This is Part 6 of our interview series on the New World Order. You can listen to the previous interviews in this series here: Part I, Part II, Part III , Part IV, and Part 5.

Investigative journalist and NATO expert Rick Rozoff joins us to discuss the eighteen-year-old project of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Paul Wolfowitz and their cabal to destroy the post-Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States and create a chain of buffer states around Russia, enclosing it with NATO member states and partners. He provides us with analyses and implications of the invasion of Afghanistan by the U.S. and NATO, and the duo’s expansion into Central Asia where Russian, Chinese and Iranian interests converge. Mr. Rozoff talks about the Central Asia chessboard and how the region may be transformed into a battleground of conflicting 21st century geopolitical interests, the role of Islamic extremism and how it is used by the West on this grand chess board, Mujahideen and Al Qaeda’s partnership with US-NATO in the Balkans, Caucasus and Central Asia operations, the real mission of Afghanistan’s NATO-trained 7,000 troops as guardians of the oil and gas pipeline connecting Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India- the TAPI pipeline & more!

Rick Rozoff is an investigative journalist based in Chicago and has been an active opponent of war, militarism and intervention for over 40 years. He manages the Stop NATO e-mail list , and is the editor of Stop NATO, a website on the threat of international militarization, especially on the globalization of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Mr. Rozoff has a graduate degree in European literature.

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In the first two parts of this series we saw how a group of officers at Alec Station, the CIA’s bin Laden unit, concealed information about al-Qaeda’s Malaysia summit from their FBI colleagues in January 2000. In particular they hid information about a US visa in the possession of Flight 77 hijacker Khalid Almihdhar. We also saw how this protection of Almihdhar, his partner Nawaf Alhazmi and al-Qaeda leader Khallad bin Attash continued even after the involvement of Almihdhar and bin Attash in the October 2000 USS Cole bombing became known to the US intelligence community. Concealing information about terrorists involved in seventeen homicides was bad enough, but things were about to get much worse.

Shortly after the CIA had failed to respond truthfully to a second formal request for information about the Cole bombing from FBI agent Ali Soufan in April 2001, the cables the CIA drafted about the Malaysia summit were reviewed at Alec Station. The review was conducted by Tom Wilshire, the station’s deputy chief and one of the key figures in the withholding of the information, and a female CIA officer whose name is not known. The two of them re-read cables from the previous year that said Almihdhar had a US visa and that Alhazmi had flown to Los Angeles with a companion, but neither of them took the appropriate action—watchlisting the Malaysia attendees and alerting the FBI.

After this review, Wilshire ordered another review of the same information. The review was to be carried out by Margaret Gillespie, a CIA detailee to Alec Station whose alleged memory loss regarding the events of January 2000 makes one suspicious of her motives. Wilshire believed, correctly as it turns out, that the cables contained the key to preventing the next major al-Qaeda attack—had they been handled properly, 9/11 would never have happened.

Three weeks before the attacks, Gillespie allegedly discovered a key cable, and this led her to tell the FBI about Almihdhar and Alhazmi. As you know, the FBI hunt for Almihdhar and Alhazmi was unsuccessful and this, as you probably don’t know, was largely due to Wilshire. Nevertheless, Wilshire received substantial praise from the post-attack investigations for getting Gillespie to do the review. Plenty of his other actions cast suspicion on him, but this review seemed to put him in the clear—if he really was trying to hide the information, why start a review?

If we look at how Wilshire started the review, two things stand out. First, Wilshire told Gillespie that the review was not urgent and that she should do it in her free time. There were obviously other things to do at the time, but figuring out the location of the next major al-Qaeda attack should have been fairly high on the Counterterrorist Center’s to-do list. Second, the reason it allegedly took Gillespie three months to review a handful of relatively short documents is reportedly that she could not find them in the CIA’s database. However, Wilshire had the cables when the review started, but simply failed to give them to Gillespie. Had he done so, the review would have lasted closer to a couple of hours than three months. As we will see, Gillespie says she discovered the key cable that led her to alert the Bureau shortly after the 9/11 hijackers finalised the date of the attack.

After the above facts are taken into consideration, we can come up with a theory about why Wilshire started the second review: after the first review by Wilshire and the unnamed CIA officer, it was obvious that action should be taken; specifically, the FBI and INS should be contacted and told what Alec Station knew, which would have prevented Almihdhar re-entering the US late in the year, or enabled the FBI to follow him when he did. In order to prevent the unknown officer from doing this, Wilshire suggested a second review, which he may have represented as being, for example, more complete, thorough, wide-ranging, etc. Initiating such a review was the only way he could come up with to stop this officer from doing what she knew she should do.

Shortly after this, Wilshire moved to the FBI, where he became deputy chief of the International Terrorism Operations Section. He also initiated a series of events that led to the FBI’s Cole investigators being shown photos of Almihdhar and Alhazmi, although all information about the two men continued to be withheld.

First, Wilshire initiated a discussion with a CIA analyst named Clark Shannon in which a group of three surveillance photos taken at al-Qaeda’s Malaysia summit were mentioned. In this discussion, Wilshire committed a slip, suggesting that the photo of Alhazmi that, based on the January 4 meeting with “Omar” discussed in part two of this series, the CIA believed showed bin Attash did not actually show bin Attash at all. “Someone saw something that wasn’t there,” he wrote to Shannon. Given that Wilshire claims he had not even read the cable reporting on the January 4 identification of bin Attash, this is surprising to say the least. Wilshire was, in fact, correct and the photo showed Alhazmi, not bin Attash, but Wilshire appeared to know al-Qaeda operatives better than one of the US’s top sources inside the organization. The explanation for this seems clear: Wilshire knew well who Alhazmi was, and he knew bin Attash too.

After e-mailing with Wilshire, Shannon mentioned the photos to Dina Corsi, an FBI headquarters analyst who worked closely with Wilshire and will go on to play a key role in the story. Wilshire then printed the photos off for Corsi, who was to show them to the Cole agents. Naturally, Wilshire forgot to mention that bin Attash, the mastermind of the attack they were all investigating, had been in Malaysia with Almihdhar in January 2000. Corsi also obtained information from the NSA about the Malaysia meeting.

On June 11, 2001, Shannon, Corsi and Gillespie went to meet with the Cole agents, in particular Steve Bongardt and Russell Fincher, at the FBI’s New York office. After a presentation by the Bureau about the state of the investigation, Shannon told Corsi to take the photos out and show them to her FBI colleagues. Bongardt was immediately curious and asked some basic questions about the photos, such as who was in them and what was going on. The “Wilshire” side of the table mostly refused to answer them. There was an argument, a “shouting match,” which continued between Bongardt and Corsi when the meeting broke up.

It is hard to sustain a good-faith explanation for this meeting, which represents another opportunity to interdict Almihdhar, Alhazmi and the whole 9/11 plot. The claimed reason for showing the photos was that the CIA wanted to know if any of them showed Fahad al-Quso, one of the Cole plotters who was in Yemeni custody and had been interviewed by the FBI. However, one of the photos showed Almihdhar. Wilshire identified him as such when he gave Corsi the photos and she even wrote Almihdhar’s name on the back of the photo. How was the FBI supposed to identify al-Quso in a photo of Khalid Almihdhar? Another photo showed Alhazmi, who looked nothing like al-Quso. Also, Shannon provided conflicting accounts of the meeting afterwards, and his claim that he went to an information-sharing meeting without any information to share is both bizarre and contradicted by Corsi’s notes, which show he did disclose that Almihdhar was travelling on a Saudi passport in January 2000.

Corsi’s refusal to provide the Cole investigators with the NSA information is also incredible. She claimed she could not do so because of an offshoot of the “wall” regulations, which primarily governed the sharing of information between FBI intelligence agents and criminal prosecutors. However, the regulations did not apply to one of the New York agents at the meeting, who was a designated intelligence agent. In addition, it would have taken Corsi one day to get permission to pass the information to the other agents, who were on the criminal side, from the NSA’s general counsel.

When the events of the meetings and what preceded it are weighed up, the following conclusion seems inescapable: the meeting was not a good faith attempt to share information, but a ruse—orchestrated by Wilshire—to learn whether the Cole agents recognised Alhazmi and Almihdhar.

When this meeting is compared to the January 4, 2001 meeting with “Omar” referenced in part two of this series, there is a striking similarity: photos of Almihdhar and Alhazmi are passed under the pretext that they show other people, and information just happens not to be shared. Meanwhile, the group around Wilshire learns whether the people recognise Almihdhar and Alhazmi or not.

Another significance of the June 11 meeting is that it shows us that whatever the CIA was doing with Almihdhar and Alhazmi was still very much ongoing. The two men had not been forgotten, they were at the front of the minds of Wilshire and his now-former boss, Richard Blee. As we will see in part 4 of the series, both men were highly aware of the drumbeat of threat reporting in the summer of 2001 and Wilshire even linked Almihdhar to the forthcoming major al-Qaeda attack in a highly incriminating e-mail.

Kevin Fenton is the author of Disconnecting the Dots: How CIA and FBI Officials Helped Enable 9/11 and Evaded Government Investigations.

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Peter B Collins: Our guest today is Paul Thompson, he is the author of the Terror Timeline, he is an alumnus, a graduate of Stanford university, and he has been researching 9/11 and related issues for many years. Paul Thompson, welcome to the Boiling Frogs.

Paul Thomspon: Hey, thanks for having me.

PC: I just wanted to mention as we delve into the complex issues of the events of September 11, 2001, that there were 2 key bits that prompted me to become skeptical or curious, and follow your lead in many respects to question the official story and seek the truth about 9/11. The first was when a friend who was a medical doctor and a private pilot came to me and talked to me about the disconnect between the Federal Aviation Agency and NORAD on 9/11. We may get into those details but, suffice to say, it was a sad comedy of errors and it piqued my interest. But it wasn’t until I saw the timelines that were developed by people like you, and there was some others who did similar work, that really showed the glaring inconsistencies in the official narrative and led to ask questions about the role of some of the individuals in the Bush administration, and the level of honesty, or of lack of it that we have had to encounter, including the way 9/11 Commission was used to “firm up”, the myth that had been launched right after the 9/11 attacks. Now, Paul Thompson, in recent weeks Richard Clarke, who was a key counterterrorism advisor to George W. Bush in the Bush White House, was the subject of an interview that was actually conducted a couple of years ago, but was broadcast on a public television station in Colorado. And it includes some very interesting new allegations from Clarke, essentially that he was kept in the dark on one specific piece of information regarding two of the individuals who were later alleged to have been hijackers on 9/11. Why don’t you recap for our listeners what Clarke said, and why it makes news about these issues.

PT: Well, I recommend people go check out the interview with Clarke for themselves. It’s at secrecykills.com, and it’s about 12 minutes long, so it’s not too much information to take in, and I think the whole thing was very interesting. But in short, he was the ‘counterterrorism czar’ at the time of 9/11 and for a few years before that, and that means he was the highest counterterrorism official in the United States. So he really was the top dog, and all information, all important information, was supposed to come through him, to get to his desk. And, so in this interview he says, ‘you know, there were these two hijackers, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almidhar, and it looks now in retrospect, that for a long time, people in the CIA knew a lot about those guys, those two hijackers, and that information did not come across my desk.’ He says he was in contact with Tenet, talking to him on the phone, three, four times a day, any time there was any little bit of information, he would get a phone call from Tenet. He was receiving over 100 CIA reports a day and looking them over. There was a steady flow of information and it’s hard to think before 9/11, what would be a bigger red flag than having 2 known al-Qaeda operatives actually inside the United States? And for all of this time, nobody told him that, he claims. And so he’s quite shocked about this and quite dismayed, and he ends up coming up with a theory to explain why that happened.

PC: And his theory essentially is that the CIA was trying to work with these two Saudis, and convert them to CIA assets. And in order to ‘flip’ them, they kept this very tightly held. The other theory that surfaces for me though, Paul, is that as you mentioned Richard Clarke had served in the Clinton administration and was a holdover into the Bush White House, one of the few.

PT: Mm-hmm.

PC: And my sense is that he was not entrusted with the darkest secrets of the Republican inner circle that arrived determined to attack Iraq and Afghanistan.

PT: Well, I think to some extent that’s true, he was certainly kind of demoted, allowed to keep his job but sort of not in the inner circle. He wasn’t meeting with the principals anymore, meaning cabinet-level people like he had been in the Clinton administration. But you have to remember also that George Tenet was a holdover from the Clinton administration and he

PC: Yep.

PT: he was the head of the CIA all the way back to 1997, and this is really a lot about Tenet and the CIA hiding this information. So, you’ve got two Clinton holdovers really, who are at the center of this.

PC: Mm-hmm.

PT: And to some extent he was privy to some of this stuff that the Bush administration was doing. I had heard this interview with Richard Clarke and I was driving down the road, and I practically drove off the road I was so shocked, this was a few years ago, where he mentioned in an interview with NPR radio that around, I think it was around April, May 2001…basically, top Bush people were sitting around a table and discussing ways to have some kind of provocation to go to war with Iraq. And they were kind of brainstorming different ideas on ways to have a casus belli

PC: Mm-hmm.

PT: you know, some sort of excuse for the war. They talked about things like flying an airplane over Iraq and making sure it got shot down by the Iraqi forces, so they could use that as an excuse. So that’s some pretty wild stuff that most of the American public has never heard about and people

PC: That particular idea that was floated by, apparently, George W. Bush was in a conversation with Tony Blair. And it was British, I believe, Sir David Manning, the British Ambassador to Washington who ultimately revealed that.

PT: Mm-hmm.

PC: And it does show that they were looking for a pretext and possibly it wasn’t the first one that they had thought about or activated.

PT: Right.

PC: So Paul, as we heard this interview with Richard Clarke, many other questions come up because he does make a very precise allegation, which is, on September 4th of 2001, there was a principals meeting in the White House, and, he was not told, the principals were not told, that the CIA had informed the FBI about the presence in the united states of Alhazmi and Almidhar. And he says, ‘if they had told us, we would have found those assholes’, and he talks about what they would have done first to launching an investigation into malfeasance by the CIA for not sharing this information and secondly, that he said, ‘we would have put it out on the Associated Press and found those guys.’

PT: Mm-hmm. Well, I’d kind of like to go the whole way back to the beginning and talk about the whole story of these two guys. I think their story has not really been understood or appreciated by the American people as the importance that it really needs to have. But to just kind of mention just a little bit about what you were saying…that very day that that meeting happened, which was September 4th, one week before the 9/11 attacks; There’s a very strange mystery because there was, in the couple weeks right before 9/11 there was some information about these 2 hijackers that was finally given to the FBI after they had, the CIA, had known about these guys for 2 years.
And there was this very inexperienced FBI agent by the name of Robert Fuller, who was given the job of finding these two hijackers. The hijackers, these 2 guys, were not living under cover, using aliases, using all kinds of clever spy tactics…they were living completely openly in the United States. One of them even had his name in the San Diego phone book for crying out loud. They had bank accounts, they had credit cards, they had car registrations, they had traffic tickets…all down the line, everything in their own name. So, at that time, the United States had developed over the years a lot of databases. For instance, you can look up police database that would have anybody’s traffic tickets or arrests in there, and Alhazmi had actually been arrested a couple times for minor things. You can look up credit checks, you can look up the motor vehicle index, they have all these great, sort of private companies collecting incredible amounts of information about people, like Choicepoint was one of these. They had the hijackers’ names and addresses in that. So, he had all of these databases to look at, something like ten different databases, and he supposedly he didn’t find the names of these 2 hijackers in any of the databases which just doesn’t make any sense at all.

Immediately after 9/11, other people did checks and they found these names in pretty much all of these databases. And interestingly enough, we have a mention that says that he asked permission from someone else, from a higher up, to search the credit card database for the names of these 2 people and he was told that was not advisable, ‘not prudent, to do so at this time.’ So, you can see, there’s something very strange going on there, why on earth would they not want to be looking at databases to see if these people are in the United States. What would be the possible excuse to be telling this agent not to do that? So I would like to go all the way back to the beginning and kind of tell the whole story about these 2 hijackers.
PC: Well, go right ahead, we are all ears. So how far back would you like to go?

PT: I want to go all the way back. I think another really great, untold story, in which I have to sort of give the highlights of, is how much the United States intelligence community knew about al Quaeda before 9/11. I just want to mention something that I found, it was from a report, about 6 months after 9/11 that shows just how jaw dropping this was. And this was from a Washington Post article that talked about the capture of Abu Zubayda who supposedly is an al Quaeda big wig and he was arrested early in 2002. And I’ll quote from the article, “‘When agents found Zubaydas laptop computer’, a senior law enforcement source said, ‘They discovered that the vast majority of people he had been communicating with were being monitored under Visa warrants or international spying efforts.’ ‘Finally we got some comfort that surveillance efforts are working’, said a government official familiar with Zubaydas arrest.” So this is quite remarkable because there’s been a lot of controversy about Zubayda; was he really some important al Quaeda guy or not?

Some people think he was mentally ill. But there’s no doubt that he was sort of like a travel agent and he was in communication with a vast number of people. One of the people who said he was kind of crazy and not as important as people say, an FBI agent by the name of Dan Coleman, he said that even though he was crazy, he was constantly on the telephone talking to people all around the world. He was kind of being used, perhaps as someone who is expendable if they got caught, because he did have these mental issues. So, all around the world, all these al Quaeda operatives, we find that the vast majority of them were actually under surveillance at this time, just a short time after 9/11. So, to me, that’s a story that’s never been told, how is that al Quaeda has been able to operate as successfully as they were when they were being monitored so closely?
PC: Well, that’s a lingering question that we are going to have to deal with. So, take us back to Alhazmi and Almidhar first became evident, or, we first became aware of them as we look back forensically.

PT: Right, well, I think we have to go even further back than that. If you go all the way back to the early 1990′s, you have Osama bin Laden living in Sudan rather openly. And we know that way back then, the US intelligence community already started monitoring his satellite phone. In fact, according to one report, even way back then, they developed a technology that they got enough of his vocal recognition, so that if he called on any telephone, they would be able to go through their incredible NSA database and match that phone call with his voice. So he didn’t even have to be using his phone, any voice they’d be able to figure out that was an Osama bin Laden call.

So anyway, so he’s living there and around 2006 (1996?), this other al Quaeda operative, who’s a long time close personal friend of Osama bin Laden, starts this hub in Yemen, and this is going to play a very important role in the story of Alhazmi and Almidhar. And what was happening was that a lot of the countries where al Quaeda was operating like Afghanistan, Egypt, Somalia, different countries, the governments there, they were trying to prevent phone calls being made by militants from one country to another. So for instance, Egypt didn’t allow anybody in Egypt to call Afghanistan. They would block all those calls that they could. There was a lot of these blockages, so what a lot of the al Quaeda operatives around the world did was they used this Yemen hub as basically an al Quaeda switchboard.
They would call that hub and say, ‘I’m looking for so-and-so somewhere, and my friend’s over in Europe’, and connect me with that person. So this was just of incredible importance, this hub. Osama bin Laden himself called the hub many, many times. And what happened was the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, they all realized the great importance of this hub. So much so, that they not only monitored phone calls from the hub, but they actually physically planted bugs inside the building, and they even had a satellite in the sky that was dedicated to the hub, that would take satellite photos of anybody coming and going from the building.
This goes way back to the 1990s when they were doing this. What they also did was they had a big map of the world that they put on the wall somewhere, some FBI agents, and every time there would be a call from that hub to somewhere in the world, they would put a pin in the location to where that call was going. And so over time, they were able to map al Quaedas operations all around the world.
So you can start to see why, from this Washington Post article, they were able to say that they had the vast majority of all al Quaeda operatives around the world under surveillance. It was mostly because of this hub.

So now lets get to the Alhazmi-Almidhar part of this. It turns out that the person who owned this building and ran that hub, was actually the father in law of Khalid Almidhar, one of the hijackers. And so, Khalid Almidhar lived in the hub, his wife lived in the hub. Of course he would be off doing various operations, but he would come back from time to time, visit his wife and his extended family which was all pretty much living in that hub. And everyone in that family was pretty much al Quaeda. One report says that practically half of all of the really dangerous operatives in Yemen were all related to this one family. So, this was just like a laser being shone on this hub, on these phone calls and people in the hub, it just couldn’t be any more important. And then, at the end of, well actually all through 1999, Khalid Almidhar was coming and going, NSA was recording phone calls, the fact that he was living there. They got his name, they got the name of his good friend Nawaf Alhazmi, and then it reached a climax at the end of 2009 (1999?) when there was a series of phone calls, basically another high ranking al Quaeda leader named Khalad bin Attash, called up at the hub, called Khalid Almidhar there, and said ‘there’s an important meeting coming up in Malaysia, we want you to attend’. And he said ‘OK’. And there was also a call to Nawaf Alhazmi saying the same thing, ‘Come to the meeting in Malaysia’, and there was a call also to Salem Alhazmi, Nawafs’ brother who’s another 9/11 hijacker. He was also told to come to the meeting. All of these calls are all being recorded by the NSA. And so, they realized with the other US intelligence agencies ‘something really important is happening in Malaysia. Let’s track these guys to the meeting, record the meeting, find out what’s going on there. And that’s exactly what they do. On the way to the meeting Khalid Almidhar stops by in Dubai in the middle east and his passport, his photograph, secretly, might have been by some local people there, might have been some people breaking into this hotel room and photographing it, but for whatever reason they got his passport and it revealed that he had a Visa to come to the United States; and this is huge. Can’t get any more important information than that, because they’ve never really had any solid link of al Quaeda doing something, planning some kind of attack in the United States. This was the first really big break. So, this brings us all the way up to the Malaysia Summit.
PC: And before we go there, Paul, can I just ask you a couple of things about this hub in Yemen? Because Michael Scheuer, who was heading the Alec station, that was the al Quaeda desk, and it was named for his son Alec. He told me, and I believe he also told James Bamford that he tried to get the NSA to share transcripts of these intercepted satellite phone calls that were coming into the hub in Sanaa, in Yemen

PT: Mm-hmm.

PC: and that the NSA refused. And apparently CIA was able to get one portion of the call. Let’s just say that it’s the part originating from Yemen going up to the bird. And he even made a transcript of the one side of the call that CIA was able to intercept, sent it over to NSA and said, ‘well now will you please give us the rest of it?’, and they declined. So some of this in fighting between intelligence agencies on the US side is of interest to me, because it once again suggests, as Richard Clarke has, that the top CIA officials were keeping some information about key al Quaeda operatives very, very tightly held.

PT: Right. Well, I’d say that, sort of the main explanation that people give when they talk about this kind of thing, is they talk about the infighting between these various agencies and, ‘isn’t a shame that there was so much infighting, and that’s really what prevented US intelligence from stopping the 9/11 attacks’, and certainly there was a tremendous amount of infighting that was going on. And what Richard Clarke said is that the infighting excuse is not enough; it wasn’t simply that FBI and CIA couldn’t play ball together and so forth, that there is such an egregious amount of hiding of information about these 2 hijackers that that alone doesn’t explain it. And I think that’s what I’m going to try to argue here, as we go along, is that yes there was this infighting but that alone does not explain what’s going on here. And certainly with the Yemen hub there’s a tremendous amount of hoarding of information. The NSA hardly shared anything that they were getting about this.

So, what’s interesting is that all 3 of those agencies, NSA, CIA, FBI, they realized how important this hub was, and they pretty much independently created their own ways of getting information about the hub so they wouldn’t have to rely on the other agencies. I think the CIA actually went so far as to build their own satellite antenna in the Indian ocean so that they could get the information from this hub. So, we follow that about not sharing of information, but we have to be mindful that in a way that doesn’t really apply to things, because they were gathering their own information independently of each other.
PC: Mm-hmm. And I think I may have misstated his name, it was Scheuer, Michael Scheuer. Ok, so with that said, continue your narrative and let’s go to Malaysia.

PT: I’d also like to point out that Scheuer, he left the CIA bin Laden Unit in the middle of 1999, so he is not really privy to what happens afterwards.

PC: Mm-hmm.

PT: Which is, we’re getting at the very end of ’99. So they’ve tracked these 2 people, Alhazmi and Almidhar, to the Malaysia summit. It’s not really clear if Salem Alhazmi ever attended or not, although he did go on to participate in the 9/11 attacks. Malaysia was a great place to meet because the Malaysian government, wanting to be friendly with middle eastern governments, didn’t even require a Visa from most countries to come to that country, so people could just drift in very easily. And what seems to have happened was it was kind of like an ‘al Quaeda all-star team’ arrived at this summit, and there’s some dispute over exactly who attended, and I think there’s been a deliberate obfuscation all the way until today about just who was at that meeting, but I believe that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the “9/11 mastermind” was at that summit.

For instance, there’s a lot of newspaper reports to that effect, and recently I came across some Wikileaks documents that came out that indicated that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed lived for a whole week with Alhazmi and Almidhar in Malaysia at that time, which would seem to confirm that he was there. Then you’ve got Hambali, who’s sort of al Quaedas biggest man in Southeast Asia. He worked with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on the Bojinka plot in 1995 which was kind of an early version of the 9/11 attacks which could have killed up to 4,000 people. Very major terrorist; he was known to be a major terrorist by the time of the summit. Then you’ve got Ramzi bin Alshibh; now he’s a very interesting case because he was a member of the Hamburg cell with Mohammed Atta, and some of the other 9/11 pilots who seem to have come to this summit. German intelligence says they have credit cards of him being in Malaysia at the time, there were photographs of him taken at the summit. So that’s a big ‘what if?’. How is it that he goes to the summit and that doesn’t somehow lead to the Hamburg cell in Germany being wrapped up? Because the summit is being very heavily monitored by intelligence agencies. We’ll get back to that. But anyways, so then you’ve got him, you’ve got Alhazmi and Almidhar, the host of the summit is a person named Yazid Sufaat, who’s seemingly head of al Quaedas biological weapons program; it’s being held in his apartment. You’ve got Khalad bin Attash who’s a major operational planner, you’ve got another guy al-Nashiri, major operational planner, about a dozen guys in all. Very, very important, I don’t think there was probably ever a time before 9/11 where there was such a collection of individuals outside of Afghanistan. It was just an unparalleled intelligence opportunity.

So all these guys are gathering at this apartment of Yazid Sufaat, and what the CIA did apparently was instead of monitoring these summit attendees themselves, they had the Malaysian Special Branch, their intelligence agency in Malaysia, do the monitoring. And so the Malaysian Special Branch took photographs, the first day they actually recorded a lot of video footage, but the story is they never got into the apartment where the summit was held. They never had any audio recordings, they were only taking pictures of these people as they wandered around town, they were staying at hotels, they were going to restaurants visiting internet cafes, so on and so on. But they never actually knew what going on in the summit. Now, I don’t know if I believe that, but be that as it may, they’ve got this recording of all this going on, and at the time it was considered so important that people at the cabinet-level in the United States were being updated on a daily basis. The head of the FBI, George Tenet, head of the CIA, the National Security Advisor; it doesn’t seem it actually got all the way up to the level of president Clinton, but certainly very top level people were being told on a daily basis as this summit went on. It was a 4 day meeting. Every day they would be getting updates on what was happening at that summit. And another very important point is that this is at the very time where fear about al Quaeda was hitting a peak, because this summit just happened a few days after January 1 2000, and there was a great fear that there would be millennium attacks, to be timed at the start of the new millennium. There had been an al Quaeda operative captured as he tried to enter the US in Seattle just a couple weeks before. And so there was this great fear that al Quaeda might be planning some attacks to happen very soon in the United States. So you have this incredible worry and focus and you have all these al Quaeda big wigs all meeting right there in Yemen (Malaysia?) So, you would think that after all that, 2 of the 9/11 hijackers attending, the 9/11 mastermind attending…how is it possible that they don’t just wrap up the whole 9/11 plot based on the surveillance of the summit? That’s one of the big mysteries that’s never been explained.
PC: And so, without asking you to form some hardened conclusion, as you recite these things, is it your suspicion that the Bush administration allowed it to happen, or was some way involved in orchestrating it with these characters that they certainly had under surveillance?

PT: Well, you know, I don’t like to speculate along those lines, I don’t even think speculation is necessary, because I think as we go into more details of this Malaysia summit and these hijackers and so forth, you can put forward 3 theories: you can say there was some sort of incompetence; people dropped the ball, that there was an al Quaeda operation going forward and the Bush administration let it happen, or that they actually helped make it happen. But I think the least worst of those would be the incompetence, obviously. When you really look at this, it would have to be such a level of incompetence where you just have this right in your face over and over and over again, that that would have to be criminal incompetence, which should lead to jail terms in my opinion.

So you’re kind of, those different theories, it’s almost a moot point where you’re kind of arguing just how long do these people go to jail, you know? I kind of put it, I like to think of it in terms of a bank robbery.

