Some Context - Quareness Series (30th "Lecture").

 

I believe it was JFK one time resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue who pointed out that ......the greatest enemy of the truth is not the deliberate, contrived and dishonest lie but the persistent, pervasive and unrealistic myth.....an astute observation and also perhaps a prophetic one. The history of "international relations" over the closing years of the 20th Century and the early ones of the 21st may illustrate the possibility (or as some would maintain the probability or even the certainty) of this type of "conspiracy theory truism".

 

Despite continuing to pervade the imagination of much of the world, the events of 9/11 and those leading up to it remain largely unknown and apparently little understood by the general public. The facts and truths of that time are "lost" in the simplistic folklore myth that the largest ever attack carried out on US soil was orchestrated by 19 fanatical fundamentalist Muslims armed with box cutters and under the direction of Osama bin Laden, the leader of a global terrorist network called al-Qaeda, operating out of a cave in Afghanistan. To try to understand the context of the causes and consequences of this terrible day requires some attempt to address the complexity of this type of terror and to examine the geopolitical historical origins and nature of what we today know as al-Qaeda.

 

The Safari Club.

 

Gerald Ford became the new US President in 1974, after Richard Nixon's resignation. Henry Kissinger remained on as Secretary of State and Ford brought into his Administration - Donald Rumsfeld as Chief of Staff (later promoted to Secretary of Defence) and Dick Cheney as Deputy Assistant to the President (later promoted to Chief of Staff). He also appointed George H.W. Bush as CIA Director. The Vice President was Nelson Rockefeller.
A coalition of Intelligence Agencies called the Safari Club was formed in 1976 at a time when the CIA was embroiled in domestic scrutiny over the Watergate scandal and a Congressional investigation into its covert activities, forcing it to become even more covert in its activities. Prince Turki bin Faisal, the Saudi intelligence chief, confirmed this in 2002 when he stated that in response to the CIA’s need for more discretion, a group of countries got together to fight Communism and set up what was called the Safari Club which included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Iran (under the Shah). And because this "Club" needed a network of banks to finance its intelligence operations, the then Saudi intelligence chief, Kamal Adham, with the official blessing of George H.W. Bush as head of the CIA, transformed a small Pakistani merchant bank (Bank of Credit and Commerce International - BCCI) into a world-wide money-laundering machine, buying banks across the globe to create the biggest clandestine money network in history. In effect the Safari Club had been formed by a group of States in order to conduct through their own Intelligence Agencies operations that were now difficult for the CIA.

 

The “Arc of Crisis” and the Iranian Revolution.

 

Zbigniew Brzezinski and David Rockefeller had formed the Trilateral Commission international think-tank back in 1973, and Brzezinski had invited Jimmy Carter to join. When Carter became President in 1977, he appointed over two-dozen members of this Trilateral Commission to his Administration, including Brzezinski himself as National Security Adviser, Cyrus Vance as Secretary of State and Samuel Huntington as Coordinator of National Security and Deputy to Brzezinski. Huntington and Brzezinski were to determine the US policy position in the Cold War, termed “Cooperation and Competition” in which Brzezinski would press for cooperation with the Soviets when talking to the press but privately push for competition. Meanwhile a policy of pursuing détente with the Soviet Union appeared to be implemented by Cyrus Vance.

 

In a speech during 1978 Brzezinski stated...... “An arc of crisis stretches along the shores of the Indian Ocean, with fragile social and political structures in a region of vital importance to us threatened with fragmentation. The resulting political chaos could well be filled by elements hostile to our values and sympathetic to our adversaries”. The particular area of focus was “the nations that stretch across the southern flank of the Soviet Union from the Indian subcontinent to Turkey, and southward through the Arabian Peninsula to the Horn of Africa”. And the “center of gravity of this arc is Iran, the world’s fourth largest oil producer and for more than two decades a citadel of U.S. military and economic strength in the Middle East. Now it appears that the 37-year reign of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi is almost over, ended by months of rising civil unrest and revolution.”
Brzezinski conceived this arc of crisis with rising discontent in the region as an opportunity to mobilise an Arc of Islam to contain the Soviets. Just a month before that speech Carter had appointed the Bilderberg Group's George Ball, another member of the Trilateral Commission, to head a special White House Iranian Task Force under the National Security Council’s Brzezinski and Ball had recommended that Washington drop its support for the Shah and support instead the fundamentalist Islamic opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. At the same time the US Ambassador to Iran, William Sullivan, thought that the revolution would succeed and James Bill, a Carter adviser, felt that “a religious movement brought about with the United States’ assistance would be a natural friend of the United States".

 

At the Bilderberg Group meeting in May 1979 the British historian Bernard Lewis presented an Anglo- American strategy which endorsed the radical Muslim Brotherhood movement behind Khomeini, in order to promote balkanisation of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. Lewis argued that the West should encourage autonomous groups such as the Kurds, Armenians, Lebanese Maronites, Ethiopian Copts, Azerbaijani Turks, and so forth. He believed that chaos would spread in what he termed an ‘Arc of Crisis’ which would spill over into the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union and thereby prevent the latter gaining influence in the Middle East. The Soviets would then be viewed as atheistic and godless imperialists who would seek to impose secularism across Muslim countries. In this way supporting radical Islamic Groups would mean that the Soviet Union would be less likely to have any influence or relations with Middle Eastern countries, making the US a more acceptable candidate for developing relations.
"Foreign Affairs", the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, carried an article in 1979 which described the Arc of Crisis saying that...... “The Middle East constitutes its central core. Its strategic position is unequalled: it is the last major region of the Free World directly adjacent to the Soviet Union, it holds in its subsoil about three-fourths of the proven and estimated world oil reserves, and it is the locus of one of the most intractable conflicts of the twentieth century: that of Zionism versus Arab nationalism”. It went on to explain that post-war US policy in the region was focused on “containment” of the Soviet Union, as well as access to the region's oil. The article further pointed out that the most “obvious division” within the Middle East was “that which separates the Northern Tier (Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan) from the Arab core” and that “after World War II, Turkey and Iran were the two countries most immediately threatened by Soviet territorial expansionism and political subversion”. Ultimately “the Northern Tier was assured of a serious and sustained American commitment to save it from sharing the fate of Eastern Europe”.

 

Just a few days before the February 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran a representative of the French President organized a meeting in Paris at which Khomeini made certain demands of the "current world powers"....the Shah’s removal and help in avoiding a coup d’état by the Iranian Army. The Western powers were worried about the Soviet Union’s empowerment and penetration and a disruption in Iran’s oil supply to the West. Khomeini gave the necessary guarantees and a few days later left Paris for Iran on an Air France flight, with the blessing of Jimmy Carter. On 4th February Ayatollah Khomeini confidently named Mehdi Bazargan as prime minister of the Provisional Revolutionary Government but at the same time the Carter Administration under Brzezinski had begun planning a military coup. Interestingly, however, in January 1979 as the Shah was about to leave the country, the American Deputy Commander in NATO (General Huyser) arrived and over a period of a month conferred constantly with Iranian military leaders which may well have influenced their decision not to attempt a coup and eventually to yield to the Khomeini forces.

 

During the last months of the Shah's reign tensions had increased among the Iranian population and the US had sent “security advisers” to Iran to pressure SAVAK (secret police) to implement a policy of ever more brutal repression in a manner calculated to maximise popular antipathy to the Shah, while at the same time the Carter administration had begun publicly criticising his Regime’s human rights abuses. On 6th September 1978 the Shah banned demonstrations and the following day hundreds of demonstrators were gunned down following advice from Brzezinski "to be firm". Again at the same time the US Ambassador to the UN, Andrew Young (another Trilateral Commission member) said that “Khomeini will eventually be hailed as a saint” and the US Ambassador to Iran, William Sullivan said “Khomeini is a Gandhi-like figure” while Carter’s adviser James Bill said that Khomeini was a man of “impeccable integrity and honesty.” In the event the Shah fled to the Bahamas in January 1979 and the Islamic Republic was established.

 

There had been a long standing relationship between the Rockefeller family and the Shah - in effect Rockefeller interests had directed US policy in Iran since the CIA engineered coup there back in 1953. Joseph V. Reed (Chase Manhattan Bank Chairman David Rockefeller’s personal assistant) had been assigned to handle the Shah’s finances and his personal needs, Robert Armao (who worked for Vice President Nelson Rockefeller) was sent to act as the Shah’s public relations agent and lobbyist, and Benjamin H. Kean (David's doctor and a longtime associate) was sent to Mexico when the Shah was there and advised that he be treated at an American hospital.
Chase Manhattan Bank had more interests in Iran than any other US bank. Indeed the Shah had instructed that all his Government’s major operating accounts be held at Chase and that letters of credit for the purchase of oil be handled exclusively through Chase. The bank also became the agent and lead manager for many of the loans to Iran. Following the Shah’s flight from Iran there was increased pressure by some powerful people to have him admitted to the United States......what we might by now call the usual suspects among them Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, John J. McCloy (senior member of the Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, who was also a lawyer for Chase Manhattan) and of course David Rockefeller.

 

The Iranian Interim Government headed by Prime Minister Bazargan collapsed in November of 1979 when Iranian students seized the US Embassy in Tehran. However, during its short reign several actions were undertaken which threatened some very powerful interests who had helped the Ayatollah into power.
Billions in questionable loans to Iran had been funneled through Chase Manhattan Bank which now faced a liquidity crisis. As soon as the Interim Government was put in power, it began to take steps to market its oil independently of the Western Oil Majors. Also it wanted Chase Manhattan to return Iranian assets of at least $1 billion which could have created a further liquidity crisis for the bank already coping with financial troubles.

