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A Half-Dozen Questions About 9/11 They Don't Want You to Ask
Who Is Osama? Where Did He Come From? How Did He Escape? What
About Those Anthrax Attacks?
The events of September 11, 2001 evoke painful memories, tinged with
a powerful nostalgia for the way of life before it happened. The
immediate tragedy caused a disorientation sufficient to distort the
critical faculties in the direction of retrospectively predictable
responses: bureaucratic adaptation, opportunism, profiteering,
kitsch sentiment, and mindless sloganeering.
As 9/11, and the report of the commission charged to investigate it,
fade into history like the Warren Commission that preceded it, the
questions, gaps, and anomalies raised by the report have created an
entire cottage industry of amateur speculation--as did the omissions
and distortions of the Warren Report four decades ago. How could it
not?
While initially received as definitive by a rapturous official
press, the 9/11 Report has been overtaken by reality, not only
because of unsatisfying content--like all "independent" government
reports, it is fundamentally an apology and a coverup masquerading
as an expos --but because we now know more: more about the feckless
invasion of Iraq, more about the occupation of Afghanistan and the
purported hunt for Osama bin Laden, more about the post-9/11
stampede to repeal elements of the Bill of Rights, more about the
rush to create the Department of Homeland Security, an agency to
"prevent another 9/11," which, in retrospect, is plainly about
cronyism, contracts, and Congressional boodle.
Many of the amateur sleuths of the 9/11 mystery have based their
investigations on microscopic forensics regarding the publicly
released video footage, or speculations into the physics of
impacting aircraft or collapsing buildings. But staring too closely
at the recorded traces of subatomic phenomena involved in a one-time
event can deceive us into finding the answer we are looking for, as
Professor Heisenberg once postulated. Over 40 years on, the Magic
Bullet is still the Magic Bullet: improbable, yes, but not outside
the realm of the possible.
But there is surprisingly little discussion of the basic
higher-order political factors surrounding 9/11, factors that do not
require knowledge of the melting point of girder steel or the
unknowable piloting abilities of the presumed perpetrators. Let us
proceed, then, in a spirit of detached scientific inquiry, to ask
questions the 9/11 Commission was unprepared to ask.
1. Who is Osama bin Laden, and where did he come from? On this point, the report retreats into obfuscation. While
acknowledging that he had something to do with resisting the Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan, the report suggests, without explicitly
so stating, that the links between Osama and the United States were
practically nonexistent. This will not parse: until the present
Global War on Terrorism, the CIA's operation against the Red Army in
Afghanistan was the biggest and most expensive covert operation in
the agency's history. The 9/11 Report provides no convincing
documented refutation of Osama's links with the CIA, given that the
agency was running a major war in which he was a participant.
Similarly, the report's authors did not plumb the informal U.S.
government connections with the same Saudi government whose links
with the bin Laden family could have provided a cut-out for any
CIA-Osama relationship. <1>
2. When were Osama's last non-hostile links with the U.S.
government? Consistent with its view of Osama's relationship with the CIA during
the anti-Soviet enterprise, the 9/11 Report ignores the possibility
that he may have had a continuing relationship with the U.S.
government, particularly with its intelligence services. The report
brushes this hypothesis aside with a footnote to the effect that
both the CIA and purported second-ranking al Qaeda figure Ayman al
Zawahiri deny a relationship. <2>
One may doubt the veracity of Langley's denials of a relationship
with Osama bin Laden and his associates, given the lack of
truthfulness of its earlier statement to the Warren Commission about
not having had a relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald. Or in
alleging that an employee named "Mr. George Bush" whom the agency
cited in its reporting of the events of 22 November 1963 was a
completely different person from the George Bush who subsequently
became the 41st U.S. president, after serving as Director of
Central Intelligence.
Likewise, Mr. Zawahiri's assertion of not having received a penny of
CIA funds deserves the searchlight of skeptical scrutiny. What the
report describes as Zawahiri's "memoir" is actually a broadside
published in a London-based newspaper in December 2001, i.e., after
the events of 9/11. It was obviously intended as a call to the
Muslim faithful for a holy war against the infidel desecrator of the
holy places; would such a person, conscious of the need to gain
recruits in a war of pure faith against the Great Satan, have
confirmed having been on the payroll of his principal enemy? It is
no more likely than for the current President of the United States,
in drawing parallels between the war in Iraq and World War II, to
advert to the fact that his grandfather's bank was seized by the
U.S. government in 1942 for illicit trading with the Third Reich.
