Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley
Posted: Tue Nov 19, 2013 7:20 am
PART 1 OF 3
CHAPTER I: THE MYTH OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
With the publication of the Report of the Commission to Investigate Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (also known as the Kean-Hamilton Commission after its chairman and vice- chairman), the pattern of coverup and incompetence on the part of the officially constituted investigative agencies of the United States Government is complete. Since September 11, 2001, no part of the United States Government has offered a convincing, coherent, complete explanation of the events of that day, and of other events related to them. Indeed, no US government agency has ever so much as proposed to prove the truth of the official account, even in the way that the Warren Commission attempted to demonstrate the veracity of its version of the Kennedy assassination.
The Kean-Hamilton Commission called no hostile witnesses, no skeptics, no devil’s advocates. It ignored a growing number of book-length studies which have appeared in English, French, German, and other languages around the world. It never invited to its plenum FBI whistle-blowers like Colleen Rowley (who shared Time Magazine’s Person of the Year honors at the end of 2002), nor did it call FBI agent Kenneth Williams, the author of the famous Phoenix memo, to testify in its plenary meetings. The Commission was, by contrast, happy to invite the obsessive anti-Iraq ideologue Laurie Mylroie, a fanatic so notorious that she is dismissed with contempt as “totally discredited” even by Richard Clarke in his book, Against All Enemies. (Clarke 232) As we will show at various points in this study, the Kean-Hamilton Commission represents a cynical and meticulously orchestrated exercise in coverup and obfuscation. The net overall result of the Kean-Hamilton Commission has been to obscure even those few relevant facts which had become well established in the mainstream media prior to its inception.
Before the Kean-Hamilton Commission, the chronology of events regarding the interplay among the Federal Aeronautics Administration (FAA), the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), and other government agencies had been fairly well established by the 9/11 truth movement. The deliberately doctored chronologies offered by the Kean-Hamilton staff have turned that clear picture into chaos. Before the Kean- Hamilton operation went to work, there was an important debate about whether phone calls received at the White House on the morning of September 11 had indicated that unauthorized persons were in possession of top-secret US government code words. The Kean-Hamilton Commission has now assured us that this crucial incident in effect never happened. Before Kean-Hamilton, Congressional Committees and the National Institute of Standards and Technology had been forced to grapple in public with the blatant anomalies of three modern steel skyscrapers collapsing on the same day as the result of fire – something that has happened on no other day of world history. For the Kean- Hamilton Commission, this problem simply does not exist – it has disappeared from the official narrative. No account has been taken of critical or skeptical commentaries, even when these have been the centerpieces of books which have reached the top of the best- seller charts in important countries like France, Germany, Italy, and elsewhere, or have been telecast in prime time in these same places. The demands of the bereaved families of 9/11 have been ignored – even though it was because of the persistent lobbying of these families that the Kean-Hamilton Commission ever came into being in the first place. A cruel hoax has been practiced on these families, and those who thought that an attempt to cooperate in good faith with the Kean-Hamilton Commission to guide it toward the truth have received a bitter disappointment. The Kean-Hamilton Commission in short has shown no decent respect for the opinions of mankind, and has submitted no important facts to a candid world.
The Kean-Hamilton Commission has turned out to be nothing more than a colossal exercise in begging the question. Everything that was controversial, everything that was dubious in the eyes of billions around the world has been simply assumed to be true and posited as the starting point for the entire inquiry. As a fallacy this has been around since the medieval schoolmen, who called it petitio principii. In the hands of the Kean- Hamilton Commission, begging the question is meant to work as an arrogant, bureaucratic act of superior power. Believe this, said the Inquisition, or be damned. Believe this, says the Kean-Hamilton Commission, or be vilified as a paranoid obsessed with conspiracies. Thus, when the 9/11 commission was created, it formed nine investigative teams. The first of these was entitled: “Al Qaeda and the Organization of the 9/11 Attack.” That is a clear case of rush to judgment and jumping to conclusions, since such a finding should be the end result of an inquiry, and not its starting point.
For the Kean-Hamilton Commission is not a contribution to scholarly debate. It is just as much a part of the US government’s assault on the world as an F-16 bombing Fallujah. For the Kean- Hamilton Commission is an act of ideological terrorism worthy of Senator Joe McCarthy. Behind it stands the taboo proclaimed by the figurehead of the regime:
It is a point of view at variance with the best moments in American history, as we intend to show. But no amount of bureaucratic arrogance has been able to paper over the manifold absurdities, the contradictions, the impossibilities, the outrageous flaws that infest the official version of the 9/11 events. The Kean-Hamilton Commission simply has no answer for questions about how the alleged hijackers were identified, how they were able to operate, why WTC Building 7 collapsed, why air defense was non-existent, what hit the Pentagon, what happened over Shanksville, what happened to the insider trading, and many more. For any serious, intelligent person – and there are many – the Kean- Hamilton pastiche can only be rejected.
The failure of the Kean-Hamilton Commission leaves the world with the imbecilic myth: the four airliners were hijacked by nineteen Arabs, from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Kuwait. Their squad leaders were Atta, Shehhi, Hanjour, and Jarrah. Their “mastermind” was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Their rear echelon was Ramzi Binalshib. Their guru was Osama Bin Laden, the terrorist pope who lives in a cave. From his distant grotto in the mountains of Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden, the diabolical genius of the twenty-first century, directed the worldwide network that attacked the United States.
THE SEPTEMBER CRIMINALS ARE STILL AT LARGE
At a deeper level, closer to the heart of the matter, the Kean-Hamilton has failed to indict the real September criminals. It leaves untouched the network of moles in the US government without whose efforts, both in preparation and in coverup, the events of 9/11 could never have happened. It has not identified the clandestine command center which directed the operation. It has taken not one step towards locating the technocrats of death who actually had the physical and technical capability to make these events happen, in contrast to the supermarket-caliber terrorists who are supposed to have caused them. All of these networks remain in place, and remain anxious to avoid detection. The September criminals and their project, the clash of civilizations in the form of a new Thirty Years War, remain at large, their desperation magnified, but their power undiminished. Think of this when you hear the strident clatter of the Bush regime as it warns the public that a new wave of terror attacks, quite possibly using weapons of mass destruction of the atomic, bacteriological and chemical varieties, is inevitable before the November 2004 elections. The government has failed us, and the Kean-Hamilton Commission has failed us, before, during and after 9/11. The September criminals remain in place, with every intention of striking again, then to take cover behind the shield of martial law.
We are opposed to terrorism. We seek to prevent a new wave of terrorism. We want to identify the September criminals and bring them to justice, because no one has laid a glove on them so far. We have no illusions about the psychotic Arab patsies whose antics are being used to cover up what was in reality a coup d’etat made in the USA, a coup d’etat not against Bush but in favor of a specific policy, that of the clash of civilizations. We condemn terrorism because terrorism is the means used by oligarchs to wage secret war against the people. But the terrorism we fight is the real terrorism of the real world, not the idiotic distortions dished up by the regime and the media.
The official 9/11 account has by now taken on all the characteristics of a myth. In the minds of many, credulousness in regard to the myth has taken on the overtones of religious sanctity. It has taken root deeply in the dark places of the American mind. The myth is a sensitive subject, hedged round with powerful reaction formations and fearful taboos. Challenge these and the subject will often respond with irrational anger and indignation. Nevertheless, the fact remains: the official version has never been proved. It is an unproven assertion, and in the end a myth. Attempts to base an entire world order on unproven assertions and lies did not fare well in the twentieth century: the war guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty of 1919, which assigned exclusive responsibility for the war to Germany and her allies, while completely exonerating the Allies, was intended as a means to extort some 55 billion gold dollars in reparations. But it turned out to be the key to Hitler’s successful demagogy, and generally one of the main causes for fascism, Nazism, and World War II. Let us not build our political house on unproven assertions. Indeed, we should recall that it was the Nazis themselves who avidly embraced myth as the basis for politics: the official chief ideologist of the Nazi movement was Alfred Rosenberg, and his famous work was The Myth of the Twentieth Century. The story of Osama in the distant cave is already the myth of the twenty-first century.
Because of the events of 9/11, the regime proclaims, the world as we knew it has disappeared. We are confronted with a new world of preventive and pre-emptive war, of first use of nuclear weapons, of unilateral aggression, of barbarian racism and hatred, of the glorification of violence and killing, of force and the threat of force. Yet before we go willingly into this monstrous new world, it is our right to demand that the events of 9/11 – precisely because they are said to have caused all this – be more thoroughly examined. Before we accept the neocon death warrant for civilization, culture, and every human value, we demand the right of an appeal to the court of reason.
That project will be undertaken in this book. We will draw on the extensive research completed by the 9/11 truth movement during the time since that catastrophic day. Specific indebtedness and especially meritorious works will be acknowledged in the text, or in the footnotes. Participants in the 9/11 truth movement have almost always been private citizens, more or less isolated, more or less bereft of means, but nevertheless determined to seek the truth. The researchers, writers, scientists, historians, websites, and activists of the 9/11 truth movement have upheld the values of universal intellect – la république des lettres – as these were spurned by the mass media, the US government, and most academics. They have produced what can now be seen as a coherent body of work which is readily accessible to anyone who wants to learn. This field is no more free from aberrant theories, petty squabbles, and crank positions than any other, and not everything can be taken for pure gold, but the difference between this honest research and the corrupt, controlled corporate media and official pronouncements is as day and night. The 9/11 truth movement is a work in progress which has already accomplished much, and which now awaits wider discussion and the further refinement which that greater exposure will undoubtedly bring.
