that need to be briefly addressed. First of all, Le Figaro is French, not Italian, and yes, I do read French. I read it almost daily, it is one of the most credible newspapers in the world, albeit rather too conservative for my tastes. It is not the type of newspaper that writes unsubstantiated rumours purporting to be true. Online at www.lefigaro.fr
Second, I certainly don't believe Bush was behind 9/11. That would be quite absurd, and I have no idea why you choose to bring up that particular straw man (along with your child and father nonsense). It's really difficult to picture Bush masterminding anything at all. He obviously knew something was coming (remember the aug 6 memo, if nothing else -
if nothing else), but exactly how much he knew is what Rumsfeld would call a known unknown. Tenet must have known a whole lot, perhaps a lot more than Bush, perhaps it was all passed on to the purported commander in chief. Who knows, but he did fly to Crawford to review the intelligence with Bush on aug 6 (and we know how much this president values his vacations). But with 15 foreign intelligence agencies warning the US in the months before the attack, providing information about approximately when (the week from sept 10), the targets, and the names of many of the hijackers, some of that information (if not all of it) must have reached Tenet, and through him, one would assume, Bush. Nevertheless, the upper echelons of the FBI continued to block investigations of arabs taking flight lesson, despite the pleas of desperate FBI agents, the CIA did not share its info with the FBI etc. It could all be attributed to incompetence, at least theoretically, but what an incompetence.
No, I don't think much would happen if Bush were to snap his fingers. I don't think he's in charge of much of anything. And I am very well aware of the reality of Islamic terrorism and political Islam. I am of course not implying that it's all a creation of the CIA (though the CIA started infiltrating the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1950s and played a role in the radicalization of the mujahiddeen in Afghanistan in the 80s, to the point of printing Islamist schoolbooks for Pakistani madrasas in the US). I to some extent agree with CIA analyst Michael Schauer, that "we are fighting a worldwide Islamic insurgency -- not criminality or terrorism."
However, a common mistake is to infer that since America is hated around the world, and politically or religiously inspired violence is a very real occurrance (the former much more than the latter, though), then 9/11 must have been perpetrated for the purpose of waging holy war against America, when in fact it could have been perpetrated for a number of reasons, and when in fact we simply do not know conclusively.
You are, for no apparent reason, very certain that Bin Ladin was never funded by the CIA. That may or may not be true, as far as money goes, but he certainly did have a close relationship with them.
His biography usually has him having a religious epiphany at the moment the Soviets roll into Afghanistan, and immidiately heading off to Pakistan to start his holy war with a pack of newly recruited Arab fighters.
Now, we know, thanks to the admissions of Zbigniew Brzezinski and William Colby, that the CIA started to destabilize the Afghan govt six months before the Soviets invaded, to lure the Soviets to do just that. The plan was to give them "their Vietnam", as Brzezinski told Carter. The jihad of the mujahiddeen was obviously an integral part of that plan from the start, the plan being made by Brzezinski and the CIA in conjunction with the ISI and the govt of military dictator Zia ul-Haq (brought to power with the help of the CIA). ul-Haq had a vision of Pakistani hegemony in central Asia, which would require Pakistani dominance in Afghanistan, while the CIA/Brzezinski wanted to bleed Russia. It was a marriage of convenience I guess one could say.
So, the question is, did Bin Ladin get the idea of going to Afghanistan all by himself or did someone propose it to him. I don't know. But it is a fact that he worked with the CIA in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The CIA even sponsored a fund raising and informational trip to the US and Canada for him. Eric Margolis, the Toronto Sun columnist, seasoned war correspondent and ex-Marine, met Bin Ladin when he was in Mississauga, Ontario on one of his CIA-arranged stops ("He was quite charming and very articulate", Margolis said about him in 2002). Margolis, by the way, has some comments here about the Bin Ladin "confession" tape:
http://www.ericmargolis.com/archives/2001/12/bin_laden_tape.phpElsewhere, Margolis takes note of an interview with Bin Ladin in a Pakistani newspaper:
"Pakistani paper Uumat published a lengthy interview with him that reveals much about the motivation of America's arch-enemy. (...)