Where you can think, OK, you can have a person standing there as a security guard, and the bank robber runs down the street runs into the bank; so what is the security guards role? He could be working to help the person rob the bank, it could be part of the team, or, he could be just letting it happen because he wants to see that bank robbed. Or, he could be totally incompetent and do nothing while massive amount of time goes by, and the bank gets robbed. And that’s just as bad as the other two pretty much! I mean, wouldn’t that security guard be locked up for a long time if he just waited an hour knowing that the bank is being robbed and he didn’t do anything about it? Didn’t tell anybody about it? To me, it’s just as bad, really.
PC: Mm-hmm.

PT: So, I see it as kind of– you can’t really know, you can’t really go inside these people’s heads, we don’t have enough data to really know everything, but we know enough that I think if there were to be, to this to actually come to the US courts, that people would go to jail for something. Because there’s no good excuse for why these various attacks were allowed to go forward.

Sibel Edmonds: Well, actually it even gets more confusing and complex than that, and that’s the fact that both the CIA and the State Department, because a lot of these operatives at the CIA, they worked under State Department titles. And a study from 1995, 1996, these same actors were working with, back then they were not called al Quaeda, at least not by the FBIs’ definition or the wiretaps collected at the scene, –foreign targets of the State Department. But, the same actors that we are talking about, our government people within the State Department and the CIA, this is during the Clinton years, were working with these people in Chechnya, in the Balkans, in the central Asian Caucasus. And I’m talking about working together.

PT: Right, well

SE: OK, and so the question that comes up is, they are our partners, they were our partners, in the Balkans, you know, with the conflict in Bosnia, and also in Kosovo. They were our partners with what we did with Chechnya, with Russia. They were our partners with some of the assassinations and the plots they were carrying out in places like Azerbaijan. The same people, bin Laden, Zawahiri, even some of the actors involved in this
PT: Mm-hmm.

SE: And yet, we were also monitoring them as terrorists while we were actually working with them. That’s

PT: Yeah, it’s sort of crazy when you think about it. I mean, I think that if you really start looking at the Machiavellian workings of what the US government and other governments were doing, they kind of saw things in terms of “good terrorists” and “bad terrorists”. Where you have terrorists who for whatever reason, these people are somehow doing our bidding, they are helping us out, they’re helping us achieve our goals, either wittingly or unwittingly.
A good example would be Chechnya, where, for a long time the US had a great quagmire in Viet Nam, and they liked to sort of think of Chechnya as Russia’s’ Viet Nam, and this is a big quagmire for them. They’ve got to be dealing with these Islamist militants and fighting there constantly, year after year, sapping their economy.
SE: Exactly.

PT: They’re a traditional enemy of the United States, so the more Chechnya can sap them, the more the American foreign policy experts and officials are saying, ‘hey this is a really good thing, so why would we want to stop any potential Islamist militant from going to Chechnya and fight there? Hey, instead of stopping them, let’s pretty much give them the plane tickets, have them go there, because that’s helping us out, right?’

SE: Exactly. Right.

PT: And so that’s not just with Chechnya, but that happened in a lot of other places around the world. So, you have this idea where one man’s terrorist is another persons freedom fighter, right? It’s all these labels you throw on these people, these very loaded words, I try not to use words like ‘terrorists’ if I can, because you never know exactly who really these people are, who they’re working for, really what’s going on there? It often turns out there’s double agents and all kinds of intrigue going on, like some sort of exciting spy novel. But anyways, you’ve got these good terrorists, you’ve got these bad terrorists, and it’s clear to me that there were a lot of people before 9/11 who were ‘good terrorists’ in the eyes of the United States because they were doing something that the United States thought was helpful.

In fact there’s a famous quote by Zbigniew Brzezinski, if I can get his name right, who’s the National Security Advisor way back under Carter, and he was asked in 1998 about starting the whole war in Afghanistan way back in the 1970s, because really, it looks now that the CIA kind of goaded the Soviets into attacking by putting some operatives in there, and kind of stirring people up and creating a lot of chaos. So he said, let’s see if I can find his quote here, what he said…I can’t find his exact quote offhand, but it was something to the effect of ‘what’s more important, defeating the Soviet Union or a few stirred up Muslims?’ So the idea is that in a very Machiavellian way, thinking that ‘I’m using these people to get at the Soviets and to achieve our foreign policy goals, so we certainly don’t want to stop these people, we actually want to help them, fund them, train them in some cases…
SE: Exactly.

PT: And we could go way back and look at a long history of US covert support for Islamist militants around the world.

SE: Right! And let’s say just in the 1990s, starting from the mid-1990s to 2000, and we are talking about during the Clinton administration, and we are talking about the 2 guys who are left over from that administration. We are talking about Tenet, and we are talking about Clarke. And Tenet and Clarke were also aware, not only aware, they were involved, both through the diplomatic; working through State Department, but also through these ‘black ops’ and operations in Central Asia and the Balkans. So we have those 2 guys involved in that.

PT: Mm-hmm, yea. These two people particular people, Alhazmi and Almidhar, they have a very long history of working with al Quaeda, and it goes all the way back to the Bosnian conflict in the early 1990s,

SE: Exactly.

PT: it appears that they were involved n that. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed also appears to have fought in Bosnia in the early 1990′s, and then it appears that later on that they made attempts at least and probably went to fight in Chechnya as well, these two: Alhazmi and Almidhar.

SE: Mm-hmm.

PT: So it could be that they might have had linkages you know, there’s a whole other story about US support working with al Qaeda

SE: They were not even called al Qaeda, at least not in the FBI. This is one of the things I kept emphasizing during my testimony with the 9/11 Commission. The Arabic unit that worked, and that includes the bombing in Nairobi, because some of the translators, with FBI agents actually went in there, I’m not going to get too deep into the details of those, but they did not even emphasize a title, the name al Qaeda.

PT: Mm-hmm.

SE: So this is the interesting from the FBI side: you mean al Qaeda did not, even though we have this stuff, yea, al Quaeda came up again in 1997, FBI didn’t even have an al Quaeda unit. And these cases, the filings for these cases were not even under ‘al Quaeda.’

PT: Mm-hmm.

SE: The al Quaeda became popular after 9/11.

PT: Right.

SE: Became a brand, it was not even being used as a title for this group, or these groups. And that’s another interesting point, at least for the FBI.

PT: Well, I don’t think the title is so important. Obviously bin Laden, he didn’t really like al Quaeda, he came up with some other long winded names for his group that he wanted to use, and eventually he kind of got, just had to acknowledge that the media was using around the world ‘al Quaeda’ so much,

SE: Exactly, US media made it like (inaudible)

PT: he said, ‘OK, we’re al Quaeda’, but that was pretty much after 9/11. It’s not really so much important what these people are called, is what they were doing and who they’re working with, in my opinion. And you can see these 2 hijackers in particular, have a long history going way back to the 1990s. I don’t want to get too much into the Bosnian conflict, but there’s good evidence the US was working hand in hand with Osama bin Laden and his supporters in Bosnia at that time. So these guys may well have had some sort of contacts with that, going way back. So when Richard Clarke in his interview says, ‘maybe they were trying to turn them’, maybe they thought that they’d already turned them, or maybe they thought that, ‘well these guys, we know them, we know all about them, these are great candidates to turn.’ I don’t know, we can just kind of speculate. (laughs) So anyways, to kind of get back to the thread of what happened at the Malaysia summit and so forth…So what’s really interesting is that, sort of the bombshell out of this, all of the summit stuff, was the fact that Khalid Almidhar had a Visa to come to the United States. And actually, Nawaf Alhazmi did too, but apparently they didn’t know about that right at that point in time. Even as the summit was going on, there were efforts to prevent the FBI from knowing about that.

SE: Before you go further, one question, because I don’t have that information. Do you know where the Visa was obtained, which embassy, where?

PT: I’m pretty sure it was in Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia, if I remember.

SE: OK, thank you.

PT: Which is kind of a whole other story, because that, at least historically had been used in the Afghan war to have the Mujahedeen who were fighting in Afghanistan, to get Visas for them to come to the Unites States to be secretly trained and supported over there. So, it’s, (laughs) the more you dig into this stuff, the more interesting it gets.

SE: Right, because I have a State Department whistleblower, he hasn’t been really that public and vocal, but he worked, he was actually in charge of the Visa office in Jeddah.

PT: Mm-hmm.

SE: Until, I believe 2000-2001, and he also went to the Commission and he spoke a little bit about this stuff. He still hasn’t gotten into the names, but he actually filed complaints about people who actually they knew were confirmed terrorists, candidates, lists. Because many of these CIA operatives worked through the embassy there in Jeddah. Every time they brought it up, they would be overridden by the CIA guys in the embassy of there in Jeddah.

PT: Right.

SE: That was why I was asking.

PT: Right, so anyway you get these hijackers at the summit, then the summit starts to break up, and these people start to be scattered to the four winds. At that time, it would make sense that, normally, the CIA would normally say, ‘OK, FBI, you’re interested in what’s going on in the United States. We have information that one of these people at the summit, Khalid Almidhar, he has a Visa to come to the United States. He’s almost certainly going to use it and probably be involved in some sort of attack there.’ They knew for instance, he was involved in the embassy bombings and some other big attacks already.

That does not happen. In fact, there is somebody who drafts a cable to be sent to the FBI saying just that, that he has this Visa. His superior over rid him and basically said, ‘you can’t send that cable, you’re not allowed to send it.’ He tried later, another week or two later again and told, ‘you’re not allowed to send it.’ That same superior who told him not to send the cable turned around and sent a cable within the CIA telling everybody that the FBI had been told. You can see right there, you really see some duplicity. It goes even further than just the FBI and the CIA not getting along. We have evidence, for instance, of the CIA branch in Thailand, because these guys Alhazmi and Almidhar, they went from the Malaysian meeting, they went to Thailand. The CIA branch in Malaysia kind of asked the Thai branch, ‘what’s going on with these guys? Do you know what happened to them there in Thailand?’ And the Thai branch said, ‘we’ll have to get back to you, we don’t know what’s going on.’ Where at that point we know that the Thai was aware about this US Visa. So even within the United States, within the CIA, one branch is lying to the other branch about what they knew about these 2 particular hijackers. It’s not just a FBI/CIA turf battle kind of thing that’s going on here.

So anyway, so after about a week after the summit, these 2 hijackers, they’re from Thailand, they get on a plane, and they fly to the United States, and they immediately start living in San Diego. And Nawaf Alhazmi at least, he spends the next 2 years, basically he never leaves the United States from that point on. He just lives openly in San Diego, he’s got his number in the phone book and everything. It would be so easy to find him. Khalid Almidhar after a while, he leaves, and he actually –because as I’ve said, his father-in-law was a person who runs that Yemen hub, he actually goes back to the Yemen hub where his wife is, and he lives there for at least a month. Now remember that that hub is so monitored, anybody coming and going their picture is taken, there’s bugs inside the house, there’s so much that has not been revealed. How is it possible for Khalid Almidhar to back to that hub and live there for an entire month? He thinks that he’s with fellow al Quaeda people that he can trust. Would he not be talking about his time in the United States and what he is doing there, and the whole 9/11 plot that he’s a part of, in this very building that is a focus point of US intelligence collection efforts? How is it possible that this 9/11 plot isn’t discovered? And then you’ve got the fact that Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, when they’re living in San Diego, they’re making calls back and forth to this hub all the time. And they’re making other calls around, but you know, at least those calls are being monitored and recorded by the NSA. Again, how is it possible that some people don’t say, ‘hey, these 2 people are living in the United States, and probably up to no good there.’
PC: And Paul, what was the source of the funding that paid for their housing, paid for their expenses, while they were living in San Diego?

PT: (laughs) Yea, again there are just so many threads to this. I think what happens is that it’s such a complicated story that people kind of lose the thread after a while, because there’s so many tangents and things. But, it turns out that while those 2 hijackers were living in San Diego, there seems to have been a lot of money coming through the Saudi embassy in Washington, D.C. into sort of the wife of a friend, and it seems to have increased right when the hijackers got there. A lot of people believe that that money was actually helping to pay their living expenses, and there’s a tremendous amount of other information about these hijackers having ties with the Saudis while they were there, and by Saudis I don’t just mean Saudi citizens, I mean Saudi intelligence agents. They went to the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles, you know, hooked up with people there, some of whom were very radical, militant minded themselves, who were working at that consulate.

There was one particular guy named Omar al-Bayoumi, who’s a very important figure, because he was living in San Diego, and he really seems to have been some sort of Saudi intelligence agent. He had no visible means of support, yet he had some ghost job with some Saudi government kind of related company, and he was being paid a tremendous amount of money for doing no work. And he had this habit of wandering around the mosques and places where Saudis were living in the United States congregate. You have the video camera and a microphone on the camera, and he’d just be recording people willy nilly, and talking into the microphone making his observations about all the things that he was recording. Everybody in town who was in that Saudi community had basically knew that he was a Saudi government agent, and his job pretty much –you would think that the Saudi government has always been very worried about radical Islamics who come along who want to overthrow the Saudi government.

People like Osama bin Laden, who’s said all kinds of things about how they want to overthrow the Saudi royalty. So, in sort of most towns, they would have somebody like Omar al-Bayoumi, who was keeping an eye to make sure that there weren’t anti-Saudi government insurrections going on amongst Saudi students who were scattered all over the world. So, this guy, and when you go back to the Richard Clarke interview, he puts forth the theory, and he says, ‘well maybe when Alhazmi and Almidhar were living in the United States, maybe the CIA kind of handed off surveillance of these 2 people to the Saudis, and so somebody like Omar al-Bayoumi running around with his video camera would be a likely person to be keeping close eyes on these guys.
He did have all kinds of ties with these 2 people, they even lived at his place for a couple weeks when they first got there. I’ve found that there’s good evidence that Alhazmi knew that al-Bayoumi was a Saudi intelligence agent and he disliked him and tried to stay away from him, and sort of was very wise to what this al-Bayoumi guy was doing. If the CIA was trusting monitoring these 2 incredibly important al Quaeda operatives to some guy who’s just wandering around openly known as a Saudi intelligence agent, walking around with a video camera all the time, I mean that just doesn’t seem to make any sense. Why would you do that? How could you learn any secrets about these people when you’re so openly advertising yourself as a Saudi intelligence agent?
PC: Well, and Paul, it begs the question about the role of Saudi Arabia and the royal family in funding al Quaeda, supporting their efforts. We know that the bulk of the alleged hijackers were Saudi citizens, and yet, the Bush administration gave Saudi Arabia a virtual complete pass

PT: Right.

PC: in any investigation into these events. We went into Afghanistan to distract people from Saudi Arabia.

PT: You know, there’s so many different threads in this story, and one thing that I’ve always been interested in is not only the possible whatever role the United States government and other western governments had in linkages with al Quaeda and so forth, but also, there were a lot of supporters of groups like al Quaeda in the Muslim world. People, even higher ups, billionaires in Saudi Arabia and other countries were very kind of ideological, same thinking as Osama bin Laden, and so they would be supporting these groups with a lot of money and other kinds of support. You see all along that Osama bin Laden would never have been able to keep up, even though he had some money from his inheritance from his big, rich family. It was estimated that al Quaeda cost about 30 million dollars to run every year. Not so much all these operatives running around, but sort of the training camps and there’s a whole sort of network you have to have, before you can even have any operative taking part in everything. You have to be recruiting people and so forth. So you sort of have this big operation that costs 30 million dollars a year, he would have run out of money pretty quickly. He had all these rich Sheiks living in the Middle East who were giving him a lot of money. So the question is, may have some of these Saudi contacts been aware of the 9/11 plot? May have they actually been funding some of the 9/11 hijackers? That’s a very interesting story, but I think it’s kind of a tangential story to the other story we’re talking about today, which is why doesn’t the CIA do something about these guys. What do they know about these guys and why don’t they do something about them?

One of the things about the Saudis is that the CIA knew way back that the Saudi intelligence agency had been very compromised by their support for al Quaeda. There was some people from another intelligence agency, I think the Jordanian intelligence agency one day went into the headquarters of the Saudi intelligence agency and looked around, and they saw on the computers a lot of the people actually had pictures of bin Laden as their screensavers on their computers because they were big supporters of bin Laden.
SE: Now here is another contradiction Paul, because all this time we keep hearing from the both from the media, but also from various supposed speeches by bin Laden, that he was actually a threat to the Saudi establishment, that he was absolutely feared and hated by the Saudis, and basically his number one goal was to basically get rid of the US bases from Saudi Arabia, and also the kingdom. So how do they work together? I mean you’re looking at two now almost contradictory concepts here in terms of the relationship between bin Laden and the Saudis.

PT: Well it’s so complicated, and it’s a very parallel situation in Pakistan, where you see tremendous support from Pakistan, even from the Pakistani intelligence agency to al Quaeda and related groups. And at the same time, these groups are often attacking Pakistani government buildings, and killing lots of people in Pakistan. In Saudi Arabia, it seems even royal members, high ranking members of the royal family are supporting bin Laden and al Quaeda, and Osama bin Laden’s saying, ‘down with the royal family.’ So I think a lot of this kind of ends up being intrigues and politics, where for instance you might have one faction of the Saudi royal family who thinks, ‘I would like to be king one day, and if I can use the fact that there are a huge number of people in Saudi Arabia who are supportive of bin Laden and bin Laden-type extremists, Wahabist religious beliefs, and ally with that whole faction, then that could help me get to power.’
And the same kind of thing happening in Pakistan, where you have various playing off against each other and using these militant groups as a way to get an edge. In fact, in Pakistan there are times where one faction would actually hire people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Yousef, his nephew for instance, to kill –there was an attempt where those guys tried to kill Benazir Bhutto back in the 1990s. So they’re very much involved in the intrigues and the politics of these countries which get very complicated, and people working sometimes at cross purposes, or trying to kill each other and so forth.
SE: That makes a lot of sense, especially with what you said with the divided kingdom, as far as Saudi Arabia is concerned. And I think one of the dividers there is the attitude or the stand when it comes to Israel, because where you have the old timers, you have the top layer, that actually behind the scenes, they do have good relationship with Israel. Then you have the segment there within the Saudi kingdom who are absolutely against Zionism and what’s happening in Israel. So that itself is just one other example of how divided they are within their own kingdom.

PT: Right. So to kind of keep trying make sure we stay on the focus of these Alhazmi and Almidhar characters…Richard Clarke, he’s saying that these guys may have been monitored by Saudi Arabia, but to get back to the point that I made a minute ago, that the CIA was so leery of the support that a lot of people in the Saudi intelligence agency had for al Quaeda, that they had put out a notice a couple years prior to all these events saying basically, ‘don’t trust the Saudi intelligence agency about anything having to do with bin Laden.’ So how could they then turn around and say, ‘oh, let’s just leave these 2, the first 2 al Quaeda people we ever really knew who were living in the United States, we’ll just trust the Saudi intelligence agency to keep an eye on them. I mean, that just doesn’t make any sense to me. I don’t buy Richard Clarkes’ theory there. So, if you don’t buy that theory, then that leaves a gaping hole. Well, who’s looking after these 2 people when they’re living for 2 years in the United States? Did they just drop the ball so badly that they just said, ‘oh, I wonder whatever happened to those guys.’ (laughs) No one checked on them for 2 years. I don’t buy that.

SE: Neither do I.

PC: Well, at this point, I’m going to pause here and conclude part 1 of our conversation with Paul Thompson, and this’ll make it easier for our listeners to listen to and absorb, and we will continue in part 2, which will be released in short order after part 1, so that you can get all this information and listen to them at your convenience.

This is Part 3 of our three-part one-of-a-kind interview series with author and researcher Paul Thompson. For additional background information please visit the complete 9/11 Timeline Investigative Project at HistoryCommons.Org.

Paul Thompson joins us to discuss one of the most blacked-out and censored aspects of Al-Qaeda-CIA connections: The partnership and alliance between the CIA and Al Qaeda and their joint operations in Central Asia, Balkans and Caucasus throughout the 1990’s. Mr. Thompson talks about Al-Qaeda’s Balkans operations, running training camps, money-laundering, and drug running networks in the region, Ayman Al-Zawahiri and his residence in Bulgaria in order to help manage the Al Qaeda effort in nearby Bosnia, the Al Qaeda cells in Chechnya and Azerbaijan, BCCI and more!

Paul Thompson is the author of the Terror Timeline, a compilation of over 5,000 reports and articles concerning the September 11, 2001 attacks. His research in the field has garnered over 100 radio and TV interviews. Mr. Thompson holds a psychology degree from Stanford University obtained in 1990. For the complete 9/11 Timeline Investigative Project visit HistoryCommons.Org

Here is our guest Paul Thompson unplugged!

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Last Tuesday, following his visit to ground zero, Obama’s New Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned the public of upcoming 9/11-like terrorist attacks. After a decade of war with Al Qaeda, the potential for another devastating terrorist assault “remains very real,” Panetta said, and added that the nature of the terrorist threat has evolved to the point that Al Qaeda “nodes” outside Afghanistan and Pakistan are now the most dangerous, before delivering the most significant part of his fear mongering propaganda-speech: “Yemen has risen to the top of the list.”

Panetta has been laying the groundwork for the next attack-Yemen- since the early days of his confirmation. Two months ago, on July 9, he stated the following:

Panetta said that it was from Yemen — not Pakistan — that the U.S. faces the most potent threat of future terrorist attacks, from an Al Qaeda offshoot known as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Is it me or do you sense that troubling and nudging déjà vu feeling? I keep seeing Cheney and Rumsfeld. I hear the echoes of the past involving the imaginary Iraq WMD and Saddam-9/11 connections…I am reading the exact same lines of lies delivered by the exact same kind of liars. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this way, but let me refresh the memories of those who may have already forgotten.

The following is a direct quote from the previous regime’s Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld:

No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq- Donald Rumsfeld, testimony to Congress, Sept. 19, 2002

So is this one:

Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.

And here are a few related news clips from the then Vice President, Dick Cheney:

Vice President Dick Cheney said Thursday the evidence is “overwhelming” that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq.

“There clearly was a relationship. It’s been testified to. The evidence is overwhelming.” Cheney said he had seen proof that Saddam Hussein had provided “training” to al Qaeda operatives and all but called Russert a liar, saying he had personally told Russert that significant evidence existed of a connection between Hussein and al Qaeda.

In 2007, years after all the carefully-planned propaganda was debunked and exposed as nothing but intentional lies,  41% of Americans still answered ‘Yes‘ to the question “Do you think Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq was directly involved in planning, financing, or carrying out the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001?”

Yes
Now
41%
4/2003
53%

When it comes to Obama’s Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s latest propaganda you don’t have to read between the lines. Just read the lines: “Yemen has risen to the top of the list.” You see, the groundwork for the next US offensive is being completed.

It didn’t take too much effort to have Americans swallow the Iraq-9/11 ties. Given that even now, a decade later, many still believe in the Saddam-WMD-9/11 fable, will it take much for the current regime to sell Yemen-Al Qaeda-Next 9/11 propaganda? Unfortunately, I don’t think so.

The Bush administration dragged our nation into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Obama regime picked up where Bush left off, expanded our wars into Pakistan and Libya, and now are laying the groundwork for the next war-Yemen. Coming next, probably for our next to-be-elected president, will be Syria, and the ultimate nation to be devoured-Iran. Amazing parallels and incredible sameness that apply to both the propagators and the public.

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In the first part of this series we saw how, in January 2000, the CIA learned that Flight 77 hijacker Khalid Almihdhar had a US visa, but kept this secret from the FBI. At the time, concealing a terrorist or two from the FBI may have been wrong, but it was nothing to get that excited about. However, the withholding of the information took on a new meaning on October 12, 2000, when al-Qaeda bombed the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen.

Although there is no stone-cold proof of Almihdhar’s involvement in the bombing, there is a small hill of circumstantial evidence linking him to it. For example, he was in Yemen at the time, reportedly with one of the masterminds of the attack, Khallad bin Attash, and the bombers called his phone number in Sana’a, Yemen, although this was an al-Qaeda communications hub and they could have been talking to somebody else there. In addition, one day after al-Qaeda’s previous ship-bombing attempt in Yemen, he had left the country and gone to meet with other people suspected of involvement in the operation. Also, he worked on another al-Qaeda ship-bombing plot, to be carried out in Singapore.

The team that went to Yemen to investigate the bombings was mostly from the FBI, although there were also Naval Criminal Investigative Service agents, and the CIA station in Yemen was supposed to co-operate. The team was led by FBI managers John O’Neill, who died on 9/11, and Ali Soufan, who later became famous due to his opposition to torture by the CIA and US military.

They quickly found evidence linking the bombing to al-Qaeda. This was both through the calls to the communications hub where Almihdhar lived and through evidence linking the attack to bin Attash and another al-Qaeda leader, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Both bin Attash and al-Nashiri were known to the US intelligence community. Indeed, the number of core bin Laden operatives was so small that both had also played a part in the 1998 East African embassy bombings, something already known to US authorities in 2000.

Investigating bin Attash, Soufan picked up hints of an al-Qaeda meeting somewhere in Southeast Asia around January 2000. Thinking this might be significant; in November 2000 he sent a formal request to the CIA asking whether the Agency knew anything about such meeting. The reply that came back was that it knew nothing. This was not true, as the CIA was highly aware of the meeting, having followed the participants around Kuala Lumpur for several days.

It is hard to comprehend how the CIA could simply have forgotten it knew about Malaysia. It is even harder when one learns that Soufan sent not one such request, but three, the latter two coming in the spring and summer of 2001. Each request was more specific than the last. In the end, Soufan even linked the Cole operation to a pay phone used by the militants outside the condominium in Kuala Lumpur where al-Qaeda’s Malaysia summit was held and asked the CIA about this pay phone. The Agency had watched the attendees coming out of the building, walking round the block and then making calls from the pay phone, but they were determined not to tell Soufan any of this before 9/11.

Soufan’s requests were first made public in a New York Times piece by James Risen in April 2004, a few months before the 9/11 Commission and Justice Department inspector general, which investigated the FBI’s pre-9/11 performance, reported. Yet, there is not a single mention of these three requests in either of these two reports. Neither is there any mention of them in what remained unredacted of the 2002 Congressional Inquiry report or the executive summary of the CIA inspector general’s report into that agency’s failings. Soufan was interviewed three times by the 9/11 Commission, which also looked at documentation from the Cole bombing enquiry. There was a plan to have Soufan testify publicly at a 9/11 Commission hearing, but it never came to fruition.

Working the bin Attash angle, Soufan received a photo of a person thought to be bin Attash from the Yemeni authorities on November 22. He sent it to the US embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, via the CIA, to check that it was the same Khallad a joint FBI-CIA source inside al-Qaeda who was handled out of Islamabad had previously reported on. On December 16, an FBI agent known as “Michael D.” and a CIA officer known as “Chris” took the photo to the source, who we will call “Omar.” Chris showed the photo to Omar while Michael D., who could not speak any of the source’s languages, was out of the room. When Michael D. came back, Chris showed the photo again, and Omar identified it again as bin Attash in front of Michael D. The news that Omar said the photo showed the Khallad bin Attash he knew was passed along. This might seem less glamorous than assassinating someone with a missile, but it is real police work.

Shortly after this, an unknown CIA official drafted a cable containing some information about bin Attash and some information not about bin Attash. The cable instructed officers to share the information not about bin Attash with the Bureau, but contained no such order regarding the information about bin Attash. Again, this seems to be part of a plan to withhold evidence about certain terrorists from the FBI, although it is unclear whether the center of attention is bin Attash, Almihdhar or someone else.

The CIA alleges that it then somehow convinced itself that Almihdhar may in fact be bin Attash. This despite the fact that it had photos of the two men and they have remarkably different facial features. The idea led the agency to send one of the Malaysia photos showing Almihdhar to Islamabad for Chris and Michael D. to show Omar. However, when the photo arrived in Islamabad it was accompanied by another one; it showed Alhazmi and was also taken in Kuala Lumpur.

Chris and Michel D. went to meet Omar on January 4, 2001. While Michael D. was out of the room, Chris showed Omar the photos of Alhazmi and Almihdhar. Omar did not recognize Almihdhar, but said that the photo of Alhazmi actually showed bin Attash. Although this might sound odd, the two men actually have similar facial features. Unlike on the previous occasion, when Michael D. came back into the room Chris did not have the identification repeated for his benefit. In fact, he never mentioned it to Michael D. at all. He then drafted three cables about the meeting. Two of them, crucially including one disseminated to the wider intelligence community, made no mention of the identification of bin Attash. The one that mentioned his identification was sent only to the CIA.

