Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley
Posted: Tue Nov 19, 2013 8:28 am
PART 2 OF 2 (CH. 4 CONT'D.)
BRITISH TERROR SCHOOLS FOR PATSIES
A window into the London state-sponsored synthetic terror milieu came in December 2001, when British authorities were forced to arrest and question Mark Yates, a self- styled security expert who ran a firearms training camp in Alabama, Yates was suspected of helping Islamic terrorist patsies from Britain who were to hone their marksmanship skills on American soil before going off to fight for Islamic causes around the globe. Yates, a British bodyguard and firearms trainer who had operations in both the United Kingdom and the United States, allegedly offered "live fire" weapons training in America for aspiring holy warriors. British police thought that Yates was involved on the U.S. end of the "Ultimate Jihad Challenge" training program offered on the London market by the Sakina Security Services company, owned by Suleiman Bilal Zain-ul-abidin. Yates, who was also the operations and training director at the Ground Zero firearms training camp outside Marion, Alabama, denied everything. "Ultimate Jihad Challenge" included instruction in "art of bone breaking," and learning to "improvise explosive devices." British Moslems would be given the opportunity to squeeze off up to 3,000 rounds at a shooting range in the United States before heading off to fight for Islamic causes around the world. "All serious firearms training must be done overseas" because of British gun laws, advertising for the course noted. British prosecutors said their investigators had searched Zain-ul-abidin's apartment and seized documents believed to be related to suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network, anti-Semitic material and what appeared to be disabled firearms, including a rifle and two handguns. The Sunday Telegraph reported about another military training course, this time at a secret camp near the village of Yetgoch in southern Wales. Young Moslems and others learned how to use Uzi machine guns at the camp, which was run by Trans Global Security International.
The reports of the Welsh training camp rekindled a debate in Britain over how the UK had become a hotbed for military recruitment by radical Islamic elements. Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammed, a firebrand Islamic leader in London, founder of the fundamentalist al-Muhajiroun organization, and Bin Laden's sometime spokesman, said in 2000 that between 1,800 and 2,000 British Moslems were going abroad each year for military training. "We find young men in university classes or mosques, invite them for a meal and discuss ... ongoing attacks being suffered by Moslems in Chechnya, Palestine or Kashmir," Bakri Mohammed said. "We ... make them understand their duty to support the jihad (holy war) struggle verbally, financially and, if they can, physically in order to liberate their homeland." Bakri's al-Muhajiroun group, like al Qaeda, advocated wiping out the world's 50-plus existing Moslem-majority states and replacing them with a single "khilafah" (caliphate), or Islamic state. (Sunday Telegraph, MSNBC, December 27, 2001)
Satellite phone records of a phone used by Osama bin Laden during 1996-98, revealed that "Britain was at the heart of the terrorist's planning for his worldwide campaign of murder and destruction," according to the London Sunday Times. Bin Laden and his most senior aides made more calls to Britain than to any other country; they made more than 260 calls from Afghanistan to 27 numbers in Britain. According to documents from the trial of the U.S. east African embassy bombings, the telephone was bought in 1996 with the help of Dr Sa ad al Fagih, 45, the head of the London-based Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia. Al Fagih had been regularly used by the BBC as an expert on Bin Laden. His credit card was also used to buy more than 3,000 minutes of pre-paid airtime. The records showed calls to ten other countries, the next most frequent after the UK being Yemen. There were no calls to Iraq. (London Sunday Times, March 24, 2002)
AL QAEDA AND LONDONISTAN
The role of London as the leading center of Islamic radicalism has been an open secret for years, but has never been reported by the U.S. controlled corporate media. In the nineteenth century, when Mazzini and Marx operated out of London, the slogan was that "England supports all revolutions but her own." In the post-colonial world, the British have found it to their advantage to encourage violent movements which could be used for destabilizations and assassinations in the former colonies, which their ex-masters did not want to see become strong and effective modern states. Between 1995 and 1999, protests were lodged by many countries concerning the willingness of the British government to permit terror groups to operate from British territory. Among the protestors were: Israel, Algeria, Turkey, Libya, Yemen, India, Egypt, France, Peru, Germany, Nigeria, and Russia. This is a list which, if widely known, might force certain U.S. radio commentators to change their world picture about who is soft on terrorism.
A number of groups which were cited as terrorist organizations by the U.S. State Department had their headquarters in London. Among them were the Islamic Group of Egypt, led by Bin Laden's current right-hand man, Zawahiri, who was a known participant in the plot to assassinate Egyptian President Sadat; this was also the group which had murdered foreign tourists at Luxor in an attempt to wreck the Egyptian tourist industry. Also present in London were Al Jihad of Egypt, Hamas of Palestine, the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) of Algeria (responsible for large-scale massacres in that country), the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), which attacked targets in Turkey, and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (Tamil Tigers) of Sri Lanka, who assassinated Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Ghandi. Sheikh Bakri, Bin Laden spokesman's spokesman, was openly active in London into mid-1998 and later; he gave a press conference after the bombings of the U.S. East African embassies. The killings of figures like Sadat and Rajiv Ghandi should indicate the scale of the destabilization in developing countries of which some of these groups are capable.
Non-Anglo-Saxon press organs have from time to time pointed up the role of London in worldwide subversion. "The track of ... the GIA leader in Paris leads to Great Britain. The British capital has served as logistical and financial base for the terrorists," wrote Le Figaro on Nov. 3, 1995, in the wake of a murderous terror attack carried out in France. A report by the French National Assembly in October 2001 alleged that London played the key role as clearinghouse for money laundering of criminal and terrorist organizations. On March 3, 1996: Hamas bombed a market in Jerusalem, leaving 12 Israelis dead. A British newspaper reported soon after: "Israeli security sources say the fanatics ... are funded and controlled through secret cells operating here. ... Military chiefs in Jerusalem detailed how Islamic groups raised £7 million in donations from British organizations." (Daily Express, London, March 5, 1996)
In the midst of a campaign of destabilization against Egypt in the mid-1990s, the semi- official organ of the Egyptian government pointed out that "Britain has become the number one base in the world for international terrorism." (Al Ahram, Cairo, September 7, 1996) Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak noted that "... some states, like Britain, give political asylum to terrorists, and these states will pay the price for that." (Al-Hayat, September 18, 1996) British newspapers were also alarmed by the level of Islamic extremist activity they saw around them. By the late 1990s, there were so many Islamic extremists in London that the city had acquired the nickname of "Londonistan." The leading right-wing paper in the UK wrote: "Britain is now an international center for Islamic militancy on a huge scale. ..and the capital is home to a bewildering variety of radical Islamic movements, many of which make no secret of their commitment to violence and terrorism to achieve their goals." (London Daily Telegraph, November 20, 1999) President Putin of Russia saw a direct link between the London Islamic scene and terrorism in his own country. He said in an interview with a German newsmagazine: "In London, there is a recruitment station for people wanting to join combat in Chechnya. Today -- not officially, but effectively in the open -- they are talking there about recruiting volunteers to go to Afghanistan." (Focus, September 2001)
Brixton Mosque was one of the notorious centers for terrorist recruitment in the heart of London. This was the home base of Zacharias Mousawi, the French citizen put on trial in Alexandria, Va. It was also the home of Richard Reid, the shoe bomber of December 2001. Imam Qureshi of Brixton and others were allowed by the British authorities to preach anti-U.S. sermons to the some 4,000 Moslem inmates in British prisons, and thus to recruit new patsies for the world-wide terror machine. According to Bakri, Bin Laden's spokesman, during the late 1990s 2,000 fighters were trained yearly, including many in the U.S. because of the lax firearms legislation. The rival of Brixton Mosque was the equally redoubtable Finsbury Mosque, the home of the Saudi demagogue al Masri, who was finally taken into custody in the spring of 2004. There is every reason to believe that London is one of the main recruiting grounds for patsies, dupes, fanatics, double agents, and other roustabouts of the terrorist scene.
AL QAEDA AND MI-5 AGAINST LIBYA
Muammar Qaddafi of Libya, who had been bombed by the U.S. in the mid-1980s, not coincidentally became a target of al Qaeda. In March 1994, Bin Laden supporters killed 2 German agents in Libya. In November 1996, there was an MI-5 assassination attempt against the Libyan dictator with the help of the local Bin Laden organization, in which several people were killed. Here is a prime example of al Qaeda being employed by UK intelligence for purposes of state sponsored terrorism with the goal of eliminating a political leader who was not appreciated by London. (Hollingsworth and Fielding) The conclusion is clear: al Qaeda is a subsidiary of Anglo-American intelligence.
According to the French authors Brisard and Dasquie, Bin Laden's controllers had been using him to cause trouble for Qaddafi since the early 1980s, when Bin Laden had demanded permission to set up a base of operations in Libya, but was rebuffed by Qaddafi. "Enraged by Libya's refusal, Bin Laden organized attacks inside Libya, including assassination attempts against Qadaffi," Dasquie told IPS press service. The French authors cited the Islamic Fighting Group, headquartered in London, as the Libyan opposition group most closely allied with Bin Laden. Author Dasquie told IPS, "Qadaffi even demanded that Western police institutions, such as Interpol, pursue the IFG and Bin Laden, but never obtained cooperation. Until this very day [late 2001], members of IFG openly live in London." In 1998, former MI5 officer David Shayler told reporters that the British secret services had financed the assassination attempt against Qadaffi. (Inter Press service, November 15, 2001)
A rare moment of truth about the infrastructure of international terrorism was provided in October 2001 by Qaddafi, who was aware of al Qaeda's track record of attempting to eliminate him in the service of the U.S. and UK. In an appearance on the popular Al-Jazeera program "The Opposite Direction," Qaddafi condemned the 9/11 attacks, and referred to Bin Laden's Arab Afghans as "stray dogs" and terrorists. But then Qaddafi began to talk about the support network for al Qaeda:
The interviewer, a former BBC employee, quickly changed the subject before the mercurial dictator could say more. At this time, al Jazeera was closely monitored by all the international wire services, since it had the best reporting from inside Afghanistan. But none of them reported these illuminating remarks from Qaddafi.
