Story Of Pakistan | If 9/11 had not happened

So well the adage goes that necessity is the mother of invention. We find that 9/11 was essentially an urgent need of the United States. If 9/11 had not happened, it would have been necessary to invent it. This is what a deep probe into the episode of 9/11 shows and this is what a series of the events of the last 150 years and American WMDD (weapons of mass deception + destruction) expose. The media, quoting government sources, identified Bin Laden as the most likely culprit within hours of the attacks on the Twin Towers. It took more time for the story to evolve to the point where the Taliban became equivalent to evil along with Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, but soon enough, the whole affair was openly presented as a Manichean conflict between good and evil, even including the claim that the United States was attacked because evil folk hate good folk. The war was directed toward much broader purposes than a simple effort to punish the actual culprits of September 11. Kinsley writes: But how did the war on terrorism change focus so quickly from rooting out and punishing the perpetrators of 9-11 – a task that is still incomplete – to something (what?) about nuclear proliferation? In Matthewss view, the limited punitive war has been hijacked by people with other, broader aims – including, as he specifies, the proposed effort to prevent members of the axis of evil from developing weapons of mass destruction.

The US history is replete with convenient conventions that justified a number of invasions, occupations, subversions and the overthrow of sovereign states by the US administration in order to pursue its economic/political objectives. Beginning with the Native Americans, followed by the Africans and South Americans, right through to the Japanese, who have suffered ineffable horror by being the only race to know the true meaning of weapons of mass destruction. It is now an open secret that the US knew about 9/11 in advance and manipulated to comply with it. It is neither too far fetched nor out of keeping with imperialist stratagem. If one thinks of history as a conspiracy of the powerful, then 9/11 was definitely more than a conspiracy. The US has operated ruthlessly in the pursuit of achieving global hegemony. Driven by forces that it barely comprehends, yet possessed of the means of manipulation, it hurtles toward the future, essentially out of control. The US power elite, drunk on its success of winning the Cold War is brazen in its credence that the 21st century is the “American Century.”

Since the end of the Cold War, a series of events have unfolded absolute power to shape the new world order in its favor. The opening shot was the Gulf War of 1990 but the groundwork for it was laid down decades earlier. In 1953, the British and American governments initiated a joint Anglo-American plan for the covert overthrow of Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq, the Prime Minister of Iran. With a plan called Operation AJAX with Kermit Roosevelt, announced John Foster Dulles to a group of top Washington policy makers in June 1953, “So this is how we will get rid of the madman Mossadeq in Iran”. Predictably, the overthrow of Mossadeq was about oil and Irans strategic position on the southeastern border of the Soviet Union. With the Shah, an anti-Soviet ally and friend of Anglo-US oil corporations, the issue of defeating the Soviet Unions expanding influence, oil and the preservation of Israel remained the central planks of US foreign policy in the Middle East. The series of coups and counter-coups in Iraq that followed the overthrow of pro-western King Faisal in 1958 were part of the larger fight against the Arab independence movements that followed WWII. A central feature of US strategy has been the tactic of playing both ends against the middle, as it did during the Iran-Iraq war in order to let both sides exhaust each other in what the US hoped would be a never-ending war of attrition. There were so many U.S. corporations, subsidiaries of foreign corporations, and a number of U.S. government agencies that provided parts, material, training and other assistance to Iraq’s chemical, biological, missile, and nuclear weapons programs throughout the 1970s and 80s, some continuing till the end of 1990. A major front-page article in the Washington Post (December 30, 2002) detailed the active involvement of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, then a special envoy of President Reagan to Iraq, in reestablishing full diplomatic relations and improving trade and other economic ties that bolstered Washington’s military support of Iraq. But all the support shifted to denunciation as soon as their friend Saddam committed his first authentic crime, which was disobeying or perhaps misunderstanding orders, by invading Kuwait. Saddam Hussein did use chemical and biological weapons against Iranians and Kurdish Iraqis, and that those weapons came from western countries – especially U.S. and France – and that Saddam Hussein was a close ally of the U.S. right up to the moment that he invaded Kuwait to take over their oil fields, and that precipitated a complete sea change. Many analysts think that Glaspie apparently unwittingly gave Saddam indications that the U.S. wouldn’t be too concerned if Saddam happened to take over those oil fields. But once that happened, of course, everything changed, and then Saddam had to be turned into the great evil – a Satanic or Hitler-like character. People like Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld and others, within hours of the 9/11 attacks, were seizing on the attacks as a green light to attack Iraq.

This is how the “imperial grand strategy” presents the US as “a revisionist state seeking to parlay its momentary advantages into a world order in which it runs the show”, a unipolar world in which no state or coalition could ever challenge it as global leader, protector, and enforcer.

