[images and captions added by this website]   David Irving comments: Don't recall seeing this in your local newspaper either? The item was reported by the Jewish Telegraph Agency, but no other news outlet mentioned this in their coverage of the US general's speech before the National Press Club.    The news brief is no longer accessible at the jta.org website, but it is still available at the following link (scroll down partway to see headline "Franks: Threat on...").    Come to think of it I have not found any reference to this reason being given in the 9/11 Commission Report. But then that weighty document does not even mention the four-page letter in Arabic found among the possessions of the hijackers and allegedly at the crash site in Pennsylvania.    That is, we were told at the time that it was four pages. As our Middle East expert Eric Mueller pointed out, it must have been originally a five-page letter. The traditional Muslim opening sentences in any letter are missing: they were on the first page which has evidently been withheld by the FBI.    (Hazard a guess that it spelt out in simple, credible language the reasons why Atta and his eighteen intrepid men were sacrificing themselves to attack Wall Street, the Pentagon, and the Capitol?)  Franks: Threat on Israel justified pre-emption (JTA) - The threat of a missile attack on Israel was one reason justifying a pre-emptive strike against Iraq, Gen. Tommy Franks (below) said. Franks, who retired from the U.S. military last year after leading the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, said he supported the Bush administration policy of pre-emption. "The reason we could not afford to give up time is because we wanted the water infrastructure to remain in place," Franks said Monday at the [US] National Press Club. "We wanted the oil infrastructure in Iraq to remain in place. We did not want to subject ourselves and Israel to the potential consequence of a long-range missile being fired into Tel Aviv or Jerusalem." Franks also said Israel's conflict with the Palestinians fuels anti-U.S. resentment in the Middle East. "We don't do body-counts" - Tommy Franks      Radical's Diary on The 9/11 Commission Report

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