However, this was very significant information for the Agency, as it now officially believed a senior al-Qaeda operative, one who had just masterminded an operation that cost 17 American lives, had been at the Malaysia summit. The CIA claims it did not know this before—even though it is hard to credit these protestations of ignorance.

Chris sent the information that the photo showed bin Attash and that he had therefore been at the Malaysia summit to the CIA station in Sana’s, Yemen. That station was supposed to be working closely with the FBI on the Cole investigation. The day Sana’a station received the news bin Attash had been at the Malaysia summit, it failed to tell the FBI. It also failed to do so the next day, and the next, and so on, right up until 9/11. The 9/11 Commission knew the information had been sent to the CIA station in Sana’a, but omitted this from its report. It is hard to imagine what good-faith explanation could be advanced for such error.

The same as the station in Sana’a, Alec Station also failed to pass on the information to its FBI colleagues, this despite the fact that in mid-January 2001 Chris asked his Alec Station counterparts to contact FBI headquarters and tell it about recent developments.

Two of the Cole agents, apparently including Soufan, then flew out to Islamabad to have Omar formally identify the first bin Attash photograph for possible use in a criminal proceeding against bin Attash. When they met with Omar, on February 1, 2001, Chris was present. He made no mention of the fact that just four weeks previously Omar had seen bin Attash in a Malaysia meeting photograph. In fact, like all other CIA agents, he made no reference to the Malaysia summit at all.

This is perhaps the most confusing episode of the pre-9/11 intelligence failures, so some explanations are in order. When one views the facts as set out above, something seems to be missing, the whole episode is a series of loose ends and unanswered questions. Why would the CIA think Almihdhar and bin Attash were the same person? Why send the additional photo, showing Alhazmi, to Islamabad? And what happened between the meeting when Omar identified bin Attash in the Yemeni photograph, when everything went swimmingly, and the subsequent one, when Chris had evidently gone over to the dark side?

The explanation that best fits the facts is this: nobody involved in the withholding of the Malaysia information from the FBI realized any danger when Soufan sent the first photo to Islamabad, so Chris did his job the way the taxpayers pay him to do it. However, one of the coterie of officials who was withholding information from the FBI subsequently realized that, as Omar had identified bin Attash and bin Attash was an associate of Almihdhar and Alhazmi, then Omar might also identify these two men as well, if shown photos from the FBI. Therefore, it was necessary to ascertain to what extent this danger was real. The speculation that Almihdhar and bin Attash were the same person was then simply a ruse under which a photo could quickly be transmitted to Islamabad to be shown to Omar. The reason the Alhazmi photo arrived unannounced was that there was concern Omar might identify Alhazmi to the FBI as well. The reason neither Chris nor anyone else mentioned the apparent identification of bin Attash to the Bureau is that, well, this was information the CIA had been working hard to keep from the Bureau for a year, why tell it to them now?

It has become a truism that intelligence operations that go on for a long time get screwed up, often for the strangest reasons, and this is a perfect example of that. Nobody could have anticipated that Omar would look at the photo of Alhazmi and say it was bin Attash, but it had happened. Now Alec Station was forced to withhold crucial information about the USS Cole bombing mastermind and tied itself up in knots about how it had failed to pass this information along after 9/11. The tale of incompetence in withholding the information about Almihdhar, Alhazmi and bin Attash had been stretched well beyond breaking point, but much more, and much worse, was to come in the late spring and summer of 2001. These events will be the subject of part 3 of this series.

Kevin Fenton is the author of Disconnecting the Dots: How CIA and FBI Officials Helped Enable 9/11 and Evaded Government Investigations

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Although the story of the CIA’s actions in the run-up to 9/11 is complicated, at a fairly early point in any examination of them it becomes clear the agency committed multiple failures, and that these failures enabled the attacks to go forward. The key issue that remains in dispute ten years on is whether these “failures” were deliberate or simply the product of overwork and incompetence. Making an informed judgment means taking the time to look at all the failures, put them in order, and analyze what it all means.

Perhaps the most comprehensible problem is the scope of the CIA’s failings. There was not one error by some lowly neophyte, but a massive string of failures. As Tom Wilshire, one of the key CIA officials involved in the withholding of the information commented to the Congressional Inquiry, “[E]very place that something could have gone wrong in this over a year and a half, it went wrong. All the processes that had been put in place, all the safeguards, everything else, they failed at every possible opportunity. Nothing went right.”

In addition, some of the failures were extremely serious. For example, the alleged failure by Alec Station, the CIA’s bin Laden unit, to inform CIA Director George Tenet that Flight 77 hijacker Khalid Almihdhar was in the country in August 2001 is simply beyond comprehension. Added to this, the failures were committed by a small group of intelligence officers, centered on Wilshire and his boss Richard Blee, and focused on a few al-Qaeda operatives, in particular Almihdhar and his partner Nawaf Alhazmi. Finally, one of the officers who withheld information has admitted this publicly, and a second reportedly in private, and some surviving documents contradict the “incompetence excuse.”

The story of the CIA’s pre-9/11 failings starts in late December 1999, when the NSA intercepted an al-Qaeda communication, apparently between Almihdhar and bin Laden associate Khallad bin Attash, who is currently in Gitmo. One end of the call was at al-Qaeda’s operations hub in Yemen, which the NSA had been monitoring for some time. The communication showed that a group of al-Qaeda operatives would soon be travelling to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The NSA told the CIA and FBI.

The CIA tracked Almihdhar from Yemen to a stopover in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where a photocopy of his passport was made. US officials discovered he had a US visa, issued several months earlier and due to expire in April 2000. This information was reported to the various CIA stations involved in the tracking operation and to Alec Station at CIA headquarters on January 5, 2000.

An FBI detailee named Doug Miller read the relevant cables from the field and drafted a message to the FBI to telling them Almihdhar had a US visa. The FBI is a domestically focused organization, so without the US visa Almihdhar was just a foreign terrorist abroad, and not of much concern to it. It was the US visa that would have made Almihdhar significant to the Bureau. A female CIA officer who we will call “Michael” then told Miller not to send the cable yet, saying Wilshire wanted to hold off on it—no one below Wilshire had authority to release such information to the FBI.

A few hours after she blocked Miller’s cable to the FBI, Michael sent out a cable stating that the FBI had been informed of Almihdhar’s visa information. This was not true, and Michael must have known this at the time.

You will not find this episode in the main text of the 9/11 Commission report. Despite its obvious importance, the commission relegated it to a small-type endnote, number 44 to chapter 6.

Miller turned to a fellow FBI detailee, Mark Rossini, who went to Michael to ask what was happening. According to Rossini, Michael said that the FBI was not going to get the information until the CIA wanted it to and that the next al-Qaeda attack was going to be in Southeast Asia.

In addition, according to several CIA officers interviewed by the Agency’s inspector general, it was standard practice to confirm the Bureau had received such information. This was not done.

Around a week later, Miller sent an e-mail to Wilshire asking whether he could send the message to the FBI now. He received no reply.

After 9/11, investigators were unable to find Miller’s draft cable for nearly two and a half years and the people involved allegedly forgot all about it. It was discovered in early 2004, necessitating they relevant officials be interviewed again. However, they still claimed to have no recollection.

Rossini began to talk more freely about what happened to Lawrence Wright for his 2006 book The Looming Tower, which has an unnamed CIA official tell Miller “This is not a matter for the FBI.” However, Rossini then left the Bureau in disgrace and gave a full account of what happened to author James Bamford and journalist Jeff Stein in 2008. According to Rossini, there was nothing wrong with his memory when interviewed by investigators; he simply chose to lie under pressure from the CIA. Rossini also says there was a minder in the room during the interview, a depressingly typical occurrence for the post-9/11 investigations.

On the same day Miller’s cable was blocked, a CIA officer on loan to the FBI who we will call “Robert” briefed two FBI colleagues on what the CIA knew about the Malaysia meeting. Robert told the two FBI agents pretty much everything the CIA knew except the one key thing the Bureau needed to make it sit up and take notice—that Almihdhar had a US visa. Robert then told another CIA officer on loan to the Bureau there was no need to brief the FBI about Malaysia because he had already done so, ensuring this officer would not let slip the Almihdhar visa information.

Meanwhile in Malaysia, the CIA and a local Malaysian intelligence service were following Almihdhar, Alhazmi and their contacts around. Numerous photos were taken, the attendees at the meeting were videoed on the first day, the operatives went out to use computers at an internet cafe, and intelligence officials then examined the computers. However, an attempt to bug the meeting allegedly failed.

The full list of the attendees is not known. However, in addition to Almihdhar and Alhazmi, we do know that two leading radicals, bin Attash and Hambali, a leader of the al-Qaeda affiliate Jemaah Islamiyah, were present, along with several other lower-level militants. According to counterterrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna and a Pentagon document about Hambali, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohamed was also there. If true, this would make the CIA’s failure to exploit the meeting all the more bizarre—the Agency was actively looking to rendition him to New York for trial at this time due to his involvement in the 1995 Bojinka plot to blow up multiple airliners.

On January 8, Almihdhar, Alhazmi and bin Attash left Kuala Lumpur for Bangkok, Thailand. The CIA claims it lost them at this point, failing to get men to the airport in time to follow them. This claim needs to be taken with a pinch of salt—bin Attash was monitored in Malaysia making a call to the Washington Hotel in Bangkok, where the three men ended up staying, so it would not be too hard to find them there.

Something strange happened at Alec Station on January 12 and 14. Four days after the three men had left Kuala Lumpur, Wilshire’s boss Blee briefed his superiors, presumably including Counterterrorist Center chief Cofer Black and CIA Director George Tenet, about what was happening. He falsely claimed the surveillance in Malaysia was ongoing. Two days later, he gave another false briefing, saying that the meeting had broken up and, again falsely, that the attendees were still being tracked.

This is a puzzle. It is hard to believe that Blee, who managed only a couple of dozen officers, could be so ignorant of the various cables sent and received about the travel to Bangkok. So why did he misinform his superiors? Was he genuinely misleading them? Or had they told him they wanted no paper trail linking them to what was happening?

On January 15, Alec Station dropped the matter entirely, even allegedly failing to write up a full report on the matter. However, in February a foreign intelligence service made an offer to help with Almihdhar, an offer mentioned in the 9/11 Congressional Inquiry Report, but not the 9/11 Commission Report. The reply that came stated that no help was needed because the CIA was in the middle of an investigation “to determine what the subject is up to.” This is a key document, as it contradicts the claim Alec Station had forgotten all about the two men at the time.

Also in February, a CIA station (almost certainly the one in Kuala Lumpur) prodded Bangkok station about Almihdhar. What had happened to him? Bangkok was silent for some time, then replied they did not know, and would have difficulty finding out. As Thailand had watchlisted Almihdhar and Alhazmi at the CIA’s request in mid-January, it almost certainly did know, or could get the information with a simple phone call. A couple of weeks later, Bangkok got round to replying in a cable also sent to Alec Station: it said Alhazmi had taken a flight to Los Angeles on January 15 with a companion, who was not named but who was in fact Almihdhar. The non-naming of the companion was totally bizarre, the March 5 cable was drafted in response to a query about Almihdhar and Bangkok must have known his name, so why omit it?

Alec Station did nothing with this cable, which was yet another opportunity to watchlist the two men and inform the FBI. This was not the last time such failures were committed.

How the two main inquiries, by the two Congressional intelligence committees and the 9/11 Commission handled the March 5 cable is instructive. The 9/11 Commission report just glosses over it in a couple of lines. The Congressional Inquiry, however, realized just how important it was and zeroed in. Tenet was asked about this publicly under oath by Senator Carl Levin and Tenet… well, he was less than a hundred per cent truthful. In response to the questioning he claimed, “I know that nobody read that cable,” and then repeated the assertion twice. In actual fact, as the public learned five years later, at least 50 people at the CIA had read the cable. It is hard to believe that Tenet, who must have prepared thoroughly for such an important appearance before Congress, thought what he was saying was accurate. So the simple question is: what was he trying to cover up?

Part two of this series will focus on the bombing of the USS Cole and the CIA’s continuing failure to share information with the FBI.

Kevin Fenton is the author of Disconnecting the Dots: How CIA and FBI Officials Helped Enable 9/11 and Evaded Government Investigations.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by subscribing .

From ten years on, everything about 9/11 feels otherworldly and irrational, the reasons for it, the apparent helplessness in the face of it, the curious identities of the people involved and the American government’s response to it. It defied logic then and it still does. The World Trade Towers were proud symbols of who we were as early 21^st century Americans, at least who we thought we were. After all, wasn’t the spiritual motto of the original 1939 Flushing, NY World’s Fair “World trade center” pavilion dedicated to “world peace through trade?”  

There would be no peace after 9/11. The destruction loosed a demon that had been struggling for America’s soul since the creation of the Cold War in 1947. The U.S. would now be freed to pursue “evil” wherever it could be found and there would be no turning back. The creation of the World Trade Towers by Rockefeller brothers Nelson and David had been steeped in psychological symbolism from their start in the early 1960s. As the most well known scions of American business, the Rockefeller family brought more than just money to their endeavors, they brought a vision for the future of the planet and a philosophy to guide it.

Begun as a massive undertaking to revitalize lower Manhattan, Chase Manhattan Bank Chairman David and New York Governor Nelson pushed hard for the project and each tower stood as a symbol of their respective power. As metaphor, the towers were more than just two of the tallest buildings in the world. It might be said they were as important as the two pillars Joachim and Boaz which stood at the entrance to Solomon’s Temple; mystical gates to a Cathedral of wisdom in which all could worship under one religion; the religion of business, Capitalism.

The Rockefellers were no strangers to the power of psychological warfare and its impact on American opinion. During World War II Nelson had headed the U.S. government’s intelligence agency for Latin America, the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA). CIAA’s film division guided the 1942 production of Walt Disney’s Saludos Amigos to promote pro-American sentiment in South America. In 1954 Nelson was appointed as President Eisenhower’s White House special assistant on Cold War tactics and psychological warfare. Nelson Rockefeller played a central role in formulating domestic propaganda programs throughout the 1950s as chairman of the Planning Coordination Group which, in addition to its propaganda work, oversaw all CIA covert operations. His 1956 Special Studies Project directed by Rockefeller protégé Henry Kissinger produced many of the domestic policy recommendations that came to be known as President Kennedy’s New Frontier. His family’s philanthropic support of the arts had been carefully coordinated with the CIA and was both overtly and covertly propagandistic.

As a committed Anglophile, Rockefeller had aided British intelligence during World War II when he rented space in New York’s Rockefeller Center at a steep discount to a number of British propaganda agencies including their secret intelligence service for the Americas, the British Security Coordination (BSC). The BSC’s chief, Sir William Stephenson (Intrepid) set up shop in New York City with the help of some of New York’s wealthiest families with one main objective in mind: Get the United States into the war in Europe on Britain’s behalf.

One key agent in the psychological war for American public opinion was young RAF pilot Roald Dahl who along with James Bond creator Ian Fleming, playwright Noel Coward and Gallup pollster David Ogilvy were given free rein to commit sabotage, political subversion and propagandize “the natives” (Americans) through whatever means possible.

Dahl’s creative fiction earned him praise from the New York Times and publishing contracts from Random House as well as entrée to Hollywood where he would collaborate with Walt and Roy Disney in their studio’s transformation into an arsenal of animation while inspiring numerous imitators.  Dahl would go on to marry a movie star and become a Hollywood icon with perennial successes, most notably “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” The cult of intelligence would ultimately become so seamlessly blended into every aspect of publishing, television and film, the CIA would jokingly be referred to as “the Chocolate Factory.” Along with Fleming, Ogilvy and Coward, Dahl would help to get the United States into the war with Germany and craft an enduring Anglo-centric cultural narrative in the public’s mind whose main objective was the promotion of a British agenda for the United States. That agenda would quickly shift from anti-fascist to aggressive Cold War anti-communist (read anti-Russian) as World War II ended, with Britain playing a seminal role in the creation of America’s national security state.

President Harry Truman’s March 12, 1947 proclamation laying out the rationale for the Cold War (Truman Doctrine), fundamentally altered America’s identity by embedding a permanent psychology of fear. But a hidden aspect of this conflict was the slow, grinding corruption that its unreality fostered in America’s leadership. That unreality was finally revealed in the catastrophe of Vietnam.

In a remarkably self-effacing (especially by today’s standards) January 8, 1972 New Yorker article tracing the origins of the devastation caused by Vietnam titled “Reflections: In Thrall To Fear,” Senator J. William Fulbright bemoaned the mental corruption caused by the Truman Doctrine during the 1940s, 50s and 60s, whereby “Our leaders became liberated from the normal rules of evidence and inference when it came to dealing with Communism… The effect of the anti-Communist ideology was to spare us the task of taking cognizance of the specific facts of specific situations. Our ‘faith’ liberated us, like the believers of old, from the requirements of empirical thinking… Like medieval theologians, we had a philosophy that explained everything to us in advance, and everything that did not fit could be readily identified as a fraud or a lie or an illusion.”

What Fulbright’s brilliant but tragic reflections fail to include is that America’s assumptions about the Cold War were never empirical. In fact the assumptions weren’t even necessarily American but had been crafted by America’s Anglo-centric intelligence bureaucracy and rooted in messianic 19^th century British designs for control of the Eurasian landmass. A recent release of classified documents reveals that Britain’s wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill was so obsessed with Eurasian conquest, he’d envisioned rearming Germany and attacking the Soviet Union right up to the end of World War II in a plan named Operation Unthinkable. Faced with the absurdity of confronting an overwhelmingly superior Soviet force and starting World War III, Churchill’s operation was shelved, but his famous Iron Curtain speech of 1946 would animate the idea while establishing the ideological narrative by which all future U.S./Soviet relations would be defined.   

The inspiration for Churchill’s speech and its warning of the growing Communist threat to “Christian civilization” was the American child of British immigrants, James Burnham. As the godfather of neoconservatism, Burnham would work his way from Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky in the 1930s, to authoring a book that would forge the foundations of a new kind of planned, centralized society, to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. His much critiqued landmark 1940 The Managerial Revolution would be read and admired by Hitler’s general staff and viewed as the blueprint for George Orwell’s 1984 in which a new class of business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers would destroy the old capitalist order, crush the working class and seize all of society’s wealth for themselves.

In a 1945 Partisan Review article titled “Lenin’s Heir” Burnham, while still at the OSS, infused his apocalyptic political views with mystical allusions to the Eurasian heartland as “the magnetic core” of Soviet power, comparing it to the mystical “reality of the One of Neo-Platonism,” whose inexorable and unstoppable “emanative progression… descends through the stages of Mind, Soul, and Matter” towards its ultimate destination beyond the Eurasian boundaries and through “Appeasement and Infiltration (England, the United States).”  Burnham was a keen advocate of dirty tricks. He would play an important role in the overthrow of Iran’s Mohammed Mosaddeq and the installation of the Shah. His book The Machiavellians would become a handbook for CIA planners. 

As an “anti-Communist ideology” Burnham’s apocalyptic warnings about the inevitability of Soviet expansion from Eurasia’s magnetic core ring like a medieval theologian’s incantation throughout Churchill’s  “Iron Curtain” speech. George Orwell even makes clear in his 1946 “Second Thoughts on James Burnham” that Burnham’s words read like a mystical invocation and were most likely intended to hypnotize.  

Twenty six years later, Senator Fulbright would realize that only because of the disastrous outcome of Vietnam was there any willingness at all to reexamine the basic assumptions of American postwar policy toward the Soviet Union and what had brought the United States to such a sorry state. The 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks SALT would spring from this realization, as would the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty ABM and eventually SALT II, until in January of 1980 President Jimmy Carter would ask the Senate to delay consideration of the Treaty on the Senate floor because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. That treaty would never be passed.

Our involvement in the Afghanistan story began in the summer of 1979 when we began production of a documentary titled Arms Race and the Economy: A Delicate Balance. During the next months numerous experts including economist John Kenneth Galbraith lent their experience to our understanding of the unseen damage that a massive new diversion of tax dollars and investment capital would represent to the civilian economy. Galbraith insisted that accelerated defense spending and renewing the Cold War – as the neoconservative right was demanding at that critical moment – would ultimately destroy the civilian economy. He was convinced that the Cold War had already made America more and more like the Soviet Union, ruled by a military-industrial-academic establishment suspended from reality.

But by the time our program aired that winter, the argument was no longer whether our government should call a halt to the nuclear arms race and reinvest in the civilian economy. The December 27, 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had rolled back the narrative to 1947, the Truman Doctrine, to Churchill and Burnham’s mystical, medieval enchantment and the psychological warfare campaign necessary to bring it back to life was about to begin.

J. William Fulbright’s 1972 “Reflections: In Thrall To Fear” represented an awakening from the deep hypnotic trance imposed upon Americans by Cold War ideology. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan brought about its re-emersion, but this time to a deeper and totally detached level of unreality.

With the election of Ronald Reagan in the fall of 1980, the United States not only rejected Fulbright’s concerns for the intellectual dishonesty represented by the continuation of the Cold War, but willfully embraced the fraud, the lie and the illusion as its own and was willing to take it one step further.   

The U.S. had silently, almost imperceptibly crossed through a mirror in 1947 with the creation of a second and covert national-security-government. But few in Washington understood at the time, the Faustian bargain they were signing onto. Now that secret government would take the U.S. on a fairytale journey into a mirrored image of itself from the 1940s, interweaving its own delusion with a remanufactured, two dimensional Hollywood invention named Ronald Reagan as the host. America would never be the same.

As an actor, Reagan had been implanted into America’s subconscious as a hero during the 1940s and his militaristic campaign of Peace through Strength  was sold to Americans as the Reagan revolution. It was in fact a counter-revolution engineered by a reactionary gang of consummate insiders headed by former Research Industry of America employee, OSS veteran and Wall Street lawyer William J. Casey with the intention of restoring America’s militarist Cold War thinking.

As Reagan’s intelligence chief, Casey had key access to the concentric circles of international power necessary to carry off the tectonic shift of wealth from Main Street to Wall Street that would transfer power to an already wealthy globalist elite. As one of OSS chief Wild Bill Donovan’s Knights Templar during World War II, Casey took his “Crusade for Freedom” and a one world religion of Capitalism as creed, and as Director of Central Intelligence was perfectly positioned to put James Burnham’s dirty tricks and Machiavellian philosophy to work in the heartland of Eurasia.

Casey’s passion for the Afghan jihad was messianic. An ultra-conservative Catholic, Casey saw little difference in the antimodernist beliefs of the Wahhabist House of Saud and the anti-enlightenment views of the newly installed Polish Pope, John Paul II. Disguised as a war to liberate Afghanistan from Soviet aggression, Casey’s campaign was intended to infiltrate covert teams beyond Afghanistan into the Soviet Union’s Muslim provinces and provoke an insurrection. Backed by neoconservatives, the Saudis and secretive organizations like the Safari Club, Le Cercle, the Bilderberg Group and the 6I, it would play out in propaganda from Rambo to Charlie Wilson’s War as the greatest American victory of the Cold War.

In reality, Casey’s team would so tear down the wall between fact and fiction, legal and illegal, truth and the lie, it would make 9/11 inevitable.

But if anyone deserves the prize for the culture of triumphalist self-deception which lives on today in the endless war on terror and the Homeland Security State-culture-of-fear, it is James Burnham.  On February 23, 1983 James Burnham was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan culminating his fifty years of service as one of the “guiding lights in mankind’s quest for truth.” Burnham’s 1940 prediction that Nazi Germany would win the war had actually been wrong as was his prediction that the Soviet Union would lose. His subsequent revised prediction that the Soviets would win and expand beyond the Eurasian heartland followed only after a Soviet victory appeared obvious in 1944.

In George Orwell’s 1946, “Second Thoughts on James Burnham,” Orwell clinically diagnosed Burnham’s convenient powers of revisionist prophecy as the product of a “mental disease” whose “roots lie partly in cowardice and partly in the worship of power, which is not fully separable from cowardice.”

Ten years after the events of September 11, 2001, thirty two years after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and sixty four years after the creation of the Cold War, James Burnham lives on as an icon to a deeply corrupted Homeland Security-culture “In Thrall to Fear.” We have no one to blame but ourselves for allowing that culture’s acolytes, their lies and their fabrications to continue to hypnotize us.

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story and Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire Visit their website here.

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The root cause of what the United States suffers from today, both politically and economically stems from the psychological warfare campaign triggered by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.  At that time, Americans responded dutifully if not robotically to the threat as a barrage of propaganda poured from a hoard of foreign policy “experts” claiming vindication for Vietnam while bemoaning America’s military weakness. Zbigniew Brzezinski himself claimed that the Soviet invasion was a vindication of his prediction that the Soviets would be emboldened by a lack of U.S. resolve elsewhere. The shaken president, Jimmy Carter announced a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, the creation of a rapid deployment force to the Middle East and a new get tough posture toward the Soviet Union.

On January 2, 1980 the MacNeil Lehrer News Hour presented former U.S. Ambassador Theodore Eliot and Harvard Professor Richard Pipes to speculate on the implications of the invasion. As an unabashed neoconservative ideologue, Pipes should have been considered a controversial choice sitting alongside the thoroughly Eastern establishment Eliot. But on this evening Pipes had been carefully chosen to play the very special role of delegitimizing détente with the Soviet Union while moving the discussion permanently and irretrievably to the neoconservative right.  Paired with Eliot, the dean of American diplomacy and soon to be Secretary General for the United States of a gathering of international elites calling itself, the Bilderberg group, the two were there to send the signal that the ideology of neoconservatism, globalism and the institutions of the American government were now one and the same.

It was a moment that would change the United States in ways that few Americans would immediately understand and many continue to find baffling. Years earlier, Pipes had been chosen to chair a highly controversial operation known as the Team B experiment in competitive analysis.

The decade of the 1970s had presented a series of strategic shocks to the United States. The Watergate scandal and the Arab oil embargo, campus protests, combined with the American military failure in Vietnam had shaken Washington’s own belief in the American narrative. Vietnam had removed the veil from America’s Cold War defense-intellectual elite, revealing their elaborate plans and complex mathematical formulas to be useless as a guide to action. But even before the end of that war in 1975, pressure had been building from a powerful collection of right-wing ideologues to ignore their own complete intellectual failure, wind back the clock and return to an openly militarized Cold War approach to the Soviet Union.

Backed by Gerald Ford’s CIA director George W. Bush, the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) vice chairman, Leo Cherne, and the father of Cold War thinking, Paul Nitze, Team B’s goal was to turn the CIA’s thinking about the Soviet Union on its head.

“The intensity and scope of the current Soviet military effort in peacetime is without parallel in twentieth century history,” they claimed in their top secret 1976 report. The Soviets were preparing for a “third world war” and were comparable only to “Nazi remilitarization of the 1930s.” Given military superiority and the will to use it, they reasoned, at some point in the near future the Soviets would make a strategic move that the United States would be militarily unable to stop.

But it was in their claim that the Soviets would first “intimidate smaller powers . . . adjacent to the USSR . . . where pro-Soviet forces have an opportunity to seize power but are unable to do so without military help,” that the Team B assessment attained a level of prophecy.

If anything could be described as a psychological warfare operation come unhinged, it was the Team B experiment. Team B effectively exposed the government’s own process of rational analysis to an irrational exercise in personalized, politicized, ethnic and faith-based psychological warfare. And it succeeded.

By 1979, the Team B and its acolytes Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Zalmay Khalilzad had so managed to overlay their alternate reality onto the mind of government that when the invasion of Afghanistan took place in 1979 their fantasy appeared to be as real and foreordained as it was intended to be.

Richard Pipes made clear in that January 2, 1980 broadcast that Afghanistan was “a superb springboard from which to launch offensives both into the Indian subcontinent and into Iran and the Iranian Gulf….” And then invoked the magic of World War II by stating that never before had the Soviets “felt bold enough… to engage in a direct blitzkrieg. So if they get away with it in Afghanistan, there’ll not only be great danger for our whole Middle eastern position but we will have encouraged them to engage in actions of this sort in other parts of the world, including, for example, Southeastern Europe or possibly even Western Europe.”

A “direct blitzkrieg” aimed at the Middle East, India, Southeastern and even Western Europe? Just like the phantom threat posed by Saddam Hussein in 2003 and brought forward by the very same people, the idea that the Soviets might cut off a vital oil supply was all that was needed to capture public opinion. That spring CBS News anchor Dan Rather followed up with a coast to coast broadcast reinforcing the company line: the American people were asleep to Soviet designs and had better start supporting the Mujahideen “freedom fighters” before it was too late. 

The major media had been priming the pump for months prior to the invasion citing Brzezinski and the importance of the “arc of crisis,” and predicting that the Soviet Union would be driven toward the Persian Gulf within the decade due to intelligence reports that it was “running short of the oil it needs to fuel an expanding economy.” Never mind that the Soviet economy was actually contracting at that point and the CIA’s secret 14-page memo titled “The Impending Soviet Oil Crisis,” was pure hokum.

