See Part 2: Watching the hijackers , Part 3: The United States and Mideast terrorism, and Part 4: The refusal to investigate ]
It is not necessary to postulate an all-embracing conspiracy, extending from the White House to the airline security personnel who let the armed hijackers board the planes, to believe that there is much more to the story of the September 11 attacks than the American public has been told so far. Certainly the least likely and least credible explanation of that day’s events is that the vast US national security apparatus was entirely unaware of the activities of the hijackers until the airliners slammed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
According to this official version, voiced most crudely by FBI Director Robert Mueller immediately after the event, no one in the US government had the slightest idea of the identities of the September 11 hijackers, the methods they would employ, or the targets they would choose. A careful review of the information that has come to light, in bits and pieces, since September 11, demonstrates that these claims are not merely tenuous, but clearly, obviously and knowingly false.
The case of Zacarias Moussaoui [“ The strange case of Zacarias Moussaoui: FBI refused to investigate man charged in September 11 attacks ”] is only the most glaring evidence that the September 11 terrorist attacks represent, not merely a colossal failure on the part of the FBI and CIA, but a refusal to act that has no legitimate explanation. Not only were there general warnings of the likelihood of suicide hijackings, but several of the hijackers, including the man alleged to be the principal organizer, Mohammed Atta, were under active surveillance by US agents. It is not too much to say that the terrorists were only able to accomplish their murderous and destructive mission because US intelligence agencies ignored repeated warnings, refused to carry out elementary defensive actions and manifested a seeming indifference to the prospect of a major terrorist attack on American soil.
Added to that is the refusal of any branch of the US government to conduct any probe into the circumstances of an attack which killed more American civilians on a single day than any other act of violence in US history. There has been no serious effort in the four months since September 11 to investigate, learn lessons and assign responsibility. This by itself is a demonstration that there are highly placed people in Washington with a great deal to hide.
The governments of at least four countries—Germany, Egypt, Russia and Israel—gave specific warnings to the US of an impending terrorist attack in the months preceding September 11. These alerts, while fragmentary, not only combined to foretell the scale of the attack and its main target, but indicated that hijacked commercial aircraft would be the weapon of choice.
According to an article in one of the major daily newspapers in Germany, published just after the destruction of the World Trade Center, the German intelligence service BND told both US and Israeli intelligence agencies in June that Middle East terrorists were “planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture.”
The newspaper cited unnamed German intelligence sources, who said that the information came through Echelon, the US-controlled system of 120 satellites which monitors all worldwide electronic communications. Echelon is operated jointly by the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand, although its existence is not officially admitted. (Source: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 14, 2001)
The government of Egypt sent an urgent warning to the US June 13, based on a video made by Osama bin Laden. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak told the French newspaper Le Figaro that the warning was originally delivered just before the G-8 summit in Genoa. It was taken seriously enough that antiaircraft batteries were stationed around Christopher Columbus Airport in the Italian city. According to Mubarak, bin Laden “spoke of assassinating President Bush and other heads of state in Genoa. It was a question of an airplane stuffed with explosives. These precautions then had been taken.” (Source: New York Times, September 26, 2001, “2 Leaders Tell of Plot to Kill Bush in Genoa,” by David Sanger)
According to Russian press reports, Russian intelligence notified the CIA during the summer that 25 terrorist pilots had been specifically training for suicide missions. In an interview September 15 with MSNBC, Russian President Vladimir Putin confirmed that he had ordered Russian intelligence in August to warn the US government “in the strongest possible terms” of imminent attacks on airports and government buildings. (Source: From The Wilderness web site; MSNBC).
The London-based Sunday Telegraph —an arch-conservative newspaper usually highly supportive of the Bush administration—reported that the Israeli intelligence service Mossad had delivered a warning to the FBI and CIA in August that as many as 200 followers of Osama bin Laden were slipping into the country to prepare “a major assault on the United States.” The advisory spoke of a “large-scale target” in which Americans would be “very vulnerable.” The Los Angeles Times cited unnamed US officials confirming this Mossad warning had been received. (Source: Sunday Telegraph, September 16, 2001, “Israeli security issued urgent warning to CIA of large-scale terror attacks,” by David Wastell and Philip Jacobson; Los Angeles Times, September 20, 2001, “Officials Told of ‘Major Assault’ Plans,” by Richard A. Serrano and John-Thor Dahlburg)
The Independent, a liberal daily in Great Britain, published an article asserting the US government “was warned repeatedly that a devastating attack on the United States was on its way.” The Independent cited an interview given by Osama bin Laden to a London-based Arabic-language newspaper, al-Quds al-Arabi, in late August. About the same time, tighter security measures were ordered at the World Trade Center, for unexplained reasons. (Source: Independent, September 17, 2001, “Bush did not heed several warnings of attack,” by Andrew Gumbel)
Despite this series of alerts, no US intelligence agency issued any warning of a possible attack on a target on US territory in the months leading up to September 11. The CIA and FBI had issued warnings about likely attacks on American military bases or embassies in the Middle East, Europe and Asia. On September 7 the US Department of State issued a worldwide alert about an impending attack by bin Laden followers, although it was focused on US-related targets in east Asia, especially Japan, not within the US itself. As the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Richard Shelby, admitted, “This obviously was a failure of great dimension. We had no specific warning of the US being attacked.”
Moreover, the FBI’s decision to take no action on Zacarias Moussaoui must be considered in the light of this continuous stream of warnings from overseas. The US government was being repeatedly alerted to the danger of devastating attacks using hijacked commercial aircraft, yet the FBI decided to conduct no serious investigation into a man, believed by French intelligence to be linked to Osama bin Laden, who wanted to learn how to steer a 747 jumbo jet, but not to take off or land. Moussaoui was not even turned over to the FBI by the Immigration and Naturalization Service until after September 11.
Despite claims that US intelligence agencies had not considered the possibility of suicide attacks involving commercial airliners before September 11, there were many indications of such concerns on the part of the American government over a period of eight years.