 

The Shah being accepted into the United States precipitated the hostage crisis at the American Embassy in Tehran which occurred on 4th November 1979. Ten days later Carter froze all Iranian assets in US banks on the advice of his Treasury Secretary William Miller, who happened to have ties to Chase Manhattan Bank. This freezing of assets made the attempt to market its oil independently of the Western Oil Majors more difficult for the Iranians - this was particularly significant for Chase Manhattan because of the close interlocking of its board with those oil companies and because Chase exclusively handled all the letters of credit for the purchase of Iranian oil. Nevertheless the larger designs behind this crisis flowed from the perceived opportunity presented by the earlier rising discontent within Iran at the Shah and the quick actions taken in covertly pushing the country into revolution.

The Iranian assets freeze became a major factor in the huge oil price increases of 1979 and 1981. Also in 1979 British Petroleum cancelled major supply contracts which along with cancellations taken by Royal Dutch Shell drove the price of oil up higher. The first major price rises in 1973 (urged by Henry Kissinger) forced the Third World to borrow heavily from US and European banks to finance development. With the second oil price shocks of 1979, Paul Volcker the US Federal Reserve Chairman (himself having served a career under David Rockefeller at Chase Manhattan) dramatically raised interest rates from 2% in the late 70s to 18% in the early 80s. Of course developing nations could not afford to pay such interest on their loans and thus the 1980s debt crisis spread throughout the Third World. And of course the IMF and World Bank came to the “rescue” with their Structural Adjustment Programs thereby ensuring western control over the developing world’s economies.

 

Covertly the United States helped a radical Islamist Government come to power in Iran - the centre of the "Arc of Crisis” - and then stirred up conflict and war in the region. Five months before the April 1980 Iraqi invasion of Iran, Zbigniew Brzezinski openly declared the willingness of the US to work closely with Iraq. Two months before the war Brzezinski met with Saddam Hussein in Jordan, where he gave support for the destabilisation of Iran. Saddam also met with three senior CIA agents there which was arranged by King Hussein of Jordan. He then met with King Fahd in Saudi Arabia and with the King of Kuwait informing them of his plans to invade Iran. He gained the support of America as well as financial and arms support from the Arab oil producing countries. That war lasted until 1988 and resulted in over a million deaths.

Thus emerged the grand “strategy of tension” in the “Arc of Crisis” involving the covert support of radical Islamic elements to forment violence and conflict in a region..... pitting people against each other so that they would not join forces against the imperial power. This violence and radical Islamism would further provide the pretext for which the US and its imperial allies could then engage in war and occupation within the region, all the while securing their vast economic and strategic interests.

 

Afghanistan - The Safari Club in Action.

 

In 1978 the progressive Taraki Government in Afghanistan managed to incur the anger of the United States due to its egalitarian and collectivist economic policies. Although undertaking friendly policies and engagement with the Soviet Union, this Government  was not itself Communist (despite its wide portrayal as such in the West).

Almost immediately after the New Government came to power the US began covertly funding rebel groups through the CIA. Throughout 1979 Brzezinski worked closely with his aide from the CIA (Robert Gates) in shifting President Carter’s Islamic policy. He admitted as much in a later 1998 interview with a French publication....."According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention". Brzezinski elaborated that he “knowingly increased the probability that [the Soviets] would invade” and recalled writing to Carter on the day of that invasion that "we now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war and for almost 10 years Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralisation and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire”. When asked about the repercussions of such support fostering the rise of Islamic fundamentalism Brzezinski responded.... “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”.

 

For generations in both Afghanistan and the Soviet Muslim Republics the dominant form of Islam had been local and largely Sufi. The decision to work with the Saudi and Pakistani Secret Services meant that billions of CIA and Saudi dollars would ultimately be spent in programs that would help enhance the globalistic and Wahhabistic jihadism that are associated today with al-Qaeda.
Hafizullah Amin, a top official in Taraki’s Government, orchestrated a coup in September of 1979, and executed Taraki, halted the reforms, and murdered, jailed, or exiled thousands of Taraki supporters as he moved toward establishing a fundamentalist Islamic State. However, within two months he in turn was overthrown by PDP remnants including elements within the military. The Soviets also intervened in order to replace Amin (who was seen as “unpredictable and extremist”) with “the more moderate Barbak Karmal”.

The Soviet invasion thus prompted the US National Security Establishment to undertake the largest covert operation in history. When Ronald Reagan replaced Jimmy Carter in 1981, the covert assistance to the Afghan Mujahideen not only continued on the path set by Brzezinski but it rapidly accelerated, as did the overall strategy in the “Arc of Crisis”. Reagan's Vice President was one George H.W. Bush (ex CIA, Safari Club, BCCI player). In the campaign to aid the Afghan rebels BCCI emerged as a U.S. intelligence asset and the CIA began to use the Saudis, Pakistanis and BCCI to run what they couldn’t get through Congress. BCCI president Abedi and the then CIA Director Casey met repeatedly during that time.
In 1981 Director Casey worked with the Saudi Intelligence Agency (GID) chief Prince Turki bin Faisal and the Pakistani ISI to create a foreign legion of jihadi muslims or so-called Arab Afghans, an idea with its origins in the elite Safari Club. In 1986 the CIA backed a plan by the Pakistani ISI to recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. Between 1986 and 1992 more than 100,000 Islamic militants were trained in Pakistan in camps overseen by the CIA and MI6 and with the SAS British Special Forces training future al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters in bomb-making, etc. while their leaders were trained at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was called Operation Cyclone and continued long after the Soviets had withdrawn in 1989. CIA funding for all this was funneled through General Zia and the ISI in Pakistan.

 

The Global Drug Trade and the CIA.

 

As a central facet of the covert financing and training of the Afghan Mujahideen, the role of the drug trade became invaluable.

 

The global drug trade has long been used by empires for fuelling and financing conflict with the aim of facilitating imperial domination. In 1773 the British Governor in Bengal established a colonial monopoly on the sale of opium and as the East India Company expanded production, opium became India’s main export. Over the next 130 years Britain actively promoted the export of Indian opium to China, defying Chinese drug laws and fighting two wars to open China’s opium market for its merchants. Using its military and mercantile power Britain played a central role in making China a vast drug market and in accelerating opium cultivation throughout China. By 1900 China had 13.5 million addicts consuming 39,000 tons of opium.

In Indochina in the 1940s and 50s the French Intelligence Services enabled the opium trade to survive government suppression efforts, and subsequently CIA activities in Burma helped transform the Shan States from a relatively minor poppy-cultivating area into the largest opium-growing region in the world.
They did this through supporting the Kuomintang (KMT) Army in Burma for an invasion of China and facilitating its monopolisation and expansion of the opium trade. The KMT remained in control of Burma until a coup in 1961 when they were driven into Laos and Thailand. And the CIA subsequently played a large role in the facilitation of the drugs trade in Laos and Vietnam throughout the 1960s and into the 70s.

 

It was during the 1980s that the CIA’s covert war in Afghanistan transformed Central Asia from a self-contained opium zone into a major supplier of heroin for the world market. Until the late 1970s tribal farmers in the highlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan grew limited quantities of opium and sold it to merchant caravans bound west for Iran and east to India. In its decade of covert warfare against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan the CIA’s operations provided the political protection and logistics linkages that joined Afghanistan’s poppy fields to heroin markets in Europe and America.

In 1977 General Zia Ul Haq in Pakistan launched a military coup imposing a harsh martial-law regime and executing former President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. When Zia came to power the Pakistani ISI was a minor military intelligence unit but under the advice and assistance of the CIA, General Zia transformed it into a powerful covert unit and made it the strong arm of his martial-law regime. The CIA and Saudi money then flowed not only to weapons and training for the Mujahideen but also into the drug trade. Zia appointed General Fazle Haq as the Military Governor of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province who would consult with Brzezinski on developing an Afghan resistance program. When CIA Director Casey or Vice President George H.W. Bush reviewed their Afghan operation they went to see Haq who moved much of the narcotics money through the BCCI.

In May of 1979 well prior to the December invasion of the Soviet Union into Afghanistan, a CIA envoy met with Afghan resistance leaders in a meeting organized by the ISI. The ISI offered the CIA envoy an alliance with its own Afghan client Gulbuddin Hekmatyar who led a small guerilla group. Over the following decade half of the CIA’s aid went to Hekmatyar’s guerillas and he in turn became Afghanistan’s leading Mujahideen Drug Lord developing a complex of six heroin labs in an ISI-controlled area of Baluchistan (Pakistan). Throughout the 1980s the US in conjunction with Saudi Arabia gave Hekmatyar more than $1 billion in armaments. And right from the start of this "largesse" heroin began flowing from Afghanistan to America. By 1980 drug-related deaths in New York City rose 77% over 1979. By 1981 the drug lords in Pakistan and Afghanistan supplied 60% of America’s heroin. Trucks going into Afghanistan with CIA arms from Pakistan would return with heroin protected by ISI papers from police search. Both Haq and the BCCI bank were heavily involved in this.

Haq, the CIA asset in Pakistan, and the BCCI bank were in effect running this drug trade. In the 1980s the ISI at the prompting of the CIA created a special cell for the use of heroin for covert actions. The plan (another Safari Club idea) was to promote the cultivation of opium and the extraction of heroin in Pakistani territory as well as in the Afghan territory under Mujahideen control for smuggling into Soviet controlled areas in order to make the Soviet troops heroin addicts.