We urge you to grapple with the issues presented in this book. This is important because of the imminent threat of new terrorist attacks, organized in large part by the original September criminals. It is important also because this is a time of aggravated world economic, political, and strategic crisis, wars, depression, and breakdown crisis, as we will have occasion briefly to show as part of our explanation of why the 9/11 attacks happened. We must also be aware of the underlying long waves of American history. As we will outline towards the end of this book, the 2004 election has completed a fateful cycle of that history – the pattern of party re-alignment which has recurred every 36 or so years since the ratification of the federal Constitution, taking place in 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932, and 1968. We are due for a profound shakeup in the party structure and the basic pattern of political life in this country. The reason for sending this book into the world is this: if the 9/11 myth can be dismantled, discredited, and denounced before the masses, there is hope that the party re-alignment may unfold in a progressive direction, perhaps with the collapse of the Republican Party, perhaps with the split of the Democratic Party into factions representing roughly the views of Senator Lieberman and those of Senator Kennedy. Under these conditions, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan can be terminated, and new aggressions warded off. The neocons can be brought to justice. International monetary reform, world reconstruction and economic development, vast projects of infrastructure can be addressed. But if the 9/11 myth is allowed to stand intact as the basis for US national life, the current regime, and the Republican and Democratic Parties, then there is every reason to fear that the likely party re-alignment will represent the transition to fascism in some form whose outlines we can already see.
The dominant oligarchies of the United States and several other countries committed a serious error when they decided to accept the crude conspiracy theory peddled by the Bush regime concerning 9/11. This was a matter where a careful and judicious ruling class would have exercised more restraint, and kept more options open. The wholesale endorsement of the official 9/11 myth by the controlled corporate news media, by the two major political parties, and by large parts of academia has created a situation in which the 9/11 myth is now the indispensable basis of large sectors of American life. Many institutions have in effect wedded their entire credibility to the myth. This was very unwise. We cannot be entirely certain that the truth about 9/11 will ever become generally accepted by the masses, but if such revelations should ever occur, they will now destroy far more than the 9/11 myth. The dismantling of the myth in favor of an account at least closer to reality will have the most profound institutional implications. The Republican Party, because it has presided over the institutionalization and exploitation of the myth, would tend toward extinction. The contradictions inside the Democratic Party would explode. Many careers would go by the boards. Because the entire society is so heavily invested in the myth, the entire social order would be called into question. Even the prevalent property relations, at least in regard to media, defense industries, oil and some other sectors, would inevitably be called into question. The current status of the 9/11 myth as the substratum of so many hegemonic institutions helps to explain the absolute hysteria of the ruling elite whenever substantive critiques of the myth arise, as they must ever tend to do.
Everything depends on intellectual activists like you. The 9/11 myth is the last line of defense of a bankrupt regime. Was the Iraq war based on lies? Do the atrocities of Abu Ghraib violate the laws of war and the Geneva Convention? Is the middle class being crushed? The regime, with its back to the wall, has only one answer, “9/11.” The mantra of 9/11 is the carte blanche for black propaganda, war crimes, a police state, and thievery until the end of time, if we listen to those now in power. And there is an irony: if the regime itself has been able to cite the need for wartime solidarity in regard to Afghanistan, the Democratic Party has had only the litany of 9/11 to fall back on. The Democratic Party has portrayed itself as the true believers in the 9/11 myth, eyes fixed on the quest to find Bin Laden, while the Republicans were going astray in Mesopotamia. Senator Kerry, until he can be convinced to think otherwise, is more married to the 9/11 myth than Bush is. The Democrats are Johnny one note, while Bush has the means to modulate. Result: 9/11 is the lever used by all factions of the oligarchy to keep the masses in submission. This lever we will break before their faces.
WHAT DO YOU KNOW AND HOW DO YOU KNOW IT?
Many readers are by now spluttering with indignation. We can hear them expostulating: “The official version of 9/11 is a myth and a lie!” – followed by a string of obscenities worthy of Dick Cheney. But think for a minute: if you think you know all about 9/11, how do you know what you think you know?
The first identification of Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda as the perpetrators came during the day on September 11, as various commentators and announcers for cable, broadcast, and public television began floating the charge that Bin Laden and al Qaeda were behind the attacks. Apparently CNN was the first to mention Bin Laden, and the other myth- mongers immediately followed its lead. In retrospect, we know that many of these leaks came from two important functionaries in the Washington bureaucracy. These were George Tenet, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who should have been fired that same day, but who was allowed to resign in disgrace in June 2004, on the eve of the publication of a Senate Intelligence Committee report which pilloried him and his agency for gross incompetence. This was the same Tenet who later assured Bush that the case for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as a pretext for a US invasion was a “slam dunk.” The other prime myth-monger was Richard A. Clarke, the former terror czar of the Clinton administration who had been kept on by Bush. Clarke had a long history, of which many of his gulled victims at those hearings were unaware. He had been dropped from the State Department by James Baker III because he was accused of concealing Israeli exports of US military technology to the People’s Republic of China which were banned under US law, and which the Israelis had agreed in advance not to carry out. In some quarters, Richard Clarke’s name was mentioned at the time of the hunt for MEGA, the Israeli mole thought to be operating in the White House. Clarke is a close friend of Israeli defense officials, among them David Ivry of the Israeli Defense Ministry.
As Clarke recounts in his recently published memoir: “At the outset of the first Gulf War, Ivry and I conspired to get our governments to agree to deploy a US Army Patriot unit in Israel. No foreign troops had ever been stationed before in Israel. We also worked together to sell Patriots to Israel, and to tie in the Kiriat [the Israeli Pentagon] with American satellites that detected Iraqi Scud missile launches towards Israel. After the war, the CIA circulated unfounded rumors that Israel had sold some of the Patriots to China. Many in the State Department who thought I was ‘too close to Israel’ sought to blame me.” (Clarke 46) Clarke was a protégé of Arnold L. Raphael (killed in the same plane crash with Gen. Zia of Pakistan), and worked closely with Morton Abramowitz.
On the morning of Sept. 11, as the White House was being evacuated for fear that it could be hit after the strikes against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the first top official to say “This is Al Qaeda!” had been Richard Clarke. (New York Times, December 30, 2001). When Clarke arrived at the White House a little after 9 AM on 9/11, he found Cheney and Condoleezza Rice alone in Cheney’s office. “What do you think,” asked the horrified Cheney. Clarke’s immediate reply: “It’s an al Qaeda attack and they like simultaneous attacks. This may not be over.” (Clarke 2) This is the moment of conception of the 9/11 myth. At this moment Clarke, as a New Yorker would say, didn’t know from nothing. Had he ever heard of strategic deception? Had he ever heard of diversionary tactics? Had he ever heard of feints?
Clarke tells us in his memoir that he attempted to collect his thoughts about the events going on around him as he walked from the White House Secure Videoconferencing Center just off the Situation Room across the White House to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, which was Cheney’s underground bunker:
This is already one of the most fateful snap judgments in world history. Had Clarke utterly forgotten the lessons of Oklahoma City, when leakers had inspired the report that the explosion was the work of Moslems? Clarke had no proof then, and has come forward with none since.
Rushing to overtake Clarke as the leading hipshot in snap strategic diagnosis was CIA Director Tenet. While Bush was cowering in his spider hole at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, he conducted a National Security Council meeting by means of teleconference screens. “Who do you think did this to us?” Bush asked Tenet. Tenet was emphatic: “Sir, I believe it’s al Qaeda. We’re doing the assessment, but it looks like, it feels like, it smells like Al Qaeda.” (Bamford 2004 91) In other words, Tenet also had no proof, no evidence, no case – just his crude Lockean sense certainty.
Later, after World Trade Center 7 had gone through its inexplicable and embarrassing collapse at about 5:20 PM, Clarke addressed a high-level interagency meeting from the Situation Room. Present by video link were Armitage of State, General Meyers of the JCS, and other important officials. Clarke stated: “Okay, we all know this was al Qaeda. FBI and CIA will develop the case and see if I’m right. We want the truth but, in the meantime, let’s go with the assumption it’s al Qaeda. What’s next?” (Clarke 23) Before he went to bed in the White House, Bush jotted a note to himself: “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today. We think it’s Osama Bin Laden.” (Bamford 2004 92)
Given the fecklessness of Bush, Cheney, and Rice, Richard Clarke was running the US government on 9/11, and it was he who made the myth of the exclusive responsibility of al Qaeda/Bin Laden into the official policy of the US. Clarke can thus claim pride of place as the originator of the 9/11 myth. And Clarke was more than a mythograph. Clarke also shared in the responsibility for the bungling and stupid attack on an aspirin factory in Khartoum, Sudan, after the bombing of US embassies in east Africa in the summer of 1998. If there were an Oscar for deception, Clarke’s performance at the Kean-Hamilton Commission hearings in April 2004 would have won it. It was that virtuoso performance which launched Clarke on his current career as a television commentator predicting imminent WMD terrorist attacks on this country and advocating the speedy imposition of martial law. We will hear more about this gentleman later. All we need to note right now is that anyone would be foolish to buy a used car from Clarke or Tenet.