An expert panel commissioned by the Pentagon in 1993 discussed how an airplane could be used to bomb national landmarks. “It was considered radical thinking, a little too scary for the times,” said retired Air Force Col. Doug Menarchik, who organized the $150,000 study for the Defense Department’s Office of Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict. “After I left, it met a quiet death.” The decision not to publish detailed scenarios was made partly out of a fear that it could give terrorists ideas, participants said. A draft was circulated through the Pentagon, the Justice Department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but senior agency officials ultimately decided against a public release. (Source: Washington Post, October 2, 2001, “Before Attack, U.S. Expected Different Hit, Chemical, Germ Agents Focus of Preparations,” by Jo Warrick and Joe Stephens)
Three incidents of attempted attacks on buildings using airplanes took place during 1994. The first, in April of that year, involved a Federal Express flight engineer who was facing dismissal. He boarded a DC-10 as a passenger and invaded the cockpit, planning to crash the plane into a company building in Memphis, but was overpowered by the crew. The second came that September, when a lone pilot crashed a stolen single-engine Cessna into a tree on the White House grounds just short of the president’s bedroom. The third was the December hijacking of an Air France flight in Algiers by the Armed Islamic Group. The hijackers had the plane land in Marseilles and ordered it loaded with 27 tons of fuel, three times the amount required to reach Paris. Their aim was to crash it into the Eiffel Tower. French special forces stormed the plane on the ground. (Source: New York Times, October 3, 2001, “Earlier Hijackings Offered Signals That Were Missed,” by Matthew Wald)
In January 1995, Philippine police arrested and tortured Abdul Hakim Murad in a Manila apartment where bomb-making equipment was found. He told them of plans to plant timed explosive devices on 11 US airliners simultaneously, and to crash-land an airplane into CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The preparations were so far advanced that Murad detailed the specific flights targeted, most of them trans-Pacific flights which would explode over the ocean. Murad had attended flying schools in the United States, earned a commercial pilot’s license, and told investigators he was to fly the plane into CIA headquarters. Another Islamic fundamentalist was to fly a second plane into the Pentagon. (Source: Washington Post, September 23, “Borderless Network of Terror, Bin Laden Followers Reach Across Globe,” by Doug Struck, Howard Schneider, Karl Vick and Peter Baker)
Later that year, the alleged organizer of the first World Trade Center bombing, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, was captured in Pakistan, turned over to US agents and flown back to the United States for trial. On the flight, Yousef reportedly boasted to FBI agent Brian Parr and the other agents guarding him that he had narrowly missed several opportunities to blow up a dozen airliners on a single day over the Pacific and to carry out a kamikaze-type suicide attack on CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Yousef was referring to the same plot for which Abdul Hakim Murad had been arrested in the Philippines. Murad was extradited to the United States, where his testimony played a major role in Yousef’s trial and conviction. (Source: John Cooley, Unholy Wars , New York, NY, 2000, p. 247)
Early in 1996, US officials had identified crop-dusters and suicide flights as potential terrorist weapons, and began taking elaborate steps to prevent an attack from the air during the Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta. Black Hawk helicopters and US Customs Service jets were deployed to intercept suspicious aircraft in the skies over the Olympic venues. Agents monitored crop-duster flights within hundreds of miles of downtown Atlanta. Law enforcement agents also fanned out to regional airports throughout northern Georgia “to make sure nobody hijacked a small aircraft and tried to attack one of the venues,” said Woody Johnson, the FBI agent in charge of the Atlanta office at the time. From July 6 through the end of the Games on August 11, the FAA banned all aviation within a one-mile radius of the Olympic Village that housed the athletes. It also ordered aircraft to stay at least three miles away from other sites beginning three hours before each event until three hours after each event ended. (Source: Los Angeles Times, November 17, 2001, “Suicide Flights and Crop Dusters Considered Threats at ’96 Olympics,” by Mark Fineman and Judy Pasternak)
As early as 1996 the FBI began investigating the activities of Arab students at US flight schools. Government officials admitted that “law enforcement officials were aware that fewer than a dozen people with links to bin Laden had attended US flight schools.” FBI agents visited two flight schools in 1996 to get information about several Arab pilots who received training there. The two schools were among those attended by Abdul Hakim Murad, who had told Philippine and US police about plans to fly a hijacked plane into CIA headquarters. In 1998 FBI agents questioned officials from Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma about a graduate identified in court testimony as a pilot for Osama bin Laden. This was the school later attended by Zacarias Moussaoui. A Washington Post article concludes: “Since 1996, the FBI had been developing evidence that international terrorists were using US flight schools to learn to fly jumbo jets. A foiled plot in Manila to blow up U.S. airliners and later court testimony by an associate of bin Laden had touched off FBI inquiries at several schools, officials say.” (Source: Washington Post, September 23, 2001, “FBI Knew Terrorists Were Using Flight Schools,” by Steve Fainaru and James V. Grimaldi)
In the run-up to the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, there was active consideration of the danger of “a fully loaded, fuelled airliner crashing into the opening ceremony before a worldwide television audience,” according to former Sydney police superintendent Paul McKinnon. Osama bin Laden was considered the number one threat, he said. IOC officials said plane-crash catastrophes have been incorporated into security planning for every Olympics since 1972. “That was our nightmare scenario,” one IOC official said. There were extensive IOC discussions with the FBI during 2001 in the course of the security planning for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. (Source: Sydney Morning Herald, September 20, 2001, “Jet crash on stadium was Olympics nightmare,” by Jacquelin Magnay)
The 2000 edition of the Federal Aviation Administration’s annual report on Criminal Acts Against Aviation, published early in 2001, said that although bin Laden “is not known to have attacked civil aviation, he has both the motivation and the wherewithal to do so,” adding, “Bin Laden’s anti-Western and anti-American attitudes make him and his followers a significant threat to civil aviation, particularly to US civil aviation.” (Source: FAA)
Beginning in early 2001 a trial was held in New York City of four defendants charged with involvement in the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The trial revealed that two bin Laden operatives had received pilot training in Texas and Oklahoma and another had been asked to take lessons. L’Houssaine Kherchtou, a bin Laden associate turned government witness, told the court how he was asked to take flying lessons in 1993. Another bin Laden aide, Essam al-Ridi, testified that he had bought a military aircraft for bin Laden and flown it to Sudan. Al-Ridi became a government witness in 1998, giving the FBI inside information about a pilot-training scheme three years before the September 11 attack. While the proceedings of the trial extended from February to July 2001, they did not produce any heightened alert in relation to US commercial aviation. (Source: Court transcript available at www.cryptome.org )
The United States government maintains the world’s largest apparatus for collecting intelligence and monitoring telecommunications, comprised of multiple agencies—CIA, FBI, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, Defense Signals Intercept Organization, etc.—bankrolled by a secret budget estimated at a staggering $30 billion a year.
Yet the Bush administration claims, with no dissent from the tame American media, that this huge national security apparatus had not the slightest inkling that nearly two dozen men were preparing to hijack commercial jetliners and crash them into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Nor has there been any public clamor for the removal of those whose seeming incompetence, if the official story is to be believed, cost the lives of nearly 3,000 American citizens.
What has emerged over the past four months, however, is a much different picture of the events of September 11 and the relation of the US military-intelligence complex to them. Not only were there frequent advance warnings, derived both from foreign intelligence services and US investigations into previous terrorist attacks [Was the US government alerted to September 11 attack? Part 1: Warnings in advance ], but the US government was itself in possession of considerable information from contemporaneous electronic and physical surveillance of Osama bin Laden and his associates in the Al Qaeda organization.
It is well known that the National Security Agency at one time had virtually complete access to the electronic communications of bin Laden and his associates. In the period leading up to the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, the monitoring was so extensive that NSA officials used to play back telephone conversations between bin Laden and his mother to impress visiting dignitaries—and help boost their congressional appropriations.
By one account, the NSA had recorded virtually every minute of conversations on a satellite telephone which bin Laden was using in Afghanistan. The laptop device was purchased in New York City for the Al Qaeda leader, who used all of its more than 2,000 prepaid minutes phoning supporters in dozens of countries—a fact that suggests that he was less than the world’s greatest conspirator. (Source: Los Angeles Times, September 21, 2001, “Hate Unites an Enemy Without an Army,” by Bob Drogin; Chicago Tribune, September 16, 2001, “Bin Laden, associates elude spy agency’s eavesdropping,” by Scott Shane)
US officials have suggested that this access was abruptly cut off after bin Laden learned that the monitored communications had helped the Pentagon target a training camp in eastern Afghanistan for the cruise missile strike ordered by President Clinton. The Al Qaeda leader stopped using telephones and other electronic devices entirely, they claim, resorting to couriers and other forms of direct communication which cannot be monitored so easily.