 

Again during the 1980s the United States undertook a program to finance Mujahideen propaganda in textbooks for Afghan schools. The US gave the Mujahideen $43 million in “non-lethal” aid for the textbook project alone, which was delivered by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) coordinating its work with the CIA which in turn ran the weapons program.The US Government told USAID to let the Afghan War Chiefs decide the school curriculum and the content of the textbooks which in the event were filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings and with much talk of jihad featuring drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines. These textbooks have served ever since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum....even the Taliban used them. The books were originally developed through a USAID grant to the University of Nebraska-Omaha and its Center for Afghanistan Studies and were smuggled into Afghanistan through regional military leaders - children were taught to count with illustrations showing tanks, missiles and land mines. USAID stopped this funding in 1994.

 

The Rise of the Taliban.

 

After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 fighting continued between the Afghan Government backed by the USSR and the Mujahideen backed by the US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 so too did its aid to the Afghan Government which itself was overthrown in 1992. Almost immediately fighting broke out between rival factions vying for power including Hekmatyar.

In the early 1990s an obscure group of “Pashtun country folk” had become a powerful military and political force in Afghanistan, known as the Taliban. They originally surfaced as a small militia force operating near Kandahar City during the spring and summer of 1994, carrying out vigilante attacks against minor warlords. As discontent with the warlords grew, so too did the reputation of the Taliban. In 1994 they acquired an alliance with the ISI and throughout 1995 their relationship accelerated and became more and more of a direct military alliance. The Taliban ultimately became an asset of the ISI and a client of the Pakistan army. Furthermore between 1994 and 1996 the USA supported the Taliban politically through its allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, essentially because Washington viewed the Taliban as anti-Iranian, anti-Shia, and pro-Western.

 

Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

 

Between 1980 and 1989 roughly $600 million was passed through Osama bin Laden’s charity front organizations, specifically the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) also known as al-Kifah, to arm and fund the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. The money mostly originated with wealthy donors in Saudi Arabia and other areas in the Persian Gulf.

In the 1980s also the British SAS were training Mujahideen in Afghanistan as well as in secret camps in Scotland. The CIA also indirectly began to arm Osama bin Laden through his front charity (MAK) which was nurtured by the Pakistani ISI.

Osama bin Laden was reported to have been personally recruited by the CIA in 1979 in Istanbul. He had the support of his friend Prince Turki bin Faisal (head of Saudi Intelligence) and also developed ties with Hekmatyar in Afghanistan. General Akhtar Abdul Rahman (then head of the Pakistani ISI from 1980 to 1987) would meet regularly with bin Laden in Pakistan and they formed a partnership in demanding a tax on the opium trade from warlords. By 1985 bin Laden and the ISI were splitting the profits of over $100 million per year. In 1985 his brother Salem stated that Osama was the liaison between the US, the Saudi Government, and the Afghan rebels.

 

In 1988, bin Laden discussed the establishment of a new military group which would come to be known as al-Qaeda. His charity front (MAK) founded the al-Kifah Centre in Brooklyn New York to recruit Muslims for the jihad against the Soviets. This was done with the support of the US Government which provided visas for known terrorists associated with the organization, including Ali Mohamed and the “blind sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman. And this coincided with the creation of al-Qaeda for which the al-Kifah Centre was in effect a recruiting front.

Foot soldiers for al-Qaeda were admitted to the United States for training under a special visa program. Up to that time the FBI had been actively surveilling the training of terrorists but it terminated this surveillance during autumn of 1989. The CIA granted Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman a visa to come run the al-Kifah Centre in 1990.

 

Robin Cook, the former British MP and Minister of Foreign Affairs, wrote that al-Qaeda was originally the computer file of the thousands of Mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians. This account was corroborated by a former French military intelligence agent who stated that in the mid-1980s al-Qaeda was a database and that it remained as such into the 1990s. He contended that it was neither a terrorist group nor Osama bin Laden’s personal property.

It would appear that there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called al-Qaeda but that there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the "devil" in order to drive the "TV watcher" to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The evidence also suggests that the country behind this propaganda is the US and the lobbyists for the US war on terrorism are mainly interested in making money.

Thus it seems that the creation of al-Queda was facilitated by the CIA and allied intelligence networks with the purpose of maintaining a “database” of Mujahideen to be used as intelligence assets to achieve US foreign policy objectives throughout both the Cold War and into the post-Cold War era of the "new world order".

 

Strategy for a "New World Order" after the Cold War.

 

With the end of the Cold War a new strategy had to be determined to manage the global system.

 

When the Soviet Union collapsed a number of new independent Central Asian and Eastern European States were formed and with that, their immense deposits of natural gas and energy became available for exploitation. Afghanistan itself was considered a major strategic pivot because of it being the primary gateway to Central Asia and the immense energy deposits therein. And many of the Western Oil Companies (Exxon Mobil, Texaco, Unocal, BP Amoco, Shell, and Enron) began pouring billions of dollars into the countries of Central Asia in the early 1990s.

 

In 1992 a Pentagon document titled “Defense Planning Guidance” drafted by George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney described a strategy for the United States in the “new world order” stating that “America’s political and military mission in the post-cold-war era will be to ensure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territories of the former Soviet Union” and making the case for "a world dominated by one superpower whose position can be perpetuated by constructive behavior and sufficient military might to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy”. Further it sketched a world in which there is one dominant military power whose leaders "must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role”. The document postulated regional wars against Iraq and North Korea and identified China and Russia as major threats. It further suggested that "the United States could also consider extending to Eastern and Central European nations security commitments similar to those extended to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Arab states along the Persian Gulf”. (This classified document was leaked to the press).

Also in 1992 the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (an influential US think-tank) had established a commission to determine a new foreign policy for the United States in the wake of the Cold War. Among its participants were Madeleine Albright, Henry Cisneros, John Deutch, Richard Holbrooke, Alice Rivlin, David Gergen and Admiral William Crowe. In the summer of that year its final report - “Changing Our Ways: America and the New World” - was published urging a new principle of international relations with the destruction or displacement of groups of people within States to serve as justification for international intervention. It suggested that the US “realign NATO and OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) to deal with new security problems in Europe” and urged "military intervention under humanitarian guises”. This report planted the policy seedlings for the Kosovo war providing both the rationale for US interventionism and a policy recommendation about the best means (NATO) for waging that war.

Another Carnegie publication in the same year - “Self-Determination in the New World Order” - set criteria for officials to use in deciding when to support separatist ethnic groups seeking independence, and advocated military force for that purpose. It recommended that “international military coalitions, preferably U.N.-led, could send armed force not as peacekeepers but peacemakers–to prevent conflict from breaking out and stay in place indefinitely”. It further stated that “the use of military force to create a new state would require conduct by the parent government so egregious that it has forfeited any right to govern the minority claiming self-determination”.

 

The United States and its NATO allies then were soon to undertake a new strategy seeking to maintain dominance over the world and to expand their hegemony over regions previously under the influence of the Soviet Union and to prevent the rise of a resurgent Russia or China. One of the key facets of this strategy was the notion of “humanitarian intervention”.

 

Yugoslavia Dismantled.

 

In the 1990s the United States and its NATO allies (in particular Germany and the UK) undertook a strategy of destabilisation in Yugoslavia seeking to dismantle and ultimately fracture the country through manipulating ethnic tensions and arming and training various militias. And they used the “database” (al-Qaeda) to promote this agenda.

 

In 1989 Yugoslavia had sought financial aid from the World Bank and IMF which implemented a Structural Adjustment Program resulting in the dismantling of the public state. This exacerbated social issues and fuelled separatist tendencies leading to Croatia and Slovenia seceding from the republic in 1991.

In 1990 the US Intelligence Community had released a report predicting that Yugoslavia would break apart and erupt in civil war, and it blamed Milosevic for the impending disaster. This was despite the fact that as far back as 1988 the leader of Croatia met with the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to create a joint policy to break up Yugoslavia and bring Slovenia and Croatia into the “German economic zone.” US Army officers were dispatched to Croatia, Bosnia, Albania, and Macedonia as “advisers” and brought in US Special Forces to help.

The fighting which broke out between Yugoslavia and Croatia when the latter declared independence in 1991 lasted until 1995 and merged in part with the Bosnian war. The US supported the Croats and the CIA actively provided intelligence to their forces which lead to the displacement of between 150,000 and 200,000 Serbs (largely through means of murder, plundering, burning villages and ethnic cleansing). The Croatian Army was trained by US advisers and a general who was later put on trial at the Hague for war crimes was personally supported by the CIA.

 

After the Clinton Administration gave the “green light” there was an influx of Iranian weapons and advisers into Bosnia from 1992 to January 1996.  Iran and other Muslim States further helped to bring Mujahideen fighters into Bosnia to aid the local Muslims against the Serbs. Some of these "holy warriors" from Afghanistan, Chechnya, Yemen and Algeria had suspected links with Osama bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan.

Throughout the war in Bosnia there was a vast secret conduit of weapons smuggling through Croatia arranged by the clandestine agencies of the US, Turkey and Iran, together with a range of radical Islamist groups including Afghan Mujahideen and the pro-Iranian Hizbullah. Germany’s BND Intelligence Agency also ran arms shipments to the Bosnian Muslims and Croatia to fight against the Serbs. At the same time the Secret Services of Ukraine, Greece and Israel were arming the Bosnian Serbs. In the event every side in the Yugoslav conflict was being funded and armed by outside powers seeking to foment trouble and ultimately to break up Yugoslavia in order to serve their own imperial objectives in the region.

