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Centre de recherche sur la mondialisation
There's Something About Omar:
Truth, Lies, and The Legend of 9/11
by Chaim Kupferberg
www.globalresearch.ca , 21 October 2003
The URL of this article is:
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KUP310A.html
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It was almost an afterthought. On March 1, 2003, the War On Terror
had finally served up the alleged paymaster of 9/11 - a shadowy Saudi
by the name of Mustafa Ahmed al-Hisawi. Yet his arrest just happened
to coincide with the capture of a much bigger fish - the reported 9/11
mastermind himself, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed - thus relegating Mustafa
Ahmed to the footnote section of the "official" 9/11 Legend. But
there was another, more explosive side to this tale. Only seventeen
months before, a former London schoolboy by the name of Omar Saeed
Sheikh was first exposed as the 9/11 paymaster, acting under the
authority of a Pakistani general who was in Washington D.C. on
September 11, meeting with the very two lawmakers who would
subsequently preside over the "official" 9/11 congressional inquiry.
Omar Saeed, as reported back then by CNN, was acting under the alias
of...Mustafa Ahmed. So where is Omar now? Sitting in a Pakistani
prison, awaiting his execution for the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl -
while another man fills the shoes of his pseudonym. What follows is a
reconstruction of one of the most extensive disinformation campaigns
in history, and the chronicle of a legend that may now shine a
devastating spotlight on some of the cliques behind 9/11 - and the FBI
Director covering the paper trails.
"The hijackers left no paper trail," proclaimed FBI Director Robert
Mueller on April 30, 2002. "In our investigation, we have not
uncovered a single piece of paper...that mentioned any aspect of the
Sept. 11 plot." Yet in the weeks immediately following September 11,
Mueller and his FBI had left the public with a very different
impression - an impression that conjured the vision of truckloads of
paper documents pointing any number of ways to the culpability of
Osama Bin Laden for the events of 9/11. For one, there was the
infamous handwritten "checklist" found not only in hijacker Mohamed
Atta's abandoned luggage, but also in the car rented in hijacker
al-Hazmi's name, discovered at Dulles Airport, and which included
lofty Arabic prayers alongside last minute reminders to bring "knives,
your will, IDs, your passport, all your papers." But more
importantly, the treasure trove in al-Hazmi's glove compartment
yielded a paper trail that led all the way to London - and to the
arrest of a potentially major suspect.
On September 30, 2001, as reported in the Telegraph by David Bamber,
British prosecutor Arvinda Sambir announced that authorities had
arrested Lotfi Raissi, whose name was found in al-Hazmi's rental. A
further search of Raissi's apartment had yielded up a video clip
starring Raissi with alleged hijacker Hani Hanjour - all in all,
another circumstantial slam-dunk in the snowballing case against
al-Qaida. Or was it? For by April of 2002 - when Mueller made his
"paper trail" declaration - Raissi would go free for want of evidence.
As we will shortly see, Raissi was being set up to play his part in a
prearranged drama, one in which a definitive money trail leading to
al-Qaida would be announced just in time for the October 7, 2001
launch into Afghanistan. Yet a brief, almost innocuous, article in
the October 9 Times of India would lay havoc to this plan,
necessitating a massive cover-up and a search for an alternative
smoking gun that would unveil itself before a skeptical world audience
on December 13, 2001 as the Official Bin Laden Videotape Confession.
An essential player in that original plan was Omar Saeed Sheikh
(hereafter Omar Saeed), a 27 year-old London-born man of Pakistani
parentage who had attended the London School of Economics before
answering the call of militancy, heading off to Bosnia, and from
there, to Pakistan, where he would make his "bones" in a 1994
kidnapping, serving time in an Indian prison until being bartered out
for hostages in a 1999 airplane hijacking. Packing a lifetime into
the next two years, Omar Saeed caught the eye of the so-called
militant faction of Pakistan's ISI (the Pakistani CIA), rounding out
his curricular vitae by tinkering around with the al-Qaida computer
network in Afghanistan.
Omar Saeed made his public post-9/11 debut on September 23, 2001, on
the very same day that his pseudonym, Mustafa Ahmad, made its own
post-9/11 debut through President Bush's Global Terrorist Executive
Order, in which a "Shaykh Sai'id (aka Mustafa Muhammad Ahmad)" was
mentioned as a financial operative in al-Qaida, among a list of 27
individuals and entities slated to have their assets frozen. On
September 23, Nick Fielding of The Sunday Times reported: "British
officials have now asked India for legal assistance in seeking the
whereabouts of Omar [Saeed] Sheikh. British security services
confirmed this weekend that they wanted him for questioning."
A week later, on September 30, 2001, we found out why, when David
Bamber of the Telegraph reported: "Police also believe that ... Omar
[Saeed] Sheikh, who is British, trained the terrorists in hijacking
techniques." As Bamber implied, Omar Saeed was working in cahoots with
Lotfi Raissi, who was just recently arrested and charged with training
the hijacker pilots. In other words, in less than three weeks after
9/11, authorities were closing in on Raissi and Omar Saeed, the
alleged trainers of the alleged hijackers.
Now all that remained was to furnish a "smoking gun" link to al-Qaida
by way of a money trail, all in time for the planned October 7
invasion of Afghanistan. On the very day that the Telegraph outed
Raissi and Omar Saeed as the 9/11 trainers, ABC News This Week
announced that a $100,000 money trail had been traced in Florida from
hijacker Atta to "people linked to Osama bin Laden."
The very next day, on October 1, Judith Miller of the New York Times
reported that hijacker Atta received money from someone using the
alias "Mustafa Ahmad". Five days later, on October 6, Maria Ressa of
CNN, quoting terrorism expert Magnus Ranstorp, officially unveiled
Omar Saeed as the pseudonymous 9/11 money man: "He [Omar Saeed] is ...
linked to the financial network feeding bin Laden's assets, so
therefore he's quite an important person...because he transfers money
between various operatives, and he's a node between al Qaeda and foot
soldiers on the ground." Ressa went on to report: "Because
investigators have now determined that [Omar Saeed] and Mustafa
Muhammad Ahmad [the pseudonym] are the same person, it provides
another key link to bin Laden as the mastermind of the overall [9/11]
plot."
Two days later, on October 8, Ressa revisited the story, this time
connecting Omar Saeed to an October 1 attack on the provincial
legislature in Kashmir - an incident that led Pakistan and India
closer to the brink. October 8, incidentally, was also one of the
very last times that CNN touched upon Omar Saeed - at least until he
bobbed up a few months later, on February 6, as the FBI's main suspect
in the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl. Yet by then, CNN - and Maria Ressa
- was stricken by a curious case of amnesia, neglecting to mention
that Saeed was previously outed by them as the 9/11 bag-man. Why this
sudden silence? And, more to the point, why did Omar Saeed virtually
drop off CNN's radar after October 8?
Perhaps the answer lies in an October 9 bombshell, courtesy of the
Times of India:
"While the Pakistani Inter Services Public Relations claimed that
former ISI [Pakistani intelligence] director-general Lt-Gen Mahmud
Ahmad sought retirement after being superseded on Monday, the truth is
more shocking. Top sources confirmed here on Tuesday that the general
lost his job because of the "evidence" India produced to show his
links to one of the suicide bombers that wrecked the World Trade
Center. The U.S. authorities sought his removal after confirming the
fact that $100,000 were wired to WTC hijacker Mohammed Atta from
Pakistan by [Omar Saeed] at the instance of General Mahmud [Ahmad]."
In short, the Times of India revealed that Omar Saeed was acting under
the direct orders of the head of Pakistani intelligence and not Osama
bin Laden. That in itself could perhaps have been explained away, as
it was widely acknowledged that Islamic elements in the ISI were
sympathetic to the Taliban and their al-Qaida guests. Yet tracing the
"smoking gun" money trail to General Ahmad created an entirely new
smoking gun that led straight back to Washington, D.C. - for General
Ahmad had already been reported as having breakfast in the nation's
capital with Senator Bob Graham and Representative Porter Goss on the
morning of September 11 (Both Graham and Goss would go on to co-chair
the joint Senate-House 9/11 inquiry). In fact, as early as September
9 - two days before 9/11, for those who didn't notice - Karachi News
had weighed in with the following observation:
"ISI Chief Lt-Gen [Mahmud Ahmad's] week-long presence in Washington
has triggered speculation about the agenda of his mysterious meetings
at the Pentagon and National Security Council... What added interest
to his visit is the history of such visits. Last time Ziauddin Butt,
[General Ahmad's] predecessor, was here during Nawaz Sharif's
government, the domestic politics turned topsy-turvy within days. That
this is not the first visit by [General Ahmad] in the last three
months shows the urgency of the ongoing parleys."
If ever there was a paper trail leading to the 9/11conspirators, these
articles provided the print-smeared paving. Taken together, they
would conjure up the following plausible scenario: Omar Saeed, acting
under the direction of General Ahmad and the ISI, had provided money
and "training" (as reported in the Telegraph) to the hijackers while
"false-flagging" himself to the hijackers as an operative of al-Qaida.
The General, on the other hand, may have represented himself to Omar
Saeed as acting exclusively under ISI authority, when in fact he was
acting under the direction of his American-Anglo handlers. With Omar
Saeed seeding the "legend" of a bona fide money trail leading back to
bin Laden, the stage would then be set for Omar Saeed to take the fall
as the main patsy providing the smoking gun of al-Qaida complicity for
9/11. Yet at some point, this carefully enacted "legend" began to
unravel once Indian intelligence was able to establish (or just
mischievously leaked) Saeed's link with General Ahmad, forcing a
reluctant FBI - or, alternatively, a cooperative element in the FBI
outside of the hermetically compartmentalized loop - to go along and
confirm the findings.
Naturally, in the light of the Times of India's Oct. 9 bombshell,
somebody would have to organize a prophylactic strategy of damage
control. Yet where the original money trail "legend" was carefully,
even artfully, crafted, the efforts to perform a partial-birth
abortion on it were piecemeal, ill-considered, and - most damaging of
all- worked to highlight the participation of individual accessories
in the cover-up campaign.
A comprehensive cover-up strategy would entail four objectives: i)
explaining General Ahmad's "sudden retirement"; ii) gradually
minimizing the money trail story while subtly transforming it; iii)
providing a new "smoking gun"; and iv) carving out an alternative
"legend" for Omar Saeed while finding an alternative paymaster. Of
the four objectives, the last one would turn out to be the most
convoluted.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media - except for a brief mention by the
Wall Street Journal - would largely ignore the October 9 Times of
India item. General Ahmad's "sudden dismissal" was accounted for by
TIME and The Washington Post as being due to his "pro-Taliban"
loyalties - leaving out any mention of an al-Qaida or money trail
connection. With General Ahmad thus safely "out of sight", he was
also presumably "out of mind." Omar Saeed, on the other hand,
represented a trickier problem, as the authorities and the mainstream
media - CNN at least - had already gone on record as fingering him as
the 9/11 paymaster. Moreover, Omar Saeed had originally been set up
to be a major player in the overall 9/11 "legend".
As we will see, many of the players in this carefully plotted,
decade-long "legend" - Ramzi Yousef, Mohamed Atta, Ramzi Binalshibh
(or bin al-shibh), Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Zacarias Moussaoui, and the
paymaster role - were intricately interconnected in a web of
activities and unfolding revelations. With the definitive
identification of a paymaster now put on hold, the full
crystallization of the Official 9/11 Legend would also have to await a
more opportune time. In the short term, Omar Saeed would have to
disappear, yet due to his prior exposure in the media, and in view of
his deep involvement with many of the other players in the legend, his
role in all this would ultimately have to be accounted for. And so,
Omar Saeed would need to be reintegrated back into the 9/11 picture by
way of an alternative legend, most of which would play itself out
after September 11.
