, of course, will let Hollywood be Hollywood, he will not publicly comment on this," the official said, "but I can tell you he is not enthusiastic. I, myself, have serious, serious reservations"including that it may "numb-down" the public to real warnings issued by the government.
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