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9/11 SYNTHETIC TERRORISM MADE IN U.S.A

CHAPTER IV: AL QAEDA: THE CIA'S ARAB LEGION

"I thought these guys [Atta & Co] were double agents." -- former executive, Huffman Aviation, Venice FL (Hopsicker 150)

Al Qaeda and its best-known leader Bin Laden would not exist without the help of the United States, which created them for use against the U.S.S.R. in Afghanistan, and which continues to support them until this day. At various times, the U.S. Special Forces have been Bin Laden's valets; the State Department has acted as his defense counsel and his travel bureau, and the CIA has furnished his public relations advisors and his preferred health plan; the British government has acted as his Human Resources department to recruit new personnel.

Osama Bin Laden is a rich recluse who speaks to the world by means of video tapes and audio tapes, the validity of which cannot be determined. Bin Laden may be dead, or he may be one of the CIA's several hundred ghost prisoners, who are being held in secret prisons around the world in violation of the Geneva Convention. There is no way of determining the authenticity of any of Bin Laden's tapes, and the statements that are made in them by the figure representing Bin Laden are contradictory. For example, in the weeks after 9/11, a Pakistani newspaper published an interview with "Osama Bin Laden" in which we find the following denial of any role in 9/11:

I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Moslem, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people. Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of a battle. It is the United States, which is perpetrating every maltreatment on women, children and common people of other faiths, particularly the followers of Islam. All that is going on in Palestine for the last 11 months is sufficient to call the wrath of God upon the United States and Israel. There is also a warning for those Moslem countries, which witnessed all these as a silent spectator. What had earlier been done to the innocent people of Iraq, Chechnya and Bosnia? Only one conclusion could be derived from the indifference of the United States and the West to these acts of terror and the patronage of the tyrants by these powers: that America is an anti-Islamic power and it is patronizing the anti-Islamic forces. Its friendship with the Moslem countries is just a show, rather deceit. By enticing or intimidating these countries, the United States is forcing them to play a role of its choice. Put a glance all around and you will see that the slaves of the United States are either rulers or enemies of Moslems.

The countries which do not agree to become the U.S. slaves are China, Iran, Libya, Cuba, Syria [Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iraq, Sudan, Indonesia, Malaysia] and Russia. Whoever committed the act of 11 September are not the friends of the American people. I have already said that we are against the American system, not against its people, whereas in these attacks, the common American people have been killed. According to my information, the death toll is much higher than what the U.S. Government has stated. But the Bush Administration does not want the panic to spread. The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself; the people who are a part of the U.S. system, but are dissenting against it. Or those who are working for some other system; persons who want to make the present century as a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity so that their own civilization,  nation, country, or ideology could survive. They can be anyone, from Russia to Israel and from India to Serbia. In the U.S. itself, there are dozens of well-organized and well-equipped groups, which are capable of causing a large-scale destruction. Then you cannot target the American- Jews, who are annoyed with President Bush ever since the elections in Florida and want to avenge him.

Then there are intelligence agencies in the U.S., which require billions of dollars worth of funds from the Congress and the government every year. This [funding issue] was not a big problem till the existence of the former Soviet Union but after that the budget of these agencies has been in danger. They needed an enemy. So, they first started propaganda against Osama and Taliban and then this incident happened. You see, the Bush Administration approved a budget of 40 billion dollars. Where will this huge amount go? It will be provided to the same agencies, which need huge funds and want to exert their importance. Now they will spend the money for their expansion and for increasing their importance. I will give you an example. Drug smugglers from all over the world are in contact with the U.S. secret agencies. These agencies do not want to eradicate narcotics cultivation and trafficking because  their importance will be diminished. The people in the U.S. Drug Enforcement Department are encouraging drug trade so that they could show performance and get millions of dollars worth of budget. General Noriega was made a drug baron by the CIA and, in need, he was made a scapegoat. In the same way, whether it is President Bush or any other U.S. President, they cannot bring Israel to justice for its human rights abuses or to hold it accountable for such crimes. What is this? Is it not that there exists a government within the government in the United Sates? That secret government must be asked as to who carried out the attacks. (Ummat, Karachi, September 28, 2001)

This may be the voice of one of several Bin Ladens, or it may be the Pakistani voice of one Bin Laden. Several weeks after this interview a tape surfaced in which a rather different Bin Laden seemed to acknowledge, at least obliquely, that he was involved in 9/11. This Bin Laden comments that

The brothers, who conducted the operation, all they knew was that they have a martyrdom operation and we asked each of them to go to America but they didn't know anything about the operation, not even one letter. But they were trained and we did not reveal the operation to them until they are there and just before they boarded the planes.  (Meyssan 2002 196)

Which, if either, is the real Bin laden? There is no way of knowing, so every assertion made about the mysterious, mercurial, and erratic Saudi millionaire is an exercise in speculation.