Indeed, U.S. intelligence agencies have had, purely as a function
of their charters, relationships with most of the world's
scoundrels, con-men, and psychopaths of the last 70 years: from
Lucky Luciano and the Gambino Mob, to Reinhard Gehlen and Timothy
Leary, to the perpetrators of the massacre of 500,000 people in
Indonesia in 1965, to the Cuban exiles who blew up an airliner in
1976 <3>, to such shady characters as Ahmed Chalabi and his friend
"Curveball." Among such a gallery of murderous kooks, bin Laden and
his cohorts do not especially stand out.
More dispositive than these speculations, however, are the very real
connections between Washington and Islamic jihadists in the Balkans
throughout the 1990s. The report hints at this relationship by
mentioning the presence of charity fronts of bin Laden's "network"
in Zagreb and Sarajevo. In fact, the U.S. government engaged in a
massive covert operation to infiltrate Islamic fighters, many of
them veterans of the Afghan war, into the Balkans for the purpose of
undermining the Milosevic government. The "arms embargo," enforced
by the U.S. military, was a cover for this activity (i.e., using
military force to keep prying eyes from seeing what was going on).
A key Washington fixer for the Muslim government of Bosnia was the
law firm of Feith and Zell. Yes, Douglas Feith, one of the
principal conspirators involved in launching the Iraq war under the
banner of opposing Islamic terrorism, was a proponent of introducing
Islamic terrorists into South Eastern Europe. Do the
"Islamofascists" of pseudo-conservative demonology accordingly seem
less like satanic enemies and more like puppets dangling from an
unseen hand? Or perhaps the analogy is incorrect: more like a
Frankenstein's Monster that has slipped the control of its creator.
3. How did the President of United States React to the August 6
2001 Presidential Daily Brief? Although the August 6 PBD had been mentioned in the foreign press
since 2002, it did not come to the attention of official Washington
until then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice impaled
herself upon the hook of 9/11 Commission member Richard Ben
Veniste's artful line of questioning in mid-2004. Blurting out the
title of the PBD, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," she let
the cat out of the bag--or perhaps not. Having opened Pandora's
Box, the commissioners displayed no troublesome curiosity about its
contents.
What concrete measures did the president take after receiving
perhaps the most significant strategic warning that any head of
state could have hoped to receive about an impending attack on his
country? Did he alert the intelligence agencies, law enforcement,
the Border patrol, the Federal Aviation Administration, to comb
through their current information and increase their alert rates?
Did the threat warning of the PBD (granted that it did not reveal
the tail numbers of the aircraft to be hijacked), in combination
with the numerous threat warnings from other sources <4> elicit
feverish activity to "protect the American people?" Not that we can
observe.
So what was the actual response of the U.S. government? Here the
9/11 Report exhibits autism. As nearly as we can determine from
contemporaneous bulletins, the president massacred whole hecatombs
of mesquite bushes and large-mouthed bass, perfected his golf swing,
and hosted various captains of industry in the rustic repose of
Crawford, Texas. In other words, he presided over the most
egregious example of Constitutional nonfeasance since the
administration of James Buchanan allowed Southern secessionists to
take possession of the arms in several federal arsenals. The 9/11
Commission's silence on this point is an abundant demonstration of
its role as an apologist, rather than a dispassionate truth-teller.
The testimony of federal officials about what they did up to and
during the attacks is telling, in so far as the false and misleading
statements of witnesses provide clues. Ms. Rice, her tremulous
voice betraying nervousness, averred, against the plain evidence of
the public record and common sense, that a PBD stating that Osama
bin Laden was determined to strike within the borders of the United
States was too ambiguous to take any action.
Likewise, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft may have perjured
himself when he denied under oath that acting FBI Director Thomas
Pickard came to him on July 5, 2001 with information of terrorist
plots--information that the Attorney General "did not want to hear
about anymore," as NBC News reported on June 22, 2004. It might be
considered a matter of Ashcroft's word against Pickering's, except
for the fact that Pickering had a corroborating witness.
4. Who wrote the script for the rhetorical response to 9/11? The smoke was still rising from the rubble of the World Trade Center
complex and the Pentagon when the unanimous and universal cry
erupted in government circles, and was relentlessly amplified by the
media, that this was "war," not a criminal act of terrorism. How
very convenient that this war, declared against a diffuse and
stateless entity, would trigger long-sought legal authorities and
constitutional loopholes which would not apply in the case of a
criminal act. <5> Torture, domestic spying, selective suspension of
habeas corpus, all the unconstitutional monsters whose implications
are only clear four years after the event, all slipped into
immediate usage with the rhetorical invocation of war.