Another early official fingering of Osama Bin Laden as the guilty party came from Secretary of State Colin Powell on September 13. At this point Powell was competing for attention with the fulminations and Schrecklichkeit of neocons like Wolfowitz, who was ranting that the US would “end states harboring terrorism,” and would do so unilaterally, without reference to the collective security of the United Nations. Already voices of caution were being raised about another ill-prepared rush to judgment. Professor Paul Rogers, of Bradford University's peace department, warned against assuming Middle East extremists were behind the tragedy. “We've been here before. With Oklahoma, everybody assumed it was Middle East [terrorists], then it turned out to be home-grown Timothy McVeigh,” he said. “Again with the pipe bomb in Atlanta, it turned out to be domestic.” (Guardian, September 11, 2001) In any event, this was the same Colin Powell, who in February 2003, before the United Nations Security Council, perjured himself on the question of Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. This was the same Colin Powell who alleged mobile biological weapons labs, chemical weapons dispensers, and tubes being used for centrifuges in the process of uranium enrichment. This was the same Colin Powell who committed the most spectacular perjury in the history of the United Nations Security Council.
On September 14, the FBI, which had known nothing about anything before the attacks, published its infamous list of nineteen hijackers. As we will soon see, the mortality rate among those supposed kamikazes was less than 100%, with no less than seven of the suspects named turning up alive and well in the days after this list was published. More importantly, this was a list prepared by the same FBI which had been responsible for the Waco massacre of men, women, and children in 1992, the agency that illegally withheld documents in the capital murder trial of Timothy McVeigh, an abuse which ought to have caused his conviction to be thrown out, but which only caused it to be delayed. This is the agency whose vaunted Crime Lab turned out to be a sewer of incompetence and corruption. This is the same FBI which clumsily attempted to entrap and frame up the innocent Richard Jewel during the 1996 Atlanta Olympic games, while the real culprit went free. This is the same FBI which persecuted the Chinese-American scientist Wen Ho Lee without any grounds, accusing him of having transferred secrets to the People’s Republic of China. This is the same FBI which permitted the Soviet mole Robert Hanssen to operate inside it for fifteen years. This is the agency which ostracized John O’Neill, and which ignored the Phoenix memorandum and Colleen Rowley’s warnings from Minneapolis. This is the same FBI which could not capture the Unabomber over decades, until his own brother turned him in. This is the same agency which, over the previous months, in the words of Governor Kean of the 9/11 Commission, “failed and failed and failed and failed and failed.” Are we then to believe that on September 14 this troubled and incompetent agency enjoyed a brief interlude of success, as represented by the list of the 19? And if they did succeed that day, they must have soon lapsed back into incompetence again, as seen in their utter failure to prevent the October 2001 anthrax attacks, or ever to identify the perpetrator, perhaps because the anthrax in question was weapons grade material which had come from a US military lab, probably Fort Detrick, Maryland. This was the same FBI whose main activity after 9/11 seemed to consist in confiscating relevant evidence and tampering with witnesses, telling them that had not seen what they knew they had. Anyone familiar with the record will have a very hard time taking seriously such allegations coming from the discredited, dysfunctional FBI.
BUSH AS INVETERATE LIAR
The definitive identification of Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda as the authors of the atrocity came only on September 20, in Bush’s address to a joint session of Congress. Bush stated:
Here we can see how inextricably the naming of Bin Laden and al Qaeda is bound up with the unilateral preventive war doctrine, the attack on Afghanistan, and the aggression against Iraq. But let us put these remarks into contact. Some months later, delivering his January 2003 State of the Union address from the same podium in the well of the House of Representatives, this same Bush intoned:
These infamous sixteen words added up to one Big Lie in Dr. Goebbel’s sense, as has been amply demonstrated. In the same speech this same Bush claimed:
No such vehicles ever existed. This same Bush also alleged:
Mobile labs of the type described by Bush have never been found in Iraq. Experts have speculated that these wildly exaggerated reports were based on vans used for public health purposes, or perhaps on ice cream trucks. On another occasion the very same Bush asserted:
But the renewed nuclear program turned out to be a chimera, most likely invented by the neocon darling, convicted bank embezzler, and betrayer of American state secrets, Achmed Chalabi, to justify his $400,000 monthly stipend provided by the American taxpayer. This was the same Bush who had conjured up the specter of an Iraqi nuclear attack on the United States:
The internet teems with web sites dedicated primarily to keeping up with Bush’s legendary, picaresque mendacity. Bush has lied about the cost of his prescription drug boondoggle, about nonexistent economic reports he claimed had buttressed his economic prognostications, about all spheres of policy. He has lied about funding first responders, grants for port security, payments to children’s hospitals, and veterans’ benefits. The tenant of the White House has a troubled relation to the very concept of truth.
This is the man who has acquired an unparalleled at home and abroad reputation as a liar – at least, in those quarters, like the Office of Canadian Prime Minister Chretien, where he was dismissed as a moron. This is an administration in which blatant lying has become part of the daily routine – in part because of neocon guru Leo Strauss’s theory that truth is dangerous for the masses, and rulers therefore have to be esoteric, that is, lie through their teeth. But whether Bush is a cretin or a liar, his statements offer no sufficient basis for falling in with the neocons in their march towards endless war against the entire world. Knowing what we knew as of late 2004, no person of good judgment could ever accept statements from the current regime at face value. Nevertheless, otherwise intelligent people who would not dream believing Bush about Iraq or other issues are content to swallow his biggest whopper of them all: his 9/11 story. This doublethink must end. The Bush regime is a castle of lies and fabrications, and the keystone of all of them is the 9/11 myth.
It is now proverbial in Washington to remark that there is no proof linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11, and this is certainly true. But, by the very same token, there is also no proof in the public domain anywhere that adds up to a case against Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda. We should point out that we hold no brief for the misfit sheikh and his sociopathic followers. Bin Laden was a creation of the CIA, and his al Qaeda followers, to the extent that they exist at all, are doubtless individuals characterized by a surfeit of criminal intent. But we must not join the anonymous CIA agent author of the recent book Imperial Hubris in portraying the inept and unstable Bin Laden as a genius. Taken by themselves, Bin Laden and his band represent supermarket-caliber terrorists, capable of bombing a shopping center, or of destroying a bus. Any capabilities above and beyond this can only be explained through assistance provided by intelligence agencies, primarily but not limited to the American ones. There is no doubt that Bin Laden and his benighted gaggle would have desired to inflict destruction on the scale of 9/11. What is at issue is their physical and technical capability of doing so on their own in the universe as we otherwise know it to be constituted. From this point of view, Bin Laden and company emerge perhaps as actors in the plot, but playing the parts of patsies, dupes, fall-guys, or useful idiots. The main point remains that Tenet, Clarke, Powell, the FBI, and Bush have produced no convincing evidence to establish the 19 Moslem men, al Qaeda, and Bin Laden as the authors of the crimes.
Another Bush administration mythograph has been Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense. But Rumsfeld as well has a troubled relation to truth. In a press conference, he was asked if he planned to lie in order to protect state secrets. Rumsfeld boasted that he was clever enough to keep secrets in other ways, but that his underlings might have to preserve secrecy any way they could:
Theodore Olson, together with his wife Barbara Olson, had been the host of a salon which served in 1998-1999 as a meeting place for one of the principal cliques supporting the Clinton impeachment. This group included the late Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Federal Appellate Judge Robert Silberman, failed Supreme Court candidate Robert Bork, and other militant reactionaries. Olson had on one occasion lectured the US Supreme Court that “it is easy to imagine an infinite number of situations…where government officials might quite legitimately have reasons to give false information out.” (Yahoo News, March 22, 2001) Mrs. Olson was later counted among the victims of 9/11; we will return to her story.
In neocon philosophy, the art of lying has been raised to a fine art. Let us take the case of William Kristol, a leading Washington Straussian, and founder of the Project for a New American Century, a congeries of warmongers. Kristol told Nina J. Easton, the author of a profile of some top neocon leaders of the 1990s, Gang of Five (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000) that “One of the main teachings [of Strauss] is that all politics are limited and none of them is really based on the truth. So there's a certain philosophic disposition where you have some distance from these political fights....You don't take yourself or your causes as seriously as you would if you thought this was 100% ‘truth.’ Political movements are always full of partisans fighting for their opinion. But that's very different from 'the truth.'” With the help of money from Rupert Murdoch, Kristol has cultivated the art of the Goebbels Big Lie since 1995 in his weekly magazine, the Weekly Standard, the neocon house organ.
But, discredited as Tenet, Clarke, Powell, the FBI, Rumsfeld, Kristol, and Bush may appear, perhaps other proof has been offered since? No.
In the days right after the attacks, Colin Powell promised the world a white paper or white book to set forth the contentions of the United States government about what had happened, with supporting evidence. Powell did this on NBC’s Meet the Press, where the following exchange occurred on September 23, 2001:
The following day, September 24, saw a front page article in the New York Times which bragged that Powell’s evidence “reaches from the southern tip of Manhattan to the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan.” However, there was clearly something wrong with the US case, since, in an appearance with Bush at the White House rose garden on September 24, Powell somewhat obliquely retracted his promise. And on that same afternoon, Bush’s spokesman Ari Fleischer, a past master of mendacity, said that Powell had been the victim of a misunderstanding. No white paper would be forthcoming, he suggested. According to Fleischer, much of the information of Bin Laden was classified, and making it public would compromise US intelligence methods and sources. Even the press trollops in the White House briefing room rebelled at this attempted sleight of hand. A reporter challenged Ari, asking if there was in fact “any plan to present public evidence so that the average citizen, not just Americans, but people all over the world can understand the case against Bin Laden.” Fleischer disappeared in a cloud of verbiage: “In a democracy it’s always important to provide the maximum amount of information possible. But I think the American people also understand that there are going to be times when that information cannot immediately be forthcoming.” As of this writing, it still has not been forthcoming.