 

In 1992 the al-Kifah Centre in Brooklyn made Bosnia its chief target. By 1993 it had opened a branch in Croatia. This recruitment operation for the Bosnian Muslims was a covert action project sponsored not only by Saudi Arabia but also in part by the US Government.

In 1996 the Albanian Mafia in collaboration with the militant guerilla Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) took control of the Balkan heroin trafficking routes. And the KLA itself was linked to former Mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan. By 1997 the KLA had begun fighting against Serbian forces and in 1998 the US State Department removed it from its list of terrorist organizations. Both before and after 1998 the KLA was receiving arms, training and support from the US and NATO, and Clinton’s Secretary of State (Madeline Albright) had close ties with KLA leader Hashim Thaci. The CIA and BND German Intelligence supported the KLA prior to and after the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. The BND had KLA contacts since the early 1990s when the latter was establishing its al-Qaeda contacts and having members trained by Osama bin Laden at camps in Afghanistan.

The March 1999 NATO bombing of Kosovo was justified on the pretence of putting an end to Serbian oppression of Kosovo Albanians, which was termed genocide. The Clinton Administration made claims that at least 100,000 Kosovo Albanians were missing and “may have been killed” by the Serbs. Bill Clinton personally compared events in Kosovo to the Holocaust. The US State Department had stated that up to 500,000 Albanians were feared dead. In time the official estimate was reduced to 10,000 and after later exhaustive investigations it was eventually revealed that the death of less than 2,500 Albanians could be attributed to the Serbs.

During the NATO bombing campaign between 400 and 1,500 Serb civilians had been killed and a Serb TV station and a hospital were criminally attacked - double standards indeed, especially when you consider the genocide committed by "our side" as simply humanitarian intervention.

 

Ultimately the war in Yugoslavia was waged in order to enlarge NATO and to exclude Serbia long term from European development so as to justify a US military presence in the region and to contain Russia. An op-ed in the New York Times in 1996 stated that “instead of seeing Bosnia as the eastern frontier of NATO, we should view the Balkans as the western frontier of America’s rapidly expanding sphere of influence in the Middle East”. And  the fact that the United States is more enthusiastic than its European allies about a Bosnian Muslim State reflects, among other things, the new American role as the leader of an informal collection of Muslim Nations from the Persian Gulf to the Balkans.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union prompted the United States to expand its zone of military hegemony into Eastern Europe (through NATO) and into formerly neutral Yugoslavia. And most importantly the end of the cold war has permitted America to deepen its involvement in the Middle East.

Another important "benefit" of the dismantling of the former Yugoslavia was to facilitate a passageway for the transport of oil and natural gas from the Caspian region through the construction of the Trans-Balkan pipeline to run from the Black Sea port of Burgas to the Adriatic at Vlore, passing through Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania. This could become part of the main route to the West for the oil and gas being extracted in Central Asia, capable of carrying 750,000 barrels a day. As the Guardian (British newspaper) reported - "The project is necessary, according to a paper published by the US Trade and Development Agency last May, because the oil coming from the Caspian Sea will quickly surpass the safe capacity of the Bosphorus as a shipping lane. The scheme, the agency notes, will provide a consistent source of crude oil to American refineries, provide American companies with a key role in developing the vital east-west corridor, advance the privatisation aspirations of the US government in the region and facilitate rapid integration of the Balkans with Western Europe".

In November 1998 the then US Energy Secretary (Bill Richardson) spelt out his policy on the extraction and transport of Caspian oil - "This is about America’s energy security, it’s also about preventing strategic inroads by those who don’t share our values. We’re trying to move these newly independent countries toward the west. We would like to see them reliant on western commercial and political interests rather than going another way. We’ve made a substantial political investment in the Caspian, and it’s very important to us that both the pipeline map and the politics come out right.”

 

The pipeline project supported since 1994 had featured prominently in Balkan war politics. On 9th December 1998 the Albanian President attended a meeting about the scheme in Sofia and linked it inextricably to Kosovo. His message at the meeting was that if the United States wanted Albanian consent for the Trans-Balkan pipeline, it had better wrest Kosovo out of the hands of the Serbs. In the end American political and economic hegemony expanded into Central Asia and the Caspian region with the help of an international network of CIA-trained Islamic militants.

 

The Spread of al-Qaeda.

 

Following the Cold War Islamic fundamentalism came to play a part in the new American/NATO strategy. Many places around the world saw the spread of this al-Queda “database” of Islamist fighters, always aided by Western Intelligence Agencies or their regional conduits (such as the Pakistani and Saudi Intelligence Agencies). 

 

Bernard Lewis a former British intelligence officer and historian who regards Arab discontent towards the West as being rooted in religion rather than anti-imperialism in that he sees Islam as incompatible with the West and that they are destined to have a “Clash of Civilizations”, has for decades played a critical role as professor, mentor, and guru to two generations of Orientalists, academics, US and British intelligence specialists, think-tank denizens, and assorted neoconservatives. He was also one of the originators, along with Brzezinski, of the “Arc of Crisis” strategy employed in the late 1970s. In 1992 he wrote an article in "Foreign Affairs" (the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations) titled “Rethinking the Middle East” wherein he raised the prospect of another policy towards the Middle East in the wake of the end of the Cold War and beginnings of the New World Order “which could even be precipitated by fundamentalism" - a process of "Lebanonisation".

Most of the States of the Middle East being of relatively recent and artificial construction are vulnerable to such a process. If the central power is sufficiently weakened there is no real civil society to hold the polity together given no real sense of common national identity or overriding allegiance to the nation-state. In this way al-Qaeda could be spread internationally so as to destabilise various regions and thus provide the justification for outside intervention. Well-placed intelligence operatives controlling key leadership positions within the terrorist organisations were the key and the great majority of both its higher-ups and nearly all al-Qaeda operatives would not have to be made aware of their covert use as an arm of US geo-policy.

 

In the 1990s Osama bin Laden built a shadow air force to support his activities, using Afghanistan’s national airline, a surplus US Air Force jet and clandestine charters. As the Los Angeles Times revealed -
With the Taliban’s blessing bin Laden effectively had hijacked Ariana, the national civilian airline of Afghanistan. For four years, according to former US aides and exiled Afghan officials, Ariana’s passenger and charter flights ferried Islamic militants, arms, cash and opium through the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan. Members of bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist network were provided false Ariana identification that gave them free run of airports in the Middle East.
Taliban Authorities also opened the country’s airstrips to high-ranking Persian Gulf State officials who routinely flew in for lavish hunting parties. Sometimes joined by bin Laden and Taliban leaders the dignitaries, who included several high-ranking officials from Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, left behind money, vehicles and equipment with their hosts, according to US and Afghan accounts.
OBL’s secret purchase of a US Air Force jet in 1992 was used to ferry al-Qaeda commanders to East Africa where they trained Somali tribesmen for attacks on US peacekeeping forces, and Americans had “unwittingly” helped bin Laden disguise the plane as a civilian jet. US security officials were well aware of Ariana airlines being used by al-Qaeda.
Among the high-ranking Persian Gulf officials who flew to Afghanistan for “hunting trips” were Prince Turki al Faisal (who ran Saudi intelligence until August 2001 maintaining close ties with bin Laden and the Taliban) as well as Sheik Mohammed ibn Rashid al Maktum (the Dubai Crown Prince and Emirates Defence Minister). On occasions both Osama bin Laden and Omar, the head of the Taliban, mingled with the hunters. Upon their departure the wealthy visitors often left behind late-model jeeps, trucks and supplies which was one way the Taliban got their equipment.

 

What the LA Times article did not mention was that the ISI was the prime sponsor of the Taliban with the complete backing and facilitation of the CIA, and that the Safari Club created back in 1976 by the French, may have survived as a covert network encompassing Western Intelligence Agencies working through regional agencies such as those of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. In 2004 the German Intelligence Agency (BND) revealed that two Saudi companies linked with financing al-Qaeda throughout the 1990s were in fact front organizations for Saudi Intelligence.

 

Between 1989 and 2001 several al-Qaeda operatives around the world were trained by Billy Waugh a CIA contractor. And in 2002 it was revealed that British Intelligence had paid large sums of money to an al-Qaeda cell in Libya in a doomed attempt to assassinate Colonel Gadaffi back in 1996. In 1998 Libya had issued an arrest warrant for Osama bin Laden but British and US
Intelligence Agencies buried this fact and played down the threat thwarting early attempts to bring him to justice. Five months after that warrant was issued al-Qaeda killed more than 200 people in the truck bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. This resistance to the Libyan concerns may well have had something to do with Britain's MI6 involvement with the coup plot e.g. Anas al-Liby (a Libyan al-Qaeda leader) was given political asylum in Britain and lived in Manchester until May 2000 when he eluded a police raid on his house and fled abroad.

 

Following the end of the Cold War many Mujahideen fighters were relocated to Russia’s unstable region of Chechnya where the two main rebel leaders who came to power had previously been trained and funded by the CIA in Afghanistan. The war in Chechnya had been planned in a secret meeting in 1996 attended by Osama bin Laden and high-ranking officials of the Pakistani ISI. The US and UK supported Chechen separatism because it weakened Russia (a potential future rival) and advanced US power in the vital Caspian Sea region. Indeed Mikhail Gorbachev (former President of Russia) claimed that the British had been arming the Chechen rebels. Chechnya is also home to large reserves of oil as well as pipeline corridor routes being competed over by Russian and Anglo-American conglomerates.