AL QAEDA, BIN LADEN: THE ACCUSED

Osama Bin Laden appears as a rich misfit, certainly a sociopath, and doubtless obsessed with his own fanatical ideological vision of what the world should be. His main goal would appear to be the restoration of the caliphate, the combined emperor and pope of the Islamic world, an institution which was until about 1924 embodied in the figure of the Ottoman Turkish Sultan. Of course, this utopian Pan-Arab program means that Bin Laden is automatically the enemy of any existing state in the Arab or Islamic world, and thus allows him to conduct what amount to Anglo-American destabilization operations against these states under a cloak of radical Islamic historical legitimacy which certain rulers are clearly hard put to answer.

But Bin Laden is not the greatest political genius of today's world, as the anonymous author of Imperial Hubris attempts to convince us. Bin Laden is a dilettante who could not survive very long without powerful protectors and a comprehensive support network, including kidney dialysis. Rather than a political genius, we evidently see in Bin Laden a clueless dupe, a patsy who cannot comprehend the forces around him which make his day to day activity and above all his universal notoriety possible. According to one of Bin Laden's handlers by the name of Beardman, during the Afghan years Bin Laden was not aware of the role he was playing on behalf of Washington. In the words of Bin Laden (quoted by Beardman): "neither I, nor my brothers saw evidence of American help." (Meyssan 2002 7) In an interview with Frontline, Prince Bandar, the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, said that when he first met bin Laden, in the nineteen-eighties, "I thought he couldn't lead eight ducks across the street."

Osama Bin Laden was one of dozens of children in the Bin Laden harem, which was presided over by the patriarch of the Saudi Bin Laden construction company fortune. Osama's mother was not the number one wife or valide sultan in this seraglio; she was instead one of the least favored and least important of the numerous spouses. This peculiarity made Osama what we would call in the language of European feudal aristocracy a cadet or younger son, and cadet sons are by definition expendable. The Bin Laden family was one of the wealthiest in Saudi Arabia, and functioned as compradors of the British and the U.S., including the dirty operations of MI-6 and CIA; Osama was for example a relative by marriage of the Iran-contra businessman Adnan Kashoggi. Since he was a cadet son and not one of the Saudi royals, Osama was doubly expendable. He was allegedly asked in 1979 by Prince Turki of Saudi intelligence to mobilize money and volunteers for operations against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Prince Turki wanted a Pan-Arab force to go and fight the Red Army and the Kabul regime. Part of Osama's role was simply to be a bagman for Saudi government funds being sent to the Afghan fighters. In these efforts, Bin Laden worked closely with the Pakistani Interservice Intelligence, and thus also with the CIA and MI-6. The CIA had teams in Afghanistan in early 1979, well before the Soviet invasion which Brzezinski provoked. According to former CIA Director Robert Gates, the big expansion of the U.S. covert operation in Afghanistan began in 1984. During this year, "the size of the CIA's covert program to help the Mujaheddin increased several times over," reaching a level of about $500 million in U.S. and Saudi payments funneled through the Zia regime in Pakistan. As Gates recalled, "it was during this period [1985] that we began to learn of a significant increase in the number of Arab nationals from other countries who had traveled to Afghanistan to fight in the Holy War against the Soviets. They came from Syria, Iraq, Algeria, and elsewhere, and most fought with the Islamic fundamentalist Muj groups, particularly that headed by Abdul Resaul Sayyaf. We examined ways to increase their participation, perhaps in the form of some sort of' international brigade, , but nothing came of it. Years later, these fundamentalist fighters trained by the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan would begin to show up around the world, from the Middle East to New York City, still fighting their Holy War, only now including the United States among their enemies. Our mission was to push the Soviets out of Afghanistan. We expected a post-Soviet Afghanistan to be ugly, but never considered that it would become a haven for terrorists operating worldwide." (Gates: 349) But the international brigade Gates talked about was in fact created -- as the group now known as al Qaeda.

