Osama didn't mind whether brother died on 9/11...

Osama bin Laden was "estranged" from his brother. So thus Osama really didn't mind whether his brother was within the target zone of the al Qaeda hijackers.

That seems to be the suggestion of ex-CIA chief George Tenet in his new book, At the Center of the Storm, which is evasive and fishy enough to be worthy of a top spook.

Tenet notes that when Flight 77 struck the Pentagon [I'm using the government's silly storyline here], Shafiq bin Laden was representing his billionaire family interests at the annual investor conference of the Carlyle Group at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, just a few blocks from the White House.

Didn't the feds tell us that an intended target of Flight 93 was the White House or the Capitol building (likewise not too far down the Washington mall from the conference)?

Well, sure some brothers ARE spiteful enough not to find a way to give a brother a heads-up to stay away from D.C. and New York on Sept. 11. BUT, Osama had good relations with his mom, whom he chit-chatted with on his cell phone shortly before 9/11, the government claims. Had Shafiq been killed or injured in the attacks, what would his mother have thought of Osama? In fact, what would his al Qaeda comrades thought of him?

Maybe Osama was enough of a probabilist to figure that the chance of his brother being struck was fairly low. Yet, surely Osama would have realized the possibility of death or harm from secondary effects, such as getting crushed by a panicked crowd.

Well, before Shafiq could be questioned publicly, he was spirited out of the country on White House orders.

Tenet vouches for the 9/11 yarn told by the 9/11 commission, but seems to be trying to put the lion's share of the blame for the Iraq war on a few now-well-known neocons, specifically Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Scotter Libby.
He says that initially Bush and his top aides had little enthusiasm for striking Iraq in retaliation for 9/11.

So, if the poop does hit the fan with respect to 9/11, Tenet will be able to say it was some neocons in the Pentagon that outplotted the CIA.

Let's think back to June 2002. That's when public disclosures put the CIA and the entire security apparatus in great danger of being torn apart limb from limb. Soon thereafter, Bush made a big show of "doing something" about security with his "homeland security" reorganization plan.

But, that wasn't quite enough and as Bush mulled with advisers during the hot Texas August in Crawford, we began to hear intimations that war with Iraq was brewing. Once September rolled around, it had become inevitable, with the war tom-toms going full blast. Nothing like a war to save the system, as occurred following the JFK murder.

As Tenet says, "everything changed" after 9/11 and so the official policy of regime change in Iraq was now translatable into a war of offense.

So then, what was the real motive for 9/11? Very likely "the group" feared losing power under a weak (before 9/11) president and favored a powerplay to control the nation with a greatly-strengthened Pentagon as its base.

Surely some neocons found such a scenario appetizing. But there are others, whom Tenet is shielding (including to a great extent, Bush). For example, a shadowy element of the hard left is running interference for the 9/11 murderers. What group do you suppose that might be, given the history of the 20th century and the maneuvers to rob democracies of liberty?