- It is not necessary to postulate an all-embracing
conspiracy,
extending from the White House to the airline security personnel who let
the armed hijackers board the planes, to believe that there is much more
to the story of the September 11 attacks than the American public has been
told so far. Certainly the least likely and least credible explanation
of that day's events is that the vast US national security apparatus was
entirely unaware of the activities of the hijackers until the airliners
slammed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
-
- According to this official version, voiced most crudely
by FBI Director Robert Mueller immediately after the event, no one in the
US government had the slightest idea of the identities of the September
11 hijackers, the methods they would employ, or the targets they would
choose. A careful review of the information that has come to light, in
bits and pieces, since September 11, demonstrates that these claims are
not merely tenuous, but clearly, obviously and knowingly false.
-
- The case of Zacarias Moussaoui ["The strange case
of Zacarias Moussaoui: FBI refused to investigate man charged in September
11 attacks"] is only the most glaring evidence that the September
11 terrorist attacks represent, not merely a colossal failure on the part
of the FBI and CIA, but a refusal to act that has no legitimate
explanation.
Not only were there general warnings of the likelihood of suicide
hijackings,
but several of the hijackers, including the man alleged to be the principal
organizer, Mohammed Atta, were under active surveillance by US agents.
It is not too much to say that the terrorists were only able to accomplish
their murderous and destructive mission because US intelligence agencies
ignored repeated warnings, refused to carry out elementary defensive
actions
and manifested a seeming indifference to the prospect of a major terrorist
attack on American soil.
-
- Added to that is the refusal of any branch of the US
government to conduct any probe into the circumstances of an attack which
killed more American civilians on a single day than any other act of
violence
in US history. There has been no serious effort in the four months since
September 11 to investigate, learn lessons and assign responsibility. This
by itself is a demonstration that there are highly placed people in
Washington
with a great deal to hide.
-
- Warnings from foreign governments
-
- The governments of at least four
countriesóGermany,
Egypt, Russia and Israelógave specific warnings to the US of an
impending terrorist attack in the months preceding September 11. These
alerts, while fragmentary, not only combined to foretell the scale of the
attack and its main target, but indicated that hijacked commercial aircraft
would be the weapon of choice.
-
- According to an article in one of the major daily
newspapers
in Germany, published just after the destruction of the World Trade Center,
the German intelligence service BND told both US and Israeli intelligence
agencies in June that Middle East terrorists were "planning to hijack
commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of
American
and Israeli culture."
-
- The newspaper cited unnamed German intelligence sources,
who said that the information came through Echelon, the US- controlled
system of 120 satellites which monitors all worldwide electronic
communications.
Echelon is operated jointly by the United States, Canada, Britain,
Australia
and New Zealand, although its existence is not officially admitted.
(Source:
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 14, 2001)
-
- The government of Egypt sent an urgent warning to the
US June 13, based on a video made by Osama bin Laden. Egyptian President
Hosni Mubarak told the French newspaper Le Figaro that the warning was
originally delivered just before the G-8 summit in Genoa. It was taken
seriously enough that antiaircraft batteries were stationed around
Christopher
Columbus Airport in the Italian city. According to Mubarak, bin Laden
"spoke
of assassinating President Bush and other heads of state in Genoa. It was
a question of an airplane stuffed with explosives. These precautions then
had been taken." (Source: New York Times, September 26, 2001, "2
Leaders Tell of Plot to Kill Bush in Genoa," by David Sanger)
-
- According to Russian press reports, Russian intelligence
notified the CIA during the summer that 25 terrorist pilots had been
specifically
training for suicide missions. In an interview September 15 with MSNBC,
Russian President Vladimir Putin confirmed that he had ordered Russian
intelligence in August to warn the US government "in the strongest
possible terms" of imminent attacks on airports and government
buildings.
(Source: From The Wilderness web site; MSNBC).
-
- The London-based Sunday Telegraph óan
arch-conservative
newspaper usually highly supportive of the Bush administrationó
reported that the Israeli intelligence service Mossad had delivered a
warning
to the FBI and CIA in August that as many as 200 followers of Osama bin
Laden were slipping into the country to prepare "a major assault on
the United States." The advisory spoke of a "large-scale
target"
in which Americans would be "very vulnerable." The Los Angeles
Times cited unnamed US officials confirming this Mossad warning had been
received. (Source: Sunday Telegraph, September 16, 2001, "Israeli
security issued urgent warning to CIA of large-scale terror attacks,"
by David Wastell and Philip Jacobson; Los Angeles Times, September 20,
2001, "Officials Told of 'Major Assault' Plans," by Richard A.
