Who Is Osama Bin Laden? Does He Have Anything To Do With The September 11 Attack?
Bin Laden - Immortal Technique
Osama Is An Arsenal Supporter
In early 1994, Osama bin Laden spent three months in London, Osama bin Laden spent three months in London, where he visited supporters and bankers and went to watch the famous soccer club Arsenal four times.
Before returning to Sudan, just a step ahead of being extradited to Saudi Arabia, he bought his sons gifts from the club's souvenir shop.
"Nothing would be what it is, Because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary-wise - what it is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?"
"I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people. Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of a battle."
One example may be sufficient to show how difficult and important the struggle against terrorism is: Even if the FBI finds the anthrax-by-mail terrorist(s) tomorrow, the fact will remain that the bioterrorist(s) in question was/were at large for about four months.
Hundreds of thousands or millions of Americans could be killed in four months by really up-to-date large-scale bioterrorists stealing a five-pound bag of that same antiquated anthrax, to say nothing of later and far more potent and effective 'biopreparations'.
A far easier way was to personify the terrorism as Osama bin Laden, with his Al-Qaeda, and rush in hot pursuit of the villain who "planned and carried out" (as Prime Minister Tony Blair put it) the terrorist attack on the United States of September 11, 2001.
But who is bin Laden? Why did the CIA choose this feeble-minded nonentity in the 1980s to create the Services Office for the recruitment of guerrilla soldiers in 50 countries for the war against the secular pro-Soviet government in Afghanistan?
He had inherited $300 million, and hence the CIA was able to funnel $5 billion through him, which he could pass off as his own money and thus leave the CIA behind the scenes. Officially, the United States did not participate in the war.
In 1978, the per capita income in Afghanistan was $168 a year. In other words, $1,000 a year was a fortune. For $300 million, bin Laden (that is, the CIA) could recruit 30,000 guerrilla soldiers to serve for 10 years for $1,000 a year per recruit.
A guerrilla soldier learned in a training camp how to ambush Soviet and pro-Soviet soldiers, fire a Kalashnikov at them, and flee to his 'base' in the mountains or caves. Most of the 30,000 guerrilla soldiers survived the war and were far better off materially in Islamic countries like Afghanistan than the average-income person, to say nothing of those who were starving.
The CIA no longer needed guerrilla soldiers, so bin Laden inherited them.
In print and on Barry Farber's radio talk show in the late 1980s, I explained that Soviet Russia securely held Afghanistan. Not because of 'tactical nuclear weapons', discussed by the US government following September 11, 2001, but by creating a single infrastructure so that finally the guerrillas would starve and die out in their mountains and caves, a strategy by which Russia had conquered the Islamic Caucasus in the 19th century.
Why,then, did Gorbachev withdraw from Afghanistan? For the same reason he withdrew from East Germany and many other territories, for which he was made a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Until 1992, the Western public did not know that Gorbachev was developing Superweapon No. 3. He withdrew from Afghanistan and East Germany because he believed in world domination via Superweapon No. 3, not via old-fashioned territorial expansion.
But Gorbachev's geostrategic withdrawal from Afghanistan was perceived by the West (and the Islamic world) as a Soviet rout. This imaginary Soviet debacle transformed the nonentity bin Laden, the CIA's financial screen, into a megalomaniac - a new Muhammad who had rallied Moslems in 50 countries and defeated Soviet Russia with the help of his (the CIA's) Services Office.
Now, if he had defeated Soviet Russia, he could certainly defeat the United States, too. He had hated the secular pro-Soviet government in Afghanistan because it had introduced universal school education that included girls. He hated the United States even more: The American permissiveness with respect to females was even worse than the Soviet indulgence, and American troops were on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia!
So, in the late 1980s, he renamed the Services Office, created by the CIA in 50 countries, as The Base (al-Qaeda) to fight "the Jews and the Crusaders" (that is, Christians). But the feeble-minded megalomaniac did not take into account the cardinal difference between a guerrilla soldier and a terrorist.
