Although fighter jets were racing toward the city after the commandeered planes, the transcripts showed that controllers at La Guardia Airport, apparently unaware of the hijackings, continued to send out flights until the second plane had struck the World Trade Center. That was nearly an hour after the first plane had been hijacked.
Nothing on the tapes shows that the La Guardia controllers knew that the planes flying into their airspace had been seized by terrorists, or that military aircraft were screaming in pursuit over the Hudson River.

The Port Authority said the transcripts released Monday were delayed because the tapes were discovered later. They cover calls with employees at La Guardia Airport.

A number of intelligence community veterans likewise did not buy what Tenet was trying to sell. I spoke with Andrew Wilkie in those July days when all of this was unfolding. Wilkie is a former senior intelligence analyst for the Office of National Assessments, the senior Australian intelligence agency which provides intelligence assessments to the Australian prime minister. "In the last week in Australia," said Wilkie, "the Defense Intelligence Organization has admitted they had the information on the Niger forgeries and says they didn't tell the Defense Minister. The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs has admitted they had the information on the Niger forgeries and didn't tell the Foreign Minister. The place I used to work, the Office of National Assessments, has admitted publicly that they knew the Niger evidence was fake and didn't tell the Prime Minister about it."
Valerie Plame ran a clandestine global network designed to track any person, group or nation that might try to deliver weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.

In a bit of black comedy, the Niger uranium claims - so thoroughly debunked that America stands ashamed before the world because Bush used them publicly to augment his case for war - still remain on this official White House page.

The New York Times carried a story dated 12-29-3 entitled '2 American Soldiers Die in Iraq; 7 Are Wounded'.
Several hours later, that story had disappeared from the Times website, and the SAME link brought up a story which did not mention any US casualties. The text of the original New York Times story is posted below: (see link)




Howard Dean has mobilised the apathetic, the disaffected and the downright angry to forge a grassroots coalition that has the Bush administration worried - and in the process, he's torn up the rule book of modern political campaigning.

In a fund-raising e-mail sent to Republican supporters at the weekend, the Bush campaign singled out for attack George Soros, the Hungarian-born financier who plans to use part of his fortune to help those who would turf the President from the White House.

Mr Soros has pledged $12.5m (£7m) to ensure that "we can write off the Bush doctrine as a temporary aberration".

Sirens constantly wail in the nation's capital and its Virginia and Maryland suburbs. One security expert has reported that Washington, DC, Metro Police have sometimes been instructed to turn on their sirens for no reason because police in Israel discovered that sirens are a psychological deterrent to would-be terrorists.

SYRIA repeatedly breached United Nations embargoes to supply Iraq with arms and military hardware in the run-up to the coalition’s invasion in March, it was reported yesterday.
Last night, the Foreign Office gave warning that it was examining the evidence documented by the Los Angeles Times and was prepared to raise concerns with Syria if appropriate.
These revelations and others like them could place a question mark over Mr Blair’s approach to Syria. The Prime Minister has attempted to win round the Syrian president, Bashir Assad, through diplomacy, in contrast to the White House, which has taken a more aggressive approach.

Saudi Arabia yesterday denied a British newspaper report that security forces seized two planes packed with explosives near Riyadh’s King Khaled International Airport, foiling a plot to blow up a British Airways jet.
“A Saudi security official said that a report by The Mail on Sunday quoting a British politician as saying that Saudi authorities arrested two suicide pilots who were planning to fly two small planes into a packed British Airways plane is not true,” the Saudi Press Agency reported.