BLAIR’S 9/11 DOSSIER: THE CLIFF’S NOTES VERSION
With the US regime struggling, into the breach rushed Tony Blair, a glib and slippery apologist for war. On October 2, Blair’s office in Number 10 Downing Street released the first of his celebrated dossiers. It was entitled “Responsibility for the Terrorist Atrocities in the United States.” Unfortunately, Blair’s dossier was obliged to begin on an uncertain note: “This document does not purport to provide a prosecutable case against Osama Bin Laden in a court of law.” Why not, given what is at stake? Answer: “Intelligence often cannot be used evidentially, due both to the strict rules of admissibility and to the need to protect the safety of sources. But on the basis of all the information available HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] is confident of its conclusions as expressed in this document.” Of course, this means that since the proof may be insufficient, we are expected to believe Blair & Co. on the basis of their general integrity and credibility. This is a controversial point, to which we will soon return.
Blair’s main finding:
The clear conclusions reached by the government are: Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, the terrorist network which he heads, planned and carried out the atrocities on 11 September 2001; Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda retain the will and the resources to carry out further atrocities; The United Kingdom, and United Kingdom nationals are potential targets; and Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were able to commit these atrocities because of their close alliance with the Taliban regime, which allowed them to operate with impunity in pursuing their terrorist activity.” (Blair at http://www.counterpunch.org/dossier1.html, 1)
Blair’s dossier then went on for 16 of its 19 pages reciting the nefarious deeds of which Bin Laden had been accused: Bin Laden has worked with the Taliban, attacked the USS Cole, and bombed the US embassies in East Africa. He had doubtless issued bloodthirsty calls for murder against the US and its citizens. As for his claims of responsibility, they could simply be the ravings of a megalomaniac. But none of this adds up to 9/11 or anything approaching it. If working in favor of the Taliban were a crime, it would have been necessary to indict Henry Kissinger, who lobbied Congress in favor of Unocal’s pipeline project there. And throughout the argument, Blair relied on unnamed intelligence sources for most of his material.
When Blair finally got to 9/11, he proceeded through a chain of unproven assertions, as signaled by a shift into the vagueness of the passive voice: “Nineteen men have been identified as the hijackers from the passenger lists of the four planes hijacked on September 11. At least three of them have already been positively identified as associates of al-Qaeda.” (Blair 21) But all this means is that the FBI is accusing them, which is wholly inadequate.
From intelligence sources, the following facts have been established subsequent to 11 September; for intelligence reasons, the names of associates, though known, are not given. In the run-up to 11 September, bin Laden was mounting a concerted propaganda campaign amongst like- minded groups of people – including videos and documentation – justifying attacks on Jewish and American targets; and claiming that those who died in the course of them were carrying out God’s work. We have learned, subsequent to 11 September, that Bin Laden himself asserted shortly before 11 September that he was preparing a major attack on America. In August and early September close associates of Bin Laden were warned to return to Afghanistan from other parts of the world by 10 September. Immediately prior to 11 September some known associates of Bin Laden were naming the date for action as on or around 11 September. Since 11 September we have learned that one of Bin Laden’s closest and most senior associates was responsible for the detailed planning of the attacks. There is evidence of a very specific nature relating to Bin Laden and his associates that is too sensitive to release. (Blair 22-23, emphasis added)
All we have here is an exercise in check kiting. The CIA had forwarded a bouncing check to MI-6, and MI-6 had sent it back to Washington by simply citing the claims of the CIA as fact, and covering the whole in a mantle of the Official Secrets Act. It is perfectly plausible that Bin Laden and his associates were planning a terror attack on the US which seemed large to them. The issue, once again, is their physical and technical ability to bring about destruction in the places and on the scale observed. Blair’s document brought the central issue to a head when he asserted:
The modus operandi of 11 September was entirely consistent with previous attacks….The attacks of 11 September are entirely consistent with the scale and sophistication which went in to the attacks on the East African Embassies and the USS Cole. (Blair 23)
The problem is that the 9/11 attacks were incomparably larger and more serious than anything attempted by al Qaeda previously – they were in fact several orders of magnitude larger. This is apart from the question, which we will address later, of the degree to which al Qaeda has continued to receive technical assistance from certain rogue elements of US intelligence and others. So Tony Blair’s dossier turned out to be a string of unsubstantiated assertions, and thus a miserable excuse for proof.
In addition, later events taught us more about Tony Blair’s methods in compiling dossiers.