Serrano and John-Thor Dahlburg)
-
- The Independent, a liberal daily in Great Britain,
published
an article asserting the US government "was warned repeatedly that
a devastating attack on the United States was on its way." The
Independent
cited an interview given by Osama bin Laden to a London-based
Arabic-language
newspaper, al-Quds al-Arabi, in late August. About the same time, tighter
security measures were ordered at the World Trade Center, for unexplained
reasons. (Source: Independent, September 17, 2001, "Bush did not heed
several warnings of attack," by Andrew Gumbel)
-
- Despite this series of alerts, no US intelligence agency
issued any warning of a possible attack on a target on US territory in
the months leading up to September 11. The CIA and FBI had issued warnings
about likely attacks on American military bases or embassies in the Middle
East, Europe and Asia. On September 7 the US Department of State issued
a worldwide alert about an impending attack by bin Laden followers,
although
it was focused on US-related targets in east Asia, especially Japan, not
within the US itself. As the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence
Committee, Senator Richard Shelby, admitted, "This obviously was a
failure of great dimension. We had no specific warning of the US being
attacked."
-
- Moreover, the FBI's decision to take no action on
Zacarias
Moussaoui must be considered in the light of this continuous stream of
warnings from overseas. The US government was being repeatedly alerted
to the danger of devastating attacks using hijacked commercial aircraft,
yet the FBI decided to conduct no serious investigation into a man,
believed
by French intelligence to be linked to Osama bin Laden, who wanted to learn
how to steer a 747 jumbo jet, but not to take off or land. Moussaoui was
not even turned over to the FBI by the Immigration and Naturalization
Service
until after September 11.
-
- US investigations and concerns
-
- Despite claims that US intelligence agencies had not
considered the possibility of suicide attacks involving commercial
airliners
before September 11, there were many indications of such concerns on the
part of the American government over a period of eight years.
-
- An expert panel commissioned by the Pentagon in 1993
discussed how an airplane could be used to bomb national landmarks.
"It
was considered radical thinking, a little too scary for the times,"
said retired Air Force Col. Doug Menarchik, who organized the $150,000
study for the Defense Department's Office of Special Operations and
Low-Intensity
Conflict. "After I left, it met a quiet death." The decision
not to publish detailed scenarios was made partly out of a fear that it
could give terrorists ideas, participants said. A draft was circulated
through the Pentagon, the Justice Department and the Federal Emergency
Management Agency, but senior agency officials ultimately decided against
a public release. (Source: Washington Post, October 2, 2001, "Before
Attack, U.S. Expected Different Hit, Chemical, Germ Agents Focus of
Preparations,"
by Jo Warrick and Joe Stephens)
-
- Three incidents of attempted attacks on buildings using
airplanes took place during 1994. The first, in April of that year,
involved
a Federal Express flight engineer who was facing dismissal. He boarded
a DC-10 as a passenger and invaded the cockpit, planning to crash the plane
into a company building in Memphis, but was overpowered by the crew. The
second came that September, when a lone pilot crashed a stolen
single-engine
Cessna into a tree on the White House grounds just short of the president's
bedroom. The third was the December hijacking of an Air France flight in
Algiers by the Armed Islamic Group. The hijackers had the plane land in
Marseilles and ordered it loaded with 27 tons of fuel, three times the
amount required to reach Paris. Their aim was to crash it into the Eiffel
Tower. French special forces stormed the plane on the ground. (Source:
New York Times, October 3, 2001, "Earlier Hijackings Offered Signals
That Were Missed," by Matthew Wald)
-
- In January 1995, Philippine police arrested and tortured
Abdul Hakim Murad in a Manila apartment where bomb-making equipment was
found. He told them of plans to plant timed explosive devices on 11 US
airliners simultaneously, and to crash-land an airplane into CIA
headquarters
in Langley, Virginia. The preparations were so far advanced that Murad
detailed the specific flights targeted, most of them trans-Pacific flights
which would explode over the ocean. Murad had attended flying schools in
the United States, earned a commercial pilot's license, and told
investigators
he was to fly the plane into CIA headquarters. Another Islamic
fundamentalist
was to fly a second plane into the Pentagon. (Source: Washington Post,
September 23, "Borderless Network of Terror, Bin Laden Followers Reach
Across Globe," by Doug Struck, Howard Schneider, Karl Vick and Peter
Baker)
-
- Later that year, the alleged organizer of the first World
Trade Center bombing, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, was captured in Pakistan, turned
over to US agents and flown back to the United States for trial. On the
flight, Yousef reportedly boasted to FBI agent Brian Parr and the other
agents guarding him that he had narrowly missed several opportunities to
blow up a dozen airliners on a single day over the Pacific and to carry
out a kamikaze-type suicide attack on CIA headquarters in Langley,
Virginia.