In the early 1990s US Intelligence helped fund and transport al-Qaeda into Chechnya and remained involved until the end of the decade.

 

The Global Domination Strategy for a New Century.

 

During the 1990s the neoconservative hawks in the US Foreign Policy Establishment formed the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) think-tank.

Their report "Rebuilding America’s Defenses" (published in 2000) outlined a strategy for the United States in the “new century”. Following on where the Defense Planning Guidance document left off (during the first Bush administration) the report stated that "the United States must retain sufficient forces able to rapidly deploy and win multiple simultaneous large-scale wars” and that there is a “need to retain sufficient combat forces to fight and win, multiple, nearly simultaneous major theatre wars” and “the Pentagon needs to begin to calculate the force necessary to protect, independently, US interests in Europe, East Asia and the Gulf at all times”. Recommending "regime change" in Iraq as the “immediate justification” for a US military presence in the Gulf they went on to stress that “the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein”.

In advocating for a massive increase in defence spending and outlining military operations against Iraq, North Korea and possibly Iran, the report stated that “further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor”.

In his book "The Grand Chessboard" Zbigniew Brzezinski outlined a long-term American imperial strategy to control Eurasia stating bluntly that “it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America”. Like for all empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy he advocated were to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.

The Central Asian nations were of importance from the standpoint of security and historical ambitions to at least three of their most immediate and more powerful neighbors - Russia, Turkey and Iran (and increasingly to China) -  but were much more important as a potential economic prize with their enormous concentration of natural gas, oil reserves and important minerals (including gold). Brzezinski emphasized that "America’s primary interest is to help ensure that no single power comes to control this geopolitical space and that the global community has unhindered financial and economic access to it”.

 

Preparing for War against Afghanistan.

 

In 1997 Taliban officials travelled to Texas to meet with Unocal Oil to discuss the possibility of a pipeline being built from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan to Pakistan. Unocal already had agreements with Turkmenistan to sell its gas and with Pakistan to buy it. However, Afghanistan was then embroiled in a civil war making the prospect of a pipeline being built an unstable venture.

Shortly beforehand Unocal's main competitor - Bridas (an Argentine firm) - merged its oil and gas assets with Amoco-Argentina Oil a British Petroleum (BP) subsidiary, and announced that it was close to signing a two billion dollar deal with the Taliban, saying “the talks were in their final stages”. And after the Texas visit the Taliban announced in January of 1998 that they were close to reaching a final agreement on the building of a gas pipeline across Afghanistan, but without indicating which of two competing companies they favoured.

 

Among the figures then involved with the oil companies in relation to Central Asian gas reserves and pipeline projects were Zbigniew Brzezinski (as an adviser to BP-Amoco specifically dealing with the Caspian region), Henry Kissinger (hired by Unocal) and Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad (a former Reagan State Department Advisor during the Afghan-Soviet War brought on as a consultant for a group hired by Unocal, and later to become US envoy to Afghanistan after the 2001 invasion).

Unocal pulled out of the deal in December 1998 because of the continual conflict raging in Afghanistan between various groups as well as the Taliban Government not being fully recognized internationally as legitimate (this latter meaning that the pipeline project could not receive international funding from such as the World Bank). Despite this Enron (which between 1996 and 2001 had given millions of dollars in bribes to Taliban officials) continued to pressure the Taliban to proceed with a pipeline, partly because they had signed a deal in 1996 with neighbouring Uzbekistan to develop Uzbek natural gas fields. In 1997 Halliburton also (with Dick Cheney as CEO) had secured a contract in Turkmenistan for exploration and drilling in the Caspian Sea basin. However, the project was to hit significant problems in December 2001 when Enron filed for bankruptcy.

 

In 1999 a Pentagon document confirmed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defence stated that “Oil conflicts over production facilities and transport routes, particularly in the Persian Gulf and Caspian regions, are specifically envisaged” in the near future and that “energy and resource issues will continue to shape international security” thus vividly highlighting how the highest levels of the US Defence Community accepted the waging of an oil war as a legitimate military option.

 

As it happened, well before George W. Bush became President in January 2001, US Government plans (which included attempts to secure an alliance with the Russians) were already in train for a war against Afghanistan. By March it was reported that India had joined the US, Russia and Iran in an effort to militarily replace the Afghan Taliban Government, using Tajikistan and Uzbekistan as bases to launch incursions. And In the spring of 2001 the US military war-gamed the entire scenario of a US attack on Afghanistan (which subsequently became the operational plan for the later war).

By the summer of that year the Taliban obtained leaked information from top-secret meetings that the Bush Regime was planning to launch a military operation to depose them in July. A US military contingency plan existed on paper to attack Afghanistan from the north by the end of the summer.

As per a BBC report Niaz Naik (former Pakistani Foreign Secretary) was told by senior American officials at a secretive UN-sponsored meeting which took place in Berlin in July 2001 with officials from the US, Russia, and many Central Asian countries, that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October and that the US would launch the operation from their bases in Tajikistan where American advisers were already in place. And MSNBC revealed that President Bush was expected to sign detailed plans for a worldwide war against al-Qaeda two days before September 11 and that all aspects were included ranging from diplomatic initiatives to military operations in Afghanistan - essentially the same war plan as was put into action following the 9/11 attacks.

A National Security document to this effect was also submitted to Condoleezza Rice prior to 9/11 and included plans to attack the Taliban and remove them from power in Afghanistan. The British Prime Minister Tony Blair later stated...."To be truthful about it, there was no way we could have got the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened on September 11".

 

Afghanistan of course had oil and gas of its own, but not enough to qualify as a major strategic concern. By contrast its northern neighbours contained reserves which could be critical to future global supply. In 1998 Dick Cheney (later US Vice President under GW) had remarked “I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian”. Of course the oil and gas there would remain worthless until moved and the only route making both political and economic sense would be through Afghanistan.

 

Transporting all Caspian basin fossil fuel through Russia or Azerbaijan would greatly enhance the former’s political and economic control over the Central Asian Republics, which is precisely what the West had spent ten years trying to prevent. Piping it through Iran would enrich a regime which the US had been seeking to isolate. And sending it the long way round through China, quite aside from the strategic considerations, would be prohibitively expensive. But pipelines through Afghanistan would allow the US both to pursue its aim of diversifying energy supply and to penetrate the world’s most lucrative markets. Growth in European oil consumption was slow and competition intense. By contrast South Asian demand was booming and competitors scarce - in effect pumping oil south and selling it in Pakistan and India would be far more profitable than pumping it west and selling it in Europe.

 

For the first year of Taliban rule US policy towards the Regime appears to have been determined principally by Unocal’s interests. In 1997 a US diplomat told the author Ahmed Rashid “The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco [the former US oil consortium in Saudi Arabia] pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that”. Only in December 1998, four months after the embassy bombings in East Africa, did Unocal drop its plans.

Nevertheless Afghanistan remained of strategic importance given that US foreign policy was now governed by the “full-spectrum dominance” doctrine which means that the US should control military, economic and political development worldwide. By overthrowing the Taliban and replacing them with a stable and grateful pro-western government and then binding the economies of Central Asia to that of its ally Pakistan, it will have crushed not only terrorism but also the growing ambitions of both Russia and China in their attempts to foster world multi-polarisation.

 

However, as revealed by the San Francisco Chronicle in November of 2001 “the United States and Pakistan decided to install a stable regime in place in Afghanistan around 1994 — a regime that would end the country’s civil war and thus ensure the safety of the Unocal pipeline project”. And so the State Department and Pakistan’s Inter- Services Intelligence Agency agreed to funnel arms and funding to the Taliban in their war against the ethnically Tajik Northern Alliance. Ironically as late as 1999, US taxpayers were paying the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official, all in the hopes of returning to the days of dollar-a- gallon gas. Pakistan would pick up revenues from a Karachi oil port facility.

 

The plans and purposes for war on Afghanistan had been well established in advance - so much so that it could kick off in jig time on 7th October, less than a month after 9/11. The final push needed was the public justification. The people would not readily support a war to dominate strategic energy reserves and pipeline routes halfway around the world. Besides the fact that this would be an admission of empire (still a difficult "self concept" for a great many in the US) it would not be an easy task to ask Americans to die for Unocal. What was "needed" to rouse people's appetite for war was to have their collective consciousness reshaped by fear.

 

Anticipating an Attack.

 

Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard that “America’s primary interest is to help ensure that no single power comes to control this geopolitical space [of Central Asia] and that the global community has unhindered financial and economic access to it”. He acknowledged 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”. He also wrote that “the public supported America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor”.

 

In 1999 Andrew Krepinevich (Executive Director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments) testified before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities that the US faced an “unprecedented challenge” and stressed the "need to transform our armed forces into a very different kind of military from that which exists today, while sustaining the military’s ability to play a very active role in supporting US near-term efforts to preserve global stability within a national security strategy of engagement and enlargement". In advocating a massive re-imagining of the role and nature of US military might, and pushing the notion of a “revolution in military affairs” and an acceleration of imperial ambitions, he told the Senate Committee that there appeared to be general agreement concerning the need to transform the US military into a significantly different kind of force from that which emerged victorious from the Cold and Gulf Wars but this verbal support had not yet been translated into a defence program supporting transformation. While there was growing support in Congress for transformation, the “critical mass” (of public support) needed to effect it had not yet been achieved. He concluded that in the absence of a strong external shock to the United States—a latter-day “Pearl Harbor” of sorts—surmounting the barriers to transformation would likely prove a long, arduous process.