Such claims are dismissed as US disinformation by many knowledgeable observers. Longtime Egyptian journalist and former government spokesman Mohammed Heikal, in an interview with a British newspaper, expressed disbelief that bin Laden and his Al Qaeda group could have conducted the September 11 attack without the United States knowing: “Bin Laden has been under surveillance for years: every telephone call was monitored and Al-Qaeda has been penetrated by American intelligence, Pakistani intelligence, Saudi intelligence, Egyptian intelligence. They could not have kept secret an operation that required such a degree of organisation and sophistication.” (Source: Heikal interview with the Guardian, October 10, 2001)
The more sweeping the US government claims about the global scope and high-level coordination of bin Laden’s activities, the less credible is the claim that electronic monitoring has yielded no results. It would be practically impossible to avoid any kind of electronic interchange of information in operating a worldwide network capable of carrying out attacks in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Europe and the United States.
There have been scattered reports in the press suggesting that bin Laden’s associates, if not the Islamic fundamentalist leader himself, have used electronic communications devices and these have been monitored by US agencies.
UPI correspondent Richard Sale, covering the trial of bin Laden followers in New York City last year, reported that the National Security Agency had broken bin Laden’s encrypted communications. Given that US officials “believe the planning for the Sept. 11 attacks probably began two years ago,” ( New York Times, October 14, 2001) this suggests that some information on the preparations for September 11 was available to electronic intercept. (Source: United Press International, February 13, 2001)
The clearest suggestion of successful US monitoring of Al Qaeda communications—and the closest to the September 11 attacks—was the statement by Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, a conservative Republican with wide contacts in the national security establishment. He told the Associated Press on September 11 that the US government was monitoring bin Laden’s communications electronically and had overheard two bin Laden aides celebrating the successful terrorist attack. “They have an intercept of some information that included people associated with bin Laden who acknowledged a couple of targets were hit,” he told AP. (Source: Associated Press, September 11, 2001, “World Trade Center collapses in terrorist attack,” by David Crary and Jerry Schwartz)
Hatch repeated this assertion in an interview with ABC News the same day, saying that both CIA and FBI officials had told him the same story. That his statement was true is demonstrated by the Bush administration reaction. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld publicly denounced the report as an unauthorized release of classified information. The White House later cited this leak as grounds for withholding detailed information on US counterterrorist actions from Congress, although Bush was later compelled to resume the briefings of a handful of congressional leaders.
There were several other media reports of similar successful monitoring of Al Qaeda communications. The German magazine Der Spiegel said that officers from the German intelligence service BND intercepted phone conversations between two bin Laden supporters. NBC News reported October 4 that bin Laden called his mother two days before the World Trade Center attack and told her, “In two days you’re going to hear big news, and you’re not going to hear from me for a while.” NBC said that a foreign intelligence service had recorded the call and relayed the information to the US. Such reports must be considered cautiously, especially coming as they did on the eve of the launching of US air strikes on Afghanistan. But it is impossible to avoid the conclusion: if US intelligence agencies could obtain such information after September 11, they were able to do so before that date. (Source: Toronto Globe & Mail, October 5, 2001)
Besides the actual communications among the hijackers and their co-conspirators, there was another electronic tip-off to September 11. It has been widely reported that during the week before the suicide hijackings, there was sudden and unexplained speculation in the stock of American and United airlines. Huge bets were placed that the stock prices of both airlines would plunge, as did happen after two American and two United jets were hijacked and crashed. No other airlines saw such speculation, and the identity of those who placed the thousands of “put” options—bets that a stock will go down—has not been revealed.
Less well known is the fact that the CIA operates a sophisticated software system, known as Promis, which monitors such sudden price movements for the specific purpose of providing advance warning that a particular industry or corporation may be targeted for a terrorist attack. This software provides around-the-clock real-time monitoring, so that CIA officials would have been alerted as early as September 7 that American and United were potential targets. According to the right-wing, stridently pro-Bush Fox News network, both the FBI and the Justice Department have confirmed that Promis was in use last summer for US intelligence gathering. There is no indication that the CIA warned either the airlines themselves or the US agencies responsible for domestic security.
According to the official Bush administration account of the terrorist attacks, only 2 of the 19 alleged suicide hijackers were known to US authorities before September 11. These two, Kahlil Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhamzi, had been placed on an FBI “watch list” at the request of the CIA, after Almihdhar was linked to a bin Laden operative in Malaysia.
Innumerable accounts in the American media sought to answer the questions that were inevitably raised by this version of events. How was it possible for two men being sought by the FBI and CIA, with alleged ties to the man the US government had branded the most dangerous terrorist in world, to buy expensive first-class one-way tickets for an airline flight, then board and hijack a jetliner on September 11?
Almihdhar and Alhamzi apparently lived in southern California, in the San Diego area for nearly two years, leaving and reentering the United States at least once—only a few weeks before the “watch list” alert was issued. According to one press report, Alhamzi was even listed in the San Diego phone book—a fact that certainly calls into question the media portrayal of the suicide hijackers as master conspirators who covered their tracks and were essentially undetectable. (Source: Washington Post, December 29, 2001)
Whatever the circumstances in which these two future hijackers escaped detection, however, the basic premise of the official story—that these two were the only hijackers identified as terrorist suspects before September 11—is false. Several other hijackers or men now believed to be their accomplices had come to the attention of US police and intelligence agencies before the destruction of the World Trade Center, but they were allowed to go their way.
There is the strange case of Ziad Samir Jarrah, one of the suspected hijackers on board the United Airlines jet that crashed in Pennsylvania. Officials in the United Arab Emirates acknowledge that Jarrah arrived in the UAE on January 30, 2001, after two months in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and was questioned for several hours at Dubai International Airport, at the request of the US government. He was then permitted to leave, traveling on to Hamburg via Amsterdam. Later he flew to the United States.
Despite official US interest sufficient to have him detained in the UAE, he was allowed to enter the country and then enrolled in a flight school. Jarrah was stopped for speeding on Interstate 95 in Maryland on September 9, two days before the hijacking, ticketed and released. The Maryland State Police apparently ran his name through their computers and found nothing. In response to post-September 11 inquiries, FBI and CIA officials claimed that neither agency had been aware of Jarrah or placed him on any watch list, although some US government agency had sought his detention eight months before in Dubai. (Sources: Chicago Tribune, December 14, 2001; Baltimore Sun, December 14, 2001)
Newsweek magazine, in its special edition published immediately after the September 11 attack, made a startling claim about ties between the hijackers and the American national security apparatus. Citing US military sources, Newsweek reported that “five of the alleged hijackers of the planes that were used in Tuesday’s terror attacks received training at secure U.S. military installations in the 1990s.” Three had listed addresses at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida when they applied for driver’s licenses or car registrations. Another trained at the Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama, while the fifth took language instruction at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. The three men who trained at Pensacola were named as Saeed Alghamdi and Ahmad Alnami, both aboard United Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, and Ahmed Alghamdi, aboard United Flight 75, which hit the south tower of the World Trade Center.