NEOCONS' PLAN FOR AL QAEDA'S GLOBAL FUTURE
Voices from the Washington neocon oligarchy leave no doubt that the U.S. establishment's reliance on al Qaeda as its tool for ordering world affairs is intended to be a long-term one. The neocon retired Army colonel Robert Killebrew considers al Qaeda as the "once and future threat, : since he believes that "the al Qaeda we will face in 2010 will be an even more dangerous threat to Americas than the al Qaeda our troops are fighting today." According to Killebrew, "we can expect that within a decade al Qaeda will open one, or possibly several, political fronts in predominantly Islamic states, transforming itself from a deadly but diffuse terrorist movement into implacably hostile governmental factions throughout the Middle East that will pose critical geostrategic challenges to America and our allies.... the political transformation of al Qaeda into a radical pan Islamic movement would divide the world between the progressive West and a number of deeply reactionary, nuclear-armed states, and raise the possibility of far more serious conflict." (Washington Post, August 8, 2004) Here we see the oligarchy's intent of employing the benighted ideology of al Qaeda to organize the Arab and Islamic worlds for their own destruction. As we will see, neocolonial and neo-imperial powers have always feared secular Arab nationalism of the Nasser type, and have been eager to foment fundamentalist alternatives in the hope of perpetuating backwardness and isolation. The big danger for the U.S. has always been that Arab oil producers would reach their own economic development accords with western Europe, Japan, and the larger third world nations, such as Brazil. Al Qaeda fanaticism makes precisely these types of understandings impossible, preventing the forms of cooperation which would do the most damage to U.S.. The U.S. is biggest backer of al Qaeda, in just the same way that the Bank of England, Royal Dutch Shell, the City of London, and Wall Street were the biggest boosters of Hitler: if you know that you may face an adversary, the reasoning goes, then try to make sure that adversary will have a raving, incompetent, fanatical leader who will be structurally incapable of making successful alliances with your other foes.
Perhaps this is what Bush 43, whose family tradition includes grandfather Prescott Bush's implication in the Thyssen Nazi financial infrastructure, meant when he said in late 2001 that the United States has "the best intelligence we can possibly have," and what Porter J. Goss, the Florida Republican who chaired the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in 2001, meant when he denied that any intelligence failure had taken place around 9/11. (R.W. Apple, New York Times, December 14, 2001)
PRELIMINARIES: TERRORISM IN THE 1990s
Synthetic terrorism is an enterprise that terrorist controllers often choose to escalate gradually, partly to enhance their own technical preparedness, and partly as a means of progressively degrading public intelligence while institutionalizing fantastic lies about what is going on. The Italian terrorism of 1967-1985, for example, which was directed by NATO intelligence, MI-6, the CIA, and SISMI, shows an unmistakable pattern of escalation, inasmuch as each terrorist attack became the stepping stone of the successive one, with an overall tendency towards larger and more complicated operations with higher and higher numbers of victims, reaching a culmination at Bologna in 1980. lf we look at terrorism in the U.S. during the 1990s, we see a similar pattern. One has the impression of looking at a crescendo of terror attacks, in which each new attack introduces new elements which will be important in the attacks to come. It is worth pointing out that, during the 1990s, few if any wealthy oligarchs became victims of terrorism; the dead were almost always the little people, the masses, and so it was to remain on 9/11. In addition, each new distortion accepted by the public increased the overall gullibility of the political system.
THE WORLD TRADE CENTER 1993: THE FBI SET IT UP AND LET IT HAPPEN
The bomb detonated in the underground parking garage at the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993 killed six people, resulted in injuries to a thousand more, and threw lower Manhattan into chaos. At the center of the terror cell was a bombmaker who had been in the Egyptian army. He was also a paid informer and provocateur for the FBl. Other participants in the terror operation had entered the country with the connivance of the CIA, despite the fact that normally they would not have been allowed in. The FBI was aware of every phase of the plot, but refused to exploit numerous opportunities to stop it. The first WTC bomb of 1993 went off with the full complicity of the FBl, which tried repeatedly to pass off the blame to the Sudanese mission to the United Nations. The Kean-Hamilton Commission has nothing to say about this.
A detailed narrative of these events has appeared under the title The Cell. It is a coverup, written by participants in the operation. This book ignores the central and most dramatic event of the entire affair, which was the publication of the tapes secretly made by FBl provocateur Emad Salem of his own conversations with his FBI controllers -tapes which he wisely surmised he might need later as an insurance policy. Salem appears to have been passed from British intelligence to the FBI.
Even without the Salem tapes, The Cell presents a story of criminal incompetence within the FBI. The story starts with the November 1990 assassination in New York City of Rabbi Meir Kahane, an Israeli terrorist leader who had founded the Jewsih Defense League several decades earlier. The accused assassin of Kahane was El Sayyid Nosai, an Egyptian fanatic. But Nosair was not just a drifting fanatic: when the police searched his apartment, "there were training manuals from the Army Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg. There were copies of teletypes that had been routed to the Secretary of the Army and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. How had Nosair come up with those? Clearly, he had a source in a sensitive position in the U.S. military." (Cell 45) Much more likely, his terrorist controller occupied a sensitive position in the U.S. military, as any fool can see.
Nosair's Arabic-language files were said to contain the detailed plan of a series of future terrorist acts, including the 1993 WTC bombing. But the FBI was not interested in having these documents translated; it simply put them into storage and ignored them until it was too late. This vital evidence, according to our authors, "entered a black hole."
Sheikh Abdel Rahman, known to Kean-Hamilton commission devo1:ees as the blind Sheikh, was a known terrorist, a friend of the CIA's favorite Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and of Osama Bin Laden. He had been placed under house arrest in Egypt. Nevertheless, he was allowed to enter the U.S., coming from Sudan. In the light of the subsequent demonization of the blind Sheikh as one of the key terrorist plotters of the 1990s, we are entitled to ask why he was allowed to come to the us in the first place. The preferred answer: "Abdel Rahman's visa was signed by a CIA officer stationed at the Sudanese consulate, and one theory advanced by FBI agents is that the Agency sponsored his immigration. The CIA, in that scenario, may have wanted to nurture its ties to the Egyptian fundamentalists in order to avoid a replay of Iran in 1979, when the overthrow of the Shah left U.S. intelligence out in the cold. Another theory was that the officer had 'gone bad."' (Cell 54) More likely, the CIA or the moles within it simply wanted to use the Sheikh for terror operations against Egypt and/or the U.S.. As for the Shah, he was deliberately overthrown by the U.S. in the framework of Brzezinski's Islamic fundamentalism strategy, with the CIA as an active participant. (See Dreyfus)
The key wrecker in this episode seems to be one Carson Dunbar, an FBI manager working in the FBI National Security Division who oversaw the activities of the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York City. Salem's two controllers were Louie Napoli and John Anticev, who reported to Dunbar. Even though Salem was supposedly providing good information, Dunbar "was reluctant to trust too much" in him. (Cell 70-71) Salem for his part did not want to wear a wire when talking to his terrorist confreres, since that would mean he would have to testify in court, which would put an end to his career as an infiltrator. Dunbar increasingly insisted that Salem wear a wire, and Salem kept refusing. This then led to the alleged "firing" of Salem as an FBI informant by Napoli, acting under pressure from Dunbar. The cover story" "... many people in the Bureau, especially street agents, blamed Dunbar for dropping Salem." (Cell 75) A more sophisticated interpretation would be that Dunbar was deliberately wrecking the surveillance of the terror cell. Was Dunbar a mole?
When alleged terror planner Ramzi Yousef comes on the scene, the INS inspector at the airport suggests that he be locked up. But by some strange coincidence "there was not enough room in the INS lockup, so he was released with the promise that he would turn up at a hearing later." (Cell 77)
When the terrorists in the cell decide that they need training, they turn to Garrett Wilson, former Army Ranger who worked as a military police officer at a naval base near Philadelphia. Wilson was an agent of NCIS, meaning naval intelligence. The idea was now supposedly that while Wilson provided the training -- allegedly for Jihad in Bosnia, which matched U.S. government policy at the time -- the FBI could monitor the comings and goings of the terrorists, and track each one of them to his home and job. Dunbar once again attempted sabotage: "Dunbar was concerned that the Bureau was training potential terrorists, holy warriors who may not be breaking the law now, but who might one day turn the skills they were acquiring against the U.S. ... Dunbar ... was uncomfortable with the entire mission." (Cell 88) Because of these scruples, Dunbar was able to contrive an outcome in which the terrorist got their training, while the FBI was deprived of the promised harvest of valuable information. On a certain weekend in January 1993, about a month before the WTC bombing, the terrorists had all gathered on a farm near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The FBI had the place staked out and surrounded. All that was needed was the patience to wait until the terrorists got into their cars and drove off for home, and the FBI would know precisely where each of them lived and slept, making it possible to roll up the entire cell on demand. But at this critical moment, Dunbar decided that this was nothing but a waste of manpower. He called all the FBI agents back to New York, preventing them from tailing their suspects home. He also wanted to dump the entire investigation on the FBI's Newark office, washing his hands of it.
The way was now clear for the attack on the WTC a few weeks later. The FBI had thoroughly bungled the case:
Thus far the coverup, which appears damning enough in its own way. But The Cell constitutes only a limited hangout, conceding incompetence in the hopes of obscuring real treason. The procedure is not a new one, having been outlined some four hundred years ago by Paolo Sarpi of Venetian intelligence, who perfected the technique of speaking well of someone while pretending to speak ill. The technique amounts to criticizing a valued asset because he beats his wife, while remaining silent on the fact that he is also a serial killer.
We get far closer to reality with the following article by Ralph Blumenthal from the New York Times which appeared on October 28, 1993:
Salem was later given $1.5 million by the FBI to keep his mouth shut. This extraordinary article, and the transcripts upon which it is based, leave no doubt that a faction within the FBI was determined to have the first WTC bombing take place, aru:1 sabotaged any and all serious law enforcement efforts which non-witting FBI personnel and New York police undertook in good faith to try to avoid this disaster. FBI managers wanted a real bomb, and at the same time wrecked the surveillance operation that had been watching the terrorist cell. So far as is known, none of the FBI moles involved has ever been called to account. The Kean-Hamilton commission has nothing whatever to say about this "intelligence failure." In any sane society, the active participation of the FBI in the first WTC bomb plot conspiracy would have been the occasion for the breakup of this dysfunctional agency, or at the very least a thorough purge of the officials involved. The silence of the 9/11 commission on this matter is yet another indicator of its moral and conceptual bankruptcy.