Bin Laden denies his al-Qaida organization was responsible for the suicide attacks against the U.S. But he applauds them. He suggests the attacks were
made by Americans from either intelligence agencies or "a hidden government.""
(
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1021-10.htm)
We shouldn't take Bin Ladin's word for that, of course, just as we shouldn't take his later purported confession to mean much.
That Bin Ladin has denied, in at least one interview, that he ever had any relation to the CIA is interesting, and in my view quite revealing. He clearly doesn't want that part of his life to be widely known.
I think Bin Ladin has had and possibly still has some kind of mutually beneficial relationship with the CIA or some faction of the US National Security State, but he is clearly not controlled by them. I don't think he is the leader, in any sense but symbolically, of "al-Qaeda" (Robert Fisk, who interviewed him in the nineties, said it struck him how out of touch with the outside world he seemed to be). I'm not entirely convinced about the honesty of his jihad (his motivations seem to change between each interview), although, of course, many, many Muslims are. Many Christians are convinced of the honesty of Bush's born-again Christianity too, after all. It's hard to tell where his loyalties lie but I would guess with factions of the Saudi ruling dynasty. I think he told the truth when he denied his involvement in 9/11.
I find Leonid Shebarshin highly credible, and concur with thw following:
"Osama bin Laden has become No. 1 villain, a priori. It seems that
someone has been preparing him for this role for several years. The US has created a myth that this mysterious person is behind all acts of terrorism."
Bob Graham said (paraphrasing) that all the keys to the 9/11 attacks are in Saudi Arabia. Perhaps, but perhaps he's also deflecting attention away from his 9/11 breakfast date, Lt. Gen. Ahmed and Pakistan. In Pakistan, as in America, there are different factions with different aims and interests. But it would be erroneous to see Musharraf as opposed to the "al-Qaeda/Taliban" faction in the Army and the ISI, I think. The coup that brought him to power in 1999 was organized by the ISI and the military, after all, and one major reason for the coup is the ISI felt the previous ruler had to go, "out of fear that he might buckle to American pressure and reverse Pakistan's policy of supporting the Taliban." (New York Times, 12/8/01). Paul Thompson adds ("The Terror Timeline", plus online at
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org):
"Shortly thereafter Musharraf replaces the leader of the ISI, Brig Imtiaz, because of his close ties to the previous leader. Imtiaz is arrested and convicted of "having assets disproportionate to his known sources of income." It comes out that he was keeping tens of millions of dollars earned from heroin smuggling in a Deutschebank account. This is interesting because insider trading just prior to 9/11 will later connect to a branch of Deutschebank recently run by "Buzzy" Krongard, now Executive Director of the CIA (see September 6-10, 2001). (Financial Times (Asian edition), 8/10/01) The new Director of the ISI is
Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed, a close ally of Musharraf who is instrumental in the success of the coup. (Guardian, 10/9/01) Mahmood will later be fired after suggestions that he helped fund the 9/11 attacks."