FBI officials told the office of Senator Bill Nelson (D-Florida) that the agents assigned to the World Trade Center/Pentagon case were “investigating any connection to the military facility,” but that no determination had been made, because of uncertainty over whether the hijackers had stolen the IDs of other Middle East visitors to the US, especially from Saudi Arabia. Pensacola has been the site of military training for foreign aviators, including many from Saudi Arabia and other US clients in the Middle East.
Saudi officials also sought to dispute the reports that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens, but these have proven to be true. There has been no further press reporting on the Pensacola story, either in Newsweek itself, which never did a follow-up, or any other major media outlet.
Even more extraordinary is the treatment of Mohammed Atta, the alleged ringleader of the hijackings. Atta was reportedly an object of attention for the Egyptian, German and American police and yet traveled without hindrance between Europe and America throughout 2000 and 2001.
According to a report on the German public television channel ARD, Atta was the subject of telephone monitoring by the Egyptian secret service, which had learned that he had made at least one recent visit to Afghanistan from his home in Hamburg, Germany. The German program, broadcast November 23, said that the American FBI had monitored Atta’s movements for several months in 2000, when he traveled several times from Hamburg to Frankfurt and bought large quantities of chemicals potentially usable in making explosives. Atta’s name was also mentioned in a Hamburg phone call between Islamic fundamentalists monitored by the German police in 1999. The BBC, commenting on the German report, said, “The evidence ... reinforces concerns that the international intelligence community may have known more about Atta before September 11 than was previously thought, but had failed to act.” (Source: British Broadcasting Corporation report, November 26, 2001)
Atta came to the attention of US authorities on several occasions in the course of 2001. In January he was allowed to reenter the United States after a trip to Germany, despite the fact that he was in violation of his visa status. He landed in Miami January 10 on a flight from Madrid, on a tourist visa, although he told immigration inspectors that he was taking flying lessons in the US, for which an M-1 student visa is required. Jeanne Butterfield, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told the Washington Post, “Nine times out of 10, they would have told him to go back and file [for that status] overseas. You’re not supposed to come in as a visitor for pleasure and go to work or school.” The recipient of this indulgent treatment, it must be emphasized, had previously been under FBI surveillance for stockpiling bomb-making materials! (Source: Washington Post, October 28, 2001)
According to a report on Canadian television, Atta had been implicated in a terrorist bombing in Israel and the information passed on to the United States before he was first issued a tourist visa. (Source: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, September 14, 2001, reported by Diana Swain from Vero Beach, Florida)
Atta made other trips to Europe, returning to Germany in May and visiting Spain in July, each time returning to the United States and being admitted by US customs and immigration. Another British press report notes that Atta “was under surveillance between January and May last year after he was reportedly observed buying large quantities of chemicals in Frankfurt, apparently for the production of explosives and for biological warfare. The US agents reported to have trailed Atta are said to have failed to inform the German authorities about their investigation. The disclosure that Atta was being trailed by police long before 11 September raises the question why the attacks could not have been prevented with the man’s arrest.” (Source: The Observer , September 30, 2001)
During the summer of 2001, Atta received a wire transfer of $100,000 from an account in Pakistan allegedly controlled by a representative of Osama bin Laden. This transfer has been cited repeatedly by US officials as proof that bin Laden inspired the September 11 attacks, but they have not explained how such a large sum of money could be transmitted with impunity to someone under FBI surveillance. Another remarkable fact: according to an Indian newspaper, the man who actually authorized the wire transfer to Atta was General Mahmud Ahmed, head of the Pakistani intelligence agency ISI, the principal sponsor of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Ahmed was forced to resign after India made his role public and it was confirmed by the FBI. Coincidentally or not, Ahmed was in Washington, DC on September 11, for consultations with American intelligence officials. (Source: CNN report, October 1, 2001; The Times of India, October 11, 2001).
An essential aspect of the official version of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—which maintains that these attacks came as a complete surprise to the US government and its intelligence apparatus—is the claim that the CIA and other intelligence agencies relied too heavily on electronic surveillance rather than on-the-spot agents infiltrated into the terrorist organizations.
As a result, so the story goes, without agents among the Islamic fundamentalists, the CIA and FBI were unable to discover the plans of Osama bin Laden and forestall them. The absence of American agents is simply asserted, without any examination of the evidence. The argument is largely circular. The very success of the attack on September 11 is taken to prove that the US government had no agents in the milieu which supported the hijackers.
There are two assumptions here: first, that US agents could not penetrate the terrorist circles; and second, that American agents would have intervened to stop an attack had they learned of it in advance. Both these assumptions are questionable.
The official claim of “no human intelligence” about September 11 is of course difficult to analyze or refute on the basis of empirical or forensic evidence. It is in the nature of such activities that they take place in secret, and remain largely unknown to the public. But the credibility of this claim can be judged in the light of the historical record of the relationship between American imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism.
The United States has been deeply involved in the Middle East for more than half a century, and in Afghanistan for more than two decades. US intelligence agencies have had long and intimate ties with Islamic fundamentalists and encouraged them to engage in terrorist violence. Without this US role there would have been no al Qaeda, bin Laden would have remained a construction magnate in Saudi Arabia, and September 11 would never have taken place.
Those who carried out the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were not even born when the US government first began to sponsor violent Islamic fundamentalists and use them against political opponents in the Middle East. As far back as the 1950s, the United States and its main Arab client state, Saudi Arabia, gave financial support to fundamentalist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. US officials backed the fundamentalists against the pan-Arab nationalism of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, as well as against socialist elements in the Arab working class, especially in the Saudi oilfields.
One analyst of this process writes: “It was during the 1958-60 period that the US State Department began to exaggerate the communist threat to the Middle East, and the ARAMCO CIA, and indeed the Beirut and Cairo CIAs, began supporting Islamic fundamentalist groups as a counterweight to Nasser. In part, this was an extension of Kim Roosevelt’s earlier successful use of Muslim elements (Fadayeen Islam) against leftists in Iran. The anti-Nasser Muslim Brotherhood was funded, religious leaders were prodded to attack the USSR for its anti-Muslim ways (Said K. Aburish, The Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall of the House of Saud, St. Martin’s Press, New York, NY, 1996, p. 161).
This relationship expanded quantitatively and qualitatively with the outbreak of civil war in Afghanistan. Even before the invasion of the country by the Soviet Union in December 1979, the United States had decided to give financial and military backing to the Islamic fundamentalist parties engaged in guerrilla warfare against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, which had come to power in an April 1978 military coup.
US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski hoped that a full-scale war in Afghanistan would prove as debilitating for the USSR as the Vietnam War had been for the United States. The Carter administration began to pour in weapons and money, especially favoring the most right-wing Islamic fundamentalists, those who became the ideological forebears of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.
Carter’s successor Ronald Reagan enthusiastically embraced the fundamentalists. He hailed as “freedom fighters” political organizations that sought to establish a state based on a medieval version of Islamic law: a religious dictatorship which practiced slavery, oppression of women and barbaric mutilations for alleged lawbreakers.