As for the formerly snowballing money trail story, post-October 9, it
was gradually being ushered to a slow death of irrelevance, awaiting
its temporary replacement with a new "smoking gun." In the meantime,
the "Mustafa Ahmad" pseudonym was being passed on to a new owner - or
a number of alternative ones, depending on which media outlet was
offering whichever version. In some reports, the paymaster alias
would be tagged to an Egyptian "Shayk Saiid". In its November 11,
2001 issue, Newsweek bequeathed the alias to a 33 year-old Saudi named
"Shaikh Saiid," who was apparently caught on surveillance video
picking up a package in Dubai mailed by hijacker Mohammed Atta. On
December 18, 2001, the Associated Press added further details,
revealing that "Shaikh Saiid" was also the alias for bin Laden's
brother-in-law, Sa'd al-Sharif. Both items, taken together, would
mean that we would have an actual video of bin Laden's brother-in-law
picking up a package from one of the hijackers - a smoking gun if ever
there was one, and just one more example of the incredible
carelessness by which these throwaway details were revealed as
"evidence." In any case, the original smoking gun - the money trail
story - was officially supplanted earlier in that week, on December
13, 2001, with the worldwide release of the Official Bin Laden
Videotape Confession.
Now all that remained was to properly dispose of the Omar Saeed
"legend." Whether a new "legend" was being crafted for Saeed right
after October 9, or considerably later, is a fact that may never be
known with certainty. What we do know, however, is that Saeed was
later linked to a December 13, 2001 suicide attack on the Indian
Parliament in addition to a January 22, 2002 attack on the American
Cultural Center in Calcutta.
In fact, January 22, 2002 was a key date for the plan to carve out a
new "legend" for Omar Saeed. As we will see, FBI Director Robert
Mueller just happened to be on scene in India, awaiting his crucial
role in the unfolding drama - just one day before Daniel Pearl
disappeared off the streets of Karachi.
Enter Daniel Pearl
We may never know the true motivation that set Daniel Pearl on a quest
that would ultimately lead to his grisly demise. However, thanks to
an invaluable article by Robert Sam Anson in the August 2002 issue of
Vanity Fair, we do know which key player was involved in guiding him
on his quest for knowledge.
Mansoor Ijaz is not a man widely known outside his circle, but his
intimate connections run deep in Washington's power circles. A
counter-terror expert, a member of the Council On Foreign Relations, a
Fox News analyst, as well as a business partner of former CIA Director
James Woolsey, Ijaz is represented by the public relations firm of
Benador Associates, whose client list reads like a "who's who" of the
propaganda heavy-hitters who were pushing for a war in Iraq - Richard
Perle (former Chairman of the Defense Policy Board), Woolsey (also a
member of the Defense Policy Board), Iraqi scientist ( and chronicler
of Saddam's weapons program) Khidir Khamza, former Washington Times
publisher (and UPI chief) Arnaud De Borchgrave, anti-Saddam author
Laurie Mylroie, Harvard professor/CIA associate Richard Pipes (mentor
of Mylroie, and father of Daniel Pipes), and Frank Gaffney, president
of the hard-right Center For Security Policy (of which Perle and
Woolsey are on the advisory council).
The interlocking relationships of members of this clique - or "crew",
in the parlance of organized crime - is indeed a testament to the
power of networking, yet the astonishing scope of their most recent
activities - both in the lead-up to and aftermath of 9/11 - is perhaps
indicative of a more covertly sinister tint in the psychological
makeup of some members of the political "power elite."
Ijaz's frequent writing partner, James Woolsey, for example, was one
of just 17 participants in a July 2001 bio-warfare exercise dubbed
"Dark Winter," a simulation of a mass smallpox attack, co-sponsored by
the ANSER Institute of Homeland Security and the Center for Strategic
and International Studies (CSIS). Among the other participants was
Benador client Arnaud De Borchgrave and New York Times journalist
Judith Miller, who had co-authored a book with Benador client Mylroie
in the early '90's. Mylroie's book - an attempt at linking Iraq to
9/11 - was released just weeks after September 11 with a foreword
written by James Woolsey. Around the same time, Judith Miller had
just launched her own well-publicized book on the germ warfare threat
- within a week or two of her own well-publicized role as one of the
very few recipients of an "anthrax" mailing (which turned out not to
be anthrax).
As for the anthrax threat, a major principal in the company that holds
the exclusive license for the anthrax vaccine is former Chair of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff William Crowe, whose business associate in the
consulting firm Global Options is - you guessed it - James Woolsey.
As for the present smallpox threat, the man charged with overseeing
President Bush's mass vaccination policy was another "Dark Winter"
alumnus, Jerry Hauer. Hauer, a former director of Kroll Associates -
the security firm at the helm when the Twin Towers fell - is also the
man who personally pulled strings in order to get senior FBI official
John O'Neill his job as head of security at the World Trade Center.
O'Neill, who had left a 30-year career in the FBI only two weeks
before September 11, had perished in the rubble of the Twin Towers on
his very first day at the post. Incidentally, O'Neill just happened
to have been the main FBI official in charge of investigating all
things bin Laden.
Given the above social contacts, from Daniel Pearl's point of view,
Mansoor Ijaz was indeed the man to meet. "He [Pearl] wanted me to
introduce him to people who could open doors for him," explained Ijaz
in Vanity Fair. One of those doors opened to Khalid Khawaja, a former
ISI agent whose militant credentials included a longstanding
friendship with Osama bin Laden. But Khawaja was a liberal militant,
counting among his acquaintances both Ijaz and Woolsey, with whom he
carried on a lengthy correspondence.
With Ijaz's letter of reference in hand, Pearl established contact
with Khawaja in Pakistan. As reported by Arshad Sharif in a February
14, 2002 item from Dawn, "Khawaja claimed that he introduced Mr. Pearl
to his contacts and arranged interviews with Taliban diplomats and
other people." According to the "official" record of Pearl's
journalistic quest, he was on the trail of Richard Reid, otherwise
known as the "shoe bomber." According to Anson, Pearl believed that
Reid was a follower of Sheikh Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani, "a leader of an
obscure Muslim militant group named Jamaat ul-Fuqra."
As Khawaja spins the tale, when Pearl asked for an introduction to
Gilani in early January, Khawaja's militant toes went cold. With
Khawaja now purportedly out of the picture, Pearl was left to scrounge
up his own contacts. Eventually, Pearl found a "connected" militant
who went by the name of Chaudry Bashir - but who was, in actual fact,
Omar Saeed clothed in yet another alias. Or so that is the "official"
version. If true, our man Saeed had his terrorist appointment book
just about crammed with militant activities at the time, for he was,
according to Indian intelligence, intimately involved with the man who
took responsibility for the terrorist attack in Calcutta on January
22, 2002 - just one day before Pearl's disappearance.
On that very day, a militant/gangster by the name of Aftab Ansari
called in his claim of responsibility for the carnage. As for his
connection with Omar Saeed, here is how the Times of India reported it
on January 22:
"[Indian] CBI Director P C Sharma told visiting FBI Chief Robert S
Mueller that Ansari, who claimed responsibility for [today's Calcutta]
attack, had taken a ransom of Rs 37.5 million to free shoe baron
Parthapratim Roy Burman through hawala channels to Dubai, CBI sources
said. Out of this amount, Omar [Saeed] ... had sent $100,000 to Atta
through telegraphic transfer, CBI sources said."
What was going on here? Apparently, the January 22 Calcutta incident
was the trigger for an update on the "legend" of 9/11 - and FBI
Director Mueller was on scene to play his part in the unfolding drama.
Within hours of the January 22 attack, the Indian Central Bureau of
Investigation (CBI) was circulating news that the main suspect in the
Calcutta attack, Ansari, had sent money to Omar Saeed, who then sent
it on to Mohamed Atta in preparation for the September 11 attacks. No
mention was made of the previously reported involvement of the chief
of Pakistani intelligence. In fact, The Times of India would, within
the next few weeks, back away from its October 9 article linking Omar
Saeed to the Pakistani General - perhaps at the behest of Indian
intelligence. The 9/11 money, in the CBI's new version, came from an
August 2001 kidnapping masterminded by Ansari and Asif Reza Khan.
Unfortunately, Khan was not around by this time to confirm it, as he
had already been killed in what was believed to be a staged shootout
with Indian police several weeks earlier.
The story at this point gets a bit murky, as it becomes difficult to
distinguish fact from disinformation, but what is clear is the very
real perception of a well-timed and coordinated set-up. The next day
- on January 23, 2002 - Daniel Pearl disappeared off the streets of
Karachi, Pakistan after setting up an appointment to meet Omar Saeed,
alias "Bashir", for the first time. Meanwhile, on that very day,
Aftab Ansari was arrested by UAE authorities at Dubai International
Airport while attempting to board a plane bound for Islamabad. Also
on the very day of Pearl's disappearance, the Los Angeles Times
reinstated Omar Saeed back into "mainstream" view by citing a report
by India Today, which mentioned the new Saeed/Ansari/9/11 Money Trail
connection. The British Independent, on January 24, also gave voice
to the Saeed revelations stemming from the Indian CBI, throwing in,
for good measure, an extensive biography of Omar Saeed. This was
followed by a January 27 item in the Telegraph that also touched upon
Saeed's link to the Calcutta attack.
Why was Omar Saeed suddenly being "resurrected" worldwide within hours
of the January 22 attack, after being mostly forgotten after October
9? It should be pointed out that Saeed's purported links to the Pearl
kidnapping were not yet "known" until February 5, 2002. In that
light, Robert Mueller's subsequent travel itinerary bears closer
scrutiny. As reported by the Los Angeles Times on January 23, "FBI
Director Mueller said Tuesday (i.e. January 22) that Indian
authorities provided leads in the search for Al Qaeda members and
cells, based on arrests in India." There was no word from Mueller,
however, on his reported discussions with the CBI Chief concerning the
9/11 money trail.
The very next day - January 23 - Mueller was in Pakistan, just in time
for the Pearl kidnapping by Omar Saeed. Of course, Mueller could not
have known by then that the person who was mentioned to him the day
before as being the 9/11 paymaster would be involved in the Pearl
kidnapping the very next day. One might even chalk it up to
coincidence - or maybe not. On January 24, Mueller reportedly took up
the matter of Omar Saeed with Pakistan President Musharraf. Was he
discussing CBI Chief Sharma's revelations about Omar Saeed and the
9/11 money trail? As later revealed by an "anonymous" Bush
administration official, Mueller was formally requesting the
extradition of Omar Saeed - for a 1994 kidnapping of an American
tourist.
What, according to the "mainstream" media, prompted this sudden,
rather overdue, request? According to the February 24, 2002 issue of
Newsweek, Saeed was "secretly" indicted back in November 2001 for that
obscure kidnapping. As reported by CNN on February 28, 2002:
"Justice Department officials won't say what prompted that indictment,
which came more than six years after the incident." It also came
several weeks after Saeed was first outed as the 9/11 paymaster.
The possibility also exists that the November 2001 "secret" indictment
was a late February fiction meant to explain Mueller's sudden interest
in Omar Saeed. For good measure, timed with the Newsweek revelation,
Wendy Chamberlin, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, revealed to CBS
News that she had preceded Mueller's request with an informal approach
to Musharraf concerning Saeed's extradition a few months before. The
reader would be cautioned as to drawing any firm conclusions as to the
true nature of the "secret" November indictment. Instead, one should
focus on the compelling circumstantial evidence of a disinformation
campaign that appears to be organized around a number of conveniently
timed set-ups. According to CNN, Mueller was also the one who first
informed Musharraf of the Pearl kidnapping. So, to recap: only two
days after the Times of India reported Mueller's discussions with the
CBI concerning the Omar Saeed link to 9/11, Mueller reportedly
discussed Omar Saeed only in connection with an obscure 1994
kidnapping, while broaching a new kidnapping that occurred the day
before, which, in a matter of weeks, would publicly be linked
to...Omar Saeed.
