It is very unusual that a prominent — and controversial– 9/11 witness would die only days before the release of NIST’s report on WTC7 and shortly after a firestorm erupted over his testimony that he heard explosions inside the building prior to collapse of either tower and that there were dead bodies in the building’s blown-out lobby.

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Chiesa, one of Italy's most respected journalists and a La Stampa foreign correspondent for more than 20 years, told his Berlin audience an 9/11 international tribunal could serve a useful purpose. "If feelings were strong enough a positive result could be obtained, but it would not happen immediately. So far it's been the US administration that has won the information fight and obtained their result - unfortunately," Chiesa said. "Our task is to inform millions of people of the true situation. Everybody should be involved in this struggle with a tribunal or commission helping once we win approval for the idea," he said.

A GOP congressional leader who was wavering on giving President Bush the authority to wage war in late 2002 said Vice President Cheney misled him by saying that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had direct personal ties to al-Qaeda terrorists and was making rapid progress toward a suitcase nuclear weapon, according to a new book by Washington Post investigative reporter Barton Gellman.

Cheney's assertions, described by former House majority leader Richard K. Armey (Tex.), came in a highly classified one-on-one briefing in Room H-208, the vice president's hideaway office in the Capitol. The threat Cheney described went far beyond public statements that have been criticized for relying on "cherry-picked" intelligence of unknown reliability. There was no intelligence to support the vice president's private assertions, Gellman reports, and they "crossed so far beyond the known universe of fact that they were simply without foundation." 

The collapse last week of the London trial against the men accused of a plot to blow up airliners can be traced back to a peevish president desperate for a poll fillip.

The most knowledgeable British anti-terrorism officials are the most outraged. Before dawn breaks in the UK, they’re already assessing the damage from what one calls a “forced, foolish hastiness”. But the White House already has a media strategy in place to leverage news of the thwarted attack, “the worst since 9/11”. All that’s left to do is wait a few hours until sunrise, when the arrests will hit the US news cycles and the president and vice-president can register surprise about how right they’ve been all along, about everything. 

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