NUMBER 10 DOWNING STREET – KITCHEN OF LIES
New light on the putative value of intelligence dossiers issued by Tony Blair’s office in Number 10 Downing Street was not long in coming. In September 2002, Blair published amid great fanfare his dossier purporting to demonstrate that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq currently possessed weapons of mass destruction. This was entitled “Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception, and Intimidation,” and it was clearly crafted to provide a pretext for waging unprovoked and aggressive war against Iraq. This dossier was exposed as a fraud in two distinct waves of demystification. The first exposure took place in February 2003, when it emerged that entire sections of this report, which had been billed as the most up-to-date evaluation that could be offered by the very formidable capabilities of MI-6 and the rest of the British intelligence machine, had simply been lifted, plagiarized without attribution, from older documents in the public domain. The Iraq dossier had been concocted by Blair and his media guru Alistair Campbell, a figure who combined the worst of image-mongers like Michael Deaver and Karl Rove, using materials provided by British intelligence. Parts of Blair’s dossier had been stolen from articles written by Sean Boyne of Jane’s Intelligence Review, who was horrified by the nefarious use to which his work had been put. “I don’t like to think that anything I wrote has been used as an argument for war. I am concerned because I am against the war,” complained Boyne. Another source from which Blair had lifted material verbatim was a thesis entitled “Iraq’s Security and Intelligence Network,” published in September 2002 by a graduate student, Ibrahim al-Marashi, a California resident. Al-Marashi was equally indignant, commenting that “this is wholesale deception. How can the British public trust the government if it is up to this sort of tricks? People will treat any other information they publish now with a lot of skepticism from now on.” And not just from now on; it is our contention here that this disbelief in regard to Tony Blair’s work product should also be applied retrospectively.
The British Parliament was appalled by Blair’s mendacity, which was so crude that the coded titles of the Microsoft Word documents that made up the dossier had been allowed to remain visible on the Number 10 Downing Street web site. Many pointed to Alistair Hamilton as the dervish of spin behind the entire sordid operation. Former Labour Party Defense Minister and current Member of Parliament Peter Kilfoyle observed that Blair’s deception merely “adds to the general impression that what we have been treated to is a farrago of half-truths. I am shocked that on such thin evidence that we should be trying to convince the British people that this war is worth fighting. Labour MP Glenda Jackson added “It is another example of how the Government is attempting to mislead the country and Parliament. And of course to mislead is a Parliamentary euphemism for lying.” (Daily Mirror, February 8, 2003)
Blair’s nonchalance in cribbing together dossiers on subjects of vast importance also attracted the barbs of British wits. AheadOfNews.com spoofed Blair’s plagiarized Iraq dossier by writing that “a spokesman for Prime Minister Tony Blair acknowledged recently that the report, ‘Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception, and Intimidation,’ had been cobbled together from a variety of sources, including old term papers, Readers Digest, and several tabloids. John Miller, Undersecretary for Cutting- and-Pasting, explained that ‘plagiarized’ sections of the report included spelling errors, such as ‘weapons of mass distraction,’ and ‘Untied States’ found in the originals. “Our deceptions might have succeeded,’ he said, ‘except for our bloody incompetent proofreaders.” (February 12, 2003) Blair’s Iraq dossier was an international laughingstock, but that had not prevented Colin Powell from praising it in his infamous speech to the United Nations Security Council.
But Blair’s dossier was in the end no laughing matter: it contributed to the deaths of perhaps 15,000 people in Iraq within a year. It also brought tragedy to one of the British intelligence officials who had collaborated in its creation.
In June, 2003, when the Iraq war had already begun to go badly for the aggressors, BBC News broadcast a story by correspondent Barnaby Mason reporting that Blair and Campbell had personally supervised the concoction of the Iraq WMD dossier, sending proposed drafts back to the Joint Intelligence Committee “six to eight times” to be “sexed up” through the addition of more lurid and sensational details. One of these details was thought to be Blair’s fantastic claim that Iraq had WMD which could be launched within 45 minutes. Blair delivered this warning in such a way as to suggest that Iraq would be capable of striking the UK within 45 minutes, despite the fact that Iraq possessed no delivery systems capable of doling this.
The response of the Blair regime to this report was to promote a witch-hunt to ferret out the source inside the government who had leaked such embarrassing material to Barnaby Mason. Officials of the British Defense Ministry allowed journalists to read them lists of persons suspected of being the leaker, and were willing to confirm the identity of their prime suspect as soon as the journalists mentioned his name. In this way, the Defense Ministry in effect betrayed one of its own employees, Dr. David Kelly. A few days later Kelly was found dead in a forest near his home, with his wrists slashed. His death was quickly ruled a suicide. After Kelly’s death, a UN diplomat recalled that he had asked Kelly back in February 2003 what would happen if Tony Blair went through with his plan to join Bush in attacking Iraq. “I will probably be found dead in the woods,” was Kelly’s prophetic reply.