Bush himself rejected any white paper. He said that any such publication may “make the war more difficult to win.” (AP, September 24, 2001) Amidst much embarrassment, the Bush regime quickly fell back on the following ploy: they would assemble a watertight case against Bin Laden, but this was so sensitive that could only be shown to governments. We must always bear in mind that these assertions were not presented in the manner of a scholarly debate, but as part of brutal pressure on sovereign states to yield to Bush’s manichean Diktat.
Even though Bush did not have enough information on the 9/11 events to put out a credible white paper, he nevertheless ordered the FBI to curtail their investigation of the case. The FBI order to stop probing described the investigation done so far as “the most exhaustive in its history.” A government official said in an understatement that “The investigative staff has to be made to understand that we’re not trying to solve a crime now.”
BANKRUPT LEFTISTS
Not just the impotence, but the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of many US leftists was pitilessly displayed by the events of 9/11. Many who would never dream of believing Bush or the FBI on matters far less important were willing to swallow the entire official story this time around. Noam Chomsky went so far as to issue a lengthy interview in the wake of 9/11; he even had it published as a small book. This passage is at the heart of the matter:
This leaves our poor Chomsky far to the right of the 9/11 euroskeptics – and that means foreign ministers, defense ministers, and generals -- in the NATO ministerial council! Michael Parenti’s book on the terrorism trap falls into it, at least as far as the 9/11 official story is concerned. Amy Goodman of the Democracy Now radio program banned all criticism of the official 9/11 story, while proclaiming her own superlative courage in tackling issues like East Timor. When she finally let the dignified academic David Ray Griffin come on her show, she insisted on balancing him with the slimy character assassin Chip Berlet, who knew nothing in particular about 9/11.
The left wing of the Democratic Party, grouped around The Nation magazine, was rudderless. Some time after 9/11 this magazine produced an anthology of its most important post-9/11 articles. A key contributor to this collection was Jonathan Schell, who wrote in his introduction: “It was clear from the start that Islamic fundamentalists were responsible, almost certainly in the service of the Al Qaeda terrorist organization, but the magnitude of the force involved remained hazy in the extreme.” (Vanden Heuvel xv) Other articles in the collection, some by very distinguished and well-meaning authors, may have more or less merit, but they do not rise above this inadequate level. The US left might object all it liked to the consequences which Bush derived from his fabricated 9/11 premise, but unless those leftists were willing to attack the premise, it was clear that their efforts would not be effective. Even in the pages of The Nation, it was the neocon bully Christopher Hitchens, billed until only yesterday as the “last Marxist,” who seemed to carry the day, based on the refusal of all the others to challenge the myth he shamelessly used to club them into submission.
Some governments found ways to leak their estimate of Bush’s alleged proof. One was the government of Pakistan, which had been placed under a US war ultimatum to cooperate in an attack on Afghanistan. Here the distinguished retired military leader General Mirza Aslam Beg told an interviewer some months after the fact that the “evidence” provided to Pakistan's Musharraf government “would not hold in a court of law, because of the inherent weaknesses.” (EIR, December 10, 2001) In a newspaper interview, Gen. Beg insisted that the attacks had been the work of highly-trained experts “who used high technology for destruction. He argued that even ordinary trained pilots could not have carried out the missions observed. (Nawa- Waqt, September 13, 2001) [1]
Egyptian strategic analyst Tal’at Muslim argued in al-Akhbar of Cairo that the resources available to Arab and Islamic terror organizations were “well below” what was plainly necessary to carry out operations on the scale of 9/11. (September 13, 2001) In the Palestinian paper al-Quds, Hatim Abu Sha’ban found that the US authorities were searching for the perpetrators in entirely the wrong places. “They accused…the least likely to be perpetrators in light of the operation’s nature, which requires great planning capabilities, knowledge of information, and mobility on the part of the criminals who committed this terrorist operation.” (September 18, 2001)
The Saudi government complained that its citizens were being accused of crimes, but that the US had provided no hard evidence. Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef said that he viewed Osama Bin Laden more “as a tool,” than the mastermind of the September 11 attacks. “He's at the top of the pyramid from the media point of view, but from my personal views and conviction, I don't think he's at the top of the pyramid,” commented Prince Nayef. U.S. officials were claiming that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. But Nayef noted that “until now, we have no evidence that assures us they are related to September 11. We have not received anything in this regard from the United States.” (New York Times, December 10, 2001)
Some indication of the problems being encountered by the US bureaucracy in trying to pin 9/11 on Bin Laden were reflected in a Wall Street Journal article entitled “Faint Trail: It's Surprisingly Tough To Pin Terror Attacks on the ‘Prime Suspect.’” Here the paucity of evidence was the dominant note. Such evidence as did exist was largely circumstantial, the Journal noted, such as ties of suspected hijacker Mohammed Atta to Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which allegedly was part of bin Laden's Al Qaeda; the presence of one hijacker in Malaysia in January 2000, meeting with someone linked to the bombing of the USS Cole, which was in turn allegedly linked to bin Laden; communications intercepts showing Al Qaeda operatives had some advanced knowledge of the strikes; or that two of the suspected hijackers were perhaps linked to a suspected bin Laden operative in Boston. The Journal conceded that the issue of proof was a key component of the U.S.'s ability to enlist support of Islamic countries such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and perhaps Syria. “The issue of proof is no small matter,” one Administration official was cited as observing. But the US case was plainly a lame one, with an unidentified intelligence official concluding weakly that “no information has come up that suggests that bin Laden wasn't involved.” None of this could even begin to explain how these ragtag forces could mount such a spectacular action. Here was surely no justification for abandoning the entire edifice of international law, which had been formed in large part as a result of wars in which tens of millions of people had perished.
CHAPTER I: THE MYTH OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in some connection to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, “just to keep the people frightened.”
-- Orwell, 1984, 127.
With the publication of the Report of the Commission to Investigate Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (also known as the Kean-Hamilton Commission after its chairman and vice- chairman), the pattern of coverup and incompetence on the part of the officially constituted investigative agencies of the United States Government is complete. Since September 11, 2001, no part of the United States Government has offered a convincing, coherent, complete explanation of the events of that day, and of other events related to them. Indeed, no US government agency has ever so much as proposed to prove the truth of the official account, even in the way that the Warren Commission attempted to demonstrate the veracity of its version of the Kennedy assassination.
The Kean-Hamilton Commission called no hostile witnesses, no skeptics, no devil’s advocates. It ignored a growing number of book-length studies which have appeared in English, French, German, and other languages around the world. It never invited to its plenum FBI whistle-blowers like Colleen Rowley (who shared Time Magazine’s Person of the Year honors at the end of 2002), nor did it call FBI agent Kenneth Williams, the author of the famous Phoenix memo, to testify in its plenary meetings. The Commission was, by contrast, happy to invite the obsessive anti-Iraq ideologue Laurie Mylroie, a fanatic so notorious that she is dismissed with contempt as “totally discredited” even by Richard Clarke in his book, Against All Enemies. (Clarke 232) As we will show at various points in this study, the Kean-Hamilton Commission represents a cynical and meticulously orchestrated exercise in coverup and obfuscation. The net overall result of the Kean-Hamilton Commission has been to obscure even those few relevant facts which had become well established in the mainstream media prior to its inception.
Before the Kean-Hamilton Commission, the chronology of events regarding the interplay among the Federal Aeronautics Administration (FAA), the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), and other government agencies had been fairly well established by the 9/11 truth movement. The deliberately doctored chronologies offered by the Kean-Hamilton staff have turned that clear picture into chaos. Before the Kean- Hamilton operation went to work, there was an important debate about whether phone calls received at the White House on the morning of September 11 had indicated that unauthorized persons were in possession of top-secret US government code words. The Kean-Hamilton Commission has now assured us that this crucial incident in effect never happened. Before Kean-Hamilton, Congressional Committees and the National Institute of Standards and Technology had been forced to grapple in public with the blatant anomalies of three modern steel skyscrapers collapsing on the same day as the result of fire – something that has happened on no other day of world history. For the Kean- Hamilton Commission, this problem simply does not exist – it has disappeared from the official narrative. No account has been taken of critical or skeptical commentaries, even when these have been the centerpieces of books which have reached the top of the best- seller charts in important countries like France, Germany, Italy, and elsewhere, or have been telecast in prime time in these same places. The demands of the bereaved families of 9/11 have been ignored – even though it was because of the persistent lobbying of these families that the Kean-Hamilton Commission ever came into being in the first place. A cruel hoax has been practiced on these families, and those who thought that an attempt to cooperate in good faith with the Kean-Hamilton Commission to guide it toward the truth have received a bitter disappointment. The Kean-Hamilton Commission in short has shown no decent respect for the opinions of mankind, and has submitted no important facts to a candid world.
The Kean-Hamilton Commission has turned out to be nothing more than a colossal exercise in begging the question. Everything that was controversial, everything that was dubious in the eyes of billions around the world has been simply assumed to be true and posited as the starting point for the entire inquiry. As a fallacy this has been around since the medieval schoolmen, who called it petitio principii. In the hands of the Kean- Hamilton Commission, begging the question is meant to work as an arrogant, bureaucratic act of superior power. Believe this, said the Inquisition, or be damned. Believe this, says the Kean-Hamilton Commission, or be vilified as a paranoid obsessed with conspiracies. Thus, when the 9/11 commission was created, it formed nine investigative teams. The first of these was entitled: “Al Qaeda and the Organization of the 9/11 Attack.” That is a clear case of rush to judgment and jumping to conclusions, since such a finding should be the end result of an inquiry, and not its starting point.