Osama bin Laden had been an amiable ally and intelligence asset of the only existing Super Power during the Cold War; The relationship is said to “go way back” for these Osama-CIA links belong to the “bygone era” of the Soviet-Afghan war. But how can they be viewed as “irrelevant” to an understanding of present events? How can the role of the CIA in supporting and developing international terrorist organizations during the Cold war and its aftermath be ignored or downplayed by the Western media? A blatant example of media distortion is the so-called “blowback” thesis: “intelligence assets” are said to “have gone against their sponsors”; “what we’ve created blows back in our face. In a twisted logic, the US government and the CIA are portrayed as the ill-fated victims. The US media concedes: “the Taliban’s coming to power (in 1995) is partly the outcome of the U.S. support of the Mujahideen, the radical Islamic group, in the 1980s in the war against the Soviet Union”. But it also readily dismisses its own factual statements and concludes in chorus, that the CIA had been tricked by a deceitful Osama. He is like “a son going against his father”.

The United States energetically worked a plan to start the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan arming and funding the Afghan Mujahideen in 1979, and in the process tore to pieces the nation of Afghanistan as they did absolutely nothing to aid ravaged Afghanistan once the Soviets withdrew. Brzezinski proudly described the Afghan Trap in an interview he gave to a French publication, Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998. Here is a part of the interview:

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?

B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

So it was the Afghan Trap that gave birth to a man named Osama bin Laden, who became a demigod to the Taliban and the Afghan people for his service in the war against the Soviets. William Rivers Pitt puts the question: Were the Americans too dull-witted to comprehend the complex Cold War motivations that gave birth to Osama bin Laden and the Taliban? He thinks they are afraid to speak of such things, because it suggests that they erroneously bought the trouble that came upon them two years ago on 9/11.

But there is another pertinent question: Was Osama really responsible for the episode of 9/11? How can a stick-in-the-mud living without electricity, without PC, without the adequate and proper machinery and technology, in the very deep caves of Afghanistan steal the show and become all of a sudden more notorious than Hitler? Was it not a prologue of the story of pipeline? The main obstacle to the completion of the pipeline was the fact that it had to pass through Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. The project would receive no international support unless the Afghan government somehow became legitimized. In bargaining for the pipeline, the Bush administration demanded the Taliban to reinstate deposed King Mohammad Zahir Shah as ruler of Afghanistan, and hand over Osama bin Laden to America. According to W. R. Pitt, in return, the Taliban were told they would reap unimagined billions in profit from the pipeline. A central part of the Bush administration’s bargaining tactics involved threats of war if these conditions for the legitimization of Afghanistan were not met.

The BBC of London reported on September 18th, 2001 of the existence of war plans on Bush’s desk aimed at Afghanistan. Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, stated that the war plans were slated for October of 2001. Conditions set by the Bush administration to avoid war involved the Taliban’s handing over of bin Laden and the acceptance of King Zahir Shah. Naik went so far as to doubt that America would hold off on war even if these conditions were met. The stark and bitter truth is that the plan of pipeline had to be implemented by hook or by crook. The episode of 9/11 accelerated the idea that American administration had in mind much earlier.

The result, asserts W. R. Pitt, was total disaster. The Bush administration fundamentally misunderstood the Taliban regime, much the way Brezinski did in 1998. To bring back the King would have been a suicide for the Taliban. The arrival of Shah would shove them out of power, and handing bin Laden over to the West would have been seen as a high crime to the Islamic world. Instead of acquiescing to the hard-sell tactics of the Bush administration, the Taliban unleashed Osama bin Laden upon America. They were going to lose everything, and chose to attack first in the hope that all-out war would break out in Central Asia and rally other Muslim nations to their cause.

Pitt says: Albert Einstein, arguably the most brilliant human being ever to draw breath on planet Earth, defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. America instigated a horrible war in Afghanistan 24 years ago to make the world safer. We have attacked and destroyed another Muslim nation purportedly for the same purpose. One of these days we are going to realize that such actions never serve the cause of peace, but only serve to perpetuate and augment the horrors of this terrifying world. We will learn, for all time, that actions have consequences.

Pitt further adds: In the meantime, we have silence about September. We have evildoers who hate our freedom, and we have war after war after war, instigated by an administration that has so very much to answer for. I tell the people at my talks about all this, and they leave the room quivering with rage. They have the answers, as do I, and God help the administration because of it. Secrets love to whisper.

After the catastrophe of 9/11, the way the Western media had been obsessive with Osama bin Laden was so daft and funny as if he was a ghost or phantom, fear or fantasy. He had been like Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Osama seemed to be everywhere: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Africa, even Indonesia, yet he is still at large and found nowhere. The US and her front-line allies have been desperately hunting for him ever since he reportedly escaped from the exotic-sounding Tora Bora caves of Afghanistan more than 18 months ago but to no avail. He was said to be severely injured and slightly incapacitated by a shrapnel, but surprisingly still alive, leading his scattered troops, dreadful, giving his alarming messages and picking to pieces the U.S. policies through his tapes. His hand is felt, but not seen anywhere from Bali to Mombasa and from Riyadh to Casablanca. He has been hunted relentlessly, but not found. He seems to be in no mans land. Even offers of rewards of millions of dollars have not helped so far. The tribals are so poor and illiterate that they don’t know what a million dollar reward is. If one offered them instead a plot of land or a few dozen goats they could have joined the hunt with gusto. So it was said. And so it was done but still without results. Neither dollars nor plots nor goats would interest the tribals. Why? The answer is simple, my dear Americans, wrote Mr. Afrasiab Khattak, a well-known Pashtun leader of NWFP, in the Dawn of May 10, 2003. Osama is nowhere in the tribal belt. He wrote: “The myth of no-man’s land and the wild north-west comes quite handy as a spin and as a diversion when the Government fails to muster the required political will for taking the bull of terrorism right by the horns.” The US hunt for Osama bin Laden has become a butt of ridicule amongst the tribals: “Watch out if you are over six feet tall. The CIA’s Predator aircraft have been programmed to kill all those above six feet, hoping one of them would turn out to be bin Laden.”

