What happened on the East Coast, I asked my high ranking military friend.

I can’t believe a bunch of terrorists could do what they did without being aided and abetted by one or more countries. And, lord knows, we’ve got enough countries in the Middle East that hate us because we stand with Israel, which occupies land Arabs regard as their own.

Further, I think the reason they dared hit us at all was because we have failed to do what Reagan promised after they blew up our Marine barracks in Beirut, deliver “swift, effective retribution.”

We did nothing after they blew up our barracks. We did nothing after they blew up our embassy there. We did nothing to Iran after our hostages were freed. In short, the U.S. has displayed an alligator mouth and a hummingbird rear end.

Right on both counts said my friend, who will be unnamed because members of the military risk careers for criticizing the administration in public, as per directives issued during the Clinton administration. Same goes for FBI agents and CIA operatives, although some will blow the whistle with the promise of anonymity. It’s the only way a lot of information gets out.

Who did it? “The convenient patsy is going to be Osama bin Laden,” he said. “They’ll get him. But this was a very sophisticated plan, I mean they knew to cut off use of the transponder so they couldn’t be tracked. Russia is behind it. Russia will never get tagged with this but they were training the terrorists. Russia is not our friend. We killed them. We lowered the price of gold and oil to below what it took to get it out of the ground. That was Reagan’s idea. They’ll team up with China, and there’s no love lost in the Arab world for us, so it’s got to be two or three countries.”

He thinks the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania was headed for Chicago and the Sears Tower rather than Camp David. “Who cares about Camp David?”

As to how the terrorists managed to hijack four planes at the same time, airport security “is in the toilet, as is our military capability. We’ve got airplanes grounded because we can’t do maintenance on them. What happened is that we had a failure of our leadership. The FBI and the CIA, which were clean at the beginning, came completely apart under Clinton. Fish rots from the head down. The FBI actually lied. They’re weak and corrupt. The CIA relies on satellites rather than people going in to find out what’s going on. How do you judge intent from being able to see a golf ball from outer space?”

The intelligence gathering people were politicized by using them to gather dirt on public figures which further deteriorated their integrity, he said. “Basically, what it boils down to is where do we go as a nation? The Defense Department is weak, about like it was after Vietnam. We sold the highest defense secrets in the history of the world in giving up the design of our nuclear weapons to China. A guy copies it and walks off with it. We simply don’t know what’s going on in other countries. Either we don’t want to know or somebody is cooperating with somebody, which is how boats get blown up.

He’s surprised, said my friend, that there hasn’t been use of chemical or biological weapons. “One of these days, somebody is going to drop a nuke on somebody. It could be Israel if it is pushed far enough. Israel is not afraid to make the first move.”

If this had been Israel attacked instead of us, I said, it would have wiped out much of Afghanistan by now, and some of Pakistan to boot, I said. Israel invented retribution.

One more thing, he said. “Some years ago, after the first time they tried to blowup the World Trade Center (an explosives-laden truck blew up in the parking garage under the center), an officer with one of the defendants pointed at it out a window and said, ‘It’s still standing.’ The prisoner said, ‘It wouldn’t be if we had more money.’”

Obviously, they got some.
(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, WA 98340.).