But the man who really deserved the title of “founding father” of al Qaeda was Reagan’s CIA director, William Casey. It was Casey who initiated the campaign to recruit Islamic militants from all over the world to come to Afghanistan and fight in the anti-Soviet cause. Islamic fundamentalists from dozens of countries—from Morocco to Indonesia, and including even some black Muslims from the United States—traveled to Afghanistan under CIA auspices, received training in weapons and explosives from CIA trainers and went into combat with US-supplied arms.
Osama bin Laden himself was a product of this process. He first went to Afghanistan in the early 1980s as a sympathizer of the Afghan mujahedin, using his knowledge of construction to help build roads, bases and other facilities, paid for with a combination of his own and US money. It was in Afghanistan that he made the contacts among Islamic fundamentalists worldwide which made possible the organization of later terrorist attacks on US targets. What the Bush administration and the American media today demonize as a global conspiracy of Islamic extremists is thus a Frankenstein monster created by the American government itself.
This history is well understood by the more conscious strategists for American imperialism. Zbigniew Brzezinski suggested cynically a few years ago that the emergence of al Qaeda was an acceptable price to further US interests in the Middle East and internationally. He told a French newspaper: “Which was more important in world history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet empire? A few over-excited Islamists or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?” (Interview with Vincent Javert in Le Nouvel Observateur, January 15-21, 1998)
Bin Laden, as is now widely reported, turned against the United States in 1991-92 after the deployment of large numbers of American troops in Saudi Arabia in the course of the Persian Gulf War. The official story is that this marked the end of all contacts between US intelligence agencies and the Islamic fundamentalists who would go on to form al Qaeda.
Here our analysis necessarily moves into an area where established facts are few and far between, and inference and probability must be relied on. Is it credible that the CIA, after a decade of the most intimate ties with the Afghan mujahedin, was suddenly cut off from all information and unable to determine what its erstwhile protégés were doing?
The servile American media has never challenged Bush administration, Pentagon or FBI spokesmen on this subject, and one should not hold one’s breath until a highly paid American journalist puts his job on the line by asking such questions. But the long-term, close-knit relationship between the CIA and the Afghan mujahedin makes the sudden drying up of all sources of intelligence unlikely.
The CIA is in the business of knowing its collaborators intimately, and it worked with bin Laden and his supporters and followers for a dozen years. Even today, after a decade of increasing hostilities, those described by US government sources as key bin Laden aides are for the most part drawn from the Egyptian and Saudi Islamic fundamentalists radicalized during the war in Afghanistan. The CIA knew their families, their weaknesses and their vices, and it has never been squeamish about using such information to compromise individuals and secure cooperation with its purposes.
That is not to say that there was not a real conflict between bin Laden and the US government, or that al Qaeda is simply a front organization. It is not necessary to resort to such a conspiracy theory to reject the claim that the US government had no idea of the plans being laid by the terrorist group. It is the official version which is preposterous and far fetched: the claim that the most extensive and well-financed intelligence apparatus in the world could not make a dent in an organization consisting largely of its former employees.
Despite the current official mystification, bin Laden & Co. were a far more accessible target than, say, such Stalinist-ruled regimes as North Vietnam or North Korea. The CIA has cultivated sources among the Islamic fundamentalists since the 1950s. Moreover, friendly intelligence services, including at least those of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan—to say nothing of Israel—would have had their own contacts as well.
It is critical to consider September 11 in the context of earlier terrorist attacks on American targets, particularly the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In both these attacks, it has come to light that American agents provocateurs played a central role. This casts doubt on the claims that US intelligence was unable to penetrate al Qaeda. And it raises the question whether similar agents had some connection to September 11.
Those charged in the 1993 World Trade Center attack and for a subsequent conspiracy to blow up other targets in New York City were mostly former guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan who entered the United States with the covert assistance of US intelligence agencies. Among them was a former Egyptian intelligence agent and US government informer, Emad Salem, who was identified as a principal instigator of plans to bomb targets in the New York City area.
Salem and the FBI claimed that he had functioned as an informer in 1991-92 and then again from April 1993 on, but not during the period of the actual organization of the March 1993 bomb blast which killed six people and destroyed the sub-basement area of the twin towers. This was a transparent effort to avoid questions being raised about why the FBI, tipped off by its informant, did nothing to stop the attack.
In the 1998 events, it was revealed that the US government received advance warning of the Kenya bombing two weeks before it took place. During the trial last year of four men charged in the bombings, defense lawyers were able to demonstrate that US officials did not pass on the warnings to the personnel of the threatened embassies, thus contributing to the high death toll, especially among local civilians who were in or near the facilities at the time of the blasts.
As with at least one of the warnings about September 11, this information came through the Israeli intelligence service Mossad. Moreover, one of those charged in the Kenya and Tanzania bombings was a former Green Beret sergeant and special warfare instructor, Ali A. Mohamed, another former Egyptian security officer who was brought into the United States under a special CIA program to provide citizenship for key informants. Although Mohamed supposedly turned against the US government because of the 1991 Gulf War, he was still serving as a government informant as late as 1995.
No doubt most of those who participated in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and similar outrages, were Islamic fundamentalists who believed that they were somehow striking a blow against the US government. But in the murky world of agents, double agents, and agents provocateurs, they may well have been used to serve the purposes of American imperialism, which has utilized terrorist attacks—and above all September 11—as the pretext for carrying out military actions overseas and attacks on democratic rights at home.
Terrorist attacks on innocent civilians, whatever the motivation or pretext, are politically reactionary. Moreover, because terrorism substitutes the armed action of a tiny minority for a struggle to develop the political consciousness of the masses, it is much easier for imperialist agents to feign sympathy and penetrate and manipulate the organization involved. From this political standpoint, the claim that US intelligence was unable to infiltrate al Qaeda is not believable.
Perhaps the murkiest aspect of September 11 is establishing the actual relationship between bin Laden himself and the US government. He was, of course, a CIA asset for more than a decade. He is one of several dozen sons of a Saudi construction billionaire whose family has longstanding ties to the United States and, in particular, to the family of George W. Bush. (The bin Ladens were investors in the Carlyle Group, the multibillion-dollar venture capital firm which employs the president’s father, the former president, as a well-paid “rainmaker,” drumming up business in the Middle East. They sold their holdings in the firm after September 11.)
As late as 1996, more than four years after Osama bin Laden announced his intention to drive the US out of Saudi Arabia, the US government declined an offer by Sudan to extradite him. US officials suggested there was not enough evidence to convict bin Laden of terrorist actions in a US court. Even after the 1998 embassy bombings made him a household name, the CIA had surprising difficulty in locating him in Afghanistan.
Last October 31, the French daily newspaper Le Figaro —one of the country’s more conservative journals—published a sensational story claiming that bin Laden had met with CIA officials at some point during a nearly two-week stay, July 4-14, 2001, at the American Hospital in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, where he was treated for kidney disease.
The report was roundly denied by US and UAE officials, and there is no way to verify it independently. But the newspaper is certainly well-connected. One of its major investors is the Carlyle Group, the private equity firm which directly links the Bush family and the bin Laden family.