Brzezinski and his Team B allies wanted the Soviets in Afghanistan as part of a long standing plan for the conquest of Eurasia and the psychological warfare campaign to convince Americans of the Soviets’ malevolent desires for world domination was already gearing up to make it reality.

International Rescue Committee Chairman Leo Cherne was well practiced in the arts of such deception. As of 1978, the year of the Marxist coup in Afghanistan the IRC was already at work stating in their Annual Report that they were actively engaged in bringing Afghan refugees to Europe and the United States following “The takeover of Afghanistan by dictatorial forces sympathetic to the Soviet Union…” The IRC’s Annual Report that year featured a photograph of Cherne’s old protégé at the Research Institute of America, board member William J. Casey while conducting a tour of Southeast Asia. Casey would serve as Chairman of the Executive Committee the next year before running Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election campaign and shortly thereafter becoming his CIA director.

The IRC in cooperation with the CIA had virtually created the elaborate psychological warfare mechanism that sold the U.S. military buildup in Vietnam to the American public. By 1975 their campaign of black lies had been exposed as a dangerous fraud. But in faraway Afghanistan, those mistakes would be forgotten with the help of the Europeans and a covert globalist agenda. 

It was obvious to us in 1980 that the Soviet invasion was not what it seemed and even more obvious that the Western response to it was not what it should have been. 1979 was a critical moment in American history. Vietnam had created huge problems for the post World War II infrastructure and economy. Huge debt and a military resurgence was the last thing the U.S. needed. But when Theodore Eliot showed up at a preview of our first-person 1981 Afghan documentary on life behind Soviet lines and demanded to know who in the U.S. government had “authorized” our project, we realized we had penetrated a psychological warfare campaign that was steeped in the irrational.  

Like clockwork, the 1979 Soviet invasion would open a back door for a small band of globalists to bleed, loot and ultimately disassemble the Soviet Union, just the way the very same people would use 9/11 to go through the front door to bleed, loot and disassemble the United States.

Join us next for Willie Wonka and the National Security State as the U.S. resumes a holy war begun in the 19^th century through a syncretistic cult-like British foreign policy known as Mystical Imperialism.

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story and Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire Visit their website here.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

The state’s use of psychological warfare to bend the population to war is as old, if not older than the existence of states themselves. But it was perhaps Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering whose statement while on trial at Nuremberg best summed up the cynical simplicity of the logic.

“Of course people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders, that is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger.”

Psychological warfare in the form of propaganda comes in all shapes and sizes as well as shades of black, grey or white.  America’s coordinated use of psychological warfare began in earnest during World War II and ever since has grown and expanded into public relations, advertising, cinema, radio and television, electronic video games and now social media. Its pro-war boosterism extends over sports, religion, education, news and entertainment (and of course the military) to form a seamless electronic cocoon-like web. It is employed on an ever growing list of those deemed as enemies of America as well as on a confused and agitated American public – whose corporate news networks frame and manage an increasingly shallow narrative while engaging in a kind of Orwellian Kabuki Theatre of fairness and balance.

Americans were heavily propagandized to support a U.S. entry into World War II and again heavily propagandized to accept the morality of deploying the atomic bomb to end it, despite dissent from within the scientific community. Even Mickey Mouse was conscripted for America’s total war effort along with the minds of America’s youth. Following the war Americans were heavily propagandized to accept the Cold War, the need for maintaining a permanent army, navy and air force as well as the buildup of a nuclear weapons arsenal.

 Since 9/11 Americans have been bathed in psychological warfare on Islamic terrorism despite the fact that only a handful of incidents in the West can be attributed to radical Islamists. What is generally not appreciated by America’s leadership about this kind of prolonged use of propaganda on the American public is that it exposes the rationale for the longest war in American history in Afghanistan as flimsy and unconvincing and completely sidesteps the outright lies and deceptions used to justify the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The origins of Washington’s war in Afghanistan have always been strategic, long term and particularly black, obscured throughout the Cold War by a narrative adapted from Britain’s 19^th century colonial expansion.

Given little priority during the U.S.’s long involvement in Vietnam in the 1950s and 60s, America’s psychological warfare campaign shifted its attention to Central Asia in 1973 when Afghanistan’s king was overthrown by his brother in law and cousin Mohammed Daoud with the help of the Parcham faction of the Marxist/Leninist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). The role of the Communist party meant so little to the U.S. media at the time it remained invisible in both Time and Newsweek’s published reports of the coup. But to U.S. ambassador Robert G. Neumann, the presence of the PDPA meant that a “limited Great Game” with the Soviet Union was now back in play.

A coordinated campaign of pressure from U.S.-backed Pakistan and Iran soon ousted Daoud’s Marxist partner while the Shah’s dreaded spy agency SAVAK moved in to help Daoud clean house of leftists. The Shah even readied a military force to invade should Daoud waver in his newfound anti-Communist zeal. But by 1978 a new day for Iran and Afghanistan was about to dawn.  

Enter Hafizullah Amin. Before, during and after World War II the U.S. had created a number of psychological warfare organizations designed to compete with the political propaganda of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.  Integrated closely into the CIA’s intelligence and psychological warfare units after the war, organizations like Leo Cherne’s International Rescue Committee (IRC) and according to the CIA’s own website, the Congress for Cultural Freedom “helped to solidify CIA’s emerging strategy of promoting the non-Communist left–the strategy that would soon become the theoretical foundation of the Agency’s political operations against Communism over the next two decades.”

In constant competition with the KGB, the CIA was also known to target foreign students destined to hold high rank in their home countries.  Handpicked by U.S. administrators to participate in a UNESCO/Columbia University program, Amin was sent to New York in 1957. He later completed a master’s degree at Columbia—coincidentally at a time when future National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was gaining prominence as a professor there.

Amin claimed to have become radicalized at the University of Wisconsin in 1958. He also claimed to have become a Marxist that summer but would conceal his emergence as a leader in the Kalq faction of the PDPA until much later. Despite being a Marxist, Amin was again chosen in 1962 by the Americans to attend Columbia, this time as a doctoral candidate and rose quickly to become the president of the Afghan Student Association. A disclosure in Ramparts magazine in 1967 would reveal the CIA’s sponsorship of that same Afghan Student Association during that time. Following his return Amin rose rapidly in Afghan politics and by 1978 was positioned to play a pivotal role in another Palace coup, this time of Prince Mohammed Daoud himself.

1978 was a pivotal year in the foreign policy of the United States as President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski made steady inroads into Secretary of State Cyrus Vance’s power. By that year he had persuaded Carter to transfer jurisdiction over the CIA from the Inter-Agency Policy Review Committee, (headed by the secretary of state) to the National Security Council’s Special Coordinating Committee which he chaired. This shift gave Brzezinski control over covert operations in Afghanistan. It also gave him control of the psychological warfare campaign necessary to make those operations work both at home and abroad.

Hafizullah Amin played the perfect foil to Brzezinski’s propaganda war which, regardless of the lack of evidence, painted the PDPA takeover in Kabul as a clear example of the growing dangers of Soviet expansionism and their pursuit of dominance in the Persian Gulf. Throughout 1978 and into 1979 Amin’s actions dovetailed perfectly into the expanding psychological warfare campaign with Brzezinski blaming Amin’s February 1979 assassination of American Ambassador Adolph Dubs, on the Soviets.

Transcripts from Politburo meetings in Moscow from March 1979 show a Soviet leadership confounded as the events unfolded, referring to conversations with Amin as looking “like a detective novel.” Had the operation been scripted in advance by the CIA to confuse Moscow, it was working brilliantly.

The subsequent, December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan ended détente, renewed the Cold War and opened a U.S. relationship with Communist China that could not have been imagined at the time. It established a new narrative of an expanding Evil Empire threatening America’s vital interests in the Persian Gulf and would redefine U.S. objectives along neoconservative lines. These lines were laid out within days of the Soviet invasion by former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Theodore Eliot and Harvard Professor Richard Pipes in a MacNeil Lehrer broadcast on January 2, 1980.

But it wasn’t until we probed this new narrative by going to Afghanistan ourselves in 1981 and were challenged personally in a public forum for doing so by Ambassador Eliot, that we realized there was much more to Ambassador Eliot and his narrative than met the eye.

*Join us next as we look at the strange team behind the psychological warfare campaign that brought the United States into Afghanistan and kept it there and how that campaign has come home to haunt America in a post 9/11 world.

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story and Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire Visit their website here.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

On the other hand, by this very same definition, a criminal ‘hot case’ that has not gone through a proper investigation by real investigators remains a ‘hot case.’ Whether that hot case is shoved into a cold case file or not does not make it technically a ‘cold case.’ The never-investigated mass murder on September 11, 2001, a case never assigned to real and independent investigators, with many witnesses never-interviewed, with many suspects never-pursued, with many questions left unanswered, and with many leads never-followed, remains a ‘hot case.’ The self-serving classifications and redactions, the many cover ups, and the burial of the case and related files in government-created massive igloos, do not make 9/11 a cold case.

Let’s take a few minutes and by comparison examine a smaller scale murder investigation involving a murdered wealthy middle-aged man in an office building that was set on fire. While the forensic teams go over the body and through the charred building and debris to search for clues and evidence, the trained detectives begin interviewing witnesses, checking out the victim’s history, following any leads and forming their list of suspects.

In creating their list of suspects, the investigators look at all persons with direct or indirect motive(s): A young trophy wife with a multi-million dollar life insurance policy; a business adversary with much to gain from the elimination of the murder victim; former business partners and associates with grudges; a man who had actually threatened the murder victim; another who had shared his intense desire to see the victim dead; the owner of the handsomely insured burned down office building who had been unsuccessfully trying to sell the building and liquidate his assets …so on and so forth.

Whether through accounts of eye-witnesses or relatives, coworkers and friends, whether through documented evidence such as letters or e-mails, the investigators fill the list with possible suspects with motive(s) to see the victim dead, and maybe some with the established intent to kill him. Once the investigators create their list of suspects, and once the forensic and other evidence and witness statements have been gathered and analyzed, then they set about winnowing down the list. Using exhaustive interrogation techniques, investigative channels, and forensic evidence, the investigators begin eliminating unlikely suspects from the initial list one-by-one.

Sometimes the list is simultaneously narrowed down and expanded. While some initial suspects can be eliminated, others related to the initial suspects may be added as accessories to the crime. For example, the murder victim’s business adversary hired a professional hit organization that turned around and contracted the killing to three of its contract hit men. Or the victim’s wife’s lover plotted with her and engaged two hit men to execute the plot.

In the end, the investigators turn over their final suspect-accessory list and all the evidence that they believe will stand up in court to a prosecutor who then decides (on the evidence)  whether to bring charges against one or more suspects, and then argues the case in court. The suspect(s), motive, means and opportunity, all supported by evidence and witnesses, are presented in court for the jury to judge the case and decide guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

Of course we then have those cases that never make it to court. The lack of sufficient evidence, witnesses, or even a lack of possible suspects, moves the case from the investigation phase directly into the cold case file cabinet.

Then, we have cases that never make it even to the real investigation phase. Period. Without going through the usual investigative process- evidence-gathering, witness interviews, seeking motives and means, looking for intent, establishing a list of suspects …Without turning over any suspect with ‘all’ associated evidence and witnesses to any prosecutor…These case are evasively declared closed or a cold case.

The investigation of the 9/11 mass murder was first assigned to a highly-influenced and dependent Congress. We are not talking seasoned detectives and investigative agents here. Then, it was given to a group of sleazy pocketed politicians called a commission. Again, we are not talking about experienced detectives and savvy and independent prosecutors. No; just a handful of masterful and deceitful politicians and their puppet administrative staff.

There never was a thorough initial list of suspects. A few hours after the mass murder a bearded man in some dark cave in Afghanistan was announced as the mastermind and less than a couple dozen dead hit-men were declared the executioners of that mass murder. As for motive and intent, there was a round or two of circular discussions in the media, but absent any real investigation and thus any need for real prosecution, establishing motive and intent were deemed irrelevant and unnecessary. Same for any accessory suspects; a few hundred were rounded up around the globe and were taken into black holes, black sites, and black prisons. Some were later released, some were tortured and killed, and some still remain in those holes. We don’t know, and it looks like we’ll never know.

In a real-life mass murder investigation by real investigators a document like this, explicitly stating the desire for a mass murder like this would immediately make its way into the evidence bag, and signatories such as these people with a real motive and unlimited means would be automatically added to the top of the investigators’ initial list of suspects. They would remain there until further investigated, eliminated, or possibly prosecuted. Of course this was not a real investigation, and with no real investigators, and there never was a real list of suspects.

In a real-life investigation highly suspicious suspects like this would not easily disappear into thin air just like that.

In a real-life investigation any suspect accessory like this would be investigated, interrogated, and accordingly cleared or apprehended. And other highly suspicious persons or possible witnesses like this would be questioned and examined very thoroughly, rather than being directly assisted in fleeing the country.

In a real-life investigation key witnesses and investigative experts like these would be held with the highest regard, and their knowledge, first-hand information, and documented evidence would be considered of great value. They certainly wouldn’t be censored, classified and officially gagged.

In a real-life investigation if the highest-level criminal investigative body declares the capriciously designated perpetrator only a ‘suspect’ with no real hard evidence ever linking him to the crime in question, the case would be categorized as ‘never-solved & so very much open.’

And the list goes on and on. When we get down to it, I mean really get down to it, what do we really have in the investigation of the biggest mass murder in the history of our nation? I’ll tell you what we have. We have a still ‘Hot Case’ that has been shoved inside a massive establishment-built igloo; so far, successfully.

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Recent allegations made by former counterterrorism “tsar” Richard Clarke against former CIA Director George Tenet and two other former CIA managers, Cofer Black and Richard Blee, have thrown one of the key unanswered questions of 9/11 into sharp relief. What happened at Alec Station, the CIA’s bin Laden unit, after an officer there discovered that two of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, had entered the US?

The officer, Margaret Gillespie, says she made the discovery on August 21 and the record indicates she began to notify the FBI and other government agencies on this day. However, while a substantial amount of information has been made public about how the news circulated around the FBI, almost nothing is known of how Alec Station dealt with it.

In an interview recently broadcast as a trailer for the forthcoming audio documentary “Who Is Rich Blee?” Clarke alleged that the CIA had deliberately withheld from him information about Almihdhar and Alhazmi—in particular the news that Almihdhar had a US visa—for over twenty months before 9/11. Clarke also highlighted the importance of the information, saying it was more important than, for example, any of the key pieces of intelligence discussed at a controversial meeting with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on July 10, 2001.

According to a statement recently released by Tenet, Black and Blee, neither Tenet nor any other senior CIA official was told of the visa or of travel to the US by Alhazmi and Almihdhar before 9/11. This was also the 9/11 Commission’s conclusion, although this conclusion was hedged. If this is true, then one appropriate question would be: why not?

After the attacks, it emerged that the FBI had arrested one of the possible hijackers, Zacarias Moussaoui. However, it blew the case, failing to obtain a warrant to search Moussaoui’s belongings and even failing to inform its own director of what was happening. This later failure became a badge for the FBI’s general uselessness. And Thomas Pickard, the acting director whom the information did not reach, made matters worse when he suggested Tenet, who had been informed of the case, should have stepped in and done the job Pickard’s staff failed to do.

In his 2007 book At the Center of the Storm Tenet piled on the agony for Pickard (emphasis in original):

During the 9/11 Commission hearings, I was stunned to hear Tom Pickard, who was acting FBI director in August 2001, suggest that I had somehow failed to notify him about Moussaoui. Failed to tell him? Hell, it was the FBI’s case, their arrest. I had no idea that the Bureau wasn’t aware what its own people were doing.

However, the CIA’s failure to inform Tenet of the Almihdhar and Almihdhar information must be regarded as more serious than the FBI’s failure to inform Pickard of Moussaoui. While the local Bureau agents who arrested Moussaoui thought he may well be a terrorist, they did not even realise he was a bin Laden operative, let alone connected to a suspected forthcoming al-Qaeda attack. On the contrary, the CIA knew Almihdhar was linked to the next attack.

In a July 23, 2001 e-mail published following Moussaoui’s trial in 2006, one of Blee’s former deputies, Tom Wilshire, warned CIA Counterterrorism Center (CTC) managers of Almihdhar’s link to the next attack: “When the next big op is carried out by UBL hardcore cadre, Khalad will be at or near the top of the command food chain—and probably nowhere near either the attack site or Afghanistan. That makes people who are available and who have direct access to him of very high interest. Khalid Mihdar should be very high interest anyway, given his connection to the (redacted).”

Khalad (usually spelt Khallad) was a known al-Qaeda leader, currently in Guantanamo. The redaction is probably a reference to al-Qaeda’s global operations hub in Yemen, to which Wilshire knew Almihdhar was linked. The e-mail appears in none of the relevant reports published by the Congressional Inquiry, 9/11 Commission and Justice Department inspector general. It was a follow up to one sent ten days earlier that Blee is known to have read. Wilshire, who was on loan to the FBI at this point, is one of the officials who failed to pass on notification of the Moussaoui case towards Pickard.

The scenario that Tenet, Black and Blee are selling is this: Gillespie found that Almihdhar and Alhazmi had entered the US and notified multiple other agencies. Four weeks previously, Wilshire had informed his former CTC colleagues that Almihdhar was “very high interest.” Yet, nobody at the CTC was able to put this together. Indeed, the significance of the two militants’ presence in the US would usually necessitate prompt notification to Tenet, even without Wilshire’s e-mail. Yet this was not done.

Here, then, is a very simple question: If Tenet did not know that Alhzami and Almihdhar had entered the US after August 21, who failed to tell him?

# # # #

Kevin Fenton is the author of Disconnecting the Dots: How CIA and FBI Officials Helped Enable 9/11 and Evaded Government Investigations.

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 I am not going to get into the ‘some’ reasons for this post; although, I have plenty to say on the subject. Instead, for the purpose of this piece, and for those audiences, I am going to answer the ‘whys.’ Why ‘some’ still question and seek answer(s) and accountability on 9/11.

Why 9/11? Because ‘they’ claim that’s what gives them the right to override our Constitution and all other laws guaranteeing our liberties and privacy.

Why 9/11? Because that’s what ‘they’ claim as justification for every one of our many wars.

Why 9/11? Because that’s what ‘they’ say is the reason for us having to be violated, humiliated, groped and fondled for the ‘privilege’ of travel.

Why 9/11? Because that’s when ‘they’ began the illegal eavesdropping of all our communications.

Why 9/11? Because that’s how ‘they’ legitimize excessive secrecy.

Why 9/11? Because that’s the excuse ‘they’ use to implement torture and severe human right violations and escape all liabilities.

Why 9/11? Because that’s the rationalization ‘they’ use to expand ‘their’ size and power.

Why 9/11? Because ‘they’ have successfully made it a means to justify many unjustifiable ends.

Why 9/11? Because that holds answers to many questions ‘they’ don’t want you to ask.

Why 9/11? Because that’s the question ‘they’ don’t want ever answered.

Why 9/11? Because maybe that is what ‘they’ really wanted.

Why 9/11? Because ‘they’ should not get away with it.

With all due respect to those who are still not satisfied with my answers to their ‘why’ question, we’ll be publishing articles, podcast interviews and investigative videos on 9/11 and related topics for the next few weeks…or maybe longer.  We hope to have those friends as an open-minded and critical thinking audience during our 9/11 coverage here at Boiling Frogs Post.

Sibel Edmonds

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By Elizabeth Gould & Paul Fitzgerald

 9/11. The number still rings in the mind as if chosen to act as a Pavlovian trigger: Outrage, anger, paranoia, retribution. A shadowy band of religious zealots fly not one, but two commercial airliners into the heart of America’s financial community while others deal a deadly blow to the Pentagon. It was a Hollywood movie, an act of war rivaling Pearl Harbor. Why did it happen? Who would do this to Americans, to America? How could a band of ragged terrorists plotting from a cave in faraway Afghanistan have accomplished such a complex task given the size and pervasiveness of the largest and most expensive military/intelligence apparatus in the history of the world? And even more curiously, why would Islamic radicals give the ideology-driven neoconservative administration of George W. Bush exactly the pretext they needed to launch a bloody invasion and further occupation of the Middle East?

According to the official narrative, 9/11 was an attack on everything American and in so doing changed everything about America. Like Kafkaesque characters who’d suddenly found themselves on the other side of a Cold War “Iron Curtain” mirror, Americans would now have to “watch what they say and watch what they do,” open up to questioning or face jail when prodded by squinty-eyed border guards and forsake any hope of privacy or dignity in a new world of electronic spies and full body scans. Former National Security Advisor, Admiral John Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness program would be enacted and a preexisting “Patriot Act” would be signed into law to clamp down on dissent and real or imagined domestic terrorism.

Some careful observers like Anthony Lewis of the New York Times had already noticed the bizarre coup-like changes coming over Washington in the months leading up to the attack as the George W. Bush administration inaugurated radical shifts in domestic and foreign policy that seemed un-American and alien to anything that had gone before. But those concerns would soon be forgotten in the race for revenge. 

9/11 would ultimately give President George W. Bush and his neoconservative advisors all the public approval they needed to transform America and invade Afghanistan and Iraq to cleanse the world of evil in an endless “war on terror.” In the end it would turn America’s reputation for racial and religious tolerance, military invincibility and economic dominance on its head.

Looking back on the carnage of the last ten years it’s easy to see how the psychology of 9/11 changed America. What’s not easy to see is how a long standing campaign of covert psychological warfare built up since the early days of World War II had made the slow destruction of American democracy and the ascension of rule by secrecy inevitable, long before the planes ever left the runway on 9/11. 

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” -Dr. Joseph Goebbels

As chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, Joseph Goebbels system of black propaganda not only helped Hitler’s rise to power but kept him there by utilizing near-hypnotic powers over the German people even after the consequences of his disastrous failures had become obvious.

To counter Goebbels’ propaganda theatre emanating from Nazi party headquarters at Munich’s Braunes Haus (Brown House), an organization named Freedom House was founded in New York City in 1941. Fronted by American celebrities and public luminaries such as Eleanor Roosevelt, the brains behind the outfit was Leo Cherne, the psychological warfare specialist/co-founder of the Research Institute of America (RIA), which would much later be labeled the “CIA for businessmen.”    

If anyone was a match for Goebbels mastery of the black arts of psychological warfare it was Cherne. In 1938 Cherne had published a guide to industrial mobilization in Adjusting Your Business to War, prophetically forecasting the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 and on September 1^st of that year completed a 3000-page report titled, Industrial Mobilization Plans for World War II, the very day that German troops crossed into Poland.

That same year Cherne asked a young protégé named William J. Casey, the future director of the CIA, “How do you take a country like ours, stuck in depression, and convert it into an arsenal?” Their combined answer was the loose-leaf book called The War Coordinator. Cherne and Casey’s psychological warfare campaign would establish a narrative that didn’t just embrace freedom as its major theme, in their minds their ideas would actually become Freedom and through the use of propaganda would grow and harden over the decades into an impenetrable shield-like narrative of American triumphalism.

Cherne’s prophecies on war and business attained a near mystical quality and over the decades following World War II he would attract the most powerful and influential figures in American business and politics to his causes. A listing of Freedom House trustees on its 50^th anniversary in 1991 includes people as diverse as Kenneth L. Adelman, Andrew Young, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Albert Shanker, Donald Rumsfeld and James Woolsey. It has since become an exclusive neoconservative bastion.

Freedom House’s narrative is no less than the narrative of the American century where, “It has fought on the side of freedom and against aggressors in struggles that can be evoked by simple words and phrases: the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, NATO, Hungarian Freedom Fighters, the Berlin Wall, the Prague Spring…” and of course Afghanistan.

We experienced Freedom House’s simple words and phrases and their dark influence on the major media in the spring of 1983 in a televised Nightline program following a trip to Afghanistan with Harvard Negotiation Project Director, Roger Fisher. We had brought Fisher to Afghanistan to explore the possibilities of a Soviet withdrawal of forces and discovered the Soviets were desperate to get out. But instead of expanding on Fisher’s efforts to get the Soviets out of Afghanistan, host Ted Koppel undermined the very premise of the discussion by introducing a political officer of the Jamaat-i Islami, which Koppel described as “an anti-communist resistance group based in Pakistan. He is here in the United States under the auspices of two American organizations, concerned with democracy in Afghanistan, the Afghan Relief Committee and Freedom House.”

Had Koppel and Freedom House really been concerned about democracy in Afghanistan, their choice of the Jamaat-i Islami could not be viewed as anything but the darkest of black propaganda, an outright lie.

Originally founded by the Pakistani theologian Abul Ala Maudidi in 1941, the goal of the Jamaat-i Islami was more than just that of gaining political representation for radical Islamists. The Jamaat was to be an all-embracing, extremist Islamic Society, crafted through the strictest interpretation of Islamic law, as a replacement for a modern western-style democracy.

Through the help of the mainstream media during the 1980s the psychological war promoted by Freedom House and Ronald Reagan’s C.I.A. director William J. Casey held the Soviets in Afghanistan for an additional six years, destabilized Central Asia, encouraged the growth of the largest heroin operation in history and enabled the rise of the very Islamic extremists that allegedly planned and carried off the attacks on 9/11.

Ten years after 9/11 Afghanistan remains the center of a growing Islamic insurgency and the longest war in American history. The success of America’s seventy year old psychological warfare campaign, where the lie became the truth and the truth became the enemy of the state, has now so disorientated America’s institutional thinking that we have reached the moment when the state can no longer shield the American people from the consequences of that lie.

Follow us as we go deeper into the creation of the Afghan narrative and the broader implications of the side effects of psychological warfare on the American people in our next piece, Building the Afghan Narrative with Black Propaganda, The Process is Revealed.

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story  and   Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire Visit their website here.

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 Zacarias Moussaoui, one of the numerous “20th hijackers,” was arrested ten years ago next Tuesday, outside the Residence Inn in Eagan, Minnesota. The arrest was one of the first events in a case that gave the FBI a chance to blow open the 9/11 plot, but resulted in abject humiliation for the bureau when its headquarters’ string of errors was exposed in the press.

The Moussaoui case is a poster boy for the state of our knowledge about the attacks: we have some of the details, but know some are missing. Also, two key questions remain unanswered. This despite the wealth of information that came out at the trial and the fact that Moussaoui, although largely ignored by the 9/11 Commission’s final report—partly due to the forthcoming trial—was a major topic of the Justice Department inspector general’s report into the FBI’s pre-attack failings.

These are the bare bones of the case: Moussaoui had been a known extremist for years prior to his arrest. Before the bureau first heard his name on August 15, he had been under surveillance by French and British intelligence and the CIA, although the agency would claim it only knew him under an alias. He was sent to the US for flight training by alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, possibly to participate in 9/11, possibly to participate in a follow-up operation. However, he was a poor student and dropped out of basic flight school before obtaining a licence and went to learn about flying a Boeing 747, which aroused suspicion.

When the FBI was brought in, the Minneapolis agents realized he was dangerous and arrested him on an immigration violation—despite being told not to do so by headquarters. This was the first of many times the Minneapolis field office and FBI headquarters clashed over the case. Essentially, even though they did not know he was linked to al-Qaeda, the local agents understood the risk Moussaoui posed—one even speculated he would fly a large airliner into the World Trade Center—and they wanted a warrant to search his belongings to get information that would lead to his accomplices. On the other hand, headquarters seemed to think they were alarmist and there was nothing to the case. They kept throwing up roadblocks.

Although it is uncertain whether Moussaoui would have participated in the 9/11 attacks if he had remained free, or whether he ever met any of the nineteen hijackers, he certainly had very visible links to some of their key associates, such as Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ahmed al-Hawsawi and Yazid Sufaat. These links would have led to eleven of the nineteen. Some of the connections between what Moussaoui had in his possession and the hijackers would have been easy to make. For example, the CIA knew that Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi had stayed at Sufaat’s apartment during al-Qaeda’s January 2000 summit in Kuala Lumpur.

There were four key figures who dealt with the case at FBI headquarters: Rita Flack, an intelligence operations specialist at the FBI’s Radical Fundamentalist Unit (RFU); Michael Maltbie, a supervisory special agent with the RFU; their unit chief Dave Frasca; and Tom Wilshire, a CIA officer on loan to FBI headquarters. Wilshire was either a consultant to Michael Rolince, head of the FBI’s International Terrorism Operations Section, or his deputy. Wilshire was also the key figure in the CIA’s withholding of information about Almihdhar and Alhazmi from the bureau.

