. . . And less.
Just recently, as luck would have it, I published a column on those Saudi flights including flights out of
Among other points, the short piece revisits questions raised in a 2004 Baltimore Chronicle article of mine, still not answered, regarding the 9/11 highjackers’ sojourn in Las Vegas and the fact that several Saudi nationals quietly flown out of the U.S. by the Bush administration immediately after 9/11 left from Vegas. Given the apparent spike of currency hoarding in summer 2001, the convenience of Vegas as a venue for money laundering, and the anomalies of visits by rigidly devout Muslims like Mohamed Atta to Vegas in the first place, I still wonder why more investigation has not been done.
Perhaps the question is rather what investigation has been done, by quiet and genuinely dedicated law enforcement personnel and others, and what the results have been.
Well, now we’re seeing one result. On January 3, 2006, “the government dropped Las Vegas from a list of cities considered potential high-risk targets eligible for special anti-terrorism grants,” according to news reports.
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2006/Jan-05-Thu-2006/news/5212776.html
Sen. Harry Reid of
My opinion was and is that creating the new Department of “Homeland Security” obstructed the common-sense approach to fighting terrorism. Instead of strengthening detection and analysis, the White House and its GOP Congress created an additional giant layer of bureaucracy, which as anyone could have predicted has turned into a giant boondoggle. Its name is brownshirt, the names of its spawn are legion – including “security” contracts, government surveillance, manipulations of the news media, security breaches involving foreign businesses and foreign governments, and lobbying. Had the White House really wanted to go after terrorism, it would have helped the FBI. Instead, to this day the FBI lacks even the computers needed for its investigations. Criminals flout the law and the FBI so openly that I routinely receive offers of prescription meds, sexual relationships, advanced degrees without benefit of going to school, surgical procedures without benefit of medical advice, and bogus sweepstakes offers, via the convenience of my very own PC. Every single one of these, so far as I know, is illegal. But this White House has been sitting on the FBI since at least January 2001, using neglect and suppression so flagrant that even our corporate media outlets should have caught on by now.
Tabling that issue for the moment, it is reasonable to assume that dropping Vegas from the list of likely targets will reduce the resources the city gets for detective work. What we’re seeing with regard to
Stumble It!