Millions, or dozens of millions, of Moslems would find it quite attractive to be guerrilla soldiers in a war for $1,000 a year and live happily after the war. But all terrorism is mortally dangerous, for a terrorist in New York or Washington cannot flee into the mountains or caves of Afghanistan. He is in the position of the most dangerous and most wanted criminal in a foreign country.
Besides, the most effective terrorism is suicidal, and there is a psychological chasm between a guerrilla soldier surviving a guerrilla war and a 'martyr' who sacrifices his life. Bin Laden could, in October and November of 2001, have attacked his enemies in Afghanistan and died in a terrorist act. But so far he has been good at fleeing and hiding, not at sacrificing his life.
Was there a single terrorist in Al-Qaeda? The US war on the Taliban's Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001. Any real terrorist organization would have retaliated within days, if not hours. Indeed, bin Laden brandished his alleged nuclear and biological weapons verbally, and the US government warned that retaliation was drawing nigh.
But these were bin Laden's megalomaniacal theatricals. Where was his Al-Qaeda in 50 or 68 countries when the war in Afghanistan was on? As for Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, its members seemed to be bad even as guerrilla fighters recruited by the CIA in the 1980s, but they behaved just as bureaucrats do when their office is attacked: running away or even surrendering. There was not a single case of terrorism or of any bold counterattack.
Considering the poverty in the Islamic world, the CIA and, later, bin Laden could have hired millions or dozens of millions of Moslems, but what were they good for besides wearing 10-cent badges saying "Beware! I am bin Laden's suicidal terrorist" and then fleeing, with bin Laden fleeing faster than any of them.
Bin Laden actually redefined the definition of who is a terrorist: "A terrorist, and especially a suicidal terrorist, is a man who runs away for his dear life from his enemies faster than anyone else."
Arabs often look like Jews, since both are Semitic. Much as bin Laden hates Jews and imagines himself to be an Arab holy war daredevil, who defeated Soviet Russia and will defeat the West, he looks like a 19th century Russian Jew, terrified by pogroms. His premature senility and grave ailments do not add to his heroic holy war self-image either.
Before 1999, even those terrorist acts that were ascribed (falsely?) to bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda had been so few and insignificant that the U.S. State Department had not included Al-Qaeda on its list of 30 (as of 1997) Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
Before me is the State Department's 16-page document of October 31, 2001, entitled 'Significant Terrorist Incidents, 1961-2001: Chronology'. In 1999, the first year the State Department included Al-Qaeda on its list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, there were 12 "significant terrorist incidents," but not one of them was claimed by, or ascribed to, Al-Qaeda.
In 2000, there were nine such 'incidents', and in only one of them, in Yemen, "supporters of Usama bin Laden were suspected." It is not clear why two terrorists could not carry out this terrorist act on their own without the support of Al-Qaeda. A "small dinghy carrying explosives rammed the destroyer USS Cole, killing 17 sailors." This is a humdrum terrorist act of the 19th century.
The money to buy the explosives? An American taxi driver 'without a medallion' nets $100 a day. Characteristic is the word 'supporters' above. The United States has made bin Laden an evil world celebrity for the West and hence a heroic world celebrity for terrorists. Quite recently, a born-and-bred 15-year-old WASP American, Charles Bishop, rammed a stolen plane into the Bank of America building in Tampa and expressed in his suicide note his support for bin Laden. What does this mean? Nothing, except that bin Laden is now a household name, due to the US media.
Had we not known the story from the police in detail, the US media would have been likely to use that magic word link' and say that Bishop was 'linked' to bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, from which the public would conclude that Bishop was an Al-Qaeda 'operative' and that Al-Qaeda had actually 'planned and carried out' Bishop's terrorist act, while Bishop was just a cog in its wheel.
In its report of January 17, 2002, from Washington on the Philippine Islamic Abu Sayyaf, which has "up to 2,000 members," the World reporter notes that "some of them" (how many? Two percent, one percent, 0.1 percent?) "trained in Afghanistan."