Blair’s fabrications have been covered up with the help of two devious Lords, Lord Hutton and Lord Butler, both of whom have absolved the Prime Minister and his cohorts of deliberately fabricating intelligence. But the London press has dismissed these two reports as “Whitewash” and “Whitewash II” respectively. Each of them is a politically motivated coverup designed to save the interests of the British oligarchy, which has heavily invested in Blair, the 9/11 myth, and the Iraq war. The probative value of these whitewashes is nil.
In the light of all these facts, anyone interested in truth as distinct from propaganda can hardly accept at face value dossiers issued by the man whom his countrymen have now dubbed “Tony Bliar.” Such skepticism must apply not only to Blair’s Iraq dossier, but also to his earlier Bin Laden dossier, which was an important building block in the Bin Laden myth.
TORRICELLI: AN IMMEDIATE BOARD OF INQUIRY
In contrast to the relentless stonewalling of the Bush administration on any serious investigation of 9/11, Democratic New Jersey Senator Robert Torricelli soon came forward as the most consistent spokesman for a real probe, accompanied by accountability for the nonfeasance or malfeasance of federal officials. Torricelli represented New Jersey, the state where the largest number of victims of 9/11 had lived, and he appeared to take seriously the need for finding out what happened. Torricelli’s fate therefore becomes a case study of the workings of the US regime in the wake of 9/11. On September 26, Torricelli made an address to the Senate in which he began by talking about how much New Jersey had suffered:
There is not a small town or a city in northern New Jersey that has not been touched or changed. At the time the final body has been found and the search has concluded, 2,000 to 3,000 people in New Jersey may have lost their lives. It is estimated there are 1,500 orphans in my State. It struck everywhere.
He then turned to the US intelligence community, which had manifestly failed its citizens in the most grievous way. He talked about the disproportion between the means allocated and the results obtained:
It is reported in the media that the United States, in what would otherwise be a classified figure, may spend $30 billion per year on intelligence services, including the CIA and the NSA. The Washington Post reports the FBI counterterrorism spending grew to $423 million this year, a figure which in the last 8 years has grown by 300 percent. It is not enough to ask for more. It is necessary to assess what went wrong. Did leadership fail? Were the plans inadequate? Did we have the wrong people, or were they on the wrong mission?
This was a challenge to the CIA, FBI, and the other spy agencies. Torricelli then began to enumerate several concrete examples of incompetence by these same agencies:
Earlier this week, the Washington Post reported that over the past 2 years the Central Intelligence Agency had provided to the FBI the names of 100 suspected associates of Osama bin Laden who were either in or on their way to the United States. Yet the Washington Post concludes that the FBI “was ill equipped and unprepared” to deal with this information.
Some of the allegations reported in the media are stunning and deeply troubling, not simply about what happened but revealing about our inability to deal with the current crisis. Previous terrorist investigations, it is alleged, produced boxes of evidentiary material written in Arabic that remained unanalyzed for lack of translators. During the 1993 World Trade Center bombing trial, agents discovered that photos and drawings outlining the plot had been in their possession for 3 years, but they had not been analyzed.
Since 1996, the FBI had evidence that international terrorists were learning to fly passenger jets at U.S. flight schools, but that does not seem to have obviously raised sufficient concern, and there was no apparent action.
In August, the FBI received notice from French intelligence that one man who had paid cash to use flight simulators in Minnesota was a “radical Islamic extremist” with ties to Afghani terrorist training camps. Regrettably, this intelligence information was apparently not seen in the greater context of an actual threat that has now been realized. […]
Torricelli then raised his key demand, which was for the immediate convocation of a Board of Inquiry on 9/11, modeled on the boards of inquiry which had been convened after the explosion of the USS Maine, the Pearl Harbor attack, and the losses of the space shuttle Challenger:
On behalf of the people of my State, if I need to return to this Chamber every day of every week of every month, this Senate is going to vote for some board of inquiry. I joined my colleagues after the Challenger accident, recognizing that that loss of life, the failure of technology and leadership, indicated something was wrong in NASA. The board of inquiry reformed NASA and the technology and gave it new leadership, and it served the Nation well.
After Pearl Harbor, we recognized something was wrong militarily. We had a board of inquiry. We found those responsible, we held them accountable, and we instituted the changes.