 

Also in 1999 Graham Fuller (former Deputy Director of the CIA’s National Council on Intelligence) advocated using Muslim forces to further US interests in Central Asia stating that - “The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia”.

 

In June of 2000 the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Pentagon released their "Joint Vision 2020" outlining the American military strategy that the Department of Defence “will follow in the future”. The report stressed the notion of “Full Spectrum Dominance” meaning “the ability of US forces, operating alone or with allies, to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the range of military operations” including nuclear war, major theater wars and smaller-scale contingencies, peacekeeping and noncombat humanitarian relief.

 

As alluded to earlier, the neoconservative think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC) released a report in September of 2000 titled "Rebuilding America’s Defenses" in which they advocated for a massive expansion of America’s empire and “full spectrum dominance” as well as the necessity to undertake a “revolution in military affairs” and engage in multiple simultaneous wars in different regions of the world. The report pointed out that "the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor”.

Several members of this think-tank and authors of the report would go on to hold key policy positions within the Bush Administration some months later including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Zalmay Khalilzad.

 

In January 2001 the Rumsfeld Commission, set up to analyse the US National Security Space Management and Organization and chaired by the incoming US Secretary of Defence, advocated an expansion of military capabilities in space and a total reorganisation of the armed forces and intelligence agencies of the United States. It stated that......"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".

 

As early as 1998, the then President (Bill Clinton) was warned in his CIA daily briefing that “bin Laden and his allies are preparing for an attack in the US, including an aircraft hijacking”. The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) also at that time conducted an exercise to counter a terrorist attack involving smashing an airplane into a building. Of course NORAD had for years been conducting military exercises and drills in which it envisioned planes being hijacked and flown into buildings in the United States and one of the intended targets in these drills was the World Trade Centre. Another of these drills involved a mock shootdown over the Atlantic Ocean of a jet supposedly laden with chemical poisons and headed toward a target in the US.

In August 1999 the Federal Aviation Administration’s Intelligence Branch warned of a possible “suicide hijacking operation” by Osama Bin Laden and in October of 2000 the Pentagon undertook an emergency response exercise which envisaged a terrorist incident at the Pentagon Metro stop, a construction accident and a “downed passenger aircraft” in the Pentagon courtyard.

 

The British Guardian newspaper revealed in April of 2004 that five months before the 9/11 attacks US military planners had suggested a war game to practise a response to a terrorist attack using a commercial airliner flown into the Pentagon, but senior officers rejected the scenario as “too unrealistic”.

 

In May of 2001 an exercise ("Unified Vision 2001") involving US Central Command, US Special Operations Command and US Joint Forces Command took place in which the military establishment “forecasted” the first war of the 21st Century. According to Dave Ozolek (a former top official involved) this exercise grew out of the realisation that the threat was changing. He said the scenario was a major regional threat emanating from the Middle East and called for global deployment into a landlocked country with hostile terrain and a lack of basing and agreements with neighbouring countries for U.S. access. The threat  portrayed was an unstable and hostile State, but the primary enemy was not the State itself but a transnational actor based out of that area, globally connected, capable and willing to conduct terrorist attacks in the US as part of that campaign. Per Ozolek....100 days later many of the participants became war planners who took their experiences in Unified Vision back to their commands and put them to use as those commands created plans for Operations Enduring Freedom and Noble Eagle....they had an idea of the tactics, techniques and procedures needed to operate against such an enemy.

 

In May 2002 Condoleezza Rice stated that “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile” - a strange thing to say given that the National Security apparatus had fully anticipated and even war gamed and drilled this very scenario.

 

The 9/11 Commission.

 

The Bush Administration resisted attempts to form a commission to investigate the attacks of 9/11 for over a year, even pressuring Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle not to launch an inquiry. In May 2002 President Bush voiced his opposition but by September reversed his previous decision and backed the proposal to form an “independent” commission to investigate the attacks. Within a month of this statement the White House began undermining the process when an almost completed Congressional deal was suddenly undone after a Republican lawmaker involved in the final negotiations received a call from Vice President Dick Cheney which led to a stalling of the process. However, in mid-November Congress approved the creation of a bi-partisan 9/11 Commission to investigate the attacks with ten Congressmen (five Democrats and five Republicans) and a Chairman appointed by the Bush Administration and Vice Chair appointed by the Democrats.

The chosen Chairman was Henry Kissinger (former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State for Nixon and Ford) “a consummate Washington insider”. As the New York Times had to admit - "Unfortunately, his affinity for power and the commercial interests he has cultivated since leaving government may make him less than the staunchly independent figure that is needed for this critical post. Indeed, it is tempting to wonder if the choice of Mr. Kissinger is not a clever maneuver by the White House to contain an investigation it long opposed". Two weeks later facing questions about potential conflicts of interest Henry Kissinger resigned and was replaced by former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, leading another of the commissioners (Max Cleland) to claim in November 2003 that the investigation had been compromised by the White House.

The Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission and the ultimate author of the final report (Philip Zelikow) controlled the research staff of the commission. He was appointed despite his close ties to the Bush White House and remained in regular contact throughout with Karl Rove while overseeing the commission. He had previously co-authored a book with Condoleezza Rice and following the publication of the report he went to work as an adviser to her at the White House. Again this could reasonably pose some concerns about his independence and objectivity.

 

Shortly after the release of the final 9/11 Commission Report in 2004, Harper’s Magazine called it “a cheat and a fraud” declaring it to be a “whitewash”. In 2006 the two co-Chairs published a book in which they claimed that the Commission was lied to by both the FAA and the Department of Defence, specifically NORAD. Indeed several of the commissioners are on the record as saying they felt that the Pentagon purposely lied to them in order to mislead them. And furthermore much of the information received and used in its report “was the product of harsh interrogations of al-Qaida operatives – interrogations that many critics have labeled torture”.

 

A critical element in understanding the events of 9/11 (or any such large scale crime) would surely be the matter of funding the operation i.e. to follow the money. Suspiciously this did not happen. On the contrary the 9/11 Commission itself stated...."To date the US government has not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9/11 attacks. Ultimately the question is of little practical significance" - a rather odd view indeed.

 

The bin Ladens.

 

Osama bin Laden, whose relationship with the CIA in the past had been well documented, reportedly acted as a rogue following the 1991 US Gulf War against Iraq and American stationing of troops and military bases in Saudi Arabia. However, there are reports indicating that on the contrary his relationship with the US Intelligence apparatus remained in place, at least to some degree, for many more years given the nature of al-Qaeda as an organization or network of intelligence assets funded, armed, trained and dispersed around the world by a complex network of Intelligence Agencies from the United States, France, Great Britain, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.

 

A French court undertook a probe into the financial network of Osama bin Laden, who was widely assumed to simply be independently wealthy and financed al-Qaeda operations through his own funds. However, this revealed that Osama maintained a joint Swiss bank account with his half-brother Yeslam bin Laden between 1990 and 1997. Of particular interest to the investigators was a 241 million euro transfer made to Pakistan in 2000 from an account belonging to a company called Cambridge (a Saudi bin Laden Group subsidiary) that was opened at Deutsche Bank in Geneva with the funds transferred into an account belonging jointly to Osama bin Laden and someone of Pakistani nationality.
Separately the German newspaper Der Spiegel gained access to thousands of pages of intelligence documents relating to bin Laden and al-Qaeda and revealed that when bin Laden needed financing “The Saudi elite — and his own family — came to his assistance”. The list of Middle Eastern financiers included two former cabinet ministers, six bankers and twelve prominent businessmen, and also mentioned “the bin Laden brothers” (despite their having issued a misleading? joint press statement declaring that they were ejecting Osama from the family as a “black sheep" in 1994). At the time one Osama sister-in-law even stated "I absolutely do not believe that the bin Ladens disowned Osama. In this family, a brother is always a brother, no matter what he has done. I am convinced that the complex and tightly woven network between the bin Laden clan and the Saudi royal family is still in operation".

Following the death of Osama’s father (Salem) Der Spiegel reported that "Salem bin Laden established the company’s ties to the American political elite when, according to French intelligence sources, he helped the Reagan administration circumvent the US Senate and funnel $34 million to the right-wing Contra rebels operating in Nicaragua. He also developed close ties with the Bush family in Texas".

While Osama was fighting in Afghanistan against the Soviets he was often personally visited by Saudi Prince Turki (the head of Saudi Intelligence) and was funded by both the Saudi bin Laden Group (SBG) and the Saudi royal family. In 1990 when King Fahd of Saudi Arabia allowed the Americans to establish military bases in Saudi Arabia, the SBG got the construction contract.

 

While Osama was in Sudan in the early 1990s Saudi Intelligence would so frequently send his family over to meet with him and kept in such close contact with him that Mossad (the Israeli Intelligence Agency) believed him to be a Saudi spy. Nevertheless in 1994, under intense public pressure, both Saudi Arabia and the bin Laden family publicly revoked their ties with Osama.
Depite this after OBL returned to Afghanistan in the mid-1990s to work with the Taliban, Prince Turki still maintained contact even visiting and bringing “gifts” such as dozens of trucks. According to a former member of the Taliban Intelligence Service, a deal was struck whereby the Saudis would support al-Qaeda financially but only on condition that there would be no attacks on Saudi soil.