There are other indications that the relations between the US government and Islamic terrorists are not as they appear in the American media.
There is the case of Nabil al-Marabh, who was caught at the Niagara Falls, New York border crossing in June 2001, stowed away inside a tractor-trailer with a forged passport, and was turned back to Canada by US immigration officials. “Nine months earlier, he had been identified to American intelligence agents as one of Osama bin Laden’s operatives in the United States. American customs agents knew about money he had transferred to an associate of Osama bin Laden in the Middle East. And the Boston police had issued a warrant for his arrest after he violated probation for stabbing a friend with a knife.” Al-Marabh was released on bail in Canada, and later arrested near Chicago after the September 11 attacks. While he was jailed in Canada, “Marabh boasted to his cellmates that he was ‘special’ to the F.B.I.” (New York Times, October 5, 2001)
Then there is the report which appeared September 24 in Newsweek . The weekly magazine reported that on September 10 “a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns.” This suggests that some level of the American state had knowledge, not only of the imminence of the attack, but even of its exact timing. Needless to say, no major American publication has followed up this report.
And what is one to make of an article that appeared in the Washington Post September 23, on the newspaper’s front page, under a double headline: “Investigators Identify 4 to 5 Groups Linked to Bin Laden Operating in US. No Connection Found Between ‘Cell’ Members and 19 Hijackers, Officials Say”?
The article reports that the FBI had identified multiple al Qaeda groups operating “for the last several years” in the United States, but found no connection between them and the 19 hijackers who carried out the September 11 attack. This is an astonishing admission, given that the entire US military campaign against Afghanistan has been predicated on holding Osama bin Laden responsible for the suicide hijackings. The article continues:
“The FBI has not made any arrests because the group members entered the country legally in recent years and have not been involved in illegal activities since they arrived, the officials said.
“Government officials say they do not know why the cells are here, what their purpose is or whether their members are planning attacks. One official even described their presence as ‘possibly benign,’ though others have a more sinister interpretation and give assurances that measures are in place to protect the public.”
Here the mind boggles: amid a nationwide dragnet, with hundreds of Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans rounded up and questioned for no other reason than their national origin and religion, the FBI tells the principal daily newspaper in the nation’s capital that it has not arrested known collaborators of Osama bin Laden because they have done nothing wrong since they arrived in the US. Their presence may even be “benign,” an astonishing adjective to use after the murder of nearly 3,000 people.
The Post article was written jointly by Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus, a fact which adds to its significance. Woodward needs no introduction to those familiar with the Watergate scandal. He was the recipient of the most famous leak in US history, obtaining inside information about Nixon’s actions in Watergate from a source Woodward dubbed “Deep Throat,” never identified but believed to be a top official in the national security apparatus. Walter Pincus is a national-security reporter for the Post, covering the CIA and Pentagon. He worked as a CIA operative in the 1960s, as a member of the National Student Association, a fact which was only revealed two decades later.
An article by these two individuals, given the prominence of front-page publication in the Washington Post, should be understood as a semiofficial hint by the US intelligence services that their relationship with Osama bin Laden is considerably more complex than that presented in the propaganda which now dominates the media.
This series has reviewed evidence that US intelligence agencies had ample advance information about the September 11 attacks, from specific details of the methods and the likely targets to the identities of a number of the hijackers, including the alleged principal organizer, Mohammed Atta. There are other troubling and unresolved issues, such as the failure to scramble air defense fighters in time to intercept any of the jetliners.
From a political standpoint, however, there is a piece of evidence which outweighs all others in suggesting that the real story of September 11 has yet to be told: the refusal of the Bush administration and Congress to conduct any investigation into the terrorist attacks and the government response to them.
More than four months after the largest single act of mass murder ever to take place on US soil, there have been no congressional hearings, no investigating commission has been announced, and calls for such a panel have been largely ignored. Even internal FBI investigations have been shelved. This inaction is extraordinary and has no legitimate political explanation. It stinks of political cover-up.
The initial response in Congress to September 11 was to move toward the formation of an independent commission, with members appointed by the congressional leadership and the White House, to review the events leading up to the attack, including the obvious failure of US intelligence agencies to forestall or prevent the suicide hijackings. The House Intelligence Committee included such a proposal in its draft of the appropriations bill for US intelligence operations. Then the White House stepped in.
On October 6, the House of Representatives voted to approve the intelligence budget, with a huge increase in spending, while backing off from calls for an investigation into the unpreparedness revealed on September 11. The Republican House leadership moved to limit the commission’s authority, putting forward an amendment to strip the commission of subpoena powers and the right to grant immunity to witnesses, and shifting its focus to an examination of “structural impediments” to the collection and analysis of intelligence information. In other words, instead of an investigation into the failure of the CIA and FBI to prevent September 11, the commission’s mandate would be to propose broad new powers for the spy agencies.
The congressional Republicans were clearly carrying out the wishes of the Bush administration. Democrats declined to push for a roll-call vote on the issue, allowing the Republican plan to pass on a voice vote. The New YorkTimes wrote: “There is little appetite in Washington now for a postmortem on the government’s failure to detect and defeat the plot.”
Two weeks later, Republican Senator John McCain and Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman declared in a television appearance on “Meet the Press” that they supported the establishment of an independent commission to investigate the September 11 attack. Lieberman cited, among other examples, the precedent of the special commission which investigated military preparedness after Pearl Harbor. The Democrat said he expected the Bush administration to support such a proposal.
But on November 21, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and his Republican counterpart, Robert Graham of Florida and Richard Shelby of Alabama, said that they would forego any investigation into the failure to predict or prevent the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks until sometime in 2002. House leaders also agreed to wait until the new year. Graham said it would not be appropriate to conduct such a probe during the war in Afghanistan, and Shelby described an investigation as a diversion. Both senators said they had been in contact with the White House, which agreed with their decision to put off any hearings.
During the same period the FBI moved to put an end to any serious criminal investigation into the suicide hijackings. The New York Times reported October 8: “The Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have ordered agents across the country to curtail their investigation of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks so they can pursue leads that might prevent a second, possibly imminent, round of attacks, senior law enforcement officials said.”
Shortly thereafter two senior FBI officials decided to retire. Neil J. Gallagher announced he would leave his position as head of the national security division. Thomas J. Pickard, the day-to-day chief of the investigation into the September 11 attacks, told the agency October 31 that he would also quit. Both retirements took effect November 30.
Pickard had handled many previous terrorism investigations for the FBI and was only 50 years old. His abrupt departure under wartime conditions is therefore all the more extraordinary. Under other circumstances the media might have denounced this as tantamount to desertion of duty, or conversely praised his ouster as an example of the FBI cleaning house after a disastrous failure. Instead, the retirement of the man principally responsible for the investigation into September 11 drew almost no media attention.
The refusal to conduct an investigation into September 11 has been variously justified on the grounds that such a probe would be inappropriate in wartime or that it would become an exercise in partisan finger-pointing.
As the experience of the Clinton administration showed, there is hardly any reluctance in today’s Washington to engage in scapegoating and the use of investigations to fight out political differences. One can only imagine what the response of congressional Republicans would have been had September 11 occurred in 2000 instead of 2001. But as New York Times columnist R.W. Apple observed December 14, “so far surprisingly few people inside government or out have been willing to accuse the agencies of falling down on the job. And there has been no chorus of voices calling for the head of George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence.”
