Bush Speech Terror Claim Debunked A Year Ago
A claim made by President Bush in his State of the Union speech last night, that an attack on an L.A. skyscraper had been averted, was universally debunked as a hoax by Mayors, CIA, FBI and NSA personnel and counter-terror experts nearly a year ago when it first surfaced.
Anyone surprised?
I won’t dispute the basic point and I’ll admit some laziness on my part, but is there another source for this? I’ve never heard of prisonplanet.com and its name doesn’t inspire unbiased reporting confidence.
Another general warning sign for me are phrases like “Bush’s address was punctuated with deception, horse hockey and propagandistic drivel…” and “Amidst the cacophony of bullshit came this belter…” Not to mention the fact that the article doesn’t link to anything I’ve heard of — its even mildly deceptive in that the article purports to link to the New York Times and Washington Post, only to have those links go to fair.org. It seems a bit ironic that the article refers to Fox “News” (their formatting) as being obviously biased when they are equally hostile from the opposite side.
Anyway, I’m not disputing the facts here, of which I am uncertain. I’m just pointing out that for a casual reader to not dismiss this point, some better sources would help.
Good call. Here we’ve got:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6970491
“Our success in this war is often measured by the things that did not happen. We cannot know the full extent of the attacks that we and our allies have prevented – but here is some of what we do know: We stopped an al Qaeda plot to fly a hijacked airplane into the tallest building on the West Coast.”
That’s a reference to a previous speech of his:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/02/20060209-2.html
“We now know that in October 2001, Khalid Shaykh Muhammad — the mastermind of the September the 11th attacks — had already set in motion a plan to have terrorist operatives hijack an airplane using shoe bombs to breach the cockpit door, and fly the plane into the tallest building on the West Coast. We believe the intended target was Liberty [sic, should have been ‘Library’] Tower in Los Angeles, California.”
Here’s a page from back then analyzing and critiquing the claim —
http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/6581.html
Unfortunately it’s been long enough that most of the news articles linked to there and elsewhere seem to have fallen off the web.
Here’s the Capitol Hill Blue one though, courtesy the Wayback Machine —
http://web.archive.org/web/20060423080650/http://www.capitolhillblue.com/blog/2006/02/intel_pros_say_bush_is_lying_a.html
I think you’re right that the site doesn’t present itself as very unbiased reporting, but it sounds like there’s substance to their claims.