For the Kean-Hamilton Commission is not a contribution to scholarly debate. It is just as much a part of the US government’s assault on the world as an F-16 bombing Fallujah. For the Kean- Hamilton Commission is an act of ideological terrorism worthy of Senator Joe McCarthy. Behind it stands the taboo proclaimed by the figurehead of the regime:
We must speak the truth about terror. Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th, malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists themselves, away from the guilty. (UN General Assembly, November 10, 2001)
It is a point of view at variance with the best moments in American history, as we intend to show. But no amount of bureaucratic arrogance has been able to paper over the manifold absurdities, the contradictions, the impossibilities, the outrageous flaws that infest the official version of the 9/11 events. The Kean-Hamilton Commission simply has no answer for questions about how the alleged hijackers were identified, how they were able to operate, why WTC Building 7 collapsed, why air defense was non-existent, what hit the Pentagon, what happened over Shanksville, what happened to the insider trading, and many more. For any serious, intelligent person – and there are many – the Kean- Hamilton pastiche can only be rejected.
The failure of the Kean-Hamilton Commission leaves the world with the imbecilic myth: the four airliners were hijacked by nineteen Arabs, from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Kuwait. Their squad leaders were Atta, Shehhi, Hanjour, and Jarrah. Their “mastermind” was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Their rear echelon was Ramzi Binalshib. Their guru was Osama Bin Laden, the terrorist pope who lives in a cave. From his distant grotto in the mountains of Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden, the diabolical genius of the twenty-first century, directed the worldwide network that attacked the United States.
THE SEPTEMBER CRIMINALS ARE STILL AT LARGE
At a deeper level, closer to the heart of the matter, the Kean-Hamilton has failed to indict the real September criminals. It leaves untouched the network of moles in the US government without whose efforts, both in preparation and in coverup, the events of 9/11 could never have happened. It has not identified the clandestine command center which directed the operation. It has taken not one step towards locating the technocrats of death who actually had the physical and technical capability to make these events happen, in contrast to the supermarket-caliber terrorists who are supposed to have caused them. All of these networks remain in place, and remain anxious to avoid detection. The September criminals and their project, the clash of civilizations in the form of a new Thirty Years War, remain at large, their desperation magnified, but their power undiminished. Think of this when you hear the strident clatter of the Bush regime as it warns the public that a new wave of terror attacks, quite possibly using weapons of mass destruction of the atomic, bacteriological and chemical varieties, is inevitable before the November 2004 elections. The government has failed us, and the Kean-Hamilton Commission has failed us, before, during and after 9/11. The September criminals remain in place, with every intention of striking again, then to take cover behind the shield of martial law.
We are opposed to terrorism. We seek to prevent a new wave of terrorism. We want to identify the September criminals and bring them to justice, because no one has laid a glove on them so far. We have no illusions about the psychotic Arab patsies whose antics are being used to cover up what was in reality a coup d’etat made in the USA, a coup d’etat not against Bush but in favor of a specific policy, that of the clash of civilizations. We condemn terrorism because terrorism is the means used by oligarchs to wage secret war against the people. But the terrorism we fight is the real terrorism of the real world, not the idiotic distortions dished up by the regime and the media.
The official 9/11 account has by now taken on all the characteristics of a myth. In the minds of many, credulousness in regard to the myth has taken on the overtones of religious sanctity. It has taken root deeply in the dark places of the American mind. The myth is a sensitive subject, hedged round with powerful reaction formations and fearful taboos. Challenge these and the subject will often respond with irrational anger and indignation. Nevertheless, the fact remains: the official version has never been proved. It is an unproven assertion, and in the end a myth. Attempts to base an entire world order on unproven assertions and lies did not fare well in the twentieth century: the war guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty of 1919, which assigned exclusive responsibility for the war to Germany and her allies, while completely exonerating the Allies, was intended as a means to extort some 55 billion gold dollars in reparations. But it turned out to be the key to Hitler’s successful demagogy, and generally one of the main causes for fascism, Nazism, and World War II. Let us not build our political house on unproven assertions. Indeed, we should recall that it was the Nazis themselves who avidly embraced myth as the basis for politics: the official chief ideologist of the Nazi movement was Alfred Rosenberg, and his famous work was The Myth of the Twentieth Century. The story of Osama in the distant cave is already the myth of the twenty-first century.
Because of the events of 9/11, the regime proclaims, the world as we knew it has disappeared. We are confronted with a new world of preventive and pre-emptive war, of first use of nuclear weapons, of unilateral aggression, of barbarian racism and hatred, of the glorification of violence and killing, of force and the threat of force. Yet before we go willingly into this monstrous new world, it is our right to demand that the events of 9/11 – precisely because they are said to have caused all this – be more thoroughly examined. Before we accept the neocon death warrant for civilization, culture, and every human value, we demand the right of an appeal to the court of reason.
That project will be undertaken in this book. We will draw on the extensive research completed by the 9/11 truth movement during the time since that catastrophic day. Specific indebtedness and especially meritorious works will be acknowledged in the text, or in the footnotes. Participants in the 9/11 truth movement have almost always been private citizens, more or less isolated, more or less bereft of means, but nevertheless determined to seek the truth. The researchers, writers, scientists, historians, websites, and activists of the 9/11 truth movement have upheld the values of universal intellect – la république des lettres – as these were spurned by the mass media, the US government, and most academics. They have produced what can now be seen as a coherent body of work which is readily accessible to anyone who wants to learn. This field is no more free from aberrant theories, petty squabbles, and crank positions than any other, and not everything can be taken for pure gold, but the difference between this honest research and the corrupt, controlled corporate media and official pronouncements is as day and night. The 9/11 truth movement is a work in progress which has already accomplished much, and which now awaits wider discussion and the further refinement which that greater exposure will undoubtedly bring.
We urge you to grapple with the issues presented in this book. This is important because of the imminent threat of new terrorist attacks, organized in large part by the original September criminals. It is important also because this is a time of aggravated world economic, political, and strategic crisis, wars, depression, and breakdown crisis, as we will have occasion briefly to show as part of our explanation of why the 9/11 attacks happened. We must also be aware of the underlying long waves of American history. As we will outline towards the end of this book, the 2004 election has completed a fateful cycle of that history – the pattern of party re-alignment which has recurred every 36 or so years since the ratification of the federal Constitution, taking place in 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932, and 1968. We are due for a profound shakeup in the party structure and the basic pattern of political life in this country. The reason for sending this book into the world is this: if the 9/11 myth can be dismantled, discredited, and denounced before the masses, there is hope that the party re-alignment may unfold in a progressive direction, perhaps with the collapse of the Republican Party, perhaps with the split of the Democratic Party into factions representing roughly the views of Senator Lieberman and those of Senator Kennedy. Under these conditions, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan can be terminated, and new aggressions warded off. The neocons can be brought to justice. International monetary reform, world reconstruction and economic development, vast projects of infrastructure can be addressed. But if the 9/11 myth is allowed to stand intact as the basis for US national life, the current regime, and the Republican and Democratic Parties, then there is every reason to fear that the likely party re-alignment will represent the transition to fascism in some form whose outlines we can already see.
The dominant oligarchies of the United States and several other countries committed a serious error when they decided to accept the crude conspiracy theory peddled by the Bush regime concerning 9/11. This was a matter where a careful and judicious ruling class would have exercised more restraint, and kept more options open. The wholesale endorsement of the official 9/11 myth by the controlled corporate news media, by the two major political parties, and by large parts of academia has created a situation in which the 9/11 myth is now the indispensable basis of large sectors of American life. Many institutions have in effect wedded their entire credibility to the myth. This was very unwise. We cannot be entirely certain that the truth about 9/11 will ever become generally accepted by the masses, but if such revelations should ever occur, they will now destroy far more than the 9/11 myth. The dismantling of the myth in favor of an account at least closer to reality will have the most profound institutional implications. The Republican Party, because it has presided over the institutionalization and exploitation of the myth, would tend toward extinction. The contradictions inside the Democratic Party would explode. Many careers would go by the boards. Because the entire society is so heavily invested in the myth, the entire social order would be called into question. Even the prevalent property relations, at least in regard to media, defense industries, oil and some other sectors, would inevitably be called into question. The current status of the 9/11 myth as the substratum of so many hegemonic institutions helps to explain the absolute hysteria of the ruling elite whenever substantive critiques of the myth arise, as they must ever tend to do.
Everything depends on intellectual activists like you. The 9/11 myth is the last line of defense of a bankrupt regime. Was the Iraq war based on lies? Do the atrocities of Abu Ghraib violate the laws of war and the Geneva Convention? Is the middle class being crushed? The regime, with its back to the wall, has only one answer, “9/11.” The mantra of 9/11 is the carte blanche for black propaganda, war crimes, a police state, and thievery until the end of time, if we listen to those now in power. And there is an irony: if the regime itself has been able to cite the need for wartime solidarity in regard to Afghanistan, the Democratic Party has had only the litany of 9/11 to fall back on. The Democratic Party has portrayed itself as the true believers in the 9/11 myth, eyes fixed on the quest to find Bin Laden, while the Republicans were going astray in Mesopotamia. Senator Kerry, until he can be convinced to think otherwise, is more married to the 9/11 myth than Bush is. The Democrats are Johnny one note, while Bush has the means to modulate. Result: 9/11 is the lever used by all factions of the oligarchy to keep the masses in submission. This lever we will break before their faces.
WHAT DO YOU KNOW AND HOW DO YOU KNOW IT?
Many readers are by now spluttering with indignation. We can hear them expostulating: “The official version of 9/11 is a myth and a lie!” – followed by a string of obscenities worthy of Dick Cheney. But think for a minute: if you think you know all about 9/11, how do you know what you think you know?
