By Jack Cashill

© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com

In his new stand-up documentary, Mega Fix, Jack Cashill traces the roots of September 11 to the political exploitation of terror investigations by the Clinton White House in the desperate 1995-1996 election cycle. This eight part series, which began in Oklahoma City, culminates at the 9-11 Commission hearings. To arrange a showing in your city, contact Jack at jcashill@aol.com.

The "Mega Fix" DVD is available now at the online store.

At the 9-11 Commission hearing in the spring of 2004, one could be pardoned for thinking that justice was about to be served. At the very beginning of the grilling of National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Commission Chairman, Thomas Kean asks the most important question of the hearing.

Did you ever see or hear from the FBI, from the CIA, from any other intelligence agency, any memos or discussions or anything else between the time you got into office and 9-11 that talked about using planes as bombs?

“To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Chairman,” Rice replies, “this kind of analysis about the use of airplanes as weapons actually was never briefed to us.” Rice is almost assuredly telling the truth. No Democrat member of the panel challenges her.

In fact, Richard Clarke has acknowledged as much during his earlier testimony before the panel. In response to a question by Democrat Richard Ben-Veniste, Clarke has admitted that the “knowledge about Al Qaida having thought of using aircraft as weapons” was relatively old, “five years, six years old.” He asks that intelligence analysts “be forgiven for not thinking about it given the fact that they hadn't seen a lot in the five or six years intervening about it.”

Be forgiven? Just like that? Consider the Al Qaeda-explosives-aircraft thread that Clarke has had to overlook in the eight years of the Clinton administration, particularly in the two-year election cycle of 1995-1996:

• The vow of Ramzi Yousef, “Rashid the Iraqi,” to finish the job he started on February 26, 1993, the second anniversary of the liberation of Kuwait, when he failed to destroy the World Trade Center.
• The return of Yousef’s accomplice, Abdul Rahman Yasin, to Baghdad where he would live for the next ten years with Saddam’s protection.
• The simultaneous arrival of Yousef and Terry Nichols in the Philippines in November 1994 and the possibility, which Clarke himself entertains, that Yousef instructed Nichols in the art of bomb making.
• Yousef’s plans to use aircraft as bombs, either hijacked commercial airliners or small planes filled with high explosives, and the training of the pilots in American flight schools. These plans reach Washington by early 1995.
• The well documented assistance that McVeigh received in Oklahoma City from “middle-eastern looking men,” almost assuredly Iraqi nationals. The FBI cites these eyewitness sightings in its request before a federal judge to hold McVeigh over for trial .
• First the identification and then the inexplicable dismissal of the short, swarthy John Doe #2 in the Oklahoma City bombing case.
• The Clintons’ willingness to suppress both investigations—Air Force and Armed Force Institute of Pathology--into the crash of Ron Brown’s plane in Croatia.
• Clarke’s own open warning during security planning for the Atlanta Olympics that Islamic terrorists might hijack a 747 and fly it into Olympic stadium.
• The Clintons’ reluctance to seek the truth in the Khobar Towers bombing in June 1996.
• The overwhelming evidence that points to a terrorist attack on TWA Flight 800 on July 17, 1996, “national liberation day” in Saddam’s Iraq.
• The likely use of a terrorist plane filled with high explosives in the attack on TWA Flight 800 (see First Strike for details.)
• President Clinton’s review of Yousef’s “planes as bombs” plans after the destruction of TWA Flight 800 as witnessed by Col. Buzz Patterson.
• The FBI’s interception of Yousef’s jail messages in the summer of 1996, in which Yousef plotted to blow up a 747, as documented in Peter Lance’s Cover Up.
• Yousef’s communications that same summer with 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Yousef’s uncle.
• The administration’s scapegoating of Richard Jewell in the Olympic Park bombing and its failure to investigate any Islamic terror trails.
• The inexplicable involvement of the CIA in creating an animation to discredit the 270 FBI eyewitnesses who saw objects ascending in the direction of TWA Flight 800.

There are only two reasons why Clarke might not have shared any of this information with the incoming administration. One is incompetence. The other is complicity in the most serious political fix in American history, the Mega Fix. The evidence points strongly to the latter.

In Against All Enemies, Clarke takes credit for discovering the transparently false TWA Flight 800 exploding fuel tank scenario, and he was almost assuredly involved in the CIA fraud that discredited the eyewitnesses. If he tells the incoming administration or the 9-11 Commission what he knows about the potential use of planes as bombs, he opens the door on a stunning deception in which he himself is a key figure. He also exposes the potential Iraqi thread that he has more recently built his literary career on denying.

Clarke had help keeping this all under wraps. Former Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick was likely placed on the 9-11 Commission for no other reason. It was she who convened the August 22, 1996 meeting at which the FBI was compelled to abandon the TWA Flight 800 terrorist inquiry. She was in a position to give the same order at Oklahoma City.

And then there is Sandy Berger, the one person identified as being in the family quarters with the president on the night of July 17, 1996. Berger was a political agent. His boss at the time, NSA Advisor Tony Lake, remained in his own office on the night of July 17. In his pilfering from the archives, Berger may well have been looking for Clinton’s hand annotated review from the summer of 1996 on Yousef’s “planes as bombs” plan, a legacy-killing document if ever made public.

John Kerry knows something as well. A member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 1996, Kerry infers both on the Larry King Show on September 11, 2001 and on Hardball on September 24, 2001 that TWA Flight 800 has been destroyed by terrorists.

On September 20, 2001, one major newspaper in the country breaks the story of how Al Gore has sold out the post-TWA Flight 800 airline safety and security commission for the sake of campaign cash, Kerry’s much too friendly Boston Globe This is almost assuredly not a coincidence. At the time, Gore is the one person standing in Kerry’s run for the Democratic nomination, but Kerry knows Gore’s Achilles’ heel, and he seems to have gone for it.

Kerry and Gore both understood something that even Clarke and Gorelick might not have. The Mega Fix has little to do with national security and a whole lot to do with politics. Like just about everything else the Clinton White House did, the Mega Fix appears to be improvised, ill-organized, and ad hoc. It has proven effective thanks largely to the witless complicity of the American media, particularly the New York Times.

And as late as September 10, 2001, its conspirators probably felt pretty dang good about it.

End of the Mega Fix Preview series. See Mega Fix Table of Contents

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Jack Cashill is an Emmy-award winning independent writer and producer with a Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue.