The new Pearl Harbor Part Two full text

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CHAPTER FIVE

DID US OFFICIALS HAVE ADVANCE INFORMATION ABOUT 9/11?

The larger context for viewing the events of 9/11, according to critics of the official account, consists of four more types of evidence against that account. In this chapter, I explore the first type: evidence that US officials had information about the attacks before they happened.

Many leading officials in the Bush administration have claimed that the events of 9/11 were completely unanticipated. For example, Condoleezza Rice, Bush's National Security Advisor, said in May of 2002: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use...a hijacked airplane as a missile.">1 The next month, President Bush, in an address to the nation, said: "Based on everything I've seen, I do not believe anyone could have prevented the horror of September the 11th.">2 A further claim, endorsed in the summary of the final report of the Joint Inquiry conducted by the intelligence committees of the US Senate and House of Representatives, is that although there were some indications of plans for terrorist attacks within the United States, "it was the general view of the Intelligence Community, in the spring and summer of 2001, that the threatened bin Laden attacks would most likely occur against US interests overseas.">3 These general claims can be divided into two more particular ones, each of which has been challenged by critics of the official account.

Was the Very Possibility of Such Attacks not Envisioned?

One of these claims is that the very possibility that someone would use planes as weapons had not been imagined. For example, a defense official was quoted as saying: "I don't think any of us envisioned an internal air threat by big aircraft. I don't know of anybody that ever thought through that." >4 About a year later, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said: "Until the attack took place, i think it's fair to say that no one envisioned that as a possibility.

Critics say, however, that there is much evidence to the contrary. For example, in 1993 a panel of experts commissioned by the Pentagon suggested that airplanes could be used as missiles to bomb national landmarks. However, this notion was not published in its report, Terror 2000, because, said one of its authors: "We were told by the Department of Defense not to put it in." But in 1994, one of these experts wrote in the Futurist magazine:

Targets such as the World Trade Center not only provide the requisite casualties but, because of their symbolic nature, provide more bang for the buck. In order to maximize their odds for success, terrorist groups will likely consider mounting multiple, simultaneous operations.>6 In that same year, there were three airplanes hijacked with the intent to use them as weapons, including a highly publicized plan of a terrorist group linked with al-Qaeda to crash one into the Eiffel Tower. In 1995, Senator Sam Nunn, in Time magazines cover story, described a scenario in which terrorists crash a radio-controlled airplane into the US Capitol building.>7 The year 1995 also brought the most important discovery, which has been widely reported: Philippine police found an al-Qaeda computer with a plan called Project Bojinka, one version of which involved hijacking planes and flying them into targets such as the World Trade Center, the White House, CIA headquarters, and the Pentagon. This plan—which was evidently formulated by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (later to be identified as the mastermind of 9/11) and his relative Ramsi Yousef >8—resurfaced in the 1996 trial of the latter for masterminding the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center (in which Mohammed was also indicted).>5 (Note: Ramsi Youssef was NOT charged with the 1993 attack on the WTC, there is an mp3 of his lawyer talking publicly about it on the web. It is now established that a FBI [double-?]agent instigated that attack.) Yousef's conviction, Ahmed points out, was on September 11, 1996, so that 9/11 was its fifth anniversary.." Furthermore, after the attacks, reports Thompson, a Philippine investigator said: "It's Bojinka... We told the Americans everything about Bojinka. Why didn't they pay attention?">11

In 1999, the National Intelligence Council, which advise the President and US intelligence agencies on emerging threats, said in a special report on terrorism:

Al-Qaeda's expected retaliation for the US cruise missile attack [of 1998]...could take several forms of terrorist attack in the nation's capitol. Suicide bombers belonging to al-Qaeda's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives...into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House.>12 With regard to the Pentagon in particular, officials in October of 2000 carried out an emergency drill to prepare for the possibility that a hijacked airliner might be crashed into the Pentagon.>13 In sum, argue critics, the claim that the possibility of such attacks had not been envisioned is clearly untrue.

Were There No Specific Warnings about the Attacks?

A second, narrower claim is that although there were warnings about the possibility of this kind of attack, there were no specific warnings relating to 9/11. For example, three days afterwards, FBI Director Robert Mueller (six days in office) said: "There were no warning signs that I'm aware of that would indicate this type of operation in the country.">14 A year later, he still claimed: "To this day we have found no one in the United States except the actual hijackers who knew of the plot.">15

Acceptance of this claim is reflected in the summary of the final report of the Joint Inquiry conducted by the House and Senate intelligence committees. The first "finding" reported in this summary reads:

While the Intelligence Community had amassed a great deal of valuable intelligence regarding Usama Bin Laden and his terrorist activities, none of it identified the time, place, and specific nature of the attack that were planned for September 11, 2001. [Author's note: Spellings of his name shift due to different styles of transliterating the Arabic into English.] Indeed, as we saw earlier, this summary of the Joint Inquiry's final report said that the information led the intelligence community to expect the attacks to be directed "against US interests overseas." But in fact, critics argue, there were evidently many quite specific warnings in the months leading up to 9/11 and, given the fact that by May of 2001, warnings of an attack against the US were reportedly higher than ever before, US intelligence agencies should have been especially on the alert.>16 This state of alert should have been increased still further, one would assume, given the fact that an intelligence summary for Condoleezza Rice from CIA Director George Tenet on June 28 said: "It is highly likely that a significant al-Qadea attack is in the near future, within several weeks.">17 It was in such a context that the rather specific warnings came. In late July, for example, the Taliban's Foreign Minister informed US officials that Osama ben Laden was planning a "huge attack" inside America that was imminent and would kill thousands.>18 That the information indicated that the attack was to involve commercial airlines is suggested by the fact that on July 26, CBS News reported that Attorney General Ashcroft had decided to quit using this mode of travel because of a threat assessment—although "neither the FBI nor the Justice Department—would identify what the threat was, when it was detected or who made it.">19 In May of 2002, it was claimed that the threat assessment had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, but Ashcroft, according to the Associated Press, walked out of his office rather than answer questions about it. The San Francisco Chronicle complained: "The FBI obviously knew something was in the wind.... The FBI did advise Ashcroft to stay off commercial aircraft. The rest of us just had to take our chances." CBS's Dan Rather later asked, with regard to this warning: "Why wasn't it shared with the public at large?">20

August and September brought more warnings. A Moroccan agent who had penetrated al-Qaeda was evidently brought to the United States to discuss his report that bin Laden, being disappointed that the 1993 bombing had not toppled the "WTC, planned "large scale operations in New York in the summer or fall of 2001.">21 Former CIA agent Robert Baer reportedly told the CIAs Counter-Terrorism Center that he had learned from a military associate of a Persian Gulf prince that a "spectacular terrorist operation" was about to take place.>22 Some warnings, furthermore, were reportedly given by several foreign intelligence agencies. For example, Russian President Putin later stated that in August, "I ordered my intelligence to warn President Bush in the strongest terms that 25 terrorists were getting ready to attack the US, including important government buildings like the Pentagon." The head of Russian intelligence also said: "We had clearly warned them" on several occasions, but they "did not pay the necessary attention.">23 Warnings were also reportedly given by Jordan, Egypt, and Israel,>24 with the latter country warning, a few days before 9/11, that perhaps 200 terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden were "preparing a big operation.">25

One of the official warnings during this period became widely known—a memo provided by Great Britain, which was included in the intelligence briefing for President Bush on August 6. This warning said that al-Qeda had planned an attack in the United States involving multiple airplane hijackings. The White House kept this warning secret, with the president repeatedly claiming after 9/11 that he had received no warning of any kind. But on May 15, 2002, CBS Evening News revealed the existence of this memo from British intelligence. Condoleezza Rice tried to dismiss its significance by saying that it was "fuzzy and thin," consisting of only a page and a half. Newspaper accounts, however, said that it was 11 pages long.>26 Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said in no uncertain terms: "The president did not—not—receive information about the use of airplanes as missiles by suicide bombers.">27 A few days later, however, the Guardian reported that "the [August 6] memo left little doubt that the hijacked airliners were intended for use as missiles and that intended targets were to be inside the US.">28 Doubt about the administrations truthfulness is raised by the fact that it has refused to release the memo while claiming that there is nothing specific in it. As Michael Moore has asked: "If there is nothing specific, then why cant they release it?">29

In any case, if that information is still considered too general to have made the events of 9/11 preventable, even more specific information was provided by the stock market. Intelligence agencies monitor the stock market, critics point out, to watch for clues of impending catastrophes. And the days just before September 11 saw an extremely high volume of "put options" purchased for the stock of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, which occupied 22 stories of the World Trade Center, and for United and American Airlines, the two airlines used in the attacks.>30 For these two airlines, and only these two, "the level of these trades was up by 1,200 percent in the three days prior to the World Trade Center attacks.">31 To buy a put option is to bet that the price of shares is going to go down, and in this case the bet was highly profitable. As the San Francisco Chronicle explained: "When the stock prices...dropped...in response to the terrorist attacks, the options multiplied a hundredfold in value, making millions of dollars in profit." If a single group of speculators purchased most of the thousands of put options for those three stocks, this group would have made over $10 million. This unusual set of purchases "raises suspicions that the investors...had advance knowledge of the strikes.">32

Even more important here is the conclusion that any intelligence officer looking at this development, especially in light of all the warnings, would easily have concluded that someone with inside information knew that in the near future both American and United airplanes were going to be used in attacks, quite likely on the World Trade Center. And there can be no serious doubt, Ahmed adds, that intelligence officers monitor the market looking for such anomalies. He quotes investigative journalist Michael Ruppert, a former detective for the Los Angeles Police Department, who wrote: "It is well documented that the CIA has long monitored such trades—in real time—as potential warnings of terrorist attacks and other economic moves contrary to US interests." Ahmed adds that "[t]he UPI also reported that the US-sponsored ECHELON intelligence network closely monitors stock trading.">33

An intriguing footnote to this story is that A. B. "Buzzy" Krongard, who in March of 2001 was promoted within the CIA by President Bush to become its executive director, had until 1998 been the manager of Deutsche Bank, one of the major banks through which put options on United Airlines were purchased.>34 The implication, of course, is that there might have been insider trading going on that dwarfed Martha Stewart's in size and significance.

In any case, further specific information, critics continue, was evidendy obtained from electronic intercepts. Shordy before 9/11, the FBI reportedly intercepted messages such as "There is a big thing coming" and "They're going to pay the price.">35 On September 9, a foreign intelligence service reportedly passed on to US intelligence an intercepted message from bin Laden to his mother, in which he told her: In two days you're going to hear big news, and you're not going to hear from me for a while.">36 And the next day, September 10, US intelligence reportedly obtained electronic intercepts of conversations in which al Queda members said: "Tomorrow will be a great day for us.">37 One of those intercepts was reportedly made by the National Security Agency (NSA), which had monitored a call during the summer between Mohamed Atta and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, believed to be one of the architects of Project Bojinka, the 1993 bombing of the WTC, and the bombing of the USS Cole. >38 In the intercept of September 10, 2001, Atta reportedly received final approval for the 9/11 attacks from Mohammed. According to the September 15, 2002 story in the Independent that reported this intercept, information as to when the intercept was translated had not been released.>39 But given the fact that US intelligence had learned in June of 2001 that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was interested in "sending terrorists to the United States,">40 one would assume that translating an intercepted message from him would have had the highest priority.

US intelligence agencies, however, would later claim that the highly specific messages received the two days before 9/11 were not translated until afterwards. In relation to this claim, it is significant, as Thompson points out, that Senator Orrin Hatch reported that US officials had overheard two bin Laden aides celebrating the successful terrorist attack At a news briefing on September 12, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld reportedly manifested chagrin at Hatch's breach, which revealed that the US government was, in fact, monitoring these communications electronically in real time.>41 The idea that specific information was not only received but also translated on September 10 is further suggested by Newsweek's report that on that day "a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns.">42

With this information before us, we can better evaluate the Joint Inquiry's final report, as reflected in its summary, according to which none of the information available to the intelligence community "identified the time, place, and specific nature of the attacks that were planned for September 11, 2001." The Joint Inquiry evidently tried to reconcile this finding with the kind of very specific information reviewed above by saying: "In the period from September 8 to September 10, 2001, NSA intercepted, but did not translate or disseminate until after September 11, some communications that indicated possible impending terrorist activity.">43 It would be interesting to know, however, whether this conclusion was based on any evidence other than testimony by members of the NSA. It would also be interesting to know whether the Joint Inquiry tried to explain why on September 10 "a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning." And whether they asked why, given the many very specific reports prior to September 8, the NSA was not translating and disseminating the warnings it intercepted from September 8 to 10—in other words, whether the claim that it did not do so is really believable.

In any case, Ahmed, referring to Condoleezza Rice's statement that US officials had no specific information about the attacks in advance, concludes that it is "patendy false.">44 Michel Chossudovsky, referring to the discussion of whether members of the Bush administration knew about the attacks beforehand, says: "Of course they knew!"—adding that "the American people have been consciously and deliberately deceived.">45

Critics of the official account have certainly provided evidence that seems to support these conclusions. The material in this chapter provides, at the very least, further evidence against the first two of the possible views, according to which US intelligence agencies had no specific information about the attacks. Some of this evidence, furthermore, seems to rule out the first six views, according to which at least the White House had no specific knowledge about the impending attacks. All the views except the seventh and the eighth, accordingly, would seem to be ruled out insofar as the evidence summarized in this chapter stands up to further scrutiny.

The cumulative evidence of government complicity becomes even more compelling, critics of the official account of 9/11 believe, when it includes evidence that US officials actively obstructed investigations that might have uncovered the plot.

FOOTNOTES to chapter 5

hint: press the BACK-button on your browser to jump back to the original text-location 1This statement was made in Rice's press briefing of May 16, 2002, which was reported in the Washington Post, May 17, 2002. It was quoted by Mary Fetchet, Co-Chair of Voices of 9/11 and a member of the Family Steering Commission for the 9/11 Independent Commission, in testimony to that commission, March 31, 2003 (available at 911citizenswatch.org). 2Sydney Morning Herald, June 8, 2002, quoted in Thompson, "Timeline," June 4,2002 3The summary of this final report of the Joint Inquiry can be read at http://intelligence.senate.gov/press.htm under December 11, 2002. 4Newsday, September 23, 2001, quoted in "Timeline," September 11, 2001 (C). 5MSNBC, September 18, 2002, quoted in "Timeline," May 15, 2002. 6Washington Post, October 2, 2001, quoted in "Timeline," 1993 (C). 7New York Times, November 3, 2001, and Time, April 4, 1995, cited in "Timeline," April 3, 1995. 8New York Times, June 5, 2002. 9New York Times, October 3, 2001; Robert Novak, Chicago Sun-Times, September 27, 2001; "Western Intelligence Knew of Laden Plan Since 1995," Agence France-Press, December 8, 2001; Washington Post, September 23, 2001; and "Terrorist Plan to Use Planes as Weapons Dates to 1995: WTC Bomber Yousef Confessed to US Agents in 1995," Public Education Center Report (www. publicedcenter.org); cited in Ahmed, 83-84, and "Timeline," January 6, 1995. 10Ahmed, 84. 11Thompson, "Timeline," January 6, 1995, quoting Washington Post, September 23, 2001. 12Associated Press, April 18, 2002, quoted in "Timeline," September, 1999. 13MDW News Service, November 3, 2000, and Mirror, May 24, 2002, cited in "Timeline," October 24-26, 2000. 14"Timeline," May 21, 2002 (see also September 14, 2001). 15"Timeline," September 10, 2001, and June 18, 2002. 16"Timeline," May, 2001, citing Los Angeles Times, May 18, 2002, and the Senate Intelligence Committee, September 18, 2001. 17Washington Post, May 17, 2002, quoted in "Timeline," June 28, 2001. 18Independentand Reuters, both September 7, 2002, cited in "Timeline," late July 2001 (A). 19CBS News, July 26, 2001, cited in "Timeline," July 26, 2001. 20Associated Press, May 16, 2002, and San Francisco Chronicle, June 3, 2002, cited in "Timeline," July 26,2001; Washington Post, May 27, 2002, cited in "Timeline," July 26,2001. 21Agence France-Presse, November 22, 2001, International Herald Tribune, May 21, and London Times, May 12, 2002, cited in "Timeline," August 2001 (C). 22Robert Baer, See No Evil; The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (New York: Crown Pub, 2002), 270-71; Bill Gertz, Breakdown: How America's Intelligence Failures Led to September 11 (Washington: Regnery, 2002), 55-58; and Financial Times, January 12, 2002; all cited in "Timeline," August 2001 (E). 23MSNBC, September 15, 2001, and Agence France-Presse, September 16, 2001, quoted in "Timeline," August 2001 (D). 24Telegraph, September 16, 2001, Los Angela Times. September 20, 2001. Fox News, May 17, 2002, International Herald Tribune, May 2, 2002, and New York Times, June 4 2002, cited in "Timeline," August 6, August 30-Septcmber 4, and late summer, 2001. 25David Wastell and Philip Jacobson, "Israeli Security Issued Warning to C1A of Large-Scale Terror Attacks," Telegraph, September 16, 2001, quoted in Ahmed, 114. 26Newsweek May 27, 2002, New York Times, May 15, 2002, and DieZeit, October 1, 2002, cited in "Timeline," August 6, 2001. 27New York Times, May 16, 2002, quoted in Timeline," May 15, 2002. 28Guardian, May 19, 2002, quoted in "Timeline," May 15, 2002. 29Michael Moore, Dude, Where's My Country? (New York: Warner Books, 2003), 114. Incidentally, although Moore's book has a less than scholarly tide and contains much humor, it is also a serious book based on remarkably good research. This is especially true of his first chapter, "George of Arabia," which is discussed at the end of this book. 30Ahmed, 118-24. 31Michael Ruppert, "Guns and Butter: The Economy Watch," available at "The CIA's Wall Street Connections," Centre for Research on Globalisation (http://globalresearch.ca), quoted in Ahmed, 122. 32San Francisco Chronicle, September 29, 2001, quoted in Ahmed, 118. 33Ahmed, 120, quoting Michael Ruppert, "Suppressed Details of Criminal Insider Trading Lead Directly into the CIA's Highest Ranks," From the Wilderness Publications (www.fromthewilderness.com or www.copvcia.com), October 9, 2001, and United Press International, February 13, 2001. On ECHELON, see Ahmed, 127-30. 34Independent, October 10, 2001, and Michael Ruppert, "Suppressed Details," cited in Ahmed, 124. 35Newsweek, October 1, 2001, quoted in Ahmed, 117. 36NEC News, October 4, 2001, quoted in Ahmed, 117. 37USA Today, June 4, 2002, quoted in "Timeline," September 10, 2001 (C). 38Los Angeles Times, December 22 and 24 and August 1, 2002, and Independent, June 6, 2002, cited in "Timeline," January 6, 1995; Knight Ridder, June 6, and Independent, June 6, 2002, cited in "Timeline," summer 2001. 39Independent, September 15, 2002, cited in "Timeline," September 10, 2001 (F). 40Los Angeles Times, December 12, 2003, reporting findings of the Congressional Joint Inquiry, cited in "Timeline," June 2001 (I). 41Associated Press and ABC News, both September 12, 2001, cited in "Timeline," September 11, 2001 (I). 42Newsweek, September 24, 2001, quoted in Ahmed, 125. 43Summary of the Final Report of the Joint Inquiry (http://intelligence. senate.gov/press.htm). 44Ahmed, 135 n. 169. Readers familiar with evidence that US intelligence agencies had advance knowledge of the attacks may wonder why I have not included the case of Delmart "Mike" Vreeland. After being jailed in Toronto on charges of fraud in August of 2001, Vreeland claimed to be an officer with US naval intelligence. Evidently in support of this claim, Vreeland wrote something on a piece of paper, sealed it in an envelope, and gave it to Canadian authorities. Then on September 14, according to a newspaper story, these authorities opened the envelope and found that Vreeland's note had accurately predicted the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Vreelands lawyers were evidently able to prove that he was indeed a naval officer on active duty. But although there was a lot of bitter controversy about this story, most of it was beside the point, because Vreelands note could not reasonably be considered a prediction of the attacks of 9/11. Besides listing several sites other than the WTC and the Pentagon (such as the Sears Tower in Chicago and the Parliament Building in Ottawa), it also had no reference to 2001. The only dates on the note were 2007 and 2009. The note has been made available by From the Wilderness Publications http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/01_28_02__vreeland.jpg 45Chossudovsky, War and Globalisation, 145, 62.

CHAPTER SIX

DID US OFFICIALS OBSTRUCT INVESTIGATIONS PRIOR TO 9/11?

When information of some of the warnings discussed in the previous chapter leaked out, US officials dismissed the importance of these warnings by claiming that there is always so much intelligence coming in that it is often difficult to distinguish the significant information from the "noise," meaning all the reports that turn out to be false or insignificant. After a catastrophe such as 9/11 happens, they say, it is unfair to pick out those few bits of information related to it and claim, with 20/20 hindsight, that officials should have been able to "connect the dots." However, say critics, even if that argument could legitimately be used to dismiss the warnings discussed in the previous chapter (which, they maintain, it could not), the fact of official complicity would be strongly suggested if there is evidence that governmental agencies had purposely prevented investigations of al-Qaeda and individuals thought to be connected to it. And, they claim, such evidence does exist.

The Anti-Hunt for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda

One of the main reasons for doubting the official story about 9/11, say critics, is evidence that, far from doing everything it could to kill or capture bin Laden, US government officials repeatedly failed to do so when they had opportunities. I will summarize a few of the episodes that have been dug up by Ahmed and Thompson.

In December of 1998, CIA Director George Tenet reportedly circulated a memorandum in the intelligence community that said: "We are at war," and added: "I want no resources or people spared in this effort, either inside CIA or the [larger intelligence] community." But the Congressional Joint Inquiry would later learn that there was no significant shift in budget or personnel and that few FBI agents had ever heard of the declaration.>1

On December 20 of 2000 Richard Clarke, a counter-terrorism expert, submitted a plan to roll back al-Qaeda in response to the bombing of the USS Cole (which had occurred in October). The main component of Clarke's plan was a dramatic increase in covert action in Afghanistan to "eliminate the sanctuary" for bin Laden. The Clinton administration, on the grounds that the Bush admimstration would be taking over in only a few weeks, passed the plan on to it. In January however, the Bush administration rejected the plan and took no action.>2

According to a story reported by ABC News, Julie Sirrs, an agent for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), traveled to Afghanistan twice in 2001. On her first trip, she met with Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Masood.>3 On her second trip, she returned home with what she later called "a treasure trove of information," including evidence that bin Laden was planning to assassinate Masood (and Masood would indeed be assassinated on September 9, as discussed in Chapter 8). But she was met at the airport by a security officer, who confiscated her material, after which the DIA and the FBI investigated her. However, she said, no higher intelligence officials wanted to hear what she had learned in Afghanistan. Finally, her security clearance was pulled and she resigned from the DIA.>4

In March of 2001, the Russian Permanent Mission at the United Nations secretly submitted "an unprecedentedly detailed report" to the UN Security Council about bin Laden and his whereabouts, including "a listing of all bin Laden's bases, his government contacts and foreign advisors"—enough information, they said, to kill him. But the Bush administration took no action. Alex Standish, the editor of Jane's Intelligence Review, would later conclude that the attacks of 9/11 were not an intelligence failure but the result of "a political decision not to act against bin Laden.">5

By the summer of 2001, Osama bin Laden was America's "most wanted" criminal, for whom it was offering a $5 million bounty, and the US government had supposedly tried to kill him. And yet in July according to reports by several of Europe's most respected news sources, bin Laden spent two weeks in the American hospital in Dubai (of the United Arab Emirates). Besides being treated by an American surgeon, Dr. Terry Callaway, he was also reportedly visited by the head of Saudi intelligence and, on July 12, by the localCIA agent, Larry Mitchell. Although the reports were denied by the CIA, the hospital, and bin Laden himself, Dr. Callaway reportedly simply refused comment, and the news agencies stood by their story.>6

"The explosive story," comments Thompson, was "widely reported in Europe, but barely at all in the US.">7 After this story broke in November Chossudovsky, quoting Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's comment that finding binLaden would be like "searching for a needle in a stack of hay," said: "But the US could have ordered his arrest and extradition in Dubai last July. But then they would not have had a pretext for waging a war.">8

Hidden Connections between Bush, bin Laden, and Saudi Royals

One of the disturbing questions that has been raised by critics of the official account is whether the actual relations between the Bush administration, Osama bin Laden, and the Saudi Royal family are not rather different from the public portrayal of these relations. There are several grounds for suspicion. First, the bin Laden family—one of the wealthiest and most influential families in Saudi Arabia—and the Bush family had business relations for over 20 years.>9 Second, although Osama binLadin has been portrayed as the black sheep of the family who was disowned for his terrorist ways—so that the "good bin Ladens" could be radically distinguished from the "bad bin Laden"—there is much evidence that Osama's close ties with his family continued.>10 Third, there is evidence that Osama bin Laden continued to receive covert aid from America's close ally, Saudi Arabia.>11 A fourth ground for suspicion is the report that immediately after 9/11, the US government, working with the Saudi government, helped many members of the bin Laden family depart from the United States, even allowing their jets to fly before the national air ban was lifted.>12 A fifth cause for suspicion is the fact that when the final report of the Joint Inquiry into 9/11 carried out by the House and Senate intelligence committees was finally released in 2003, the administration had insisted on blocking out some 28 pages, which reportedly dealt primarily with Saudi Arabia. There is, finally, the simple fact that most of the alleged hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.

These grounds for suspicion are, furthermore, supported by reports from credible people about continuing ties between the Saudi government, Osama bin Laden, and al-Qaeda.

On August 22, 2001, John O'Neill, a counter-terrorism expert who was said to be the US governments "most commmed tracker of Osama bin Ladeen and his al-Qaeda network of terrorists," resigned from the FBI, citing repeated obstruction of his investigations into al-Qaeda.>13 The previous month, O'Neill, who held one of the top positions in the FBI had reportedly complained of obstruction by the White House, saying that the main obstacles to investigating al-Qaeda were "US Oil corporate interests and the role played by Saudi Arabia." He then added: "All the answers, everything needed to dismantle Osama bin Laden's organization, can be found in Saudi Arabia.">14 O'Neill's assessment, Ahmed comments, was given support by Tariq Ali, who wrote: "Bin Laden and his gang are just the tentacles [of the Wahhabi octopus]; the head lies safely in Saudi Arabia, protected by US forces.">15 The idea that any serious investigation would need to focus on Saudi Arabia has, interestingly, been supported more recently by Gerald Posner, an author who on most points supports the official account of 9/11.>16 On the basis of information provided anonymously but independently by two sources in the US government, Possner reports on the US interrogation of the Saudi Arabian Abu Zubaydah, one of al- Qaeda's top operatives, who was captured in Pakistan late in March of 2002. The interrogation, aided by thiopental sodium (Sodium Pentothal), was carried out by two Arab-Americans pretending to be Saudi Arabians. Relieved to be in the presence of men he believed to be fellow countrymen, Zubaydah became very talkative.>17

Hoping to save himself, Zubaydah claimed that he, as a member of al-Qaeda, had been working on behalf of senior Saudi officials. Encouraging his interrogators to confirm his claim, he told them to call one of King Fahd's nephews, Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul-Aziz (chairman of a huge publishing empire and founder of the Thoroughbred Corporation, which produced Kentucky Derby winner War Emblem). Zubaydah even gave them Prince Ahmed's telephone numbers from memory. When his interrogators said that 9/11 had surely changed everything, so that Prince Ahmed would no longer be supportive of al-Qaeda, Zubaydah told them that it would not have changed anything, because Prince Ahmed had known in advance that America would be attacked on 9/11. Zubaydah also gave from memory the phone numbers of two other relatives of King Fahd's who could confirm his claims: Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud and Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir.

Less than four months later, events occurred that suggested to Posner that Zubaydah's testimony may have been true. Within an eight-day period, all three of the named Saudis died. On July 22, Prince Ahmed, who was 43, reportedly died of a heart attack. The next day, Prince Sultan bin Faisal, who was 41, reportedly died in a single-car accident. And a week later, Prince Fahd bin Turki, who was 21, "died of thirst.">18

Zubaydah also said that he had been present at several meetings between Osama bin Laden and Prince Turki bin Faisal, the chief of Saudi intelligence, including a meeting in Kandahar in 1998 at which Prince Turki promised that Saudis would continue to support the Taliban and would not ask for Osama's extradition as long as al-Qaeda kept its promise not to attack the Saudi kingdom. But Prince Turki—who had been dismissed as head of Saudi intelligence ten days before 9/11, after which he became the Saudi ambassador to Great Britain—survived the testimony about him.>19

In any case, the accounts of these interconnections between Saudi royals, Osama bin Laden, and al-Qaeda suggest that the American failure to capture bin Laden may be connected with the close relations between the Saudi royals, the bin Laden family, and the Bush administration. According to a story by investigative reporters Gregory Palast and David Pallister, US intelligence agents, having long complained that they had been "prevented for political reasons from carrying out full investigations into members of the bin Laden family," said that after the Bush administration took over, things had become worse—that they "had been told to 'back off' from investigations involving other members of the Bin Laden family [and] the Saudi royals.">20 Palast, elaborating on this point in an interview, stated: "There is no question we had what looked like the biggest failure of the intelligence community since Pearl Harbor but what we are learning now is it wasn't a failure, it was a directive.">21 This conclusion is supported by an American intelligence agent, who said: "There were particular investigations [of the bin Laden family] that were effectively killed.">22

It was not, however, only with regard to bin Laden and his family that investigations were reportedly stifled. Ahmed and Thompson point to several cases in which investigations of other promising leads were apparently either obstructed or not even initiated. These cases are especially pertinent to the Joint Inquiry's conclusion that the attacks of 9/11 were due to intelligence failures that were regrettable but understandable. While pointing out that the intelligence agencies had received more warnings than they had admitted, the Joint Inquiry partly let them off the hook by saying that although they had missed some important clues, "They are the kinds of misses that happen when people ... are simply overwhelmed.">23 In some of the following cases, agents in the field were evidently less overwhelmed than overruled.

Ignoring the FBI in Phoenix

On July 10, 2001, Phoenix FBI agent Ken Williams sent a now well-known memorandum to the counterterrorism division at FBI headquarters, warning about suspicious activities involving a group of Middle Eastern men who were taking flight training lessons. Williams had begun investigating them in 2000, but early in 2001 he was reassigned to an arson case—leading a retired agent in Phoenix to write FBI Director Mueller after 9/11, asking: "Why take your best terrorism investigator and put him on an arson case?" Williams had been back on the flight-school case for only a month when he wrote his memo. Suggesting that bin Ladens followers might be taking flying lessons for terrorist purposes, he recommended a national program to track suspicious flight-school students. FBI headquarters, however, did not institute such a program.>24

Blocking the FBI in Minneapolis

In mid-August of 2001, the staff at a flight school in Minneapolis called the local FBI to report their suspicion that Zacarias Moussaoui, who had paid to train on a Boeing 747 simulator, was planning to use a real 747 "as a weapon.">25 After the Minneapolis FBI agents arrested Moussaoui and discovered many suspicious things about him, they asked FBI headquarters for a warrant to search his laptop computer and other possessions. However, even though FBI headquarters received additional information about Moussaoui from France—which according to French officials clearly showed that he posed a threat >26— senior FBI officials said that the information "was too sketchy to justify a search warrant for his computer.">27 But the Minneapolis agents, having seen the French intelligence report, were "in a frenzy," with one agent speculating that Moussaoui might "fly something into the World Trade Center.">28 Becoming "desperate to search the computer lap top," the Minneapolis agents sent a request through FBI headquarters for a search warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which would be certain to grant it, because in the past its officials had granted virtually all requests.>29

At FBI headquarters, however, the request was given to the Radical Fundamentalist Unit (RFU), one of whose agents criticized the Minneapolis FBI supervisor for getting people "spun up" over Moussaoui—but without telling this supervisor about the memo from Ken Williams in Phoenix, which the head of the RFU had received.>30 The Minneapolis request was then given to RFU agent Marion "Spike" Bowman, who lived up to his nickname by proceeding to remove the evidence that Moussaoui was connected to al-Qaeda through a rebel group in Chechnya. Then the FBI Deputy General Counsel, on the basis of this edited request, said that there was insufficient connection to al-Qaeda for a search warrant and did not even forward the request to FISA.>31 Minneapolis FBI legal officer Coleen Rowley asked: "Why would an FBI agent deliberately sabotage a case?" Other agents in the Minneapolis office joked that those at headquarters who blocked the request "had to be spies or moles...working for Osama bin Laden," while one agent concluded that FBI headquarters was "setting this up for failure.">32

It is interesting to compare this account of what happened with the "finding" in the Joint Inquiry's summary of its final report, which says that "personnel at FBI Headquarters, including the Radical Fundamentalist Unit and the National Security Law Unit, as well as agents in the Minneapolis field office, misunderstood the legal standard for obtaining an order under FISA," having "the perception...that the FISA process was lengthy and fraught with peril." According to this finding, there was no sabotage, just misunderstanding all around, even in Minneapolis. Given the fact that this report was published many months after Coleen Rowley's blistering memo, discussed below, became part of the public record, it is puzzling how the Joint Inquiry could have thought that the agents in Minneapolis were confused.

In any case, the Minneapolis FBI agents were unable to examine Moussaoui's computer and other personal effects until after the 9/11 attacks.>33 Following that search, the former FBI Deputy Director said that the computer contained "nothing significant...pertaining to 9/11," but the Washington Post cited congressional investigators as saying that "the evidence that lay unexamined in Zacarias Moussaouis possession was even more valuable than previously believed," as it connected him "to the main hijacking cell in Hamburg" and to "an al-Qaeda associate in Malaysia whose activities [had been] monitored by the CIA.">34 The New York Times concluded that the Moussaoui case "raised new questions about why the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies did not prevent the hijackings.">35

Three days after 9/11, FBI Director Mueller, who had only recently been appointed to this position, made his previously quoted statement: "There were no warning signs that I'm aware of that would indicate this type of operation in the country." Coleen Rowley and other Minneapolis agents tried to reach his office to make him aware of the Moussaoui case so that his "public statements could be accordingly modified," yet Mueller continued to make similar comments, including his testimony in a Senate hearing on May 8, 2002, that "there was nothing the agency could have done to anticipate and prevent the attacks.">36 According to reports of this hearing, however, Mueller finally had to admit that a month before 9/11, one FBI agent had speculated "at a high-level meeting that Moussaoui might have been taking lessons to enable him to crash an aircraft into the World Trade Center in New York.">37 Two weeks later, Rowley released a long memo she had written about the FBI's handling of the Moussaoui case, which Time magazine called a "colossal indictment of our chief law-enforcement agency's neglect.">38 After this memo became publicized, Mueller modified his public stance slightly, saying: "I cannot say for sure that there wasn't a possibility we could have come across some lead that would have led us to the hijackers.">39

Blocking the FBI in Chicago

In 1998, FBI agent Robert Wright had begun tracking a terrorist cell in Chicago, suspecting that money used for the 1998 bombings of US embassies came from a Saudi multimillionaire living in Chicago. In January of 2001, in spite of his belief that his case was growing stronger, he was told that it was being closed. In June, he wrote an internal memo charging that the FBI, rather than trying to prevent a terrorist attack, "was merely gathering intelligence so they would know who to arrest when a terrorist attack occurred.">40 In May of 2002, Wright announced jhat he was suing the FBI for refusing to allow him to publish a book he had written about the affair. Included in his description of the actions of his superiors in curtailing his investigations were words such as "prevented," "thwarted," "obstructed," "threatened," "intimidated," and "retaliation.">41 In a later interview, reporting that he had been told that his case was being closed because it was "better to let sleeping dogs lie," he said: "Those dogs weren't sleeping, they were training, they were getting ready.... September the 11th is a direct result of the incompetence of the FBI's International Terrorism Unit." Chicago federal prosecutor Mark Flessner, who also worked on the case, evidently thought that something other than incompetence was involved, saying that there "were powers bigger than I was in the Justice Department and within the FBI that simply were not going to let [the building of a criminal case] happen.">42

Blocking the FBI in New York

On August 28, 2001, the FBI office in New York, believing Khalid Almihdhar—who would later be named as one of the hijackers—had been involved in the bombing of the USS Cole, tried to convince FBI headquarters to open a criminal investigation. But the New York request was turned down on the grounds that Almilidhar could not be tied to the Cole investigation without the inclusion of sensitive intelligence information. One New York agent expressed his frustration in an e-mail letter, saying, "Whatever has happened to this—someday someone will die—and...the public will not understand why we were not more effective.... Let's hope the [FBI's] National Security Law Unit will stand behind their decisions then, especially since the biggest threat to us now, UBL [Usama bin Laden], is getting the most 'protection.'">43

Justice for a Spy

Sibel Edmonds and Can Dickerson were both hired by the FBI as translators after the 9/11 attacks. Edmonds soon informed her superiors that Dickerson had previously worked for a particular foreign organization, which was being investigated by the FBI, and that Dickerson was mistranslating, or even not translating at all, sensitive information regarding this organization. Edmonds informed her superiors, furthermore, that Dickerson had threatened her for refusing to work as a spy for this organization. But, Edmonds reported, the FBI failed to respond to her complaints, which she had made more than once, so in March she wrote a letter to the Inspector General of the Department of Justice, soon after which she was fired. Claiming that she was fired for whistleblowing, she sued. In October, at FBI Director Mueller's request, Attorney General Ashcroft, appealing to the privilege of state secrets "to protect the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States," asked a judge to throw out Edmonds' lawsuit.>44 Critics wonder, of course, why the national security of the United States would be protected by ignoring a claim that a spy for a foreign organization being investigated by the FBI was sabotaging that investigation.

Schippers and FBI Agents Versus the US Government

On September 13, 2001, Attorney David Schippers—who was the Chief Investigative Counsel for the US House of Representatives' Judiciary Committee in 1998 and its chief prosecutor for the impeachment of President Clinton in 1999—publicly stated that he had attempted to warn Attorney General Ashcroft about attacks planned for "lower Manhattan" six weeks beforehand, based on information he had received from FBI agents. In this and subsequent statements, Schippers said that the dates and targets of the attacks as well as the names and funding sources of the hijackers were known by these agents months in advance. Schippers claimed further that the FBI curtailed these investigations, then threatened the agents with prosecution if they went public with their information. At that time, Schippers further stated, the agents asked him to try to use his influence to get the government to take action to prevent the attacks. Having failed in that effort, Schippers agreed to represent some of the agents in a suit against the federal government, during which, if subpoenaed, they would be able to tell their story without fear of prosecution.>45

Because of this suit, Schippers—like the public interest law firm Judicial Watch, which joined forces with him on this case—is not a disinterested witness. But Schippers' allegations have been corroborated, Ahmed points out, in a story by William Norman Grigg in a conservative rnagazine, The New American. Gngg, having interviewed three FBI agents reported that they had confirmed "that the information provided to Schippers was widely known within the Bureau before September 11th." One of them reportedly said that some of the FBI field agents—who were some of the "most experienced guys"—"predicted, almost precisely, what happened on September 11th." He also said that it was widely known "all over the Bureau, how these [warnings] were ignored by Washington.">46

These reports make even more puzzling how the Joint Inquiry could have concluded, as mentioned in the previous chapter, that none of the information available to the intelligence community "identified the time place, and specific nature of the attacks that were planned for September 11, 2001." It seems that at least one US intelligence agency had this kind of very specific advance knowledge.

Visa and Watch List Violations

Immediately after 9/11, a number of irregularities regarding the alleged hijackers became known. It was learned, for example, that Mohamed Atta, considered the ringleader, was allowed back in the United States three times in 2001, in spite of the fact that he had let his visa expire in 2000, had violated his visa by taking flying lessons, was known to have terrorist connections, and was under FBI surveillance. It was reported, furthermore, that evidently over 50 people were involved in planning 9/11. These facts led to this criticism in a review by Accuracy in Media (AIM):

Yet the conspirators proceeded unmolested. What is striking is how safe these people apparently felt, how unthreatened by law enforcement.... They left and entered the country unimpeded. Some were reportedly on the so-called "watch list".... Yet this apparently caused them no problems.>47 The critics suspect, of course, that something other than incompetence might account for this pattern. The Question of the True Identity of the Hijackers

Although this issue does not, strictly speaking, belong in this chapter, I should explain why I have been qualifying "hijackers" with the adjective "alleged." One of the unanswered questions about 9/11 is whether the hijackings were really carried out by any of the men later named.Shortly after the attacks, stories appeared in newspapers suggesting that at leastfive of the men identified by the FBI as 9/11 hijackers were still alive, and these stories were supported by reports of "stolen identities.">48 The Saudiembassy in Washington, reports Meyssan, said that Abdulaziz al-Omari (supposedly the pilot of Flight 11, which crashed into the North Tower of the WTC), Mohand al-Shehri, Salem al-Hazmi, and Saeed al-Bhamdi were all alive and living in Saudi Arabia. Meyssan also says that a fifth alleged hijacker, Waleed M. al-Shehri, "gave an interview to the Arab-language daily, Al-Quds al-Arabi, based in London.">49 One report even said that "investigators are studying the possibility that the entire suicide squad consisted of impostors.">50 FBI Director Mueller, however, later claimed: "We at this point definitely know the 19 hijackers who were responsible.">51 "Yet many of the names and photos are known to be wrong," says Thompson. "Perhaps embarrassing facts would come out if we knew their real names.">52

Another report that creates suspicion regarding the official story, according to which the hijackers were "fundamentalist" Muslims, is that between May and August of 2001, several of the alleged hijackers, including Mohamed Atta, reportedly made at least six visits to Las Vegas, during which they drank alcohol, gambled, and frequented strip clubs, where they had lap dances performed for them.>53 Is this something that true believers would do shortly before going on a suicide mission to meet their maker?

There are also grounds for suspicion that evidence was planted to connect some of the alleged hijackers to the flights. On 9/11, for example, authorities found two of Attas bags, which failed to get loaded onto Flight 11. These bags contained various items, including flight simulation manuals for Boeing airplanes, a copy of the Koran, a religious cassette tape, a note to other hijackers about mental preparation, and Attas will, passport, and international drivers license. A reporter for the New Yorker later wrote:

many of the investigators believe that some of the initial clues that were uncovered about the terrorists' identities and preparations, such as flight manuals, were meant to be found. A former high-level intelligence official told me, "Whatever trail was left was left deliberately—for the FBI to chase." As Thompson asks, why would Atta have planned to bring his will "onto a plane he knew would be destroyed?">54 Also suspicious was the discovery, a few blocks from the WTC on the day after 9/11, of the passport of alleged hijacker Satam al-Suqami.>55 One newspaper— reflecting the fact that it was widely but mistakenly reported that the passport belonged to Atta—said "the idea that Atta's passport had escaped from that inferno unsinged [strains] credulity.">56 These stories suggest that the truth about what happened on 9/11 may be even further from the official account than suggested by the evidence I have cited prior to this section. Meyssan, for example, proposes that "the FBI invented a list of hijackers from which it drew an identikit portrait of the enemies of the West.">57 I will, however, not pursue this question further.

This chapter obviously provides additional evidence against any position weaker than the third possible view, because it suggests that at least one US agency—the FBI—had specific advance knowledge of the plot and took deliberate steps to prevent this plot from being uncovered.

Tyrone Powers, a former FBI special agent, is quoted by Ahmed as saying that within the intelligence community, "on occasion, [damaging] acts are allowed if in the minds of the decision makers, they will lead to 'greater good.'" One of the FBI agents interviewed by Grigg for The New American said: "There's got to be more to this than we can see.... Obviously, people had to know.... Its terrible to think this, but this must have been allowed to happen as part of some other agenda.">58 The critics of the official account have some suggestions as to what this agenda might have been.

FOOTNOTES to chapter 6

hint: press the BACK-button on your browser to jump back to the original text-location 1New York Times, September 18, 2002, cited in Thompson, "Timeline," December 4, 1998. 2"Timeline," January 25, 2001. 3This man's name is also sometimes spelled Massood, Massoud, Masoud, and Masud. I have followed Chossudovsky's spelling, Masood. 4ABC News, February 18, 2002, cited in "Timeline," 2001 (this item is placed at the beginning of the items for 2001). 5Jane's Intelligence Review, October 5, 2001, quoted in "Timeline," March 7, 2001. 6Richard Labeviere, "CIA Agent Allegedly Met Bin Laden in July," Le Figaro, October 31; Anthony Sampson, "CIA Agent Alleged to Have Met bin Laden in July," Guardian, November 1; Adam Sage, "Ailing bin Laden 'Treated for Kidney Disease,'" London Times, November 1; Agence France-Presse, November 1; Radio France International, November 1; and Reuters, November 10, 2001; cited in "Timeline," July 4-14 and July 12, 2001, and in Ahmed, 207-09. 7"Timeline," July 4-14, 2001. This statement (quoted in Ahmed, 209) occurs in Chossudovsky's Introduction to Labeviere's Le Figaro article (see note 6), which is on the website of the Centre for Research on Globalisation (www.globalresearch.ca/ articles/RIClllB.html), November 2, 2001. 9See the evidence in the section entitled "Bush and Bin Laden Family Ties" in Ahmed, 179-87. 10See the section entided "Osama: Not a Black Sheep," in Ahmed, 178-79. 11See the sections entided "Osama and the Saudis: A Covert Alliance," "The US-Saudi Alliance," and "Osamagate?" in Ahmed, 187-202. 12Patrick E. Tyler, "Fearing Harm, Bin Laden Kin Fled from US," New York Times, September 30, 2001, and Jane Mayer, "The House of Bin Laden: A Family's, and a Nation's, Divided Loyalties," New Yorker, November 12, 2001. (Michael Moore reports that it was reading these stories that first made him suspicious about the official account of 9/11; see Dude, Where's My Country [New York: Warner Books, 2003], 3-5.) 13New Yorker, January 14, 2002, cited in "Timeline," August 22, 2001 (B). 14CNN, January 8, 2002, and Lara Marlowe, "US Efforts to Make Peace Summed Up by Oil," Irish Times, November 19, 2001, cited in "Timeline," Mid-July 2001 and Ahmed, 206. 15Ahmed, 191-92, quoting Tariq Ali, "The Real Muslim Extremists," New Statesman, October 1, 2001. A "Wahhabi" is a follower of Wahhabism, the extreme form of Muslim "fundamentalism" dominant in, and promoted by, Saudi Arabia. 16On Posner's general perspective about 9/11, see note 31 of the Introduction, above. 17Gerald Posner, Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11 (New York: Random House, 2003), 181-88. Posner's case for the credibility of this account is that, besides the fact that it was provided independently by two informants within the US government, he also had independent confirmation of the described interrogation techniques from a member of the Defense Intelligence Agency (180n.). 18Ibid., 188-93. 19Ibid., 193. 20Gregory Palast and David Pallister, "FBI Claims Bin Laden Inquiry Was Frustrated," Guardian, November 7, 2001, quoted in Ahmed, 111. 21"Above the Law: Bush's Radical Coup d'Etat and Intelligence Shutdown," Green Press, February 14, 2000 (www.greenpress.org), quoted in Ahmed, 186. 22Palast and Pallister, "FBI Claims Bin Laden Inquiry Was Frustrated," quoted in Ahmed, 111. 23"Excerpts from Report on Intelligence Actions and the September 11 Attacks," New York Times, July 25, 2003. 24New York Times, May 19 and 20, Fortune, May 22, and Los Angeles Times, May 26, 2002, cited in "Timeline," July 10 and December, 2001. 25New York Times, February 8, 2002, quoted in "Timeline," August 13-15, 2001. 26This warning was reported in Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, Forbidden Truth: US-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden (New York: Thunders Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2002), 53-55. Brisard is a former agent of the French secret service. Wayne Madsen, in his introduction to the book, says that when the book was first published in France in November of 2001, "skeptics inside and outside the US government scoffed at the authors' contention that French intelligence had warned the FBI about the terrorist connections and ongoing flight training in the United States of Zacarias Moussaoui," but that they were then confronted with "incontrovertible validation of this information" when Coleen Rowley's memo became public (xv). 27Time, August 4, 2002, quoted in "Timeline," August 15 and August 22, 2001. 28Newsweek, May 20, 2002, quoted in "Timeline," August 23-27, 2001. 29Time, May 21 and May 27, and New York Times, August 27, 2002, quoted in "Timeline," August 23-27, 2001. 30Senate Intelligence Committee, October 17, 2002, and Time, May 21,2002, cited in "Timeline," August 24-29, 2001. 31Senate Intelligence Committee, October 17, 2002, cited in "Timeline," August 28, 2001 (B). 32Time, July 21 and 27, 2002, and Sydney Morning Herald, July 28, 2002, cited in "Timeline," August 23-27 and August 28, 2001. 33Time May 21 and 27, and Sydney Morning Herald, May 28, 2002' cited in "Timeline," August 23-27 and August 28, 2001. 34Washington Post, June 6, 2002, quoted in "Timeline," June 3, 2002. 35New York Times, December 22, 2001, quoted in Ahmed, 95. 36Senate Intelligence Committee, September 18, Time, May 21, and New York Times, May 30, 2002, cited in "Timeline," May 8, 2002. 37Ian Bruce, "FBI 'Super Flying Squad' to Combat Terror," Herald, May 16, 2002, quoted in Ahmed, 112, who also refers to Brian Blomquist, "FBI Man's Chilling 9/11 Prediction," New York Post, May 9, 2002 (www.nypost.com). 38Time, May 27, 2002 quoted in "timeline" May 21, 2001 (A)" 39New York Times, May 30, 2002, quoted in "Timeline," May 21, 2001 (A). 40United Press International, May 30, 2002, quoted in "Timeline," June 9, 2001. 41LA Weekly, August 2, 2002, quoted in "Timeline," May 30, 2002. 42ABC News, November 26 and December 19, 2002, quoted in "Timeline," October, 1998. 43Congressional Intelligence Committee, September 20, 2002, and New York Times, September 21, 2002, quoted in "Timeline," August 28, 2001 (A). 44Washington Post, May 19, Cox News, August 14, and Associated Press, October 18, 2002, cited in "Timeline," March 22, 2002. 45Alex Jones Show, October 10; World Net Daily, October 21; "David Schippers Goes Public: The FBI Was Warned," Indianapolis Star, October 13; and "Active FBI Special Agent Files Complaint Concerning Obstructed FBI Anti-Terrorist Investigations, "Judicial Watch, November 14, 2001; cited in Ahmed, 107-09, and "Timeline," late July 2001 (B). 46William Norman Grigg, "Did We Know What Was Coming?", New American 18/5: March 11, 2002 (www.thencwamerican.com), cited in Ahmed, 110-11. 47Catastrophic Intelligence Failure," Accuracy In Media (www.aim.org), September 24, 2001, quoted in Ahmed, 95-97. 48New York Times, September 21, Telegraph, September 23, 2001, and BBC, August 1, 2002, cited in "Timeline," September 16-23, 2001. 49Meyssan, 9/11: The Big Lie, 54. 50London Times, September 20, 2001. 51Associated Press, November 3, 2002. 52"Timeline," September 16-23, 2001. One more intriguing bit of information that Thompson gives involves the reported telephone call from Amy Sweeney, a flight attendant on Flight 11, to American Airlines ground manager Michael Woodward, which began shortly after the plane was hijacked and continued until the plane hit the WTC. According to reports, she identified four hijackers, but they were not the four said to be on the plane (Thompson [8:21 AM], citing Boston Globe, November 23, 2001, and ABC News, July 18, 2002 Thompson adds that the Boston Globe says that it has a transcript of the call.

53"Timeline," May 2001 [Q), citing San Francisco Chronicle, October 4, and Newsweek, October 15, 2001. 54Timeline," September 11, 2001 (J), citing Associated Press, October 5, 2001, Boston Globe, September 18, and Independent, September 29, 2001, along with New Yorker October 1, 2001. 55ABC News, September 12 and 16, and Associated Press, September 16, 2001, cited in Timeline," September 12, 2001. 56Guardian, March 19, 2002. 579/11: The Big Lie, 56. 58Ahmed, 132, 110-11, quoting Dennis Shipman, "The Spook Who Sat Behind the Door A Modern Day Tale," IndyMedia, May 20, 2002 (http://portland.indymedia.org), and William Norman Grigg, "Did We Know What Was Coming?" New American 18/5: March 11, 2002 (www.thenewamerican.com).

CHAPTER SEVEN

DID US OFFICIALS HAVE REASONS FOR ALLOWING 9/11?

The wars waged by the US government in Afghanistan and Iraq have been portrayed as part of its "war on terrorism." These wars have been, in other words, justified as responses to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. However, say critics of the official account, these wars were actually on the agenda of the Bush administration long before the attacks. Furthermore, they claim, these wars were part of an even larger agenda.

Pre-9/11 Plans to Attack Afghanistan

With regard to Afghanistan, Ahmed, drawing on various sources,>1 calls it a matter of public record that "corresponding with the growing shift in US policy against the Taliban, a military invasion of Afghanistan was planned long before 11th September.">2 Ahmed and Thompson both suggest that at least one of the fundamental purposes behind this plan was to facilitate a huge project of a consortium of oil companies known as CentGas (Central Asia Gas Pipeline). This consortium, which includes Delta Oil of Saudi Arabia, was formed by Unocal, one of the oil giants of the United States, to build pipelines through Afghanistan and Pakistan for transporting oil and gas from Turkmenistan to the Indian Ocean. In September of 2000, a year before 9/11, an Energy Information Fact Sheet, published by the US government, said:

Afghanistan's significance from an energy standpoint stems from its geographic position as a potential transit route for oil and natural gas exports from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea. This potential includes proposed multibillion dollar oil and gas export pipelines through Afghanistan.>3 At one time, Unocal and Washington had hoped that thcTaliban would provide sufficient stability for their project to move forward, but they had lost this hope. Providing some background, Ahmed and Thompson explain that the Taliban was originally created by the CIA, working in conjunction with Pakistan's ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), with additional financial support from Saudi Arabia.>4 According to Ahmed Rashid's well-known book Taliban, the pipeline project was central to this support:

Impressed by the ruthlessness and willingness of the then-emerging Taliban to cut a pipeline deal, the State Department and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency agreed to funnel arms and funding to the Taliban.>5 When the Taliban, with this financial support from Saudi Arabia and the CIA funneled through the ISI, conquered Kabul in 1996, Unocal was hopeful that it would provide enough stability to allow its pipelines to be built and protected. Indeed, it was reported, "preliminary agreement [on the pipeline project] was reached between the [Taliban and Unocal] long before the fall of Kabul.">6 Unocal even reportedly provided some of the financial support for the Taliban.>7 The fact that the Taliban continued to serve the purposes of the ISI is illustrated, Thompson points out, by the fact that when Taliban troops were about to conquer the major city in northern Afghanistan in 1998, an ISI officer sent a message saying: "My boys and I are riding into Mazar-i- Sharif.">8 In any case, after the Taliban conquered this city, it had control of most of Afghanistan, including the entire pipeline route. CentGas then announced that it was "ready to proceed.">9 Later that year, however, Unocal, having become dubious about the Talibans ability to provide sufficient stability, pulled out of CentGas. From then on, says Ahmed, "the US grew progressively more hostile toward the Taliban, and began exploring other possibilities to secure its regional supremacy, while maintaining basic ties with the regime, to negotiate a non-military solution.">10

The final attempt to find a non-military solution reportedly occurred at a four-day meeting in Berlin in July of 2001. The Bush administration tried to get the Taliban to share power, thereby creating a joint government of "national unity." According to the Pakistani representative at the meeting, Niaz Naik, one of the Americans said "either the Taliban behave as they ought to...or we will use another option..a military operation" Another American reportedly told the Taliban: "Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of boobs.">11 Although one of the Americans later denied that such a threat was made, one of them confirmed it, saying: "I think there was some discussion of the fact that the United States was so disgusted with the Taliban that they might be considering some military action.">12

According to a BBC report, furthermore, Naik said that he was told by senior American officials that "military- action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October"—that it would take place "before the snows started falling in Afghanistan, by the middle of October at the latest.">13 Thompson, noting that the United States started bombing Afghanistan on October 7, asks: "Is it coincidence that the attacks begin exactly when the US said they would, months before 9/11?">14 The supposition that it was not simply a coincidence is supported by an account from a former member of the South Carolina National Guard, who later declared:

My unit reported for drill in July 2001 and we were suddenly and unexpectedly informed that all activities planned for the next two months would be suspended in order to prepare for a mobilization exercise to be held on Sept. 14, 2001. We worked diligently for two weekends and even came in on an unscheduled day in August to prepare for the exercise. By the end of August all we needed was a phone call, which we were to expect, and we could hop into a fully prepared convoy with our bags and equipment packed.>15 If this report is true, it suggests that it was known in July that the attacks would occur shortly before September 14. In any case, Niaz Naik also did not think that mere coincidence was involved. The BBC report quoted him as saying that he "was in no doubt that after the World Trade Center bombings, this pre-existing US plan had been built upon and would be implemented within two or three weeks." Naik also said it was doubtful that Washington would drop its plan even if bin Laden were to be surrendered immediately by the Taliban, because "the wider objective was to topple the Taleban [sic] regime and install a transitional government.">16 Ahmed and Thompson find this assessment of the wider objective, along with the view that included facilitating the pipeline project, to be confirmed by subsequent events, such as the fact commented upon in the following statement by a writer in an Israeli newspaper:

If one looks at the map of the big American bases created, one is struck by the fact that they are completely identical to the route of the projected oil pipeline to the Indian Ocean.... If I were a believer in conspiracy theory, I would think that bin Laden is an American agent.>17 Thompson and Ahmed also point out that both the new Afghani prime minister, Hamid Karzai, and President Bush's special envoy to Afghanistan, Zalamy Khalilzad, were previously on Unocals payroll. These appointments, Ahmed adds, "illustrate the fundamental interests behind US military intervention in Afghanistan.">18 As early as October 10, Ahmed further notes, the US Department of State had informed the Pakistani Minister of Oil that "in view of recent geopolitical developments," Unocal was ready to go ahead with the pipeline project.>19 In light of this background, Ahmed concludes that 9/11 was more the "trigger" than the reason for the US war in Afghanistan.>20 Pre-9/11 Plans to Attack Iraq

In a statement in early March of 2002, President Bush, after saying that he was not very concerned about Osama bin Laden, added: "I am deeply concerned about Iraq.">21 Thompson and Ahmed believe that this was not a recent concern, that the war against Iraq, like the war against Afghanistan, had already been planned by US officials prior to 9/11.

Part of the evidence for this claim is found in the document Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century, which I briefly mentioned in the Introduction. This document was published in September of 2000 by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a neo-conservative think tank that was formed by many people who went on to become insiders in the Bush admnistration, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy at the Defense Department), and Lewis "Scooter" Libby (Cheney's Chief of Staff) >22 With regard to the question of whether the 2003 war against Iraq was really motivated by the perceived need to eliminate Saddam, as these men would then claim, the following passage in Rebuilding America's Defenses (quoted by Thomspon) is relevant:

The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.>23 The main thing, in other words, was getting a "substantial American force presence in the Gulf," with Saddam providing the "immediate justification." Edward Herman also points to the importance of this document for assessing the sincerity of the public rationale given for the war: "Key members of the Bush administration," points out Herman, "had announced an aim of 'toppling Saddam Hussein back in 2000 in the publication of the Project for the New American Century.">24 This group made an even earlier statement of this aim in a letter to President Clinton in January of 1998, urging him to adopt a strategy aimed at "the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power." This letter, signed by Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle, among others, urged Clinton "to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf," adding that "American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council.">25

In supporting the contention that 9/11 was more a pretext than a reason for the attack on Iraq, Thompson quotes a report that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, only a few hours after the Pentagon had been struck, wrote a memo saying that he wanted the "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Usama bin Laden]. Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.">26 Thompsons contention is given additional support by John Pilger, who cites Bob Woodwards report that the next day at the meeting of the National Security Council, Rumsfeld said that Saddams Iraq should be targeted in the first round of the war on terrorism.>27

Critics can, furthermore, point to both actions and statements during and after the war that support their contention that the war had much more to do with oil and regional control than it did with the announced purposes for the war. Whereas the Bush and Blair administrations claimed that the war was to remove weapons of mass destruction, through which Saddam Hussein posed a threat to his neighbors and even the United Kingdom and the United States, the intelligence behind this assessment has been widely reported to have been distorted, even invented. Sir Jonathan Porritt, head of the Sustainable Development Commission, which advises Blair's government on ecological issues, publicly stated that the prospect of winning access to Iraqi oil was "a very large factor" in the allies' decision to attack Iraq in March, adding: "I don't think the war would have happened if Iraq didn't have the second-largest oil reserves in the world." Paul O'Neill, Bush's former Treasury Secretary, has said that the Bush administration had from the outset planned to attack Iraq, in large part for its oil.>28

The fact that oil was of preeminent importance was demonstrated Stephen Gowans says, by the fact that

the top item on the Pentagon's agenda, once it gave the order for jackboots to begin marching on Baghdad, was to secure the oil fields in southern Iraq. And when chaos broke out in Baghdad, US forces let gangs of looters and arsonists run riot through "the Ministry of Planning, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Irrigation, the Ministry of Trade, the Ministry of Industry, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Information." ...But at the Ministry of Oil, where archives and files related to all the oil wealth Washington has been itching to get its hands on, all was calm, for ringing the Ministry was a phalanx of tanks and armoured personnel carriers.>29 The suspicion that Iraq was not attacked primarily for the publicly stated reasons is also suggested by the evidence that the Bush administration planned to use its post-9/11 "war on terrorism" as a pretext for attacks on still other countries. A report in Newsweek for example, said that prior to the attack on Iraq, some of Bush's advisors advocated also attacking Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Egypt. One senior British official was quoted as saving: "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.">30 One of those "real men" was Richard Perle, a founding member of PNAC, who has been quoted as describing America's "war on terrorism" in these words:

This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq.... [T]his is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and....just wage a total war...our children will sing great songs about us years from now.>31 This kind of vision could give fanaticism a bad name. It is now increasingly recognized that insofar as the United States is waging a war on terrorism, "terrorism" is being defined in a very selective, self-serving way. "For Bush," Meyssan says, "terrorism seems to be defined as any form of violent opposition to American leadership.">32 Richard Falk likewise saw that it soon became clear that the "war on terrorism was being waged against all non-state revolutionary forces perceived as hostile to American global interests." What is really going on, in other words, is "an empire-building project undertaken behind the smokescreen of the war on global terror.">33 Phyllis Bennis agrees, saying that "the war [on terrorism] was never about bringing anyone to justice; it was about conquest and the mushrooming of US global power, all in the name of righteous vengeance.">34 Chossudovsky, Mahajan, and countless other critics have made the same point.

In any case, it is now widely agreed that the Bush administration (as well as Blair's government) lied about the reasons for attacking Iraq. Is it not time to expand this question to whether it also lied about the event itself, 9/11, that was used as the primary justification for the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq and the even larger agenda of the Bush administration?

A New Pearl Harbor Would Help

With regard to this larger agenda, both Ahmed and Thompson refer to the 1997 book by former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives. Besides portraying the Eurasian landmass as the key to world power, Brzezinski portrayed Central Asia, with its vast oil reserves, as the key to the domination of Eurasia. Having summarized this argument, Ahmed and Thompson point to Brzezinskis statement that ensuring continued "American primacy" by getting control of this region will require "a consensus on foreign policy issues" within the American public Getting such consensus, however, will be difficult, because "America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad," a fact that "limits the use of America's power, especially its capacity for military intimidation." Continuing his analysis of the defects in the American character, Brzezinski explained that "the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public's sense of domestic well being.">35 Therefore, he counseled, the needed consensus on foreign policy issues will be difficult to obtain "except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.">36 Ahmed connects this passage to an earlier one, in which Brzezinski said that the American public, which is ambivalent about "the external projection of American power," had "supported America's engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.">37

Ahmed's point is that if those two passages are read together, the kind of "widely perceived direct external threat" said to be needed would be Pearl Harbor type of event. Brzezinski's book, authored by a former national security advisor, cannot be considered simply one book among hundreds offering advice to the government. Although Brzezinski advised a Democratic president (Jimmy Carter), he is a hard liner who has reportedly been highly regarded by the Bush administration.

It is perhaps not merely coincidental, therefore, that three years after Brzezinskis apparent wish for a Pearl-Harbor-type event was published, the aforementioned publication of the Project for the New American Century would contain a similar passage. Although this passage has previously been cited, it is important to emphasize that it comes in the context of a call for the completion of the "revolution in military affairs," through which a Pax Americana, or "American Peace," can be more efficiently established. Unfortunately, according to this document's authors, the needed transformation would probably come about slowly "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.">38 If a new Pearl Harbor were to occur, in other words, this completion of the revolution in military affairs could be brought about more quickly, because the massive funding needed could be obtained. It was in response to this prediction that John Pilger made the assertion, quoted in the Introduction, that "[t]he attacks of 11 September 2001 provided the 'new Pearl Harbor.'">39 What kind of changes did these advocates of American dominance outline, and has the New Pearl Harbor helped bring them about?

Missile Defense and a Space Pearl Harbor

It is important to realize that the centerpiece of the "revolution in military affairs" is a program to weaponize and hence dominate space. This program will require much of the massive increase in funding for "defense" for which Brzezinski and the Project for the New American Century have called. The purpose of this program is spelled out quite explicitly in a document called "Vision for 2020," which begins with this mission statement: "US Space Command—dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect US interests and investment.">40 Its primary purpose, in other words, is not to protect the American homeland, but to protect American investments abroad. It makes this point even more explicit by comparing the importance of the Space Command today with the fact that in previous times "nations built navies to protect and enhance their commercial interests." It is to dominate space to protect the commercial interests of America's elite class that, according to current projections, over $1 trillion will be required from American taxpayers.>41

The "Vision for 2020" document engages in no sentimental propaganda about the need for the United States to dominate space for the sake of promoting democracy or otherwise serving humanity. Rather, it says candidly, if indiscreetly: "The globalization of the world economy...will continue with a widening between 'haves' and 'have-nots.'" In other words, as America's domination of the world economy increases, the poor will get still poorer while the rich get still richer, and this will make the "have-nots" hate America all the more, so we need to be able to keep them in line. We can do this through what the advocates of this program originally called "Global Battlespace Dominance." Because some people found this term too explicit, the preferred term today is "Full Spectrum Dominance" (which provided the tide for a previously quoted book by Rahul Mahajan). This term means not only being dominant on land, on the sea, and in the air, as the US military is already, but also having control of space. Discussing this "American project of global domination associated with the weaponization of space," Richard Falk says: "The empire-building quest for such awesome power is an unprecedented exhibition of geopolitical greed at its worst, and needs to be exposed and abandoned before it is too late.">42

The only part of this program that has received much public discussion is the defensive aspect of it, which in the Reagan Administration was called the Strategic Defensive Initiative and is today called the Missile Defense Shield. Although these names suggest that America's goal in space is purely defensive, this so-called shield is only one part of a three-part program. One of the other parts is putting surveillance technology in space, with the goal of being able to zero on any part of the planet with such precision that every enemy of US forces can be identified. This part is already well on the way to realization.>43 The third part of the prograrn - which shows that the informal name for this program, "Star Wars," is more accurate than its technical name - is putting actual weapons in space, including laser cannons. These lasercannons have the offensive potential, as one writer put it, to "make a cruise missile look like a firecracker.">44 With lazer weapons on our satellites, the United States will be able to destroy the military satellites any adversarial country would try to send up, and this is, indeed, part of the announced intention: "to deny others the use of space." The US Space Command could thereby maintain total and permanent dominance. The aggressive purpose of the US Space Command's program is announced in the logo of one of its divisions: "In Your Face from Outer Space.">45

It is not only in this document that such aggressive aims are frankly stated. As Mahajan points out, the Project for the New American Century's document makes the following "remarkable admission":

In the post-Cold-War era, America and its allies...have become the primary objects of deterrence and it is states like Iraq, Iran and North Korea who most wish to develop deterrent capabilities. Projecting conventional military forces—will be far more complex and constrained when the American homeland...is subject to attack by otherwise weak rogue regimes capable of cobbling together a minuscule ballistic missile force. Building an effective...system of missile defenses is a prerequisite for maintaining American preeminence.>46 In other words, although the name "missile defense shield" suggests that the system is designed to shield America from attacks, its real purpose is to prevent other nations from deterring America from attacking them. This statement further suggests that Iran, Iraq, and North Korea were later determined by President Bush to deserve the title "axis of evil" because of their perverse wish to develop the capacity to deter the United States from projecting military force against them. The Project's description of the US military's role in these offensive terms is fully in accord with the Bush administrations National Security Strategy, published in 2002, which, besides embodying most of the recommendations of Rebuilding America's Defenses, says that "our best defense is a good offense.">47 The most important new component of this offense is to be the "full spectrum dominance" afforded by complementing America's land, air, and sea forces with a full-fledged Space Force. Shortly before becoming Secretary of Defense in January of 2001, Ronald Rumsfeld completed his work as chairman of the Commission to Assess US National Security Space Management and Organization. This "Rumsfeld Commission," as it was informally known, published its report in the second week of January.>48 The aim of its proposals, it said, was to "increase the asymmetry between US forces and those of other military powers." Besides advocating the termination of the 1972 ABM Treaty (which the Bush administration acted on promptly), this report recommended substantial changes, including the subordination of all the other armed forces and the intelligence agencies to the Space Force. Recognizing that such a drastic reorganization of the armed forces and intelligence agencies would normally evoke great resistance, the report added:

History is replete with instances in which warning signs were ignored and change resisted until an external, "improbable" event forced resistant bureaucracies to take action. The question is whether the US will be wise enough to act responsibly and soon enough to reduce US space vulnerability. Or whether, as in the past, a disabling attack against the country and its people—a "Space Pearl Harbor"—will be the only event able to galvanize the nation and cause the US Government to act.>49 We have, accordingly, yet another suggestion by a central figure in the Bush administration that another "Pearl Harbor" may be necessary to "galvanize the nation." This report was released on January 11, 2001, exactly nine months before the US suffered attacks from the air that our defenses appeared to be helpless to prevent. And the primary response evoked by these attacks was a sense of America's vulnerability. The chairman of the commission that issued the above report was, furthermore, well placed to take advantage of those attacks and the resulting sense of "US space vulnerability." As Meyssan points out, at a press conference that began at 6:42 PM on 9/11 itself, Rurnsfeld, now Secretary of Defense, used the attacks to browbeat Democratic Senator Carl Levin, who was then chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee (during the brief period of the Bush administration during which Democrats had control of the Senate). Before live camera, Rumsfeld said:

Senator Levin, you and other Democrats in Congress, have voicedfear that you simply don't have enough money for the large increase in defense that the Pentagon is seeking, especially for missile defense, and you fear that you'll have to dip into the Social Security funds to pay for it. Does this sort of thing convince you that an emergency exists in this country to increase defense spending, to dip into Social Security, if necessary, to pay for defense spending --increase defense spending?>50 It does appear that the attacks of 9/11 provided Rumsfeld with what he thought could pass for "a Space Pearl Harbor," and he seemed remarkably prepared to take advantage of it. Furthermore, if US officials were involved in facilitating the attacks of 9/11 Rumsfeld was not the only one with great interest in the Space Command. Its other primary advocate was its current commander, General Ralph E. Eberhart, who in his role as commander of NORAD was in charge of air traffic control on 9/11." Also, General Richard Myers, who was in the process of becoming the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was the Acting Chairman on 9/11, had previously been head of the US Space Command. Known by some as "General Starwars," he was in charge during the writing of "Vision for 2020," with its quite explicit expression of the intent to get absolute control of space so that the Pentagon can protect American commercial interests while they are increasing the gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots" of the world. Accordingly, the three men who have been most identified with advocacy of the US Space Force are also the three figures who would have been most directly involved in promulgating and overseeing a "stand down" order on 9/11, if such was given.

The evidence summarized in this chapter shows that officials of the Pentagon and the Bush administration would have had many reasons— from their plans for Afghanistan and Iraq to their desire for massive funding to weaponize space—for allowing, if not planning, the attacks of 911.Some of this evidence points to the truth of at least the seventh possible view—that the White House had specific knowledge of the attacks in advance, knowing that they would occur, for example in time to launch a war against Afghanistan before the winter snows started. Some of the evidence even suggests the eighth view, according to which the White House was involved in the planning. It is possible of course, that although central figures of the Bush administration evidently desired "a new Pearl Harbor," they did not plan the attacks but simply learned that they had been planned by others, so that all they had to do was to make sure that the attacks were not prevented.

Yet with all that was apparently riding on the occurrence of a new Pearl Harbor, reasonable people could conclude that the White House would not have left this occurrence to chance.

A Precedent: Operation Northwoods

All the information summarized so far arguably presents strong evidence pointing to US complicity in the attacks of 9/11 involving US intelligence agencies, the Pentagon, and the White House. But regardless of how strong this evidence may be considered, many and perhaps most Americans will resist the idea that this "attack on America" could have been an inside job, staged by America's own leaders. The primary responsibility of the president and vice president, their cabinet, US intelligence agencies, and US military leaders is to protect America and its citizens. Even if the official account of 9/11 leaves dozens of unanswered questions, the true account cannot, many Americans will assume, be that American political and military leaders colluded to allow, much less stage, the attacks of 9/11- Regardless of the benefits that may have been foreseen if a "new Pearl Harbor" were to occur; our military and political leaders would not have participated in a plan to bring about such an event. We feel that we know a priori that all conspiracy theories of this type are false, because American military and political leaders simply would not do such a thing.

In 1962, however, a plan was formulated that provides a partial precedent, a plan about which we now know because of recently declassified documents. The background to this plan was President Eisenhower's request to the CIA, near the end of his administration, to come up with a pretext to invade Cuba. The CIA formulated "A Program of Covert Operations Against the Castro Regime," the goal of which was "the replacement of the Castro regime with one more devoted to the true interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the US, in such a manner to avoid any appearance of US intervention.">52 Eisenhower had approved this plan. But after the next president, John Kennedy, accepted a CIA plan that led to the Bay of Pigs fiasco, he had responsibility for Cuba taken away from the CIA and assigned it to the Department of Defense Early in 1962, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Lyman Lemnitzer brought Kennedy a plan called Operation Northwoods.>53

According to the covering "Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense," signed by all the Joint Chiefs, this plan, marked Top Secret described "pretexts which would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba.">54 According to the "Memorandum for Chief of Operations, Cuba Project," a decision to intervene "will result from a period of heightened US-Cuban tensions which place the United States in the position of suffering justifiable grievances." It was important, the memorandum said, "to camouflage the ultimate objective." Part of the idea was to influence world opinion in general and the United Nations in particular "by developing the image of the Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere.">55

The plan then listed a series of possible actions to create this image. For example: "We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington...We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida (real or simulated).">56 Particularly interesting, in light of some of the proposed scenarios as to "what really happened" on 9/11 (see Ch. 1, n. 32), is the following idea:

It is possible to create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner.... The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday.... a. An aircraft at Eglin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplication for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplication would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone.

b. Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida. From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Eglin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba the drone will being [sic] transmitting on the international distress frequency a "MAY DAY" message stating he is under attack by Cuban MIG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by destruction of the aircraft which will be triggered by radio signal.>57

In this and some of the other plans, although casualty lists would be placed in US newspapers to "cause a wave of national indignation,">58 the subterfuge would not actually result in the loss of life. But this was not true of all of the plans, such as the plan to "sink a boatload of Cubans." At least one plan, furthermore, would have taken the lives of Americans. According to this idea, called a "Remember the Maine" incident: "We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba.">59

Kennedy rejected this plan, even though it was endorsed by all the joint chiefs. Those who say that, although military leaders might formulate such plans, an American president would never agree to such a despicable plan can point to this rejection as evidence. However, different presidents, in different circumstances, make different decisions. For example, in the early 1890s, a plan to annex Hawaii was rejected by President Grover Cleveland, whose secretary of state considered the plan "a selfish and dishonourable scheme of a lot of adventurers." But this scheme was accepted by the next president, William McKinley >60 (who was also the one who used the Maine incident to justify entering the war against Spain in order to take control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines). Accordingly, the fact that Kennedy turned down that particular plan at that particular time—shortly after the Bay of Pigs embarrassment—does not necessarily mean that all American presidents in all circumstances would turn down plans to achieve geopolitical goals through "incidents" involving the taking of innocent lives, even innocent American lives.>61

The evidence in this chapter, in any case, provides further support for the conclusion of Michel Chossudovsky, only partially quoted earlier, that the post-9/11 American war "is not a campaign against international terrorism. It is a war of conquest... [a] nd the American people have been consciously and deliberately deceived by their government.">62 The next chapter will provide one more kind of evidence presented by the critics for this conclusion.

FOOTNOTES chapter 7

hint: press the BACK-button on your browser to jump back to the original text-location 1These sources include Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, Forbidden Truth: US—Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2002), and .Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 2Ahmed, 55. 3Quoted in Phyllis Bennis, Before and After US Foreign Policy and the September llth Crisis (Northampton, Mass.: Olive Branch Press, 2003), 129. This quotation occurs in a section of her book headed "Oil, Oil Everywhere," 4Ahmed, 46-48, and Thompson, "Timeline," 1994 (B), citing Times of India, March 7, 2001, Asia Times, November 15, 2001, and CNN, October 5, 1996, and February 27, 2002. 5Rashid, Taliban, as quoted in Ted Rail, "It's All about Oil," San Francisco Chronicle, November 2, 2001. 6Telegraph, October 11, 1996, quoted in Timeline," September 27, 1996. 7P. Stobdan, The Afghan Conflict and Regional Security," Strategic Analysis 23/5 (August 1999): 719-47, cited in Ahmed, 50. 8"Timeline," August 9, 1998, quoting New York Times, December 8, 2001. 9"Timeline," quoting Telegraph, August 13, 1998. 10Ahmed, 50-51. 11Julio Godoy, "US Taliban Policy Influenced by Oil," Inter Press Service, November 16, 2001, quoted in Ahmed, 58-59. 12Jonathan Steele, et al, "Threat of US Strikes Passed to Taliban Weeks Before NY Attack," Guardian, September 22, 2001, quoted in Brisard and Dasquié, Forbidden Truth, 43, and Ahmed, 60. 13George Arney, "US 'Planned Attack on Taleban'," BBC News, September 18,2001, quoted in Ahmed, 60-61. (Taleban" is a spelling used by some British writers.) 14"Timeline," October 7, 2001 (B). 15Micheal C. Ruppert, "A Timliine Surrounding September 11th," From the Wilderness Publications (www.fromthewilderness.com), item 94. citing the account as published on the Common Dreams website (www.commondreams.org/views02/0614-02.htm). 16George Arney, "US 'Planned Attack on Tafeban'," BBC News, September 18, 2001, quoted in Ahmed, 60-61. 17This statement from the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv was quoted in the Chicago Tribune, February 18, 2002, which is in turn quoted in "Timeline," February 14, 2002. 18"Timeline," December 22, 2001, and January 1, 2002, and Ahmed, 260. 19Ahmed, 227, citing Frontier Post, October 10, 2001. 20Ahmed, 60-61. 21White House, March 13, quoted in "Timeline," March 13, 2002. 22In 1992, Wolfowitz and Libby were reportedly the principal authors of a draft of the Defense Planning Guidance document that, having been leaked to the New York Times, caused a furor because of its overtly imperialistic language. Although this draft was withdrawn, its main ideas reappeared in the Project for the New American Century's 2000 publication, Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century (available at www.newamericancentury.org). On this episode, see Andrew Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 43-46 (although Bacevich, referring to this document as the "Wolfowitz Indiscretion," does not mention Libby's participation). 23"Timeline," September 2000, citing Scotland Sunday Herald, September 7, 2002, which was quoting Rebuilding America's Defenses (see previous note). 24Edward Herman, "The Manufactured and Real Iraq Crisis," ZNet Commentary, February 3, 2003. 25This letter, dated January 26, 1998, is available at the website for the Project for the New American Century (www.newamericancentury.org). 26Thompson, "September 11" (2:40 PM), quoting CBS News, September 4, 2002. 27John Pilger, New Statesman, December 12, 2002, citing Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 49. Woodward adds: "Before the attacks, the Pentagon had been working for months on developing a military option for Iraq" and "Rumsfeld was raising the possibility that they could take advantage of the opportunity offered by the terrorist attacks to go after Saddam immediately." Woodward also points out that Rumsfeld was thereby echoing the position of his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz. 28Porritt's statement is quoted in James Kirkup, "US, UK Waged War on Iraq Because of Oil, Blair Adviser Says," May 1, 2003 (http://quote.bloomberg.com), which is reprinted on Michael Rupperts website, From the Wilderness Publications (www.fromthewilderness.com or www.copvcia.com). Paul O'Neill's charge is contained in a book by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Susskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), and in an interview on CBS's "60 Minutes" on January 11, 2004. According to O'Neill, who was a member of the National Security Council, the main topic within days of the inauguration was going after Saddam, with the issue being not "Why Saddam?" or "Why Now?" but merely "finding a way to do it." Susskind, whose book is primarily based on interviews with O'Neill and other officials, says that already in January and February of 2001 the Bush administration was discussing an occupation of Iraq and the question of how to divide up Iraq's oil (see story at www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/09/60minutes/main592330.shtml). 29Stephen Gowans, "Regime Change in Iraq: A New Government by and for US Capital," ZNet, April 20, 2003, quoting Robert Fisk, Independent, April 14, 2003. 30Thompson, "Timeline," 59, August 11, 2002, citing Newsweek, August 11, 2002. 31John Pilger, New Statesman, December 12, 2002. Although Perle talks in public about using war to bring democracy to the world, he knows that it has other uses. Shortly before the recent war in Iraq, he gave a talk to clients of Goldman Sachs about moneymaking opportunities that would arise from the imminent invasion. His "total war" vision was suggested by the ride of the talk, which was: "Implications of an Imminent War Iraq Now. North Korea Next?" See Maureen Dowd, "Perle's Plunder Blunder," New York Times, March 23, 2003, and Stephen Gowans, "Regime Change in Iraq: A New Government by and for US Capital," ZNet, April 20, 2003. 32Meyssan, 9/11: The Big Lie, 130. 33Richard Falk, The Great Terror War (Northampton, Mass.: Olive Branch Press, 2002), 108, 5. 34Bennis, Before and After, 163. 35Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 35-36. 36Ibid., 212, quoted in Ahmed, 73-77, and Thompson, "Timeline," 1997. 37Ibid., 24-25, quoted in Ahmed, 77. 38John Pilger, New Statesman, December 12, 2002, quoting the Project for the New American Century, Rebuilding America's Defenses, 51- The heading of Pilger's article reads: "Two years ago a project set up by the men who now surround George W. Bush said what America needed was 'a new Pearl Harbor.' Its published aims have, alarmingly, come true." 39Ibid. 40This document is available at www.spacecom.af.mil/usspace It is discussed in Jack Hitt, "The Next Battlefield May Be in Outer Space," New York Times Magazine, August 5, 2001, and Karl Grossman, Weapons in Space (New York: Seven Stories, 2001). 41This figure is reported in rhe Global Network Space Newsletter #14 (Fall, 2003), which is posted on the website of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space (www.space4peace.org). 42Falk, The Great Terror War, xxvii. Falk continues: "If this project aiming at global domination is consummated, or nearly so, it threatens the entire world with a kind of subjugation, and risks encouraging frightening new cycles of megaterrorism as the only available and credible strategy of resistance." 43The developments achieved already by 1998 are described in George Friedman and Meredith Friedman, The Future ofWar. Power, Technology and American World Dominance in the 21st Century (New York: St. Martin's, 1998). 44Jack Hitt, "The Next Battlefield May Be in Outer Space." 45Ibid. For a brief overview of this project, see Karl Grossman's Weapons in Space. 46The Project for the New American Century, Rebuilding America's Defenses, 54; quoted in Mahajan, Full Spectrum Dominance: US Power in Iraq and Beyond (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), 53-54. 47The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington: September 2002), 6. As John Pilger concluded (see note 38, above), most of the suggestions made in the Project for the New American Century's document were enacted by the Bush administration. This is not surprising, of course, given the overlap in personnel. 48Report of the Commission to Assess US National Security Space Management and Organization (www.defenselink.mil/cgi-bin/dlprint.cgi). 49Ibid., quoted in 9/11: The Big Lie, 151-52. 50Department of Defense News Briefing on Pentagon Attack (www.defenselink.mil/cgi-bin/dlprint.cgi), quoted in 9/11: The Big Lie, 152. 519/11: The Big Lie, 154. 52"A Program of Covert Operations Against the Castro Regime," April 16, 1961 (declassified CIA document), quoted in 9/11: The Big Lie, 140. 53This plan has come to be somewhat widely known through James Bamford's discussion of it in his Body of Secrets. 54This memorandum is printed in 9/11: The Big Lie, 198. 55This memorandum is printed in 9/11: The Big Lie, 199-205. The passages quoted here are on page 199. 56Ibid., 202-203. 57Ibid., 204. 58Ibid., 202. 59Idem. The extent to which another precedent was provided by the original Pearl Harbor is a question for another occassion. 60See Richard Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire (1960; New York: Norton, 1974), 177-79. 61John Pilger points to evidence that President George W. Bush has adopted a plan somewhat reminiscent of Operation Northwoods. Describing a secret army set up by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld ("similar to those run by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and which Congress outlawed"), Pilger reports that according to a classified document, this secret army, known as "the Proactive Preemptive Operations Group," will provoke terrorist attacks that would then require "counter-attack" by the United States on countries "harbouring the terrorists" (Pilger, New Statesman, December 12, 2002, citing a report by military analyst William Arkin, "The Secret War," Los Angeles Times, October 27, 2002). 62Chossudovsky, War and Clabalisation, 62.

CHAPTER EIGHT

DID US OFFICIALS BLOCK CAPTURES AND INVESTIGATIONS AFTER 9/11?

Having suggested that the "new Pearl Harbor" that occurred on 9/11 served as a pretext for a pre-established agenda, the critics then argue that US behavior after 9/11 supports this view. Portions of this behavior—namely, the wars against both Afghanistan and Iraq—were mentioned in the previous chapter. The present chapter summarizes evidence pointing to other examples of US behavior after 9/11 that point, according to critics, to the falsity of the official account.

Continuing the Anti-Hunt for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda

Ahmed and Thompson provide considerable evidence that although the war in Afghanistan was supposedly to root out al-Qaeda and bin Laden— taking him, in President Bush's language, "dead or alive"—the actual objective must have been something else, since there were several instances in which the government and its military commanders seemed at pains to allow bin Laden and al-Qaeda to escape.

For example, according to many residents of Kabul, a convoy of al-Qaeda forces, thought to include its top leaders, made a remarkable escape during one night in early November of 2001. A local businessman said:

We don't understand how they weren't all killed the night before because they came in a convoy of at least 1,000 cars and trucks. It was a very dark night, but it must have been easy for the American pilots to see the headlights. The main road was jammed from eight in the evening until three in the morning. Thompson comments: "With all of the satellite imagery and intense focus on the Kabul area at the time, how could such a force have escaped the city unobserved by the US?">1 Also early in November, US intelligence agencies, having watched al-Qaeda fighters and leaders move into the area of Jalalabad, reported that bin Laden himself had arrived. According to Knight-Ridder newspapers, this is what happened next:

American intelligence analysts concluded that bin Laden and his recreating fighters were preparing to flee across the border. But the US Central Command, which was running the war, made no move to block their escape. "It was obvious from at least early November that this area was to be the base for an exodus into Pakistan," said one intelligence official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity. "All of this was known, and frankly we were amazed that nothing was done to prepare for it.">2 Shortly thereafter, on November 14, the Northern Alliance captured Jalalabad. That night, a convoy of "several hundred cars" holding 1,000 or more al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters, evidently including bin Laden, escaped from Jalalabad and reached the fortress of Tora Bora. US forces bombed the nearby Jalalabad airport, but apparently not the convoy.>3 On November 16, approximately 600 al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters, including many senior leaders, reportedly escaped from Afghanistan, by taking a long trek to escape the bombing in the Tora Bora region. Although there are two main routes from the Tora Bora region to Pakistan, US planes bombed only one of these routes, so that the 600 men were able to escape unharmed by using the other one. Hundreds more reportedly continued to use this escape route over the next weeks, generally not bothered by US bombing or Pakistani border guards.>4 One Afghan intelligence officer reportedly said that he was astounded that the Americans did not station troops to block the most obvious exit routes. The Telegraph later said: "In retrospect, and with the benefit of dozens of accounts from the participants, the battle for Tora Bora looks more like a grand charade." Eyewitnesses expressed shock, it said, that US forces pinned in Taliban and al-Qaeda forces, thought to contain many high leaders, on three sides only, leaving the route to Pakistan open. An intelligence chief in Afghanistan's new government was quoted as saying: "The border with Pakistan was the key, but no one paid any attention to it.">5

A Special Forces soldier stationed in Fayetteville, North Carolinalater stated that on November 28, US forces had bin Laden pinned in a Tora Bora cave but failed to act. While Special Forces soldiers were waiting for orders, he said, they watched two helicopters fly into the area where bin Laden was believed to be, load up passengers, and fly toward Pakistan. This statement, made on condition of anonymity, is given more credibility, Thompson points out, by the fact that Newsweek separately reported that many Tora Bora locals claimed that "mysterious black helicopters swept in, flying low over the mountains at night, and scooped up al-Qaeda's top leaders.">6 "Perhaps just coincidentally," Thompson adds, the same day that this story was reported there was also a story reporting that five soldiers at Fayetteville—at least three of whom were Special Forces soldiers who had recently returned from Afghanistan—and their wives had died since June in apparent murder-suicides.>7

In late December of 2001, the new Afghan interior minister, Younis Qanooni, claimed that the ISI had helped bin Laden escape from Afghanistan.>8 For critics of the official account, this claim is significant given the fact that the Bush administration has considered Pakistan a partner in its post-9/11 efforts.

In March of 2002, this apparent lack of interest in killing or capturing bin Laden was put into words by the president himself, who said of bin Laden: "He's a person who's now been marginalized...! just don't spend that much time on him...I truly am not that concerned about him." The suspicion that the war was never about bin Laden, which Bush's statement could be taken to imply, was explicitly stated, Thompson points out, a month later by General Richard Myers, who said that "the goal has never been to get bin Laden.">9 Another American official was quoted as making an even more revealing statement, saying that "casting our objectives too narrowly" risked "a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr. bin Laden was captured.">10 A way of making sense of all this was provided by George Monbiot, who wrote a week after 9/11:

If Osama bin Laden did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. For the past four years, his name has been invoked whenever a US president has sought to increase the defence budget or wriggle out of arms control treaties. He has been used to justify even President Bush's missile defence programme.... Now he has become the personification of evil required to launch a crusade for good: the face behind the faceless terror.... [H]is usefulness to western governments lies in his power to terrify. When billions of pounds of military spending are at stake, rogue states and terrorist warlords become assets precisely because they are liabilities.>11 Monbiots statement, in conjunction with the American officicial's concern about a "premature collapse of the international effort," provides apossible explanation as to why the "hunt for bin Laden" was unsuccessful. Concealing the Role of Pakistan's ISI

As we saw earlier, the CIA and its counterpart in Pakistan, the ISI, worked together in the late 1990s to create the Taliban and ensure its victory. This point is reinforced by Chossudovsky, who says: "Without US support channeled through the Pakistani ISI, the Taliban would not have been able to form a government in 1996.">12 Furthermore, he says, just as without the ISI there would have been no Taliban government in Kabul, "without the unbending support of the US government, there would be no powerful military-intelligence apparatus in Pakistan.">13 This close relationship between the CIA and the ISI goes back to the 1980s, during which the ISI was the local agency through which the CIA conducted its covert operation in Afghanistan, which began in 1979. The CIA and the ISI recruited radical Muslims from around the world to form the Mujaheddin to fight against Soviet forces.>14 Osama bin Laden was originally brought to Pakistan to help with this effort. Although he was under contract to the CIA, "the CIA gave Usama free rein in Afghanistan, as did Pakistan's intelligence generals"—Ahmed quotes John Cooley as saying—and bin Laden used that free rein and his accumulated wealth to begin organizing al-Qaeda in 1985.>15 In the late 1980s, Pakistan's President Benazir Bhutto, seeing how strong the Mujaheddin movement was becoming, told President Bush: "You are creating a Frankenstein.">16 Then in the late 1990s, after the CIA had worked with the ISI to create the Taliban, South East Asia specialist Selig Harrison who knew CIA agents, reports that he warned them that they "were creating a monster.">17

And if both al-Qaeda and the Taliban were reportedly becoming monstrous, the same was said of the ISI itself. After the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan, the ISI, which had at the instigation of the CIA begun producing heroin in order to turn Soviet soldiers into addicts, began smuggling its heroin into Western countries, using the huge profits to build itself up. As a result, said one analyst, the ISI became a "parallel structure wielding enormous power over all aspects of government." Time magazine later confirmed this analysis, saying that the "notorious" ISI "is commonly branded 'a state within the state,' or Pakistan's 'invisible government,'" and a story in the New Yorker called the ISI "a parallel government of its own.">18

This history of the ISI, with its links to the CIA on the one hand and al-Qaeda and the Taliban on the other, is important in light of evidence that these links were never broken. Chossodovsky, rejecting the view that the "Osama-CIA links belong to the 'bygone era' of the Soviet-Afghan war," asserts: "The CIA has never severed its ties to the 'Islamic Militant Network.'">19 And Ahmed quotes Selig Harrison's statement, made in March of 2001, that "[t]he CIA still has close links with the ISI.">20

These links are also supported by an investigator with a very different political perspective from Ahmed's and Chossudovky's, Gerald Posner. I cited earlier Posners report on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah insofar as it dealt with Zubaydah's claim that his al-Qaeda activities were carried out on behalf of Saudi officials. Zubaydah also reportedly said that it was on behalf of Pakistani officials. "According to Zubaydah," reports Posner,

he was present in 1996, in Pakistan, when bin Laden struck a deal with Mushaf Ali Mir, a highly placed military officer with close ties to some of the most pro-Islamist dements in ISI. It was a relationship that was still active and provided bin Laden and al-Qaeda protection, arms, and supplies.>21 Posner also reports that, just as three of the Saudis identified by Zubaydah died within four months, the same fate befell Musfaaf Ali Mir seven months later. On February 20, 2003, he, his wife, and many of his closest confidants were killed when their air force plane—which had recently passed inspection—went down in good weather.>22 Accordingly, although Posner accepts the official American position on most issues, he here presents evidence against the US attempt to distance the Pakistanis, portrayed as good, from bin Laden and al-Qieda, portrayed as evil. In any case, the importance of the fact that the ISI continued to be closely linked with both the CIA and al-Qaeda may have been made manifest by a discovery coming shortly after 9/11 - This was the disovery that an ISI agent, Saeed Sheikh, had made a wire transfer of $100.000 to Mohamed Atta's bank accounts in Florida, and that he had done this at the instruction of none other than General Mahrnoud Ahmad, the Director of the ISI.>23 Accordingly, the ISI, which had continued to work closely with the CIA, was discovered to have secretly sent money to the man considered to be the ringleader of the 9/11 terrorists. This "damning link," as Agence France-Press called it, was reportedly first revealed to the US government by the Indian government.>24

The discovery of this transfer took on even more potential significance when it was learned that General Mahmoud Ahmad had been in Washington on 9/11—having, in fact, been there from September 4 until several days after 9/11. During this period, he reportedly met with CIA Director George Tenet until September 9, then met with officials in the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and the State Department, as well as with the chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence committees. The News, a leading newspaper in Pakistan, made this significant comment on September 10: "What added interest to [General Ahmad's] visit is the history of such visits. Last time [his] predecessor was [in Washington], the domestic [Pakistani] politics turned topsy-turvy within days." The reference, Thompson points out, is to the coup of October 12, 1999, when General Musharraf took over the government—after which he made General Ahmad, who had been instrumental to the success of the coup, the Director of the ISI.>25

Big things also happened on the occasion of this visit, and not only the attacks of 9/11 itself. On September 9, the leader of the Northern Alliance, Ahmad Masood, was the victim of an assassination, which the Northern Alliance declared to be the work of the ISI. That this assassination followed immediately upon extended conversations between the head of the ISI and the head of the CIA is especially significant, suggests Chossudovsky, in light of the fact that the United States had long been seeking to "weaken Masood, who was perceived as a nationalist reformer." Suggesting that this assassination "served US interests," Chossudovsky adds that after Masood was dead, "the Northern Alliance became fragmented into different factions. Had Masood not been assassinated, he would have become the head of the post-Taliban government formed in the wake of the US bombings of Afghanistan.">26 These reflections provide a possible explanation of the treatment of Julie Sirrs by the Defense Intelligence Agency, discussed in Chapter 6.