Torricelli stressed the necessary moment of accountability for the high government officials who had been found wanting:
Indeed, that formula has served this Nation for years in numerous crises. Now I call for it again. First, review the circumstances surrounding this tragedy, the people responsible, the resources that were available, where there was a failure of action, and make recommendations and assign responsibility. Second, develop recommendations or changes of law or resources or personnel so it does not happen again. I cannot imagine we will do less. I call upon us to do more. I will not be satisfied with new assignments of powers or appropriating more money. I want to know what went wrong, and why, and who.
On October 4, Torricelli took the floor again, to repeat his demand for an immediate Board of Inquiry, and to motivate it further:
A number of my colleagues are joining with me in the coming days in introducing legislation to create a board of inquiry regarding the terrorist attacks of September 11. It is my intention to offer it as an amendment to legislation that is currently working its way through the Senate dealing with this tragedy. […]
I cannot predict any of these answers, but what is important is neither can anyone else in this Congress or the administration because without some analysis, as we have done throughout our country's history, we will never know. Indeed, if we fail to have a board of inquiry in the midst of this crisis about these circumstances, I believe history will instruct us it will be the first time in the history of the Republic that the Government did not hold itself accountable and subject to analysis when our American people have faced a crisis of this magnitude.
The people deserve an answer. The Government should hold itself accountable, and only a board of inquiry, independent of the Congress and the Executive, has the credibility to do it.
Torricelli’s proposals had an undeniable power. If a board of inquiry had been possible in desperate days at the beginning of World War II, with a real shooting war being fought against real and formidable enemies, why was it not possible now? Pro-Bush spokesmen were forced into such contortions as arguing that the current situation was infinitely more dangerous than any moment of World War II, or of the Cold War. For those who remembered the Cuban missile crisis, when 100,000,000 million Americans might have died in the first hour of a nuclear exchange, these notions were patently absurd.
Alarmed by the threat of a rapid and credible investigation being raise by the agitation of Torricelli and a small group of like-minded senators, Bush took the highly unusual step of asking House and Senate leaders to allow only two congressional committees to investigate the government's response to the events of September 11, officials said. Bush wanted the inquiry to be limited to the House and Senate intelligence committees, whose proceedings are generally secret. Senate Democratic leaders wanted a broader investigation, involving some committees that would be free to air their findings. But even the Democrats had already narrowed the focus to intelligence failures preceding the terrorist attacks. In ruling out any serious probes, Bush attempted to wrap himself in the banner of military necessity in the prosecution of his alleged war on terror; a senior administration official said “the president thinks it's important for Congress to review events in a way that does not unduly burden the defense and intelligence communities as they are still charged with fighting a war.” Bush made this request of Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D- .D.) during a breakfast meeting with congressional leaders. Daschle told reporters that Cheney had “expressed the concern that a review of what happened on September 11 would take resources and personnel away from the effort in the war on terrorism.” Daschle said he agreed with the demand by Bush and Cheney to “to limit the scope and the overall review of what happened.” In other words, the supposed opposition was agreeing that there was no need to prove the US government’s official version of events. What were they hiding? (“Bush Seeks To Restrict Hill 9/11 Probes, Intelligence Panels' Secrecy Is Favored,” Washington Post, January 30, 2002) The milquetoast Daschle was a poor substitute for a real opposition leader. His capitulation on the board of inquiry issue set the tone for a series of Democratic Party surrenders that lasted for the duration of 2002, and which included abdicating to Bush the constitutional monopoly of the Congress on the power to declare war.
And what happened to Torricelli? He was owed much by his party. As head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, he was often given credit for the 2000 election victories that brought Senate Democrats from 45 seats to 50. Soon after that, he became the target of corruption charges regarding his campaign finances and gifts he had allegedly accepted. For years, he had been profiled as a severe critic of the intelligence agencies. In January 2002, Torricelli supporters hailed U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White's decision not to pursue prosecution of Torricelli for accepting illegal gifts as a vindication. But even on that occasion, The New York Times kept up the pressure for Torricelli to be skewered, arguing in an editorial that “the allegations against Mr. Torricelli are serious and cry out for prompt investigation and resolution in a manner worthy of public respect. If the [Senate Ethics] committee will not provide it, it might as well disband.” Torricelli’s seat was up in 2002, and he was headed for almost certain re-election when the Senate Ethics Committee found he had damaged the reputation of that august body by accepting expensive personal gifts from a campaign contributor. At this point, Torricelli dropped to even with his opponent. Then, a federal judge ordered federal prosecutors to release to the press a letter which some thought suggested that Torricelli might have been guilty of more than talking gifts. A furious press campaign against the senator ensued. At this point, in September, Torricelli’s position in the polls collapsed, and he dropped out of contention. The Democratic Party replaced him with former Senator Frank Lautenberg, who won the seat. Most significantly, federal prosecutors have never to this day brought any charges against Torricelli based on the contents of the supposedly incriminating letter, or any other charges. Their interference in Torricelli’s re-election campaign thus appears to have been a political dirty trick at the outer limits of legality, designed to drive him out of political life. A reason for this operation is evident: they were defending the establishment’s omertà, its code of silence, on 9/11.