As for the argument that wartime precludes a major investigation, the Pearl Harbor precedent completely refutes it. Within a month of the attack, Roosevelt appointed a commission headed by Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts to investigate the conduct of military officers at Pearl Harbor. The commission took testimony, issued its findings and had the two commanding officers at Pearl Harbor censured, ending their careers, without the slightest detriment to the US war effort.
If it was possible for the US government to conduct an investigation while engaged in an unprecedented military mobilization against two powerful adversaries, imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, why is it impossible today, when the supposed enemy is a small band of terrorists based in the poorest country in the world?
The White House and its apologists made heavy use of the precedent of World War II to justify Bush’s issuance of an executive order to try alleged terrorists before secret military tribunals, citing the case in which Roosevelt approved a military tribunal to deal with eight captured German saboteurs. But they ignore the example of World War II when it comes to an investigation into the supposed “sneak attack” of September 11.
(The example of the Roosevelt’s tribunals is perhaps inadvertently revealing, however, since he ordered the closed-door trial not because of military necessity in wartime, but because top intelligence and military officials faced political embarrassment. Two of the eight saboteurs turned themselves in to the authorities after they arrived in the US, but the FBI initially refused to believe their account, terming their first telephone contact a “crank call.” FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wanted to conceal this negligence, while the War Department wanted to keep quiet about the ease with which the eight had been landed in Florida and Long Island by German U-boats—a fact obvious to the Nazi high command, but unknown to the American public.)
On December 20, two months after their initial comments, McCain and Lieberman unveiled legislation to establish a bipartisan 14-member commission of inquiry modeled on the Warren Commission or the Pearl Harbor investigation. Four members would be selected by Bush, and ten more by congressional leaders of both parties. McCain suggested former senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman as possible co-chairmen, since they chaired a previous commission which predicted in 1999 that in a future terrorist attack “Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers.”
McCain said that he and Lieberman had gone public with their plan because “there is resistance inside all of these agencies to an independent investigation.”
Explaining why a joint investigation involving both the executive and legislative branches was necessary, McCain said, “Neither the administration nor Congress is capable of conducting a thorough, nonpartisan, independent inquiry into what happened on September 11.”
Anne Womack, a White House spokeswoman, gave a noncommittal response to the proposals, repeating the Bush administration’s excuse for inaction. “We look forward to reviewing them,” she said. “Right now, the president is focused on fighting the war on terrorism.”
The New York Times, in reporting the new calls for an independent investigation, said that “for Democrats, a senior Congressional aide said, the government’s confused response to the anthrax sent in letters to Senators Tom Daschle, Democrat of South Dakota, and Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, had hit home in the Senate and prompted more interest in a thorough examination of the government, including its apparent lack of plans to fight bioterrorism.”
We are entitled to interpret this Aesopian language in the light of what we know about the anthrax attacks, which involved highly potent spores obtained from a secret US Army germ warfare program. The anthrax attacks were an attempt to destroy the congressional Democratic leadership. This is recognized by some of the Democrats, and likely McCain as well, impelling them to make this very tentative and cautious rejoinder.
It would be foolish to place any confidence in such half-hearted steps. The history of Democratic Party responses to state provocations and attacks on democratic rights shows a steady downward curve over the past quarter century: from the limited exposures of Watergate and the Church commission into CIA and FBI crimes in 1973-1976, to the failure to break through Reagan administration stonewalling over the Iran-Contra affair in 1987, to prostration in the face of the right-wing campaign to destabilize the Clinton administration, which culminated in impeachment.
The information summarized in this series represents only facts made public in the US and international media. The public does not have access to the far more voluminous data, based on electronic intercepts, secret surveillance and other sources, which was available to the entire American intelligence apparatus during the period leading up to September 11. But even this limited selection demonstrates the falsity of US claims that the World Trade Center was an unforeseeable surprise attack.
In examining any crime, a central question must be “who benefits?” The principal beneficiaries of the destruction of the World Trade Center are in the United States: the Bush administration, the Pentagon, the CIA and FBI, the weapons industry, the oil industry. It is reasonable to ask whether those who have profited to such an extent from this tragedy contributed to bringing it about.
Those who believe it is inconceivable that the US government could carry out such an action would be well advised to learn from history. In nearly every war since the United States first emerged as a world power a century ago, the ruling class has seized on events or atrocities of a similar kind to overcome the instinctive reluctance of the American people to become involved in overseas conflicts.
In some instances the casus belli was wholly fabricated, as in the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident which led to passage of a congressional resolution authorizing massive US intervention in Vietnam. Or the pretext may have been an accident—the explosion that destroyed the battleship Maine in Havana harbor in 1898, which set the stage for the Spanish-American War. But in the majority of cases the event chosen to trigger war was subject to a degree of manipulation behind the scenes by the US government.
The sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 was the foreseeable result of the Wilson administration’s decision to allow passenger liners to carry arms shipments for the British-French side in World War I. When a German submarine torpedoed the ship, with the loss of 1,200 lives, the resulting public outrage helped fuel US entry into the war. Pearl Harbor likewise was foreseen by the Roosevelt administration—if not the specific date and location, certainly the likelihood of a preemptive Japanese attack—once the US cut off all shipments of oil and scrap metal to Japan in the summer of 1941.
A cruder case of manipulation is the August 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, which became the occasion for the large-scale—and seemingly permanent—deployment of American troops and warplanes in the Persian Gulf and Arabian peninsula.
Throughout the 1980s, Saddam Hussein was a de facto military ally of the United States, receiving US intelligence information and US-approved weapons shipments to aid his war against Iran. After Iran was compelled to accept a cease-fire in 1988 largely favorable to Iraq, the main US (and Saudi) concern was to prevent Baghdad, with its battle-tested million-man army, from dominating the Persian Gulf.
A series of conflicts ensued, largely provoked by Kuwait. The oil-rich emirate demanded immediate repayment of billions in war loans to Iraq, while at the same time draining oil from the Rumaila field, which lies largely on the Iraqi side of the border, thus putting Iraq in a severe financial squeeze. In retaliation, Saddam Hussein engaged in saber-rattling declarations, describing Kuwait as the lost nineteenth province of Iraq, stolen from the country by British imperialism.
The US response to this conflict was notably reserved. In her now-famous meeting with Saddam Hussein the month before the Iraqi invasion, US Ambassador April Glaspie declared that Iraq’s dispute with Kuwait was a matter for those two to resolve for themselves, with no role for the United States. Meanwhile, on the orders of Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Norman Schwarzkopf drew up plans for a massive US military intervention in the Persian Gulf aimed against Iraq. War-gaming of this plan was completed in July 1990, within days of the Glaspie-Hussein meeting.
There is ample reason to believe that the US tacitly encouraged an Iraqi attack so as to provide a pretext for smashing the Iraqi military and realizing a long-desired goal of US foreign policy, the establishment of a dominant American military position in the oil-rich Persian Gulf. In the same way, the Bush administration has used the World Trade Center catastrophe as the opportunity for deploying American military forces in Central Asia and the Caspian basin, a region of vast untapped oil reserves which is expected to become the Persian Gulf of the twenty-first century.