These four people somehow managed to convince themselves that the Moussaoui case was a minor matter that deserved little attention and that the Minneapolis agents were, in Flack’s words, “maniacs.” Although very little is known about Wilshire’s involvement in the case, an e-mail used as evidence at the trial shows he shared this attitude; on August 24 he e-mailed his three colleagues asking for the latest on the “Minneapolis Airplane IV crowd,” although it is unclear whether this was a reference to Moussaoui and an associate or the Minneapolis field office.

This is one of the two key questions outstanding: where did this attitude come from? With hindsight, what the Minneapolis agents foresaw was not half as bad as what happened. It was not one airliner that flew into the WTC, but two, with another at the Pentagon and a fourth also aimed for Washington. Given the circumstances of the case, Minneapolis’ fears were reasonable and were shared both by a CIA detailee to the FBI, who predicted Moussaoui may crash a 747 into the White House, and at least one officer in the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center. Given that we still lack information about the interactions between the four participants, we cannot say with whom this bad attitude originated. However, we can say that Wilshire shared and supported it.

It would take too long to summarise all the obstacles thrown up, but here are two examples: when French intelligence reported that, yes, they knew Moussaoui and, yes, he was an Islamist militant, Maltbie objected that maybe they were talking about some other guy with the same name. Therefore, Maltbie argued, the FBI should search all the telephone directories in France to see how many people called Zacarias Moussaoui actually lived there.

The second example involves a comment made by Moussaoui’s imam on a phone monitored by the FBI to the presumed accomplice arrested with him. “I heard you guys wanted to go on jihad,” said the imam. “Don’t talk about that now,” was the reply. Frasca’s response upon learning this? “The jihad comment doesn’t concern me by itself in that this word can mean many things in various [M]uslim cultures and is frequently taken out of context.”

Other roadblocks included Frasca’s ban on Minneapolis applying for a criminal warrant itself, Maltbie blocking a referral to the Justice Department’s criminal division, Flack’s inability to provide the Phoenix memo to anyone else after she read it, the withholding of the relevant documentation from attorneys asked to assess the case, the deletion of key passages from an application for an intelligence warrant, etc., etc.

When the case became public knowledge after the attacks the bureau was a laughing stock—they arrested one of the hijackers (actually more of an associate) over three weeks before the attacks but were unable to even file a warrant application to search his luggage. What’s worse, the bureau was so completely clueless that it even failed to inform its own acting director, Thomas Pickard, of the case. How much more incompetent could it get? This dynamic was made even worse when one of the Minneapolis office employees, Coleen Rowley, went public with her criticism of FBI headquarters, becoming one of Time’s people of the year for 2002.

Logically, if the information came into FBI headquarters, but didn’t get to the acting director, it must have stopped with someone. So who was that someone? The most senior official to be told about the case was Rolince, but he received scant information on it for nearly two weeks. The two people below him were his consultant/deputy Tom Wilshire and RFU chief Dave Frasca and the blame needs to be shared between them. Exactly how it should be apportioned out we don’t know—the relevant reports, by the 9/11 Congressional Inquiry, 9/11 Commission, and Justice Department inspector general, are silent on who should carry the can—and the inspector general omits even to mention that not informing the bureau’s director was a failure. This is symptomatic of the reports’ approach—nobody who performed badly was held accountable.

Wilshire’s role in the deliberate withholding of information from the FBI about Pentagon hijackers Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi makes his presence in the Moussaoui case alarming. However, although Wilshire certainly had a malign influence on the case, there is no smoking-gun proof of wilful malfeasance on his part. What we do know, however, is that this case was a significant stimulus for the reform of the US intelligence community. Without knowing what actually happened here and why, we have no way of judging whether those reforms were warranted and appropriate. Perhaps it would have been better to fire those who performed badly, instead of promoting them.

# # # #

Kevin Fenton is the author of Disconnecting the Dots: How CIA and FBI Officials Helped Enable 9/11 and Evaded Government Investigations.

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Plan C was prepared by Obama’s White House advisors and staff, during the time that Congress was preparing their Plan B, as a last-resort wild-card maneuver to play the never- before-failed Al Qaeda Card. Although some consider the report moot and no longer of any significance, others are alarmed by the possible implications of this contingency plan as the preferred method of choice in future presidential-congressional dances involving a wide range of issues,  including  even pharmaceutical and environmental laws and regulations.

Boiling Frogs Post obtained the report prior to the deal reached by the White House and Congress on August 2. However, as a responsible news organization, BFP refrained from publishing the report until now in order to protect our national security interests in the face of the never-waning and ever-increasing Al Qaeda threat targeting our government, major mega institutions, and perhaps even insignificant and ordinary citizens. We believe we have fulfilled our journalistic obligation to our government and mega institutions by observing this grace period by sitting on the story, and now are ready to present some of the highlights of the Obama administration’s not-used but saved to-be-used-later Plan C.

Plan C emphasizes the urgent need to raise the debt ceiling in order to meet the increase in government spending on the to-be-expanded War on Terror against Al Qaeda overseas and domestically:

We are a nation at war. We are a nation involved in several wars. We are a nation intent upon getting involved in even more wars; nationally and internationally. We call it our global and domestic ‘War on Terror.’ These wars are fought to defeat Al Qaeda around the globe and within our borders. Not raising the debt ceiling would cut funding for our current wars and planned future wars, since spending money we don’t have is the only way to pay for these wars and more wars. Thus, not raising the debt ceiling would result in handing Al Qaeda terrorists our defeat. For Congress not to raise the debt ceiling is to side with terrorists; is to aid Al Qaeda. We have analyses by our legal scholars who argue that not raising the debt ceiling can actually be considered an act of terrorism; whether direct or indirect, providing aid and support to Al Qaeda terrorists is an act of terrorism.

…

In the Plan C proposal the administration provides several studies on and analyses of the ‘American Way of Life;’ what it really means today, and how the inevitable future bailouts of financial institutions are necessary to preserve and maintain this way of life:

It is a known fact that Al Qaeda hates our way of life; our previous President himself has eloquently stated so. Our corrupt financial institutions have become an inseparable part of life in America. These corrupt financial institutions are woven into the fabric of life here in the United States of America. Thus, to let these corrupt financial institutions collapse is to fulfill Al Qaeda’s objective; is to help Al Qaeda win. Is this really what Congress wishes to do? To side with Al Qaeda and let them destroy our way of life? Because to not facilitate or approve soon-to-come additional bailouts of these corrupt institutions is to fulfill Al Qaeda’s wish: to Destroy the American Way of Life. Thus, raising the debt ceiling without really capping federal government spending, including its ability to keep bailing out our corrupt financial institutions is to stand for the American way of life. You, the Congress, are either with us and our way of life, or against us and with them – the terrorists…

…

Obama’s Plan C also includes a persuasive argument against any congressional investigations into or pursuit of accountability against any of the financial industry executives who generously helped themselves to hundreds of millions of dollars in compensations taken out of government bailout packages, either past or future. This argument also heavily relies on Al Qaeda related risk evaluations:

We know that ambitiously crooked executives helped themselves to outrageous sums that came right out of generous government bailout packages to the banking industry. Yes, we are talking CEO’s taking home hundreds of millions of dollars in ‘bonuses.’ We expect to have additional bailouts in the near future, and with those, we expect to see the same CEO robbery trend happening again and again. It is a fact of life today; a fact of the American way of life. We understand public pressure to do something about this mega thievery, but we urge you not to give in. These executives are more privy to our nation’s sensitive secrets than even our high-level intelligence executives. We cannot isolate them. We cannot turn them away. Think about their value to the terrorists we are at war with – the Al Qaeda. Can we take a chance on even the slightest possibility of these executives playing for the other side? We smoke and chase them out, and the other side, the Al Qaeda, may welcome them with open arms. We consider these executives valuable potential recruits for the terrorists – the Al Qaeda. And we cannot take a chance. And we are asking you not to take that chance…

…

In the end, the Obama administration’s Al-Qaeda wild card, Plan C, was not needed in settling the debt ceiling crisis in the duel with Congress. However, the Al Qaeda wild-card outline was saved, and is being refined further. No one knows when it may come to play in full force. Will it be during the next expenditure cut duel? Will it be on the next humongous black budget item in need of congressional approval? Will it be during the next wave of corruption charges against defense, financial or intelligence industry entities? No one knows, but many expect it to come, and some with certainty. So please stay tuned.

*This article is part of Boiling Frogs Beltway Buzz Satire series.

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For almost 10 years we have been engaged in a massive and many-fronted war advertised as a war on terror-war on Al Qaeda. Recent reports put the total cost to America of this war on terror at around $3 trillion. This is not counting un-countable covert operations with secret budgets, and it does not include the war in Libya or covert wars elsewhere.

For the last 10 years of the Cold War, the period of our heightened expenditures against a war marketed as a war against communism, we reportedly spent slightly under $3 trillion.

For a moment let’s forget about the exaggerated and sometimes dubious Soviet threats that were being sold to our nation during the Cold-War, and assume all of them legitimate and warranted. Okay?

We had the Soviet military with over 5 million men. We were dealing with Long-Range Ballistic Missile capabilities.  We had an empire with a declared arsenal of 39,967 tons of chemical weapons. We were faced with massive nuclear arsenals and warheads, sophisticated fighter aircraft, tanks… All that, and of course the added fear propaganda and jazzed up other threats to go with it. My point here is not how scary an adversary the USSR was to the United States. Here is what I want you to do:

Take into perspective and compare the size, budget, militaristic and technological capabilities, and the vast power of our former adversary, the USSR, to the current alleged terrorist adversary, Al Qaeda, whom we have supposedly been fighting for ten years.

Let’s first begin by engaging in a rational process of elimination, and take out the wars and targets that are not related to the 9/11 terrorists, the supposed Al-Qaeda. That will take out Iraq and Saddam Hussein, and also Libya and Gaddafi.

Next, we should take out Afghanistan as a terrorist nation state. Afghanistan has been under our occupation for almost ten years, and we have our puppet government installed there, and when it comes down to it, the Taliban does not equate to Al-Qaeda, it never did. The Taliban did not exercise terrorism in the United States or its Global territories.

We must also remove Pakistan as a terrorist country, thus a nation state target. If you remember, neither the quasi 9/11 Congressional Inquiry nor the quasi 9/11 Commission Report ever declared the Pakistani government/nation as terrorists or an Al-Qaeda member. Let us go with their official judgment. After all, haven’t we been giving Pakistan billions of dollars in US aid since 9/11 and continuing to date? Wouldn’t it be ridiculous to on one hand categorize our drone war there as war against Pakistan as a member of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network, and on the other hand support and finance them? Exactly; that eliminates Pakistan as an Al-Qaeda nation-government. Are you with me so far? What does this leave us with?

Our war on Al-Qaeda terror does not include a single nation state or organized state military. No military infrastructure or headquarters. No trained army-navy-air force. No tanks, warplanes, nuclear warheads, drones. No intelligence institutions or landmarks. No communication satellites. No technology. No borders. No GDP…

The supposed Al Qaeda’s top leadership was declared by our government to be Osama Bin Laden, aka Al Qaeda Commander in Chief; a sickly old man who was hooked to a dialysis machine; who supposedly lived and hid in caves, and later, in a mud house located in a remote third world village with chickens and goats. A man who sustained himself and his family by periodically selling his wives jewelry or bartering milk from his goats for occasional lamb chops. All this according to our own government; coming out in bits and pieces, and of course, sometimes in a totally contradictory fashion.

The supposed Al-Qaeda network’s communication and intelligence sharing infrastructure, according to our government, was kept very simple to evade our trillion-dollar intelligence institutions. The Al-Qaeda commander-in-Chief wrote down notes and instructions. He then waited for the courier to come and pick it up. The old man courier would hop on a donkey and travel from a bigger town to the Commander-in-Chief’s mud house in a third world village. This sometimes took several days. He’d take the note, then hop on his donkey, and go back to the town where he’d meet another intermediary courier. The intermediary courier would take the note to a nondescript little house, climb up to the roof where he kept trained courier pigeons and hawks, and based on the importance of the communication given to him, he’d either choose a hawk or pigeon to send the intelligence to the next courier. The next one used couriers who traveled to the remote deserts by camels, and so on and so forth.

How about the sophistication of weapons-methods used by our target terrorists, the ominous Al Qaeda? We are talking about a dozen or so pocket knives priced at approximately $4 a piece (probably made in China), and of course if bought in bulk, for a total under $40. That for the supposed execution of the massive terror plot over here, in the world’s super power nation. As for other worldwide terror incidents that have been placed under the  ‘Al Qaeda Track Record,’  we are talking about rudimentary bomb-making ability paired up with ultra simple bombs created by ingredients such as fertilizer; we are talking a few loads of cow dung here; literally, that is.

What about the size of the manpower these terrorists, Al-Qaeda, possess? Interestingly no one in our government has ever touched upon any scientific or even commonsensical estimate as to the number of active-combative Al-Qaeda terrorists. Instead, our government, through their stenographers in the media and their marketing arm in the Hollywood filmmaking industry, has succeeded in forming this public perception of a massive number of boogieman-Al Qaeda-terrorists out there who are actively and constantly planning and executing terror plots against the West.  Thus, to get a certain level of rational perception we must look at some factual indicators:

We have had this $3 trillion ‘War on Al Qaeda Terror’ for the last 10 years with nearly a quarter million military members, thousands and thousands of intelligence operatives and analysts, highly sophisticated and gigantic intelligence gathering tools (Think NSA, satellite technologies, wiretaps, spooks and snitches), mega rewards for turning in Al-Qaeda members …You’d think in ten years of these constant war and intelligence gathering operations we’d have tens of thousands of captured Al-Qaeda terrorists in our jails here and abroad. No?

Interestingly ‘No.’ Let’s take a look at the mother of all our captive top Al Qaeda terrorists detention center; Guantanamo Bay:

Since October 7, 2001, when began the war in Afghanistan, 775 detainees have been brought to Guantanamo. Of these, most have been released without charge or transferred to facilities in their home countries. The Department of Defense often referred to these prisoners as the “worst of the worst”, but a 2003 memo by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says, “We need to stop populating Guantanamo Bay (GTMO) with low-level enemy combatants … GTMO needs to serve as an [redacted] not a prison for Afghanistan.”

Currently we have less than 200 detainees at Guantanamo most of whom have not been proven guilty of being ‘Al Qaeda terrorists.’ Let’s be even more generous and count in those detained in other US military prisons like Bagram. Again, we are looking at 500 or so prisoners none of whom having ever been charged; none of whom legally found to be an Al Qaeda terrorist.

Now please put all these facts in perspective: Ten long years of continuous wars, trillions of dollars, 250,000 military personnel, trillions of dollars worth of intelligence gathering institutions and capabilities, millions of dollars set in rewards for Al Qaeda terrorists, and a supposed network with supposed  Al Qaeda active terrorist members in very large numbers. Yet we have less than 1000 detained who have been accused of being Al Qaeda terrorists, and none ever proven to be an active Al Qaeda terrorist member.

Does this make sense to you? Does it make sense as far as the trillions of dollars you have been made to pay for this? What are we talking about here? A massive never-ending war against a fantastical network of technologically and militaristically dwarfed terrorists whose proven guilty members we haven’t been able to catch or kill.

Everyone is busy arguing whether we should cut or add a few billion dollars to the several trillion dollars war on Al Qaeda. People keep talking about which country we should be getting out of, or, how many more countries we should get into to fight against terrorist Al Qaeda. No one is asking what Al Qaeda is or who really these supposed Al Qaeda terrorists are. The question that never seems to come up is exactly how big is this Al Qaeda we are spending trillions of dollars and thousands of lives fighting against. I mean no one.

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Two of the terrorist hijackers who flew a jet into the Pentagon, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, communicated while they were in the United States to other members of al Qaeda who were overseas. But we didn’t know they were here, until it was too late.

The authorization I gave the National Security Agency after September the 11th helped address that problem in a way that is fully consistent with my constitutional responsibilities and authorities. The activities I have authorized make it more likely that killers like these 9/11 hijackers will be identified and located in time.

-President Bush, December 17, 2005

In the aftermath of 9/11, reams of newsprint were given over to discussing the CIA and FBI failures before the attacks; the agency had some of the hijackers under surveillance and allegedly lost them, the bureau was unable even to inform its own acting director of the Zacarias Moussaoui case. However, the USA’s largest and most powerful intelligence agency, the National Security Agency, got a free ride. There was no outcry over its failings, no embarrassing Congressional hearings for its director. Yet, as we will see, the NSA’s performance before 9/11 was shocking.

It is unclear when the NSA first intercepted a call by one of the nineteen hijackers. Reporting indicates it began listening in on telephone calls to the home of Pentagon hijacker Khalid Almihdhar’s wife some time around late 1996. However, although Almihdhar certainly did stay there later, it is unclear whether he lived there at that time. The house, in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a, was a key target for the US intelligence community as it was Osama bin Laden’s communication hub, run by Almihdhar’s father-in-law Ahmed al-Hada.

The NSA kept the Yemen communications hub secret from the rest of the US intelligence community. However, Alec Station, the CIA’s bin Laden unit, found out about it through an agency officer loaned to the NSA. Even after the discovery, the NSA refused to provide transcripts of the calls, meaning Alec Station could not crack the simple code the al-Qaeda operatives used. This was one reason the 1998 East African embassy bombings—assisted by al-Hada—were successful despite the bombers being known to numerous intelligence agencies.

 The first time the NSA is known for certain to have intercepted a call involving the hijackers was in early 1999, when the call involved Almihdhar and his fellow Flight 77 hijacker Nawaf Alhazmi. The NSA did not disseminate a report on this call, although the heavily redacted text of the Congressional Inquiry’s 9/11 report indicates it should have. The NSA continued to intercept Almihdhar’s calls throughout 1999, when he apparently spoke to al-Qaeda leader Khallad bin Attash, now languishing in Guantanamo Bay.

In late December 1999, the NSA picked up a call that tipped it off about al-Qaeda’s Malaysia summit meeting—a unique meeting of al-Qaeda leaders in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur. The NSA alerted both the FBI and CIA, the latter of which monitored Almihdhar, Alhazmi and their various associates at the meeting in cooperation with Malaysian colleagues. However, the CIA claims, it did not learn much about what the participants were planning.

Almihdhar and Alhazmi then travelled via Bangkok and Hong Kong to Los Angeles, but, the CIA says, it lost them on the way.

 Nevertheless, beginning a few months before the two men moved in with an FBI informer in San Diego, they began making calls back to the Yemen hub. At this time Almihdhar was on the NSA’s watchlist and the agency intercepted the calls, but generally did not disseminate reports on them.

Almihdhar left the US in the summer, returning to the Yemen hub a few months before the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen’s second city of Aden. Reports indicate that Almihdhar was involved in the bombing and that the bombers used the Yemen hub phone to “put everything together,” but the NSA apparently did nothing. There are no mentions in the media of the NSA’s inspector general investigating the agency’s performance before the Cole—or before the embassy bombings or 9/11 for that matter.

The NSA continued to intercept calls between the hijackers in the US and the Yemen hub, but sat on information that could obviously have been used to roll up the plot. The FBI, which learned of the number itself during the embassy bombing investigation, had mapped al-Qaeda’s global network based on calls from the hub and had specifically asked the NSA to be notified about all calls between it and the US. However, no notification of the calls ever arrived at the bureau.

The NSA also intercepted calls between alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed on the one hand and lead hijacker Mohamed Atta and attack coordinator Ramzi bin al-Shibh on the other. Again, it appears not much was done with these calls.

When the Congressional Inquiry first published its report, the controversy over the massive redactions was centered on the deletion of 28 pages alleging certain elements of the Saudi government had supported the hijackers. The passages on the NSA also suffered badly from redactions, making them hard to comprehend, and some events did not appear at all in the published version of the report.

This pattern was followed by the 9/11 Commission, which practically ignored the NSA in its public activities. Only one former NSA official testified publicly; he had left the agency in the early 1990s and his input focused on the FBI and CIA. Likewise, mentions of the agency are scarce in the commission’s final report, which entirely omits to remind readers the NSA intercepted calls between the hijackers in the US and al-Qaeda’s operations center in Yemen.

Two aspects of this are most disturbing. Firstly, it is clear that a group of CIA officials at Alec Station deliberately withheld information about Almihdhar and Alhazmi from the FBI. At the same time, the NSA was failing to pass on related information about the two men to the bureau. Should we write this off as a mere coincidence, or should we consider the possibility that somebody at the NSA engaged in deliberate wrongdoing?

Second, the NSA’s failure to exploit the US-Yemen hub calls before the attack was the reason for the agency’s expanded powers, in particularly its warrantless domestic wiretapping, after 9/11. This was stated most clearly by President Bush in a radio address after the New York Times broke the story in late 2005. The very first justification Bush reached for is contained in the quote at the top of this article.

So, the NSA failed to pass on information about the hijackers, perhaps deliberately to aid CIA machinations, and has not even stated publicly whether and how it investigated this failure, let alone what the conclusions of such inquiry might be. Nevertheless, with remarkable speed it used its failure as a justification for massive new powers. This is just one of the legacies of 9/11.

Kevin Fenton is the author of Disconnecting the Dots: How CIA and FBI Officials Helped Enable 9/11 and Evaded Government Investigations.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

BFP Nightly Quote

“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. No longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and vote of majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.”- President Woodrow Wilson

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Edging Towards the  Partition of Libya?

Another Stinging Blow for the Libyan Rebellion

McCain Tells Libyan Rebels: End Abuses or Risk US Support

US Accuses Iran of “Secret Deal” with Al-Qaeda

Harrowing Exhibition Reveals Damage Done by Drones in Pakistan

Israelis Torture Palestinians with Impunity, similar to US Prisons

Palestinians Fear as Israel Destroying West Bank Water Sources

Turkey: Court Forbids Corruption-Busting Journalist from Writing

* * * *

National Newsworthy

Censorship of War Casualties in US

US Cannot Say How Many Had Communications Watched

Senators Want Secret Warrantless Wiretap Renewal

First Presidential Campaign Finance Reports Show Clout of Wall Street, Retirees

White House Recruits IMF Communications Chief

Senate Extends FBI Director Mueller’s Term

Obama’s scare tactics to get Democrats to vote for his Republican Wall Street plan

TSA Readying New Behavior Detection Plan for Airport Checkpoints  

Lockheed Martin Wins $72,000,000 Contract to Install Body Scanners

DOD Full-Spectrum Cyberspace Budget Lunacy

* * * *

Noteworthy Editorials

The War on Libya: An Imperialist Project to Create Three Libyas

Obama Drug Policy: Yet another Broken Promise

Become a Conspiracy Realist

America’s Rural Ghost Towns

The “Towers of Basel”: The World’s Biggest Central Bank Has Private Shareholders

Disastrous Outcomes from an Orchestrated Economic Crisis

The Looting of America: The Federal Reserve Made $16 Trillion in Secret Loans to Bankster Friends & the Media is Ignoring the Eye-Popping Corruption that Has Been Uncovered

* * * *

BFP Nightly Funnies

“I think I know now why we are occupying Iraq. In case we have to sell America and move to a smaller country.” —Bill Maher

“Texas governor Rick Perry said God is calling on him to run for President. But Michele Bachmann said that God is calling on her to run for President. You know, if God is that indecisive, he’s probably for Mitt Romney.” —Jay Leno

* * * *

BFP Nightly Video Potpourri 

Video 1: Ferengi Discusses Earth Economics (Star Trek)

Video 2: Coal Lobby Warns Wind Farms May Blow Earth Off Orbit

Video 3: Ron Paul “What’s a Dollar?”

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

BFP Nightly Quote

 “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”- Thomas Jefferson

International Newsworthy

US Missile Shield May Be Precursor for Attack on Iran 

Iran Explores Russia’s Plan

Russia Vows Response to US Magnitsky Blacklist

Kyrgyzstan: Detained Turkish Terror Suspect now Unwanted at Home

Al-Qaeda Leader Hails Syrian Protestors

In Afghanistan Parents Balk at ‘Suicide’ Schools

Torture Still Rampant in Post Revolution Egypt

Libya Campaign is Running into the Sand

Defense for Children International Report: Palestinian Children Endure Systematic Abuse from Israeli Military Courts

****

National Newsworthy

Nervous Hillary Clinton Urges Veto on Foreign Relations Bill

Pelosi: ‘It is Clear we Must Enter an Era of Austerity’!

Ford Takes US Taxpayers Bailout & Deserts Sinking Ship: Builds 3 New Car Factories in China!

The Secret Bailout of General Electric (GE)

Greater Lack of Healthcare Access for Rural America

Feds to Grab Land for Homeland Security

TSA Agent Poses as Cop to Harass Woman

US Embargo Forces German PayPal Users to Forgo Cuban Goods

****

Noteworthy Editorials

The Moral Bankruptcy of American Spooks

The New York Times’ Ostrich Act on JFK Assassination Getting Old

Obama Returns to the Fraud of Equal Sacrifice

What is a Dollar?

Fooling People: Something Obama is Really Good at

Hidden Hegemony: Canadian Mining in Latin America

Analysis: Why Mumbai? Why Now?

****

BFP Nightly Video Potpourri 

Video 1: Social Security Reform Bill Encourages Americans to Live Faster, Die Younger!

Video 2: 5.8 Million Israelis get $100,000,000,000 in US Tax Dollars While American States are falling apart

Video 3: Rebel Militias Include the Human Traffickers of Benghazi

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

Newsworthy

‘Deadliest Six Months’ for Civilians in Afghanistan

U.S. Building New Jails across Afghanistan

Iran Rejects US Claims of Role in Iraq Attacks

Libya Says 1,100 Dead in NATO War Crimes

Unfolding the Syrian Paradox

Canada: The Gift That Keeps Giving to Israel

CIA Officer May Face War Crime Charges

The “Secret” PATRIOT ACT

Lawmaker: US Airports are not Secure Enough

A False Narrative About Fannie Mae

Select Editorials

The New “Let Them Eat Cake!”

The Military Industrial Complex: The Enemy From Within

Wasted & Stolen Trillions for War

The Media’s Endless Propaganda for War

How Has Murdock Improved With Age

Video- The Secret History of the CIA: The CIA in Business with the Parent Group to Al-Qaeda?

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

They say don’t count your chickens before they hatch. I say this doesn’t apply to the US political hatching machine, since there are more than chickens at stake. I’ll go even further and say we must start counting the eggs regardless of how many ultimately hatch. The cycle of laying eggs to hatched chickens is way too long in US political machinations hard at work towards the new world order. If one wants to keep up and be aware, one must pay close attention to the incubators and each entering egg. The Obama administration’s Bin Laden Death Script is the new designated incubator for a special batch of eggs. No matter how many will actually hatch. No matter how many will turn into specially designed future egg-laying chickens. What matters is the ultimate objective in engineering this latest designed political incubator. What matters is the path or paths set to follow the machine’s chicken delivery conveyor belts that will extend and wrap the globe, and deliver the new order.

We have had a few chickens hatch immediately following the death script; the early chicks. After the Osama Death Script release Obama’s job approval ratings jumped 11 percentage points to 57 percent according to a New York Times poll, and 9 percentage points according to a Washington Post-Pew Research Center poll. The Osama Death Script also brought a reversal in months of rising opposition to the war, when polls showed that record-low levels of Americans thought the war had  been worth it in the long run. Also, a slim majority of Americans now say things are going well for the United States in Afghanistan, a four-percentage-point increase from late March. This marks the first time in nearly two years that the majority has held this view, and only the second time since Gallup began tracking these opinions on the war in 2006.

Pakistan appears to be the batch about to hatch. I am going to reiterate what I wrote in my article, Bin Laden Death Script & the Needed Trigger for Next Step-Pakistan, neither party-US-China-Pakistan, has played all their cards yet:

The White House neocons are in the midst of age-old diplomatic games, bluffing, and hedging their bets. They have the ‘foreign & military aid’ card. They have the ‘ISI dirt files’ card. They have the ‘ultimate China leaning’ card. And of course, they have the ‘mighty power of preemptive occupation war’ card which is always blessed and supported by NATO and overlooked by their butlers in the UN.

…

Sometimes we come across an odd egg or two standing out like a giant Ostrich egg among tiny chicken eggs; like the following strange case popping up with even stranger timing; could it be an egg from the Iran Batch? :

Two defectors from Iran’s intelligence service have testified that Iranian officials had “foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks,” according to a court filing Thursday in a federal lawsuit in Manhattan that seeks damages for Iran’s “direct support for, and sponsorship of, the most deadly act of terrorism in American history.”