OKLAHOMA CITY
The attack on the Federal Building in Oklahoma City killed 168 people, and marked a definite escalation in the pattern of synthetic terrorism. Here many of the components of the 9/11 attacks were experimented with and tested, partly to gauge the degree to which the public would believe that the techniques being used were what the FBI claimed that they were. Local media coverage concurred that there had been more than one explosion at the Federal Building, and at first the national media attempted to suggest that a Middle East terror organization had been involved. Soon Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were arrested, and McVeigh in particular was subjected to a thorough demonization by the controlled corporate media. The casualties and building damage were attributed according to the official account to a single truck bomb containing some 4,800 pounds of ammonium nitrate transported in a Ryder van, and parked in front of the building. All reference to multiple explosions soon disappeared. Retired Brigadier General Benton Partin of the U.S. Air Force, an expert in explosives, including nuclear detonations, came forward with a convincing analysis showing that the official explanation was physically impossible, given what is known about the propagation of a shock wave through the atmosphere. Air, Partin stressed, is a very inefficient coupling mechanism when it comes to directing such a shock wave against heavily reinforced concrete beams and columns. Blast damage potential, according to his analysis, decreases more rapidly than an inverse function of the cube of the distance, so there was no way that a fertilizer bomb could have accounted for the extensive damage observed. Partin concluded:
"The Murrah Federal Building was not destroyed by one sole truck bomb. The major factor in its destruction appears to have been detonation of explosives carefully placed at four critical junctures on supporting columns within the building. The only possible reinforced concrete structural failure solely attributable to the truck bomb was the stripping out of the ceilings of the first and second floors in the 'pit' area behind columns B4 and By. Even this may have been caused by a demolition charge at column B3. It is truly unfortunate that a separate and independent bomb damage assessment was not made during the cleanup -- before the building was demolished on May 23 and hundreds of truck loads of debris were hauled away, smashed down, and covered with dirt behind a security fence .... All ambiguity with respect to the use of supplementing demolition charges and the type of truck used could be quickly resolved if the FBI were required to release the surveillance camera coverage of this terribly tragic event." ( http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCH ... IN/ok2.htm )
Soon after the explosion, Controlled Demolition Inc. was called in to destroy those parts of the building which had remained standing, and to speedily dispose of all the rubble of the building. This, of course, prefigures the blatant tampering with a crime scene which became the hallmark of Mayor Giuliani's approach to the World Trade Center.
We need have no illusions about Gen. Partin, who belonged to a dubious organization called the Rushmore Foundation, which occupied itself with working with and studying the right-wing militias that proliferated during the 1990s.
Partin made special reference to the problems posed by tampering with the crime scene in a July 30, 1995 letter to GOP Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. Here Partin wrote that "no government law enforcement agency should be permitted to demolish, smash, and bury evidence of a counterterrorism sting operation, sabotage, or terrorist attack without a thorough examination by an independent, technically competent agency. If an aircraft crashed because of a bomb, or a counterterrorism sting or an FAA controller error, the FAA would not be permitted to gather and bury the evidence. The National Transportation Safety Board would have been called in to conduct an investigation and where possibly every piece of debris would have been collected and arrayed to determine cause of failure." But nobody in power was willing to protect the crime scene or force the FBI to disgorge the evidence it had sequestered. The suggestible public had been given a spectacular example of how fragile steel-reinforced concrete buildings are supposed to be in the delusional world of synthetic terrorism, and the precedent of bringing in Controlled Demolition to destroy the evidence had also been established for all to see. These advances on the part of the terrorist controllers would become components in the future synthetic terrorism of 9/11.
Before leaving Oklahoma City, we should recall that the prevalent form of counter-gangs which were fielded during the 1990s by the intelligence agencies of the U.S. and Britain was precisely these right wing militias. They were a widespread phenomenon during that decade but now, from the point of view of the controlled corporate media, they have simply disappeared. But such a large recruiting ground for trained manpower does not disappear from one decade to the next. Some of the case officers who directed the duped rank and file of the right-wing militias have doubtless found their way into the clandestine ops/special forces element which made its contribution to 9/11.
TWA 800
On July 17, 1996, TWA flight 800, a Boeing 747, crashed off the coast of Long Island, killing all 230 persons on board. Pierre Salinger, the former White House press secretary to President Kennedy and a former ABC newsman, soon came forward with the charge that the plane had been destroyed by a U.S. Navy missile which had gone astray. At a press conference in Paris, Salinger offered a 69-page document and a set of radar images to bolster his case. The FBI, Pentagon and federal air safety investigators simply rejected this theory, which spread through the Internet following the July 17, 1996 crash. National Transportation Safety Board Chairman James Hall called Salinger's allegations "irresponsible." Salinger claimed the 'missile' was fired during a "super- secret" U.S. Navy exercise off Long Island and was meant to target a Tomahawk missile, but hit Flight 800 instead when it "lost its lock on its original target." They alleged that the missile was either a kinetic energy missile or a continuous rod missile; the continuous rod missile would "slice through" the plane. Salinger alleged that witnesses monitoring secret Navy anti-terrorism exercises heard a male voice say, "Oh, my God, I just hit that plane." Salinger also asserted that two Russian satellites active above the scene of the disaster had recorded images showing a missile hitting the TWA aircraft. Salinger's personal stature makes it necessary to take his charges seriously, but this case has remained clouded by mystery. (CNN, March 13, 1997)
U.S. SPECIAL FORCES SERGEANT ALl MOHAMED: BIN LADEN'S PERSONAL ASSISTANT
The other detail about the 1993 WTC bombing which we need to know is that the bombers were in fact trained by the picaresque Sergeant Ali Mohammed of the United States Army Special Forces. At different stages of his colorful career, Mohamed worked, or seemed to work, for the Egyptian Army, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the CIA, the FBI, the U.S. Army Special Forces, the al Kifah Refugee Services Office, the Afghan mujaheddin and Osama Bin Laden.
Ali Mohamed was born in Egypt in 1952. He attended the Military Academy in Cairo and gained promotion in the Egyptian Special Forces and military intelligence, rising to the rank of major. In 1981 he came to train with the U.S. green berets at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. While still in Egypt, he had become associated with the blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman, who was allegedly part of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. It was four officers from Ali Mohamed's unit who carried out the October 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Ali Mohamed was attending courses in Fort Bragg at the time, and he was never implicated in the plot. But, supposedly because he was considered a sympathizer with the assassins, Ali Mohamed was obliged to resign his commission.
In 1984, Ali Mohamed began working as a security adviser for Egypt Air. He tried to go to work for the CIA, but after a short time on the job he was dumped for having unreported contacts with Hezbollah, and his name was placed on the State Department watch list. Despite this, he was nevertheless allowed to enter the U.S. in 1986. Ali Mohamed married an American woman who worked in Silicon Valley, and became an American citizen, despite his well-established terrorist links.
In 1986, Ali Mohamed enlisted in the U.S. Army Special Forces, despite still being on the watch list. He was recruited by Lt. Col. Steve Neely to give lectures on Islamic culture and politics to the anti- in Laden units being trained at Fort Bragg.
In 1987, Ali Mohamed told Lt. Col. Neely that he wanted to use a 30-day leave to go to Afghanistan, where guerrilla warfare was raging against the Soviet Red Army occupiers. This might have created a grave incident with the Soviets, and Lt. Col. Neely sent a report about Mohamed's plan to his superiors, who failed to intervene. When Mohamed came back from Afghanistan, he told Lt. Col. Neely that he had taken part in combat and had wiped out more than one Russian patrol. Neely composed a report on Mohamed's findings about the Soviet spetsatz special forces. Ali Mohamed left the army when his enlistment expired, but he remained in the reserves. Ali Mohamed was in the Fort Bragg 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) throughout this period. A retired special ops source has stated that particularly this unit involves a virtual lifetime, informal membership; "they never drop off the radar screen." From 1989 to 1992-93, Ali Mohamed gave paramilitary training in the New York City area to the "Islamic terror" clique convicted for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. It was he who trained Nosair, and he might also have been the source of the secret documents found in Nosair's apartment. (The Cell 140 ff) The training took place at an Islamist center in Brooklyn. According to the London Independent, a CIA internal review conducted in 1998 would reveal that the Agency was "partly culpable" for the WTC bomb of 1993.
Another of Sgt. Ali Mohamed's supervisors at Fort Bragg was Col. Norville de Atkine of the Fort Bragg Special Forces School, who later turned up as the co-author with anti- Moslem agitator Daniel Pipes - -appointed by Bush to the board of the U.S. Institute of Peace -- in a 1995 piece entitled "Middle Eastern Studies: What Went Wrong" in Pipes' Middle East Quarterly.
Ali Mohamed now attempted once more to go to work for the CIA. Starting in 1990, he attempted to enter the FBI as a translator. During his interview process he told the FBI about a passport- forging operation run by Hamas, and became an FBI informant. Twice during the early 1990s, Ali Mohamed brought the person the corporate media today call Bin Laden's right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to the U.S. for fund-raising tours in California. The second tour came in 1995, exactly the time Zawahiri and his brother were beginning the mujahideen deployment into the Balkans under protection of corrupted networks within NATO. This channel became a key component of the NATO-run KLA guerrillas in Kosovo. Also in 1995, Ali Mohamed had applied for a security job in the high security area of a Department of Defense subcontractor near his home in Santa Clara, CA. He was interviewed three times by the Defense Security Service (DSS). Ali Mohamed's friend in Santa Clara, Abu El-Dahab, ran a phone patch communications link for the alleged "bin Laden Network" around the world.
In 1991, Ali Mohamed worked as a personal assistant to Osama Bin Laden, helping with security and other matters when Bin Laden moved his operation from Pakistan to Khartoum, Sudan. Ali Mohammed performed other services for Bin Laden. "In 1992, I conducted military and basic explosives training for al Qaeda in Afghanistan," Ali Mohamed told U.S. authorities in 1999. "I also conducted intelligence training for al Qaeda. I taught my trainees how to create cell structures that could be used for operations." (The Cell 145) Supposedly the FBI, in the person of agent John Zindt, got its first news of al Qaeda from an interview with Ali Mohamed in May 1993. Toward the end of the 1990s, the FBI would arrest Ali Mohamed as the prelude to putting him on the permanent payroll as an informer.
In 1993, Ali Mohamed, who was traveling in the company of an al Qaeda terrorist, was arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP); the FBI intervened, with Ali Mohamed's FBI case officer asking the RCMP to release Mohamed. According to the Toronto Globe and Mail, Ali Mohamed was "working with U.S. counter-terrorist agents, playing a double or triple game, when he was questioned in 1993."
Patrick J. Fitzgerald who prosecuted Ali Mohamed twice as U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois, told the 9/11 commission that Ali Mohamed was a top al Qaeda agent who "trained most of al Qaeda's top leadership" including "the persons 'who would later carry out the 1993 World Trade center bombing."
Ali Mohamed was put on trial in 2000 for his role in the 1998 bombings of U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which the Washington establishment had rushed to blame on Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda, in part because of their sophisticated coordination. Ali Mohamed was allowed to cop a plea bargain. As part of the deal, Mohamed revealed that he had trained the 1993 WTC bombers. According to a State Department summary of Ali Mohamed's testimony, he was ordered by the FBI in 1994 to fly from Kenya to New York, and he complied. He was debriefed by an FBI agent in the context of the upcoming trial of the blind Sheikh Abdel Rahman on charges stemming from the 1993 WTC attack. Mohamed stated: "I flew back to the United States, spoke to the FB1, but I didn't disclose everything that I knew."