This is quite possible. Way back in the 1980s, the CIA set up camps to train 30,000 recruits in the use of automatic weapons for the guerrilla war. Possibly, two percent, one percent, 0.1 percent of the 2,000 terrorists of Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines are former guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan. This is enough for the report to conclude that Abu Sayyaf is 'linked to Al-Qaeda' and conjure up once again the obsessively reiterated image of Al-Qaeda 'planning and carrying out' terrorist acts in the Philippines as well.
In this way, it is easy to further aggravate the American obsession with bin Laden by assuring the public that his Al-Qaeda has been 'planning and carrying out' all terrorist acts in the world, from the September 11, 2001, attack to Bishop's ramming of the Bank of America, since someone or something in each terrorist act is 'linked' to bin Laden, a world celebrity.
To finish the State Department's list of 'significant terrorist incidents': In 2001, before September 11, there were six 'incidents', and none has ever been 'linked' by anyone in any way with Al-Qaeda.
A bomb in a Jerusalem restaurant killed 15 Jews and wounded 90, but as usual it was claimed by Hamas, as was a bomb in a Tel Aviv nightclub that "caused over 140 casualties." Bin Laden had put Jews before Christians as enemies in his verbal holy war theatricals, but not a single terrorist act in Israel has ever been ascribed to Al-Qaeda.
A huge, inept bureaucracy, Al-Qaeda is not only useless for terrorism but also harmful and dangerous for it. For example, its bureaucrats scribbled a list of those who were assigned to bomb US military ships in Singapore. The plan was megalomaniacal, a megalomaniac's dream.
As the Al-Qaeda bureaucrats were fleeing and surrendering in Afghanistan, they dropped the records and videotapes, because he who flees the lightest, flees the fastest.
The US military picked up the records and videotapes, and on January 11, 2002, those listed by the Al-Qaeda pen-pushers were duly arrested in Singapore and can now be sentenced to death on the strength of Al-Qaeda bureaucrats' scribblings.
That is, the irresponsible Al-Qaeda bureaucracy has been acting not out of malice, but out of sheer bureaucratic indifference - as a collective agent provocateur, describing megalomaniacal terrorist acts, complete with the names, and then losing the records.
Useless and destructive for terrorism, the al-Qaeda bureaucracy has nonetheless been serving bin Laden as his giant PR exhibit, with the United States as his PR agency, sensationalizing the PR exhibit as the last word in global terrorism - the global terrorist mastermind, 'planning and carrying out' terrorist acts all over the world, and in particular, in the United States.
The American publicity, representing the feeble-minded megalomaniac as the most dangerous villain in recorded history, has been reflected upside down in the anti-American Islamic media, which represents bin Laden as the new Muhammad who has conquered the United States spiritually. The Americans have been able to think of nothing and no one except him as their most dangerous foe they have been determined to kill or capture at the price of a war in Afghanistan and no matter what.
But sadly lacking in his global Islamic glory (created by the United States) were great deed - military victories in that holy war bin Laden had been talking about for more than a decade. And here came, on September 11, 2001, an event that the United States represented as equivalent to the Second World War on American territory.
Never mind that the act took place and caused more casualties than in 1993 because of the American unpreparedness for any hostile military activity on American soil. Surely no one nationally visible and audible in the United States said that! Instead, Christiane Amanpour of CNN, for example, spoke of the event as unprecedented "in recorded history"! What a grandiose Islamic military victory worthy of Muhammad's military victories!
Yet the new Muhammad did not claim credit for this grandiose Islamic victory. Nay, in his interview of September 12, he expressly denied any involvement in it. Of course, he hailed it. He also said that "the majority of the dead were innocent people," but so also were those killed, for example, by Western aviation. He then spoke of "hundreds of Osamas," to suggest modestly (modesty is the best ornament of a great leader) that the United States was obsessed with him and refused to think of hundreds of other Osamas.
No nationally visible and audible American was surprised: A criminal always lies to conceal his or her crime. No nationally visible American seemed to understand that for most Moslems the event, magnified by the United States to infinity, was not the most heinous crime in recorded history, but the greatest (glorious and divine) military victory for the new Muhammad to be proud of. Certainly he had no fear of the United States at that time.