The story is then that Bin Laden was shocked and alienated by the arrival of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia for operation Desert Shield, after Saddam Hussein's takeover of Kuwait. The FBI and CIA have accused Bin Laden of having been behind the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 that killed six people, two bombings in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996 in which 24 American servicemen died, and the bombings of two American embassies in east Africa in 1998 that killed 224 people, as well as the attack on the 2000 U.S.S. Cole which killed 19 sailors. (New York Times, September 9, 2001)

FBI Director Robert Mueller confessed to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco on April 19, 2002 that, after six months in Afghanistan, the U.S. forces had found absolutely no documentary evidence there relating to 9/11. This was a huge scandal, just as big as the later failure to discover the phantomatic weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Mueller admitted: "The hijackers also left no paper trail. In our investigation, we have not uncovered a single piece of paper -- either here in the U.S. or in the treasure trove of information that has turned up in Afghanistan and elsewhere -that mentioned any aspect of the September 11th plot. The hijackers had no computers, no laptops, no storage media of any kind. They used hundreds of different pay phones and cell phones, often with prepaid calling cards that are extremely difficult to trace. And they made sure that all the money sent to them to fund their attacks was wired in small amount'~ to avoid detection."

Clearly the U.S. would now rather not see Bin Laden, if he still exists, be taken alive, for fear of what his testimony might be. On November 21, 2001, Rumsfeld was quite explicit on this point, saying on the CBS "60 Minutes 11" program he would prefer that Osama bin Laden be killed rather than taken alive. "You bet your life," he said.

It became known shortly after 9/11 that Osama Bin Laden's half-brother Salem was an investor in Arbusto Petroleum in the late 1970s, and thus can be counted as a former business partner of George W, Bush. Two weeks after 9/11, the London tabloid Daily Mail carried the banner headline: "Bin Laden's Amazing Business Link with President Bush." George W. Bush and Salem Bin Laden were both present at the creation of Arbusto Energy, an oil company in Texas. Salem Bin Laden had very close business ties to a friend of George w. Bush, a certain James Bath. According to researchers, it is likely that the $50,000 that Bath invested in Arbusto in 1978 actually came from Salem Bin Laden. Salem Bin Laden died in a plane crash in Texas in 1983. This Daily Mail story was singled out on BBC's "European Press Roundup" the following morning, but these facts have never been given adequate coverage by the U.S. media. The Bath angle was, however, stressed by Michael Moore in his Fahrenheit 911. (Daily Mail, September 24, 2001)

The Bin Ladens were benefactors of Harvard University, where there were fellowships offered bearing their name. This fact attracted the attention of the media, but the willingness of Harvard students to accept the Bin Laden money appeared undiminished after 9/11. Andy Tiedemann, a spokesperson in the Harvard University development office, said no Harvard students had called to object to the bin Laden fellowships. The Bin Laden family's endowed fellowships totaled $2 million, for use at Harvard's law and design schools. (Harvard Crimson, October 5, 2001)

ALBRIGHT SABOTAGES EXTRADITION OF BIN LADEN BY SUDAN

During the mid-1990s, Bin Laden established himself in Sudan. By 1996, he had become an embarrassment to the rulers of that country, General Bashir and Hassan Turabi. Sudan had shown in 1994 that it had nothing to do with terrorism when it turned the legendary terrorist Carlos the Jackal over to French authorities, who put him away for good. Early in 1996, the Sudanese government offered to deliver Bin Laden to the Saudis, who declined on the grounds that any prosecution of the fanatical sheikh in his home country might cause a split in the ruling elite, to say nothing of public disorder. In March 1996, Sudan offered to deliver Bin Laden to the U.S. government. Instead of gratefully accepting the extradition of the man who was already one of the world's top terrorists, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright chose this moment to provoke a new wave of tensions with Sudan, even contriving -- no doubt as a clever diversion -to shut down the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum because of alleged terrorist threats. The Sudanese offer remained on the table until May 19, 1996, when Bin Laden departed Sudan for Afghanistan, but Albright invented pretext after pretext to say no. Here we have a crucial experiment that proves the duplicity and hypocrisy of the U.S. regime: they could have had Bin Laden's head on a platter, and they turned it down. Bin Laden, after all, had a great career ahead of him -- he was destined to become the great false-flag countergang leader of lslamic opposition to the U.S. empire.

