Ashcroft Responds To 9/11 Foreknowledge Charges
Former Attorney General confronted on radio show, claims reports he stopped flying commercial before September 11 2001 false, war on terror not a money making scheme for some

Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com | October 10 2006

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft has been confronted on a nationally syndicated radio show about why he stopped flying commercial before 9/11 and other issues of government complicity in the attacks. Ashcroft's terse and evasive responses to the questions do not match the facts.

After accepting an invitation to briefly appear with Ashcroft on Chicago's Mancow program, radio host Alex Jones grilled the former Governor of Missouri on why he was warned to avoid using commercial airliners in the weeks before 9/11.

"I did not cease flying on commercial aircraft," said Ashcroft dismissing a July 2001 CBS News report that quoted the FBI as saying Ashcroft was only traveling via a government chartered jet due to a "threat assessment."

If Ashcroft had been flying commercial before 9/11 as he claims then they FBI could have simply stated this - why would they lie and tell CBS News that Ashcroft was "acting under guidelines," that came strictly from his FBI security detail?

Ashcroft claims he rightly used government jets for government business but the CBS report cites the fact that "all other Bush Cabinet appointees" flew commercial even when on government business, as did Ashcroft's predecessor Janet Reno.

The response was then misdirected into a discussion of how Ashcroft had traveled to Chicago to appear for the radio interview.

In claiming the reports that he switched exclusively to flying on government only aircraft, Ashcroft is contradicting CBS News, the Justice Department, the FBI and his own FBI detail who all said the opposite at the time.

"I have no awareness that anyone in the government was told not to fly and if they were told not to fly, I was not aware of it," said Ashcroft, claiming ignorance of widely circulated press reports that emerged the day after 9/11 concerning Mayor Willie Brown, who received a warning not to fly into New York the night before 9/11.

In addition, shortly after 9/11 Newsweek reported that "top Pentagon brass" got a warning and cancelled their trip the night before the attack.

When confronted with information about PNAC and Operation Northwoods, Ashcroft avoided the topics altogether.

Following Jones' questions, Ashcroft was quizzed as to the possibility that some terror alerts were manufactured for political purposes, an absolute stone-clad certainty that we have obsessively documented up one side and down the other.

While Ashcroft admitted that a terror alert could be manufactured he stated that he, "knew of none" that weren't based on intelligence under his watch. This is especially rich when we recall Ashcroft's May 2004 warning of a looming attack on America perpetrated by an Al-Qaeda offshoot known as the Hafs al Masri Brigade. Two of the alleged terrorists associated with the plan had already been arrested and a Boston Globe investigative report dismissed the group as a "phantom organization."

In May 2002 White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer openly admitted that terror alerts were being issued "as a result of all the controversy that took place last week," a brazen acknowledgement that they were being used as political retaliation.

Ashcroft also claimed that the war on terror had not been hyped for the purposes of making money, an assertion completely alien to the fact that Ashcroft himself is currently cashing in on the fearmongering he helped foster during Bush's first term.

"He's now the head of the Ashcroft Group - he's making hundreds of millions of dollars on Homeland Security contracts, Israel Aircraft Industries, General Dynamics, Boeing, Choicepoint, Oracle - the company that's getting a lot of the contracts on creating a national ID card and surveillance system, Dulles Research Corporation involved in counter-terrorism and Homeland Security - it goes on and on and on," commented former NSA official Wayne Madsen.

"9/11 was very very good for this guy....he's benefited very handsomely from all this."

During hearings to renew and expand the Patriot Act, Ashcroft attacked civil liberties advocates by stating the act did not affect U.S. citizens and those that said it did were propagating a conspiracy theory surrounding "phantoms of lost liberty." Since that time numerous separate cases have emerged where the law was directly used against Americans.

Ashcroft, a supposed Christian, holds the number two record for state executions as Governor, surpassed only by his mentor George W. Bush. He is also a member of the bizarre Brotherhood organization - an occult secret society that cites Nietzsche as its influence and supports rampant abortion.

Click here to listen to Alex Jones' radio confrontation with John Ashcroft and Alex's commentary.