Incidentally, the FBI also happened to be instrumental in coordinating
Saeed's eventual capture as the Pearl kidnap mastermind. As the
"official" story had it soon after Saeed's "official" arrest on
February 12, the case was solved when the authorities successfully
traced a series of e-mails back to one of Saeed's alleged accomplices,
who then confessed that he was only acting under Saeed's orders. The
government's case, as reported by Zarar Khan of the Associated Press
on July 1, 2002, "rests heavily on technical FBI evidence, which
traced the e-mails to fellow defendant Fahad Naseem."
Mueller, incidentally, also played a crucial role in arranging for the
deportation of Aftab Ansari from the UAE to India. Ansari, by reason
of the Calcutta bombing, was delivered to Indian custody on February
9, just three days before Omar Saeed was "officially" arrested for the
Pearl kidnapping. In short, these two purported 9/11 partners had
been arrested separately in the same week of February for crimes they
had separately committed in the same week of January.
Meanwhile, Daniel Pearl's chaperone, the "militant" Khalid Khawaja,
was beginning to feel the heat due to his involvement in managing
Pearl's appointment book. For a presumed partisan of bin Laden,
Khawaja seemed to be unduly concerned about the bad press that Pearl's
disappearance was garnering him. According to a February 15, 2002
article in Dawn by Arshad Sharif: " Khawaja said it was on the
intervention of [Mansoor] Ijaz that Newsweek toned down its article
which was allegedly raising an accusing finger on him." In a typical
example of post-9/11 news management, Khawaja - presumed friend of
Osama bin Laden - shared his correspondence from editor Gretel Kovach
of Newsweek:
"If it is of any consolation, you may have read in the e-mails I sent
Mansoor that the Newsweek article would have been much stronger in
pointing the finger at you as the person who led Danny into trouble.
Thankfully, I spoke with Mansoor and was able to offer a contrary
account - that you refused Danny's request, and that others tricked
him into thinking he could meet Gilani."
Mansoor Ijaz - fellow propagandist and business partner of the
ubiquitous James Woolsey - wasn't exactly a disinterested party in the
matter, for if it was Khawaja who had led Pearl to his ultimate fate,
so, too, by association, would suspicion lie with Ijaz, who had sent
Pearl on to Khawaja.
Meanwhile, Omar Saeed appeared to be at the very broiling
geo-political center of the Pakistan-India stand-off. With Indian
authorities publicly highlighting Omar Saeed as the poster boy of
Pakistani terrorism, using him as a cudgel to prod the reluctant
Americans into action against the Pakistani ISI, one could read
Mueller's trip to the region as an effort to broker the competing
interests of these incompatible allies in the so-called War on Terror.
Publicly, Mueller was in India on January 22 as part of a U.S.-Indo
Working Group on Counter-Terrorism. But as we do not have access to
the minutes of those meetings, we might surmise that, behind closed
doors, Mueller was negotiating with his Indian counterparts the final
dispensation of Omar Saeed within the overall 9/11 Legend. Not that
negotiations were going particularly smoothly - as evidenced by the
upsurge in daring attacks against Indian interests in the few months
previous. Yet it seems that a quid-pro-quo had been worked out along
the following lines: the Indian authorities would excise the ISI
Chief from their version of 9/11 and instead splice in a less
incriminating "gangster" from Dubai as the partner of paymaster Omar
Saeed. In return, the Americans would redouble their efforts in
moving against terror groups based out of Pakistan.
Mueller, for his part, would deal with this new version of the Omar
Saeed/Money Trail Story in the same manner that he dealt with the
older version - by ignoring it. With the Indian CBI now circulating
this new version of the Omar Saeed/ Money Trail Story to various
mainstream Western newspapers in the wake of the January 22 Calcutta
attack, Mueller would publicly go on record as reserving judgment as
to the true culprits and motives behind that incident - while
assisting India behind-the-scenes in arranging for the deportation and
arrest of Aftab Ansari. And while the Indian press was widely
presenting the Calcutta attack as an Ansari/ISI production, according
to the January 23, 2002 Indian Express, the Indian government was
backing down on pushing an ISI link to Calcutta after consultation
with the U.S. government. Why the apparent U.S. squeamishness
concerning the ISI in regards to the Calcutta attack? Perhaps due to
its proximity to the latest Omar Saeed/Ansari/Money Trail Story being
marketed by the Indians - for if the American aim was to gradually
erase Omar Saeed from the 9/11 paymaster role and place him in a
post-9/11 context, Omar Saeed would have to come by his ISI
connections through a different route, one that would in fact distance
him from his reported role on September 11. In other words, the
Americans would need to muddy the waters over Omar Saeed and the role
of the 9/11 paymaster.
It wouldn't be easy. As reported by Paul Sperry of WorldNetDaily on
January 30, 2002 (i.e. one week before Omar Saeed was first outed as a
suspect in the Pearl kidnapping):
"India's Central Bureau of Investigation is turning up evidence that
is proving inconvenient for the Bush administration as it tries to
maintain its shaky alliance with Pakistan. As administration
officials, led by State Secretary Colin Powell, praise Pakistan for
its help in the war on terrorism, FBI agents responding to Indian
leads are quietly investigating Pakistan-based terrorist groups
connected to al-Qaida and the Sept. 11 hijacking."
In other words, India was apparently putting the screws to the
Americans. If the Americans, for purely pragmatic reasons, had opted
to cozy up to the Musharraf regime, India needed insurance to hedge
against the possibility that its strategic interests would be harmed
through this likely temporary alliance. In that context, it would be
somewhat naive to assume that India just happened to "discover" the
Omar Saeed/ ISI Chief/ 9/11 connection through one of those ubiquitous
cell phone "intercepts" - for as early as September 23, 2001, the
British government was reported as seeking India's help in locating
Omar Saeed. Moreover, in view of the fact that the Mustafa Ahmad
paymaster alias also made its debut on that very day through Bush's
Global Terrorist Executive Order, there is perhaps another plausible
explanation for India's apparent obsession with Omar Saeed and his
activities.
Flashback: Assembling The Legend
As we shall see, the various elements of the 9/11 Legend were
assembled with the help of a number of international players. Through
the Pakistani ISI (an organization, in fact, with close historical
ties to the CIA and British intelligence), the Taliban were armed and
installed as the resident overlords of Afghanistan. Under the
watchful eye of German intelligence, lead hijacker Mohamed Atta would
set up his Hamburg "cell" of conspirators, sharing a flat with senior
al-Qaida operative Ramzi Binalshibh. Through French authorities,
particularly with the assistance of Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere (a
friend of John O'Neill), Zacarias Moussaoui (arrested August 2001) and
senior Al-Qaida leader Abu Zubaydah (the first "big fish" captured in
March 2002) would work their way into the official 9/11 Legend. By
way of Spanish Police Chief Juan Cotino (who was also a senior figure
in Europol), other al-Qaida cells were discovered as further proof of
bin Laden's global reach. In fact, as the 9/11 Legend would have it,
Mohamed Atta had rendezvoused with Ramzi Binalshibh in Spain sometime
in July 2001, where the two presumably made final preparations for
September 11. Around the same time, the FBI's lead point man on
al-Qaida, John O'Neill, was in Madrid to discuss counter-terror issues
with Police Chief Cotino. Thereafter, O'Neill made his last public
appearance (before his retirement the next month) at a counter-terror
conference held at a three-star hotel in the Spanish resort town of
Salou - coincidentally, only a few days before Mohammed Atta had
checked into the very same hotel in his last international trip before
September 11 (a curious fact reported in John Miller's book "The
Cell"). Atta's previous trip to Madrid had been in January 2001,
within days of the very first Europol Conference On Terrorism, also
held in Madrid.
Finally, the United Kingdom served as a major transit point,
educational center, and source of "evidence" pointing to the hijackers
and various al-Qaida operatives - most notably, Omar Saeed, Zacarias
Moussaoui, and Richard Reid, the so-called "shoe bomber." Thus, the
very countries that were so prominent in furnishing the various
elements of the 9/11 Legend - "burnishing" it with a globalized gloss
- also happened to be the same countries that served as senior
partners in the War On Terror.
The fact that France and Germany have since headed up opposition to
the War In Iraq should not be taken as an irreconcilable contradiction
in this regard. Rather, just the opposite. As we shall see, a
strategy to cast doubt on the War In Iraq - fuelled by elements in the
CIA and some of the more vociferous supporters of the War On Terror -
has actually worked to strengthen the credibility of the overall 9/11
Legend. In counter-point to that strategy lies a fall-back option
that "localizes" any potential conspiracy to a "rogue" clique of
"hawks" holding President Bush in their ideological sway - the
markedly Jewish and pro-Israeli neo-conservatives, an apparent CIA
"cut-out" helmed by Richard Mellon Scaife during the Clinton years,
then by Richard Cheney in the early months after 9/11 before he mostly
disappeared from public view along with his defibrillator, and most
famously now, by Richard Perle (a product of the RAND Corporation).
As I argued previously in The Propaganda Preparation For 9/11, the
Saudis, Pakistanis, and Israelis were set up as the primary alternate
foreign patsies to divert attention from the far more plausible (and
obvious) involvement of the U.S./U.K./E.U., the very alliance which
now spearheads the War On Terror even as it choreographs the Official
9/11 Legend. As we shall see, with the relatively recent prominence
of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as 9/11 mastermind, Iraq now takes its place
as a plausible patsy (particularly since Colin Powell's introduction
of a new al-Qaeda leader by the name of Abu Musab Zarqawi, a
Baghdad-based Palestinian whose legend and motives will no doubt grow
out of the recently completed War In Iraq). With regard to the
Saudis, their actual involvement was more indirect - as they financed
the various Pakistani madrassas (Muslim yeshivas) that served as a
farming system for the hordes of wild-eyed Wahhabi idealists looking
to set up camp in Afghanistan. Still, their domination of the Middle
East media served to give an impression - to Western eyes - that bin
Laden was more intimately known among the Arab/Muslim masses than he
was by an insular clique in the Western security establishment.
Heading up that clique was Richard A. Clarke, who joined the National
Security Council under the first President Bush, and stayed there
under Clinton. As reported by Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker, "In
the web of federal agencies concerned with terror, Clarke was the
spider." Tim Weiner of the New York Times wrote of Clarke on February
1, 1999: "He has placed proteges in key diplomatic and intelligence
positions, creating a network of loyalty and solidifying his power."
It was Clarke who, together with John O'Neill, "discovered" bin Laden
as a global terrorist mastermind. Here, as reported by Lawrence
Wright in The New Yorker, was Clarke's version of his discovery:
"We'd [O'Neill and I] see CIA reports that referred to 'financier
Osama bin Laden' and we'd ask ourselves, 'Who the hell is he?' The
more we drilled down, the more we realized he was not just a financier
- he was the leader. John said, 'We've got to get this guy. He's
building a network. Everything leads back to him.' Gradually the CIA
came along with us."
Presumably, Clarke had help in marketing bin Laden - for bin Laden
himself would soon enough make his high profile media debut as the
declared enemy of American interests the world over, thereby giving
the world's only superpower a plausibly sophisticated foe who would
overshadow the efforts of one Muslim fanatic (Ramzi Yousef, World
Trade Center '93) or one right-wing nutcase (Timothy McVeigh, Oklahoma
'95). Meanwhile, the gregarious John O'Neill would make the global
rounds, liaising with various counterparts as he shadowed the presumed
activities of Osama bin Laden. In other words, if one were
theoretically to posit the type of operatives who would be most suited
to running a highly compartmentalized "op" to develop a global legend
of Osama bin Laden, one could find no more conveniently placed men
than Richard Clarke and John O'Neill. Where Clarke would manage the
national security rank-and-file through his network of loyalists,
O'Neill would be the globetrotter, coordinating the unfolding legend
through his counterparts in various countries.
In short, Clarke and O'Neill would theoretically be conducting their
activities in "plain sight." Under the cover of counter-terrorism,
O'Neill would be building a terror legend fit for the New World Order
- in the same manner that Oliver North in the '80s employed the cover
of counter-terrorism to conduct, on behalf of Vice-President Bush,
the illegal arms dealing operations popularly known as Iran-Contra
(for which North took a decidedly light rap as the designated patsy).