 

On 9th January 2001 Osama, accompanied by his mother and two brothers, attended his son's wedding in Afghanistan. A month later two of his sisters travelled to Abu Dhabi to deliver large sums of cash to an al-Qaeda agent. In the United States the bin Laden family held diplomatic passports (why?) and so were flown out of the country following the 9/11 attacks without having been questioned. The bin Ladens were also in business with the Bush family through the Carlyle Group investment company.

 

In March of 2000 it was reported that Osama bin Laden was suffering from serious kidney and liver disease. A western intelligence source told AsiaWeek (a Hong-Kong based magazine) that bin Laden was dying of kidney failure. In July of 2001 he spent ten days at the American hospital in Dubai having travelled from Pakistan to be treated in the urology department. While he was in the hospital Osama was visited by several members of his family, Saudi officials (including Prince Turki) and the CIA station chief in Dubai (who was soon after recalled back to Washington).
On 10th September 2001 OBL was back in Pakistan getting medical treatment with the support of the very military that days later pledged its backing for the US war on terror in Afghanistan. Pakistani Intelligence reported that bin Laden was quickly taken to a military hospital in Rawalpindi for kidney dialysis treatment. Per one medical worker “they moved out all the regular staff in the urology department and sent in a secret team to replace them”. Indeed the Pakistani President Musharraf openly stated in public that Osama was suffering from kidney disease and near death.

 

The Pakistani ISI.

 

The CIA had maintained its close ties with the ISI (developed during the Soviet-Afghan war in the 1980s) all the while the latter was assisting both the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, a conduit originally set up through the Safari Club in the 1970s. A top Indian intelligence official stated that “America’s Defence Intelligence Agency was aware that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was sponsoring the Taliban and Al Qaeda, but the Bush Administration chose to ignore its findings”. Directly or indirectly the CIA was supporting al-Qaeda.

 

Shortly after 9/11 Indian Intelligence became aware that General Mahmoud Ahmad (the then ISI chief) had wired $100,000 from Saeed Sheikh (a convicted terrorist who had associations with the ISI) to Mohamed Atta the purported ringleader and one of the hijackers. And it just so happens that Ahmad went to Washington DC on 4th September for a weeklong visit. On 10th (the day before 9/11) a Pakistani newspaper ran a story on this visit....ISI Chief Lt-Gen Mahmood’s week-long presence in Washington has triggered speculation about the agenda of his mysterious meetings at the Pentagon and National Security Council. Officially, State Department sources say he is on a routine visit in return to CIA Director George Tenet’s earlier visit to Islamabad. Official sources confirm that he met Tenet this week. He also held long parleys with unspecified officials at the White House and the Pentagon. But the most important meeting was with Mark Grossman, US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs.…What added interest to his visit is the history of such visits. Last time Ziauddin Butt, Mahmood’s predecessor, was here during Nawaz Sharif’s government the domestic politics turned topsy-turvy within days. That this is not the first visit by Mahmood in the last three months shows the urgency of the ongoing parleys.

Ahmad met with both the CIA Director George Tenet and the Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage in Washington and on the morning of 9/11 itself he was in a meeting with the Chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees i.e. Senator Bob Graham and Representative Porter Goss (a former 10-year veteran of CIA clandestine operations who was later put in charge of a joint House-Senate investigation into the 9/11 attacks and indeed later became the CIA Director).

It looks then like General Mahmoud Ahmad, having wired $100,000 to Mohamad Atta (which transaction was later confirmed by the FBI), implicated the ISI in the attacks of 9/11, at least from a financial standing. And the question remains as to what was the precise nature of his secret meetings in Washington at that time. 

 

Michael Meacher, a former British MP and member of the Tony Blair cabinet, wrote in the Guardian that....
Ahmed, the paymaster for the hijackers, was actually in Washington on 9/11, and had a series of pre-9/11 top-level meetings in the White House, the Pentagon, the national security council, and with George Tenet, then head of the CIA, and Marc Grossman, the under-secretary of state for political affairs. When Ahmed was exposed by the Wall Street Journal as having sent the money to the hijackers, he was forced to “retire” by President Pervez Musharraf.
Meacher further referred to the case of Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator-turned-whistleblower who tried to expose evidence of what she saw as collusion between Intelligence Agencies and the terrorists behind 9/11. She was subsequently gagged by the U.S. Department of Justice....She is a 33-year-old Turkish-American former FBI translator of intelligence, fluent in Farsi, the language spoken mainly in Iran and Afghanistan, who had top-secret security clearance. She tried to blow the whistle on the cover-up of intelligence that names some of the culprits who orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, but is now under two gagging orders that forbid her from testifying in court or mentioning the names of the people or the countries involved. She has been quoted as saying: “My translations of the 9/11 intercepts included [terrorist] money laundering, detailed and date-specific information … if they were to do real investigations, we would see several significant high-level criminal prosecutions in this country [the US] … and believe me, they will do everything to cover this up”.
In August 2009 Sibel Edmonds revealed that “the US was on ‘intimate’ terms with the Taliban and al-Qaeda using the militants to further certain goals in central Asia” and stated “With those groups, we had operations in Central Asia.” She explained that Washington used those groups “as we did during the Afghan and Soviet conflict”.

 

On 11th September 2009 another major British newspaper the Daily Mail ran a piece critical of the official story regarding Osama bin Laden, asking....What if he has been dead for years, and the British and U.S. intelligence services are actually playing a game of double bluff? What if everything we have seen or heard of him on video and audio tapes since the early days after 9/11 is a fake – and that he is being kept ‘alive’ by the Western allies to stir up support for the war on terror? The article quoted a former US foreign intelligence officer and senior editor (Angelo M. Codevilla a professor of international relations at Boston University) as saying “All the evidence suggests Elvis Presley is more alive today than Osama Bin Laden” and that "The video and audio tapes alleged to be Osama’s never convince the impartial observer. The guy just does not look like Osama. Some videos show him with a Semitic, aquiline nose, while others show him with a shorter, broader one. Next to that, differences between the colours and styles of his beard are small stuff".

It is of interest that Osama bin Laden himself in at least four separate statements to Middle Eastern press and media stated that he did not take part in the 9/11 attacks, while the video in which he supposedly claimed responsibility for the attacks has him wearing gold rings (forbidden by his Wahhabist religion) as well as writing with his right hand (the FBI website said that he was left-handed) and his face is blurred and difficult to make out. On 28th September 2001 he had stated “I have already said I am not involved. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge… nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act”.
He was even reported to have died of kidney failure later that year on 13th December in the mountains of Tora Bora on the Afghan-Pakistan border. On that same day the US Government released that videotape in which Osama claimed responsibility for the attacks. However, the bin Laden in the video was very different from the known images of the real bin Laden - he even had a different shaped nose, his beard was darker, his skin paler and his fingers were no longer long and thin - as well as the fact that he looked to be in good health.

 

The Los Angeles Times reported in November 2009 that the extensive and close relationship between the CIA and the ISI rather than diminishing since 9/11 had in fact accelerated....“the CIA has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Pakistan’s intelligence service since the Sept. 11 attacks, accounting for as much as one-third of the foreign spy agency’s annual budget” and that “the payments to Pakistan are authorized under a covert program initially approved by then-President Bush and continued under President Obama”. Furthermore “the CIA has routinely brought ISI operatives to a secret training facility in North Carolina” and “also directs millions of dollars to other foreign spy services. But the magnitude of the payments to the ISI reflect Pakistan’s central role”. As the report explained, the CIA financial support to the ISI began during the Afghan-Soviet conflict and had not stopped since then, and indeed since 9/11 it had actually accelerated.

 

The Case of Ali Mohamed.

 

In 2001 the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a former US Army sergeant who trained Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards as well as other al-Queda operatives in camps in Afghanistan and Sudan and who helped plan the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, was a US Government informant during much of his terrorist career. Ali Mohamed (an Egyptian born US citizen) had approached the CIA in the mid 1980s. He also spent years as an FBI informant. State Department officials proclaimed this was merely a sign of the problems associated with recruiting informants and that this guy was a double agent working for al-Qaeda and that they should have “known better”. No doubt he was a double agent but perhaps more likely (given his extensive ties to several US Agencies) he was working as an al-Qaeda operative for the US Government. He was kinda continuously lucky over and over again in avoiding being caught.

 

In 1971 this Ali Mohamed (who was well educated and fluent in English) joined the Egyptian Army, rising to the rank of major. In 1981 he joined the Egyptian Islamic Jihad “a group of radical Muslim fundamentalists opposed to the Egyptian Government’s ties to the United States and Israel that included members of the Egyptian military”. That same year he travelled to the United States for the first time “graduating from a special program for foreign officers at the US Army Special Forces School at Fort Bragg, N.C.”.
By 1984, having left the military, he approached the CIA Egypt office offering to be a spy. However, shortly thereafter the CIA "officially" cut off contact with him after he had made contact with terrorist organisations informing them he was working with the CIA and supposedly proposing to spy on US Intelligence Agencies. The CIA had the State Department add him to a “watch list” so that he could not enter the United States. In the following year, however, he obtained a visa from the American Embassy and went to the US where he joined the American Army and “served with one of its most elite units”.