The first identification of Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda as the perpetrators came during the day on September 11, as various commentators and announcers for cable, broadcast, and public television began floating the charge that Bin Laden and al Qaeda were behind the attacks. Apparently CNN was the first to mention Bin Laden, and the other myth- mongers immediately followed its lead. In retrospect, we know that many of these leaks came from two important functionaries in the Washington bureaucracy. These were George Tenet, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who should have been fired that same day, but who was allowed to resign in disgrace in June 2004, on the eve of the publication of a Senate Intelligence Committee report which pilloried him and his agency for gross incompetence. This was the same Tenet who later assured Bush that the case for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as a pretext for a US invasion was a “slam dunk.” The other prime myth-monger was Richard A. Clarke, the former terror czar of the Clinton administration who had been kept on by Bush. Clarke had a long history, of which many of his gulled victims at those hearings were unaware. He had been dropped from the State Department by James Baker III because he was accused of concealing Israeli exports of US military technology to the People’s Republic of China which were banned under US law, and which the Israelis had agreed in advance not to carry out. In some quarters, Richard Clarke’s name was mentioned at the time of the hunt for MEGA, the Israeli mole thought to be operating in the White House. Clarke is a close friend of Israeli defense officials, among them David Ivry of the Israeli Defense Ministry.
As Clarke recounts in his recently published memoir: “At the outset of the first Gulf War, Ivry and I conspired to get our governments to agree to deploy a US Army Patriot unit in Israel. No foreign troops had ever been stationed before in Israel. We also worked together to sell Patriots to Israel, and to tie in the Kiriat [the Israeli Pentagon] with American satellites that detected Iraqi Scud missile launches towards Israel. After the war, the CIA circulated unfounded rumors that Israel had sold some of the Patriots to China. Many in the State Department who thought I was ‘too close to Israel’ sought to blame me.” (Clarke 46) Clarke was a protégé of Arnold L. Raphael (killed in the same plane crash with Gen. Zia of Pakistan), and worked closely with Morton Abramowitz.
On the morning of Sept. 11, as the White House was being evacuated for fear that it could be hit after the strikes against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the first top official to say “This is Al Qaeda!” had been Richard Clarke. (New York Times, December 30, 2001). When Clarke arrived at the White House a little after 9 AM on 9/11, he found Cheney and Condoleezza Rice alone in Cheney’s office. “What do you think,” asked the horrified Cheney. Clarke’s immediate reply: “It’s an al Qaeda attack and they like simultaneous attacks. This may not be over.” (Clarke 2) This is the moment of conception of the 9/11 myth. At this moment Clarke, as a New Yorker would say, didn’t know from nothing. Had he ever heard of strategic deception? Had he ever heard of diversionary tactics? Had he ever heard of feints?
Clarke tells us in his memoir that he attempted to collect his thoughts about the events going on around him as he walked from the White House Secure Videoconferencing Center just off the Situation Room across the White House to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, which was Cheney’s underground bunker:
In the quiet of the walk, I caught my breath for the first time that day: This was the “Big al Qaeda Attack” we had warned was coming and it was bigger than almost anything we had imagined, short of a nuclear weapon. (Clarke 17)
This is already one of the most fateful snap judgments in world history. Had Clarke utterly forgotten the lessons of Oklahoma City, when leakers had inspired the report that the explosion was the work of Moslems? Clarke had no proof then, and has come forward with none since.
Rushing to overtake Clarke as the leading hipshot in snap strategic diagnosis was CIA Director Tenet. While Bush was cowering in his spider hole at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, he conducted a National Security Council meeting by means of teleconference screens. “Who do you think did this to us?” Bush asked Tenet. Tenet was emphatic: “Sir, I believe it’s al Qaeda. We’re doing the assessment, but it looks like, it feels like, it smells like Al Qaeda.” (Bamford 2004 91) In other words, Tenet also had no proof, no evidence, no case – just his crude Lockean sense certainty.
Later, after World Trade Center 7 had gone through its inexplicable and embarrassing collapse at about 5:20 PM, Clarke addressed a high-level interagency meeting from the Situation Room. Present by video link were Armitage of State, General Meyers of the JCS, and other important officials. Clarke stated: “Okay, we all know this was al Qaeda. FBI and CIA will develop the case and see if I’m right. We want the truth but, in the meantime, let’s go with the assumption it’s al Qaeda. What’s next?” (Clarke 23) Before he went to bed in the White House, Bush jotted a note to himself: “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today. We think it’s Osama Bin Laden.” (Bamford 2004 92)
Given the fecklessness of Bush, Cheney, and Rice, Richard Clarke was running the US government on 9/11, and it was he who made the myth of the exclusive responsibility of al Qaeda/Bin Laden into the official policy of the US. Clarke can thus claim pride of place as the originator of the 9/11 myth. And Clarke was more than a mythograph. Clarke also shared in the responsibility for the bungling and stupid attack on an aspirin factory in Khartoum, Sudan, after the bombing of US embassies in east Africa in the summer of 1998. If there were an Oscar for deception, Clarke’s performance at the Kean-Hamilton Commission hearings in April 2004 would have won it. It was that virtuoso performance which launched Clarke on his current career as a television commentator predicting imminent WMD terrorist attacks on this country and advocating the speedy imposition of martial law. We will hear more about this gentleman later. All we need to note right now is that anyone would be foolish to buy a used car from Clarke or Tenet.
Another early official fingering of Osama Bin Laden as the guilty party came from Secretary of State Colin Powell on September 13. At this point Powell was competing for attention with the fulminations and Schrecklichkeit of neocons like Wolfowitz, who was ranting that the US would “end states harboring terrorism,” and would do so unilaterally, without reference to the collective security of the United Nations. Already voices of caution were being raised about another ill-prepared rush to judgment. Professor Paul Rogers, of Bradford University's peace department, warned against assuming Middle East extremists were behind the tragedy. “We've been here before. With Oklahoma, everybody assumed it was Middle East [terrorists], then it turned out to be home-grown Timothy McVeigh,” he said. “Again with the pipe bomb in Atlanta, it turned out to be domestic.” (Guardian, September 11, 2001) In any event, this was the same Colin Powell, who in February 2003, before the United Nations Security Council, perjured himself on the question of Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. This was the same Colin Powell who alleged mobile biological weapons labs, chemical weapons dispensers, and tubes being used for centrifuges in the process of uranium enrichment. This was the same Colin Powell who committed the most spectacular perjury in the history of the United Nations Security Council.
On September 14, the FBI, which had known nothing about anything before the attacks, published its infamous list of nineteen hijackers. As we will soon see, the mortality rate among those supposed kamikazes was less than 100%, with no less than seven of the suspects named turning up alive and well in the days after this list was published. More importantly, this was a list prepared by the same FBI which had been responsible for the Waco massacre of men, women, and children in 1992, the agency that illegally withheld documents in the capital murder trial of Timothy McVeigh, an abuse which ought to have caused his conviction to be thrown out, but which only caused it to be delayed. This is the agency whose vaunted Crime Lab turned out to be a sewer of incompetence and corruption. This is the same FBI which clumsily attempted to entrap and frame up the innocent Richard Jewel during the 1996 Atlanta Olympic games, while the real culprit went free. This is the same FBI which persecuted the Chinese-American scientist Wen Ho Lee without any grounds, accusing him of having transferred secrets to the People’s Republic of China. This is the same FBI which permitted the Soviet mole Robert Hanssen to operate inside it for fifteen years. This is the agency which ostracized John O’Neill, and which ignored the Phoenix memorandum and Colleen Rowley’s warnings from Minneapolis. This is the same FBI which could not capture the Unabomber over decades, until his own brother turned him in. This is the same agency which, over the previous months, in the words of Governor Kean of the 9/11 Commission, “failed and failed and failed and failed and failed.” Are we then to believe that on September 14 this troubled and incompetent agency enjoyed a brief interlude of success, as represented by the list of the 19? And if they did succeed that day, they must have soon lapsed back into incompetence again, as seen in their utter failure to prevent the October 2001 anthrax attacks, or ever to identify the perpetrator, perhaps because the anthrax in question was weapons grade material which had come from a US military lab, probably Fort Detrick, Maryland. This was the same FBI whose main activity after 9/11 seemed to consist in confiscating relevant evidence and tampering with witnesses, telling them that had not seen what they knew they had. Anyone familiar with the record will have a very hard time taking seriously such allegations coming from the discredited, dysfunctional FBI.
Nelson-Rees returned from his week in Miami like the local boy come home from battle. Reporters were still pursuing him. Friends showered him with congratulatory phone calls and letters. And the laboratory's resident bard immortalized his accomplishments in a limerick that appeared on one of the office bulletin boards:A perceptive young Nelson named Rees,
Dumbfounded genetic police
When HeLa he found
To abound all around,
In cell lines from West and from East.
In addition to all the excitement it generated, the publication of their report brought great relief to Nelson-Rees, Flandermeyer, and the rest of the crew. It had been frustrating to know what they knew without having a means of broadcasting it. Now that the news was out, it might be easier to spread the word about future screwups.
Yes, spreading the word, that was the goal here. The publicity was fun, of course. It was nice for an "outhouse project" to steal the show for a moment. But getting the news out to those who needed to hear it -- the scientific community -- that was the main point of all this. And the publication of their paper was really just the beginning.
Frantic scientists had been calling and writing from all over the United States and several other countries to request copies of the article. In a few weeks Nelson-Rees's secretary had mailed out all 400 reprints and had to order another batch from Science. The author himself was in equally high demand. Would he give a lecture at the Stanford School of Medicine? Could he address a meeting of viral cancer researchers in Hershey, Pennsylvania? Would he brief a group at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois?