And since November last several tapes, one tape after another, of Osama and his No.2 Ayman al-Zawahiri are being disseminated purportedly., reaching Al Jazeera and other Arab channels like rabbits out of a magician’s hat. Till February, the voice in these tapes, whether of Osama or his No.2, directed its anger only at Israel, the US and other Western countries. A tape of February attacked Pakistan for the first time, but not Musharraf, though a printed version of it denounced Musharraf too as Pakistan’s Hamid Karzai. Two more in September have not only lambasted him personally, but also called for his overthrow. It is intriguing that the personal attacks on Musharraf started appearing only after an increasing number of opinion-makers in the US began expressing their misgivings about Musharraf’s sincerity as an ally in the war against the Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

The war that was launched two years ago against bin Laden was severely criticized by some observers. If this is a war, then it is a war that Osama bin Laden is winning, observes Andrew Rawnsley, Osama bin Laden’s first victory in this conflict is a victory for his self-conceit. His face beams out of every television bulletin. He is the poster boy and chanted hero of Islamic extremists across Asia. Disturbingly, he threatens to become a legend among many Muslims who would regard themselves as moderate. In America and Britain, we have made bin Laden synonymous with Satan, the embodiment of all terrorist evil. In some parts of the Muslim world – not all parts, but enough to be chilling – he is being accorded the status of a saint, the personification of resistance to the arrogant imperialists. And he will regard both appellations as a compliment to his deed and a testimony to his power. Bush and Blair personalized the war against terrorism around one man. In this way they have given him a global recognition which outstrips Madonna or Beckham. Talk of war dignifies bin Laden and paints him as a hero who depicts himself in his video response to the beginning of the air strikes. It assists his pose as the avenging general of Islamic forces engaged in a titanic clash of civilizations. By personalizing the conflict around one man, the allies – which basically mean America and Britain – have set themselves a highly specific objective which may not be easy to realize. For Tony Blair it will be a disaster and a catastrophe for Bush if he is not caught in the eyes of their home audiences and a humiliation for the Anglo-Americans in the eyes of the Islamic world. And it will be a commensurate triumph for the West’s Most Wanted.

In one of his tapes bin Laden supposedly aspires to die as a martyr “in the eagle’s belly.” Perhaps he wants to die in the White Palace. Never mind that he was the guy Bush and Crew wanted all along. The Bushite tactic moved on to a bigger and better arena to fight the evil. He looked towards Afghanistan where he was hunting for pipeline and then toward Baghdad for capturing oil wells. That’s where the good for the US and evil for the world reside. Where there is paradise for the US, there is hell for the people of the world. Whereas there is no evidence that agencies of the US government “aided the terrorist attacks” on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, there is ample and detailed evidence that agencies of the US government as well as NATO, have since the end of the Cold War continued to “harbor such organizations”. Patriotism cannot be based on falsehoods, particularly when it constitutes a pretext for waging war and killing innocent civilians.

The official story permeating the major media runs something like this: the U.S. war on Afghanistan was simply an ad hoc response to the horrific events of September 11, which struck as a bolt from the blue, totally unexpected by American security agencies. The Afghanistan war emerged overnight as a simple effort to punish, and thus bring to justice, the perpetrators of the abominable deeds – namely, the al-Qaeda terrorist network masterminded by the infamous Osama Bin Laden, ensconced in his cave in Afghanistan (accompanied, no doubt, by his dialysis machine). Presumably, the punishment of the perpetrators would make America safer from terrorism. Because the Taliban government of Afghanistan harbored Bin Laden – the official line goes – it was necessary and just for the United States to overthrow that regime, which according to the U.S. Department of Justice was not actually a government at all but simply a vipers nest of terrorists, as evil as Bin Ladin and al Qaeda. Tracking down Osama Bin Laden and his filthy gang to the ends of the Earth, the Americans were up to the task. But when Osama could not be ransacked, the evil shifted from Osama to Saddam, from Afghanistan to Baghdad and now from Baghdad to Iran.