The significance of Masoods assassination was perhaps alluded to by John O'Neill, the investigator who had resigned from the FBI after having his attempts to investigate al-Qaeda obstructed. On September 10, the day after Masood's assassination, O'Neill moved into his new office in the North Tower of the WTC, where he had become director of security, and on 9/11 he was one of the people killed. On the night of September 10, he had reportedly told a colleague: "We're due for something big. I don't like the way things are lining up in Afghanistan.">27

From the perspective of the critics of the official account of 9/11, the fact that Masood was assassinated while the ISI chief was visiting Washington might have been one of the reasons Washington tried to keep this visit quiet. In any case, a comparison of transcripts of Condoleezza Rice's press conference on May 16, 2002, suggests, believes Chossudovsky, that the Bush administration did want to keep General Ahmads presence in Washington from being widely known. The transcript from the Federal News Service shows that the following interchange occurred:

QUESTION: Are you aware of the reports at the time that the ISI chief was in Washington on September 11th, and on September 10th, $100,000 was wired from Pakistan to these groups in this area? And why he was here? Was he meeting with you or anybody in the administration? MS. RICE: I have not seen that report, and he was certainly not meeting with me. Besides the question whether it is credible that the head of Pakistan's intelligence agency would meet with the National Security Council but not with the president's National Security Advisor, the other suspicious thing is that, as pointed out by Chossudovsky, the White House version of this transcript begins thus: QUESTION: Dr. Rice, are you aware of the reports at the time that (inaudible) was in Washington on September 11th...? This version of the transcript, which—unlike the transcript from the Federal News Service—does not contain the information that the person being discussed was "the ISI chief," was the one reported on the CNN show "Inside Politics" later that day.>28 The suspicion that US officials wanted to conceal the ISI connection is also suggested by the evidence, raised by Chossudovsky, that the FBI, in reporting on the connection with Pakistan, did not specifically mention General Ahmad, Saeed Sheikh, or the ISI. For example, Brian Ross of ABC News reported that he had been told by federal authorities that they had "tracked more than $100,000 from banks in Pakistan." Ross also reported that according to Time magazine, "some of that money ... can be traced directly to people connected to Osama bin Laden.">29 The FBI's way of reporting the story, saying that the money came from "people connected to Osama bin Laden," diverted attention from General Ahmad, Saeed Sheikh, and the ISI. Indeed, thus laundered, the potentially embarrassing discovery about the transfer of money was used to confirm the official account—that primary responsibility for the attacks belonged to Osama bin Laden.

Later evidence suggested that Saeed Sheikh had transferred even more money to Atta. Thompson says that evidently $100,000 was transferred in 2000 and another $100,000 on August 11 of 2001, and that it is not clear to which of these transfers the story that broke in October referred.>30 Also, the New York Times suggested that a total of about $325,000 was transferred to Atta's Florida accounts by one "Mustafa Ahmed," and this name was thought by some, including the Guardian and CNN, to be an alias for Saeed Sheikh.>31 This individual's final transfers to Atta's account occurred on September 8 and 9.>32 "These last-minute transfers," Thompson reports, "are touted as the 'smoking gun' proving al-Qaeda involvement in the 9/11 attacks, since Saeed is a known financial manager for bin Laden." However, Thompson asks, "since Saeed also works for the ISI, aren't these transfers equally a smoking gun of ISI involvement in the 9/11 attacks?">33

Chossudovsky takes this thought a step further, calling the story of the ISI's transfer of money to Atta, in conjunction with the presence of the ISI chief in Washington during the week, "the missing link behind 9-11." According to his summary statement:

The 9-11 terrorists did not act on their own volition. The suicide hijackers were instruments in a carefully planned intelligence operation. The evidence confirms that al-Qaeda is supported by Pakistan's ISI [and it is amply documented that] the ISI owes its existence to the CIA.>34 Chossudowski, accordingly, believes that this evidence suggests possible complicity by "key individuals within the US military-intelligence Establishment," adding: "Whether this amounts to complicity on the part of the Bush administration remains to be firmly established. The least one can expect at this stage is an inquiry.">35 Chossudowsky is not alone in his musings on the possibility that the money transfer might point to direct US involvement in the planning of 9/11. Ahmed and Jared Israel both ask whether the long-time connection between the CIA and the ISI might mean that US financial aid was funneled to al-Qaeda through the ISI.>36 This possibility is also suggested by a story in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, which said: "There are many in Musharraf's government who believe that Saeed Sheikh's power comes not from the ISI, but from his connections with our own CIA. The theory is that...Saeed Sheikh was bought and paid for.">37

Ahmed, realizing that the suggestion of CIA financing is speculative, believes that what happened next at least demonstrated that Washington did not want the continuing relationship between al-Qaeda and the ISI explored. On October 8, just before the beginning of the bombing campaign in Afghanistan, General Ahmad gave up his position with the ISI. Although it was publicly announced that he had decided it was time to retire, a story in the Times of India said: "the truth is more shocking." This more shocking truth was that after India had given US officials evidence of the money transfer ordered by General Ahmad, he had been quietly dismissed after "US authorities sought his removal.">38 For Ahmed, this behavior suggests a cover-up:

The US, which one would think would be spearheading a full-scale investigation into the role of the ISI, actually prevented one from going ahead by asking from behind the scenes for the ISI chief...to quietly resign.... By pressuring the then ISI Director-General to resign without scandal on the pretext of reshuffling, while avoiding any publicity with respect to his siphoning of funds to alleged lead hijacker Mohamed Area, the US had effectively blocked any sort of investigation into the matter. It prevented wide publicity of these facts, and allowed the ISI chief, who was clearly complicit in the terrorist attacks of 11 th September, to walk away free.

Whatever the motivations behind such a cynical policy, it is indisputable that the US response at least suggests a significant degree of indirect complicity on the part of the US government, which appears more interested in protecting, rather than investigating and prosecuting, a military intelligence agency that funded the lead hijacker in the WTC and Pentagon attacks.>39

Chossudovsky likewise finds it disturbing that "the Bush administration refuses to investigate these ISI links.">40 Another possible connection between the ISI and 9/11 is Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, identified by the US government as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks (as well as one of the planners of Project Bojinka, the 1993 bombing of the WTC, and the bombing of the USS Cole). In 1999, according to reports, he repeatedly visited Atta's apartment in Hamburg.>41 As we saw earlier, the day before 9/11 he evidently gave Atta final approval during a telephone call intercepted by the NSA. All this is generally known (with the proviso that, according to the NSA, it did not translate the content of that call until after 9/11). What has rarely been mentioned, however, is evidence that Mohammed, a Pakistani, had links to the ISI. One of the few exceptions to this silence was Josef Bodansky, the director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, who stated in 2002 that Mohammed was related to the ISI, which had acted to shield him.>42 If this is correct, then the day before 9/11, Mohamed Atta was given money by one ISI agent (Saeed Sheikh) and final authorization by another ISI agent (Khalid Shaikh Mohammed). We will see below, furthermore, that there is evidence that Saeed and Mohammed worked closely together on another ISI-related operation.

Further Evidence that the ISI Should Be Investigated

Critics of the official account of 9/11 report that in addition to the fact that US officials evidendy tried to cover up the connection between die ISI and the al-Qaeda operatives in the United States, there have been still other stories about the ISI suggesting that any real attempt to understand 9/11 would need to focus on it. Some of these stories have involved investigative reporters.

In November of 2001, Christina Lamb was in Pakistan investigating the connections between the ISI and the Taliban, but the ISI had her arrested and expelled from the country.>43 In late January of 2002, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped while in Pakiscan investigating, according to a story in the Washington Post "links between Pakistani extremists and Richard C. Reid, the British man accused of trying to blow up an American airliner with explosives hidden in his sneakers." Pearl, who had read a story in the Boston Globe suggesting that Reid may have had ties to a religious group called Al-Fuqra, was evidently going to see its leader, Ali Gilani, when he was kidnapped. Gilani reportedly had links with Saeed Sheikh and the ISI. The story in the Washington Post continued: "As part of that probe, Pearl may have soured into areas involving Pakistan's secret intelligence organisations,">44 The US press suspected early on, therefore, that the ISI was responsible for Pearl's fate.

That the kidnappers were not just ordinary terrorists was suggested by their demands, especially their demand that the United States sell F-16 fighters to Pakistan. As Thompson comments: "No terrorist group had ever shown interest in the F-16's, but this demand and the others reflect the desires of Pakistan's military and the ISI.">45 It was reported by UPI at me end of January, in fact, that US intelligence believed the kidnappers to be connected to the ISI.>46 After this, stories about Pearl would only seldom mention the ISI.

After it was learned that Pearl had been murdered, it was also learned that Saeed, the ISI agent who had wired $100,000 to Mohamed Atta, had been involved in the kidnapping. The ISI picked him up and held him secretly for a week, after which neither Saeed nor the ISI would discuss what had transpired that week. The Pakistani police then attributed Pearl's murder to him. Saeed at first confessed, but, after he was sentenced to hang, he recanted. Thompson asks: "Did Saeed work out a secret deal during his 'missing week' in ISI custody to get a light sentence, a deal that is later broken?">47 In any case, between Saeeds arrest and his conviction, Thompson reports, some news stories mentioned his links to al-Qaeda, some mentioned his links to ISI, and a few mentioned that he might have been related to both groups, but many stories failed to mention either connection. By the time of Saeed's conviction in July of 2002, moreover, "not a single US newspaper is connecting Saeed to either al-Qaeda or the ISI." Thompson asks: "Is the media afraid of reporting any news that could imply a connection between the ISI and the 9/11 attacks?">48

The same question could be asked, furthermore, with regard to the reporting about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's involvement in the Pearl case. In 1997, former CIA agent Robert Baer was told by a former police chief in Qatar—to which Mohammed had fled after the exposure of the Bojinka plot in the Philippines—that Mohammed was one of bin Laden's key aides.>49 Baer then told Pearl about Mohammed, so Pearl may have been looking into the connection between Reid and Mohammed. Investigators later came to believe, in any case, that Reid operated under Mohammed's supervision.>50 They also came to believe that Mohammed was the mastermind behind the kidnapping.>51 Furthermore, Josef Bodansky, the man who claimed in 2002 that Mohammed had ties to the ISI, also claimed then that Mohammed was the one who ordered Pearl's murder,>52 and in October of 2003, reporter John Lupkin said that US officials "now have new information that leads them to believe [Mohammed] killed Pearl.">53 In this story, however, there is no mention of a possible ISI connection. Pearl is said to have been working on "a story on Islamic militants." And the only organization to which Mohammed is connected is al-Qaeda.

In any case, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, thought to be the mastermind behind 9/11, is also thought to be behind the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl. If that is so, it would not be a big leap to infer that Pearl may have been killed out of fear that he was uncovering the truth about 9/11. And if Mohammed was indeed connected with ISI, this would be further reason to suspect ISI involvement in 9/11.

Yet another story involving the ISI and reporters began when Pakistan's government failed in February of 2002 to prevent the News from publishing a story about Saeed's connections to the ISI. Saeed had not only admitted his involvement in attacks on the Indian parliament, the story revealed, but had also said that the ISI had helped him finance, plan, and execute the attacks. Shortly thereafter, the ISI pressured the News to fire the four journalists who worked on the story and also demanded an apology from the newspaper's editor. The journalists were fired and the editor fled the country.>54 After summarizing these reports, Thompson adds: "This information comes from an article tided, 'There's Much More To Daniel Pearl's Murder Than Meets the Eye,' and that certainly seems to be the case.">55

The fact that the ISI apparently has so much to hide, combined with the fact that an American journalist was reportedly kidnapped and perhaps murdered by the same ISI agent who had sent money to Mohamed Atta, should, one would think, make US intelligence agencies very anxious to interview Saeed to learn all they could about the ISI. The Washington Post, for example, said: "The [ISI] is a house of horrors waiting to break open. Saeed has tales to tell.">56 However, in late February of 2002, Time magazine stated that the second highest Taliban official in US custody, Mullah Haji Abdul Samat Khaksar, had after several months still been waiting to talk to the CIA, even though he had reportedly volunteered the information that "ISI agents are still mixed up with the Taliban and al-Qaeda." Many months later, the Indian Express was wondering why Saeed, sitting in a Pakistani prison, still had not been interviewed by US intelligence agencies.>57 This lack of curiosity suggests to critics of the official account that US intelligence agencies assumed that these men had nothing to tell them that they did not already know.

Far from pursuing the ISI connections, in fact, Washington seemed intent on denying that there were any. In March of 2002, Secretary of State Powell declared that there were no links between Pearl's murder and "elements of the ISI." In light of the overwhelming evidence that the main suspect, Saeed Sheikh, worked for the ISI, said the Guardian, Powell's denial was "shocking.">58 Shortly thereafter, when Attorney General Ashcroft announced a criminal indictment against Saeed, there was no mention of his financing of the 9/11 attacks.>59

These incidents suggesting an official desire to cover up ISI involvement, furthermore, reportedly had a startling precedent in 1999. According to later reports, an informant for the US government, Randy Glass, made a wire-recording of a conversation at a dinner involving himself, some illegal arms dealers, and an ISI agent named Rajaa Gulum Abbas. This dinner, which took place on July 14, 1999, and was observed by FBI agents at nearby tables pretending to be customers, was at a restaurant within view of the WTC. Abbas, besides saying that he wanted to buy a shipload of stolen US military weapons to give to bin Laden, pointed to the WTC and said: "Those towers are coming down.">60 In June of 2002, Abbas was secredy indicted for attempting to buy US military weapons illegally. But when the indictment was finally revealed in March of 2003, it made "no mention of Pakistan, any ties to Afghanistan's former Taliban regime or the ultimate destination of the weapons.">61

If the part of this story about the towers is true, it suggests, obviously, that the plan to attack the WTC was discussed long before the Bush administration took office, and even before September of 2000, when the Project for the New Amencan Century published its manifesto with its reference to the good that could come out of a new Pearl Harbor." And if true, moreover, it makes the circumstantial case for ISI involvement in the planning for 9/11 even stronger, adding further interest to the fact that the Bush administration has been so intent to keep the ISI's nameout of all stories about 9/11.

FBI Flight from Flight School Investigations

Further lack of curiosity about the background to the attacks was shown by the FBI in relation to a story, which broke four days after 9/11, that many of the alleged hijackers had received flight training at US military installations. These installations included the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, and the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California.>62 The Pensacola station was even listed on the drivers licenses of three of the men as their permanent address.>63 When asked about this report, a spokesperson for the US Air Force said that while the names were similar, "we are probably not talking about the same people.">64

TV producer, book author, and investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker reports that when he asked a major in the Air Force's Public Affairs Office about this story, she said: "Biographically, they're not the same people. Some of the ages are 20 years off." But when Hopsicker, replying that he was interested only in Mohamed Atta, asked if she was "saying that the age of the Mohamed Atta who attended the Air Forces International Officer's School at Maxwell Air Force Base was different from the terrorist Atta's age as reported," she replied: "Urn, er, no." Then when Hopsicker said that he would like information about the Mohamed Atta who had attended the school at Maxwell, so that he could contact him, the major reportedly said that she did not think he was going to get that information. On September 16, news reports said that, with regard to Atta and two other men who had reportedly attended US military schools: "Officials would not release ages, country of origin or any other specific details of the three individuals.">65

Even US senators evidently got stonewalled. When Florida's Senator Bill Nelson learned that three of the hijackers had been trained at Pensacola Naval Station, he sent a letter to Attorney General Ashcroft asking if this was true. Hopsicker reports that when a spokesman for Senator Nelson was asked about this, he said: "we never got a definitive answer from the Justice Department. So we asked the FBI for an answer... Their response to date has been that they are trying to sort through something complicated and difficult."

Nevertheless, on October 10, with this "complicated and difficult" problem unsolved and dozens of other facts seeming to scream out for an extensive and intensive investigation, FBI Director Mueller, calling the FBI's month-long investigation of 9/11 "the most exhaustive in its history," declared it over. Officials reportedly said that Mueller's attitude was that his agents now had "a broad understanding of the events of September 11" and that it "was now time to move on.">66 Mueller, according to the Washington Post, "described reports that several of the hijackers had received flight training in the United States as news, quite obviously.'" But he had the agents who were investigating this news reassigned.>67 "The investigative staff has to be made to understand," one law enforcement official was quoted as saying, "that we're not trying to solve a crime now.">68

To critics of the official account, a cover-up is suggested not only by the FBI's refusal to investigate this story but also by evidence that it had earlier tried to conceal the training received by some of the hijackers at two flight schools in Venice, Florida. Hopsicker, reporting that many of the men had trained at these two schools, also reports that just 18 hours after the 9/11 attacks—at 2 AM—FBI agents came to both schools and removed student files.>69 This story, like the one about the FBI confiscating the film from the gas station across from the Pentagon immediately after the crash there, lends additional support to the charge that the FBI had rather specific advance knowledge.