 

From 1986 Ali Mohamed served at the Army’s Special Forces Base in Fort Bragg, North Carolina until he was honourably discharged in 1989. While on active duty there he went to New York where he trained local Muslims in military tactics to go fight in the Afghan-Soviet war.
In the early 1990s, when he began working for the FBI, he forged ties with Osama bin Laden and assisted in a variety of ways such as helping al-Qaeda obtain fake documents, helping with logistical tasks and even helping OBL relocate from Afghanistan to the Sudan in 1991. Some of those he'd trained were subsequently involved in the 1993 plot to blow up the World Trade Centre. In 1992 he returned to Afghanistan to continue training militants there. And that same year he was detained by officials in Rome but was soon released.

 

In 1992 Ali Mohamed created an al-Qaeda terrorist cell in Kenya and in 1993 bin Laden asked him to scout for potential targets in Nairobi. He took photos of a number of such as a result of which the American Embassy there was subsequently chosen.
In 1993 he was detained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Vancouver “while traveling in the company of a suspected associate of Mr. bin Laden’s who was trying to enter the United States using false documents” but was released after the RCMP were told to contact his FBI handlers. It seems that he subsequently masterminded the American Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. 

 

Bringing the Terrorists to America.

 

Following 9/11 several revelations were reported in the media about a covert program run by the CIA to allow high-level terrorists enter the United States on visas issued by the State Department.

 

The former head of the US Visa Bureau in Jeddah from 1987 to 1989 (Michael Springman) went public with his experiences stating that “In Saudi Arabia I was repeatedly ordered by high level State Dept officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants” and despite complaining to an assortment of different departments and agencies he was met with silence. He elaborated - “What I was protesting was, in reality, an effort to bring recruits, rounded up by Osama Bin Laden, to the US for terrorist training by the CIA. They would then be returned to Afghanistan to fight against the then-Soviets”.
He further revealed in an interview with the CBC that Sheikh Abdel Rahman (widely considered to have played a key role in the first World Trade Centre bombing in 1993) was issued a visa from a CIA case officer in Sudan...."and that 15 or so of the people who came from Saudi Arabia to participate in the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon [on 9/11] had gotten their visas through the American consular general at Jeddah”. When the interviewer asked if this suggested that the “pipeline” of visa applications issued by the CIA to terrorists was never wrapped up, Springman replied in the affirmative even though he previously thought it had been, because he had raised sufficient hell complaining to the embassy in Riyadh, to the diplomatic security in Washington, to the General Accounting Office, to the State Department Inspector General’s Office and to the Bureau of Consular Affairs at the State Department.

Eventually the State Department fired Springman without a sufficient reason. As he explained, the same program in which he was ordered to allow terrorists to enter the United States in the late 1980s had continued and fifteen of the nineteen suspected 9/11 hijackers were issued visas through this network.

 

It further turned out that our friend Ali Mohamed claiming to be working for the CIA was “admitted to the United States under a special visa program controlled by the CIA’s clandestine service”. And in the mid-1990s this guy helped Ayman al-Zawahiri (a familiar name) to come to California and raise money for al-Qaeda operations. In 2000 Ali Mohamed was arrested in relation to involvement with the 1998 embassy bombings but his current whereabouts are unknown.

 

The case of Ali Mohamed provides us with a good example of the “terror nexus” given his simultaneous connections with the CIA, the FBI, the Army and al-Qaeda. It's for sure that his high-level status within al-Qaeda could not have taken place without the knowledge and support of his handlers. While he apparently was a double agent it's not clear for whom he was really working, and considering he has disappeared into the abyss of “National Security” the answers might never be fully known. However, his  case does provide more evidence of the covert relationship that the United States Government maintained with al-Qaeda.

 

Tracking the 9/11 Players.

 

An ultra-secret program called "Able Danger" was begun by the Pentagon in 1999 at the request of the then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (General Hugh Shelton) and under the direct supervision of General Pete Schoomaker the then Commander of the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) - per Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer, a military intelligence officer who worked on the program. The CIA, however, had refused to cooperate with this program which was designed to track down terrorists and which developed a specific focus on al-Qaeda. Raytheon (a private military contracting corporation) was involved in this data-mining military intelligence program. Once Schaffer went public with his information, the then Deputy Director of Operations at the Defense Intelligence Agency essentially pulled the plug on his involvement with "Able Danger”.

In September 2000 the program identified Mohammed Atta and three of the other alleged future hijackers as likely members of a cell of al-Qaeda operating in the United States and recommended that the information be shared with the FBI to go in and remove the terrorist cell. However, this information was not shared and the recommendation was rejected, apparently because “Mr. Atta, and the others were in the United States on valid entry visas”.

 

A former spokesman for the 9/11 Commission (Al Felzenberg) confirmed that members of its staff, including Philip Zelikow, were told about the "Able Danger" program on an overseas trip in October 2003 that included stops in Afghanistan and Pakistan. A Pentagon spokesman said that the 9/11 Commission looked into the issue during its hearings but “chose not to include it in the final report”.

Other intelligence officers and sources came forward to reveal and validate the claims made about this program including a defence contractor (J.D.Smith) who confirmed that "Able Danger" had identified Atta. Navy Captain Scott Philpott had also gone on record along with Schaffer, claiming that they were “discouraged from looking further into Atta” and that their attempts to share information with the FBI were thwarted. At this point Congress began an investigation into the program.

 

According to Congressional testimony Pentagon lawyers during the Clinton Administration ordered the destruction of intelligence reports that identified the alleged September 11 leader Mohamed Atta months before the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre. And in 2004 the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) “destroyed files on the Army’s computer data-mining program known as Able Danger to avoid disclosing the information”. Retired Army Major Erik Kleinsmith (the former Director of the Army Land Information Warfare Center) told the panel he was directed by Pentagon lawyers to delete two terabytes (= a very large volume) of computer data on "Able Danger" in May or June of 2000 because of legal concerns about information on US citizens.
In September 2005 after the Pentagon “blocked several witnesses from testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee at a public hearing” several Senators from both parties accused the Defence Department “of obstructing an investigation into whether a highly classified intelligence program known as Able Danger did indeed identify Mohamed Atta and other future hijackers as potential threats well before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001”. The Pentagon even acknowledged that “it had blocked several military officers and intelligence analysts from testifying at an open Congressional hearing about a highly classified intelligence program” with a  spokesman saying that open testimony “would not be appropriate”.

 

The 9/11 Commission despite the testimony of Colonel Schaffer and others about "Able Danger" dismissed the program as “not historically significant” and justified leaving it out of the final report which stated that “American intelligence agencies were unaware of Mr. Atta until the day of the attacks”. Again this was a strange thing to say given that Commission members acknowledged in 2005 (a year after the release of the 9/11 Commission Report) that they had met with "Able Danger" officials who did mention they were tracking Atta prior to 9/11.

 

Newsweek revealed in 2002 that two of the alleged hijackers had been identified by the CIA in January 2000 when they attended an al-Qaeda meeting in Malaysia. These two men subsequently went to San Diego where they attended flight school having “moved into the home of a Muslim man who had befriended them at the local Islamic Center. The landlord regularly prayed with them and even helped one open a bank account”. The landlord also happened to be an “undercover asset” for the FBI, and yet nothing was done.

Immediately following the 9/11 attacks Newsweek had also reported that the military gave information to the FBI which alleged that five of the 9/11 hijackers had “received training at secure U.S. military installations in the 1990s” and that “three of the alleged hijackers listed their address on drivers licenses and car registrations as the Naval Air Station in Pensacola”. The report pointed out, however, that there were slight discrepancies between the military training records and the official FBI list of suspected hijackers-either in the spellings of their names or with their birthdates. One military source said it is possible that the hijackers may have stolen the identities of the foreign nationals who studied at the US installations.
Could the use of false identities or dual identities be the reason why, in late September of 2001, it was reported that four of the alleged 9/11 hijackers had turned out to be alive and well and living in the Middle East? The FBI had released the list of purported 9/11 hijackers and some of the names and photographs thereon showed people who were still alive, a remarkable thing given they were accused of crashing planes in a suicide mission. Even the FBI Director at the time agreed that the identity of many of the hijackers was still in doubt. And yet these matters were not addressed by the 9/11 Commission.

 

Perhaps just as importantly for our present and future is the question of whether the operation of al-Qaeda as a covert branch of US policy has continued, especially since the official investigations thus far would appear to have consisted in the main of willful and intended deception designed to hide the truth rather than to reveal it. It would appear also that any realistic view of the rise, role, evolution and purpose of the seemingly neverending “Global War on Terror” calls for a widespread understanding of the deep nexus of intelligence and terrorism in international relations and imperial stratagems of strategic deception.

 

Conclusion.

 

As you can imagine there's quite a volume of sources for the above material (for anybody interested I can provide pointers to these). Are they 100% credible? - being a natural sceptic I can't say for sure. However, what I would say is that taken together they're a lot more likely to be "nearer the mark" about what really happened and why, than that official fairytale about a couple of dozen mad cavemen who because they "hated our freedoms" managed without any "outside" assistance to pull off one of the biggest crimes in history including destroying a number of very large structures by magically suspending the known laws of physics. At the very least with so many unanswered questions still hanging around and for the sake of all our futures, it's well past time for a properly conducted transparent, unbiased/objective and thorough real investigation into what went down on 9/11 and the full "before and after" context of those events (I won't be holding my breath though).

 

 

Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
May, 2013.

 

PS - for a recent (2013) summary of the evidence to date as to the "technical" causes of the WTC building collapses on 9/11 see

http://www.journalof911studies.com/resources/2013EastmanColeVol37Apr.pdf

 

 

 

 

Two pillars down

And the centre cannot hold,

The house of cards is blown away

In the dying of the light

And the dawning of a new day.