The insider trading, by many considered to be the largest in history, consisted, among other things, in put options against the companies that would be directly hit by the 9/11 attacks. It's all extremely conspicuous, especially if you add the otherwise unexplainable rise in oil and gold prices prior to the attack. The SEC investigated the insider trading and found that "it was not connected to terrorists". Then, presumably, it was done by non-terrorists with very precise foreknowledge. This is a blog post on a related subject, the unexplained surge in financial transactions made just before the attack:
http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2005/02/oh-places-you-go-when-you-follow-money.htmlGraham and Goss's breakfast buddy travelled to Afghanistan with Saudi crown prince Abdullah right after 9/11 to meet Mullah Omar. Asia Times reported, in
august 2001, that the same two - Ahmed and Abdullah - made a visit to see the mullah in the summer of 2001, warning him that the
US would attack them and urging him to send Bin Ladin to Saudi Arabia. Thompson writes:
"If bin Laden were to be tried in Saudi Arabia, Abdullah would help make sure he is acquitted. Mullah Omar apparently rejects the proposal. The article suggests that Abdullah is secretly a supporter of bin Laden and is trying to protect him from harm (Asia Times, 8/22/01)"
French investigative journalist and well-known intellectual Bernhard-Henri Lévi, in his book "Qui a tué Daniel Pearl?", also emphasizes that the ISI and "al-Qaeda" are closely intertwined, and he believes Daniel Pearl was killed because he was getting too close to that truth. Curiously, the man who was arrested and sentenced to death for his kidnapping was the man who was originally pinpointed by the FBI as the man who wired $100,000 to Mohammed Atta (and whom Indian intelligence uncovered Lt. Gen. Ahmed had instructed to do so), Omar Saed Sheikh. He is a well-known ISI asset, a financial wizard (educated at London's LSE), and has also been rumoured to be a CIA double-agent (the latter was reported in at least one US newspaper). Bernhard-Henri Lévi:
"Didn't Musharraf give it away when, in a comment cited in The Washington Post (among others) on 23 February 2002, he dared to declare, 'Perhaps Daniel Pearl was over inquisitive; a mediaperson should be aware of the dangers of getting into dangerous areas; unfortunately, he got over-involved in intelligence games.' "
It is interesting that one of the demands of the people who kidnappet Daniel Pearl was that the US resume its sale of F-16s to Pakistan. What an odd demand for al-Qaeda terrorists to make. Voilá, by the way: the resumed sale of F-16s was announced last month
I agree with Margolis in the following statement, from 2002: "A year after the 9/11 attacks on the United States, we know remarkably little about the attackers, or about who really organized the complex operation that seems well beyond the capabilities of amateur terrorists". I would add that we aren't much wiser in 2005. 9/11 didn't resemble any terrorist action before or since. With the continued absence of evidence, I have become reluctant to believe it was organized and executed by guerrilla fighters trained in Afghan camps (the largest of which were, by the way, run by the ISI, and used to train insurgents to be pawns in their game of regional hegemony), of the kind that fight in Kashmir and Chechnya with RPGs and AKs, who supposedly learned to fly with Cessnas and Microsoft Flight Simulator. It is evident that the same Hani Hanjour who according to his flight school teacher couldn't fly a one-engine Cessna, did not perform the acrobatic and almost impossible manoevers of Flight 77, which hit the Pentagon. And so on.
You make a valid point about US-Pakistani relations pre-9/11. However, you are talking about the political relationship, which became colder when Congress imposed sanctions as a consequence of Pakistan's nuclear programme, halting, among other things, the sale of F-16s. There are other types of relationships, though. One is the relationship between the CIA and the ISI, which, according to Pakistan expert Selig Harrison from the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, continues to be "close" (his characterization in march 2001,
http://www.multiline.com.au/~johnm/taliban.htm)
Other types of relationships are private or commercial, see:
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/030905Stanton/030905stanton.html and
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/021805Stanton/021805stanton.htmlI could go on but I have to go. I do have some provisional theories about 9/11, but there's no need to bore others with them as it's nothing but speculation. It will suffice to quote Major General and professor Vladimir Slipchenko, a prominent Russian military analyst:
"Osama bin Laden could not have organized this alone. Entire countries and international organizations, with substantial financial backup, could have been behind the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11. (...) The unexpected methods and forms of violence in the terrorist attacks are evidence of substantial preparation, something only a general staff is capable of. The attack was arranged and executed in such a manner that virtually all world media all but complimented international terrorism on its successes. (...) I cannot understand the idleness of the NORAD system. Or the inaction of the Pentagon's air defenses. Was it treason?"
I have become convinced, however, that the Newsweek/Kean Commission story is to a large degree fictitious. That's why you sometimes hear, "The 9/11 Commission report reads like good fiction!" - to a large extent, it
is good fiction. And, yes, I "dispute sworn testimony before congress and the 9/11 commission". Gee, you think intelligence operatives would ever lie? I could also get into the composition of the Commission, but I don't have the time.
The realization that something was wrong with the "official" narrative didn't come to me until about two years after 9/11 2001, with accumulating evidence. In retrospect, I should have been alerted much sooner by the blatant obstruction of the truth that commenced immidiately. I can assure you that I didn't "find a certain comfort" in it. In fact, I would much prefer that those attacks were perpetrated by religious fanatics waging holy war.
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