All is fair for the United States. What is to be protected is US power and the interests it represents, not the world, which vigorously opposed the concept. Washington told the United Nations that the US had the “sovereign right to take military action”. And Colin Powell told the World Economic Forum: “When we feel strongly about something we will lead, even if no one is following us”. President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair underscored their contempt for international law and institutions and issued an ultimatum to the Security Council: capitulate, or we will invade without your meaningless seal of approval. And we will do so whether or not Saddam Hussein and his family leave the country. In any case US must effectively rule Iraq with formal democracy, essentially of a submissive kind accepted in the US ‘s backyard.

The grand strategy authorizes the US to carry out preventive war: preventive, not pre-emptive. Whatever the justifications for pre-emptive war might be, they do not hold for preventive war, particularly as that concept is interpreted by its current enthusiasts: the use of military force to eliminate an invented or imagined threat, so that even the term “preventive” is too charitable. Preventive war is, as critically observes Noam Chomsky, very simply, the supreme crime that was condemned at Nuremberg. Bush’s grand strategy was “alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at the time of Pearl Harbor, on a date which, as an earlier American president, Franklin D Roosevelt said it would, lives in infamy”. It was no surprise, added Schlesinger, that “the global wave of sympathy that engulfed the US after 9/11 has given way to a global wave of hatred of American arrogance and militarism” and the belief that Bush was “a greater threat to peace than Saddam Hussein”.

There is no credible evidence was for the alleged link between 9/11 and Osama bin Laden and then between Saddam Hussein and bin Laden but never mind the war against the so-called terrorism must continue merely to justify the American tactics and control the population at home. They regularly push the panic button to avoid public opposition to the policies that scatter terrorism to and fro.

When the occupying coalition army failed to discover WMD, the Senior officials then suggested a refinement in the concept of preventive war, to entitle the US to attack a country that has “deadly weapons in mass quantities”. The revision “suggests that the administration will act against a hostile regime that has nothing more than the intent and ability to develop WMD”.

This decision to mislead the American people was taken barely a few hours after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Without supporting evidence, Osama had already been tagged as the “prime suspect.” Two days later on Thursday the 13th of September — while the FBI investigations had barely commenced — President Bush pledged to “lead the world to victory”. The Administration confirmed its intention to embark on “a sustained military campaign rather than a single dramatic action” directed against Osama bin Laden. In addition to Afghanistan, a number of countries in the Middle East were mentioned as possible targets including Iraq, Iran, Libya and the Sudan. And several prominent US political figures and media pundits demanded that the air strikes be extended to other countries “which harbor international terrorism.” According to intelligence sources, Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda has operations in some 50 to 60 countries providing ample pretext to intervene in several “rogue states” in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Under the historical resolution of the US Congress adopted by both the House and the Senate on the 14th of September:

The president is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

So what happened to that gutsy war of bringing the World Trade Center and Pentagon killers to justice? Who hijacked that clear-eyed, all-American front of September-to-January and left our leaders mouthing this axis of evil line? Who hijacked the firefighters war of righteous outrage and got the American public reciting this weird mantra about Iran, Iraq – and North Korea, of all places? Kinsley and Matthews significantly observe: The war is far different from a simple effort to punish those responsible for the September 11 atrocities. There is absolutely no connection between that event and President Bushs current concern with his axis of evil. In fact, the White House does not even attempt to make such a connection. Bush abandoned, Robert Novak notes, seeking some connection between the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the next step in the war on terrorism. Indeed, the nexus between the three rogue nations and any kind of terrorism was slender, with the president asserting these countries could provide weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.

Thus it is quite evident that from the very outset the September 11 events simply gave Americas foreign policy elites the excuse to put their prewar agenda into action. American penetration of energy-rich Central Asia has been a much-discussed foreign policy objective for some years. Moreover, there is evidence that, prior to September 11, the United States had actually been making plans to remove the Taliban regime. The war was anything but an overnight improvisation to address the September 11 atrocity; rather, the September 11 atrocities provided the pretext for the United States to put her existing war plans into motion. So actually the purpose of the American hegemony was to achieve broader goals than simply the punishment of those responsible for September 11. Various important groups have benefited from September 11, especially the Bush administration itself. With the country going nowhere and the economy sliding downward, September 11 was a godsend to the beleaguered regime. Now the popularity of Bush has soared to astronomical heights. Karl Rove, the presidents top political adviser, has been urging Republicans to focus on the war theme. Even Franklin Roosevelt, seeing his popularity flagging, found it necessary to transform himself from Dr. New Deal to Dr. Win-the-War. From the war and its accompanying fever also benefited the military-industrial complex, who need an Enemy to justify their existence. And last but not the least, the September 11 tragedy led to developments long sought by Big Oil and by Israel? Were the terrorist attacks really a bolt from the blue – truly fortuitous – a case of pure serendipity? Or is there any evidence that the U.S. government and Israel had prior knowledge of the impending terrorist strikes but allowed them to take place or even facilitated them? In fact, considerable evidence as detailed below has come to light suggesting that officials of American Administration, and others, were not at all blindsided:

Just prior to September 11, sudden and unexplained speculation occurred in the stock of American and United airlines. An inordinate number of put options – bets that a stock will go down – were placed on those two listings. No other airlines saw such speculation. Similar put options were placed on the stock of various companies – including Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley – that were housed in the World Trade Towers. Since the CIA and other intelligence agencies monitor stock trading closely, American intelligence should have been aware of the abnormal speculation.
Some people outside the intelligence organs also got warnings. For example, San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown was scheduled to fly to New York City on the morning of September 11, but he claimed later that he received a call the night before from his security people at the airport telling him that he should be extra-cautious about air travel on the eleventh. Similarly, the FAA prevented the notorious author Salman Rushdie, who is under special protection because of threats on his life, from flying to the United States during the week leading up to September 11. In August 2001, Drs. Garth and Mary Nicolson also reported to Department of Defense and National Security Council officials that a number of personal friends in the intelligence and diplomatic communities had told them that a terrorist attack on the Pentagon would take place on September 11. And the extremely influential and well-established investment firm Goldman Sachs circulated an internal memo in its Tokyo office on September 10 advising all employees to avoid any U.S. government buildings because of a possible terrorist attack. If outsiders knew about the planned attack, how one would expect the CIA itself to be divested of that knowledge?
On June 23, 2001, Reuters dispatched a story headlined Bin Laden Fighters Plan Anti-U.S. attack, with this lead sentence: Followers of exiled Saudi dissident Osama Bin Laden are planning a major attack on U.S. and Israeli interests. And a June 25 UPI dispatch stated: Saudi dissident Osama Bin Laden is planning a terrorist attack against the United States.
Dire warnings flowed to the U.S. government from various sources. According to Russian news reports, Russian intelligence notified the CIA during the summer that 25 terrorist pilots had been specifically training for suicide missions. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak claims to have warned the United States 12 days prior to September 11 that something would happen. In an interview September 15 with MSNBC, Russian -President Vladimir Putin confirmed that in August he had ordered Russian intelligence to warn the United States in the strongest possible terms of imminent terrorist strikes on airports and government buildings. Moreover, U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies received warning signals in the early summer that Middle Eastern terrorists were planning to hijack commercial aircraft and use them as weapons to destroy important symbols of American and Israeli culture. German police have confirmed that an Iranian man phoned the U.S. Secret Service from his deportation cell in Germany to warn of the planned terrorist assault on the World Trade Center.
The U.S. authorities did expect acts of terrorism in the United States and the terrorist use of hijacked planes had been talked about for some time. Elements of the hijacking plan and the terrorists method of operation were already known to the FBI as early as 1995. In January 1995, Abdul Hakim Murad, an associate of Ramzi Yousef, spoke of a plan by the Ramzi group to hijack a commercial airliner and crash it into CIA headquarters in Virginia. Murad, who had attended flight schools in the United States, said that he was going to be the pilot. Filipino investigators also turned up with evidence that commercial buildings in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City were to be targeted. That information was duly passed on to the FBI.
The measures to avert suicide airliner crashes were in effect during the 2000 Olympics in Sydney and were on track for the 2002 winter games in Salt Lake City. As a matter of fact, International Olympic Committee officials have revealed that suicide plane-crash scenarios had been considered in their security planning for every Olympics since 1972. In addition, the FAAs Criminal Acts against Civil Aviation report for 2000 warned that Bin Laden and his followers were a threat to U.S. civil aviation. Finally, since 1996 the FBI had made numerous inquiries about suspected Bin Laden associates taking flight training in the United States and abroad.
Bin Laden had been under surveillance for years: every telephone call was monitored and as such they could not have kept secret an operation that required such a degree of organization and sophistication. In February, 2001, Richard Sale reported that U.S. intelligence agencies were able to monitor Bin Ladens electronic communications. Since the September 11 events required long-term planning, it is hard to believe that American intelligence could not pick up information about the plan. And if U.S. intelligence agencies were able to monitor his communications immediately after the September 11 attack, it is difficult to believe that they were totally unable to do so before that time.
The suicide hijackers were actually known to U.S. authorities, and they seem to have made little effort to conceal their identities. Interestingly, if the FBI placed two of the hijackers, Kahlil Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhamzi, on an FBI watch list on August 23, after the CIA received information linking the pair to Bin Laden why and how the authorities failed to pass along that information to the airlines with the result that the two were able to buy first-class one-way airline tickets, and then board and hijack a jetliner on September 11?
The case of Ziad Samir Jarrah, one of the suspected hijackers aboard the United Airlines jet that crashed in Pennsylvania, is rife with oddities. After the request for the interrogation had been made by the U.S. government, the authorities in the United Arab Emirates detained and questioned Jarrah at the Dubai International Airport after he arrived there from Pakistan on January 30, 2001. An unnamed United Arab Emirates official was already told by the Americans that he was a supporter of terrorist organizations and that he had connections with terrorist organizations. Jarrah was, however, allowed to leave the U.A.E., traveling on to Hamburg via Amsterdam. Despite the interest of U.S. authorities in him and his activities and his connections, Jarrah was allowed to enter the states and then enrolled in a flight school. Jarrah was stopped for speeding in Maryland on September 9, two days before the hijacking. The Maryland State Police did check his name through their computers but, amazingly and inexplicably enough, found nothing on him. They issued him a ticket and allowed him to proceed.
There is another peculiar case of Mohammed Atta, the alleged ringleader of the terrorist strike team, who was reportedly an object of acute attention for Egyptian, German, and American authorities, and yet he managed to travel without hindrance between Europe and America throughout 2000 and 2001. U.S. agents in Germany had monitored Attas group there before September 11; after the attacks, according to the British paper The Observer, A team of agents dispatched by the FBI to Germany has been focusing on the northern city of Hamburg, where three of the men who died in the planes and four others who were on the FBIs initial list of suspects studied at universities. Atta was under surveillance between January and May, 2000 after he was reportedly observed buying large quantities of chemicals in Frankfurt, apparently for the production of explosives and for biological warfare. Atta came to the attention of U.S. authorities several times in 2001. On January 10, 2001, he was allowed to enter the United States on a tourist visa, even though he admitted to immigration officials that he would be attending flight school, an activity that requires a student visa. The executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association told the Washington Post that nine times out of ten a person in that situation would have been denied entrance. Oddly enough, federal immigration police overlooked Attas visa status violation even though he had previously been under FBI surveillance for stockpiling bomb-making materials. During the summer of 2001, the FBI discovered that Atta received a wire transfer of $100,000 from a foreign account. It is difficult to understand how such a large sum of money could be transmitted with impunity to someone under FBI surveillance.