The main difference would be that where North would eventually be
tagged as the moron of Iran-Contra, O'Neill would take his place as
the martyr of 9/11.
In the few months leading up to September 11, O'Neill - for the first
time in his 30-year career with the FBI - would make the headlines in
two separate scandals. The first, reported in July 2001, concerned
O'Neill's dispute with Ambassador Barbara Bodine in Yemen, where
O'Neill was reportedly pursuing al-Qaida links to the U.S.S. Cole
bombing. As the story had it, O'Neill was too much the cowboy for
Bodine's tastes, and so she summarily banned him from returning to
Yemen. The second scandal, reported in August 2001, concerned a
briefcase of classified documents that O'Neill had misplaced during a
convention in Tampa. Considering the resolution of the latter scandal
- the documents were found, "untouched," a couple hours later - it
seemed much ado about nothing. Yet in the light of O'Neill's
subsequent death as head of security for the World Trade Center on
September 11, the scandals began to take on a more suspicious tint.
Was O'Neill digging too deep? A maverick who stepped on too many feet
in his efforts to bulldog his way through the hierarchy? Put bluntly,
had the maverick been taken down a notch by a bloated bureaucracy
beholden to a "cover-your-*****" ethic? As Richard Clarke, Jerry Hauer,
John Miller, Chris Isham, and O'Neill's friends/colleagues at Kroll
Associates would spin it, O'Neill's was the lone voice shouting in the
wilderness, warning all who would listen about the approaching bin
Laden threat before falling himself, "ironically", at the hands of bin
Laden.
It was an ingenious cover story - for if O'Neill was a crucial
operative in assembling the al-Qaida elements that fed into the 9/11
Legend, then O'Neill's crystallized role as official 9/11 martyr would
forever obscure the trail to September 11, and, by extension, leave
his most intimate comrades and contacts out of the suspect category.
In short, it would be like reconstructing the murder of Nicole Simpson
without O.J. in the tale. With O'Neill cast as martyr, 9/11 critics
would now be left with a mishmash of innuendos and bits and pieces of
shadowy conspiracies: Israeli spy rings that trail off into the ether
of Fox News; passenger lists with missing hijackers; and abandoned
"put" options. If the shadowy conspiracy had a face, it was in the
image of either ***** Cheney or Richard Perle. But then again, who
marketed them as the latest powers behind the throne? Where were the
folks who brought us BCCI, Iran-Contra, and the Warren Commission?
Where were James Baker, Zbigniew Brzezinski, David Rockefeller,
Kissinger?
Assembling The 9/11 Counter-Legends (or, Stacking Your Patsies)
The events of September 11 gave birth to three parallel threads - or
counter-legends - pointing the way to the culpability of three
possible foreign suspects, or patsies - namely, Saudi Arabia,
Pakistan, and Israel. Of the three, the Saudis were the patsies of
choice for the mainstream "critics", who were a motley assortment of
neo-cons, FBI investigators, or "retired" national security types
opposed to the war in Iraq. The Pakistan/ISI thread to 9/11 flared up
most noticeably in the events surrounding the death of Daniel Pearl
and the alleged involvement of Omar Saeed Sheikh - events which were
used, in fact, to smother the Pakistani/ISI connection to the 9/11
money trail. As regards Israel, the most radical opponents of the War
On Terror were nursed on the twin threads of an Israeli spy ring and a
neo-con cabal supposedly at the helm of the Bush Administration.
It was not by accident that these three countries were chosen to play
the role of second-tier patsies - for each of them contained insular
cliques of operatives which had played seminal roles in the covert
arms and drug trade - in cahoots with their more senior Anglo-American
handlers - throughout the Reagan-Bush years. Moreover, these
countries would make useful patsies for the very reason that they were
essentially outside the "established" - i.e. Euro-American - ring of
nations. In other words, if insular cliques of criminal operatives
were to be ferreted out of Germany, France, or Italy, no one would
think to brand these nations wholesale with the mark of Cain. The
same could not be said of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Israel, whose
very security - physical, political, and economic - would be staked to
the publicized activities of their own respective political/criminal
cliques.
Moreover, much of the political and corporate elites within these
countries were integrally networked with their American counterparts -
indeed, largely subservient to them - to such a degree that they would
also serve as useful proxies in building their own counter-legends
under Anglo-Euro-American supervision. In the early stages of the
9/11 Legend, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were employed as the central
bases for building up a terrorist home front within the borders of
Afghanistan. As for Israel - despite its aforementioned spy ring and
its supposedly allied neo-con "cabal" - its most direct and public
contribution to the 9/11 Legend in fact occurred after 9/11, with the
November 2002 coordinated attack on an Israeli-owned hotel and
airliner in Kenya - an attack for which Israeli investigators now
marshaled evidence as proof of Osama bin Laden's opening shot against
the State of Israel (which was more likely Israel's "buy-in" in return
for a promised attack on the Saddam Hussein regime).
Thus, evidence could be amassed to cast aspersions on the activities
of each of these three countries, depending on the intended audience.
On another level, political elites within these countries could be
assured that any aspersions would be relegated to insular "rogue"
cliques. In the case of Saudi Arabia, a few princes of the Saudi
royal family were thus eliminated within days of one another in 2002.
In the case of Pakistan, "rogue" elements within the ISI were publicly
purged in the months after 9/11. Yet in the case of Israel, its
apparent "buy-in" through the 2002 Kenya attack served to strengthen,
rather than weaken, the thread connecting Israel as a possible 9/11
culprit. If, in the context of this article, this would appear to be
a short-sighted strategy by Israeli political elites, one can only
surmise that these elites were blinded - or assured - by an apparent
post-9/11 geo-strategic shift in favor of Israeli interests (i.e. an
attack on Iraq) in conjunction with a publicly affirmed surge in
influence among its supposed neo-con allies.
With three alternative counter-legends in place to co-exist with the
Official (i.e. mainstream) 9/11 Legend, the stage was thereby set to
muddy the real trail leading to the events of September 11. With the
participation of a global network of well-connected spinmeisters -
both passive and active - each of the 9/11 threads could thus be
nurtured through a series of carefully calibrated revelations.
Of all the 9/11 spinmeisters, one of the most effective - and
therefore damaging - was Jean-Charles Brisard, co-author with
Guillaume Dasquie of The Forbidden Truth. Brisard burst on to the
mainstream scene shortly after September 11 as one of the first
"credible" critics of 9/11, weaving a trail of seemingly incriminating
red herrings that will, in all probability, tie up a number of
otherwise industrious conspiracy researchers for decades. In Brisard
and Dasquie's version of 9/11, the main protectors of al-Qaida were
the Saudis, who in turn were protected by greedy oil interests which
sought - through the State Department - to obstruct any investigations
that might unsettle their Saudi business associates. To nail down the
point, Brisard recounted his summer 2001 meeting with John O'Neill, in
which a frustrated, scandal-ridden O'Neill purportedly confided to
Brisard that the "answer" to the al-Qaida riddle lay in Saudi Arabia.
For good measure, Brisard had the well-timed implosion of Enron as a
backdrop for his revelation, implicating this now-dead shell of a
corporation in a stubborn push for an oil pipeline through Afghanistan
(though senior Enron exec - and CIA offspring - Frank Wisner, Jr.,
was, as it happens, also one of the 17 elite "players" in the
aforementioned "Dark Winter" exercise).
Through Brisard (in addition to Pakistani Foreign Minister Niaz Naik),
we learned that the U.S. had made plans as early as June of 2001 to
invade Afghanistan by October of that year. During that summer, as
Brisard chronicled it, a number of nations - including Iran, Russia,
and India - got together for a four-day conference in Berlin, where
the dispute with the Taliban was broached by U.S. diplomats. The U.S.
demanded that the Taliban hand over bin Laden (in addition to
negotiating for pipeline rights). Otherwise, the Americans threatened
to blanket Afghanistan with "a carpet of bombs."
Brisard's initial theory, then, was that this threat prompted bin
Laden to launch a pre-emptive attack against the very nation that was
now placing him in imminent peril. Brisard also seemed to implicate
Bush, Sr. by way of his Carlyle Group interests. But in the end, as
Brisard essentially kept bin Laden in place as the sole 9/11 culprit,
the aspersions cast on the Bushes, the State Department, "oil
interests", et al, would not amount to much - at least from a legal
standpoint. At most, these parties could be judged as too blinded by
greed to recognize - and pre-empt - the very real threat from
al-Qaida. However you clothed Brisard's revelations, the "official"
9/11 Legend remained in place. Al-Qaida was still the defendant
(albeit with a new excuse), O'Neill was still a martyr (albeit with a
new Saudi gripe), and the Saudis were still suspicious (albeit with
possibly a new gripe against Brisard). Brisard, incidentally, also
happened to have written - for French intelligence - the first
comprehensive report on the financial structure of al-Qaida, a copy of
which was furnished to the Bush administration. Thus do national
security types and their 9/11 critics have a deeper understanding of
the 9/11 Legend courtesy of the efforts of Jean-Charles Brisard.
Brisard's co-author, Guillaume Dasquie, also comes by his own
intelligence connections, by way of his role as editor of
Intelligence Online. It was through Dasquie's efforts that
Intelligence Online, in March 2002, announced that it had come into
possession of a 61-page "secret" DEA report on a large Israeli spy
ring of "art students" who were casing federal buildings several
months before September 11. The "leaking" of this document, in
conjunction with Carl Cameron's December 2001 Fox News report on the
spy ring, ignited an online firestorm among 9/11 critics - pointing
the way, for some, to the Israelis as the main operative agents behind
September 11.
Yet, as we shall see, in the campaign to paint Israel as the main
suspect, here was a case of mostly right wing sources doling out the
goods for largely left wing consumption (with the obvious exception of
Justin Raimondo, a political supporter of, and former speechwriter
for, Pat Buchanan). Thus, while the likes of Stephen Emerson, Daniel
Pipes, and John Loftus were doing the lecture circuit at Jewish
Community Centers across North America, regaling this influential
community with insinuations of possible Saudi and/or Iraqi
involvement in 9/11, a more covert - and subtle - plan was afoot to
plant the seeds of a new Jewish neocon/Zionist conspiracy among the
left wing (i.e. the traditional foothold of the bulk of the American
Jewish community).
This relatively recent campaign to subvert the left with visions of a
Jewish neocon/Zionist conspiracy dovetailed nicely with a more
longstanding covert campaign - dating back more than thirty years - to
build up a small but powerful right wing contingent of Jews to wean
the rest from their knee-jerk liberalism (and thereby sap the strength
and vigor of the traditional Democrat wing). The species of the
Jewish "neo" conservative is best represented by Irving Kristol, a
self-admitted former Trotskyite who had been a member of the
"left-wing" Congress of Cultural Freedom (later exposed as a CIA
front) before making a "sudden" right turn in the late sixties,
bringing along with him a few other like-minded "disillusioned" Jews
from CIA-funded "leftist" groups. The typical neo-conservative was
"neo" in the sense that he would continue to hold liberal social
values while espousing hard right (i.e. pro-corporate) economic views
and a hawkish foreign policy - pretty much the course that American
society has taken in the thirty-odd years since Kristol made his
ideological "shift."
Though the history is far more complex and detailed than indicated
above, the crux of the point is this: in order to neutralize the
influential American Jewish community on the subject of civil rights
and domestic dissent (where they historically predominated), it was
not sufficient only to wean the Jews from the left, but to turn the
left against the Jews by now slurring them as right wing, Zionist
"imperialists" (best exemplified by Richard Perle, who is actually
more a product of the national security community than of the Jewish
community).
In concert with this strategy was a plan - also dating back more than
thirty years - to wean the South from the Democrats by promoting a
fundamentalist Christianity that grew in counter-point to the overall
loosening social values. The typical fundamentalist Christian
Republican would hold conservative social views while espousing hard
right (i.e. pro-corporate) economic views and a hawkish foreign policy
(best exemplified by John Ashcroft, who is actually more a product of
a deeply cynical political community than of the community of belief).