***
Nelson-Rees hit the road, preaching and proselytizing like biology's Billy Graham. At one stop he would tell the stories of such victims as Bassin and Plata who, through lack of vigilance, fell prey to HeLa's sabotage. At another he would describe the waste and futility of trying to learn about breast or prostrate or kidney cells by studying cultures of cervical cancer. And he would always conclude with the exhortation: Never trade cells without reliable information about what they are and where they've been. And always double-check them, before and after your experiment.
In some respects Nelson-Rees's early evangelizing looked like a touring revival of Gartler's performance at the Bedford Springs Hotel. Like Gartler, Nelson-Rees was telling audiences they had torpedoed years of their own work by being sloppy and letting HeLa creep in on them. He encountered the same reactions, shock and skepticism. And he too was offering new tools, chromosome banding along with other techniques, to help set things straight.
But Nelson-Rees soon added a new message that was less scientific in tone and more philosophical, or perhaps more political. It was at a 1975 meeting of cell culturists and cancer researchers in Lake Placid, New York, that he began to talk about two different reasons for cell mixups. One was simple sloppiness. "It can be combatted in individual laboratories by adherence to increasingly stricter techniques," he explained. The other effect was "more lasting and insidious." It had to do with researchers' attitudes, "frailties of the human ego ... exigencies of profit margins ... the threat of cuts of support in contractual arrangements."
Most members of the audience had gone into his talk thinking they had a pretty good idea what Nelson-Rees was going to say. But when he hit this stuff about scientists' attitudes and frailties of the human ego, they didn't know quite what to make of it.
It was curious, he told his fellow researchers, how well they handled a problem involving bacteria, for example, or viruses. Most of them quickly faced up to it when a cell culture became spoiled by such infectious agents. Not so with cell mix-ups. They seemed to take it personally when someone claimed their cultures had been overtaken by other human cells, he said.
"Cases of cellular contamination have been known to precipitate lengthy diatribes and are the reason for lectures such as this one," he clucked. "This kind of contamination would certainly be easy to control if one could frankly and readily discuss it and eradicate it without fear of offending colleagues' feelings."
At the moment, said Nelson-Rees, there was no friendly forum for discussing cell mix-ups and no means of rapidly notifying the scientific community of contaminated cultures. The audience raised a few eyebrows in disapproval as he said, "I would now like to describe to you how difficult it was for us to publish our results on those cultures which we have vouched are HeLa derivatives."
He began with the story of the Russian cells. He recounted how reluctant institute officials had been to believe his results, how for months they merely ignored the rapidly accumulating data. He read aloud the reviewer's critique that accused him of making a "gratuitous attack" on the Russians, and he named a few names. Then he moved on to the American cells: HBT3, HBT39B, HEK, and the others. He explained that Science had originally turned down the now celebrated report, quoting sarcastically from Abelson's rejection letter: "The manuscript and the referees' comments are enclosed. I trust the comments will be helpful to you when you prepare the paper for submission elsewhere."
Stan Gartler had certainly never done this. He had presented his findings, disturbing as they were, made a couple of suggestions, and taken his leave. But here was Nelson-Rees hauling out the dirty laundry. He was pointing out the stains and explaining how they had got there, and more than a few members of the audience were starting to squirm.
To say that a few cell lines had got shuffled around, that was one thing. But to suggest that scientists were letting their egos get in the way of good science or that they avoided publishing important information because it might be controversial ... well, it just wasn't done.
-- A Conspiracy of Cells: One Woman's Immortal Legacy and the Medical Scandal It Caused, by Michael Gold
BUSH AS INVETERATE LIAR
The definitive identification of Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda as the authors of the atrocity came only on September 20, in Bush’s address to a joint session of Congress. Bush stated:
The evidence we have gathered all points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations known as al Qaeda. They are the murderers indicted for bombing American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and responsible for the bombing of the USS Cole. […] This group and its leader – a person named Osama Bin Laden – are linked to many other organizations in different countries, including the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. There are thousands of these terrorists in more than 60 countries. They are recruited from their own nations and neighborhoods and brought to camps in places like Afghanistan, where they are trained in the tactics of terror. They are sent back to their homes or sent to hide in countries around the world to plot evil and destruction. The leadership of al Qaeda has great influence in Afghanistan and supports the Taliban regime in controlling most of that country. In Afghanistan, we see al Qaeda’s vision for the world. […] And tonight, the United States of America makes the following demands on the Taliban: deliver to the United States authorities all the leaders of al Qaeda who hide in your land. […] These demands are not open to negotiation or discussion. The Taliban must act, and act immediately. They will hand over the terrorists, or they will share their fate. […] Our war on terror beings with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated. (Bush 10-11)
Here we can see how inextricably the naming of Bin Laden and al Qaeda is bound up with the unilateral preventive war doctrine, the attack on Afghanistan, and the aggression against Iraq. But let us put these remarks into contact. Some months later, delivering his January 2003 State of the Union address from the same podium in the well of the House of Representatives, this same Bush intoned:
The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. (January 28, 2003)
These infamous sixteen words added up to one Big Lie in Dr. Goebbel’s sense, as has been amply demonstrated. In the same speech this same Bush claimed:
We’ve also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical and biological weapons across broad areas. We’re concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States. (January 28, 2003)
No such vehicles ever existed. This same Bush also alleged:
From three Iraqi defectors we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs. These are designed to produce germ warfare agents and can be moved from place to place to evade inspectors. Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities. He has given no evidence that he has destroyed them. (January 28, 2003)
Mobile labs of the type described by Bush have never been found in Iraq. Experts have speculated that these wildly exaggerated reports were based on vans used for public health purposes, or perhaps on ice cream trucks. On another occasion the very same Bush asserted:
The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has had numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his “nuclear mujahedeen,” his nuclear holy warriors. (October 7, 2002)
But the renewed nuclear program turned out to be a chimera, most likely invented by the neocon darling, convicted bank embezzler, and betrayer of American state secrets, Achmed Chalabi, to justify his $400,000 monthly stipend provided by the American taxpayer. This was the same Bush who had conjured up the specter of an Iraqi nuclear attack on the United States:
Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud. (Cincinnati, Ohio, October 2, 2002)
The internet teems with web sites dedicated primarily to keeping up with Bush’s legendary, picaresque mendacity. Bush has lied about the cost of his prescription drug boondoggle, about nonexistent economic reports he claimed had buttressed his economic prognostications, about all spheres of policy. He has lied about funding first responders, grants for port security, payments to children’s hospitals, and veterans’ benefits. The tenant of the White House has a troubled relation to the very concept of truth.
This is the man who has acquired an unparalleled at home and abroad reputation as a liar – at least, in those quarters, like the Office of Canadian Prime Minister Chretien, where he was dismissed as a moron. This is an administration in which blatant lying has become part of the daily routine – in part because of neocon guru Leo Strauss’s theory that truth is dangerous for the masses, and rulers therefore have to be esoteric, that is, lie through their teeth. But whether Bush is a cretin or a liar, his statements offer no sufficient basis for falling in with the neocons in their march towards endless war against the entire world. Knowing what we knew as of late 2004, no person of good judgment could ever accept statements from the current regime at face value. Nevertheless, otherwise intelligent people who would not dream believing Bush about Iraq or other issues are content to swallow his biggest whopper of them all: his 9/11 story. This doublethink must end. The Bush regime is a castle of lies and fabrications, and the keystone of all of them is the 9/11 myth.
It is now proverbial in Washington to remark that there is no proof linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11, and this is certainly true. But, by the very same token, there is also no proof in the public domain anywhere that adds up to a case against Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda. We should point out that we hold no brief for the misfit sheikh and his sociopathic followers. Bin Laden was a creation of the CIA, and his al Qaeda followers, to the extent that they exist at all, are doubtless individuals characterized by a surfeit of criminal intent. But we must not join the anonymous CIA agent author of the recent book Imperial Hubris in portraying the inept and unstable Bin Laden as a genius. Taken by themselves, Bin Laden and his band represent supermarket-caliber terrorists, capable of bombing a shopping center, or of destroying a bus. Any capabilities above and beyond this can only be explained through assistance provided by intelligence agencies, primarily but not limited to the American ones. There is no doubt that Bin Laden and his benighted gaggle would have desired to inflict destruction on the scale of 9/11. What is at issue is their physical and technical capability of doing so on their own in the universe as we otherwise know it to be constituted. From this point of view, Bin Laden and company emerge perhaps as actors in the plot, but playing the parts of patsies, dupes, fall-guys, or useful idiots. The main point remains that Tenet, Clarke, Powell, the FBI, and Bush have produced no convincing evidence to establish the 19 Moslem men, al Qaeda, and Bin Laden as the authors of the crimes.
Another Bush administration mythograph has been Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense. But Rumsfeld as well has a troubled relation to truth. In a press conference, he was asked if he planned to lie in order to protect state secrets. Rumsfeld boasted that he was clever enough to keep secrets in other ways, but that his underlings might have to preserve secrecy any way they could:
Rumsfeld: Of course, this conjures up Winston Churchill’s famous phrase when he said – don’t quote me on this, okay? I don’t want to be quoted on this, so don’t quote me. He said sometimes the truth is so precious that it must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies…. That is a piece of history, and I bring it up just for the sake of background. I don’t recall that I’ve ever lied to the press, I don’t intend to, and it seems to me that there will not be reason for it. There are dozens of ways to avoid having to put yourself in a position where you’re lying. And I don’t do it.