The governments seeming lack of interest in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui is also very strange. On January 3, 2002, Moussaoui was arraigned on terrorism conspiracy charges in connection with the September 11 attacks. He had been arrested in Minnesota on August 16 after officials of a flight school there alerted the FBI of his suspicious behavior. Though lacking the most basic flying skills, he was seeking flight training on a commercial jet simulator. Moreover, he reportedly did not want to learn how to take off or land, only how to steer the jet while it was in the air. Moussaoui was detained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service on charges of violating the terms of his visa. Local FBI investigators in Minneapolis immediately viewed Moussaoui as a terrorist suspect and sought authorization for a special counterintelligence surveillance warrant in order to search the hard drive of his home computer. Higher-level officials in Washington rejected the request on the ground that there was insufficient evidence to meet the legal requirements for the warrant. On August 26, French intelligence notified FBI headquarters that Moussaoui had connections to Osama Bin Laden, but even that revelation had little effect. A special counter-terrorism panel of the FBI and CIA concluded that there was insufficient evidence to show that Moussaoui represented any threat, and he was not even transferred from INS detention to FBI custody until after September 11. In an analysis published December 22, the New York Times commented that the Moussaoui case raised new questions about why the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies did not prevent the hijackings.
In its September 24 issue, Newsweek made the startling disclosure that on September 10, A group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns. It certainly implies that some federal officials knew of the exact timing of the attack; while federal officials might have made use of such knowledge to save their own skins, they had no desire to actually prevent the terrorist attack from taking place; or, to be more precise, certain government officials at the highest levels had no desire to prevent it from taking place. David P. Schippers, noted Chicago lawyer and the House Judiciary Committees chief investigator in the Clinton impeachment trial, has charged that elements of the U.S. government had foreknowledge of the September attack. He claims that lower-echelon FBI agents in Chicago and Minnesota contacted him about a month and a half before September 11 and told him that a terrorist attack was going to occur in lower Manhattan. The agents had been developing extensive information on the planned attack for many months but the FBI command kept them off the terrorist investigation and threatened them with prosecution under the National Security Act if they went public with the information.
There is much more to add to your bewilderment. In an interview Tagesspiegel, Andreas von BÃ¼low – who served on a parliamentary commission that oversaw the three branches of German intelligence from 1969 to 1994 – finds the modus operandi of the alleged terrorist highjackers to be highly suspicious. In particular, he regards the clues that they left behind to be very amateurish, if not idiotic. The tracks behind them seemed to be like a herd of stampeding elephants. They made payments with credit cards with their own names; they reported to their flight instructors with their own names. They left behind rented cars with flight manuals in Arabic for jumbo jets. They took with them, on their suicide trip, wills and farewell letters, which fell into the hands of the FBI, because they were stored in the wrong place and wrongly addressed. Clues were left like behind like in a childs game of hide-and-seek, which were to be followed. How could terrorists who were capable of secretly carrying out a very complicated plan, undetected beforehand, leave evidence behind that even the Keystone Cops could detect? Or was the evidence left behind for the express purpose of incriminating the Bin Laden network within hours of the attacks on the Twin Towers?
Another fascinating story is that of a 35-year-old American, Delmart Edward Mike Vreeland II who claims to be a lieutenant in a U.S. Navy intelligence unit and says he knew in advance about the September 11 attacks. Imprisoned in Canada since December 2000, he tried to warn Canadian authorities about possible terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, as well as on targets in Ottawa and Toronto, but was ignored. He then wrote the warning on a piece of paper, sealed it in an envelope, and handed it to jail guards a month before the attacks. The guards opened the letter on September 14 and immediately forwarded the information to Ottawa. His prediction of the attacks could have been a lucky guess.
It is baffling to note that FBI and military intelligence officials in Washington were prevented for political reasons from carrying out full investigations into members of the Bin Laden family and Saudi activities in the United States before the attacks of September 11. FBI deputy director John ONeill, who for years led U.S. investigations into Bin Ladens al Qaeda network, resigned in August 2001 in protest over this obstruction. Behold the irony of his fate: after his resignation ONeill took a new job as head of security at the World Trade Center and died on September 11.
President Bush and his top advisors, especially Vice President Dick Cheney, have had close connections with major oil companies whose oil interests were associated with the vast, largely untapped oil and gas resources of the Caspian Basin and Central Asia. Central Asias oil and gas reserves are land-locked and as already indicated this energy wealth must be sent through long pipelines to reach global markets. The value of Afghanistan far transcends the oil-pipeline issue. Afghanistan has traditionally been, and remains, a key area in global power politics and owes its importance to its location at the confluence of major routes. It is a boundary between land power and sea power, and the meeting point between opposing forces larger than itself. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has become an important potential opening to the sea for the landlocked new states of Central Asia. American policy is based simply on the desire to dominate Central Asian energy resources as she dominates the Persian Gulf oil fields. Obviously, the development of those energy resources will mean financial gain for American investors. But control of the area will also enhance U.S. global power; Americas goal is to achieve world hegemony – any lesser achievement would leave the United States vulnerable to her enemies. To achieve hegemony America must act unilaterally and monopolize the worlds crucial energy sources to keep that wealth out of the hands of potential enemies such as Iran, Russia, and China. U.S. officials predict the 21st Century Silk Road running through Central Asia will include railroads, oil and gas pipelines, and fiber optic cables. Prosperity of the great power entails, of course, the suppression of trouble-some destabilizing elements such as Islamic fundamentalism and ethnic nationalism.