The FBI's Quick Release of Omar al-Bayoumi

One fact about post-9/11 investigations that the critics of the official account find significant is that whereas many people with no apparent connections to the hijackers were arrested and held for long periods, some people with seemingly obvious connections were, if arrested at all, quickly released. For example, reports Thompson, back in 1999, when Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar—who would later be named as two of the hijackers—first entered the country, they were met at the airport in Los Angeles by a Saudi named Umar al-Bayoumi. He drove them to San Diego and provided an apartment for them. He also helped them open a bank account, obtain car insurance, get Social Security cards, and call flight schools in Florida.>70 As the CongressionalJoint Inquiry would later learn, "One of the FBI's best sources in San Diego informed the bureau that he thought that al-Bayoumi," who seemed to have access to large sums of money, "must be an intellignece officer for Saudi Arabia,">71 Two months before 9/11, al-Bayoumi moved to England. After 9/11, he was arrested by British agents working with the FBI. However, the FBI, ostensibly accepting his story that he had met Alhazmi and Almihdhar by coincidence, angered British agents by releasing him "after a week without charge." Thompson comments: "Al-Bayoumis quick release is in sharp contrast to that of hundreds of US Muslims who are held anonymously for many monris after 9/11 despite having no connections to terrorism of any kind.">72

A Cover-Up at the NSA?

In late October of 2001, the Boston Globe reported that some government intelligence officials were furious because, they said information pertinent to the 9/11 investigation was being destroyed by the National Security Agency (NSA). They also claimed that possible leads were not being followed because of lack of cooperation by the NSA.>73 In a story that Thompson evidently thinks might be related, investigative reporter James Bamford, an authority on the NSA, reported that at least six of the identified hijackers, including all of those that boarded Flight 77 from Washington, had from August until 9/11 been "living, working, planning and developing all their activities in Laurel, Maryland, which happens to be the home of the NSA. So they were actually living alongside NSA employees as they were plotting all these things.">74 This fact might be simply a coincidence, but the accusations of a cover-up by NSA officials could make one wonder.

Later Developments Involving Moussaoui

On July 2, 2002, motions from Zacarias Moussaoui were unsealed infederal court. Claiming to have information showing the US goverment wanted the attacks of September to happen, Moussaoui indicated that hewanted to testify before both a grand jury and Congress.>75 Thus far what he has to say has not been made public.

In September of 2002, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh revealed that federal prosecutors had not discussed a plea bargain with Moussaoui since he had been indicted the previous November. Reporting that Moussaoui's lawyers, and some FBI officials, remain bewildered at the government's failure to pursue a plea bargain," Hersh quoted a federal public defender as saying: "I've never been in a conspiracy case where the government wasn't interested in knowing if the defendant had any information—to see if there wasn't more to the conspiracy.">76

On July of 2003, an Associated Press story contained the following statements:

Defying a court order, the Justice Department said Monday it would not make an al-Qaeda witness available to terrorism suspect Zacarias Moussaoui—even though prosecutors understood this could mean dismissal of the charges. The only US case to arise from the September 11 attacks could be sent to a military tribunal if US District Judge Leonie Brinkema dismissed the case....

The government said it recognizes that its objection means the deposition of suspected September 11 organizer Ramzi Binalshibh cannot go forward. The Justice Department's decision also "obligates the court now to dismiss the indictment unless the court finds that the interests of justice can be served by another action," the prosecution filing said....

Brinkema has ruled that Moussaoui, who is representing himself, should be allowed to question Binalshibh via a satellite hookup. The exchange, which the government is desperately trying to stop, could be played to jurors if Moussaoui's case goes to trial...

Repeating earlier arguments, the government said Monday: "The deposition, which would involve an admitted and unrepentant terrorist (the defendant) questioning one of his al-Qaeda confederates, would necessarily result in the unauthorized disclosure of classified information. Such a scenario is unacceptable to the government, which not only carries the responsibility for prosecuting the defendant, but also of protecting this nations security at a time of war with an enemy who already murdered thousands of our citizens.">77

From the point of view of critics of the official account of 9/11, these stories suggest that the Justice Department's primary concern is not to find out what really happened, nor to prosecute the man who has beenknown as "the 20th hijacker," but to keep him from speaking in public. Promotions Instead of Punishment

The two major theories to account for the failure to prevent the attacks of 9/11, as we have seen, are the complicity theory and the incompetence theory. As Barrie Zwicker pointed out, "Incornpetence usually earns reprimands," so the incompetence theory is weakened in the eyes of critics by the absence of reprimands. Thompson reports for example, that over a year after 9/11, the directors of the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA all admitted before a congressional committee that no individuals in their agencies had been fired or even punished for missteps connected to 9/11.>78

To the contrary, Thompson adds, some of them were promoted. For example, Marion "Spike" Bowman—the agent at FBI headquarters who altered the Minneapolis FBI's request for the warrant to search Moussaouis belongings—was in December of 2002 given an FBI award for "exceptional performance." This award came, furthermore, after a congressional report said that Bowman's RFU unit had given Minneapolis FBI agents "inexcusably confused and inaccurate information" that was "patently false.">79

Reflecting on this and other promotions, a former Justice Department official said that FBI Director Mueller had "promoted the exact same people who have presided over the—failure.">80 Such actions, of course, give critics support for their contention that from the point of the FBI and the Bush administration more generally, the events of 9/11 represented not a failure but a spectacular success.

For the critics of the official account, the evidence summarized in this chapter, which concerns official US behavior after 9/11, furtherstrengthens the case for concluding not only that the official account is false but also that the true account would point to US complicity. For one thing, the evidence that American forces did not really try to capture

Osama bin Laden suggests that his long-term relationship with US agencies had not really, as the official account says, come to an end. As to exactly which US institutions were involved in the conspiracy, evidence in this chapter, more than that in previous ones, suggests CIA involvement. This chapter also provides further evidence of complicity by the White House, at least in the attempt to cover up the ISI's—and thereby the CIA's—involvement. With regard to White House involvement in the planning: If the prediction about the WTC towers made by an ISI agent in 1999 really occurred and reflected a joint ISI-CIA plan, then that plan must have been formulated long before it was certain that George W. Bush would become president. If he was involved in the planning, he would most likely have been brought in after the basic plan had already been formulated.

FOOTNOTES to Chapter 8:

hint: press the BACK-button on your browser to jump back to the original text-location 1Thompson, "Timeline," early November 2001 (A), quoting London Times, July 22,2002. 2Knight-Ridder, October 20, 2002, quoted in "Timeline," Early November (B). 3Sydney Morning Herald, November 14, 2001, Christian Science Monitor, March 4 2002, and Knight-Ridder, November 20, 2002, cited in "Timeline," November 10, 2001 4Newsweek, August 11, 2002, cited in "Timeline," November 16, 2001 (B). 5Christian Science Monitor, March 4, 2002, and Telegraph, February 23, 2002, cited in "Timeline," early December 2001. 6"Timeline," November 28, 2001, citing Fayetteville Observer, August 2, and Newsweek, August 11, 2002. 7Timeline," November 28, 2001, citing Independent, August 2, 2002. 8BBC, December 30, 2001, cited in "Timeline," December 30, 2001. 9"Timeline," March 13, 2002, quoting the White House, March 13, and the Department of Defense, April 6, 2002. 10Ahmed, 78, quoting Daily Mirror, November 16, 2001. 11George Monbiot, "The Need for Dissent," Guardian, September 18, 2001, quoted in Ahmed, 295-96. 12Chossudovsky, War and Globalisation, 60. 13Ibid., 61. 14Ibid., 22-23; "Timeline," March 1985, citing Washington Post, Jury 19, 1992, and Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 15Ahmed, 177-78, quoting John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism (London: Pluto, 1999), 120, 226. Another thing that the CIA, the ISI, and bin Laden had in common, Thompson reports, is that they all had accounts in the now notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), which was based in Pakistan ("Timeline" July 5, 1991, citing Detroit News, September 30, 2001, and Washington Post, February 17, 2002). 16Newsweek, October 1, 2001, quoted in "Timeline," March 1985. 17Times of India, March 7, 2001, and CNN, February 27, 2002, quoted in "Timeline," March 1994 (B). 18Time, May 6, 2002, quoted in "Timeline," 1984; New Yorker, October 29, 2001, quoted in "Timeline," October 7, 2001. 19Chossudovsky, War and Globalisatum, 38. 20Ahmed, 216, quoting Selig Harrison, "Creating the Taliban: 'CIA Made a Historic Mistake,'" Rationalist International Bulletin No. 68: March 19, 2001 (http://rationalistinternational.net). 21Ahmed, 189. 22Gerald Posner, Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9111 (New York: Random House, 2003), 193. 23ABC News, September 30, and Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2001, cited in "Timeline," May 2000. 24Agence France-Presse, October 10, 2001, cited in Chossudovsky, War and Globalisation, 58. 25"Timeline," October 12, 1999, citing the News, September 10,2001. 26Chossudovsky, War and Globalisation, 52-54, 60. 27PBSs Frontline, October 3, 2002, quoted in "Timeline," August 23, 2001. 28Chossudovsky, War and Globalisation, 156-58. 29Ibid., 58-59, quoting Brian Ross on ABC's "This Week," September 30,2001. 30"Timeline," October 7, 2001. 31"Timeline," Septembre 8-11, 2001 (C), citing Guardian, October 1, and CNN, October 6, 2001. Thompson adds that although earlier the media had "sometimes made the obvious connection that the paymaster was the British man Saeed Sheikh, a financial expert who studied at the London School of Economics" (see "Timeline," June 1993-October 1994), after October 8, when the story that ISI Director Ahmad ordered Saeed to give Mohamed Atta $100,000 began to break, "References to the 9/11 paymaster being the British Saeed Sheikh.-.suddenly disappear from the Western media (with one exception [CNN, 10/28/01])." Thompson then documents the fact that the Western media began referring to this individual, under numerous names, as Egyptian or Saudi Arabian, rather than Pakistani. One of the results of this confusion was that, conveniendy, the paymaster came to be identified as "Sheikh Saiid," said to be an alias for Sa'd al-Sharif, one of bin Laden's brothers-in-law. For details about the massive confusion in the press about the name of the paymaster, see "Timeline," October 1, October 16, November 11, December 11, 2001, January 23, June 4, June 18, September 4, and December 26, 2002. See also two articles by Chaim Kupferberg (who prefers to call the paymaster Omar Saeed), "Daniel Pearl and the Paymaster of 9/11: 9/11 and the Smoking Gun that Turned on its Teacher," and "There's Something about Omar." These two articles were posted September 21, 2002, and October 21, 2003, respectively, on the website of the Centre for Research on Globalisation (www.globalresearch.ca) http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KUP310A.html. 32"Timeline," September 8-11, 2001 (C), citing New York Times, July 10, 2002, and Financial Times, November 30, 2001. 33"Timeline," September 8-11, 2001 (C), citing Guardian on the relationship between Saeed Sheikh and bin Laden. 34Chossudovsky, War and Globalisation, 146. 35Ibid., 62. 36Ahmed, 218, 226, citing Jared Israel, "Did 'Our' Allies, Pakistani Intelligence, Fund the WTC Attackers?" The Emperor's New Clothes www.emperors-clothes.com October 15,2001. 37Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, March 3, 2002, quoted in Thompson, "Timeline," 1999 (I). 38Ahmed, 218-19, citing Manoj Joshi, "India Helped FBI Trace ISI-Terrorist Links," Times of India, October 9, 2001. 39Ibid., 224, 225. 40Chossudovsky, War and Globalisation, 62. 41New York Times, November 4, and Associated Press, August 24, 2002, cited in "Timeline," 1999 (K). 42UPI (United Press International), September 30, 2002, cited in "Timeline," June 4, 2002; see also early 1994-January 1995, and December 24, 2001-January 23, 2002. 43Telegraph, November 11, 2001, cited in "Timeline," November 10, 2001. 44"Timeline," January 6 and January 23, 2002, quoting Washington Post, February 23, 2002, and citing Boston Globe, January 6, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, March, 3, and VanityFair, August, 2002. 45"Timeline," January 28, 2002, citing London Times, April 21, and Guardian, July 16, 2002. 46"Timeline," January 28, 2002, citing UPI, January 29, 2002 47"Timeline," February 12, 2002, citing Boston Globe, 7, Observer, February 24, 2002, Newsweek, March 11, and Vanity Fair, August, 2002. 48"Timeline," February 6, 2002. 49UPI, September 30, 2002; Vanity Fair, February, 2002, and Baer, See No Evil The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (New York: Crown Pub, 2002), 270-71, cited in "Timeline," December 1997. 50CNN, January 30, 2003, cited in "Timeline," December 22, 2001 (B). 51Time, January 26, and CNN, January 30,2003, cited in "Timeline," January 23,2002. 52UPI, September 30, 2002, cited in "Timeline," June 4, 2002. 53John J. Lumpkin, "New Theory on Pearl Skying: 9/11 Mastermind Believed to Have Killed Wall Street Journal Reporter," APAP, October 21, 2003 54"Timeline," February 18, 2002 (B), citing News, February 18, London Times, April 21, and Guardian, July 16, 2002. 55"Timeline," March 1, 2002, citing "There's Much More To Daniel Pearls Murder Than Meets the Eye," Washington Post, March 10, 2002. 56"Timeline," March 3, 2002. 57"Timeline," July 19, 2002 (B), citing Time, February 25, 2002, and Timeline," December 26, 2002, citing India Express, July 19, 2002. 58"Timeline," March 3, 2002, citing Dawn, March 3,2002, and Guardian, April 5,2002. 59"Timeline," March 14, 2002, citing CNN, March 14, and Los Angeles Times, March 15, 2002. 60WPBF Channel 25, August 5, 2002, Cox News, August 2, 2002, and Palm Beach Post, October 17, 2002, cited in "Timeline," July 14, 1999. 61Palm Beach Post, March 20, 2003 (see also South Florida Sun-Sentinel, March 20, 2003), quoted in Timeline," June 2002. 62Newsweek, September 15, New York Times, September 15, and Washington Post, September 16, 2001, cited in "Timeline," September 15-17, 2001. 63Gannett News Service and Pensacola News Journal, both September 17, 2001, cited in "Timeline," September 15-17, 2001. 64Washington Post, September 16, 2001, quoted in Ahmed, 97. 65Danid Hopsicker, "Did Terrorists Train at US. Military Schools?" Online Journal October 30, 2002, quoted in Ahmed, 98-99. (Hopsicker who has produced television business shows, including "Inside Wall Street," is also the author of Barry and the Boys CIA, the Mob, and'America's Secret History [Madcow Press, 2001 ].) 66Hopsicker, "Did Terrorists?" quoted in Ahmed, 98, 99. 67Steve Fainaru and James V. Grimaldi, "FBI Knew Terrorists Were Using Flight Schools," Washington Post, September 23, 2001, quoted in Ahmed, 99. 68Hopsicker, "Did Terrorists?", quoted in Ahmed, 99. 69Hopsicker, "What Are They Hiding Down in Venice, Florida?" Online Journal, November 7, 2001, quoted in Ahmed, 100. An interesting footnote to this story is provided by the fact that Arne Kruithof and Rudi Dekkers, each of whom owned one of these flight schools, each narrowly escaped dying in a small plane crash. On Kruithof's crash, which occurred on July 26, 2002, see Hopsicker, "Magic Dutch Boy Escapes Fiery Crash," Mad Cow Morning News, July 4, 2002 (www.madcowprod.com/index27.html); on Dekkers' crash, which occurred on January 24, 2003, see Hopsicker, "Dekkers' Helicopter Crashed on Way to Showdown over Huffman Aviation," Mad Cow Morning News, January 28, 2003 (www.madcowprod.com/index43.html). 70"Timeline," November 1999, citing Sunday Mercury, October 21, 2001, Washington Post, December 29, 2001, and Newsweek, September 24, 2002. 71James Risen, "Informant for F.B.I. Had Contacts with Two 9/11 Hijackers," New York Times, July 25, 2003. 72"Timeline," September 21 or 22, 2001, citing Los Angeles Times and Newsweek, both November 24, 2002. 73Boston Globe, October 27, 2001, cited in "Timeline," October 24, 2001. 74Washington Post, September 19, and the BBC, June 21, 2002, cited in "Timeline," August 2002 (B). Bamford, as we saw earlier, wrote Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (2001; New York Anchor Books, 2002). 75Michael Ruppert, "A Timeline Surrounding September 11th," From the Wilderness Publications (www.n-omthewilderness.com), item 96, citing Washington Post, July 3, 2002. 76Seymour Hersh, New Yorker, September 30, 2002, quoted in "Timeline," September 30, 2002. 77Larry Margasak, "Feds Reject Moussaoui Witness," Associated Press, July 14, 2003. 78Thompson, "Timeline," October 17,2002, citing Washington Post, September 18,2002. 79"Timeline," December 4, 2002, quoting Star Tribune, December 22, 2002. 80"Timeline," December 4, 2002, quoting Time, December 30, 2002.

PART THREE