Interestingly, despite all the contradictory, hole-filled and ever-changing Osama Death Script, and with so many eggs in the hatchery, we haven’t had any serious ‘Egg on the face’ case. One of the biggest reasons this hatchery-incubator had remained in a designed stage so long, until coming into the implementation stage recently, was the fear of losing a chicken or two that had been hatched from the 9/11 incubator. It was the question of what if the ‘Osama Death Script’ backfires and ends the motivation-reasons behind the many wars abroad and many newly gained government police powers here in the United States? It was the uncertainty as to whether we could continue this ‘Al-Qaeda Fear Brand’ and ‘war on terror’ without a healthy-wealthy and very alive Osama Man. The outcome, so far, has proved those fears baseless:

  Thanks to the real powers’ PR and propaganda machine, Al-Qaeda and the virtual terror machine have been deemed independent of Osama Bin Laden, and able to sustain, expand and grow ever increasingly and ever more powerful. The Bin Laden Chicken has been replaced by McQaeda Franchisees:

They kidnap Westerners in the deserts of Africa, turn Western-born Muslims into radicals, send bombs to the United States from Yemen and mount bloody attacks in Iraq and Pakistan.

These homegrown terror groups worldwide are informally dubbed Al Qaeda franchises – affiliates that do most of their own fundraising, recruiting and killing. The question now is this: What impact will the death of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden have on the ability and willingness of the franchises to mount attacks?

Emails found on flash drives from bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan two weeks ago show that he was communicating more than Western intelligence had thought. But Al Qaeda’s ideology plays a much bigger role in fostering terror than bin Laden’s personal involvement, said Gen. David Richards, Britain’s top military chief.”Yemen, Somalia and other places in the Middle East are today more important in a counter-terror context than what was going on…in Osama’s compound,” Richards told British lawmakers.

…

However, Al Qaeda franchises were responsible for the 2008 attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai that killed 166, and the 2002 attacks on a Bali island night club that killed 202 people, many foreign tourists.

The head of Britain’s domestic spy agency MI5, Jonathan Evans, has said it’s only a matter of time before “we see terrorism on our streets” from the Al Qaeda movement in Somalia, known as al-Shabab. He also said it is likely that Al Qaeda supporters in the Arabian Peninsula will step up attacks on Western targets.

…

And just to reassure our real hatchery and incubator-designers, a few days ago, after the supposed Bin Laden death, our supposed representatives from both houses and both parties reached a deal on a long-term extension of the PATRIOT Act without any of the inconvenient civil rights provisions and for an additional four years.

As any critical thinking and attention paying reader may already suspect, there were many eggs laid inside the Osama Death Script incubator. Some have already hatched; time will show how many will last long enough and grow into full chickens. Some are about to hatch; follow the news and developments around the world and you’ll see and recognize the chicks as they pop up. Some may take a while to hatch; patience is a virtue, if the only one, our ‘real’ rulers are known to have. And some will never hatch; well, they say no risk no rewards.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald join us to talk about their recently released book, Crossing Zero: The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire. They discuss the origins of the Taliban and the array of armed groups in AfPak that are lumped together as “Taliban” by US media and politicians. Gould-Fitzgerald talk about Pakistan’s double play, the struggle for oil and gas that is the basis for the conflict, pipeline politics, the confused or even lack of strategy in the senseless costly war, the current corruption ridden puppet regime in Afghanistan, Obama administration’s drone-mania, their 8-point plan for ending the US occupation, and more!

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, began their experience in Afghanistan when they were the first American journalists to acquire permission to enter behind Soviet lines in 1981 for CBS News and produced a documentary, Afghanistan Between Three Worlds, for PBS. In 1983 they returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher for ABC Nightline and contributed to the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. They continued to research, write and lecture about the long-term run-up that led to the US invasion of Afghanistan. They are featured in an award winning documentary by Samira Goetschel. Titled, Our own Private Bin Laden which traces the creation of the Osama bin Laden mythology in Afghanistan and how that mythology has been used to maintain the “war on terror” approach of the Bush administration. Their latest book Crossing Zero: The AFPAK War at the Turning Point of American Empire published by City Lights in March 2011 focuses on the nuances of the Obama administration’s evolving military and political strategy, those who have been chosen to implement it, and the long-term consequences for the U.S. and the region.

Here are our guests Elizabeth Gould & Paul Fitzgerald unplugged!

*For the history of democracy in Afghanistan, and a detailed recounting of the US support for the Mujahiddin during the 1980′s Soviet occupation, creating some of the “blowback” seen in the current US occupation, listen to Peter B Collins’ recent interview of the Gould-Fitzgerald duo here.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

Last week I wrote about the Washington Post’s incomplete and one-sided coverage of the recently published memoir by former Turkish Intelligence Chief Osman Nuri Gundes exposing CIA Operations via an Islamic Group in Central Asia. Since then I have gone over the same book’s review and coverage by the Turkish mainstream media, and I have interviewed reporters and sources in Turkey who have read the book, followed the coverage, and or are intimately familiar with the topic. With that I now have several additional points on this exposé which further illustrate the journalistically mind-boggling piece marketed by the Post. Writing my previous piece cost me an associate whom I like and respect. It shouldn’t have. I still believe this was a case of institution-Government-editors vs. the journalist, with the former winning. I am not going to weigh my writing, modify my facts, alter the truth, tweak, and censor based on worries of losing a source, or a friend, or even readership. With that said I’ll briefly list my points gathered from documented facts and interviews, and sources familiar with Gundes’ recent book and Gulen.
 
Extensive Coverage in the Turkish Mainstream Media

As one might expect, the Turkish mainstream media (all major newspapers, magazines, radio & TV channels) extensively (and very intensely) covered the recent publication of Gundes’ book. The following are the main points on former Turkish Intel Chief Gundes’ CIA-Gulen allegations which were documented and reported by every single media outlet in Turkey (since mid December), including this one written by one of the most prominent journalists at Milliyet:
 
1-     In Central Asia, within Gulen’s Islamic schools, the CIA operatives worked under the guise of ‘American Teachers teaching English.’

Okay, the Washington Post article, going through the exact same publications/articles forgot to add these crucial details, which would have paved the way for journalistic investigation(s) leading to either confirmation or denial. The following is the only detail the article provided:

In the 1990s, Gundes alleges, the movement “sheltered 130 CIA agents” at its schools in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan alone

In this case, as others had done already, the existence of mysterious American teachers teaching English in Gulen’s schools in Central Asia has already been confirmed.

2-     The American Teachers working at Gulen’s Islamic Schools in Central Asia possessed US Diplomatic Passports.

I contacted my source, formerly with the State Department, and he confirmed issuing diplomatic status for at least 50 Americans to teach in former Soviet republics. When I asked him whether they were employed by the State Department, he said: ‘Not officially.’ I asked him whether they were connected to the CIA, and he responded, ‘I wouldn’t know.’ I inquired about the direct foreign employer(s) of these American teachers, and this was his response: ‘Private Turkish companies in education fields and several NGOs in Turkey.’ This particular source was retired in 2004.

Again, the Washington Post article conveniently omitted this particular detail. Publishing this detail would have required seeking comments from the State Department: “Have you issued diplomatic passports to American teachers in XYZ countries.” Of course, no such inquiry was ever made by the Post.

3-     Gundes provided details of a high-level official meeting attended by MIT officials, one of Gulen’s education foundation directors, the Minister of Turkish Education Ministry Department and other high-level bureaucrats, an official from the Prime Minister’s Office, and several owners of Gulen private schools. The location for this briefing where CIA operative teachers with US Diplomatic passports were discussed was at ‘Ogretmen Evi’ and the host was the Director of Foreign Study Program at the Turkish Education Ministry. The meeting was ‘recorded,’ and an official report was prepared. The report included the following details:

1. One of the attending Gulen school owners owned and operated 18 schools for Gulen in Uzbekistan. The CIA operation disguised under ‘Teaching English’ at these 18 schools in Uzbekistan consisted of 70 CIA operatives, operating under a project named ‘Friendship Bridge’ (Operation Code Name). The operatives also submitted reports to a certain arm of the Pentagon.

 

2. The same operation (name not mentioned) had 60 American-CIA operatives as English teachers in Kyrgyzstan; again carrying US Diplomatic Passports.

 

3. The meeting (briefing) and analyses were later included in an official government report (Turkish Government) on Gulen’s operations which was ‘published.’

 
Again, the Turkish media quotes and covers these detailed allegations. None of these details, and what’s alleged as evidence by Gundes, were covered by the Post. After all, how difficult would it be to follow up and check out these American ‘teachers’ with Diplomatic Passports in the named countries? Make some use of the  Post’s foreign correspondents and partners stationed/anchored  there? No; the  Post would not dare open that can of worms. So what do they do instead: Take out all the details, get lies as quotes from the implicated CIA source, and say, ‘hmmmmm, see, nothing there.’

This is consistent with Gulen’s own media networks’, such as Today’s Zaman’s, no-denial denial operation mode. Remember, these are the same groups who deny Gulen’s 100+ charter school operations in the United States (See here), and this, despite all the documentation and hundreds of witnesses’, including former and present Americans teachers who have worked at these charter schools. Today’s Zaman, one of Gulen’s propaganda machine arms, desperately denies Gunes’ exposé, and in doing so in such desperation, it ends up with a jumble of no-denial denial (see here).

Another point worth mentioning: You’d think with all the court documents and previous reports on FBI-DOJ and the Homeland Security Department vehemently opposing Gulen’s residency request in court(s), the Washington Post would contact their plentiful DOJ-FBI-DHS sources and ask for statements; right? Well, they didn’t. In the Gulen court case we had the CIA pushing big time for Gulen’s residency request, and DOJ-FBI-DHS opposing it. Why? Why did the FBI-DOJ-DHS oppose Gulen in court? I’d say this much-First Hand information, in this case: Based on FBI-DHS joint investigations of Gulen (White Collar Crime) and the involved files, they had plenty of reasons to oppose.

Finally, as a side note, the Post, at least Mr. Stein, was very familiar with my statements regarding Gulen-CIA-Central Asia operations; including the interview I gave to the American Conservative Magazine’s Phil Giraldi. Had Mr. Stein bothered to contact me he would have gotten what the Washington Post wished not to get.

I am going to end this post with a short piece provided to our BFP readers in the US by one of my sources in Turkey who has gone through Gunes’ book, and is a journalist with inside information and unique access to those closely involved in Gulen related investigations-operations:

Fethullah Gülen & the Origin of the Turkish Deep State

By ‘The Insider from Turkey’

Those who think the Turkish/Islamic preacher Fethullah Gülen was introduced to the CIA after he had left Turkey and established himself in Pennsylvania are missing the point. Same with those who are under the impression that the Gülen movement is primarily of a religious nature.

The first contacts of Gülen with the CIA go back to way before, we learn from the recently published book The witness of takeovers and anarchy by Osman Nuri Gündes, a former operative of the Turkish intelligence outfit MIT. In the eighties Gülen associated himself with fierce anticommunist circles in Turkey supported by the joint CIA and the secretive stay behind network, Gladio. We are talking about the same Gladio which was responsible for a series of far right terrorist attacks in Turkey and who composed the overture of the bloody 1980 takeover.

According to Osman Nuri Gündes, Gülen began his own anticommunist organization in the city of Erzurum. He also mentions Gülen with respect to Radio Free Europe, a CIA propaganda project against the Soviet-Union where previous CIA station chief Paul Henze was working as well. Henze has been described as one of the dark forces behind the takeover in 1980. Gülen’s main contact in the CIA however, was Morton Abramowitz, who was stationed in Turkey as a CIA employee before he came there as US ambassador. As mentioned previously on this website, Abramowitz later came to defend Gülen when he ended up having trouble with the US immigration service. 

So, once upon a time Gülen was very close to structures in Turkey of which the remnants can still be recognized in Ergenekon, the network that targeted not only Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AK-party government, but also the Gülen-movement. This is due to the fact that the previous anticommunist network in Turkey turned away from the CIA in post-Cold War days, while Gülen and his supporters in the Turkish government remained loyal to it.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

Yesterday Washington Post’s Jeff Stein published a very interesting but incomplete story regarding a recently published memoir by former Turkish Intelligence Chief Osman Nuri Gundes. Here is the title of his post: Islamic group is CIA front, ex-Turkish Intel chief says. For those of you familiar with my case and what I’ve been covering here at Boiling Frogs Post this exposé is ‘old news’ but nonetheless a vindication. As for those who are first-timers here or not that familiar with my case, this is an opportunity for a bit of background and to learn a few important points and facts that you won’t be getting from this ‘half-picture’ presented by the Washington Post.

In his memoir Gundes claims that Fethullah Gulen’s worldwide Islamic movement based in Pennsylvania has been providing cover for the CIA since the mid-1990s, and that in the 90s, the movement “sheltered 130 CIA agents” at its schools in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan alone.

Now, as I’ve done before, I am going to praise Jeff Stain, whom I know and like, for his solid journalistic talent and background and give him a few credits for actually covering this story (it is one of those ‘thou shall not cover’ areas in an agreement between the US mainstream media and the US government), before I bash the piece, its half-a..  coverage, incomplete background, and it’s incredibly lenient treatment of a shady-dubious-charlatan, a major player in this operation yet a major denier when confronted by Stein; Graham Fuller. Again, as before, I am going to blame it on the unfortunate situation of ‘having to sell your journalistic soul to earn your living.’

Let’s start with Gulen. The only background provided on Gulen is the following with only one link which takes you to Gulen’s marketing site:

…an influential former Turkish imam by the name of Fethullah Gulen, has 600 schools and 4 million followers around the world.

…

The imam left Turkey in 1998 and settled in Saylorsburg, Pa., where the movement is headquartered. According to Intelligence Online, he obtained a residence permit only in 2008 with the help of Fuller and George Fidas, whom it described as head of the agency’s outreach to universities.

There is no mention of Gulen’s decade-long ‘wanted’ status in Turkey (until recently), no mention of the ban on Gulen and his Madrasas in several Central Asian countries, no mention of various investigations of Gulen by other western countries, no mention of the unknown sources of his billions of dollars…As we all know except for a very few, and by that I mean a number in 100s if that, no one in this country has ever heard of this guy with his billions, with his castle in Pennsylvania, his hundreds of Madrasas, now hundreds of US charter schools, his dubious businesses….Yet, for an article as serious as this (Madrasas and mosques as CIA operation centers in Central Asia), the central figure in the story has been given one sentence; no history, no relevant facts…

Those of you who have not read our previous commentaries and updates on this topic can check them out here,  here, here, and here, and below is a list of a few Gulen related facts totally (mysteriously?) absent from Washington Post piece:

-In 1999 Gulen defected to the US shortly before his scandalous speech, where he is heard calling on his supporters to “work patiently and to creep silently into the institutions in order to seize power in the state”, became public. Turkish prosecutors demanded a ten-year sentence for Gülen for having “founded an organization that sought to destroy the secular apparatus of state and establish a theocratic state”. Mr. Gulen has not left the United States since.

-The Netherlands has taken major steps to cut funding to all Gülen associated organizations and is investigating his operations. The Turkish Fethullah Gülen movement is really an Islamic fundamentalist group, claims Rotterdam council member Anita Fähmel (Leefbaar Rotterdam) on the basis of her own study of the Turkish movement.

-The Russian government has banned all Gülen schools and the activities of the Nur sect in Russia. Over 20 Turkish followers of Gulen were deported from Russia in 2002-2004.

-In 1999 Uzbekistan closed all Gulen’s Madrasas and shortly afterward arrested eight journalists who were graduates of Gulen schools, and found them guilty of setting up an illegal religious group and of involvement in an extremist organization.

-In Turkmenistan, government authorities have placed Gulen’s schools under close scrutiny and have ordered them to scrap the history of religion from curriculums.

Now, back to the story and its other major short coming:

Apparently Mr. Stein was not able to reach Gulen for comment, so he moved on to his CIA sources with ‘long ties to  Central Asia.’ First he quotes his first source, Former CIA operative Robert Baer, chief of the agency’s Central Asia and Caucasus operations from 1995 through 1997, who called the allegations bogus. However, Mr. Baer added: “It’s possible that the CIA turned around this ship after I left.”

I don’t have a problem with Baer’s response. Based on what I personally know, US Islamization Operations in Central Asia via Gulen started in late 1997, early 1998. That brings me to what truly set me off, Stein’s second source and actually a character who is pointed to by the new memoir’s author – Graham Fuller:

Graham Fuller, a former CIA station chief in Kabul and author of “The Future of Political Islam,” threw cold water on Gundes’s allegations about Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

“I think the story of 130 CIA agents in Gulen schools in Central Asia is pretty wild,” Fuller said by e-mail.

“I should hasten to add that I left CIA in 1987 — nearly 25 years ago — and I have absolutely no concrete personal knowledge whatsoever about this. But my instincts tell me the claim is highly improbable.”

Next, Jeff Stein very gently confronts Fuller with the fact that according to the memoir and related media coverage Gulen obtained his US residence permit with his (Fuller’s) help, and Fuller denies it and says that’s ‘wrong,’:

“What I did do,” Fuller explained, “was write a letter to the FBI in early 2006 …at a time when Gulen’s enemies were pressing for his extradition to Turkey from the U.S. In the post 9/11 environment, they began spreading the word that he was a dangerous radical. In my statement to the FBI I offered my views…that I did not believe he posed a security threat of any kind to the U.S. I still believe that today, as do a large body of scholars on contemporary Islam.”
…

First of all, there have been tens if not hundreds of articles establishing Graham Fuller as one of Gulen’s official references to the court for his residency, you can view some of these here, here, here. This quote comes from Foreign Policy Journal:

Fethullah Gulen became a green card holder despite serious opposition from FBI and from Homeland Security Department. Former CIA officers (formally and informally) such as Graham Fuller and Morton Abromovitz were some of the prominent references in Gulen’s green card application.

Next is the question of why. Why and in what capacity has Fuller been this active, this supportive, of Gulen? I am talking about this voluntary ‘I wrote a letter to the FBI on Gulen’ line:

…was write a letter to the FBI in early 2006 …at a time when Gulen’s enemies were pressing for his extradition to Turkey from the U.S. In the post 9/11 environment, they began spreading the word that he was a dangerous radical. In my statement to the FBI I offered my views…that I did not believe he posed a security threat of any kind to the U.S. I still believe that today, as do a large body of scholars on contemporary Islam.

And Stein let that slide?! I’d quickly ask: ‘how often do you write to the FBI on people you think have been unfairly targeted or treated by them?!’

Last but not least on Graham Fuller is my own on-the-record, more accurately, on-the-album, naming of individuals implicated (criminally) in my case, thus protected via invocation of the State Secrets Privilege:

Coinciding with the publication of the first article in a series in Britain’s Sunday Times covering some of her allegations, former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds posts a gallery of 18 photos of people and three images of question marks on her website, justacitizen.com The 21 images are divided into three groups, and the page is titled “State Secrets Privilege Gallery.”… “The third group includes people who all appear to work at think tanks—primarily WINEP, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy”: Graham E. Fuller—RAND Corporation, David Makovsky—WINEP, Alan Makovsky—WINEP, ? (box with question mark), ? (box with question mark), Yusuf Turani (president-in-exile, Turkestan), Professor Sabri Sayari (Georgetown, WINEP), and Mehmet Eymur (former head of the Turkish intelligence agency MIT).

…

I am going to leave you with the following excerpts from my interview with Phil Giraldi for the Am Con Magazine in 2009, on Gulen, CIA Central Asia operations & the use of Islam and Mujahideen there-1997-2001, [All emphasis mine]:

GIRALDI: You also have information on al-Qaeda, specifically al-Qaeda in Central Asia and Bosnia. You were privy to conversations that suggested the CIA was supporting al-Qaeda in central Asia and the Balkans, training people to get money, get weapons, and this contact continued until 9/11…

EDMONDS: I don’t know if it was CIA. There were certain forces in the U.S. government who worked with the Turkish paramilitary groups, including Abdullah Çatli’s group, Fethullah Gülen.

GIRALDI: Well, that could be either Joint Special Operations Command or CIA.

EDMONDS: Maybe in a lot of cases when they said State Department, they meant CIA?

GIRALDI: When they said State Department, they probably meant CIA.

EDMONDS: Okay. So these conversations, between 1997 and 2001, had to do with a Central Asia operation that involved bin Laden. Not once did anybody use the word “al-Qaeda.” It was always “mujahideen,” always “bin Laden” and, in fact, not “bin Laden” but “bin Ladens” plural. There were several bin Ladens who were going on private jets to Azerbaijan and Tajikistan. The Turkish ambassador in Azerbaijan worked with them.

There were bin Ladens, with the help of Pakistanis or Saudis, under our management. Marc Grossman was leading it, 100 percent, bringing people from East Turkestan into Kyrgyzstan, from Kyrgyzstan to Azerbaijan, from Azerbaijan some of them were being channeled to Chechnya, some of them were being channeled to Bosnia. From Turkey, they were putting all these bin Ladens on NATO planes. People and weapons went one way, drugs came back.

GIRALDI: Was the U.S. government aware of this circular deal?

EDMONDS: 100 percent. A lot of the drugs were going to Belgium on NATO planes. After that, they went to the UK, and a lot came to the U.S. via military planes to distribution centers in Chicago and Paterson, New Jersey. Turkish diplomats who would never be searched were coming with suitcases of heroin.

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I just finished reading an interesting article at Asia Times on the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which is characterized by some as Central Asia’s most aggressive militant group. The main focus of the article is placed on the status, recent expansion and transformation of IMU: The IMU is no longer a small band of militants focused on taking down the Uzbek regime and replacing it with an Islamic state. Today, it has a much wider reach and more ambitious goals, and has underlined its revival with attacks that suggest a presence across a wide swathe of South and Central Asia.

Considering my own focus, which I am sure many of you are pretty familiar with by now, the following bits and pieces, none of which happen to receive any elaboration or even a slight explanation by the author, deserve the real attention:

The IMU or its affiliates have been named in connection with a number of recent attacks at home and abroad. One, the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU), has been blamed for attacks in Uzbekistan in May 2009 and made headlines around the world this fall after Western intelligence determined they were planning Mumbai-style attacks on European soil… The IJU, considered a more radical affiliate of the IMU, attracts recruits from Germany’s burgeoning Turkish Diaspora and Turkic nations, leading observers to suggest that it is driven by pan-Turkic aims.

…

And this:

“The most essential things that need to be addressed are the control of the movement of militants and the control of their finances,” Babar says. “What finances them? We believe that the drug trade is financing them…

As you can see in the article the Central Asian context-states-players are: Uzbekistan-Turkmenistan-Tajikistan along Afghanistan’s northern borders, and with that we are back to my previous coverage of the trio in terms of unwritten and unspoken US foreign policies:

Things certainly haven’t been looking up for our MIC, Oil, and related mega companies in that part of the world. And this kind of situation puts our ‘real’ foreign policy makers in their ‘enemies-of-our-enemies’ are needed mode. And when that happens the rest will follow: contracts for our good ole Mujahideen friends, convenient terrorism related incidents and pipeline sabotages right and left, a more aggressive control of the opium trade to finance unwritten-unspoken foreign policy practices …

…

I suggest you read the recent article by Asia Times, and please keep in mind the cases of Mysterious Helicopter Activities in Northern Afghanistan and BF Post’s coverage  here and here. Because when it comes to answering the ‘real’ questions, the questions of funding and sponsorship, we need context, historical records, and a bit of critical thinking, and that my friends, has been largely missing in this article and similar media coverage. And finally, keep an eye on the upcoming Wikileaks’ cables for 1996-2001 Central Asia & Caucasus related goodies…that is, if they are included, or, if they are not among ‘insurance files,’ or, if the internet is not filtered & controlled by then, or…

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In the last few weeks I’ve been reading and talking about the latest developments in Central Asia and the Caucasus. I am planning to post a few updates on the status of the score board in this region (pipeline rivalries, military base ‘erection’ scores- and what-not). Meanwhile, as I am dealing with all this I keep ending up with riddle-like situations. And instead of trying to solve or get out of these riddles, I’m going to give up and instead share one of them with you, my blogosphere friends.

Our enemies’ enemies are our friends. Many of our nation’s enemies are the enemies of our enemies, so that makes them what? Friends? Enemies? It depends? Both? And what would all this make our ‘real’ foreign policy makers? Enemies? Friends? Both? What?

Seriously! Think about it.

By now we all know, or should know, about our government and mainstream media’s past almost romantic relationship with the Mujahideen, Taliban-al Qaeda, during the 80s. Back then, in the 80s, they were fighting the Soviets, they were the enemies of our enemies, thus, our beloved friends, our trusted, financed and backed allies. Here are a few excerpts from what I wrote and quoted on this topic a while back:

Now let’s go back and search U.S. press coverage of Afghanistan’s ‘Freedom Fighters’ during the 80s and try to find any coverage related to these U.S. backed and supported operations’ intersection with the global narcotics trade. Are there any? I’m afraid we know the answer to this question. Here is further coverage based on the report by FAIR:

“The press coverage of this era was overwhelmingly positive, even glowing, with regard to the guerrillas’ conduct in Afghanistan. Their unsavory features were downplayed or omitted altogether…Virtually all papers favored some amount of U.S. military support; and there was near unanimous agreement that the guerrillas were “heroic,” “courageous” and above all “freedom fighters.“”

“According to the L.A. Times (6/23/86): “The Afghan guerrillas have earned the admiration of the American people for their courageous struggle…. The rebels deserve unstinting American political support and, within the limits of prudence, military hardware.“”

And here the axis of U.S. Government-U.S. Press- and the information spin or black-out:

“Another problem was direct manipulation of reporting by the U.S. government, which was supporting the Mujahiddin guerrillas during both the Carter and Reagan administrations. (Indeed, we now know that U.S. aid to the Mujahiddin was secretly begun in July 1979, six months before the Soviets invaded–International Politics, 6/00.) This press manipulation began early in the conflict. In January 1980, the New York Times (1/26/80) reported that the State Department had “relaxed” its accuracy code for reporting information on Afghanistan. As a result, the Carter administration generated “accounts suggesting Soviet actions for which the administration itself has no solid foundation.“”

During the 80s our ‘real’ foreign policymakers couldn’t care less about adjectives such as extremists, terrorists, fanatics, anti-west…They were the beloved enemies of our enemies, and we’d do anything to support and use them. And this wasn’t necessarily about we the people of the US or our benefits or our best interests. After all, in the end the American people were the ones to pay the price for those unholy alliances where we selected, trained and backed the evildoer Bin Laden, our enemies’ enemy, thus, our beloved friend:

Our enemies’ enemies were our friends. Many of our nation’s enemies were the enemies of our enemies back then, so that made them our beloved friends.

Now, you may say, ‘that was a long time ago, it had to do with the Cold War, and it is simply not fair to criticize and judge based on this particular example…’And, I’d say, okay. Let’s fast forward. Let’s look at what we did with these same groups, in the 90s, after the wall came down and the Soviet empire collapsed.

The problem is this: without the Cold War excuse our foreign policymakers had a real hard time justifying our joint operations and terrorism schemes in the resource-rich ex Soviet states with these same groups, so they made sure they kept these policies unwritten and unspoken, and considering their grip on the mainstream media, largely unreported. Now what would your response be if I were to say, on the record, and if required, under oath:

Between 1996 and 2002, we, the United States, planned, financed and helped execute every single major terrorist incident by Chechen rebels (and the Mujahideen) against Russia

Between 1996 and 2002, we, the United States, planned, financed and helped execute every single uprising and terrorism related scheme in Xinxiang (aka East Turkistan and Uyghurstan)

Between 1996 and 2002, we, the United States, planned and carried out at least two assassination schemes against pro Russia officials in Azerbaijan

…

Those of you who are truly familiar with our real history and foreign policy making past would yawn, and say, ‘but of course. That has been our modus operandi for many decades.’ Unfortunately, the great majority would either be shocked if open minded, or shake their head in disbelief and write it off as another ‘conspiracy theory;’ well, thanks to our mainstream media.

You may remember one of these foreign policy makers from my State Secrets Privilege Gallery and my under oath testimony in the Krikorian case. Here is a quote from Graham A. Fuller, former Deputy Director of the CIA’s National Council on Intelligence:

‘The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against the Red Army. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia.’

And this goes to the heart of our ‘real’ foreign policy practices showing our ‘real’ stand on Taliban years after the end of the Cold War and the first World Trade Center bombing:

Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on South Asia, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher – former White House Special Assistant to President Reagan and now Senior Member of the House International Relations Committee – declared that ‘this administration has a covert policy that has empowered the Taliban and enabled this brutal movement to hold on to power’. The assumption is that ‘the Taliban would bring stability to Afghanistan and permit the building of oil pipelines from Central Asia through Afghanistan to Pakistan’. US companies involved in the project included UNOCAL and ENRON. As early as May 1996, UNOCAL had officially announced plans to build a pipeline to transport natural gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan through western Afghanistan.