After Ali Mohamed had been released by the RCMP on orders from the FBI, he flew to Nairobi, Kenya, where he photographed the U.S. Embassy. According to Mohamed's 2000 confession, "Bin Laden looked at the picture of the American Embassy and pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber." [3] Another cluster of attacks ascribed to Bin Laden was the bombings of U.S. East African embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
In the 9/11 commission's report we read: "As early as December, 1993, a team of al Qaeda operatives had begun casing targets in Nairobi for future attacks. It was led by Ali Mohamed, a former Egyptian army officer who had moved to the 1Jnited States in the mid-1980s, enlisted in the U.S. Army, and became an instructor at Fort Bragg. He had provided guidance and training to extremists at the Farouq Mosque in Brooklyn, including some who were subsequently convicted in the February 1993 attack on the World trade Center." (68)
Since September 11th, many publicly available leads pointing to Bin Laden in fact draw on the corrupted investigation and trial results from the 1993 WTC and 1998 African embassy bombings, a timeframe in which Ali Mohamed was in repeated contact with the FBI and Department of Defense, and was permitted to operate in the modus operandi of an officially sanctioned rogue intelligence operative. Ali Mohamed must be considered one of the most successful double agents of the party of international terror ensconced in the U.S. government.
EGYPTAIR 990: THE DEBUT OF GLOBAL HAWK?
October 31, 1999 was Halloween, and this day was marked by the mysterious crash of Egyptair flight 990, a Boeing 767 bound from New York's JFK to Cairo. At a little before 2 AM, the plane abruptly descended from its normal altitude of 33,000 feet and, after some desperate maneuvers, crashed into the sea. The U.S. government, in the person of the National Transportation Safety Board, alleged that the plane had been deliberately crashed by Co-pilot Gameel al-Batouti. The U.S. case was built on the cockpit voice recorder, which, the NTSB claimed, had registered Batouti's Islamic prayer, "I rely on God," just before the plane started its dive, and again at several points on the way down. Batouti was thus accused of being the first Islamist suicide pilot of the current phase. The Egyptian government rejected this explanation, and demanded a more objective investigation.
Of this incident, the 9/11 commission writes: "In late 1999, a great deal of discussion took place in the media about the crash off the coast of Massachusetts of Egyptair Flight 990, a Boeing 767. The most plausible explanation that emerged was that one of the pilots had gone berserk, seized the controls, and flown the aircraft into the sea. After the 1999-2000 millennium alerts, when the nation had relaxed, Clarke held a meeting of his Counterterrorism Security Group devoted largely to the possibility of a possible [sic] airline hijacking by al Qaeda." (345) Clarke, as we see, was always anxious to build up the reputation of al Qaeda in the U.S. government. The 9/11 commission also does not mention that this flight carried a group of Egyptian military officers who had just been trained in the United States to fly Apache helicopters, despite strenuous objections on the part of the government of Israel. (von Bulow 207 ff; 264 n. 204)
This case became widely known because of an article by William Langewiesche in the Atlantic Monthly which was published shortly after 9/11 ("The Crash of Egyptair 990," November 2001). According to Langewiesche, the supposed "suicide bomber" was a 60-year old bon vivant three months away from his retirement. He was married and had five children, one of whom was a girl who suffered from lupus but who had been receiving successful treatment in Los Angeles. Batouti had a comfortable home in Cairo and a vacation home by the Mediterranean. He was carrying with him an automobile tire he had bought in New Jersey the day before, and had a number of Viagra samples to distribute to his friends as gifts. Any attempt to depict this man as a suicide pilot is destined to shipwreck on the shoals of absurdity.
According to Langewiesche's tendentious account, at 1:48 the flight's pilot, Captain Habashi, went to the bathroom, leaving Batouti alone at the controls. At 1:48:30 an unintelligible sound was recorded on the CVR, which he claims was "control it" or "hydraulic." The word was probably in English, with three syllables, and the accent was on the second syllable. What this might mean remains a mystery. Then Batouti repeated four times as the aircraft descended: "I rely on God."
Absolutely no Cockpit Voice Recorders from 9/11 have ever been made available in full to the general public or to researchers; the FBI and the government obviously have a great deal to hide. If those CVRs could speak, they might sound something like this dialogue:
Perhaps Egyptair 990 was no longer under the control of its pilots, but was now being remotely controlled by the U.S. Force's Global Hawk system, the same technology used to guide the Predator drone used in Afghanistan about which Richard Clarke had so much to say at the 9/11 commission in Apri1 2004. Perhaps Egyptair 990 was the Boeing 767 chosen for the dress rehearsal for 9/11. In the light of subsequent events, this hypothesis is far more credible than the absurd explanation espoused by the NTSB and its minion, Langewiesche.
It was later found from the Flight Data Recorder that the elevators on the tail were split, with one in position to lower the nose of the plane, and the other positioned to raise it. "The ailerons on both wings had assumed a strange upswept position, normally never seen on an airplane." (46) These anomalies did not interest the NTSB, which had espoused the "suicide pilot" thesis.
The Egyptian representatives at the NTSB proceedings pointed out that when Batouti idled the engines, it was to keep from gaining speed as the plane had begun its dive. When he cut the engines, Batouti was carrying out the prescribed restart procedure, because he erroneously believed -- based on the low oil pressure warning light that was flashing in the cockpit -- that the engines had flamed out. Habashi was apparently under the same impression. When Habashi called on him to pull, Batouti did so, as the FDR showed. Despite so much uncertainty, the U.S. government arrogantly pushed forward with its own improbable version of the event -- Vice President Al Gore reportedly angered Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak during his state visit to Washington by making a crack about "the suicide flight." The reality may have been the debut of Global Hawk as a system for synthetic terrorism.
Tarek Selim, the chief pilot of Egypt Air, told a British reporter that the plane was going so fast that it must somehow have lost its tail assembly. Selim called the FBI's theory that one of the pilots had deliberately crashed the plane in a suicide action as "ridiculous" and "nonsense." Selim's view was that the Egyptian aircraft "had been brought down by either a bomb or a missile that hit the plane's tail." (Al-Ahram Weekly, The Guardian, November 26, 1999)
As for Langewiesche, the primitive level of his propaganda style can be seen in the passage in which he attempts to win his readers' gullible devotion for the NTSB. According to its apologist Langewiesche, the NTSB is shielded from the political currents of Washington; it "represents the most progressive American thinking on the role and character of good government " (44) Langewiesche goes on: "In part because the NTSB seems so lean, and in part because by its very definition it advocates for the 'right' causes, it receives almost universally positive press coverage. The NTSB is technocratic. It is clean. It is Government Lite." (44) Egypt Air, by contrast, is portrayed as a sinister enterprise, operating out of Stalinist-style office buildings, which refuses to be privatized. Our reporter's lack of impartiality could hardly be more evident. Of course, the specialty of the NTSB in the 1990s was to run interference for the asset-strippers and corporate wreckers who had taken over the freight railways of this country with every intention of running them into the ground while extracting the maximum of loot from the deteriorating fixed capital. They did this by ruling that trainwrecks were human error, and not the fault of the railroads. One such case was the February 17, 1996 crash of a freight train with a local commuter train on the Chesapeake and Ohio tracks near Silver Spring, Maryland. Eleven persons were killed and 24 were injured when an Amtrak train collided with a Maryland Rail Commuter (MARC) train. The cause of the crash was clearly the railroad's lack of upkeep on the signal system, but the NTSB ruled that the cause was human error -on the part of the engineer who was dead. The NTSB is mandated by law to provide a timely accident investigation for all fatal transportation mishaps in the U.S. or involving U.S. carriers abroad; so far the NTSB has failed to report on the four plane crashes believed to have occurred on 9/11. Perhaps it is not so well insulated from dirty Washington politics as it would like to make people think. Langewiesche established his credentials for dishonesty so well in this article that he was immediately assigned to cover the WTC crime scene, where he managed to write 200 pages without saying anything about the illegal removal of evidence in a criminal case that was going on all around him, as we will soon see.
AMERICAN 587
Two months after 9/11, American Airlines Flight 587 -- an Airbus 300-600 -- left John F. Kennedy International Airport en route to the Dominican Republic. Less than three minutes after takeoff, the aircraft crashed in a blazing inferno in the heart of a Queens neighborhood. All 265 people aboard perished. According to the NTSB, the tail fin and rudder of the plane sheared off as it accelerated. This was the second deadliest crash in U.S. history, but it also "was the first example where we had an in-flight failure of a major structural component of an aircraft that in fact was made of composite materials," said National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Chairwoman Marion Blakey.
In the case of American Airlines Flight 587, federal officials seemed interested in avoiding the question of terrorism, and so they released detailed information about the cockpit voice recorder within less than 36 hours. (Philadelphia Daily News, November 15, 2001) While this crash also remains very suspicious, and exhibits some technical parallels to Egyptair 890, it appears impossible to come to a definite conclusion at this time as to what causes were involved.
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Notes:
3. Peter Dale Scott, "9/11 Commission Misses FBI's Embarrassing al Qaeda Dealings," http://www.dissidentvoice.org , June 27, 2004.
BRITISH TERROR SCHOOLS FOR PATSIES
A window into the London state-sponsored synthetic terror milieu came in December 2001, when British authorities were forced to arrest and question Mark Yates, a self- styled security expert who ran a firearms training camp in Alabama, Yates was suspected of helping Islamic terrorist patsies from Britain who were to hone their marksmanship skills on American soil before going off to fight for Islamic causes around the globe. Yates, a British bodyguard and firearms trainer who had operations in both the United Kingdom and the United States, allegedly offered "live fire" weapons training in America for aspiring holy warriors. British police thought that Yates was involved on the U.S. end of the "Ultimate Jihad Challenge" training program offered on the London market by the Sakina Security Services company, owned by Suleiman Bilal Zain-ul-abidin. Yates, who was also the operations and training director at the Ground Zero firearms training camp outside Marion, Alabama, denied everything. "Ultimate Jihad Challenge" included instruction in "art of bone breaking," and learning to "improvise explosive devices." British Moslems would be given the opportunity to squeeze off up to 3,000 rounds at a shooting range in the United States before heading off to fight for Islamic causes around the world. "All serious firearms training must be done overseas" because of British gun laws, advertising for the course noted. British prosecutors said their investigators had searched Zain-ul-abidin's apartment and seized documents believed to be related to suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network, anti-Semitic material and what appeared to be disabled firearms, including a rifle and two handguns. The Sunday Telegraph reported about another military training course, this time at a secret camp near the village of Yetgoch in southern Wales. Young Moslems and others learned how to use Uzi machine guns at the camp, which was run by Trans Global Security International.