Yousef was referring to the same plot for which Abdul Hakim Murad had been
arrested in the Philippines. Murad was extradited to the United States,
where his testimony played a major role in Yousef's trial and conviction.
(Source: John Cooley, Unholy Wars, New York, NY, 2000, p. 247)
-
- Early in 1996, US officials had identified crop-dusters
and suicide flights as potential terrorist weapons, and began taking
elaborate
steps to prevent an attack from the air during the Summer Olympic Games
in Atlanta. Black Hawk helicopters and US Customs Service jets were
deployed
to intercept suspicious aircraft in the skies over the Olympic venues.
Agents monitored crop-duster flights within hundreds of miles of downtown
Atlanta. Law enforcement agents also fanned out to regional airports
throughout
northern Georgia "to make sure nobody hijacked a small aircraft and
tried to attack one of the venues," said Woody Johnson, the FBI agent
in charge of the Atlanta office at the time. From July 6 through the end
of the Games on August 11, the FAA banned all aviation within a one- mile
radius of the Olympic Village that housed the athletes. It also ordered
aircraft to stay at least three miles away from other sites beginning three
hours before each event until three hours after each event ended. (Source:
Los Angeles Times, November 17, 2001, "Suicide Flights and Crop
Dusters
Considered Threats at '96 Olympics," by Mark Fineman and Judy
Pasternak)
-
- As early as 1996 the FBI began investigating the
activities
of Arab students at US flight schools. Government officials admitted that
"law enforcement officials were aware that fewer than a dozen people
with links to bin Laden had attended US flight schools." FBI agents
visited two flight schools in 1996 to get information about several Arab
pilots who received training there. The two schools were among those
attended
by Abdul Hakim Murad, who had told Philippine and US police about plans
to fly a hijacked plane into CIA headquarters. In 1998 FBI agents
questioned
officials from Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma about a graduate
identified in court testimony as a pilot for Osama bin Laden. This was
the school later attended by Zacarias Moussaoui. A Washington Post article
concludes: "Since 1996, the FBI had been developing evidence that
international terrorists were using US flight schools to learn to fly jumbo
jets. A foiled plot in Manila to blow up U.S. airliners and later court
testimony by an associate of bin Laden had touched off FBI inquiries at
several schools, officials say." (Source: Washington Post, September
23, 2001, "FBI Knew Terrorists Were Using Flight Schools," by
Steve Fainaru and James V. Grimaldi)
-
- In the run-up to the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, there
was active consideration of the danger of "a fully loaded, fuelled
airliner crashing into the opening ceremony before a worldwide television
audience," according to former Sydney police superintendent Paul
McKinnon.
Osama bin Laden was considered the number threat, he said. IOC officials
said plane-crash catastrophes have been incorporated into security planning
for every Olympics since 1972. "That was our nightmare scenario,"
one IOC official said. There were extensive IOC discussions with the FBI
during 2001 in the course of the security planning for the 2002 Winter
Olympics in Salt Lake City. (Source: Sydney Morning Herald, September 20,
2001, "Jet crash on stadium was Olympics nightmare," by Jacquelin
Magnay)
-
- The 2000 edition of the Federal Aviation Administration's
annual report on Criminal Acts Against Aviation, published early in 2001,
said that although bin Laden "is not known to have attacked civil
aviation, he has both the motivation and the wherewithal to do so,"
adding, "Bin Laden's anti-Western and anti-American attitudes make
him and his followers a significant threat to civil aviation, particularly
to US civil aviation." (Source: FAA)
-
- Beginning in early 2001 a trial was held in New York
City of four defendants charged with involvement in the 1998 bombings of
US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The trial revealed that two bin Laden
operatives had received pilot training in Texas and Oklahoma and another
had been asked to take lessons. L'Houssaine Kherchtou, a bin Laden
associate
turned government witness, told the court how he was asked to take flying
lessons in 1993. Another bin Laden aide, Essam al-Ridi, testified that
he had bought a military aircraft for bin Laden and flown it to Sudan.
Al-Ridi became a government witness in 1998, giving the FBI inside
information
about a pilot-training scheme three years before the September 11 attack.
While the proceedings of the trial extended from February to July 2001,
they did not produce any heightened alert in relation to US commercial
aviation. (Source: Court transcript available at www.cryptome.org )
-
- To be continued Friday, January 18
- http://www.wsws.org
|