With that background in mind, we may now touch upon the national
security/conservative clique which has furnished most of the
information concerning Israeli perfidy and 9/11. For our purposes,
the story begins on May 7, 1997, when Nora Boustany of The Washington
Post first broached the existence of Mega, a suspected code name for a
suspected Israeli mole within the upper echelons of the Clinton
government. As reported by Boustany, the National Security Agency
had intercepted a request from a Mossad operative to view a diplomatic
letter from Yasser Arafat. When the operative was heard to ask his
superior for the assistance of someone or something called Mega, he
received the reply, "We don't use Mega for this."
The story, in fact, broke on the very day when South Korean spy Robert
C. Kim was scheduled to deliver a guilty plea after a plea bargain - a
similar bargain that was, in fact, dishonored in the case of convicted
Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard in the mid-80's. Kim, like Pollard, had
worked in the Office of Naval Intelligence, though Pollard had worked
in the counter-terrorism section. A week before the Mega story broke
- on April 30, 1997 - Pollard had petitioned the Israeli High Court to
compel the Israeli government to reveal what it knew about his case.
If a battle was brewing between Pollard supporters (Likud/ neocon
elements) and opponents (the Bush/ Baker clique/ Woolsey/the national
intelligence apparatus), the May 7 Mega leak by way of the National
Security Agency seemed to head it off, publicly raising the specter of
yet another Israeli mole. And then the story ultimately went cold,
with no official resolution and - most crucially - no hard details by
which to flesh out this possible mole hunt.
Yet Jeffrey Steinberg of Lyndon LaRouche's Executive Intelligence
Review has attempted to draw a line between this morsel of an item and
a Mega Group that was mentioned by Lisa Miller in the Wall Street
Journal on May 4, 1998. In Steinberg's telling, the Mega Group is, in
fact, the shadowy Mega from the Boustany article. As Steinberg put
it, the Mega Group - a select group of Jewish billionaires including
Bronfman, Steinhardt, Spielberg, Tisch, and others - had come together
to influence U.S. security policy toward Israel. Yet that was a
disingenous - and I dare say, dishonest - reading of the Miller
article. In other words - and this was very clear from the Miller
article - their main concern was assimilation and philanthropy, not
Israeli national security issues, as Steinberg had reported. But
Steinberg's technique was all too typical - mischievously weaving two
totally disconnected items so as to give the impression that he was
uncovering bona fide evidence of a fully known Jewish/Israeli
conspiracy.
Yet taking the thread of a burgeoning Israeli spy conspiracy further,
in May 2000, J. Michael Waller and Paul M. Rodriguez of Insight
magazine (the sister publication of the ultra-right wing Washington
Times, which is in turn owned by the Moonies) broke the story that the
Israelis had possibly compromised U.S. government phone lines, giving
them access to sensitive information. Carl Cameron of Fox News
followed this up on May 5, 2000 by reporting on the investigation into
the Israeli-founded company AMDOCS, describing "an alleged penetration
of U.S. government phone systems."
This thread was also taken up by Gordon Thomas, the MI5 (British
intelligence) connected editor of the website Globe-Intel. Thomas, in
his book, Gideon's Spies, broached the subject of the Israeli
infiltration of the Clinton White House by way of the Mega mole. He
also had alleged that the Mossad had a possible role in the death of
Princess Diana; that the Mossad tapped Monica Lewinsky's phone in
order to pick up her conversations with President Clinton; and that
the Israelis stole the sophisticated PROMIS software, which eventually
ended up in the possession of Osama bin Laden. Incidentally, Gordon
Thomas holds himself out as a friend and intimate confidant of Mossad
insiders. We shall return to Thomas shortly, for he - like Brisard
and Dasquie - has also played a significant part in lining up new
alternate 9/11 suspects (most recently China, in his book Seeds of
Fire).
Picking up the thread, in March 2001 - significantly, several months
before September 11 - the U.S. National Counterintelligence Center
sent out an advisory for federal employees to be aware that a number
of young Israelis were approaching federal agents at their offices and
at their residences throughout the country, passing themselves off as
art students looking to sell their work - but more peculiarly,
identifying themselves as Israeli art students, thereby "red-flagging"
themselves for the benefit of the National Counterintelligence Center.
A few months after September 11, Carl Cameron - in December of 2001 -
once more visited the issue of Israeli penetration, this time naming a
second Israeli company, Comverse Infosys, as having access to nearly
all wiretaps placed by U.S. law enforcement. As part of a four-part
series for Fox News, Cameron also cited a "secret" DEA report that
chronicled the actions of the aforementioned Israeli "art student" spy
ring. Soon after a transcript of Cameron's report was uploaded on the
Fox News website, it was taken offline and purged from the archives -
a presumed cover-up that actually raised far more suspicions over
Israeli/Jewish influence than the report itself.
Perhaps that was the intended effect - as the purpose would be to "red
flag" this item for an "alternative" online audience, not for the
mainstream couch potatoes who were wedded to the Official 9/11 Legend
in any case. Was Cameron simply a dedicated journalist who was
muzzled by his conservative, pro-Israeli, employers at Fox? Or was he
rather a passive disinformation asset, coyly nursing the Israeli
thread when told to do so? On May 13, 2002, with government warnings
of a follow-up terrorist attack seeding the media zeitgeist, Cameron
red-flagged the Israelis once more, this time reporting that a rental
truck with traces of TNT was pulled over near an army base in the
State of Washington. Once again, suspicious Israelis were discovered
as occupants, and once again, the news suspiciously disappeared from
the airwaves.
There was a curious parallel to the manner by which various Israelis
tended to be "pulled over" in the Israeli/9/11 Counter-Legend as
opposed to the manner by which various al-Qaida operatives tended to
incriminate themselves through those fortuitous cell phone and email
"intercepts" in the al-Qaida/9/11 Legend. On June 23, 2002, ABC News
picked up the earlier story of five "suspicious" Israelis celebrating
on the roof of their van in the wake of September 11. When the police
had pulled them over and searched the contents of the van, sure
enough, they found...box cutters. And just as sure enough, this story
also "suspiciously" vanished without a follow-up. It is also a
curious fact that former CIA counterterror chief/ABC News consultant
Vincent Cannistraro lent his own spin on that report. As I had
pointed out in The Propaganda Preparation For 9/11, and as I will show
further in this article, Cannistraro has "spun" a great deal of
information on the 9/11 Legend.
While the spy ring story has been neglected by much of the mainstream
media, it nevertheless remains in the background, ready to be
"mainstreamed" if or when the "official" 9/11 Legend begins to show
cracks (or if the resident Israeli government proves to be
troublesome). As I have pointed out, much of the first-hand
revelations of Israeli penetrations have come not from alternative
sources, but from well-established, "credible" conservative sources
highly placed within the intelligence apparatus. While Daniel Pipes
(CFR member and former Defense Department employee) made a
disingenuous attempt at discrediting the spy ring story, the actual
DEA report that was acquired by Dasquie's Intelligence Online was
confirmed as authentic on February 25, 2002 by Will Glaspy of the
DEA's public affairs bureau. Moreover, according to a May 5, 2002
report in Le Monde, Cameron's four-part Fox broadcast was shown and
cleared with the CIA, FBI, and NSA before its airing. Clearly,
somebody high up wants this out in the ether.
Yet it is a curious fact that some of this information comes from
sources which are traditionally known to be friendly to Israeli
interests. For instance, J. Michael Waller, who wrote the Insight
piece with Paul M. Rodriguez, is a member of the right wing,
pro-Israel Center For Security Policy, which, according to the
Center's own site, includes an "extraordinary number of members of the
Center's National Security Advisory Council" in the top echelons of
the Bush Administration. Waller, incidentally, also wrote an Insight
piece entitled "Preparing For The Next Pearl Harbor Attack" - just a
few months before 9/11 - in which he described the plan for a Homeland
Security Agency, as recommended by the Hart-Rudman Commission report
(yes, they had the "homeland security" blueprint in place several
months before 9/11).
As for Waller's associate, Paul M. Rodriguez - the managing editor of
Insight - has had a history of printing incriminating items that don't
quite circulate yet get the point across all the same. One
particularly creepy example concerns an Insight piece that Rodriguez
wrote in 1989, reporting on a pedophile ring in the nation's capital,
linking one of its participants to Donald Gregg, a senior aide to
President Bush. Since then, Gregg has served as Ambassador to South
Korea and as head of the Korea Society. This might have something to
do with the fact that the Moonies, owner of Insight, have been rumored
to be a front for the South Korean CIA. Incidentally, since President
George H.W. Bush has left office, he has put in a considerable number
of appearances at Moonie functions.
As for Gordon Thomas of Globe-Intel, it turns out that he has been a
major contributor to the Israel/9/11/ Counter-Legend in addition to
his other contributions to Israeli legends. Perchance he had come by
this good fortune through his father-in-law, a former MI5 British
intelligence operative who had introduced Thomas to so many of his
intelligence contacts. Adding his own "insider" gloss to the spy ring
tale, Thomas is a source for the claim that Israel sent out spies to
infiltrate al-Qaida in the U.S., writing that Israel sent warnings
about the impending attacks to the Bush administration through French
and German intelligence.
In his May 21, 2002 article for Globe-Intel, Thomas - in a Mossad
"insider" scoop - revealed that Israeli Prime Minister Sharon in fact
authorized a "leak" of documents showing that Bush was warned by
Israel of the approaching al-Qaida threat by virtue of Israel's
comprehensive infiltration of al-Qaida cells on American soil. In
other words, Sharon wanted to prove to Bush (and to Globe-Intel
readers?) that his Mossad agents - art students, perhaps? - had
learned of 9/11 over coffee with Mohammed Atta. As Thomas put it:
"Sharon's reaction is a calculated response to growing claims that
Mossad has been running spy operations in the United States..." A
calculated response? Either Thomas is serving us up some fairly heavy
British intelligence disinformation (false-flagged as a Mossad scoop),
or he's implying that Sharon was on some pretty serious weed at the
time - for insisting with documented proof that, yes, his own agents
did in fact illegally spy on U.S. territory, and what's more, did
lunch with the 9/11 hijackers. Yet given Thomas' record of pinning
likely British intelligence "hits" on the Mossad - Princess Diana,
Robert Maxwell, etc. - I'm willing to bet that the former is the case.
In that context, it is perhaps curious that Thomas - like Brisard -
has chosen to use John O'Neill, this time in order to weave a
counter-legend of Israel at the center of a global criminal network.
In his latest book on Robert Maxwell, Thomas alleges that Maxwell was
an Israeli "super-spy" who, in the words of John O'Neill, "was at the
heart of the global criminal network." Thomas writes that O'Neill's
contribution to the book was "enormous" - which is indeed interesting,
as the book covers much of the corruption wrought through the
British/C.I.A./BCCI networks, though Thomas employs O'Neill to "spin"
the global corruption instead as the joint work of Israel (via
Maxwell) and Russian criminal gangs.
Thomas' fellow Globe-Intel editors are also an interesting bunch. One
fellow editor, the British Sunday Express correspondent Yvonne Ridley,
had made her own entry into the 9/11 Legend as a high-profile captive
of the Taliban. Ridley, who claimed that the British government were
inciting the Taliban to kill her by implying that she was their covert
agent, was fortunately released by her captors on October 8, 2001,
just one day after the invasion of Afghanistan had begun. Given such
a grave accusation, one wonders why she would subsequently take up
office space with an MI5 "groupie" (Thomas) - unless, of course, she
had now established her bona fides as a "credible" source of
disinformation.
Rounding out the Globe-Intel editorial group is terrorism expert
Martin Dillon, who wrote a well-circulated tribute to his friend John
O'Neill, substantiating the official legend that O'Neill was
"frustrated" by State Department efforts to block his pursuit of bin
Laden.
In reading the detailed revelations of Brisard, Dasquie, and Thomas,
one enters the proverbial hall of mirrors, where subtle truths reflect
back upon themselves as half-lies, and perceptions splinter amid a
cascade of contradictions. Such is the world of the disinformation
operative. As a first defense, all you need to know is when you're in
it, not particularly what's in it.