CIA Director George Tenet told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on October 17, 2002 that the CIA officially knew nothing about a Sudanese offer to give Bin Laden to the U.S.: "Mr. Chairman, CIA has no knowledge of such an offer ," said Tenet. The 9/11 Commission announced in one of their staff reports that they found no evidence that Sudan had offered to deliver Bin Laden directly to the U.S., but they did establish that Sudan was willing to extradite him to Saudi Arabia. (9/11 commission staff report, March 24, 2004) The 9/11 commission final report, ever true to form, simply ignores the Sudanese offer and with it the key issue of why the Albright State Department refused to accept Bin Laden's extradition or rendition. (9/11 commission 61-(62)

These findings simply ignore the public record as documented by Barton Gellman in the Washington Post soon after 9/11-- a specialty of the 9/11 commission. According to Gellman, in 1999, Sudanese President Omar Hassan Bashir referred elliptically to his government's 1996 willingness to send bin Laden to Saudi Arabia. What remained to be added was the role of the U.S. government and a secret channel from Khartoum to Washington. Gellman wrote:

The government of Sudan, employing a back channel direct from its president to the Central Intelligence Agency, offered in the early spring of 1996 to arrest Osama bin Laden and place him in Saudi custody, according to officials and former officials in all three countries.

Clinton administration struggled to find a way to accept the offer in secret contacts that stretched from a meeting at a Rosslyn hotel on March 3, 1996, to a fax that closed the door on the effort 10 weeks later. Unable to persuade the Saudis to accept bin Laden, and lacking a case to indict him in U.S. courts at the time, the Clinton administration finally gave up on the capture. (Washington Post, Wednesday, October 3, 2001)

The Sudanese envoy to the U.S. in this attempted rendition was Sudan's 2001 UN ambassador, major general Elfatih Erwa, who, as Sudan's minister of state for defense in 1996, flew from Khartoum to Washington for secret negotiations with the CIA.

Anthony Lake, then U.S. national security adviser, says Washington was skeptical of Sudan's offer -- meaning that there was an offer. Lake told the Village Voice that Sudan brought up the story after 9/11 because it feared U.S. bombing attacks during the war on terrorism. Apart from the hindsight, why did the U.S. not test the sincerity of the Sudanese offer by demanding the rendition of Bin Laden? The Sudanese offer of Bin Laden was also obliquely confirmed by Susan Rice, a former assistant secretary of state for African affairs who was then senior director for Africa on the NSC. Rice's variation is the claim that Sudan made the offer knowing the U.S. couldn't accept it. "They calculated that we didn't have the means to successfully prosecute Bin Laden. That's why I question the sincerity of the offer." Again, rather than indulge in such hairsplitting, why not test Sudanese sincerity by demanding Bin Laden's extradition? One U.S. intelligence source in the region seemed to be close to an answer when he called the lost opportunity a disgrace. "We kidnap minor drug czars and bring them back in burlap bags. Somebody didn't want this to happen." (Village Voice, October 31, 2001) Indeed: a most valuable patsy had to be protected.

But the U.S. refusal to take Bin Laden from the Sudan remains an important point, embarrassing enough to engage Richard Clarke, the true high priest of the Bin Laden myth. Clarke writes in his memoir:

Turabi and Bin Laden parted as friends, and pledged to continue the struggle and to use Khartoum as a safe haven. In recent years Sudanese intelligence officials and Americans friendly to the Sudan regime have invented a fable about Bin Laden's final days in Khartoum. In the fable the Sudanese government offers to arrest Bin Laden and hand him over in chains to FBl agents, but Washington rejects the offer because the Clinton administration does not see Bin Laden as important or does and cannot find anywhere to put him on trial. The only slivers of truth in this fable are that a) the Sudanese government was denying its support for terrorism in the wake of the UN sanctions, and b) the CSG had initiated informal inquiries with several nations about incarcerating Bin Laden, or putting him on trial. There were no takers. Nonetheless, had we been able to put our hands on him we would gladly have done so. U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White in Manhattan could, as the saying goes, "indict a ham sandwich." She certainly could have obtained an indictment for Bin Laden in 1996 had we needed it. In the spring of 1998, she did so. The facts about the supposed Sudanese offer to give us Bin Laden are that Turabi was not about to turn over his partner in terror to us and no real attempt to do so ever occurred. (Clarke 142)