Because of his megalomania (created by the United States) he could not imagine the forthcoming debacle of the Taliban and the flight (or surrender) of his Al-Qaeda in November and December. In September, the megalomaniac refused to leave Afghanistan, and the Taliban refused to extradite him and thus avoid the war.
Yes, in September, the megalomaniac still challenged the West, the US armed forces, as well as the 42 tribes hostile to the Taliban of the Pushtun tribe. Certainly it was not fear of the United States at that time that prompted bin Laden to expressly declare publicly that he had nothing to do with what was to most Moslems the greatest (glorious and divine) victory of September 11, 2001, in that holy war that he had declared on the United States. What prompted him to make such a public statement?
There had been a lesson for him in the past. When President Clinton automatically accused him of a 1995 assassination attempt in Addis Ababa against Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president, he did not deny the charge. Actually, this terrorist act had been planned for more than a year and carried out by Gama al-Islamija of Egypt, as its members explained to Western correspondents.
So bin Laden looked like a braggart, stealing the bona fide holy warriors' deed. If he had "planned and carried out" the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, the greatest victorious battle in the holy war, then, as soon as the fourth airliner crashed, he, and most of more than 1 billion Moslems as well as the anti-American Islamic media would have screamed that the new Muhammad had at last achieved a grandiose military victory worthy of Muhammad's victories in the 7th century.
But he had not (as we will see below) had anything to do with that greatest victory in the holy war, and he did not want to repeat his experience of 1995 and to hear those who had done it and his numberless Islamic enemies branding him as a liar, a fraud and a scoundrel, deserving to be assassinated by the bona fide terrorists in accordance with the code of honor in the holy war.
Hence, he expressly stated publicly that he had not been involved in any way in that greatest victory in the holy war.
To justify the attack on the Taliban's Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, Prime Minster Tony Blair of England had addressed, on October 4, the House of Commons (as was shown by the American commercial mainstream television) with a 16-page 'intelligence report', according to which bin Laden, at the head of al-Qaeda, harbored by the Taliban, had 'planned and carried out' the epoch-making terrorist attack.
If Blair had presented any evidence showing that bin Laden financed the attack, that might have been an impudent lie, based on fabrications, but at least it would have been a plausible lie. But he said nothing about any financing, while his assertion that bin Laden 'planned and carried out' from Afghanistan the attack in the United States was an implausible lie, for no one could 'plan and carry out' from Afghanistan the training in the United States of pilots and hijackers in the respective flight schools and sports gyms, the 19 terrorists' buying airline tickets in the United States according to the local airline timetables, the pilots' calculations of the time to reach all the targets simultaneously (to avoid interception), as well as the hijacking and the ramming themselves.
Blair's 16-page 'intelligence report' must have seemed implausible even to the British prime minister himself, for more than a month later, on November 14, 2001, he released a 23-page 'intelligence dossier', according to which bin Laden was the perpetrator of the epoch-making terrorist attack of more than two months earlier because he praised it to the skies as the 'battle' that "has been moved inside America."
Blair thus postulated that if bin Laden had not 'planned and carried out' the attack, he would have condemned it as a crime. The American commercial mainstream television showed Blair addressing the British Parliament, which, instead of shouting 'Idiot' shouted 'Yeah' after every other sentence Blair uttered in triumph.
To think that this was the Parliament of the nation that produced Swift, Dickens, John Stuart Mill and Orwell.
Finally, on December 11, 2001, the US government released a privately-made videotape (made in mid-November) on which bin Laden lied with unrestrained megalomaniacal abandon to his several worshippers about how he had 'planned and carried out' (as Tony Blair had put it) that terrorist act that the United States had sensationalized into what most Moslems perceived as the greatest (divine and glorious) victory in the holy war.
Bin Laden's motivation was obvious. He still did not want to take credit publicly for the greatest victory in the holy war lest those really responsible for it and yet alive call him, the new Muhammad, a liar, a fraud and a scoundrel, to be heard by his foes, as numerous as his worshippers.