Still, a more curious case is that of John Loftus, a long-standing
Catholic friend of the Jews who had served in the Justice Department's
Nazi-hunting unit, where he had discovered - through CIA archives -
the depth of the CIA program to smuggle in Nazi war criminals through
"ratlines" to the United States after the Second World War. In his
book, The Secret War Against The Jews, Loftus documented in painful
detail the anti-Semitic history of the powerful Anglo-American
"Establishment", the Wasp clique which, through their oil and
industrial holdings, has had a stranglehold on American foreign - and
military - policy for close to a century. Loftus, clearly intimate
with a great many operatives in the intelligence community - whom he
refers to as the "old spies" - had posited that the Jews were
repeatedly used as pawns and scapegoats in the grand match played out
by these men on the geopolitical chessboard. Loftus' reading of this
Establishment - which encompasses the likes of the Rockefellers, the
Dulles brothers, the Bakers, and the Bushes - dovetails nicely with
the writings of scholars like Peter Dale Scott (whose personal
integrity and research skills are beyond question). In other words,
Loftus knows who is the real power behind the throne.
Yet in the light of 9/11, it appears that Loftus has put on his
blinders, going out on the lecture circuit and offering the
warmed-over neo-conservative view that September 11 was essentially
the work of wicked Saudis intent on destabilizing the West by priming
the terror pumps with their oil wealth. More ominously, Loftus was
offering his audiences a neocon bird's eye view into the near future
(courtesy of his military contacts out of MacDill Air Force Base in
Tampa) - a future in which a liberated Iraq would be turned over to a
compliant Hashemite monarchy (now resident in Jordan), and then on to
Saudi Arabia, where the Saudis would be booted and replaced by
compliant Hashemite monarchs in a new Hashemite Arabia. And as for
the West Bank Palestinians - well, they would be handed over to the
custody of the compliant Jordanian Hashemites. As for Loftus, he was
making his own contribution by heading up a class action lawsuit on
behalf of the families of 9/11 against those ruthless Saudi
financiers. And, as an aside, he was assuring his mostly Jewish
audience that George W. Bush is, at root, a decent fellow.
In short, Loftus was propagandizing his audience toward a highly
selective reading of 9/11. Gone were the ominous shadows of BCCI and
Iran-Contra, casting their pall over the credibility of those powerful
politicians feeding us their take on a new world order. More than
anyone (this writer included), Loftus should have been able to detect
a high-level disinformation campaign to set up "the Jews" and "the
Zionists" as the main evil conspirators behind 9/11. Yet ironically,
here was Loftus casting his lot in with those very neo-conservatives
who will one day serve as the showcase exhibits for what is sure to be
the latest entry in an updated blood libel. From the Crucifixion, to
the Rothschilds, and on to the Twin Towers, the Jews were being set up
once more to play their historical role as punch toys to smokescreen a
powerful oligarchy.
The set-up was on two fronts - foreign and domestic. On the domestic
front, the neo-conservatives headed by ***** Cheney and Richard Perle
-widely dubbed by the mainstream press as the "hawks" - were being
marketed as the true ideological powers behind the Bush
administration. Their patchwork of inter-connected think tanks -
Center for Security Policy, Project for A New American Century (PNAC),
Center For Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), American
Enterprise Institute (AEI) - were deeply involved in sending out
various "experts" to explain the War On Terrorism in a mainstream
forum, thereby setting out the parameters of debate (in addition to
the parameters of the perceived threat).
But did these neo-conservatives constitute a mere "rogue element" -
an insular "cabal" of pro-Zionist conservatives holding a largely
naive President Bush in their sway (as Lyndon LaRouche and the folks
at Executive Intelligence Review would have us believe)? Or rather,
were they just a group "cut-out" for other, more powerful interests -
in other words, the public face that would skew the ultimate
responsibility, letting the true masterminds off the hook while the
"cut-out" proxies would double as potential patsies?
It had certainly been the case during the Clinton era, when Richard
Mellon Scaife's organization took center stage as the most vociferous
entity in attacking the integrity of President Clinton. Thus, while
Scaife's cronies made sure that all eyes were focused on Whitewater,
Lewinsky, Foster, et al, the mainstream focus was kept far from the
infinitely more nefarious, and damaging, scandal that was known by the
four-letter word Mena, the crucial transit point in Arkansas which,
under Governor Clinton, had served to sustain the arms/drug dealing
operations that were fed through Iran-Contra and laundered through
BCCI. Thus, with Whitewater as the Scaife-funded public face of the
Starr inquiry into Clinton, those Clinton associates who could really
provide the dirt on the Clinton/Mena connection were being "purged" in
plain sight - through various prosecutions, accidents, murders, or
well-timed heart attacks (in the case of Jim MacDougall). Meanwhile,
all eyes were directed to the curious stain on the blue dress. Once
Clinton was safely out of office (and a leash presumably was no longer
needed), Scaife disappeared from public view as suddenly as he entered
it - to be replaced by ***** Cheney, Richard Perle, and their coalition
of fundamentalist Christian/Jewish Zionists.
On the foreign front, journalists like Globe-Intel's Thomas laid the
groundwork for a future expose of Israeli complicity. An example of
the subtlety of this effort: in his May 21, 2002 piece on the Israeli
spy ring, Thomas mentioned that the Mossad sent its agents trailing
the hijackers to New York, Florida, and - very significantly - the
Netherlands (in particular, to the Schipol Airport). Whether Thomas
here was a witting or unwitting agent of disinformation cannot be
ascertained, but clearly somebody knew the crucial importance of
including the Netherlands on the Mossad infiltration itinerary - for
it was an Israeli-founded company, ICTS, which, through its
subsidiary, Huntleigh, handled passenger screening for one of the
airliners out of Boston's Logan Airport on September 11. And, as it
so happened, ICTS was based out of the Netherlands. As we shall see,
the security companies would theoretically be the ideal operative
agents for ensuring that the September 11 "op" would go off without a
hitch. Thus, an Israeli connection on this front would be a key
factor in a counter-legend placing the State of Israel - as opposed to
individual Jews and/or Israeli operatives - front and center as the
main perpetrator of 9/11.
Securing The Plot - The Lead-Up To 9/11
In the immediate aftermath of September 11, the mainstream newspapers
were replete with items implicating Argenbright security (which was
charged with overall security at Logan Airport) with lax procedures,
thereby largely giving a "free pass" to the two companies that
actually handled passenger screening for the hijacked planes out of
Logan.
Besides Huntleigh, the other security company at Logan screening
passengers was Burns Security, through its subsidiary, Globe Security.
Burns Security, the former employer of Timothy McVeigh and suspected
al-Qaida member Mohamed Abdi (connected by authorities to attempted
"millennial" bomber Ahmed Ressam), also happened to make the news in
the most high profile incident preceding September 11. Just a few
days before the Twin Towers came down, a disgruntled Burns security
guard by the name of Joseph Ferguson went on a murderous rampage,
killing, among several others, his supervisor at Burns - a Ukrainian
immigrant by the name of Nikolay Popovich, in the Sacramento suburb of
Rancho Cordova. Before Ferguson turned his gun on himself, he claimed
that he was inspired to follow in the footsteps of Timothy McVeigh and
Nikolay Soltys, a Ukrainian immigrant who, only a couple weeks before
Ferguson, had went on his own mass murder rampage in the suburb of
Rancho Cordova. In Ferguson's home, authorities found right wing
militia literature, particularly that of the World Church of the
Creator. The Ferguson episode also caused a temporary disruption in
Burns' West Coast operations, forcing many of its employees to steer
clear of work, out of harm's way, until Ferguson could be apprehended.
A post-script on Nikolay Soltys, the Sacramento mass murderer who
inspired Ferguson's rampage: on February 12, 2002, Soltys' lawyer,
Tommy Clinkenbeard, revealed in an Associated Press article that a
Sacramento County social services agency was tracking Soltys before
the slayings, and that Clinkenbeard was barred by court order from
seeing all of Soltys' social services records, which were sealed.
Clinkenbeard said that he intended to subpoena those records, but
Soltys was found hanging in his jail cell the very next day. His cell
had been under 24-hour surveillance.
What, if any, was the connection here to September 11? Were these
copy-cat mass murder episodes just a random occurrence - or perhaps
indicative of a far more murky, complex drama playing out just below
the surface? Yet none of this would have merited any notice in
chronicling the Legend of 9/11, had there not been a crucial
Burns/Al-Qaida/Right Wing Militia/Sacramento nexus in the millennial
lead-up to 9/11.
In the weeks leading up to January 1, 2000, the news media were
swamped with speculations of impending catastrophe. We had already
experienced the domestic terror wrought by Timothy McVeigh
(representing the right wing militia set) and Ted Kaczynski alias the
"Unabomber" (representing the lone wacko set). Now we were told to
expect an apocalyptic meltdown of our technological infrastructure by
way of the Y2K "bug", or, alternatively, an attack by America's
self-declared Number One Enemy - Osama bin Laden. The expected
catastrophe came 21 months later than expected, with the blow struck
in New York City.
Yet according to the Official 9/11 Legend, the expected millennial
catastrophe was actually averted two weeks before the new year, with
the arrest in Seattle of al-Qaida operative Ahmed Ressam. Ressam, as
was later discovered, was on his way to mastermind a massive terror
attack on the West Coast - at Los Angeles International Airport, a
facility secured through the services of Burns Security. After
September 11, authorities arrested a former Burns security guard named
Mohamed Abdi in Washington, D.C., on the pretext that he was connected
to Ressam.
Ten days before Ressam was arrested - on December 4, 1999 - two right
wing "militiamen" were arrested on charges of plotting to blow up, on
the new year, a Suburban Propane facility at Elk Grove near
Sacramento. It was thought that had they succeeded, hundreds of
casualties might have resulted. It is thus on the West Coast, in the
lead-up to the millennial new year, that we have the convergence of a
pre-existing domestic threat (i.e. the militias stoked through the
legends of Waco and Ruby Ridge) and a pre-existing foreign threat
(i.e. the bin Laden minions stoked through the legends of Gulf War '91
and World Trade Center '93). As we shall see later in this article,
these two threats had actually converged for the first time back in
April 1995, with Timothy McVeigh's destruction of the FBI Murrah
building in Oklahoma.
Sacramento, though by no means the only West Coast city with an
alleged al-Qaida connection, did seem to have a magnetic pull for this
type of convergence. An al-Qaida graduate of Cal State, Sacramento,
Raed Hijazi, was charged with plotting to blow up a Jordanian hotel on
the millennial new year, while another al-Qaida operative, Ali A.
Mohamed - a former Sacramento resident who was also a U.S. Army
sergeant in Fort Bragg, N.C. - had pleaded guilty to the 1998 U.S.
embassy bombings in Africa (the bombings that had garnered bin Laden
his most widespread notice up until the U.S.S. Cole attack in October
2000). On the domestic terror front, Sacramento was also the scene of
the notorious racist attacks on local synagogues by the Williams
brothers.
In The Propaganda Preparation For 9/11, I posited the existence of two
key domestic operative cliques - one based in New York City and the
other in Florida (particularly in Tampa, by MacDill Air Force base).
But the crucial question is this: was a West Coast operative clique
also to play a role on September 11 - and if so, then at what point
was the West Coast aspect of these operations scotched?
Alternatively, perhaps the West Coast millennial operations were a
bluff - a diversion meant to take the exclusive focus off of New York,
and perhaps lay the psychological groundwork for the eventual
assignment of blame for 9/11. Toward that end, the pre-millennial
Ahmed Ressam episode was a key pivot point in the Official 9/11
Legend, as Ressam provided the crucial links to the networks that the
authorities would later use in constructing the case against al-Qaida
for the September 11 attacks. It was through Ressam that authorities
allegedly got a peek at the upper structures of al-Qaida, with Ressam
detailing the operational role of senior al-Qaida man Abu Zubaydah
(subsequently the first "big fish" caught in the War On Terror in
March 2002). The Ressam episode also provided a close-up view as to
how those all-important connections were made, and, most importantly,
by whom.