This was not merely war, it was unlimited war, both in the sense of
total war meant by General Ludendorff (civilian rights being
trivial), and in the sense of lacking a comprehensible time span.
"A war that will not end in our lifetimes," said Vice President
Cheney on Meet the Press on the very Sunday following the attacks.
How could he be so sure during the fog of uncertainty following the
strike?
If bin Laden and his followers were merely a limited number of
fanatics living in Afghan caves, as we were assured at the time, why
did the Bush administration relentlessly advance the meme that a
decades-long war was inevitable? Could not a concerted
intelligence, law-enforcement, and diplomatic campaign, embracing
all sovereign countries, have effectively shut down "al Qaeda"
within a reasonable period of time--say, within the period it took
to fight World War II between Pearl Harbor and the Japanese
surrender?
Four years on, Vice President Cheney, doing a plausible imitation of
the radio voice of The Shadow, continues to publicly mutter, in
menacing tones of the lower octaves, that the war on terrorism <6>
is a conflict that will last for decades. <7> This at the same time
as the junior partner of the ruling dyarchy, the sitting president,
is giving upbeat speeches promising victory in the war on terrorism
(i.e., Iraq, the Central Front on the War on Terrorism) against a
papier mach backdrop containing the printed slogan "Strategy for
Victory."
It is curious that no one--not the watchdogs of the supposedly
adversary media, nor the nominal opposition party in Washington, nor
otherwise intelligent observers--has remarked on this seeming
contradiction: victory is just around the corner, yet the war will
last for decades. Quite in the manner of the war between Eastasia
and Oceania in 1984.
In earlier times, this contradiction would have seemed newsworthy,
if not scandalous. Suppose President Roosevelt had opined at the
Teheran Conference that the Axis would be defeated in two years.
Then suppose his vice president had at the same time traveled about
the United States telling his audiences that the Axis would not be
defeated for decades. An American public not yet conditioned by
television would at least have noticed, and demanded some
explanation.
So question number 4 concludes with a question: why does the U.S.
government hive so firmly to the notion of a long, drawn-out,
indeterminate war, when Occam's Razor would suggest the desirability
of presenting a clear-cut victory within the span of imagination of
the average impatient American--a couple of years at most? Or is
endless war the point?
5. Why did the mysterious anthrax attacks come and go like a
wraith? For those in immediate proximity to the events, the September
11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were
frightening in the extreme, but they had not the slow accumulation
of dread that the anthrax scare of October 2001 presented. Far more
than any anomaly concerning 9/11 itself, the anthrax mystery is the
undecoded Rosetta Stone of recent years.
The anthrax attacks were the most anomalous terrorist attacks in
history: clever, successful, unpunished, causing five deaths and a
billion dollars' damage. Yet never repeated. This alone makes them
remarkable in the annals of criminal activity, but there is
more--the intended victims (at least those with an official
position) were warned in writing of their peril in sufficient detail
that they could take steps to administer an antidote. Is this
characteristic of terrorist attacks by "al Qaeda," or by any known
Middle Eastern terrorist group?
Except for the ambiguous first attack (which killed a National
Enquirer photo editor), all the deaths resulting from the anthrax
plot were incidental--mail handlers and innocent recipients of mail
which had been contaminated by proximity to the threat letters.
Evidently the West Jefferson anthrax strain was more powerful and
had greater accidental effects than the plotters had intended.
But what did the plotters intend, if they did not will the deaths of
the addressees of their anthrax letters? It was pure coincidence,
perhaps, that the anthrax scare was at its height, producing
psychosomatic illness symptoms among members of Congress and
staffers, just as the USA PATRIOT Act was wending its way through
the legislative process. This measure, which originated among the
same Justice Department lawyers who legally opined that torture was
wholesome, was rammed through the Congress after enactment of the
authorization of the use of force in Afghanistan. Why is this
sequence significant?
The then-majority leader of the U.S. Senate, Tom Daschle, wrote a
curious op-ed in the Washington Post four years after the events
just described. <8>. In attempting to refute the administration's
allegation that it had been granted plenary wiretap powers in the
Afghanistan authorization, he stated that he and his Senatorial
confreres explicitly rejected an administration proposal to
authorize an effective state of war within the borders of the United
States itself.