From February to August, the Bush regime conducted detailed negotiations with Taliban diplomatic representatives, meeting several times in Washington, Berlin, and Islamabad. Instead of serving as a pliable government that could provide requisite stability for American exploitation of energy resources, the Taliban were exporting their revolutionary Islamic fundamentalism to nearby Central Asian countries, thus destabilizing the entire energy-rich region for Americans. U.S. negotiations with the Taliban broke down in August,2001 after a U.S. negotiator threatened military action against the Taliban, telling them to accept the American offer of a carpet of gold, or youll get a carpet of bombs.
Even before the September 11 attack, the United States and Uzbekistan had been sharing intelligence and conducting joint covert operations against the Taliban. That prior secret relationship helps explain the rapid emergence of the post-September 11 military partnership between the two countries, making Uzbekistan a base for launching attacks on Afghanistan. Since 1997 not only did the CIA work with the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, it also helped establish an anti-Taliban network in southern Afghanistan, the area of the Talibans greatest support. With the advent of the Bush administration in 2001, U.S. officials settled on concrete plans for military action, especially in cooperation with Pakistan, to remove the Taliban regime. Significantly, some information on those plans leaked to the public before September 11. On March 15, 2001, the British-based Janes International Security reported that the new U.S. regime was working with India, Iran, and Russia in a concerted front against Afghanistans Taliban regime. India was supplying the Northern Alliance with military equipment, advisors, and helicopter technicians, and both India and Russia were using bases in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan for their operations. Janes reported. Intelligence sources in Delhi said that while India, Russia, and Iran were leading the anti-Taliban campaign on the ground, Washington was giving the Northern Alliance information and logistic support. According to a June 26, 2001, article in the Indian public-affairs Web magazine Indiareacts.com, the United States, Russia, Pakistan, and India made a pact for war against the Taliban. Iran was considered a covert participant. The powers planned to begin the war in mid October. A similar story, reported by the BBC on September 18, was related by Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani foreign secretary who was told by senior U.S. officials in mid July that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October. The broader goal was the removal of the Taliban and the installation of a compliant pro-American regime. According to Naik, he was told that the United States would launch her operation from bases in Tajikistan, where American military advisors were already in place.
Despite her preparations for war, the United States couldnt just launch an attack on Afghanistan as the U.S. officials required a compelling pretext in order to mobilize the American public into supporting a war in that faraway, and, to most people, unknown land. As Brzezinski had acknowledged, American military expansion into Central Asia could not be undertaken except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat. Was September 11 just a fortuitous event that meshed perfectly with U.S. strategic designs for foreign oil resources and with actual U.S. military planning? Hitler may not have started the Reichstag fire, but he certainly intended to become dictator and was able to exploit the fire to achieve his goal; and that would be worth putting in context. The aims of the war are quite different. If the terrible tragedy of September 11 had not served as a pretext for Americas war policy, something else probably would have, though undoubtedly less effectively. But given the above-mentioned evidence, it is also conceivable that high U.S. officials had advance knowledge of a terrorist attack and decided to let it proceed, perhaps without envisioning the magnitude of the destruction, in order to provide a catalyst for their already planned war in Afghanistan.
The belief that Israel might engage in such deceptive terrorism against the United States is expressed in a recent study by the Armys School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS). A reference to this study appeared, poignantly, in a front-page article in the Washington Times on September 10, 2001 – one day before the horrific attacks. According to the article, Of the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, the SAMS officers say: Wildcard. Ruthless and cunning has capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act. Thereafter intimations of a possible Israeli connection emerged immediately after the September 11 tragedy. Initial reports from Israel disclosed that 4,000 Israelis worked in the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon, or in their vicinity. However, it turned out that only one or two Israeli died.
Law enforcement officials took at least three different groups of Israelis into custody after eyewitnesses reported seeing them celebrating in several locations in New Jersey, across the river from lower Manhattan, as the September 11 attacks occurred. In two cases, men were reported to have videotaped the initial attack on the World Trade Center. Witnesses say it appeared that they were already cognizant of what would happen before it happened. Some of the Israelis arrested were carrying maps linking them to the blasts. All the detained Israelis were connected to Israeli-owned moving companies operating out of New York and New Jersey. A clear implication is that the moving companies were fronts for an Israeli spy network.
an eye-opening story with Brit Hume, featuring reporter Carl Cameron broke on December 12, Fox News: federal law enforcement officials had detained approximately 60 Israeli citizens, including some described as active Israeli military or intelligence operatives, in the course of the post-September 11 roundup of potential terrorists. U.S. officials suspected that the Israelis were part of an extensive Israeli intelligence network active in America, which probably had obtained advance information of the September 11 attacks. A highly placed investigator said there are tie-ins. But when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them, saying, Evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. Its classified information.
A considerable number of intelligence experts have contended that the whole September 11 event was too complicated to have been successfully conducted by al-Qaeda and that it required state sponsorship. Some have pointed to Iraq, a few to Iran; however, no evidence inculpating either of those states has turned up. Intelligence specialists committed to the mainstream have refrained, of course, from pointing any accusatory fingers at Israel or the United States. An intelligence expert Andreas von BÃ¼low maintains that the planning of the attacks was technically and organizationally a master achievement. To hijack four huge airplanes within a few minutes and within one hour, to drive them into their targets, with complicated flight maneuvers! This is unthinkable, without years-long support from secret apparatuses of the state and industry. It is too difficult to imagine that all this sprang out of the mind of an evil man in his cave. A lot of fundamental problems with the official story persist for us to assume that Bin Laden is an evil genius capable of directing a complex attack from halfway around the globe. How could Bin Laden have directed a complicated scheme, executed by people known to be his associates, without the authorities detecting anything? That the September 11 event took place in the way that the official story claims is entirely impossible. The fact of the matter is that Osama Bin Laden had nothing to do with the attack but was simply a convenient scapegoat. Besides, there are so many questions that come to mind and are left unanswered by the American Administration? The event of September 11, however, did provide a pretext to achieve, by military action, already-existing foreign policy goals.