A privately-made videotape was something quite different. Of course, the Americans would get hold of a copy, and the American television would give it world publicity. Well, if those really responsible for the greatest victory in the holy war and alive challenged his claim, he and his worshippers would say that the videotape was an American fabrication. But if no one challenged his claim on the videotape, most Moslems would know, owing to both American and Islamic television, that the new Muhammad had won that greatest victory in the holy war.
The videotape was hailed as the 'smoking gun' by those nationally visible and audible Americans who were obsessed with bin Laden: The criminal told the gospel truth (what a truthful man!) and made a clean breast of his heinous crime in the belief that never, ever would a copy of the videotape stray beyond his trusted circle.
Actually, the videotape proved beyond reasonable doubt that bin Laden was a liar, a fraud and, in terms of the terrorist code of honor, a scoundrel.
Again, if he had said that he had financed the terrorist act, by paying all the terrorists' expenses, that might have been a lie, but at least it would have been a plausible lie. But in mid-November nothing had been said publicly, as yet, in the United States about the terrorists' United Arab Emirates account or about the training in American flight schools and sports gyms, for which they paid by drawing on that UAE account.
Hence, bin Laden did not know that either, and said nothing about the finances and the UAE account. He obviously believed that the terrorists had not been financed from any outside source at all, since they had not needed the money to pay for their training in the United States: according to the videotape, there was no such training - bin Laden did not say a word about it.
On the other hand, he had certainly heard the British prime minister's idiotic declaration that he, bin Laden, had 'planned and carried out' – in Afghanistan – the terrorist hijacking and ramming of three buildings in the United States, and in his feeble-minded megalomania, bin Laden explained that this was precisely what he had been doing in Afghanistan. Thus, "we calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the (World Trade Center) towers."
Well, the 'number of casualties' depended on the general capacity of the two towers, on which floors the airliners rammed, on whether the two towers would collapse, on the time when they would collapse, on the number of the people still there at the time, and on details like the flight of the elevator operators.
Hence, the 'number of casualties' in the two towers could be anywhere from 300 to 50,000. After mid-November, when the videotape was made, the number of casualties was revised repeatedly. But bin Laden and his experts in Afghanistan had 'calculated in advance the number of casualties' by 'the position of the towers'.
At the same time, bin Laden said that they were not sure that the towers would collapse. How did they 'calculate' the 'number of casualties' if they were not even sure that the towers would collapse? Only bin Laden himself foresaw it (and made a separate calculation of the 'number of casualties'?) because he knew that the gasoline in the airliners would melt their steel structure.
That is, bin Laden parroted what the American 'television experts' were saying in mid-November. Now, in December, the American 'experts' began to say in the media that the cause of the collapse was 'faulty fireproofing': on December 13, the New York Times even published (page B8) photographs of 1993 and 1994, showing faulty fireproofing or the total absence of fireproofing already in those years.
Had bin Laden spoken in December, he would have lied about how he foresaw faulty fireproofing as the cause of the collapse. But he spoke in mid-November, and parroted what the American 'television experts' were saying at that time.
The fact that the terrorist act of Sept. 11 germinated from a cell of college buddies at a major technological institute in Hamburg became known only on November 28, 2001, and hence bin Laden had known nothing about it. As a result, he represented the terrorists as strangers to one another, who "didn't know anything about the operation, not even one letter."
Bin Laden was unaware of the fact they had been learning in the United States how to pilot airliners without taking off or landing them, that is, to ram them, and how to hijack them by knife-fighting and kick-boxing. His absurd megalomaniac lie was meant to represent the 19 suicidal terrorists as 19 cogs of his bureaucratic machine that he (that is, the CIA) had created.
Bin Laden explained to his worshippers that he knew the time when each airliner would ram its target:
They (the Islamic television viewers) were overjoyed when the first plane hit the building, so I said to them: Be patient. The difference between the first and the second plane hitting the towers was 20 minutes. And the difference between the first plane and the plane that hit the Pentagon was one hour.