The initial congressional effort at dealing with the events of 9/11 was the pitiful coverup offered by the Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security of the House Intelligence Committee. Most of the subcommittee’s work remained cloaked under a veil of secrecy, but a short executive summary containing analysis and a few anodyne recommendations were made available to the public. This simulacrum of a real probe was directed by Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, an opportunistic scoundrel who, at the same time he was superintending this superficial report, was conducting one of the most shameful senate campaigns in US history. Chambliss was seeking to unseat Georgia Democrat Max Cleland, a future member of the Kean-Hamilton Commission. Cleland was a war veteran who had left both his legs and one arm on the battlefield – triple amputee. Chambliss, like Cheney and so many other hypocritical Bush backers, had had other priorities during the Vietnam era. But this did not prevent Chambliss from running as a warmonger, while vilifying Cleland, the war hero, as unpatriotic because he refused to support Bush’s Iraq adventure. And it had worked: Chambliss was elected to the Senate a few months after the report was published. This may have represented the oligarchy’s reward to Chambliss for his yeoman service in piloting the first Congressional coverup of 9/11.
Chambliss billed his handiwork as “a very critical report,” but it was nothing of the kind. Starting from a wholly uncritical acceptance of the 9/11 myth as its premises, the report merely attempted to identify shortcomings in US intelligence and to offer helpful hints about how they might be remedied. Although the subcommittee chronicled the well- known failures of FBI, CIA, NSA and others, no disciplinary action against any sitting federal bureaucrat was recommended. According to Rep. Jane Harman, Democrat of California and the ranking member, the report was “designed to give good people better tools, more resources, access to good watch lists, digital technologies, enhanced platforms, better language training, and career support.” The subcommittee was of the opinion that the 9/11 attacks could not have been prevented, even if all the intelligence in the possession of the entire US government had been synthesized and brought to bear – an absurd thesis. However, by virtue of so much ineptitude, the tradition of begging the question had been further solidified. (CNSNEWS.com, July 17, 2002)
The healthy skepticism displayed by world public opinion in response to the fantastic and unsubstantiated stories peddled by the dubious US regime rankled with Paul Wolfowitz, the chief neocon and the number two in the Rumsfeld Pentagon. When a new Bin Laden tape appeared in which Bin Laden was understood by some as claiming responsibility for the attacks, Wolfowitz expressed the wish that this new tape would put an end to “conspiracy theories.” According to Wolfowitz, the new find “confirms everything we've known about him already. There's nothing new or surprising in it. It's just further confirmation and hopefully, maybe, we'll stop hearing anything more about these insane conspiracy theories that somehow that the US has made this up or that somebody else did it.” (Sam Donaldson, ABC, December 9, 2001)
The US Congress mounted an inquiry, which was conducted by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, acting as the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001. The history of this committee, known as the JICI, was a troubled one. Three months into the probe, the original staff director suddenly resigned. This was L. Britt Snider, the former inspector general of the CIA. He was known for being a creature of Tenet, and was considered too eager to spare his former colleagues any embarrassment. But on the other hand, Snider had been favored by Democrat Bob Graham of Florida, who wanted to run for president, and was opposed by Republican senators. Snider was replaced temporarily by Rick Cinquegrana, another CIA officer, and then permanently by Eleanor Hill. “Members are trying to say, ‘We've got to get to the bottom of what happened’ while also saying, ‘We don't want to make it into a witch hunt,’” said L. Paul Bremer, who led a previous probe of intelligence agencies after the bombing of U.S. embassies in East Africa. Bremer later became notorious as Bush’s proconsul in Mesopotamia. Those impulses, Bremer said, “will be an inherent tension irrespective of who is the staff director.” When this JICI’s report was published in December 2002, the most notable thing about it was that 28 pages were absolutely blank – redacted at the insistence of the administration. Remarks by Graham and others fueled speculation that the 28 blank pages contained information that somehow implicated Saudi Arabia, and the press made much of this. But the general approach of the JICI was that there had been an intelligence failure, and that there ought to be measures to avoid more intelligence failures – nothing more.