US officials were quoted after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait to the effect that they had not thought that Saddam Hussein would seize the whole country. In other words, they encouraged his appetites, expecting only a border conflict which would bring the US in as an arbiter and thus strengthen its role in the Gulf region. A similar miscalculation may have been involved in the September 11 hijackings, whose consequences were far more devastating than might have been expected.
It is not possible to determine, based on the facts currently available, the exact degree of advance knowledge the American government possessed about the World Trade Center catastrophe. But the question deserves the most thorough investigation.
Alternative explanations—that the FBI and CIA were guilty of ineptitude so spectacular that it amounts to criminal negligence—do not place the US government in a much better light. The American people are being asked to give their blind trust for an unlimited and open-ended campaign of military action by a government which either permitted, or proved incapable of preventing, the slaughter of thousands of its own citizens.
The case of Zacarias Moussaoui raises many questions about the conduct of the FBI and other US intelligence agencies in the period leading up the September 11. It is the clearest example of the almost inexplicable refusal on the part of these agencies to take any action that could have prevented the bloodiest terrorist attack in American history.
Moussaoui was arraigned January 3 on six counts of conspiracy to commit murder and terrorism in the September 11 attacks. A French-born man of Moroccan Arab descent, Moussaoui refused “in the name of Allah” to make a plea, and a plea of not guilty was entered for him at the request of his public defender.
The 30-minute hearing in a federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia concluded with US District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema setting a trial date for next October, despite defense protests that this would put jury selection around the first anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Defense lawyers suggested they would seek a change of venue from Alexandria, only a few miles from the Pentagon where 189 people were killed when a hijacked American Airlines jet slammed into the building on September 11. Brinkema indicated that she was not inclined to grant a change of venue, saying that a fair jury could be found in northern Virginia.
Four of the six charges against Moussaoui carry the death penalty, although he was arrested a month before the September 11 attacks and therefore could not have played any active role in the mass murder. Prosecutors have until March 29 to announce whether they will seek death sentences. Moussaoui would be the first French citizen to face the death penalty in the United States since the US Supreme Court restored the death penalty in 1976.
Moussaoui was arrested in Minnesota August 16 after officials of a flight school, the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Eagan, a suburb of Minneapolis, tipped off the FBI that he was seeking flight training on a Boeing 747 jumbo jet.
His conduct aroused suspicion: his attitude was belligerent, he was evasive about his personal background, he declined to speak French with an instructor who knew the language, and he paid the $6,300 fee in cash. He insisted on training to fly a jumbo jet despite an obvious lack of skill even with small planes. The prospective student reportedly did not want to learn how to take off or land, only how to steer the jet while it was in the air.
The instructor and a vice president of the flight school briefed two Democratic congressmen from the Minneapolis area in November about their repeated efforts to get the FBI to take an interest in Moussaoui’s conduct. Their accounts were first reported in the MinneapolisStar-Tribune, then in the New York Times December 22.
The vice president of the flight school, who briefed Minnesota Congressmen James Oberstar and Martin Sabo, said it took four to six phone calls to the FBI to find an agent who would help. The instructor became so frustrated by the lack of response that he gave a prescient warning to the FBI that “a 747 loaded with fuel can be used as a bomb.”
Moussaoui was detained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service on charges of violating the terms of his visa. Local FBI investigators in Minneapolis immediately viewed Moussaoui as a terrorist suspect and sought authorization for a special counterintelligence surveillance warrant to search the hard drive of his home computer. This was rejected by higher-level officials in Washington, who claimed there was insufficient evidence to meet the legal requirements for the warrant.
FBI agents tracked Moussaoui’s movements to the Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma, where he logged 57 hours of flight time earlier in 2001 but was never allowed to fly on his own because of his poor skills. This alone should have set off alarm bells, since a confessed Al Qaeda operative, Abdul Hakim Murad, had trained at the same school, as part of preparations for a suicide hijack attack on CIA headquarters. Murad testified about these plans in the 1996 trial of Ramzi Ahmed Yusef, the principal organizer of the 1993 World Trade Center car-bombing.
Several of the September 11 hijackers had either enrolled in or visited the Oklahoma flight school, as a more thorough investigation determined in the aftermath of the suicide hijackings.
On August 26, FBI headquarters was notified by French intelligence that Moussaoui had ties to the Al Qaeda organization and Osama bin Laden. Even this report did not spur the agency to action. A special counterterrorism panel of the FBI and CIA reviewed the information against him, but concluded there was insufficient evidence that he represented any threat, despite his refusal to answer questions and the French allegations. Moussaoui was not even transferred from INS detention to FBI custody until after September 11.
The French warning arrived on the day after the first two suicide hijackers purchased their one-way, first class tickets for flights on September 11. More tickets were purchased on August 26, 27, 28 and 29, while the FBI was refusing to pursue a more intensive investigation into Moussaoui or search his computer.
The New York Times commented December 22 that the Moussaoui case “raised new questions about why the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies did not prevent the hijackings.”
FBI officials responded indirectly to this criticism, flatly denying the account of the warning given by the flight school personnel. “The notion of flying a plane into a building or using it as a bomb never came up,” one senior official to the Washington Post January 2. “It was a straight hijacking scenario that they were worried about.”
This issue is of critical importance, and the flight school instructor, unlike the FBI, has absolutely no reason to lie. In the wake of September 11, FBI Director Robert Mueller flatly declared that the FBI had no indication that terrorists were seeking to use hijacked airliners as flying bombs. His assurances were accepted uncritically by the American media. The account given by the flight school shows that these assurances were lies.
The Moussaoui case is only one of a number of indications that the US government had ample warning that a major terrorist operation was under way in the United States and yet did nothing to preempt or block it.
* The governments of at least four countries—Russia, Germany, Israel and Egypt—gave Washington specific warnings of terrorist attacks in the United States involving the use of hijacked airplanes as weapons, in the months leading up to September 11.
* The US government itself had multiple indications of the danger of suicide hijackings, based on its own investigations into other terrorist attacks attributed to Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network.
* The US government was monitoring the electronic communications of bin Laden and his associates during the extensive period of advance planning which preceded the September 11 attack.
* Several of the September 11 hijackers, including Mohammed Atta, the alleged ringleader, were under direct surveillance by US agencies as suspected terrorists during 2000 and 2001.Yet they were allowed to travel freely into and out of the US and eventually carry out their plans.
September 11 took place amid a virtual stand-down of the security forces which permits no innocent explanation. The circumstances of the terrorist attacks deserve the most serious and conscientious investigation. Both the Bush administration and the Democrats and Republicans in Congress have rejected any such probe, suggesting that to question the role of the FBI, CIA and other intelligence agencies is unpatriotic.
But the facts which are known so far point to the conclusion that officials at the highest levels of the US government knew that a major terrorist attack was under way and made no serious effort to prevent it. The political motive can be inferred: they permitted an attack to go forward—whether they knew its full dimensions or not—in order to provide the necessary pretext for carrying out a right-wing agenda of military intervention abroad and attacks on democratic rights at home.
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