“Actively Conspiring”

In an article entitled,“New Smoking Gun Disclosures,” Tom Burghardt reports, that a month after passengers foiled an attempted suicide bomb attack aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 as it approached Detroit on Christmas Day, new information reveals that the White House and U.S. security agencies had specific intelligence on accused terrorist, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, far earlier than previously acknowledged.

New reports suggest that the administration’s cover-up of the affair has very little to do with a failure by the intelligence apparatus to connect the dots and may have far more serious political implications for the Obama administration, and what little remains of a functioning democracy in the United States, than a botched bombing.

The New York Times claimed, that Michael Leiter joined the staff of a commission, appointed by President George W. Bush, to examine intelligence failures leading up to the war in Iraq. That led to a series of jobs in the intelligence world, and in 2008, Bush appointed him director of the counterterrorism center.

One subject barely explored by corporate media throughout the Flight 253 affair, is the unsettling notion that the aborted Christmas day bombing may have been a move by rightist elements within the security apparatus to destabilize the Obama administration.

It becomes a painfully simple matter for the enemy to gain advantage and change their tactics, when those charged with protecting the public actually facilitate their entrée into the country for some undisclosed reason.

Burghardt wrote: “As events continue to unfold and new information shreds the official story, is Leiter’s chilling testimony that suspected terrorists are allowed to enter the United States ‘because we have generally made the choice that we want them here in the country for some reason or another,’ merely a banal slip or something far more sinister that betrays the real order of things in post-democratic America?

“Relevant questions begging for answers include: Who made the decision not to ‘connect the dots’? Are right-wing elements and holdovers from the previous administration actively conspiring to destabilize the Obama government? Was the attempted bombing a planned provocation meant to incite new conflicts in the Middle East and restrict democratic rights at home?

“As with the 9/11 attacks, these questions go unasked by corporate media. Indeed, such lines of inquiry are entirely off the table and are further signs that a cover-up is in full-swing, not a hard-hitting investigation.

“In truth, what we are dealing with here as we stagger into the second decade of the 21st century, is not a conspiracy per se but a modus operandi as the World Socialist Web Site has argued, rooted in a bankrupt system quickly reaching the end of the line.”