As chronicled in a multi-part Seattle Times investigation, The
Terrorist Within, by Hal Bernton, immediately after Ressam was
arrested on December 14, 1999, John O'Neill called up the
Seattle-based FBI agent assigned to the investigation, Fred Humphries,
and hooked Humphries up with O'Neill's friend, the powerful French
anti-terror prosecutor, Jean-Louis Bruguiere. Humphries, who seemed
to be "out of the loop" as regards the complexities of the terror
networks, was taken by the hand by Bruguiere, and pointed in the
"right" direction - that is, toward the evidence showing the full
depth of Ressam's connections. On the very night that Humphries first
met up with Bruguiere in New York City, O'Neill orchestrated a
four-alarm, razzle-dazzle show of FBI authority that could not have
failed to make an impression on the novice agent Humphries:
"That evening, O'Neill took them out on the town, requisitioning a
SWAT team for security and roaring off in a black SUV, lights flashing
and sirens echoing along Manhattan's skyscraper canyons.
At Cité, a fashionable steakhouse, the SWAT team checked for danger,
then set up a guard post outside while the trio dined in style."
Thereafter, Bruguiere led Humphries to his associates in the Canadian
intelligence service, who furnished Humphries with the evidence of
Ressam's Montreal "cell." Then Bruguiere provided Humphries and his
assistant a refresher course in the Terror Story, bringing them to
Paris where they could likewise be fed the latest information from the
"official" French intelligence dossiers. Back stateside, Bruguiere
kept on with the Ressam case, furnishing the prosecution - and the
media - his expert take on Ressam's fit in the overall al-Qaida
puzzle.
To the casual observer, there is absolutely nothing nefarious in any
of this. It would make sense that a highly esteemed international
expert and prosecutor of terror would be so intimately involved in
such an important case. Yet, as in so much of this tale, it is the
overall context that one must consider when evaluating the specific
elements of the 9/11 Legend. Proceeding on the hypothesis that
O'Neill would theoretically be the most well-placed operative to
assemble the various global elements implicating al-Qaida in 9/11 -
and in view of the fact that O'Neill was at the improbable center of
far too many coincidences - one could judge O'Neill's involvement here
in the Ressam episode as one plausible example by which O'Neill (along
with his colleague, Bruguiere) could use his authority and prestige in
order to "structure" an investigation in a certain direction. In this
respect, Humphries would be playing the role of any number of people
in his position - trusting in the expert opinion of a superior
authority, and honestly taking his leads where directed. In such a
manner do literally thousands of decent law enforcement folk become
party to a set-up managed by the few in the upper echelons,
reinforcing among one another the perception that the truth is known
among a wide swath of their colleagues - a "herd mentality" that is as
prevalent in the realm of law enforcement as it is in government and
media.
If Bruguiere had given Humphries the initial impression that Humphries
was receiving a fully independent assessment from the Canadian
intelligence service, well, that wasn't exactly the case either. As
chronicled in Bernton's Seattle Times investigation, only a few years
before - back in the summer of 1996 - it was Bruguiere who had first
contacted the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), informing
them of his belief that "terrorists had formed a 'cell' in Montreal.
In particular, Bruguiere told CSIS, watch for a man named Fateh
Kamel."
Bruguiere led the skeptical Canadians to an apartment he dubbed the
"appartement de conspiracie", among whose occupants was the
aforementioned Fateh Kamel and his protege, Ahmed Ressam. At
Bruguiere's urging, the Canadians proceeded to monitor the apartment
for a period of two years, amassing a "400-page file on the men who
came and went from the apartment." Though impressively thick, the
file contained little more than the macho rantings of men whom the
Canadians considered to be petty thieves and immigrant visa violators
at the worst. All the same, Ressam's voice made it on to the "record"
in "nearly 400 wire-tapped conversations." Once the Canadians ended
their fruitless two-year surveillance in 1998, Ressam was off to
Afghanistan - the finishing school for his terrorist education. The
Canadians had apparently lost interest, and subsequently, the denizens
of the "appartement de conspiracie" had moved on.
Phase Two: almost one year later, in February 1999, Ressam returned
to Montreal, now presumably indoctrinated and trained in the al-Qaida
brand of covert terror. In one of those recurring synchronicities we
tend to find popping up in the Legend of 9/11, Bruguiere - after more
than two years of laying low - decided that now was the time to make
his move on the aforementioned Fateh Kamel, who he just happened to
find in Jordan, and subsequently prodded the Jordanians to arrest him
and extradite him to France to face charges of abetting terror. As
chronicled in the Seattle Times investigation, Bruguiere made his next
move several weeks later - requesting that the Canadians question
Kamel's former apartment mates in Montreal, among them the newly
returned Ressam.
Now, pay special attention to the timing: Ressam, upon his recent
return to Montreal, moved into a new apartment on Sherbrooke Avenue.
The Canadians, however, showed up at the old "appartement de
conspiracie", now bereft of its alleged conspirators, who had moved on
in the past year. Bruguiere continued to harangue the Canadians. A
few months later, they finally tracked down the address of Ressam's
Sherbrooke Avenue lodgings. Only problem was, Ressam was no longer
officially lodging there. In the interim, he had moved on to another
apartment on Rue du Fort (what may, in retrospect, be considered as a
"safe house" in more ways than one). However, Ressam "occasionally
spent the night at his old apartment on Sherbrooke, where his friends
still lived." As happenstance would have it, on one of those
overnight stays, at the tender hour of a quarter past six in the
morning, the Canadian authorities showed up in the foyer of the
building and dialed up Ressam's old apartment, waiting to be "buzzed
in." Bruguiere had been given the heads-up for this raid, though he
did not join in. Here is what happened next, as chronicled by the
Seattle Times: "At the sound of the bell, Ressam bolted from the
apartment and out a back door into an alley. The door was unguarded.
He got away."
Nevertheless, the Canadians did find inside the "dingy apartment" some
photographs of the aforementioned Fateh Kamel, along with a
conveniently placed black address book left in Ressam's presumably
abandoned knapsack, which contained the phone number of Abu Zubaydah
(relatively unknown by then) and the address for Evergro Products, an
agricultural-supply store in British Columbia (later to be tagged as
Exhibit A for the prosecution). As reported in the Seattle Times, it
was all pretty much Greek to the Canadian corporal who led the raid,
and who subsequently "made a copy of the book and sent it off to
Bruguiere in Paris to figure out."
And where did Ressam run off to? Back to his Rue du Fort apartment
(or "safe house"), where he reportedly proceeded that night to plan
his explosive attack on the Los Angeles International Airport in the
weeks ahead. Oddly, it did not occur to him that the authorities
might also track him down to this apartment as well (from the
perspective of a man who was apparently alert enough - and prescient -
to bolt from his overnight lodgings at the first toll of a bell in the
wee hours of dawn). But as fate - or perhaps Bruguiere? - would have
it, the authorities would not pick up on Ressam's trail again until
that designated day in December 1999 when he was pulled over with the
"smoking gun" explosives at customs in Seattle.
On that fateful day, Ressam had almost gone out of his way to draw
suspicion on himself, as reported in the Seattle Times:
"Driving through the island city of Victoria to get to Seattle from
mainland Canada was a bizarre choice — understandable for a tourist,
maybe, but not for a business trip."
Even so, Ressam's car was allowed on to the ferry to Seattle.
Stateside, with his car the last in line off the ferry at customs,
Ressam put on a sweaty, "jittery" show for the benefit of the
discerning customs inspector, who this time got the message and
proceeded to do a standard search of Ressam's car. The rest, as they
say, is history. By the time agent Humphries was handed the case, the
Canadians now had a fully documented dossier on Ressam waiting for
him.
Though the Seattle Times investigation kept fairly close to the
contours of the Official 9/11 Legend, the obvious anomalies in a
simple reading of the Ressam episode fairly scream out for more
attention. Was this all a well-timed set-up, orchestrated by
Bruguiere, using the unwitting Canadian authorities - and,
subsequently, Agent Humphries - to give the general impression that
Ressam's activities were being ferreted out by a virtual army of
independent investigators? In short, through just the prism of the
Ressam episode, might we detect the inner workings of a covert
legend-in-progress?
Backdrop - Detecting The Puppet Masters
With the above-stated hypothesis in mind, one should perhaps cast a
discerning eye toward those manning the counter-terror posts in Los
Angeles today - for an important element in John O'Neill's New York
circle has recently relocated to the West Coast. In particular,
O'Neill's friend, John Miller, has left a lucrative job at ABC News in
order to work under William Bratton in the Los Angeles counter-terror
office. Miller, some might recall, was one of the very few Americans
to conduct a face-to-face interview with bin Laden before September
11. Before he had come aboard as a correspondent for ABC News, Miller
had worked under Bratton in the NYPD. Bratton, through his
acquaintance with O'Neill's friend Jerry Hauer, has also had intimate
business dealings with Kroll Associates, the World Trade Center
security firm which hired O'Neill.
It is, in fact, security firms like Kroll Associates, Burns Security,
Teg, Wackenhut, and their ilk that should garner our interest at least
as much as the web of conservative think tanks that have welded in
place the parameters of "mainstream" debate - for it is through these
very firms that the former stars of law enforcement have gone through
the revolving door into the lucrative private sector. It is a world
where former military types mix with various operatives of the CIA,
FBI, DEA and any number of alphabet soup agencies charged with the
security of our nation.
Moreover, the top people in the private security sector have the
authority, prestige, and, most importantly, the skill to carry out -
successfully and below the radar - the kinds of domestic operations
that have been pegged as the province of shaggy al-Qaida operatives.
Who, after all, could best ensure that 19 terrorists would be able to
make it aboard four separate flights without any real danger of
detection? And who, after all, would be best placed to ensure a
complete and successful implosion of not just the two Twin Towers, but
the neighboring building - 7 World Trade Center - which housed a
bio-warfare "command and control bunker" under the direction of Jerry
Hauer?
With that in mind, we get a bit closer to the "how" of 9/11 - an
important consideration in analyzing the Legend of 9/11. A good part
of the early work on that legend had been accomplished through the
offices of Michael Cherkasky, the managing director of Kroll
Associates - in his capacity as a prosecutor working in the New York
office of Robert Morgenthau. Cherkasky had worked on the case arising
out of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, which had
established Ramzi Yousef as the terrorist mastermind behind the
attack. Cherkasky had also worked on the John Gotti and BCCI criminal
cases, two cases that would not, at first glance, seem to be related,
much less to the events of September 11.
Yet there is a curious continuity here - one that highlights the
global infrastructure that has made 9/11 such a successful worldwide
"op", with a legend whose global parameters defy the perceptions of
even the most dogged investigators. As Peter Dale Scott has argued in
great and persuasive detail, the "deep political structure" of
American society - and I would argue that this now applies globally -
is permeated by an interwoven nexus between political/corporate elites
and an organized criminal subculture, whereby certain political or
business arrangements are made in an extra-legal sphere, beyond the
reach of sanction or salience. Although this dual-purpose netherworld
has been with us for over a century - and roughly parallels the rise
of an American industrial "Establishment" of which the Bushes and
Rockefellers are most representative - for our purposes, we will date
the true globalization of this "deep political structure" with the
creation of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, better
known as BCCI.
The story goes that BCCI was founded by Pakistani financier Aga Hassan
Abedi. In truth, it was mostly a British intelligence operation using
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates as fronts, while
C.I.A. elements allied with George H. W. Bush used the banking
network to conduct a number of under-the-table operations throughout
the '80's. Before it went under, BCCI served as the cardiovascular
system for a global criminal milieu, its laundered arteries servicing
the needs of various drug lords, arms dealers, fraudsters, dictators,
corrupt politicians, terrorists, and intelligence agencies seeking
loose cash for their extra-legal activities.
