Greenspan stokes controversy over 9/11

Adding fuel to the firestorm over Alan Greenspan's charges of a White House fraud concerning the Iraq war is another, related, observation by the former Fed chief:

If al Qaeda's 9/11 strike was really part of a plot to disrupt the U.S. economy, why was there no follow-up attack? Greenspan wonders in his memoir, The age of turbulence: adventures in a new world.

"There was no bigger question in Washington than, Why no second attack? If al Qaeda's plan was to disrupt the U.S. economy, as bin Laden had declared, the attacks had to continue."

Greenspan has no answer for this puzzle, though he mildly raises the issue of some restrictions on personal privacy immediately after the attacks. But he certainly doesn't seem to be convinced that it was a security crackdown that prevented further strikes.

(The index of Greenspan's book contains no reference to the anthrax attacks which early on were bruited as some sort of follow-up, and used by the White House and its supporters to inferentially link Saddam to the 9/11 strike.)

Greenspan, who was airborne over the Atlantic rather than in his office near the trade center at the time of the attacks, wrote, "Whatever their publicized angst over Saddam Hussein's 'weapons of mass destruction,' American and British authorities were also concerned about violations in an area that harbors a resource indespensable for the functioning of the world economy.

"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."

Greenspan is on record as telling the White House that, if oil security was to be ensured, Saddam would have to be removed.

However, at the time he made his recommendation, there was somewhat less awareness of the strong evidence of treason within the Bush administration on 9/11. At the time he penned his memoir, the evidence had mounted. It seems likely that his wife, NBC newswoman Andrea Mitchell, would have kept him posted on the increasingly troubling questions concerning 9/11 coverups.

Greenspan avoids anything but generalizations regarding 9/11, ducking blow-by-blow accounts of meetings concerning 9/11 details, leading one to suspect that there's a lot about 9/11 that he feels it unwise to discuss out loud.