Reporter: That goes for everybody in the Department of Defense?
Rumsfeld: You’ve got to be kidding. (Laughter.) (September 25, 2001)
Theodore Olson, together with his wife Barbara Olson, had been the host of a salon which served in 1998-1999 as a meeting place for one of the principal cliques supporting the Clinton impeachment. This group included the late Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Federal Appellate Judge Robert Silberman, failed Supreme Court candidate Robert Bork, and other militant reactionaries. Olson had on one occasion lectured the US Supreme Court that “it is easy to imagine an infinite number of situations…where government officials might quite legitimately have reasons to give false information out.” (Yahoo News, March 22, 2001) Mrs. Olson was later counted among the victims of 9/11; we will return to her story.
In neocon philosophy, the art of lying has been raised to a fine art. Let us take the case of William Kristol, a leading Washington Straussian, and founder of the Project for a New American Century, a congeries of warmongers. Kristol told Nina J. Easton, the author of a profile of some top neocon leaders of the 1990s, Gang of Five (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000) that “One of the main teachings [of Strauss] is that all politics are limited and none of them is really based on the truth. So there's a certain philosophic disposition where you have some distance from these political fights....You don't take yourself or your causes as seriously as you would if you thought this was 100% ‘truth.’ Political movements are always full of partisans fighting for their opinion. But that's very different from 'the truth.'” With the help of money from Rupert Murdoch, Kristol has cultivated the art of the Goebbels Big Lie since 1995 in his weekly magazine, the Weekly Standard, the neocon house organ.
But, discredited as Tenet, Clarke, Powell, the FBI, Rumsfeld, Kristol, and Bush may appear, perhaps other proof has been offered since? No.
In the days right after the attacks, Colin Powell promised the world a white paper or white book to set forth the contentions of the United States government about what had happened, with supporting evidence. Powell did this on NBC’s Meet the Press, where the following exchange occurred on September 23, 2001:
Question: Are you absolutely convinced that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for this attack?
Secretary Powell: I am absolutely convinced that the al Qaeda network, which he heads, was responsible for this attack. […]
Question: Will you release publicly a white paper, which links him and his organization to this attack, to put people at ease? Secretary Powell: We are hard at work bringing all the information together, intelligence information, law enforcement information. And I think, in the near future, we will be able to put out a paper, a document, that will describe quite clearly the evidence we have linking him to the attack. And also, remember, he has been linked to previous attacks against US interests and he was already indicated for earlier attacks against the United States. ( http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2001/5012.htm )
The following day, September 24, saw a front page article in the New York Times which bragged that Powell’s evidence “reaches from the southern tip of Manhattan to the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan.” However, there was clearly something wrong with the US case, since, in an appearance with Bush at the White House rose garden on September 24, Powell somewhat obliquely retracted his promise. And on that same afternoon, Bush’s spokesman Ari Fleischer, a past master of mendacity, said that Powell had been the victim of a misunderstanding. No white paper would be forthcoming, he suggested. According to Fleischer, much of the information of Bin Laden was classified, and making it public would compromise US intelligence methods and sources. Even the press trollops in the White House briefing room rebelled at this attempted sleight of hand. A reporter challenged Ari, asking if there was in fact “any plan to present public evidence so that the average citizen, not just Americans, but people all over the world can understand the case against Bin Laden.” Fleischer disappeared in a cloud of verbiage: “In a democracy it’s always important to provide the maximum amount of information possible. But I think the American people also understand that there are going to be times when that information cannot immediately be forthcoming.” As of this writing, it still has not been forthcoming.
Bush himself rejected any white paper. He said that any such publication may “make the war more difficult to win.” (AP, September 24, 2001) Amidst much embarrassment, the Bush regime quickly fell back on the following ploy: they would assemble a watertight case against Bin Laden, but this was so sensitive that could only be shown to governments. We must always bear in mind that these assertions were not presented in the manner of a scholarly debate, but as part of brutal pressure on sovereign states to yield to Bush’s manichean Diktat.
Even though Bush did not have enough information on the 9/11 events to put out a credible white paper, he nevertheless ordered the FBI to curtail their investigation of the case. The FBI order to stop probing described the investigation done so far as “the most exhaustive in its history.” A government official said in an understatement that “The investigative staff has to be made to understand that we’re not trying to solve a crime now.”
BANKRUPT LEFTISTS
Not just the impotence, but the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of many US leftists was pitilessly displayed by the events of 9/11. Many who would never dream of believing Bush or the FBI on matters far less important were willing to swallow the entire official story this time around. Noam Chomsky went so far as to issue a lengthy interview in the wake of 9/11; he even had it published as a small book. This passage is at the heart of the matter:
Q: NATO is keeping quiet until they find out whether the attack was internal or external. How do you interpret this?
Chomsky: I do not think that is the reason for NATO’s hesitation. There is no serious doubt that the attack was ‘external.’ […]
Q: Could you say something about connivance and the role of America secret service?
Chomsky: I don’t quite understand the question. This attack was surely an enormous shock and surprise to the intelligence services of the West, including those of the United States.” (Chomsky 17)
This leaves our poor Chomsky far to the right of the 9/11 euroskeptics – and that means foreign ministers, defense ministers, and generals -- in the NATO ministerial council! Michael Parenti’s book on the terrorism trap falls into it, at least as far as the 9/11 official story is concerned. Amy Goodman of the Democracy Now radio program banned all criticism of the official 9/11 story, while proclaiming her own superlative courage in tackling issues like East Timor. When she finally let the dignified academic David Ray Griffin come on her show, she insisted on balancing him with the slimy character assassin Chip Berlet, who knew nothing in particular about 9/11.
The left wing of the Democratic Party, grouped around The Nation magazine, was rudderless. Some time after 9/11 this magazine produced an anthology of its most important post-9/11 articles. A key contributor to this collection was Jonathan Schell, who wrote in his introduction: “It was clear from the start that Islamic fundamentalists were responsible, almost certainly in the service of the Al Qaeda terrorist organization, but the magnitude of the force involved remained hazy in the extreme.” (Vanden Heuvel xv) Other articles in the collection, some by very distinguished and well-meaning authors, may have more or less merit, but they do not rise above this inadequate level. The US left might object all it liked to the consequences which Bush derived from his fabricated 9/11 premise, but unless those leftists were willing to attack the premise, it was clear that their efforts would not be effective. Even in the pages of The Nation, it was the neocon bully Christopher Hitchens, billed until only yesterday as the “last Marxist,” who seemed to carry the day, based on the refusal of all the others to challenge the myth he shamelessly used to club them into submission.
Some governments found ways to leak their estimate of Bush’s alleged proof. One was the government of Pakistan, which had been placed under a US war ultimatum to cooperate in an attack on Afghanistan. Here the distinguished retired military leader General Mirza Aslam Beg told an interviewer some months after the fact that the “evidence” provided to Pakistan's Musharraf government “would not hold in a court of law, because of the inherent weaknesses.” (EIR, December 10, 2001) In a newspaper interview, Gen. Beg insisted that the attacks had been the work of highly-trained experts “who used high technology for destruction. He argued that even ordinary trained pilots could not have carried out the missions observed. (Nawa- Waqt, September 13, 2001) [1]
Egyptian strategic analyst Tal’at Muslim argued in al-Akhbar of Cairo that the resources available to Arab and Islamic terror organizations were “well below” what was plainly necessary to carry out operations on the scale of 9/11. (September 13, 2001) In the Palestinian paper al-Quds, Hatim Abu Sha’ban found that the US authorities were searching for the perpetrators in entirely the wrong places. “They accused…the least likely to be perpetrators in light of the operation’s nature, which requires great planning capabilities, knowledge of information, and mobility on the part of the criminals who committed this terrorist operation.” (September 18, 2001)
The Saudi government complained that its citizens were being accused of crimes, but that the US had provided no hard evidence. Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef said that he viewed Osama Bin Laden more “as a tool,” than the mastermind of the September 11 attacks. “He's at the top of the pyramid from the media point of view, but from my personal views and conviction, I don't think he's at the top of the pyramid,” commented Prince Nayef. U.S. officials were claiming that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. But Nayef noted that “until now, we have no evidence that assures us they are related to September 11. We have not received anything in this regard from the United States.” (New York Times, December 10, 2001)
Some indication of the problems being encountered by the US bureaucracy in trying to pin 9/11 on Bin Laden were reflected in a Wall Street Journal article entitled “Faint Trail: It's Surprisingly Tough To Pin Terror Attacks on the ‘Prime Suspect.’” Here the paucity of evidence was the dominant note. Such evidence as did exist was largely circumstantial, the Journal noted, such as ties of suspected hijacker Mohammed Atta to Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which allegedly was part of bin Laden's Al Qaeda; the presence of one hijacker in Malaysia in January 2000, meeting with someone linked to the bombing of the USS Cole, which was in turn allegedly linked to bin Laden; communications intercepts showing Al Qaeda operatives had some advanced knowledge of the strikes; or that two of the suspected hijackers were perhaps linked to a suspected bin Laden operative in Boston. The Journal conceded that the issue of proof was a key component of the U.S.'s ability to enlist support of Islamic countries such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and perhaps Syria. “The issue of proof is no small matter,” one Administration official was cited as observing. But the US case was plainly a lame one, with an unidentified intelligence official concluding weakly that “no information has come up that suggests that bin Laden wasn't involved.” None of this could even begin to explain how these ragtag forces could mount such a spectacular action. Here was surely no justification for abandoning the entire edifice of international law, which had been formed in large part as a result of wars in which tens of millions of people had perished.