And Chechens are good friends since they are the enemies of our enemy, Russia:

From the mid-1990s, bin Laden funded Chechen guerrilla leaders Shamil Basayev and Omar ibn al-Khattab to the tune of several millions of dollars per month, sidelining the moderate Chechen majority. US intelligence remained deeply involved until the end of the decade. According to Yossef Bodanksy, then-Director of the US Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, Washington was actively involved in ‘yet another anti-Russian jihad, ‘seeking to support and empower the most virulent anti-Western Islamist forces’. US Government officials participated in ‘a formal meeting in Azerbaijan’ in December 1999 ‘in which specific programmes for the training and equipping of mujahidin from the Caucasus, Central/South Asia and the Arab world were discussed and agreed upon’, culminating in ‘Washington’s tacit encouragement of both Muslim allies (mainly Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia) and US “private security companies”… to assist the Chechens and their Islamist allies to surge in the spring of 2000 and sustain the ensuing jihad for a long time.’ The US saw the sponsorship of ‘Islamist jihad in the Caucasus’ as a way to ‘deprive Russia of a viable pipeline route through spiraling violence and terrorism’.

…

Okay, so the partnership and joint operations between our operatives and the Mujahideen (including the Taliban & al Qaeda) continued after the Cold War, and even after the first World Trade Center bombing, Khobar Towers, and the 1998 Embassy Bombings. On one hand we were declaring these people as our enemies, on the other hand, in Central Asia-Caucaus-Balkans and Xinxiang, they were the enemies of our enemies , thus our good partners and dear old friends. Except, by this time, the majority of us had stopped considering the Russians and Chinese enemies, instead they were viewed as mere competitors. And with that, the riddle slightly changes here:

Our competitors’ enemies were our friends. Many of our nation’s enemies were willing to become the enemies of our competitors, so that made them our dear friends.

You’d think after the September 11 Terrorist Attacks our foreign policy makers would seriously rethink their past M.O. and cease certain friendships and unholy alliances, despite the severe monetary consequences for a handful in the oil and MIC industries. But no. That doesn’t appear to be the case. And, as always, you won’t get the ‘real’ stories on this from the MSM. Here is a recent example:

Persistent accounts of western forces in Afghanistan using their helicopters to ferry Taleban fighters, strongly denied by the military, is feeding mistrust of the forces that are supposed to be bringing order to the country.

One such tale came from a soldier from the 209th Shahin Corps of the Afghan National Army, fighting against the growing insurgency in Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan. Over several months, he had taken part in several pitched battles against the armed opposition.

“Just when the police and army managed to surround the Taleban in a village of Qala-e-Zaal district, we saw helicopters land with support teams,” he said. “They managed to rescue their friends from our encirclement, and even to inflict defeat on the Afghan National Army.”

This story, in one form or another, is being repeated throughout northern Afghanistan. Dozens of people claim to have seen Taleban fighters disembark from foreign helicopters in several provinces. The local talk is of the insurgency being consciously moved north, with international troops ferrying fighters in from the volatile south, to create mayhem in a new location.Helicopters are almost exclusively the domain of foreign forces in Afghanistan – the international military controls the air space, and has a virtual monopoly on aircraft. So when Afghans see choppers, they think foreign military.

“Our fight against the Taleban is nonsense,” said the soldier from Shahin Corps. “Our foreigner ‘friends’ are friendlier to the opposition.”

…

Let’s take a look at certain important northern neighbors in Afghanistan where our ‘real’ policymakers have been facing…hmmm… frustration, thus, in need of friends to get back at those who’ve been causing this…hmmmmm… frustration:

Previously close to Washington (which gave Uzbekistan half a billion dollars in aid in 2004, about a quarter of its military budget), the government of Uzbekistan has recently restricted American military use of the airbase at Karshi-Khanabad for air operations in neighboring Afghanistan.

The relationship between Uzbekistan and the United States began to deteriorate after the so-called “colour revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine (and to a lesser extent Kyrgyzstan). When the U.S. joined in a call for an independent international investigation of the bloody events at Andijon, the relationship took an additional nosedive, and President Islam Karimov changed the political alignment of the country to bring it closer to Russia and China, countries which chose not to criticise Uzbekistan’s leaders for their alleged human rights violations.

In late July 2005, the government of Uzbekistan ordered the United States to vacate an air base in Karshi-Kanabad (near Uzbekistan’s border with Afghanistan) within 180 days. Karimov had offered use of the base to the U.S. shortly after 9/11. It is also believed by some Uzbeks that the protests in Andijan were brought about by the U.K. and U.S. influences in the area of Andijan. This is another reason for the hostility between Uzbekistan and the West.

…

And this to sweeten the deal, or is it turning it into a rather strong vinegar, at least for the ones who count in making and implementing our unwritten and unspoken foreign policy practices:

The leaders of Uzbekistan and China on Wednesday said they had signed deals aimed at increasing cooperation on energy and regional security. Speaking ahead of an annual meeting of the Chinese-led Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting in Tashkent, Chinese President Hu Jintao and Uzbek President Islam Karimov pledged closer ties, particularly on nuclear fuel.

“One of the question we discussed was that of long-term and stable cooperation in the field of … uranium. It’s necessary to work in such a way to develop natural uranium and uranium fields,” Hu told reporters.

Although the leaders said they had signed a number of agreements regarding the purchase of energy from Uzbekistan, including uranium and natural gas, they declined to provide specifics details on the deals.

…

Okay, so you get the general picture on Uzbekistan. Right?

Next, let’s take a quick look at Turkmenistan:

Turkmenistan ranks fourth in the world to Russia, Iran and the United States in natural gas reserves. The Turkmenistan Natural Gas Company (Türkmengaz), under the auspices of the Ministry of Oil and Gas, controls gas extraction in the country. Gas production is the most dynamic and promising sector of the national economy. Turkmenistan’s gas reserves are estimated at 3.5-6.7 mcubic meters and its prospecting potential at up to 21 trillion cubic meters. In 2010 Ashgabat started a policy of diversifying export routes for its raw materials.

China is set to become the largest buyer of gas from Turkmenistan over the coming years as a pipeline linking the two countries, through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, reaches full capacity. In addition to supplying Russia, China and Iran, Ashgabat took concrete measures to accelerate progress in the construction of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan and India pipeline (TAPI). Turkmenistan has previously estimated the cost of the project at $3.3 billion. On May 21st, president Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov unexpectedly signed a decree stating that companies from Turkmenistan will build an internal East-West gas pipeline allowing the transfer of gas from the biggest deposits in Turkmenistan (Dowlatabad and Yolotan) to the Caspian coast. The East-West pipeline is planned to be around 1000 km long and have a carrying capacity of 30 bn m³ annually, at a cost of between one and one and a half billion US dollars.

…

And, this is the latest to truly pi.. off our ‘real’ foreign policy beneficiaries:

China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) has announced the discovery of yet another gas field on the right bank of the Amu Darya River in Turkmenistan, holding in excess of 100 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas.

Separately, Turkmenistan President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow inaugurated a new compressor station at the Bagtiyarlyk fields, estimated by Chinese engineers to hold 1.6 trillion cubic meters of natural gas.

These fields feed the Turkmenistan-China pipeline, which traverses Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and was opened in December 2009 with a projected capacity of 40 billion cubic meters per year (bcm/y) by 2015, with some of that volume being consumed in southern Kazakhstan. (See Gas pipeline gigantism, Asia Times Online, July 17, 2008.)

In June this year, Ashgabad and Beijing agreed to increase Turkmen exports to China above the agreed level; the new compressor station will eventually raise the existing capacity to 22 bcm/y from the 6 bcm/y estimate of Chinese consumption of Turkmenistan-sourced gas for 2010.

…

And here, a brief snapshot of where Tajikistan stands:

Tajikistan is ready to further improve its cooperation in various fields with China, and make joint efforts to ensure the continued success of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), President Emomali Rakhmonov said in a recent interview with Chinese media.

The establishment of a friendly relationship with China was one of the great achievements that Tajikistan had made since its independence nearly 15 years ago, he said in his interview shortly ahead of the summit of the SCO heads of state to be held in Shanghai.

…

He mentioned in particular the opening of the Karasu pass on the Tajik-Chinese border.

“It is an important event in the history of the Tajik-Chinese relations, since it was the first time that the two countries were linked by motor traffic,” Rakhmonov said.

Trade between the two countries was developing rapidly and China’s influence on the Tajik economy was also growing, he said.

The president expressed satisfaction with the Tajik-Chinese trade volume which was increasing every year. In 2005, bilateral trade between the two countries had doubled from the previous year, he said.

…

And finally, if you’ve been following the recent turmoil and elections in Kyrgyzstan, you’d know that things haven’t been looking up for US business and bases over there:

In a surprise result which underscores what remains an extremely divided electorate in Kyrgyzstan, the parliamentary vote has led to the victory of the nationalist Fatherland Party (Ata-Jurt) and a very unclear road to a coalition government.

…

A Fatherland dominated government might bode ill for the Obama Administration’s designs on keeping a military base in Kyrgyzstan, as the party has spoken out against extending the US lease on the base past 2011.

…

Things certainly haven’t been looking up for our MIC, Oil, and related mega companies in that part of the world. And this kind of situation puts our ‘real’ foreign policy makers in their ‘enemies-of-our-enemies’ are needed mode. And when that happens the rest will follow: contracts for our good ole  Mujahideen friends, convenient terrorism related incidents and pipeline sabotages right and left, a more aggressive control of the opium trade to finance unwritten-unspoken foreign policy practices …

In the coming days I’ll be posting more updates and brief (not like this one!) commentaries and analysis on this topic, meanwhile, let’s round up our confusing but pretty much on target foreign policy riddle for the post 9/11 decade:

Our competitors’ enemies are our friends. Our nation’s government designated terrorist enemies are willing to become our competitors’ enemies, and that makes them our foreign policymakers’ convenient good friends while they remain our nation’s enemies. And that, my friend, makes our real foreign policy makers our (?)…

I’ll leave the solving and perfection of the above riddle to you. Please keep them coming.

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In the two years since the publication of our book Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story we have had the chance to address dozens of forums and radio audiences around the United States about Afghanistan. It has been an illuminating exercise, not so much in terms of what Americans understand about the Afghanistan/Pakistan region (which unfortunately isn’t very much) but by the way it reveals how Americans are struggling to catch up with a world that seems to have left them behind. A morning-drive-time radio talk show host in Chicago wanted to know whether a nuclear bomb dropped on the Hindu Kush wouldn’t solve the problem. When we replied that using a nuclear weapon to kill a few thousand suspected terrorists would kill millions of innocent people, he responded abruptly before cutting us off: The Japanese got the message when we dropped it on them.

Most people are confused about the America they find themselves in, in the 21^st century. They wonder where “their” America went. According to the popular mythology, the U.S. started the decade as the world’s lone hyper-power, beholden to none. It ends the first decade of the new millennium as a debt-hobbled-capitalist shell, beholden to a rising communist China and a host of oil-rich medieval Middle-East Sheikdoms.  Americans are frustrated and resentful, denying any responsibility for the ongoing Afghan fiasco while expressing anger and often disbelief that our leadership has refused to learn the lessons of Vietnam and taken us on yet another mindless ride into a hopeless quagmire.

When we are asked why the U.S. is still in Afghanistan after a decade, we explain that America’s DNA profile has been all over that country since 1973. While no one was looking, the CIA’s secret mission became entangled with Pakistan’s support for Afghanistan’s small core of foreign-trained right wing Islamic extremists. Thanks to President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, this entanglement blossomed into a marriage following the 1978 Marxist coup and a full-blown commitment to holy war and the Islamization of Pakistan – long before the Soviet invasion of 1979.

The United States continued to support the right wing extremists all through the 1980s and then (in order to serve the interests of Pakistan’s military and Saudi/American oil conglomerates) the CIA helped Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) to establish the Taliban. The Taliban’s inability to totally conquer Afghanistan and their close relationship with the Arab extremists known as Al Qaeda challenged this American relationship. But it was the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Nairobi and the near sinking of the U.S.S. Cole in Aden harbor in 2000 that strained U.S./Taliban relations to the breaking point.

We then explain that for very much the same reasons that the Soviet Union overreacted to extremist provocations on their southern border in December 1979, the United States invaded Afghanistan following the events of 9/11. The intention was to drive the Taliban out of power and root out, intercept, kill or capture Al Qaeda terrorists and their leader Osama bin Laden, the reputed 9/11 architect. 

This information usually produces audible groans and looks of profound despair, followed by the question, why has none of this happened? That answer we now believe has been revealed.

In A June 24, New York Times article titled, Pakistan Is Said to Pursue a Foothold in Afghanistan,[1][1] the authors maintain that according to Afghan officials, Pakistani Army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani personally offered to broker a deal between Hamid Karzai and the Taliban leadership including Sirajuddin Haqqani’s terror network and his Al Qaeda allies. The report also maintained that Kayani and his spy chief, Lt. General Ahmad Shuja Pasha agreed with Afghan president Karzai that the U.S. effort in Afghanistan was doomed to fail “and that a postwar Afghanistan should incorporate the Haqqani network, a longtime Pakistani asset.”

Wiretaps long ago revealed General Kayani as an extremist sponsor playing a double game, who referred to the Haqqani network as a “strategic asset.” Both Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh have publicly linked Pakistan’s ISI to terror activities. Reports of Pakistani complicity in the events of 9/11 linger unresolved.  But does the Times’ revelation of an active Pakistani military collusion with Al Qaeda-conduit Haqqani and Washington’s admitted “nervousness” about it, mean that the U.S./Pakistani relationship has finally been pushed to the breaking point?

The United States has spent a decade and hundreds of billions of dollars chasing Osama bin Laden and his mysterious organization known as Al Qaeda around the world. It has given billions more to Pakistan’s military to fight Al Qaeda terrorism. The U.S. continues to trample standards of international law by executing suspected terrorists (including Americans) without trial and at the same time suspends civil liberties at home.  Pakistan’s offer and Hamid Karzai’s receptiveness to it represents a checkmate move. Whether anyone in Washington can admit it or not, Kayani has exposed the “war on terror” and its Bill of Rights-busting USA Patriot Act, as a tragic deception. A recent study by the Institute for the Study of War’s Jeffrey Dressler picked up on the glaring incongruities of the rapidly devolving scenario.

“The Haqqanis rely on Al Qaeda for mass appeal, funding, resources and training, and in return provide Al Qaeda with shelter, protection and a means to strike foreign forces in Afghanistan and beyond. Any negotiated settlement with the Haqqanis threatens to undermine the raison d’etre for U.S. involvement in Afghanistan over the past decade.”

But if the raison d’etre for American involvement over the last ten years has made the Haqqanis and Al Qaeda even stronger than they were before, then perhaps the time has come to consider that the raison for the war on terror has been revealed as a double-cross.

A May 31^st 2010 article in the London Sunday Times reports that $1½ billion dollars of Saudi Arabian money has flowed into Afghanistan from Haqqani and Al Qaeda controlled territory in North Waziristan over the past four years and the U.S. government knows it. In the 1980s the U.S. with Saudi Arabian backing went out of its way to finance and train the Haqqanis under the auspices of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and warlords like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. According to numerous sources, a good part of the ISI/Hekmatyar operation involved assassinating Afghan nationalists to ensure that a moderate coalition government in Kabul could never be achieved. According to declassified U.S. government documents from the early 1970s, the focus on controlling Afghanistan even then was viewed as centered on a “Chinese-Iranian-Pakistani-Arabian peninsula Axis with U.S. support.” Thanks to Pakistani General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, there is little reason to think that the Taliban, Haqqani network and Al Qaeda are any less connected to their ultimate goals today than they were forty years ago

# # # #

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, began their experience in Afghanistan when they were the first American journalists to acquire permission to enter behind Soviet lines in 1981 for CBS News and produced a documentary, Afghanistan Between Three Worlds, for PBS. In 1983 they returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher for ABC Nightline and contributed to the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. They continued to research, write and lecture about the long-term run-up that led to the US invasion of Afghanistan. They are featured in an award winning documentary by Samira Goetschel. Titled, Our own Private Bin Laden which traces the creation of the Osama bin Laden mythology in Afghanistan and how that mythology has been used to maintain the “war on terror” approach of the Bush administration. Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story published by City Lights, January 2009 chronicles their three-decade-focus on Afghanistan and the media. Their next book Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire will be published February, 2011.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed provides us with an overview of the role played by US military and intelligence practices in the creation of terrorism, particularly Al-Qaeda. He tells us about the status of investigations into the Blair government’s complicity with the Bush administration in supporting the invasion of Iraq. He discusses possible factors behind Americans’ long-held denial and dismissal of dark US foreign policy practices as conspiracies. Mr. Nafeez talks about the Obama administration, the ongoing posture of US corporate interests and the desire to dominate world energy supplies, the so-called liquid bombing plot and how it was mythologized in the US, and more.

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is a bestselling author and political analyst. He is the Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, and has taught courses in contemporary history and international relations theory at the University of Sussex. His Doctoral thesis investigated the radicalization processes and dynamics of violent conflict in the context of hierarchical social systems in the modern world. Dr. Ahmed has also published extensively on international security issues, including The London Bombings; The War on Truth; Behind the War on Terror; and The War on Freedom. He has been an expert commentator for BBC News 24, BBC World Today, Al-Jazeera English, among others. He is currently advising the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst on engaging British Muslim communities. Visit Dr. Nafeez’ website.

Here is our guest Nafeez Ahmed unplugged!

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The US and UK intelligence communities have known for decades of al-Qaeda’s presence in Yemen. The presence, however, is not simply peripheral to the question of international terrorism. US intelligence investigations into major terrorist attacks such as the 1998 US embassy bombings, the USS Cole bombing, as well as  9/11 (among others) have consistently revealed that Yemen has been used by al-Qaeda as a central communications hub for the coordination of transnational terrorist activities – with the tacit (and often not-so-tacit) complicity of the Yemen government.

In fact, abundant evidence from the History Commons shows that the National Security Agency has, and continues to, monitor al-Qaeda communications in Yemen extensively. But from 1996 all the way through to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the NSA consistently failed (in violation of mandatory security protocols) to share the detailed mountains of intercept evidence on Osama bin Laden’s activities thus obtained with the rest of the US intelligence community, despite repeated urgent requests from the CIA in the context of then ongoing terrorism investigations. After 9/11, however, much of this information became public knowledge – the US thus has extensive and intimate understanding of al-Qaeda’s activities in Yemen, and their direct connection with the execution of terrorist attacks against US and Western targets. The failures that facilitated the 25^th December 2009 crotch bombing must be understood against this background – how could the same loopholes remain open now?… unless our relationship with the terrorists is a little more complicated than officials would like us to believe.

Al-Qaeda & the 1994 North-South Civil War

A US Congressional Research Service (CRS) document – Yemen: Background and US Relations (7^th July 2009) – by Jeremy M. Sharp, Middle East analyst in the foreign affairs, defense and trade division, provides a few surprisingly candid snapshots of all this, and the ambiguous response of the US to it all:

“The Republic of Yemen was formed by the merger of the formerly separate states of North Yemen and South Yemen in 1990. In 1994, government forces loyal to President Ali Abdullah Saleh put down an attempt by southern-based dissidents to secede from the newly unified state… since the 1980s, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh has tolerated the presence of radical Islamists in the country and has used their presence to bolster his credibility among Islamist hardliners… During the 1994 civil war, President Saleh dispatched several brigades of ‘Arab Afghans’ to fight against southern late secessionists. In the mid to 1990s, Yemeni (and many foreign) militants, many with ties to Al Qaeda, began striking targets inside the country.” (pp. 1-2)

During this period, in which bin Laden’s mujahideen networks were mobilised by the north to consolidate its control over the south, President Saleh was supported by the United States. Tufts University historian Professor Gary Leupp writes: “During the 1994 civil war in the country, the U.S. had backed the current leadership against the ‘leftist’ opposition. (So had anti-U.S. Muslim fundamentalist factions, whom the leadership cannot now afford to alienate.)”

Notably, during the same period, as I and others have documented extensively, the US was busy covertly sponsoring the mobilisation of bin Laden’s networks in Azerbaijan, Dagestan and Chechnya, and the Balkans.

Al-Qaeda in Yemen in Context: the Pentagon’s Saudi-Backed ‘Redirection’ Strategy

The CRS report continues: “Overall, Islamist terrorist groups are not strong enough to topple President Saleh’s regime, but most analysts consider them capable of successfully striking a high value target, such as an oil installation…” (p. 5) It goes on to note that in January 2009, al-Qaeda militants in Yemen “announced that the Saudi and Yemeni ‘branches’ of Al Qaeda were merging under the banner of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which formerly had denoted militants responsible for the wave of terrorist violence that swept Saudi Arabia from 2003 through 2007.” The report also notes that many militants are coming in not only from Saudi Arabia but from Iraq. (p. 6)

But who was responsible for the expansion of Saudi militant activity? A few years back, Seymour Hersh answered that question in the New Yorker, when he reported that since around 2003, the CIA and Pentagon have ‘redirected’ US policy by funnelling millions of dollars via Saudi Arabia to al-Qaeda-affiliated Sunni extremist groups across the Middle East and Central Asia, as part of a bid to counter Iranian Shi’ite influence. Alex Cockburn was the first to report on the early US Presidential Finding – uncontested by Republican and Democratic representatives – that this funding has amounted to at least $400 million. The “black” operation aimed at isolating Iran was also confirmed by ABC News. Hersh went on to quote one of his sources, a US government consultant, explaining that Prince Bandar and other Saudi officials had assured the White House as follows:

“… they will keep a very close eye on the religious fundamentalists. Their message to us was ‘We’ve created this movement, and we can control it.’ It’s not that we don’t want the Salafis to throw bombs; it’s who they throw them at—Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr, Iran, and at the Syrians, if they continue to work with Hezbollah and Iran.’”

Right. Should we add Yemen to this list of people we “want the Salafis to throw bombs” at? Or was that not part of the plan? (oops?)

Unfortunately, so far we have had no indication that President Obama has rolled-up, nor has any intention of rolling-up this covert action programme of Saudi-backed al-Qaeda sponsorship. It is also clear that the programme has accelerated terrorist activity across the region.

Harbouring al-Qaeda, Fighting the People

The consequent escalation of al-Qaeda militant activity in Yemen has revolved around oil installations and has prompted US defense officials to highlight the necessity of US intervention due to Yemen’s critical geostrategic position. The CRS report continues to note that: “In recent months, AQAP has threatened to attack Yemeni oil facilities, Western interests in Yemen, foreign tourists, and Yemeni soldiers protecting oil installations.” (p. 7) It then cites US Central Command chief Gen. David Petraeus, declaring:

“Were extremist cells in Yemen to grow, Yemen’s strategic location would facilitate terrorist freedom of movement in the region and allow terrorist organizations to threaten Yemen’s neighbors, especially Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States. In view of this, we are expanding our security cooperation efforts with Yemen to help build the nation’s security, counter- insurgency, and counter-terror capabilities.” (pp. 7-8)

But what good, really, is all this joint counter-terrorism work, in terms of actually fighting terror? And has the US government demonstrated a serious interest in crackdown down on al-Qaeda’s base in Yemen? The CRS report, of course, does not directly address this question, but the facts speak for themselves:

“Yemen continues to harbor a number of Al Qaeda operatives and has refused to extradite several known militants on the FBI’s list of most wanted terrorists. (Article 44 of the constitution states that a Yemeni national may not be extradited to a foreign authority) According to a report in the Washington Post, three known Al Qaeda operatives (Jamal al Badawi, Fahd al Quso, and Jaber A. Elbaneh,), sought under the FBI’s Rewards for Justice program, are in Yemen. Before his incarceration, Elbaneh was roaming freely on the streets of Sana’a despite his conviction for his involvement in the 2002 attack French tanker Limburg and other attacks against Yemeni oil installations. In 2003, U.S. prosecutors charged Elbaneh in absentia with conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization. One expert, Ali H. Soufan, a former FBI supervisory special agent, argues that ‘If Yemen is truly an ally, it should act as an ally. Until it does, U.S. aid to Yemen should be reevaluated. It will be impossible to defeat Al Qaeda if our ‘allies’ are freeing the convicted murderers of U.S. citizens and terrorist masterminds while receiving direct U.S. financial aid.’” (p. 14)

The truth is that “al-Qaeda” is not the real destabilizing factor here: the limits of a system of rampant corruption, hydrocarbon energy dependency, striking poverty and inequality (40 per cent below the poverty line), and northern profiteering at the expense of the south, are being breached as Yemen’s oil exports have declined in the context of rising fresh water shortages and a growing food production crisis. “Although terrorism, provincial revolts, and unrest in the south are all serious concerns related to Yemeni stability,” the CRS report observes, reflecting on these issues, “they pale in comparison to the long term structural resource and economic challenges facing a country with a rapidly growing population.” (p. 11) Those structural and systemic “challenges” are generating a groundswell of popular discontent that neither the Yemen government, nor the US (nor US-backed institutions like the IMF and World Bank) have any interest in resolving through genuine structural and systemic reform to create a genuinely sustainable, equitable and democratic society.

The Saleh-Zawahiri Pact

Instead, precisely the opposite is taking place. On the pretext of fighting an al-Qaeda presence to which both US and Yemeni authorities have variably turned a blind eye, tacitly tolerated, and actively sponsored, Obama’s military-security plan for Yemen is designed purely to facilitate the north’s capacity to exert control over an increasingly volatile south and to put down northern Shi’ite rebels – while still failing to resolve the outstanding issues underscoring the complicity of Yemeni authorities in harbouring and protecting al-Qaeda networks in the country. What mainstream media pundits and government commentators have totally ignored is that the resurgence of al-Qaeda in Yemen has occurred as a consequence of President Saleh’s attempt to re-mobilise the Islamist jihadist networks to consolidate northern control over the south in the interests of a ‘unified Yemen’, something which the Obama administration has repeatedly acknowledged to be one of the end-goals of US involvement. US journalist and Yemen specialist Jane Novak reported in February 2009 that after al-Qaeda officially declared the formation of “Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” (AQAP) in early 2008, President Saleh moved almost immediately to strike an agreement with the network:

“Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh recently struck a deal with Ayman Zawahiri, and Yemen is in the process of emptying its jails of known jihadists. The Yemeni government is recruiting these established jihadists to attack its domestic enemies as it refrains from serious counter-terror measures against the newly formed Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula… In the latest round of negotiations, Saleh reportedly asked the militants to engage in violence against the southern mobility movement. The southern uprising is bent on achieving the independence of South Yemen and is a substantial threat to Saleh’s grip on power.”

The deal has reportedly included the supply of arms and ammunition to al-Qaeda paramilitary forces by the Yemen military. Novak continues to note that the Saleh-Zawahiri agreement was re-confirmed in late 2008:

“AQAP issued a communiqué explaining the unique configuration to its local members and legitimized fighting for the state by referencing the 1994 war. A copy of the letter was obtained by News Yemen. Echoing the earlier agreement by Saleh and Zawahiri late in 2008, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula explained to its followers that President Saleh wants jihadists to fight on behalf of the state, especially those who did already in 1994, against the enemies of unity- southern oppositionists. AQAP in return will gain prison releases and unimpeded travel to external theatres of jihad, the letter explained.”

It is therefore clear that US military activities in Yemen will have little meaningful impact on fighting al-Qaeda. They do have a great deal to do with shoring up a corrupt, illegitimate regime which itself is a state-sponsor of al-Qaeda, and continues to have a fraught, ambiguous relationship with the terrorist network.

Meanwhile, the victims of US ‘counter-terror’ support for Yemen, prior to the failed Christmas Day crotch bombing, have not been al-Qaeda networks – but overwhelmingly innocent civilians. For more than five years, reports Human Rights Watch, Yemen military forces “have been battling Huthi rebels in the mountainous north of the country, with successive ceasefires punctuated by new rounds of fighting.” Over 175,000 people have been displaced according to the UN, “with reports of extreme scarcity of water and malnutrition.” In October 2009, eyewitness testimony gathered by HRW confirmed “aerial bombing and artillery shelling by the Yemeni armed forces that resulted in high civilian casualties.” Since 2007, “a growing wave of protests has rocked the south, with the loosely-knit Southern Movement now demanding secession.” HRW documents “six occasions during 2008 and 2009 in which security forces opened fire on unarmed protesters, often without warning and aiming at them from short range.” As for the Yemeni bombing raids on the 17^th and 24^th December backed by Washington, “Human rights groups in Yemen have claimed the attacks killed dozens of women and children, in addition to al Qaeda members.”