The reports of the Welsh training camp rekindled a debate in Britain over how the UK had become a hotbed for military recruitment by radical Islamic elements. Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammed, a firebrand Islamic leader in London, founder of the fundamentalist al-Muhajiroun organization, and Bin Laden's sometime spokesman, said in 2000 that between 1,800 and 2,000 British Moslems were going abroad each year for military training. "We find young men in university classes or mosques, invite them for a meal and discuss ... ongoing attacks being suffered by Moslems in Chechnya, Palestine or Kashmir," Bakri Mohammed said. "We ... make them understand their duty to support the jihad (holy war) struggle verbally, financially and, if they can, physically in order to liberate their homeland." Bakri's al-Muhajiroun group, like al Qaeda, advocated wiping out the world's 50-plus existing Moslem-majority states and replacing them with a single "khilafah" (caliphate), or Islamic state. (Sunday Telegraph, MSNBC, December 27, 2001)
Satellite phone records of a phone used by Osama bin Laden during 1996-98, revealed that "Britain was at the heart of the terrorist's planning for his worldwide campaign of murder and destruction," according to the London Sunday Times. Bin Laden and his most senior aides made more calls to Britain than to any other country; they made more than 260 calls from Afghanistan to 27 numbers in Britain. According to documents from the trial of the U.S. east African embassy bombings, the telephone was bought in 1996 with the help of Dr Sa ad al Fagih, 45, the head of the London-based Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia. Al Fagih had been regularly used by the BBC as an expert on Bin Laden. His credit card was also used to buy more than 3,000 minutes of pre-paid airtime. The records showed calls to ten other countries, the next most frequent after the UK being Yemen. There were no calls to Iraq. (London Sunday Times, March 24, 2002)
AL QAEDA AND LONDONISTAN
The role of London as the leading center of Islamic radicalism has been an open secret for years, but has never been reported by the U.S. controlled corporate media. In the nineteenth century, when Mazzini and Marx operated out of London, the slogan was that "England supports all revolutions but her own." In the post-colonial world, the British have found it to their advantage to encourage violent movements which could be used for destabilizations and assassinations in the former colonies, which their ex-masters did not want to see become strong and effective modern states. Between 1995 and 1999, protests were lodged by many countries concerning the willingness of the British government to permit terror groups to operate from British territory. Among the protestors were: Israel, Algeria, Turkey, Libya, Yemen, India, Egypt, France, Peru, Germany, Nigeria, and Russia. This is a list which, if widely known, might force certain U.S. radio commentators to change their world picture about who is soft on terrorism.
A number of groups which were cited as terrorist organizations by the U.S. State Department had their headquarters in London. Among them were the Islamic Group of Egypt, led by Bin Laden's current right-hand man, Zawahiri, who was a known participant in the plot to assassinate Egyptian President Sadat; this was also the group which had murdered foreign tourists at Luxor in an attempt to wreck the Egyptian tourist industry. Also present in London were Al Jihad of Egypt, Hamas of Palestine, the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) of Algeria (responsible for large-scale massacres in that country), the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), which attacked targets in Turkey, and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (Tamil Tigers) of Sri Lanka, who assassinated Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Ghandi. Sheikh Bakri, Bin Laden spokesman's spokesman, was openly active in London into mid-1998 and later; he gave a press conference after the bombings of the U.S. East African embassies. The killings of figures like Sadat and Rajiv Ghandi should indicate the scale of the destabilization in developing countries of which some of these groups are capable.
Non-Anglo-Saxon press organs have from time to time pointed up the role of London in worldwide subversion. "The track of ... the GIA leader in Paris leads to Great Britain. The British capital has served as logistical and financial base for the terrorists," wrote Le Figaro on Nov. 3, 1995, in the wake of a murderous terror attack carried out in France. A report by the French National Assembly in October 2001 alleged that London played the key role as clearinghouse for money laundering of criminal and terrorist organizations. On March 3, 1996: Hamas bombed a market in Jerusalem, leaving 12 Israelis dead. A British newspaper reported soon after: "Israeli security sources say the fanatics ... are funded and controlled through secret cells operating here. ... Military chiefs in Jerusalem detailed how Islamic groups raised £7 million in donations from British organizations." (Daily Express, London, March 5, 1996)
In the midst of a campaign of destabilization against Egypt in the mid-1990s, the semi- official organ of the Egyptian government pointed out that "Britain has become the number one base in the world for international terrorism." (Al Ahram, Cairo, September 7, 1996) Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak noted that "... some states, like Britain, give political asylum to terrorists, and these states will pay the price for that." (Al-Hayat, September 18, 1996) British newspapers were also alarmed by the level of Islamic extremist activity they saw around them. By the late 1990s, there were so many Islamic extremists in London that the city had acquired the nickname of "Londonistan." The leading right-wing paper in the UK wrote: "Britain is now an international center for Islamic militancy on a huge scale. ..and the capital is home to a bewildering variety of radical Islamic movements, many of which make no secret of their commitment to violence and terrorism to achieve their goals." (London Daily Telegraph, November 20, 1999) President Putin of Russia saw a direct link between the London Islamic scene and terrorism in his own country. He said in an interview with a German newsmagazine: "In London, there is a recruitment station for people wanting to join combat in Chechnya. Today -- not officially, but effectively in the open -- they are talking there about recruiting volunteers to go to Afghanistan." (Focus, September 2001)
Brixton Mosque was one of the notorious centers for terrorist recruitment in the heart of London. This was the home base of Zacharias Mousawi, the French citizen put on trial in Alexandria, Va. It was also the home of Richard Reid, the shoe bomber of December 2001. Imam Qureshi of Brixton and others were allowed by the British authorities to preach anti-U.S. sermons to the some 4,000 Moslem inmates in British prisons, and thus to recruit new patsies for the world-wide terror machine. According to Bakri, Bin Laden's spokesman, during the late 1990s 2,000 fighters were trained yearly, including many in the U.S. because of the lax firearms legislation. The rival of Brixton Mosque was the equally redoubtable Finsbury Mosque, the home of the Saudi demagogue al Masri, who was finally taken into custody in the spring of 2004. There is every reason to believe that London is one of the main recruiting grounds for patsies, dupes, fanatics, double agents, and other roustabouts of the terrorist scene.
AL QAEDA AND MI-5 AGAINST LIBYA
Muammar Qaddafi of Libya, who had been bombed by the U.S. in the mid-1980s, not coincidentally became a target of al Qaeda. In March 1994, Bin Laden supporters killed 2 German agents in Libya. In November 1996, there was an MI-5 assassination attempt against the Libyan dictator with the help of the local Bin Laden organization, in which several people were killed. Here is a prime example of al Qaeda being employed by UK intelligence for purposes of state sponsored terrorism with the goal of eliminating a political leader who was not appreciated by London. (Hollingsworth and Fielding) The conclusion is clear: al Qaeda is a subsidiary of Anglo-American intelligence.
According to the French authors Brisard and Dasquie, Bin Laden's controllers had been using him to cause trouble for Qaddafi since the early 1980s, when Bin Laden had demanded permission to set up a base of operations in Libya, but was rebuffed by Qaddafi. "Enraged by Libya's refusal, Bin Laden organized attacks inside Libya, including assassination attempts against Qadaffi," Dasquie told IPS press service. The French authors cited the Islamic Fighting Group, headquartered in London, as the Libyan opposition group most closely allied with Bin Laden. Author Dasquie told IPS, "Qadaffi even demanded that Western police institutions, such as Interpol, pursue the IFG and Bin Laden, but never obtained cooperation. Until this very day [late 2001], members of IFG openly live in London." In 1998, former MI5 officer David Shayler told reporters that the British secret services had financed the assassination attempt against Qadaffi. (Inter Press service, November 15, 2001)
A rare moment of truth about the infrastructure of international terrorism was provided in October 2001 by Qaddafi, who was aware of al Qaeda's track record of attempting to eliminate him in the service of the U.S. and UK. In an appearance on the popular Al-Jazeera program "The Opposite Direction," Qaddafi condemned the 9/11 attacks, and referred to Bin Laden's Arab Afghans as "stray dogs" and terrorists. But then Qaddafi began to talk about the support network for al Qaeda:
I am actually puzzled. I mean, if America were serious about eliminating terrorism, the first capital it should rock with cruise missiles is London.
Interviewer: London!?
Qaddafi: London. It is the center of terrorism. It gives safehousing to the terrorists. I mean, as long as America does not bomb London, I think the U.S. is not serious, and is using a double standard. I mean, on the contrary, London is far more dangerous than Kabul. How could it rock Kabul with missiles and leave London untouched? (Al-Jazeera, Qatar-Tripoli, October 25, 2001)
The interviewer, a former BBC employee, quickly changed the subject before the mercurial dictator could say more. At this time, al Jazeera was closely monitored by all the international wire services, since it had the best reporting from inside Afghanistan. But none of them reported these illuminating remarks from Qaddafi.
NEOCONS' PLAN FOR AL QAEDA'S GLOBAL FUTURE
Voices from the Washington neocon oligarchy leave no doubt that the U.S. establishment's reliance on al Qaeda as its tool for ordering world affairs is intended to be a long-term one. The neocon retired Army colonel Robert Killebrew considers al Qaeda as the "once and future threat, : since he believes that "the al Qaeda we will face in 2010 will be an even more dangerous threat to Americas than the al Qaeda our troops are fighting today." According to Killebrew, "we can expect that within a decade al Qaeda will open one, or possibly several, political fronts in predominantly Islamic states, transforming itself from a deadly but diffuse terrorist movement into implacably hostile governmental factions throughout the Middle East that will pose critical geostrategic challenges to America and our allies.... the political transformation of al Qaeda into a radical pan Islamic movement would divide the world between the progressive West and a number of deeply reactionary, nuclear-armed states, and raise the possibility of far more serious conflict." (Washington Post, August 8, 2004) Here we see the oligarchy's intent of employing the benighted ideology of al Qaeda to organize the Arab and Islamic worlds for their own destruction. As we will see, neocolonial and neo-imperial powers have always feared secular Arab nationalism of the Nasser type, and have been eager to foment fundamentalist alternatives in the hope of perpetuating backwardness and isolation. The big danger for the U.S. has always been that Arab oil producers would reach their own economic development accords with western Europe, Japan, and the larger third world nations, such as Brazil. Al Qaeda fanaticism makes precisely these types of understandings impossible, preventing the forms of cooperation which would do the most damage to U.S.. The U.S. is biggest backer of al Qaeda, in just the same way that the Bank of England, Royal Dutch Shell, the City of London, and Wall Street were the biggest boosters of Hitler: if you know that you may face an adversary, the reasoning goes, then try to make sure that adversary will have a raving, incompetent, fanatical leader who will be structurally incapable of making successful alliances with your other foes.