Given the administration's repeatedly demonstrated refusal to accept
any limitation on its powers, it is logical that the rebuff on the
war powers authorization was followed by the prompt submittal of the
Justice Department's draft of the PATRIOT Act, containing many of
the domestic authorities the Bush White House had sought in the use
of force legislation. How doubly coincidental that two of the
limited number of addressees of the threat letters should have been
the offices of Daschle himself, and Sen. Patrick Leahy,
then-chairman of the committee of jurisdiction over the PATRIOT Act.
Needless to say, the measure was passed by an even more comfortable
margin than that enjoyed by the 1933 Enabling Law in the Reichstag.
<9> Notwithstanding buyer's remorse exhibited by many members of
Congress, and current efforts to amend its more onerous provisions,
it appears we are saddled with the main burdens of its edicts in
perpetuity.
How the government placed this perpetual burden on its citizens is
bound up with the mysterious anthrax scare of October 2001, an
outrage that, unlike 9/11, does not even merit an official
explanation. No one has been charged.
6. Why did Osama bin Laden escape?<[br />
"Wanted, dead or alive!" "We'll smoke 'em out of their caves!" All
Americans know the feeling of righteous retribution that attended
the hunt for Osama bin Laden in the autumn and winter of 2001. Yet,
suddenly, it fizzled out and became subsumed in attacking Iraq and
its oilfields.
We know the explanation. Somehow, bin Laden escaped in the battle
of Tora Bora, because "the back door was open." Only after the
invasion of Iraq, more than a year later, was there general
acknowledgement that resources intended for Afghanistan had been
diverted to the buildup for Iraq. The public was lead to believe
that supplemental appropriations for Afghanistan were siphoned into
the Iraq project beginning about mid-2002.
But the strange apathy about Osama's whereabouts began sooner than
that. In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, then-Senate
Intelligence Committee Bob Graham states the following:
"I was asked by one of the senior commanders of Central Command to
go into his office
Tommy Franks. Underlings do not summon senior Senators into their
offices]. We did, the door was closed, and he turned to me, and he
said, 'Senator, we have stopped fighting the war on terror in
Afghanistan. We are moving military and intelligence personnel and
resources out of Afghanistan to get ready for a future war in Iraq.'
This is February of 2002 . 'Senator, what we are
engaged in now is a manhunt not a war, and we are not trained to
conduct a manhunt.'"
Senator Graham elaborates on this matter in his book, Intelligence
Matters, on page 125:
"At that point, General Franks asked for an additional word with me
in his office. When I walked in, he closed the door. Looking
troubled, he said, 'Senator, we are not engaged in a war in
Afghanistan.'
"'Excuse me?" I asked.
"'Military and intelligence personnel are being redeployed to
prepare for an action in Iraq,' he continued. 'The Predators are
being relocated. What we are doing is a manhunt. We have wrapped
ourselves too much in trailing Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar.
We're better at being a meat axe than finding a needle in a
haystack. That's not our mission, and that's not what we are
trained or prepared to do.'"
In the first excerpt, the military officer might be ambivalent about
the change in mission, merely saying that the U.S. military is
supposedly not trained for conducting manhunts. The second excerpt
provides more substance, suggesting that Franks himself agrees that
looking for Osama bin Laden is a mug's game ("We have wrapped
ourselves too much in trailing Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar.")
There we have it: as early as February 2002, the U.S. government
was pulling the plug. Or was it even earlier? Gary Berntsen, a
former CIA officer, says in his book Jawbreaker that his
paramilitary team tracked bin Laden to the Tora Bora region late in
2001 and could have killed or captured him if his superiors had
agreed to his request for an additional force of about 800 U.S.
troops. But the administration was already gearing up for war with
Iraq and troops were never sent, allowing bin Laden to escape.
Now, Berntsen is a typical Langley boy scout who buys into most of
the flummery about the war on terrorism; but it is precisely for
that reason that his testimony is worthwhile. Here is no
ideological critic of the Bush administration and its foreign
policies--on the contrary, he shares many of its assumptions. Like
fellow Agency alumnus Michael Scheuer, he has experienced the
cognitive dissonance of dealing with the administration's policies
at first hand, and wishes to report on his findings.