SKEPTICAL GOVERNMENTS
The other factor that ought to give any thoughtful citizen cause to reflect is the significant number of dissenting opinions registered in the months after 9/11. We have assembled some of these here for inspection. Naturally, few if any of these critical strictures on 9/11 were ever presented in the US news media. That was unconscionable, since many of those who manifested serious doubts on the main issues of 9/11 were eminently respectable, experienced persons with decades of background in government, politics, academia, and military affairs. There were prime ministers and ministers, generals, professors, and well-established experts. Even in the midst of the shock and trauma experienced by world public opinion in the wake of 9/11, they were able to formulate coherent objections to the official version, objections which in many cases have been ignored and not answered down to the present day.
The European NATO partners were confronted with the need to evaluate the US version of 9/11 in a very direct way: immediately after 9/11, the Bush regime demanded the activation of Article Five of the North Atlantic Pact, calling upon member states to assist the United States in warding off an attack from abroad. The US, however, had never offered any proof that the 9/11 attacks had indeed come from outside of its own borders. Under the shock of the 9/11 events, and fearing the retribution of a crazed regime that was announcing its determination to “end states,” the European allies approved the resolution unanimously, even though no proof had been provided. One who objected to this procedure was Helmut Schmidt, the former Chancellor and Defense Minister of Germany for the Social Democratic Party, Several months after the vote, Schmidt reiterated that the European acquiescence had been a mistake. “For that article to be put into action, proof had to be delivered that the Sept. 11 terror attacks came from abroad. That proof has still not been provided,” Schmidt. (N-TV, December 10, 2001; EIR, December 13, 2001)
Another skeptic was former Italian President, Prime Minister, and Interior Minister Francesco Cossiga, who had been in charge of Italy’s internal security during the 1978 kidnap-murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro. Cossiga indicated his suspicion that the attacks presupposed some form of complicity within the US security system. The mastermind of the attack, Cossiga observed must have been a “sophisticated mind, provided with ample means not only to recruit fanatic kamikazes, but also highly specialized personnel. I add one thing: it could not be accomplished without infiltrations in the radar and flight security personnel.” As for Bin Laden, Cossiga added that “it is not thinkable that he did everything by himself.” (La Stampa, September 14, 2001; EIR September 15, 2001)
General Heinz Karst was one of the founders of the reconstituted German military forces, or Bundeswehr, in the mid-1950s. Like other experienced military men, Karst found the 9/11 story purveyed by the Bush administration suspiciously incomplete. In an interview, he noted that “British secret service coordinator, Pauline Neville-Jones considers--as most experts do--a Bin Laden co-authorship likely. But as far as the logistical operation is concerned, she is almost sure that the attacks were planned out in America, over the last six months.” Karst put these comments in historical context: “When, in 1995, the Federal building in Oklahoma was blown up and 168 human beings were killed, people first thought of Islamic terrorists. But they were Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, two elite soldiers of the Green Berets. The Americans have a long tradition of assassination attacks and of terrorism. Their most famous President, Abraham Lincoln, was shot dead in the theater. Martin Luther King was shot dead. John F. Kennedy was shot dead. His assassin was shot dead. Bob Kennedy was shot dead. Ronald Reagan survived an assassination attempt. There are rumors that also American ex-military have their hands in many cases.” (Deutschlandmagazin, December 17, 2001; EIR)
Also in Germany, former Technology Minister and deputy Defense Minister Andreas von Bülow developed a broad critique of the official 9/11 story, to which we will have occasion to refer several times. In early January 2002 von Bülow told the Berlin Tagespiegel that “planning the attacks was a masterwork, in technical and organizational terms. To hijack four big airliners within a few minutes and fly them into targets within a single hour and to do so on complicated flight routes! That is unthinkable, without backing from the secret apparatus of state and industry.” He called attention to the fact that covering up the real authorship of a terrorist crime with false tracks for investigators to follow has “been an accompanying feature of covert operations ever since they have been launched by influential agencies.” Von Bülow’s conclusion was that the full truth about September 11 had yet to be told. (Berlin Tagespiegel, January 13, 2002; EIR)
Another critical view of the 9/11 story came from Dr. Johannes B. Koeppl, a former official in the German Defense Ministry, and an advisor to the former NATO General Secretary, Manfred Woerner. Koeppl told Mike Ruppert: “The interests behind the Bush administration, such as the CFR, the Trilateral Commission – founded by Brzezinski for David Rockefeller – and the Bilderberger group, have prepared for and are now moving to implement open world dictatorship within the next five years. They are not fighting against terrorists. They are fighting against citizens.” (From the Wilderness, November 6, 2001)