In short, BCCI was Disneyworld for the New World Order of
political/corporate crime. With ample supplies of heroin leaving
Afghanistan and heading stateside throughout the '80's, there were
ample funds left to underwrite the activities of Osama bin Laden and
his mujaheddin, ensconced in a battle to oust the Soviet occupation
forces from their midst. And with cocaine coming stateside by way of
Colombia, a little pocket money could be set aside to furnish the
Nicaraguan Contras with their own anti-Soviet toys.
Could it, then, perhaps have been nothing more than a coincidence that
a brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden, Khalid bin Mahfouz, was reported
in the early 90's to own a 20% stake in BCCI - and that bin Mahfouz,
as reported by the Houston Chronicle on June 4, 1992, had intimate
business dealings with James Bath, the personal representative of bin
Laden brother Salim who had invested $50,000 in George W. Bush's
company, Arbusto? Bin Mahfouz, incidentally, had taken over Salim bin
Laden's interest in the Houston Gulf Airport after Salim met his
demise in an airplane crash over Houston in 1988 (the same year that
Iran-Contra witness, and Israeli counter-terror coordinator, Amiram
Nir met his own fortuitous demise by airplane over Mexico, thus
denying Congress one witness who could testify to Vice-President
Bush's personal involvement in the scandal).
In the decadent 80's, Bush friend and C.I.A. asset Manuel Noriega
served as a critical conduit for the drug transit through Panama.
Meanwhile, C.I. A. asset Saddam Hussein played the essential role of
wearing down the Iranian Revolution by throwing waves of Iraqi young
men at waves of Iranian young men, costing over a million lives,
though earning billions for a voracious world arms industry. As for
John Gotti, on June 21, 1991, former C.I.A. agent Richard Brenneke
gave a sworn deposition before Congressman William Alexander,
fingering Gotti as an active detergent in "laundering" the C.I.A. drug
shipments coming into the Mena Airport in Arkansas.
As history has shown, being a friend and/or C.I.A. asset of George H.
W. Bush can be an uncertain proposition. One by one, once these
psychopathic proxies had served their purpose, they were "taken out".
In the case of Noriega and Gotti, they were silenced through the
capable tools of the American justice system. And overseeing the
prosecutions - Noriega, Gotti, and BCCI - happened to be a man who
would, years later, be entrusted with overseeing the investigation
into the causes of 9/11 - Robert S. Mueller III.
In the case of BCCI, Mueller had steered the case along the
manageable "official" contours, away from the seamier aspects of
American foreign policy, ensuring that the domestic aspect of this
worldwide fraud would only singe the toes of two well-connected,
designated patsies - Clark Clifford and Robert Altman. And while
Morgenthau's New York office had indeed pushed the envelope in
investigating BCCI, as always, the essential integrity - the goodness
- of the American political/intelligence apparatus was left intact.
The real scandal of BCCI, however, was not simply that it was a
worldwide Ponzi scheme defrauding its investors of billions - for that
is the "limited", official version - but that, in the context of 9/11,
it provides a glaring spotlight on the very networks most intimately
connected with the corruption. BCCI, the brainchild of British
intelligence, was the ideal tool by which a supra-national network of
compromised politicians and corrupt officials would "play ball",
fattened up with a stream of capital furnished through the fruits of
drugs, arms, and terrorism.
As Oliver North had pioneered the use of the counter-terrorism office
in dealing with narco-terrorists like Monzer al-Kassar (connected to
the Pan Am explosion over Lockerbie), would it be such a stretch to
posit that the counter-terror apparatus - this time under Richard
Clarke and John O'Neill - was once again being employed to "work" the
corrupt networks wrought by BCCI? Can it be a mere coincidence that
the arteries of the bin Laden strain of terrorism were fed not by Iran
or Syria - the "traditional" sponsors of the more low-key types of
terrorism in the '80's - but rather by those very countries that have
long served as agents and proxies of their American-Anglo cohorts in
crime: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates (i.e. the
principal countries fronting for BCCI)? Could it be that the mutually
corrupt global relationships wrought by BCCI persist to this day, with
a bevy of compromised political officials standing ready to make their
contribution to the New World Order - and perhaps scam some extra
pocket change on the side?
As they say - follow the money. And where are the big movers and
shakers of 9/11 - those who are interpreting the threat for you -
putting their money? In vaccines, pharmaceuticals, bio-tech,
utilities, security consulting, and surveillance technologies. In
other words, they are shifting their money toward those burgeoning
industries where they can simply legislate the market need - the
favored modus operandi of the "Establishment" captains of industry who
had formerly used their clout in the political sector to secure their
all-important interests in the oil and banking sectors.
And what of FBI Director Robert Mueller? Was it a coincidence that he
was consistently chosen to oversee cases in which the whole bloody
mess - Gotti, BCCI, Noriega et al - had threatened to spill over the
"officially" designated sides? Was it a result of happenstance that
Mueller officially had taken up his job as FBI Director only one week
before September 11? Is it Mueller's job to cover the paper trails -
or just cover them up?
Polishing The Legend: A New 9/11 Mastermind
With the foregoing background in mind, we are now in a position to
chronicle and analyze the final crystallization of the 9/11 Legend.
On February 12, 2002, Omar Saeed Sheikh was "officially" arrested by
the Pakistani police for the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl after
unofficially being held in ISI custody for a week. With Omar Saeed
now back as a world headliner, his updated terror resume was also
making the rounds: jailed for a 1994 kidnapping, bartered out for a
1999 hijacking, headed up an ISI-linked terror group (the
Jaish-e-Mohammed) responsible for a number of high-profile attacks on
Indian interests in recent months, and - almost as an afterthought -
sending $100,000 along to Mohamed Atta before September 11.
Not that the newspapers were really pushing a 9/11 connection with the
Pearl kidnapping. In fact, of those few news sources that offhandedly
did mention that Saeed had been a 9/11 paymaster - for example, TIME
and the Associated Press in February - there was no mention at all of
an incriminating connection with the Pakistani ISI Chief. Meanwhile,
other journalists would mention Omar Saeed's links to al-Qaida or the
ISI, yet neglect to connect him in any manner to 9/11. A particularly
egregious example of this omission concerned Maria Ressa of CNN, who,
only months before, had definitively identified Omar Saeed as the 9/11
paymaster acting under the alias "Mustafa Ahmad." Yet by the time of
her July 7, 2002 article on Saeed, she was curiously silent on the
question of Saeed's alleged paymaster role with al-Qaida, reporting
instead that "Al Qaeda funded the [1999 Indian Airlines] hijacking
operation" which resulted in Omar Saeed's release from prison. For
good measure, her July 7 piece also mentioned the fact that bin Laden
was active in supporting terror groups in Kashmir (a cause which bin
Laden had, in fact, only formally adopted on October 14, 2001 - that
is, a mere five days after the incriminating October 9 Times of India
article). In view of the fact that Omar Saeed now was widely being
marketed as an ISI-connected terrorist leader active in Kashmir, he
would find an alternative bin Laden link (and cover story), courtesy
of Maria Ressa and colleagues.
As for the Times of India, only one day after Saeed's "official"
arrest, they were now explicitly backtracking on their October 9
revelation linking Omar Saeed to the ISI Chief. Instead, they were
going full-on with the Saeed/Ansari route to the money trail.
And what of that money trail? Was it a dead issue by the time of
Saeed's arrest for the Pearl kidnapping? Not exactly. In fact, the
mainstream media seemed to adopt - or was passively used to employ -
an extremely subtle technique to obfuscate the whole issue. Here is
how it worked in the aftermath of Omar Saeed's arrest: where an
article now mentioned Saeed's link to the $100,000 transaction, the
usual detail provided was the fact that such money was sent through
"hawala channels", a phrase that would point more curious researchers
to the Saeed/Ansari thread that had briefly made headlines with the
January 22 Calcutta attack. Those articles, however, would tellingly
omit the "Mustafa Ahmad" alias from the details.
At around this time, articles that briefly touched upon a paymaster by
the name of "Mustafa Ahmad" would reveal nothing about the man, except
for the fact that he was still "at large." Prior to the January 22
Calcutta attack, there was another thread of articles which pushed the
"Mustafa Ahmad = Shaikh Saiid = Sa'd al-Sharif" angle, culminating in
the December 18, 2001 Associated Press article which had identified
the 9/11 paymaster as bin Laden's Saudi brother-in-law and financial
chief. In light of the recent arrest of the now "official" 9/11
paymaster, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hisawi, it is possible to perceive another
thread of articles - a thread that arose full-blown, in fact, from the
Zacarias Moussaoui indictment, which was unsealed December 11, 2001.
As will become clear, the Zacarias Moussaoui indictment was a crucial
pivot point in the unfolding 9/11 Legend, locking down the money trail
story with a firm delineation of details. When Moussaoui first made
the news, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, he was touted as the
possible "twentieth hijacker" who just wasn't able to get up to bat.
In fact, by September 11, Moussaoui was already in detention, on
suspicion of being connected to al-Qaida. As the story goes,
suspicions were aroused when Moussaoui had made inquiries at a flight
school. Known to French intelligence as a suspicious character,
Moussaoui was promptly investigated by the FBI office out of
Minnesota. He was then arrested and detained in August 2001. As the
9/11 Legend has it, by the time of the September 11 attacks, the
Minnesota office was still scrambling for a warrant to check
Moussaoui's hard drive for incriminating material. The implied moral
of the Moussaoui Tale was this - if not for the undue concern over
civil rights and due process, the FBI might have been able to ferret
out Moussaoui's true role, and thus avert the 9/11 tragedy. The
Moussaoui Tale also had the added bonus of seeming to be an
incriminating aspect of the 9/11 Legend, thereby garnering it a dollop
of credibility even as it mostly functioned to shore up the evidence
pointing to al-Qaida complicity for 9/11. In the same manner through
which Brisard had offered up his own "mainstream" criticisms, the
Moussaoui Tale was just another example of a red herring news item
offered up as an "incriminating" detail, keeping the guilt balanced
squarely on the toga-clad shoulders of bin Laden.
The unsealed December 2001 Moussaoui indictment also set out two
"unindicted co-conspirators" who had yet to play their final roles in
the unfolding 9/11 Legend - Ramzi Binalshibh and Mustafa Ahmed
al-hawsawi (the "official" paymaster). Binalshibh was hijacker
Mohammed Atta's roommate in Hamburg, and the senior operative directly
linking Atta to al-Qaida. According to the Moussaoui indictment,
Binalshibh was also a "paymaster," allegedly transferring funds to
Moussaoui. As we will see, the Moussaoui indictment had lain the
groundwork for the eventual Khalid Shaikh Mohammed/ Ramzi Binalshibh/
Mustafa Ahmed nexus that really gets rolling in June 2002, when
Khalid is first introduced as the 9/11 "mastermind", then proceeds
through Binalshibh's choreographed arrest in September 2002, and
culminates with the simultaneous arrest of Khalid and Mustafa Ahmed in
March 2003. Further, we will see how FBI Director Mueller uses the
details in the Moussaoui indictment to explicitly pair up Khalid and
Mustafa Ahmed - a full nine months before these characters end up
sharing news space for their own simultaneously choreographed
apprehensions.
If, up until the March 2003 arrest of the "official" 9/11 paymaster,
the mainstream news media seemed to be going with obscure, conflicting
versions of the paymaster role, the Moussaoui indictment exhibited no
such confusion. Where "federal", "intelligence", or "law enforcement"
officials were variously reported as identifying the paymaster as
either Omar Saeed or bin Laden's brother-in-law (among others), the
Moussaoui indictment way back in December 2001 - though well after the
controversial Oct. 9 Times of India - gave the impression that the
paymaster role was a settled fact. And the "settled fact" was: the
man providing and receiving back funds under the alias of "Mustafa
Ahmad" was actually a flesh and blood 33-year old Saudi named Mustafa
Ahmed Alhawsawi (or al-Hisawi, depending on the news source).
And sure enough, a bit too far below the radar to really attract
notice, there existed a thread of articles that referen | |