Perhaps this is what Bush 43, whose family tradition includes grandfather Prescott Bush's implication in the Thyssen Nazi financial infrastructure, meant when he said in late 2001 that the United States has "the best intelligence we can possibly have," and what Porter J. Goss, the Florida Republican who chaired the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in 2001, meant when he denied that any intelligence failure had taken place around 9/11. (R.W. Apple, New York Times, December 14, 2001)
PRELIMINARIES: TERRORISM IN THE 1990s
Guys, now you saw this bomb went off and you both known we could avoid that.
-- Emad Salem to the FBI, 1993
Synthetic terrorism is an enterprise that terrorist controllers often choose to escalate gradually, partly to enhance their own technical preparedness, and partly as a means of progressively degrading public intelligence while institutionalizing fantastic lies about what is going on. The Italian terrorism of 1967-1985, for example, which was directed by NATO intelligence, MI-6, the CIA, and SISMI, shows an unmistakable pattern of escalation, inasmuch as each terrorist attack became the stepping stone of the successive one, with an overall tendency towards larger and more complicated operations with higher and higher numbers of victims, reaching a culmination at Bologna in 1980. lf we look at terrorism in the U.S. during the 1990s, we see a similar pattern. One has the impression of looking at a crescendo of terror attacks, in which each new attack introduces new elements which will be important in the attacks to come. It is worth pointing out that, during the 1990s, few if any wealthy oligarchs became victims of terrorism; the dead were almost always the little people, the masses, and so it was to remain on 9/11. In addition, each new distortion accepted by the public increased the overall gullibility of the political system.
THE WORLD TRADE CENTER 1993: THE FBI SET IT UP AND LET IT HAPPEN
The bomb detonated in the underground parking garage at the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993 killed six people, resulted in injuries to a thousand more, and threw lower Manhattan into chaos. At the center of the terror cell was a bombmaker who had been in the Egyptian army. He was also a paid informer and provocateur for the FBl. Other participants in the terror operation had entered the country with the connivance of the CIA, despite the fact that normally they would not have been allowed in. The FBI was aware of every phase of the plot, but refused to exploit numerous opportunities to stop it. The first WTC bomb of 1993 went off with the full complicity of the FBl, which tried repeatedly to pass off the blame to the Sudanese mission to the United Nations. The Kean-Hamilton Commission has nothing to say about this.
A detailed narrative of these events has appeared under the title The Cell. It is a coverup, written by participants in the operation. This book ignores the central and most dramatic event of the entire affair, which was the publication of the tapes secretly made by FBl provocateur Emad Salem of his own conversations with his FBI controllers -tapes which he wisely surmised he might need later as an insurance policy. Salem appears to have been passed from British intelligence to the FBI.
Even without the Salem tapes, The Cell presents a story of criminal incompetence within the FBI. The story starts with the November 1990 assassination in New York City of Rabbi Meir Kahane, an Israeli terrorist leader who had founded the Jewsih Defense League several decades earlier. The accused assassin of Kahane was El Sayyid Nosai, an Egyptian fanatic. But Nosair was not just a drifting fanatic: when the police searched his apartment, "there were training manuals from the Army Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg. There were copies of teletypes that had been routed to the Secretary of the Army and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. How had Nosair come up with those? Clearly, he had a source in a sensitive position in the U.S. military." (Cell 45) Much more likely, his terrorist controller occupied a sensitive position in the U.S. military, as any fool can see.
Nosair's Arabic-language files were said to contain the detailed plan of a series of future terrorist acts, including the 1993 WTC bombing. But the FBI was not interested in having these documents translated; it simply put them into storage and ignored them until it was too late. This vital evidence, according to our authors, "entered a black hole."
Sheikh Abdel Rahman, known to Kean-Hamilton commission devo1:ees as the blind Sheikh, was a known terrorist, a friend of the CIA's favorite Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and of Osama Bin Laden. He had been placed under house arrest in Egypt. Nevertheless, he was allowed to enter the U.S., coming from Sudan. In the light of the subsequent demonization of the blind Sheikh as one of the key terrorist plotters of the 1990s, we are entitled to ask why he was allowed to come to the us in the first place. The preferred answer: "Abdel Rahman's visa was signed by a CIA officer stationed at the Sudanese consulate, and one theory advanced by FBI agents is that the Agency sponsored his immigration. The CIA, in that scenario, may have wanted to nurture its ties to the Egyptian fundamentalists in order to avoid a replay of Iran in 1979, when the overthrow of the Shah left U.S. intelligence out in the cold. Another theory was that the officer had 'gone bad."' (Cell 54) More likely, the CIA or the moles within it simply wanted to use the Sheikh for terror operations against Egypt and/or the U.S.. As for the Shah, he was deliberately overthrown by the U.S. in the framework of Brzezinski's Islamic fundamentalism strategy, with the CIA as an active participant. (See Dreyfus)
The key wrecker in this episode seems to be one Carson Dunbar, an FBI manager working in the FBI National Security Division who oversaw the activities of the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York City. Salem's two controllers were Louie Napoli and John Anticev, who reported to Dunbar. Even though Salem was supposedly providing good information, Dunbar "was reluctant to trust too much" in him. (Cell 70-71) Salem for his part did not want to wear a wire when talking to his terrorist confreres, since that would mean he would have to testify in court, which would put an end to his career as an infiltrator. Dunbar increasingly insisted that Salem wear a wire, and Salem kept refusing. This then led to the alleged "firing" of Salem as an FBI informant by Napoli, acting under pressure from Dunbar. The cover story" "... many people in the Bureau, especially street agents, blamed Dunbar for dropping Salem." (Cell 75) A more sophisticated interpretation would be that Dunbar was deliberately wrecking the surveillance of the terror cell. Was Dunbar a mole?
When alleged terror planner Ramzi Yousef comes on the scene, the INS inspector at the airport suggests that he be locked up. But by some strange coincidence "there was not enough room in the INS lockup, so he was released with the promise that he would turn up at a hearing later." (Cell 77)
When the terrorists in the cell decide that they need training, they turn to Garrett Wilson, former Army Ranger who worked as a military police officer at a naval base near Philadelphia. Wilson was an agent of NCIS, meaning naval intelligence. The idea was now supposedly that while Wilson provided the training -- allegedly for Jihad in Bosnia, which matched U.S. government policy at the time -- the FBI could monitor the comings and goings of the terrorists, and track each one of them to his home and job. Dunbar once again attempted sabotage: "Dunbar was concerned that the Bureau was training potential terrorists, holy warriors who may not be breaking the law now, but who might one day turn the skills they were acquiring against the U.S. ... Dunbar ... was uncomfortable with the entire mission." (Cell 88) Because of these scruples, Dunbar was able to contrive an outcome in which the terrorist got their training, while the FBI was deprived of the promised harvest of valuable information. On a certain weekend in January 1993, about a month before the WTC bombing, the terrorists had all gathered on a farm near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The FBI had the place staked out and surrounded. All that was needed was the patience to wait until the terrorists got into their cars and drove off for home, and the FBI would know precisely where each of them lived and slept, making it possible to roll up the entire cell on demand. But at this critical moment, Dunbar decided that this was nothing but a waste of manpower. He called all the FBI agents back to New York, preventing them from tailing their suspects home. He also wanted to dump the entire investigation on the FBI's Newark office, washing his hands of it.
The JTTF was just a whisper away from the World Trade Center plot. But once more Dunbar lost patience with the operation ... At that point, JTTF's jihad investigation was effectively dead in the water, killed by an investigative stroke of the pen. ( Cell 91)
The way was now clear for the attack on the WTC a few weeks later. The FBI had thoroughly bungled the case:
There were very few strangers to law enforcement among the men who blew up the World Trade Center. Mohammed Salameh and Mahmoud Abouhalima had been collared by Eddie Norris's detectives after the Rabbi Kahane murder, but then let go under pressure from the NYPD brass. JTTF's people had surveilled a number of the other bombers at the shooting range in Calverton, even before the Kahane case. Emad Salem had become a trusted member of the group's larger circle, with close links to Abdel Rahman, Nosair, Abouhalima and el Gabrowny. He'd been in the thick of the original 'twelve Jewish locations' plot and a hair's breadth away from the actual World Trade Center bombers. Tommy Corrigan's colleagues had tailed several more of their associates to the training camp in Harrisburg just a few months ago. In fact, the last of the surveillances had run up until just a few weeks before the bombing, when one group seemed to be asking the other if they knew how to get detonators ... the two cases were both shut down based on a series of FBI management concerns that were more administrative than exigent. (Cell 98)
Thus far the coverup, which appears damning enough in its own way. But The Cell constitutes only a limited hangout, conceding incompetence in the hopes of obscuring real treason. The procedure is not a new one, having been outlined some four hundred years ago by Paolo Sarpi of Venetian intelligence, who perfected the technique of speaking well of someone while pretending to speak ill. The technique amounts to criticizing a valued asset because he beats his wife, while remaining silent on the fact that he is also a serial killer.
We get far closer to reality with the following article by Ralph Blumenthal from the New York Times which appeared on October 28, 1993:
Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast
Law enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center, and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, an informer said after the blast.
The informer was to have helped the plotters build the bomb and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by an FBI supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Emad Salem, should be used, the informer said.
The account, which is given in the transcript of hundreds of hours of tape recordings that Mr. Salem secretly made of his talk with law-enforcement agents, portrays the authorities as being in a far better position than previously known to foil the February 26th bombings of New York's tallest towers.
Supervisor 'Messed It Up'
After the bombing, [Salem] resumed his undercover work. In an undated transcript of a conversation from that period, Mr. Salem recounts a talk he had had earlier with an agent about an unnamed FBI supervisor who, he said, "came and messed it up."
"He requested to meet me in the hotel," Mr. Salem says of the supervisor.
"He requested to make me testify, and if he didn't push for that, we'll be going building the bomb with a phony powder, and grabbing the people who was involved in it. But since you, we didn't do that."
The transcript quotes Mr. Salem as saying that he wanted to complain to FBI headquarters in Washington about the Bureau's failure to stop the bombing, but was dissuaded by an agent identified as John Anticev.
Mr. Salem said Mr. Anticev had told him, "He said, I don't think that the New York people would like the things out of the New York Office to go to Washington DC."
Another agent, identified as Nancy Floyd, does not dispute Mr. Salem's account, but rather appears to agree with it, saying of the 'New York people': "well, of course not, because they don't want to get their butts chewed."