So it is the story of how the Bush Administration sold the War on Iraq to the American people by using all the Weapons of Mass Deception and the tools of Propaganda via press and electronic media. Some journalists like Paul Krugman assert: this huge deception that sold the wars against terrorism is arguably the worst political scandal of our lifetimes. There is a long history of the Big Lie tactic that entails a simple observation: if those in authority repeat a falsehood over and over enough and it remains unchallenged by the media, it will become the truth. Historically speaking, this was a tactic extensively employed by the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. And it’s especially disturbing that something as crude as the big lie tactic could be used effectively to rally support for a pre-emptive war by the U.S. by making believe that there was a close link between Al-Qaeda and Saddam and that Saddam was baby-killer. At the same time it must be remembered as pointed out by the critics that it is none other than U.S. military interventionism that provokes terrorists to target the United States for attacks. Thus, as the United States expands and intensifies her war against terrorism around the globe, she actually increases the likelihood of terrorist strikes against the American homeland.

If 9/11 had not happened, it would have been necessary to invent it just because after the yet-to-be-explored event of 9/11, the US administration has been successful, at best, in going ahead toward its pre-war agenda, e.g., disrupting the al-Qaeda network (though Osama Bin Laden and many of his leading associates remain at large), achieving the goal of American military presence in energy-rich Central Asia and a pliable government in Afghanistan, giving a green light to Israel to smash the Palestinians, capturing the Iraqi oil-wells and smoothing the path for a U.S. assault against Israels major enemies, starting with Iraq. God knows better when and how the US would meet the repercussions. But it is really amazing why strong and super nations dont learn from the annals of history and tend to forget that they would never survive if they repeat the same follies and go beyond their limits. Doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results naturally and invariably leads to insanity and annihilation.

If 9/11 had not happened

Related

References

Subscribe to our stories