Increasingly, the Yemen government is playing the terrorist card to conflate various rebel groups with al-Qaeda. Referring to the kidnapping of five German and one British nationals for the last six months, Rashad al-Aleemi – Yemeni deputy prime minister for defense and security affairs – claimed: “Alleged information confirm that there is coordination between the (northern Shiite rebels) Huthis and the Al-Qaeda in this matter”

The outcome of the US strategy – based as usual on trying to bolster a hopelessly corrupt and inequitable self-imploding system – will not be less, but more al-Qaeda recruitees: and more cannon fodder for US military expansion in Eurasia.
 

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is a bestselling author and political analyst. He is the Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, and has taught courses in contemporary history and international relations theory at the University of Sussex. His Doctoral thesis investigated the radicalization processes and dynamics of violent conflict in the context of hierarchical social systems in the modern world. Dr. Ahmed has also published extensively on international security issues, including The London Bombings; The War on Truth; Behind the War on Terror; and The War on Freedom. He has been an expert commentator for BBC News 24, BBC World Today, Al-Jazeera English, among others. He is currently advising the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst on engaging British Muslim communities. Visit Dr. Nafeez’ website.

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Pepe Escobar shares with us his background and experience as a roving journalist for over three decades. He provides us with an overview of President Obama’s recent trip to China, relevant analysis of ordinary Chinese people’s point of view and reaction, and China’s political and economic position today within the global context. Mr. Escobar discusses energy issues and the current struggle over the resource-rich Central Asia-Caspian regions as the new battle ground for the competing interests of Russia, China, Europe, and the United States, including various strategic alliances currently under way to tap into this oil-gas rich region. He talks about the absence of real coverage of the Eurasia region by the US media, the rarely-discussed and often obscured facts and realities involving the Bagram Prison in Afghanistan, and more!

Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil is the roving correspondent for Asia Times and an analyst for The Real News Network. He is an investigative journalist with three decades of experience in covering politics and conflicts around the globe. He’s been a foreign correspondent since 1985, based in London, Milan, Los Angeles, Paris, Singapore, and Bangkok. Since the late 1990s, he has specialized in covering stories and cases from the Middle East to Central Asia, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was in Afghanistan and interviewed the military leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, Ahmad Shah Masoud, a couple of weeks before his assassination. Mr. Escobar has made frequent visits to Iran and is the author of three must-read books: Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War, Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad During the Surge, and Obama Does Globalistan.

Here is our guest Pepe Escobar unplugged!

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A week after the September 11th attacks, FBI Special Agent Jack Cloonan flew back from Yemen to New York where convicted al Qaeda spy Ali Mohamed had been brought up from custodial witness protection in Florida to the M.C.C. (federal jail) in Lower Manhattan. 

Rushing from the airport and desperate to learn what Ali might have known about the attacks that killed 2,976, Cloonan got to the prison around 11:00 p.m.

“I walked in and I had him pulled out,” Cloonan said in an interview for my Ali Mohamed biography Triple Cross. “I said, ‘How’d they do it?’ and he wrote the whole thing out—the attack, as if he knew every detail of it. He [had] conducted training for Al Qaeda on how to hijack a plane.

“’This is how you get a box cutter on board. You take the knife, you remove the blade and you wrap it in [redacted] and put it in your carry-on luggage.’ They’d read the FAA regulations. They knew four inches wouldn’t go through. ‘This is how you position yourself,’ he said. ‘I taught people how to sit in first class. You sit here and some sit here.’ He wrote the whole thing out.”

On 9/11 the hijackers who flew AA Flight 77 into the Pentagon were reported to have used box cutters. Three of the muscle hijackers who stormed the cockpit and took that plane were Khalid al-Midhar and the al-Hazmi brothers, Nawaf and Salim. Later it was revealed that Khalid and Salim had obtained their fake ID’s (used to board the plane) at Sphinx Trading, the same tiny Jersey City Mailbox store that had been on Patrick Fitzgerald’s radar since the 1995 “Day of Terror” trial. (see Part I)- (Highlight ‘Part I’: link to part I)

As bin Laden’s trusted security advisor Ali Mohamed almost certainly knew of the planes-as-missiles operation that KSM was executing by 1998. Khalid Sheikh’s nephew, Ramzi Yousef, had conceived the plot in Manila in 1994; the year Ali stayed in bin Laden’s own house in Khartoum as he trained his bodyguards.  By 1997 Mohamed was living part time in Kenya with Wadih El-Hage, bin Laden’s personal secretary.

So why couldn’t Patrick Fitzgerald and the elite agents of the FBI’s Bin Laden squad have squeezed the plot out of him in the year 2000 when Ali copped a plea that spared his life? That’s one of the most important questions that could be answered if the trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed goes forward in New York. And if the Feds don’t have the inclination to ask that question, the defense attorneys surely will.

The baseless fears of the KSM trial critics

A media storm erupted from the moment the Justice Department announced that the 9/11 “mastermind” would face a jury in the Southern District of New York. The critics have ranged from Rudi Guiliani to N.Y. Gov. David Paterson and now, even 9/11 Commission chairman Gov. Tom Kean has chimed in.

KSM at Guantanamo

Many predict that the trial will be a “circus,” and a threat to U.S. security. But they seem to forget that the SDNY Feds have locked up two of the most lethal al Qaeda terrorists in the world: Ramzi Yousef and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman after separate New York trials that were models of civility.

So far in five SDNY trials, not a single al Qaeda terrorist has escaped justice. The 1994 WTC bombing trial, the 1995 Day of Terror Trial, the 1996 Bojinka trial, the second WTC bombing trial in 1997 and the Embassy bombing trial in 2001 all proceeded to convictions without incident. Except for a few raucous protests outside the New York Supreme Court trial of El Sayyid Nosair, the killer of Rabbi Meier Kahane, none of the trials turned into the “circus” the critics are predicting.

What about the threat to the U.S. homeland some critics say will increase if KSM is allowed to venture out of the confines of Gitmo? Hogwash. Ramzi Yousef and most of the principal al Qaeda convicts are serving life sentences at the Supermax in Florence, Colorado, the most hardened Federal prison in the system. The blind Sheikh, reported near death in 2007, is locked down at the Butner Federal Medical Facility in North Carolina.

As to critics like John Yoo (architect of the DOJ’s water-boarding rationale) who warned in the Wall Street Journal that KSM’s trial would represent a “bonanza” of intelligence for al Qaeda, I refer him to Ali Mohamed’s stunning track record uncovering the inner secrets of the FBI and Green Berets during his 11 year run as al Qaeda’s spy.

Thanks to Ali Amiriki, (aka “Ali the American”) the FBI informant and U.S. Army sergeant embedded at Fort Bragg, there is little or nothing about the Government’s “sensitive sources and methods,” that might come out at this trial that bin Laden and al-Zawahiri don’t already know.

Mohamed in Fort Bragg video

The likelihood KSM will walk? Zero to none
There’s little doubt that KSM will be convicted. Even if all of the “testimony” he vomited out during his months of water boarding is suppressed, he openly admitted to his role as “the executive director of 9/11” last December in the Gitmo military trial at of Salim Hamdan, bin Laden’s driver.

“Due to my work as…a military official in al Qaeda,” KSM boasted, “my job is to oversee all of the al Qaeda cells aboard.”  And he coughed up even more culpable details in March of 2007 at another Guantanamo hearing. Back then he actually boasted that he “was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z.”

KSM then went on to list 29 al Qaeda terror operations that he either ran or was a co-conspirator in planning; including both attacks on the WTC: the 1993 bombing and 9/11, the separate 1994 plots to assassinate President Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul II in the Philippines, the notorious “Bojinka” plot (hatched by his nephew Ramzi Yousef) to smuggle improvised explosive devices aboard a dozen U.S. bound airliners exiting Asia in 1995, the 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and the Bali nightclub bombing that same year which left 202 dead.

So when he goes on trial in New York, while any statements made under “enhanced” interrogations will no doubt get suppressed, those admissions made freely in open court in Guantanamo will sink him for sure.

What are the unanswered questions about the FBI’s failure to stop 9/11 that the trial of KSM in New York could reveal? And how could Ali Mohamed impact the possible prosecution of  alleged Fort Hood killer Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan?

The most important reason for bringing KSM before a civilian jury in New York is the potential his trial has for connecting the dots on the negligence of U.S. intelligence agencies prior to 9/11. The responsibility for that job was squandered by the 9/11 Commission, half the staff of which were alumni of the very agencies they were charged with auditing.

That’s why nobody in the counter-intel community was held accountable for failing to miss the “planes as missiles plot,” hatched by Ramzi Yousef and his uncle in Manila in 1994 – a plot that the Philippines National Police had warned the N.Y. Feds about as early as 1995. No wonder ex-New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean, the 9/11 Commission Chairman, doesn’t want to go back down that road.

However, in this upcoming legal showdown with KSM in New York, his ego suggests that he’ll take the stand. After all, his nephew Ramzi represented himself during his 1996 Bojinka trial (for which he was convicted). Once he starts talking, Khalid Shaikh could trigger the answers to a number of questions that were side-stepped or ignored by the 9/11 Commission and the Congressional Joint Inquiry:

1) Isn’t it true that Osama bin Laden and al-Zawahiri had established what amounted to an al Qaeda headquarters at the al Farooq mosque in Brooklyn as far back as 1989 and directly bankrolled the first WTC bombing by Yousef?

The 9/11 Commission claimed that the 1993 WTC bombing was the work of “loosely based group of Sunni Islamists.”  Even Patrick Fitzgerald, the man Vanity Fair called “the bin Laden brain” told a documentary crew in 2005 that he wasn’t sure whether al Qaeda was involved in the bombing that killed six and injured 1000 a month into Clinton’s presidency.

But if the trail of culpability for the FBI leads all the way back to their 1989 surveillance of Ali Mohamed’s trained cell at a Long Island shooting range (see Part I) ( Highlight ‘Part I’: link it to Part I) that will make three separate presidential administrations (both Bushes and Clinton’s) responsible for failing to stop the al Qaeda juggernaut.

2) After secretly indicting KSM in January, 1996, why did the Feds wait until January 2008 to unseal the indictment?

In 1995 they’d brought KSM’s nephew Ramzi to ground the old fashioned way: with a $2 million reward plastered on want posters and matchbook covers from Bangkok to Islamabad where he was finally busted after a young South African accomplice ratted him out.

KSM want posters distributed in early 1998

But the Feds didn’t go public with their worldwide hunt for KSM until early 1998 and by then he was in Hamburg, well on his way to executing the “planes operation” he and Ramzi  had set in motion back in Manila in 1994. Why did SDNY prosecutors wait so long to seek the public’s help in capturing Khalid Shaikh?

3) How much assistance did KSM get from Khalid bin Abdullah al-Thani, a member of the ruling family of Qatar who reportedly got Khalid Sheikh a new I.D. and smuggled him off to the Czech republic in 1996 after an FBI sting of Yousef revealed his uncle’s presence in Doha.

According to Paul Thompson who runs a remarkable website, KSM even returned to Qatar two weeks after 9/11 and stayed there “with the knowledge of some Qatari royals.”

Why is the possible participation of the Qataris in the 9/11 plot a crucial question? Because since 2002 the forward headquarters for CENTCOM, the United States Central Command has been located at Camp As Sayliyah in Doha. The entire invasion of Baghdad and the Iraqi campaign was coordinated out of this facility.

KSM could be the one man with insight into just how cozy the al-Thanis are with al Qaeda’s leadership. Talk about an irony, the U.S. invades Iraq on the false pretext that Saddam Hussein was linked to the 9/11 attacks and our principal strategic ally in the region may have been responsible for helping the “mastermind,” KSM slip through the FBI’s fingers five years before the attacks.
 
The importance of Ali Mohamed to the Hasan case

Bringing this story full circle; apart from the lessons the U.S. Army should have learned about sheltering Islamic radicals during Ali Mohamed’s service at Fort Bragg, it’s quite possible that if he’s convinced to talk, al Qaeda’s master spy could be helpful to the prosecution of Maj. Hasan.

Why? Because of the disturbing evidence that seems to grow each day of Hasan’s relationship with radical imam Anwar al Aulaqi. Months ago the FBI learned that Hasan and al Aulaqi communicated “10 to 20 times,” but no formal investigation was every launched by the Bureau.

Terrorism analyst Thompson has done ground-breaking investigative work on al Aulaqi; proving that he interacted directly with 9/11 hijackers al-Midhar and al Hazmi in San Diego, then helped them along after the imam moved to the Dar al Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Virginia in 2000.

 We now know that Maj. Hasan held his mother’s funeral at that mosque in May of 2001. In one of the emails, monitored by the FBI six months before the Fort Hood massacre, Maj. Hasan told al Aulaqi “I can’t wait to join you” in the afterlife.

Two degrees of separation between Maj. Hasan and KSM

In 2004 U.S. News reported that post 9/11, German authorities found the phone number of al Aulaqi’s Dar al Hijrah mosque in the apartment of Ramzi Binalshibh, Khalid Shaikh’s Number Two, who will also go on trial in New York.

While no evidence has surfaced that al Aulaqi ever met KSM, the link between the Fairfax mosque and Ramzi Binalshibh makes for two degrees of separation between the 9/11 “executive director,” Khalid Shaikh and the fanatical U.S. Army psychiatrist who allegedly left 13 dead and 30 wounded at Fort Hood.

There’s also a disturbing parallel between the FBI’s failure to detect Ali Mohamed as a threat to U.S. security and the Bureau’s lapses in monitoring Maj. Hasan.

The Weekly Standard quoted the FBI as admitting that Hasan came to their attention “in December 2008” and that the Joint Terrorism Task Force “reviewed … communications between…Hasan and (al Aulaqi) and deemed them “consistent with research being conducted by Maj. Hasan…” Contrast that with the London Telegraph’s report: in one outburst at Walter Reed Army Hospital, Hasan declared that non-believers should be beheaded and “have boiling oil poured down their throats;” hardly the view of a serious medical researcher.

As documented in Part I, Ali Mohamed not only exhibited openly hostile jihadist views while serving as an E5 sergeant at the JFK Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, the Army even used him to make a training video in which he articulated his radical Islamic beliefs. 20 years ago an actual agent of al Qaeda had burrowed into a highly secure Army facility and after he was discovered and arrested a decade later, the Army didn’t seem to learn its lesson.

A revelation or another cover up?

The continuing Hasan investigation will shed new light on whether the Bureau has sufficiently reformed in the years since the 9/11. The question is, will federal prosecutors have the courage to come clean on years of negligence by the two “Bin Laden offices of origin” and put the man who snookered them on the stand as the chief witness against KSM?

Ali Mohamed remains the greatest enigma in the war on terror. Locked away somewhere in custodial witness protection there are seals upon seals on his case. Having skirted the fate that awaits KSM, can the convicted spy now be persuaded to testify about what he knows of the 9/11 plot and Khalid Shaikh’s role in it?

If he does, he could be to terrorism what Sammy “the bull” Gravano was to organized crime – the most lethal witness ever against the 9/11 “executive director.” A full, unexpurgated vetting of FBI/DOJ blunders at that trial could be the kind of kick in the ass the Bureau needs to finally begin its reform.

There’s little time to lose. The FBI’s failure to identify Ali Mohamed as a threat two decades ago at Fort Bragg and their recent lapses in stopping the wide-eyed shooter at Ford Hood are proof positive that the Bureau has miles to go before Americans can feel protected from the metastasizing threat of radical Islam.
 

Peter Lance is a five-time Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter and former correspondent for ABC News. He has covered hundreds of stories worldwide for 20/20, Nightline, and World News Tonight. Peter is the author of 1000 Years for Revenge, Cover Up, and the novel First Degree Burn. For more details visit Peter’s website.

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In its firestorm of coverage, the mainstream media has overlooked a potential link between the two biggest domestic terrorism stories of the day: the shootings at Ford Hood and the decision by the Justice Dept. to try accused 9/11 “mastermind” Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in New York City.

Five time Emmy-winning former ABC News correspondent and HarperCollins author Peter Lance shines a light on the man who may well be the greatest enigma in the “war on terror.”

His name is Ali Abdel Saoud Mohamed, aka Ali Amirki or “Ali the American,” the ex-Egyptian Army officer who penetrated the CIA (briefly) in 1984, the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg from 1987 to 1989 and the FBI where he served as an informant from the early 1990’s, interacting with top federal prosecutors and Special Agents as he trained the cell responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and “Day of Terror” plots. Earlier he moved Osama bin Laden’s entourage from Afghanistan to Khartoum, set up the al Qaeda training camps in the Sudan, trained the Saudi billionaire’s own personal bodyguard and later served as the principal plotter in al Qaeda’s five year mission to blow up the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Ali Mohamed was the ticking time bomb at Fort Bragg who should have redefined the Army’s rules for uncovering traitorous Islamic radicals in the ranks 20 years before Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan went on his alleged rampage at Fort Hood.

But more importantly, for all the critics who think trying KSM in the Southern District of New York is a bad idea, Ali Mohamed could represent the Feds’ best witness at trial; insuring once and for all that Khalid Shaikh will finally be brought to justice.

The spy who hid in plain site

In the years leading up to the 9/11 attacks, no single agent of al Qaeda was more successful in compromising the U.S. intelligence community than Ali Mohamed. A member of the radical Egyptian Army unit that murdered President Anwar Sadat in 1981, Mohammed escaped prosecution, but he was later purged from the Egyptian military due to his radical Islamic views.

In 1983 he caught the attention of Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, five years before the doctor with the spectacles and go-tee joined bin Laden to form al Qaeda. Al Zawahiri saw Ali as the espionage agent he needed to penetrate the U.S.

After the 1983 bombings of the U.S. embassy and the Marine barracks in Beirut, the CIA was hungry to recruit assets who understood the radical Islamic mindset. So with very little vetting, the Agency sent Ali to Hamburg where he went into a Hezbollah mosque only to blow his cover and get his name on a Watch List.

Undaunted, Mohamed got onto a TWA flight from Athens to JFK in 1985. On the brief trip across the Atlantic, he managed to seduce an older American woman named Linda Sanchez who was returning from vacation in Greece.  They were married six weeks later at a drive-through wedding chapel in Reno. After that, Ali moved into Linda’s home in Santa Clara, California and set up an al Qaeda “switchboard” and sleeper cell with an ex-Egyptian medical student named Khalid Dahab.

In 1986 he drove to Oakland and enlisted in the U.S. Army, careful to stay under the radar and avoid the scrutiny of Officer Candidate School. Astonishingly, though still a resident alien, he was posted to Fort Bragg where he managed to work his way up to the rank of E5 (sergeant) and, without any security clearance, get posted to the highly secure JFK SWC where elite Green Beret and Delta Force officers train.

A chilling precursor

So far, in its official reaction to the Fort Hood massacre the U.S. Army has been taking a page from the Claude Raines school of crisis management; imitating the reaction of the duplicitous Capt. Renault in the film Casablanca who professed, “shock, shock” that there was gambling going on at Rick’s club only to be handed his winnings.

But two decades before Maj. Hasan allegedly dropped thirteen people in cold blood, key officials at Bragg were aware of Ali Mohamed’s openly jihadist views. They even used him in a training video, in which Ali declared (with chilling confidence) that it was the duty of all Muslims to change countries with secular governments into Islamic regimes.

“It’s an obligation,” said Ali on the training tape, “it’s not a choice.”
 
And how much was known at Bragg among the officer elite of Ali’s subversive agenda? Ask his own commanding officer, Col. Robert Anderson:

“I think you or I would have a better chance of winning the Powerball lottery, than an Egyptian major in the unit that assassinated Sadat would have getting a visa, getting to California, getting into the Army and getting assigned to a Special Forces unit. That just doesn’t happen.”

But it did and Ali was so audacious at Bragg that he announced to Anderson that he was going to use his leave to visit Afghanistan and hunt Soviets. It was an act that could have had global implications akin to the Soviet shoot down of Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 flight, if Mohamed had been captured or killed in the midst of the covert U.S. war to help the Mujahideen.

In an interview for my HarperCollins biography of Mohamed, Triple Cross, Anderson said that he tried to get Ali court martialed after he returned from Kabul and brazenly dropped two belts from Soviet Spetsnaz commandos on his desk. Bragging that he’d killed them, Ali wasn’t worried in the slightest that he’d be reprimanded and Anderson said he was told by a JAG officer that there was insufficient evidence “to convict anyone of anything.”

Does this resonate with the kind of audacious behavior Maj. Hasan exhibited at Walter Reed Army Hospital only to be given a pass? As the French say, “plus c’est change, plus c’est la meme chose.”

Al Qaeda’s secret spy in New York

But the Afghan theater of ops wasn’t where Ali Mohamed did his most damage. On weekends, in 1989 he began commuting up to New York from Fort Bragg where he trained Mahmoud Abouhalima, a six foot two-inch red headed Egyptian cab driver, Mohammed Salameh, a Palestinian illegal alien, and Nidal Ayad, a Kuwait émigré and Rutgers grad – all later convicted by Southern District prosecutors in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Working out of what the Feds called “the Jersey jihad office,” the Kennedy Boulevard based Al-Salaam mosque in Jersey City, Ali even played his Fort Bragg training video for the “brothers” as he schooled them in and weapons training and other covert operations.

Should the Army have known about Ali’s clandestine trips back then? Maybe not initially, but the alarm bells should have gone off at the JFK SWC in November, 1990 when El Sayyid Nosair, another Ali trainee, gunned down Rabbi Meier Kahane, founder of The Jewish Defense League as he gave a speech at the Marriot Hotel on Lexington Avenue.

That night as multiple law enforcement units descended on Nosair’s house in New Jersey they found a treasure trove of intelligence suggesting that Ali Mohamed (who stayed with Nosair on his New York visits) had betrayed not only the U.S. Army, but his adopted country.

They filled forty-seven boxes with evidence seized, including Green Beret manuals marked “Top Secret for Training” and communiqués classified as Secret from the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Another memo, entitled “Location of Selected Units on 05 December 1988,” listed the precise positions of Special Operations Forces (SOF) worldwide—including the army’s Green Berets and Navy SEAL teams—along with details of their missions. That single communiqué could have easily gotten Mohamed indicted on charges of espionage and treason, defying the legal judgment of the JAG officer at Bragg who had spurned Lt. Col. Anderson’s request for a court martial.

A warning of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing

The cache also contained hints of al Qaeda’s most famous New York target: the World Trade Center. One passage inside Nosair’s notebook called for the “destruction of the enemies of Allah…by… exploding…their civilized pillars…and high world buildings.”

Considering the “stove piping” that existed back then, you might ask how would the FBI have known about Ali’s presence at Fort Bragg or his links to El Sayyid Nosair?

Fair question, until you realize that 16 months before the Kahane assassination, the FBI Special Operations Group followed Nosair and a group of other “ME’s” (middle eastern men) from a Brooklyn mosque to the Calverton shooting range on Long Island.

Over four weekends in July, the Bureau agents took dozens of surveillance photos of Nosair, Abouhalima, Salameh, Nosair and Ayad (all trained by Ali Mohamed) firing handguns, AK-47’s and other semi-automatic weapons. They even had shots of the chrome-plated .357 Magnum, Nosair would use to rub out the rabbi.

The “lone gunman”

Even more shocking, when you ponder why the dots weren’t connected, was the presence of Abouhalima and Salameh, Nosair’s intended getaway driver’s, at his New Jersey home the night of the assassination.

They were taken into custody; only to be released by the NYPD the next day. Later, despite the involvement of three co-conspirators, Chief of Detectives Joe Borelli labeled the assassination a “lone gunman shooting.”

Nosair, a Prozac popping janitor who worked in the basement of Manhattan’s civil court was tried locally by the Manhattan D.A. and to the surprise of Bill Greenbaum, the ADA who prosecuted the case, the Army kept their distance.

“We had people from Fort Bragg who came up,” he told me. “But then they went home and we never heard a word.”

Nosair lawyered up with William Kuntsler who succeeded in getting him convicted on mere weapons charges vs. the actual Kahane murder. Years after the 9/11 attacks Eleanor Hill, chief investigator for the House-Senate Joint Inquiry, revealed that Osama bin Laden himself helped pay for Nosair’s defense.

The first U.S. blood spilled by al Qaeda

The legal fee from the Saudi billionaire suggested that the rabbi’s death at the hands of an Ali Mohamed-trainee was the first in a series of al Qaeda missions directed against U.S. citizens; the next being the murder of six people in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 Embassy bombings, the loss of 17 sailors in the bombing of the U.S. Cole in 2000 and the mass murder of 2,976 on 9/11.

Ali Mohamed was personally connected to three of those five acts of terror. In the Embassy plot, he actually took the surveillance pictures that bin Laden used to pinpoint the location of the suicide truck bombs.

And what about the culpability of the two “Bin Laden offices of origin;” The FBI’s New York Office (NYO) and the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) in failing to sniff out Mohamed as an al Qaeda spy?

In retrospect their record is shameless. But the seeming inability of the Southern District Feds to connect the dots continued up through the mid 1990’s.

In prepping for the 1995 “Day of Terror” plot, an al Qaeda scheme to blow up the bridges and tunnels into Manhattan, assistant U.S. attorneys Patrick Fitzgerald and Andrew C. McCarthy put together a list of 172 un-indicted co-conspirators.
Ali Mohamed was on the list along with Osama bin Laden and a little known individual named Waleed al Noor – co-owner with Egyptian Mohammed El-Attris of a small check cashing and mailbox story in Jersey City called Sphinx Trading.

If the Feds had any doubts about how “mobbed up” with al Qaeda Sphinx was, all they had to do was visit the building that housed the “Jersey Jihad” office  and the al Salaam mosque where blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, al Qaeda’s spiritual leader, held court. Sphinx Trading was on the ground floor.

The 9/11 dots that never got connected

One of the most shocking discoveries I made in researching Triple Cross was that, six and a half years after McCarthy and Fitzgerald put Waleed al-Noor on that list with bin Laden and Ali Mohamed, Khalid al-Midhar and Salim al-Hazmi, two of the muscle hijackers who flew AA Flight #77 into the Pentagon on 9/11, got their fake ID’s at Sphinx from Mohammed El-Attriss, al-Noor’s partner.

Meeting Mohamed face to face

In 1996, Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald (now the top Federal prosecutor in Chicago) was charged by DOJ brass with getting an indictment of bin Laden. He turned to Squad I-49 in the FBI’s NYO where he began working with Special Agents Jack Cloonan and Dan Coleman.

By the summer of 1997, suspecting that something very bad was developing in Africa, Fitzgerald sent Coleman to Nairobi where he searched the home of Wadih El Hage, a bin Laden confident who was one of the principal bombing plotters.

Coleman was shocked to discover links between El Hage and Ali Mohamed, who had been cooperating with the Feds since 1992. That prompted Fitzgerald himself to fly across country to Sacramento where Ali was then living. In a face to face meeting, the federal prosecutor naively hoped he could turn Mohamed.

But Ali was not about to betray his “sheikh,” Osama. He actually admitted to Fitzgerald that he “loved” bin Laden and “believe[d] in him.” Then, he uttered words that amounted to treason; boasting that he didn’t need a fatwa to make war on the U.S., since America was “the enemy.” There was no way he was going to betray the jihad to these hapless Feds. Finally, he got up and left.

Moments later, Fitzgerald turned to Cloonan and said, “That is the most dangerous man I have ever met. We cannot let this man out on the street.” But that’s just what he did; allowing Ali to remain free for another 10 months; waiting to arrest him until a month after the bombs went off in Africa killing 224 and injuring thousands. It was a plot that Ali had been perfecting since 1993.

Cutting a deal with the devil’s “aide”

Back at Fort Bragg, Col. Anderson, Ali’s C.O. had described him to me as a “fanatic.” He wasn’t the devil, the Colonel said, “ he was more like the aide to the devil. He had an air about him; a stare, a very coldness that was pathological.”

Does that not echo the growing testimony we’ve heard from Army colleagues who interacted for years with Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan?

It took Fitzgerald more than a year to get any real cooperation out of Mohamed. It wasn’t until the year 2000 that Ali finally pled guilty to the Embassy bombings in return for being spared the death penalty.

The problem was, as the months counted down to the 9/11 attacks, why didn’t he give up the “planes as missiles plot?” From what Cloonan told me, Mohamed knew every detail. How could a top Fed like Pat Fitzgerald cut a deal with al Qaeda’s chief spy and not squeeze the truth out of him about bin Laden’s ultimate goal?

In PART TWO we’ll look at how much Ali may have known about the 9/11 plot and why, if the Feds were smart, he could become the secret weapon against KSM.

Peter Lance is a five-time Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter and former correspondent for ABC News. He has covered hundreds of stories worldwide for 20/20, Nightline, and World News Tonight. Peter is the author of 1000 Years for Revenge, Cover Up, and the novel First Degree Burn. For more details visit Peter’s website.

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