A well-informed European source interviewed by EIR News Service on September 24, 2001 was of the opinion that 9/11 had been organized by a highly sophisticated operation inside the US. He added that “the Russians are aware of this, and that what is behind the operation, is a “vast geostrategic arrangement,” that touches upon the most sensitive Russian interests. The lack of proof of a foreign role, he thought, “makes all this talk of invoking Article 5 so problematic, because Article 5 is not valid, if the attack emanates from inside a NATO country. But the United States is hugely reluctant, to discuss the internal American factors in this. Yet, the fact is, everything that happened on 9/11, was organized, executed, and raised inside the United States. All this obsession on Osama bin Laden is pure nonsense. In fact, this was all well-organized, the people who did it were geniuses, I wish they were on our side.” He elaborated that, “as far as the Russians are concerned, there are two elements involved in all this: There is the United States as such, and there is the situation in Central Asia. All this talk of Islamic terrorism, is a cover for the fact that there are vast geostrategic rearrangements afoot, in all this.” Asked about how 9/11 came about, this source replied: “This was not primarily Islamic at all. I'm sure there were Islamic elements, but what is behind this, is a deeply embedded conspiratorial and organized operation, that took two-plus years to put together. These were people, who were able to make sophisticated moves on the markets, right before it happened. It was very carefully initiated and carried out, using American dissident groups, of which there are a lot, some quite violent. Probably the militia elements would have been tapped, although you have to keep in mind, they are a cover for something else. In any case, what I can say to you with certainty, this was not done by a handful of Islamic fanatics.”
General Mirza Aslam Beg of Pakistan voiced the doubts of his own government, even as Pakistan was being employed as a staging area for the US invasion of Afghanistan. Beg commented that “Many of us in this region believe that Osama or his al-Qaeda were not responsible for 11 September attacks in New York and Washington, yet the coalition led by United States is busy on ‘Afghan bashing,’ chasing objectives, which go much beyond Osama bin Laden. The information which is now coming up, goes to prove that involvement by the ‘rogue elements’ of the U.S. military and intelligence organization is getting more obvious. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda definitely do not have the know- how and the capability to launch such operations involving such high precision coordination, based on information and expertise.” (EIR, December 10, 2001)
Leading British academics also found the US official version unpalatable. Fred Halliday, London School of Economics Professor of International Relations and a well-known expert on the Middle East, told the BBC on September 11 that he would look for a domestic origin within the US of the September 11 events, along the lines of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. He had underlined that it would be a mistake to depend on Bin Laden/Islamist track, since, in the Middle East, bin Laden has often been derided as an American agent. (London Observer, November 25, 2001)
The Arab world in general was not buying Washington’s account, especially in the absence of concrete evidence. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the leading conservative daily in Germany, lamented towards the end of November that the Arab public preferred its own “conspiracy theories” to the assurances offered by the Bush administration. The Arabs, complained the FAZ, tend to believe that “American intelligence circles planned and executed the Sept. 11 attacks in order to launch a long- prepared general assault against the Arab and Muslim world.” As an example, the FAZ cited the November 3 lead editorial in the semi-official Egyptian newspaper paper Al Ahram, whose author, Dr. Mustafa Mahmud wrote: “History has not ended. Slowly the truth is emerging. American groups planned and executed the attacks of Sept. 11. The anthrax cases in the United States are a further indication for this. We don't know what else will come up in the coming days.... History has not ended yet. There are murderers around, who have not been punished, criminals who have not paid the price for their deeds.” (FAZ, November 23, 2001; EIR)
MOSLEM VOICES CONDEMN 9/11, DENY OFFICIAL STORY
In a talk show broadcast on the government’s official nation-wide first program of Egyptian television featuring the leading intellectual Professor Mohammed Selim on November 24, all the participants agreed that organizing the 9/11 attacks was simply beyond the ability of Osama bin Laden and company. “No one in Egypt believes that Osama bin Laden did it,” the professor noted. The London-based Al-Sharq Al-Awsat is generally viewed as the semi-official organ of the Saudi government and the Saudi royal family, and has the largest circulation in the kingdom. This paper carried a commentary by the former Minister of Culture, Farouk Al-Berbir, which attempted to refute the US official account. According to Berbir, “the war on terrorism is an umbrella for the clash of civilizations. Saudi officials suspect that American terrorists were behind the September 11 attacks.” Berbir elaborated that “probably, the statements made by some Saudi officials, who say that they suspect that terrorists from inside the United States itself have been involved in this sophisticated operation, is enough to prove the meaninglessness of accusing bin Laden,...who