Salem was later given $1.5 million by the FBI to keep his mouth shut. This extraordinary article, and the transcripts upon which it is based, leave no doubt that a faction within the FBI was determined to have the first WTC bombing take place, aru:1 sabotaged any and all serious law enforcement efforts which non-witting FBI personnel and New York police undertook in good faith to try to avoid this disaster. FBI managers wanted a real bomb, and at the same time wrecked the surveillance operation that had been watching the terrorist cell. So far as is known, none of the FBI moles involved has ever been called to account. The Kean-Hamilton commission has nothing whatever to say about this "intelligence failure." In any sane society, the active participation of the FBI in the first WTC bomb plot conspiracy would have been the occasion for the breakup of this dysfunctional agency, or at the very least a thorough purge of the officials involved. The silence of the 9/11 commission on this matter is yet another indicator of its moral and conceptual bankruptcy.
OKLAHOMA CITY
The attack on the Federal Building in Oklahoma City killed 168 people, and marked a definite escalation in the pattern of synthetic terrorism. Here many of the components of the 9/11 attacks were experimented with and tested, partly to gauge the degree to which the public would believe that the techniques being used were what the FBI claimed that they were. Local media coverage concurred that there had been more than one explosion at the Federal Building, and at first the national media attempted to suggest that a Middle East terror organization had been involved. Soon Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were arrested, and McVeigh in particular was subjected to a thorough demonization by the controlled corporate media. The casualties and building damage were attributed according to the official account to a single truck bomb containing some 4,800 pounds of ammonium nitrate transported in a Ryder van, and parked in front of the building. All reference to multiple explosions soon disappeared. Retired Brigadier General Benton Partin of the U.S. Air Force, an expert in explosives, including nuclear detonations, came forward with a convincing analysis showing that the official explanation was physically impossible, given what is known about the propagation of a shock wave through the atmosphere. Air, Partin stressed, is a very inefficient coupling mechanism when it comes to directing such a shock wave against heavily reinforced concrete beams and columns. Blast damage potential, according to his analysis, decreases more rapidly than an inverse function of the cube of the distance, so there was no way that a fertilizer bomb could have accounted for the extensive damage observed. Partin concluded:
"The Murrah Federal Building was not destroyed by one sole truck bomb. The major factor in its destruction appears to have been detonation of explosives carefully placed at four critical junctures on supporting columns within the building. The only possible reinforced concrete structural failure solely attributable to the truck bomb was the stripping out of the ceilings of the first and second floors in the 'pit' area behind columns B4 and By. Even this may have been caused by a demolition charge at column B3. It is truly unfortunate that a separate and independent bomb damage assessment was not made during the cleanup -- before the building was demolished on May 23 and hundreds of truck loads of debris were hauled away, smashed down, and covered with dirt behind a security fence .... All ambiguity with respect to the use of supplementing demolition charges and the type of truck used could be quickly resolved if the FBI were required to release the surveillance camera coverage of this terribly tragic event." ( http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCH ... IN/ok2.htm )
Soon after the explosion, Controlled Demolition Inc. was called in to destroy those parts of the building which had remained standing, and to speedily dispose of all the rubble of the building. This, of course, prefigures the blatant tampering with a crime scene which became the hallmark of Mayor Giuliani's approach to the World Trade Center.
We need have no illusions about Gen. Partin, who belonged to a dubious organization called the Rushmore Foundation, which occupied itself with working with and studying the right-wing militias that proliferated during the 1990s.
Partin made special reference to the problems posed by tampering with the crime scene in a July 30, 1995 letter to GOP Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. Here Partin wrote that "no government law enforcement agency should be permitted to demolish, smash, and bury evidence of a counterterrorism sting operation, sabotage, or terrorist attack without a thorough examination by an independent, technically competent agency. If an aircraft crashed because of a bomb, or a counterterrorism sting or an FAA controller error, the FAA would not be permitted to gather and bury the evidence. The National Transportation Safety Board would have been called in to conduct an investigation and where possibly every piece of debris would have been collected and arrayed to determine cause of failure." But nobody in power was willing to protect the crime scene or force the FBI to disgorge the evidence it had sequestered. The suggestible public had been given a spectacular example of how fragile steel-reinforced concrete buildings are supposed to be in the delusional world of synthetic terrorism, and the precedent of bringing in Controlled Demolition to destroy the evidence had also been established for all to see. These advances on the part of the terrorist controllers would become components in the future synthetic terrorism of 9/11.
Before leaving Oklahoma City, we should recall that the prevalent form of counter-gangs which were fielded during the 1990s by the intelligence agencies of the U.S. and Britain was precisely these right wing militias. They were a widespread phenomenon during that decade but now, from the point of view of the controlled corporate media, they have simply disappeared. But such a large recruiting ground for trained manpower does not disappear from one decade to the next. Some of the case officers who directed the duped rank and file of the right-wing militias have doubtless found their way into the clandestine ops/special forces element which made its contribution to 9/11.
TWA 800
On July 17, 1996, TWA flight 800, a Boeing 747, crashed off the coast of Long Island, killing all 230 persons on board. Pierre Salinger, the former White House press secretary to President Kennedy and a former ABC newsman, soon came forward with the charge that the plane had been destroyed by a U.S. Navy missile which had gone astray. At a press conference in Paris, Salinger offered a 69-page document and a set of radar images to bolster his case. The FBI, Pentagon and federal air safety investigators simply rejected this theory, which spread through the Internet following the July 17, 1996 crash. National Transportation Safety Board Chairman James Hall called Salinger's allegations "irresponsible." Salinger claimed the 'missile' was fired during a "super- secret" U.S. Navy exercise off Long Island and was meant to target a Tomahawk missile, but hit Flight 800 instead when it "lost its lock on its original target." They alleged that the missile was either a kinetic energy missile or a continuous rod missile; the continuous rod missile would "slice through" the plane. Salinger alleged that witnesses monitoring secret Navy anti-terrorism exercises heard a male voice say, "Oh, my God, I just hit that plane." Salinger also asserted that two Russian satellites active above the scene of the disaster had recorded images showing a missile hitting the TWA aircraft. Salinger's personal stature makes it necessary to take his charges seriously, but this case has remained clouded by mystery. (CNN, March 13, 1997)
U.S. SPECIAL FORCES SERGEANT ALl MOHAMED: BIN LADEN'S PERSONAL ASSISTANT
The other detail about the 1993 WTC bombing which we need to know is that the bombers were in fact trained by the picaresque Sergeant Ali Mohammed of the United States Army Special Forces. At different stages of his colorful career, Mohamed worked, or seemed to work, for the Egyptian Army, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the CIA, the FBI, the U.S. Army Special Forces, the al Kifah Refugee Services Office, the Afghan mujaheddin and Osama Bin Laden.
Ali Mohamed was born in Egypt in 1952. He attended the Military Academy in Cairo and gained promotion in the Egyptian Special Forces and military intelligence, rising to the rank of major. In 1981 he came to train with the U.S. green berets at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. While still in Egypt, he had become associated with the blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman, who was allegedly part of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. It was four officers from Ali Mohamed's unit who carried out the October 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Ali Mohamed was attending courses in Fort Bragg at the time, and he was never implicated in the plot. But, supposedly because he was considered a sympathizer with the assassins, Ali Mohamed was obliged to resign his commission.
In 1984, Ali Mohamed began working as a security adviser for Egypt Air. He tried to go to work for the CIA, but after a short time on the job he was dumped for having unreported contacts with Hezbollah, and his name was placed on the State Department watch list. Despite this, he was nevertheless allowed to enter the U.S. in 1986. Ali Mohamed married an American woman who worked in Silicon Valley, and became an American citizen, despite his well-established terrorist links.
In 1986, Ali Mohamed enlisted in the U.S. Army Special Forces, despite still being on the watch list. He was recruited by Lt. Col. Steve Neely to give lectures on Islamic culture and politics to the anti- in Laden units being trained at Fort Bragg.
In 1987, Ali Mohamed told Lt. Col. Neely that he wanted to use a 30-day leave to go to Afghanistan, where guerrilla warfare was raging against the Soviet Red Army occupiers. This might have created a grave incident with the Soviets, and Lt. Col. Neely sent a report about Mohamed's plan to his superiors, who failed to intervene. When Mohamed came back from Afghanistan, he told Lt. Col. Neely that he had taken part in combat and had wiped out more than one Russian patrol. Neely composed a report on Mohamed's findings about the Soviet spetsatz special forces. Ali Mohamed left the army when his enlistment expired, but he remained in the reserves. Ali Mohamed was in the Fort Bragg 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) throughout this period. A retired special ops source has stated that particularly this unit involves a virtual lifetime, informal membership; "they never drop off the radar screen." From 1989 to 1992-93, Ali Mohamed gave paramilitary training in the New York City area to the "Islamic terror" clique convicted for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. It was he who trained Nosair, and he might also have been the source of the secret documents found in Nosair's apartment. (The Cell 140 ff) The training took place at an Islamist center in Brooklyn. According to the London Independent, a CIA internal review conducted in 1998 would reveal that the Agency was "partly culpable" for the WTC bomb of 1993.
Another of Sgt. Ali Mohamed's supervisors at Fort Bragg was Col. Norville de Atkine of the Fort Bragg Special Forces School, who later turned up as the co-author with anti- Moslem agitator Daniel Pipes - -appointed by Bush to the board of the U.S. Institute of Peace -- in a 1995 piece entitled "Middle Eastern Studies: What Went Wrong" in Pipes' Middle East Quarterly.
Ali Mohamed now attempted once more to go to work for the CIA. Starting in 1990, he attempted to enter the FBI as a translator. During his interview process he told the FBI about a passport- forging operation run by Hamas, and became an FBI informant. Twice during the early 1990s, Ali Mohamed brought the person the corporate media today call Bin Laden's right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to the U.S. for fund-raising tours in California. The second tour came in 1995, exactly the time Zawahiri and his brother were beginning the mujahideen deployment into the Balkans under protection of corrupted networks within NATO. This channel became a key component of the NATO-run KLA guerrillas in Kosovo. Also in 1995, Ali Mohamed had applied for a security job in the high security area of a Department of Defense subcontractor near his home in Santa Clara, CA. He was interviewed three times by the Defense Security Service (DSS). Ali Mohamed's friend in Santa Clara, Abu El-Dahab, ran a phone patch communications link for the alleged "bin Laden Network" around the world.
In 1991, Ali Mohamed worked as a personal assistant to Osama Bin Laden, helping with security and other matters when Bin Laden moved his operation from Pakistan to Khartoum, Sudan. Ali Mohammed performed other services for Bin Laden. "In 1992, I conducted military and basic explosives training for al Qaeda in Afghanistan," Ali Mohamed told U.S. authorities in 1999. "I also conducted intelligence training for al Qaeda. I taught my trainees how to create cell structures that could be used for operations." (The Cell 145) Supposedly the FBI, in the person of agent John Zindt, got its first news of al Qaeda from an interview with Ali Mohamed in May 1993. Toward the end of the 1990s, the FBI would arrest Ali Mohamed as the prelude to putting him on the permanent payroll as an informer.