This cover story falls to the ground without any refutation because of its own internal contradictions; Clarke is simply lying, and his statements about terrorism need to be read with full awareness of the mendacity of which he is capable. In addition, if the U.S. waited until 1998 to indict Bin Laden, this confirms the story told in La verite interdite that the U.S. had failed to issue an Interpol warrant for Bin Laden after the Khobar Towers attack of 1996. (Brisard and Dasquie 136)

It is enough to repeat that the reason Bin Laden was not taken into U.S. custody was to preserve a patsy of incalculable value. We should recall once again that Clarke was reportedly ushered out of the James Baker State Department for covering up Israeli violations of the U.S. arms export laws involving the illegal Israeli sale of Patriot missile systems to China. In August 1998, Clarke was reportedly one of the key figures who planted false information about Sudan's involvement in the East Africa U.S. Embassy bombings, which led to U.S. cruise missile attacks on a Sudanese pharmaceutical company in Khartoum which turned out to be producing nothing but aspirin. In this incident, Clarke is said to have retailed disinformation from British-Israeli covert operations stringer Yosef Bodansky that provided a pretext for the targeting of Sudan. The Sudan extradition story was confirmed in "Targeted: Bin Laden," broadcast by the History Channel on September 15,  2004, with interviews by Anonymous, Steve Coll, Saudi Prince Turki, Robert Baer, and others. In reality, Sudan cooperated before and after 9/11 in legitimate international anti-terrorism efforts. One such case came in late spring 2002, when Sudan arrested Abu Huzifa, a suspected AI Qaeda- inked terrorist, at the request of the United States. Abu Huzifa detailed his infiltration of Saudi Arabia, to profile vulnerability of U.S. troops to terrorist attack, and described how he had fired a SAM missile at a U.S. warplane near the Prince Sultan Air Base, one of the headquarters of the U.S. Afghan military operations. According to former Clinton-era ambassador to Sudan Tim Carney, Sudan had been totally cooperative with the United States in the war on terror. (Washington Post, June 14, 2002)

FBI TOLD BY BUSH TO BACK OFF BIN LADENS

FBI agents have testified that Bush 43 ordered the bureau to relax their surveillance of the Bin Laden family members living in the United States. According to BBC Newsnight of November 6, 2001, the FBI "was told to back off bin Laden family." The program said it had been told by a highly placed source in a U.S. intelligence agency there had always 1:)een "constraints" on investigating Saudis, but under President George Bush these had become much worse. After the 2000 elections, the intelligence agencies were told to "back off" from investigating the bin Laden family and the Saudi royals. BBC2's Newsnight also said that it had secret documents from the FBI investigation into the terrorist attacks which showed that despite claims that Osama bin Laden was the black sheep of the family, at least two other U.S.-based members were suspected of having links with a possible terrorist organization. The BBC report was based on a secret FBI document numbered 1991 WF213589 and emanating out of the FBI's Washington field office. One of the organizations that the FBI was supposedly ordered to ignore was the "Saudi-funded World Association of Moslem Youth (WAMY), a suspected terrorist organization." WAMY's accounts were frozen by Pakistan after 9/11, and India "claimed that this group was linked to an organization involved in bombing in Kashmir." (Times of India, November 8, 2001) Whatever the specifics, this is the familiar pattern of police agencies finding reasons for not rolling up the financial infrastructure required to keep their indispensable patsies in the field, at least until the big hit has been accomplished.

Just after 9/11, FBI agents swooped down on the Boston suburb where around twenty wealthy relatives of Bin Laden lived, and questioned them at a condominium complex in Charlestown. Agents even visited nightclubs to collect credit cards of younger members of the family. Bin Laden's younger brother Mohammed, who was said to have moved back to Saudi Arabia with his wife and children several years before, owned a ten- bedroom mansion in nearby Wayland. Another younger brother, Abdullah, was a 1994 graduate of Harvard Law School. But, despite the official U.S. story demonizing their maverick half-brother, the plutocratic Bin Ladens had nothing to fear. Soon reports began circulating widely that the Bush regime organized special flights out of the U.S. for members of the Bin Laden family and some other wealthy Saudis. Craig Unger and others have told the story of these special flights which whisked the Bin Ladens and other Saudis out of the U.S. during a time when civil aviation was still suspended. The 9/11 commission denies that these took place between Tuesday and Sunday, that is to say during the days when all U.S. commercial aviation was grounded. The Tampa Tribune carried a story about a Lear Jet which took off from Tampa on September 13 and flew to Lexington, Kentucky with Saudi plutocrats on board. The plane started from a private hanger at Raytheon Airport Services in Tampa. It is possible that this Lear Jet was rented from Wally Hilliard, the man who financed Rudi Dekkers' Huffman Aviation in nearby Venice, Florida, where Atta and Shehhi took flight lessons. (Hopsicker, Mad Cow Morning News 11)

In Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. forces constantly imitated the Israeli practice of simply seizing family members of accused terrorists and holding them as hostages. If these illegal methods are good enough for the little people, and if Bin Laden was the heart and soul of world terrorism, why were the opulent Bin Ladens not simply declared enemy combatants and hustled off to Guantanamo for a round of sleep deprivation and other torture, until the family disgorged the fugitive sheikh? U.S. methods, although they are certainly brutal and illegal, are not consistent.

Quite apart from these flights, the U.S. State Department has long functioned as al Qaeda's virtual in-house travel agency. The former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah from 1987 to 1989, Michael Springman, told BBC Newsnight in the fall of 2001: "In Saudi Arabia I was repeatedly ordered by high-level State Department officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants -- people who had no ties either to Saudi Arabia or to their own country. I complained there. I complained here in Washington ...and I was ignored." He added: "What I was doing was giving visas to terrorists, recruited by the CIA and Osama bin Laden to come back to the United States for training to be used in the war in Afghanistan against the then Soviets."

BUSH 41 WORKS FOR BIN LADENS VIA CARLYLE GROUP

The business cooperation of the Bush and Bin Laden families did not stop with Arbusto. A few weeks after 9/11, readers of the Wall Street Journal were more than mildly surprised to learn that the 41st president of the United States, George H. W. Bush, the father of the current tenant of the White House, was in effect a paid part-time employee of the Saudi Bin Laden Group, the Bin Laden family business in Saudi Arabia, through the intermediary of the Carlyle Group, an international investment and consulting firm, in which the Bin Ladens invested. There had been at least two documented meetings of Bush 41 with the Bin Laden business clan, and in reality there had doubtless been more on social occasion and the like. Other top Republicans were also associated with the Carlyle group, such as former Secretary of State James A. Baker, Bush 43's lawyer during the 2000 stolen election, and Iran-contra heavy Frank Carlucci, a former Secretary of Defense. Also working with Carlyle were Reagan Treasury official Richard Darman, and Bush 41's White House chief of staff, John Sununu. The Journal story repeated the cover story that Osama bin Laden had supposedly been "disowned" by his family, which was running a multi-billion dollar business in Saudi Arabia and was a major investor in the senior Bush's firm. Other reports have questioned, though, whether members of his Saudi family have truly cut off Osama bin Laden. It was also reported that the FBI had subpoenaed the Bin Laden family business's bank records. (Wall Street Journal, September 27, 2001; Judicial Watch, September 28, 2001).

Almost everything about Osama Bin Laden remains uncertain, down to the question of whether he is dead or alive, free or in captivity, and whether he is one person or a group of Doppelgangers. But there is no doubt that CIA, MI-6, and their satellites have showed a remarkable loyalty to Bin Laden, building him up and lionizing him at every opportunity. These agencies do this because they need to establish the credibility of their patsy. Because of his notorious track record as a CIA asset, Bin Laden needs all the public relations assistance the agency can give him. In the days after 9/11, a large demonstration was held against terrorism by the middle classes of Teheran, Iran, and one of the most prominent signs read "Bin Laden = CIA agent."

One of Bin Laden's flacks is none other than Bernard Lewis of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, the author of the operational U.S.-UK-Israel long-term strategic plan for the dismemberment and Balkanization of the Arab and Islamic states of the Middle east and of the "arc of crisis" which we see in action in Iraq and elsewhere today. Lewis bent over backward to establish the Islamic legitimacy and bona fides of Bin Laden in an interview given about two months after 9/11.