Is it plausible that the United States Military, disposing of 1.4
million active duty troops and a million reservists, could not scare
up 800 additional troops to capture what was then characterized as a
fiend in human form? Perhaps the then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, General Richard Myers, explained it best in a CNN
interview on 6 April 2002, well after the hunt for bin Laden had
apparently been concluded:
"Well, if you remember, if we go back to the beginning of this
segment, the goal has never been to get bin Laden." <10>
What can one conclude from this series of questions? If the 9/11
mystery is like other great, mysterious events--such as the Kennedy
assassination--the course is probable. For a year or two, raw
emotion over the event forecloses inquiry; for the next several
years after that, the public's attention wanes, and the desire to
forget the painful memory predominates.
In a decade or so, though, some debunker will bring new facts into
the public arena for the edification of those Americans, then in
late middle age, who will view 9/11 as an intellectual puzzle: far
from the urgent concerns of their daily lives.
Many people may, by that time, accept that the official explanation
is bunk, and suspect that the government had once again tricked the
American public, those ever-willing foils in the eternal
Punch-and-Judy show. But the majority will neither know nor care
about obscure international relationships during a bygone era.
In 1939, the English author Eric Ambler wrote a brilliant and
now-disregarded novel whose theme was that the political events
culminating in World War II were indistinguishable from the squalid
doings of ordinary criminals. Let us quote from that novel, The
Mask of Dimitrios:
"A writer of plays said that there are some situations that one
cannot use on the stage; situations in which the audience can feel
neither approval, sympathy, nor antipathy; situations out of which
there is no possible way that is not humiliating or distressing and
from which there is no truth, however bitter, to be extracted. . .
.. All I know is that while might is right, while chaos and anarchy
masquerade as order and enlightenment, these conditions will
obtain."
Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense
analyst.
<1> Bob Woodward's 1987 book Veil describes the informal connections
between personages in the U.S. government and the Saudi government,
including the ubiquitous Prince Bandar. Talks between CIA
director William Casey and the Prince supposedly resulted in a
false-flag "terrorist" bombing in Beirut to retaliate against the
bombing of the Marine barracks there in 1983. Regrettably, the dead
were mainly civilians.
<2> 9/11 Commission Report, 23rd footnote to chapter two, page 467.
<3> This is the case of Cuban "freedom fighter" Luis Posada
Carriles, who is suspected of sending the jet-borne Cuban Olympic
fencing team to Valhalla in order to express his opposition to Fidel
Castro. The incumbent administration, otherwise so steadfastly
opposed to international terrorism, has been resistant to
extraditing Mr. Posada --no doubt the administration is casting an
eye on Florida's electoral votes.
<4> To include the Phoenix Memo, FBI agent Colleen Rowley's urgent
bulletins from Minnesota, tips from foreign intelligence agencies,
warnings from the Federal government to its high-ranking government
placemen not to fly by commercial airliner, the contemporaneously
noted presence of art students-cum-Mossad agents within two blocks
of 9/11 operative Mohammed Atta, and other indicators.
<5> Long sought by Messrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld, whose formative and
traumatic experiences in the executive branch were shaped by their
revulsion against attempts by Congress, the federal bench, and the
American people, to restrain Richard M. Nixon's assertion that the
Constitution does not apply to a sitting president.
<6> The phrase "war on terrorism" is, as many people have commented,
a somewhat hazy conception, being a war on a tactic, much as if FDR
had declared war on naval aviation after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Significantly, the popular mind has contracted this phrase into "the
war on terror," an even more illogical coinage. If the U.S.
government is truly at war against a mental state that gives rise to
ill-defined dread, it should disestablish itself forthwith, to the
benefit of our rights, our bank balances, and our physical safety.
<7> "Cheney Warns of Decades of War," BBC, 6 October 2005.
<8> "Power We Didn't Grant," by Sen. Tom Daschle, Washington Post,
23 December 2005.
<9> The Enabling Law passed the Reichstag by a vote of 444-94,
whereas the PATRIOT Act passed the House by a margin of 357-66, and
the Senate by a vote of 98-1. Curiously, the Enabling Law was
supposed to sunset in four years: on April Fool's Day, 1937,
precisely paralleling the four-year expiration of many of the
PATRIOT Act's provisions. Perhaps the eerie similarity reflects the
influence of Nazi legal scholar Carl Schmitt on neoconservative
lawyers of the Bush administration like David S. Addington, John
Yoo, and Viet Dinh.
The above article courtesy of Werther.
Until next issue stay cool and remain low profile!
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