was financed and armed by the CIA to fight the war against the Soviets.” According to Berbir, the “war against Islamic terrorism” is simply a new cloak for the old familiar American “arrogance of power” and for the powerful Zionist faction in the US administration. In Berbir’s view, the “U.S. has failed to prove or present a single tangible proof for” its official 9/11 story. (Al-Sharq Al- Awsat, November 30, 2001) The Saudi press also accused the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad, of complicity in the attacks. Columnist Abd al-Jabbar Adwan wrapped up this paper’s view when he pointed to the numerous Armageddon and Apocalypse cults now operating on the American scene, writing: “Perhaps everyone will be surprised to find that, once again, the operation was ‘Made in the USA,’ as American society is filled with religious groups who consider themselves to be enemies of the state, its mechanisms and its liberal society. (Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, September 13, 2001)
Iran’s Siyasat-e Ruz carried a front-page editorial entitled “A Blow From Within,” in which it argued that since the attacks must have been carried out according to “a complicated methodical, technical and intelligence plan, [this] must have been done by a group or organization that has precise intelligence, access to America’s vital and sensitive center, access to high quality weapons and explosives and infiltrators in those organs.” In this paper’s view, the prime suspects were “dissident elements in the American community, especially the American military, who played the main role in the explosions at the Oklahoma federal center.” (September 13, 2001)
Ferdinando Imposimato, one of the most prominent investigating judges in Italy during the years of the Red Brigades, the Moro assassination, and the attempt to assassinate Pope John Paul II, also found it impossible to accept the Bush administration account.
Imposimato was also a former senator and television personality. Speaking to students at Rome University on November 8, 2001 concerning the question of the clash of civilizations, Imposimato made clear that his own view of 9/11 centered on “the participation of internal US forces” in the attacks.
Policy elites in western Europe tended towards skepticism, thus prefiguring the clash of many of them with the Bush administration over Iraq and other issues. An influential and well-informed British observer noted that he had “been convinced, that behind the official story, there has been another story that is not being told. But instead of telling the truth, the policymakers are starting new adventures, as a preemptive move, to take our minds off what is really going on, to avoid reality. The dilemma that they face, though, is that they are only creating more and greater problems. It is the famous story of the Chinese box: you solve one crisis in one box, and then another crisis pops up….Instead of honestly facing the implications of that, Washington has hoped to preempt reality, by creating more problems elsewhere, primarily in this Afghanistan-South Asia region.” (EIR, January 9, 2002)
THE LIES OF THE US PRESS
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the US media were gripped by chauvinist hysteria and war psychosis. Two courageous editors, Ron Gutting of the Texas City, Texas City Sun and Dan Guthrie of the Grants Pass, Oregon, Daily Courier, where fired for lèse majesté (or was it Wehrkraftzersetzung?) when they dared to criticize Bush, including for his cowardice on 9/11. Edward Herman, professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, pointed out that “Pravda and Izvestia in the former Soviet Union would have been hard-pressed to surpass the American media in their subservience to the official agenda….They have abandoned the notion of objectivity or even the idea of providing a public space where problems are discussed and debated…. It’s a scandal that reveals the existence of a system of propaganda, not of serious media so essential in a Democratic society.” (Meyssan 2002 87)
Of course, the 9/11 myth could not have been generated and propagated by official leaks, statements, documents and reports alone. These had to be dished up to a gullible public by the corporate press, followed by the electronic media. Richard Bernstein and other New York Times staffers produced an elaboration of the official version entitled Out of the Blue: The Story of September 11, 2001, From Jihad to Ground Zero. Surely this embrace of 9/11 orthodoxy by the newspaper of record ought to give us some confidence that the basic facts have been checked? But of course the fact that one reads something in the New York Times guarantees nothing these days. The problem is not limited to the excesses of Jason Blair, who was terminated. Far more disturbing were the activities of neocon regime stenographer Judith Miller, a crony of the crank author Laurie Mylroie. Miller was responsible for uncritically purveying the lies of the Wolfowitz clique about Iraq’s phantomatic weapons of mass destruction. Partly because of Miller’s excess of neocon zeal, and absolute lack of critical screening, the New York Times was forced to apologize to its readers for its defective coverage. But unlike the hapless Blair, the disingenuous Miller, whose falsifications have contributed to a world tragedy, has continued to scribble. But if the New York Times had to apologize for serving as a megaphone for Bush’s lies of 2002 and 2003, how long will it be before they are forced to apologize for trumpeting Bush’s even bigger lies of 2001? How long will it be before the New York Times has to apologize for its pitiful propaganda piece, Out of the Blue?