In 1993, Ali Mohamed, who was traveling in the company of an al Qaeda terrorist, was arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP); the FBI intervened, with Ali Mohamed's FBI case officer asking the RCMP to release Mohamed. According to the Toronto Globe and Mail, Ali Mohamed was "working with U.S. counter-terrorist agents, playing a double or triple game, when he was questioned in 1993."
Patrick J. Fitzgerald who prosecuted Ali Mohamed twice as U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois, told the 9/11 commission that Ali Mohamed was a top al Qaeda agent who "trained most of al Qaeda's top leadership" including "the persons 'who would later carry out the 1993 World Trade center bombing."
Ali Mohamed was put on trial in 2000 for his role in the 1998 bombings of U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which the Washington establishment had rushed to blame on Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda, in part because of their sophisticated coordination. Ali Mohamed was allowed to cop a plea bargain. As part of the deal, Mohamed revealed that he had trained the 1993 WTC bombers. According to a State Department summary of Ali Mohamed's testimony, he was ordered by the FBI in 1994 to fly from Kenya to New York, and he complied. He was debriefed by an FBI agent in the context of the upcoming trial of the blind Sheikh Abdel Rahman on charges stemming from the 1993 WTC attack. Mohamed stated: "I flew back to the United States, spoke to the FB1, but I didn't disclose everything that I knew."
After Ali Mohamed had been released by the RCMP on orders from the FBI, he flew to Nairobi, Kenya, where he photographed the U.S. Embassy. According to Mohamed's 2000 confession, "Bin Laden looked at the picture of the American Embassy and pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber." [3] Another cluster of attacks ascribed to Bin Laden was the bombings of U.S. East African embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
In the 9/11 commission's report we read: "As early as December, 1993, a team of al Qaeda operatives had begun casing targets in Nairobi for future attacks. It was led by Ali Mohamed, a former Egyptian army officer who had moved to the 1Jnited States in the mid-1980s, enlisted in the U.S. Army, and became an instructor at Fort Bragg. He had provided guidance and training to extremists at the Farouq Mosque in Brooklyn, including some who were subsequently convicted in the February 1993 attack on the World trade Center." (68)
Since September 11th, many publicly available leads pointing to Bin Laden in fact draw on the corrupted investigation and trial results from the 1993 WTC and 1998 African embassy bombings, a timeframe in which Ali Mohamed was in repeated contact with the FBI and Department of Defense, and was permitted to operate in the modus operandi of an officially sanctioned rogue intelligence operative. Ali Mohamed must be considered one of the most successful double agents of the party of international terror ensconced in the U.S. government.
EGYPTAIR 990: THE DEBUT OF GLOBAL HAWK?
October 31, 1999 was Halloween, and this day was marked by the mysterious crash of Egyptair flight 990, a Boeing 767 bound from New York's JFK to Cairo. At a little before 2 AM, the plane abruptly descended from its normal altitude of 33,000 feet and, after some desperate maneuvers, crashed into the sea. The U.S. government, in the person of the National Transportation Safety Board, alleged that the plane had been deliberately crashed by Co-pilot Gameel al-Batouti. The U.S. case was built on the cockpit voice recorder, which, the NTSB claimed, had registered Batouti's Islamic prayer, "I rely on God," just before the plane started its dive, and again at several points on the way down. Batouti was thus accused of being the first Islamist suicide pilot of the current phase. The Egyptian government rejected this explanation, and demanded a more objective investigation.
Of this incident, the 9/11 commission writes: "In late 1999, a great deal of discussion took place in the media about the crash off the coast of Massachusetts of Egyptair Flight 990, a Boeing 767. The most plausible explanation that emerged was that one of the pilots had gone berserk, seized the controls, and flown the aircraft into the sea. After the 1999-2000 millennium alerts, when the nation had relaxed, Clarke held a meeting of his Counterterrorism Security Group devoted largely to the possibility of a possible [sic] airline hijacking by al Qaeda." (345) Clarke, as we see, was always anxious to build up the reputation of al Qaeda in the U.S. government. The 9/11 commission also does not mention that this flight carried a group of Egyptian military officers who had just been trained in the United States to fly Apache helicopters, despite strenuous objections on the part of the government of Israel. (von Bulow 207 ff; 264 n. 204)
This case became widely known because of an article by William Langewiesche in the Atlantic Monthly which was published shortly after 9/11 ("The Crash of Egyptair 990," November 2001). According to Langewiesche, the supposed "suicide bomber" was a 60-year old bon vivant three months away from his retirement. He was married and had five children, one of whom was a girl who suffered from lupus but who had been receiving successful treatment in Los Angeles. Batouti had a comfortable home in Cairo and a vacation home by the Mediterranean. He was carrying with him an automobile tire he had bought in New Jersey the day before, and had a number of Viagra samples to distribute to his friends as gifts. Any attempt to depict this man as a suicide pilot is destined to shipwreck on the shoals of absurdity.
According to Langewiesche's tendentious account, at 1:48 the flight's pilot, Captain Habashi, went to the bathroom, leaving Batouti alone at the controls. At 1:48:30 an unintelligible sound was recorded on the CVR, which he claims was "control it" or "hydraulic." The word was probably in English, with three syllables, and the accent was on the second syllable. What this might mean remains a mystery. Then Batouti repeated four times as the aircraft descended: "I rely on God."
Absolutely no Cockpit Voice Recorders from 9/11 have ever been made available in full to the general public or to researchers; the FBI and the government obviously have a great deal to hide. If those CVRs could speak, they might sound something like this dialogue:
Habashi: What's happening? What's happening?
Batouti: I rely on God. I rely on God.
Habashi: What's happening, Gameel? What's happening?
Habashi: What is this? What is this? Did you shut the engines?
Habashi: Get away in the engines! ...shut the engines!
Batouti: It's shut.
Habashi: Pull! Pull with me! Pull with me! Pull with me!
[Silence]
Perhaps Egyptair 990 was no longer under the control of its pilots, but was now being remotely controlled by the U.S. Force's Global Hawk system, the same technology used to guide the Predator drone used in Afghanistan about which Richard Clarke had so much to say at the 9/11 commission in Apri1 2004. Perhaps Egyptair 990 was the Boeing 767 chosen for the dress rehearsal for 9/11. In the light of subsequent events, this hypothesis is far more credible than the absurd explanation espoused by the NTSB and its minion, Langewiesche.
It was later found from the Flight Data Recorder that the elevators on the tail were split, with one in position to lower the nose of the plane, and the other positioned to raise it. "The ailerons on both wings had assumed a strange upswept position, normally never seen on an airplane." (46) These anomalies did not interest the NTSB, which had espoused the "suicide pilot" thesis.
The Egyptian representatives at the NTSB proceedings pointed out that when Batouti idled the engines, it was to keep from gaining speed as the plane had begun its dive. When he cut the engines, Batouti was carrying out the prescribed restart procedure, because he erroneously believed -- based on the low oil pressure warning light that was flashing in the cockpit -- that the engines had flamed out. Habashi was apparently under the same impression. When Habashi called on him to pull, Batouti did so, as the FDR showed. Despite so much uncertainty, the U.S. government arrogantly pushed forward with its own improbable version of the event -- Vice President Al Gore reportedly angered Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak during his state visit to Washington by making a crack about "the suicide flight." The reality may have been the debut of Global Hawk as a system for synthetic terrorism.
Tarek Selim, the chief pilot of Egypt Air, told a British reporter that the plane was going so fast that it must somehow have lost its tail assembly. Selim called the FBI's theory that one of the pilots had deliberately crashed the plane in a suicide action as "ridiculous" and "nonsense." Selim's view was that the Egyptian aircraft "had been brought down by either a bomb or a missile that hit the plane's tail." (Al-Ahram Weekly, The Guardian, November 26, 1999)
As for Langewiesche, the primitive level of his propaganda style can be seen in the passage in which he attempts to win his readers' gullible devotion for the NTSB. According to its apologist Langewiesche, the NTSB is shielded from the political currents of Washington; it "represents the most progressive American thinking on the role and character of good government " (44) Langewiesche goes on: "In part because the NTSB seems so lean, and in part because by its very definition it advocates for the 'right' causes, it receives almost universally positive press coverage. The NTSB is technocratic. It is clean. It is Government Lite." (44) Egypt Air, by contrast, is portrayed as a sinister enterprise, operating out of Stalinist-style office buildings, which refuses to be privatized. Our reporter's lack of impartiality could hardly be more evident. Of course, the specialty of the NTSB in the 1990s was to run interference for the asset-strippers and corporate wreckers who had taken over the freight railways of this country with every intention of running them into the ground while extracting the maximum of loot from the deteriorating fixed capital. They did this by ruling that trainwrecks were human error, and not the fault of the railroads. One such case was the February 17, 1996 crash of a freight train with a local commuter train on the Chesapeake and Ohio tracks near Silver Spring, Maryland. Eleven persons were killed and 24 were injured when an Amtrak train collided with a Maryland Rail Commuter (MARC) train. The cause of the crash was clearly the railroad's lack of upkeep on the signal system, but the NTSB ruled that the cause was human error -on the part of the engineer who was dead. The NTSB is mandated by law to provide a timely accident investigation for all fatal transportation mishaps in the U.S. or involving U.S. carriers abroad; so far the NTSB has failed to report on the four plane crashes believed to have occurred on 9/11. Perhaps it is not so well insulated from dirty Washington politics as it would like to make people think. Langewiesche established his credentials for dishonesty so well in this article that he was immediately assigned to cover the WTC crime scene, where he managed to write 200 pages without saying anything about the illegal removal of evidence in a criminal case that was going on all around him, as we will soon see.
AMERICAN 587
Two months after 9/11, American Airlines Flight 587 -- an Airbus 300-600 -- left John F. Kennedy International Airport en route to the Dominican Republic. Less than three minutes after takeoff, the aircraft crashed in a blazing inferno in the heart of a Queens neighborhood. All 265 people aboard perished. According to the NTSB, the tail fin and rudder of the plane sheared off as it accelerated. This was the second deadliest crash in U.S. history, but it also "was the first example where we had an in-flight failure of a major structural component of an aircraft that in fact was made of composite materials," said National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Chairwoman Marion Blakey.
In the case of American Airlines Flight 587, federal officials seemed interested in avoiding the question of terrorism, and so they released detailed information about the cockpit voice recorder within less than 36 hours. (Philadelphia Daily News, November 15, 2001) While this crash also remains very suspicious, and exhibits some technical parallels to Egyptair 890, it appears impossible to come to a definite conclusion at this time as to what causes were involved.
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Notes:
3. Peter Dale Scott, "9/11 Commission Misses FBI's Embarrassing al Qaeda Dealings," http://www.dissidentvoice.org , June 27, 2004.