That is, bin Laden did not even understand that these differences in time were the inexperienced pilots' distance: speed = time miscalculations, which could lead to interception. He represented these dangerous mistakes as the time differences he had planned and calculated, and hence, while those worshippers of his were overjoyed by the first hit, he knew that the second one would follow in 20 minutes and the third in an hour.
Planning! Calculation! Science and technology in the 21st century! From Afghanistan, the scientific-technological genius of bin Laden 'planned and carried out' the operation in the United States, as Tony Blair's 'intelligence report' had put it on October 4, 2001. Bin Laden had seen him on the Islamic television, with captions in Arabic, and out-Blaired Tony Blair!
Curiously, bin Laden said nothing about the fourth airliner. What was its target? The American media (and the FBI) did not know, and hence he did not even mention the fourth airliner.
By his videotape the feeble-minded megalomaniac proved beyond reasonable doubt not only that he had nothing to do with the hijacking and ramming of September 11, 2001, but also that he was mentally unfit to mastermind any suicidal terrorist act, even if he had been personally present on its site.
The 19 suicidal terrorists were 19 individuals - 19 biographies, each worthy of Dostoyevsky's pen. But bin Laden, whom the United States has made better known than any writer or thinker alive, has been a bureaucrat whose bureaucracy was created for him by the CIA, and those terrorists whom he mentions by name on his videotape, because the American media had been mentioning them by name, are to him like construction workers he once hired for his family construction corporation. No need to know anything about them.
In his bureaucratic perception, reflected by the videotape, suicidal terrorists were just like, for example, bricklayers, except that their trade was not to lay bricks, but to sacrifice their lives, without him remembering even the names of all of them as listed by the FBI on the Internet.
He did not explain why at least eight, if not 15, of them were Saudis, and not one of them was from Afghanistan. Who cared where the bricklayers were from? Theirs was to die as unknown bricklayers, and bin Laden's was to be a world celebrity, better known than anyone else alive, owing to the United States, and seated in his high office, 'planning and carrying out' global Islamic terrorism via expendable cogs of his bureaucratic machine (built by the CIA).
If bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda bureaucrats had been personally present in the United States in 2000 and 2001 to 'plan and carry out' the terrorist act of September 11, there would have been no such act. The bureaucrats, headed by a feeble-minded megalomaniac, dealing with suicidal terrorists as with bricklayers hired by a construction corporation in Saudi Arabia, would have ruined the spirit of joint self-sacrifice, would have brought the suicidal idealism down to the level of their own earthly and cowardly selves, and would have replaced the exalted martyrdom with megalomaniac administrative orders, inevitable grudges against them, wrangling, rivalries, cowardice and other awakenings of earthly egoism, leading the would-be terrorists into the FBI's custody.
Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda bureaucrats ran away in the war in Afghanistan and dropped behind their records incriminating would-be terrorists. How could they be in charge of unanimous suicide in whatever transcendental cause? Quite likely, the 19 suicidal terrorists would have first assassinated bin Laden and his entourage as insolent frauds, cowards and agents provocateur.
It is not for nothing that Dostoyevsky argued that the freest (and most dangerous) person is someone ready to commit suicide. On January 16, 2002, it was reported that John Walker, an American who had fought for the Taliban, said that he had seen bin Laden before September 11, 2001, and the man told him about the forthcoming terrorist act. So, bin Laden blabbed about a terrorist act involving 19 terrorist lives to an American as to a friend so close and trustworthy as to be absolutely sure that the information would never reach the CIA.
For many years the media will keep publishing such lies, allegedly showing bin Laden's ubiquitous masterminding of global Islamic terrorism. But no lies can disprove bin Laden's videotape in which he demonstrated, owing to his stupidity and megalomania, that he had nothing to do with the hijacking and ramming of September 11, 2001, much as he and all those obsessed with him have wanted to prove the opposite.
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 exposé--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.
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.
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, 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 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. 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 is a conflict that will last for decades. 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 maché 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 11attacks 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. 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. 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?
"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 [this presumably means the CENTCOM Commander, GEN 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 [emphasis added]. '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."
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."
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