BERNARD LEWIS: BIN LADEN'S FLACK

Lewis argued that bin Laden's brand of Islamic terrorism was completely consistent with classical Islam, which is committed to the subjugation of the infidels to Islamic law. Lewis documented Bin Laden's place in the great tradition of the Moslem world by citing the passage in Bin Laden's recent videotape in which he spoke of "humiliation and disgrace ...for more than 80 years," a reference to the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire by Britain and France after 1918. Lewis located Bin Laden in the tradition of jihad, "bequeathed to Moslems by the Prophet." In principle, Lewis went on, the world was divided into two houses: the House of Islam, in which a Moslem government ruled and Moslem law prevailed, and the House of War, meaning the rest of the world, which was still inhabited and, more important, ruled by infidels. Between the two, there was to be a perpetual state of war until the entire world either embraced Islam or submitted to the rule of the Moslem state. Among all the different "infidels" ruling the House of War, according to Lewis, Christianity was singled out as "their primary rival in the struggle for world domination." In a masterpiece of Geschichtskletscherei, Lewis cited slogans painted on the walls of the Dome of the Rock from the 7th Century assailing Christianity. Next, Lewis asserted that the evolution of modern Islamic terrorism, specifically al-Qaeda terrorism, had a long history within Islam, dating to the Assassins of the 11-13th Centuries. He also identified Saudi Arabia and Egypt as the two regimes singled out by the Islamic jihadists for their corruption by modernism. He concluded ominously: "For Osama bin Laden, 2001 marks the resumption of the war for the religious dominance of the world that began in the 7th Century ... If Bin Laden can persuade the world of Islam to accept his views and his leadership, then a long and bigger struggle lies ahead, and not only for America. Sooner or later, al-Qaeda and related groups will clash with the other neighbors of Islam -- Russia, China, India -- who may prove less squeamish than the Americans in using their power against Moslems and their sanctities. If Bin Laden is correct in his calculations and succeeds in his war, then a dark future awaits the world, especially the part of it that embraces Islam." (New Yorker, November 19, 2001)

THE LANGLEY BIN LADEN FAN CLUB

The most comprehensive document of Bin Ladenolatry so far produced comes from the bowels of the CIA, the work place of Anonymous, the author of Imperial Hubris. This book can only be interpreted as a semi-official compendium of CIA doctrine on today's world. Anonymous is sure that Bin Laden will be able to strike the U.S. again, and this time most likely with a weapon of mass destruction, but he still offers the erratic millionaire praise without stint:

Viewed from any angle, Osama Bin Laden is a great man, one who smashed the expected unfolding of universal post-Cold War peace. The New York and Washington attacks, Andrew Bacevich and Sebastian Mallaby wrote in the Wilson Quarterly, "revealed that the pilgrimage to perfection was far from over," though "not for a moment did they cause American political leaders to question the project's feasibility." Post-11 September, Dr. Bruce Hoffman also offered an acute judgment of Bin Laden's impact. "Whatever else," Hoffman wrote, "Bin Laden is one of the few persons who can argue that they changed the course of history." ... All told, Bin Laden in certainly the most popular anti-American leader in the world today. His name is legend from Houston to Zanzibar to Jakarta, and his face and sayings are emblazoned on T-shirts, CDs, audio and videotapes, posters, photographs, cigarette lighters, and stationery across the earth. "Afghanistan's children," Daniel Bergener wrote in the New York Times Magazine in July 2003, "suck on Bin Laden candies, sugary balls in wrappers showing the leader's face, his pointed finger and the tip of a rocket." So too with his name: "one of the most common names for newborn males is Osama," James Kitfield reported in the National Journal in November 2002. "Even among those who publicly denounce his terrorist methods, the namings indicate the nearly mythical status the Islamic world has bestowed on Osama Bin Laden." (Anonymous 104-105)

Our anonymous CIA agent waxes positively indignant about those in Saudi Arabia and around the world who impugn Bin Laden's world-historical genius. He is especially upset about certain Saudis who have worked closely with Bin Laden in the past, and who find it impossible to believe that he is now functioning as the evil demiurge of the twenty-first century. Anonymous detects a "theme of Bin Laden's limited mental and leadership abilities" which has been spread by "a number of Saudi officials and writers. Their intent seems simple enough: to prove that Bin Laden is intellectually incapable of managing al Qaeda and designing its operations." (Anonymous 107) As an example of this line, Anonymous quotes an account given by Saudi Prince Mahmoud bin Abdel Aziz to the U.S. press. The Prince recalled

that night a decade ago when Osama Bin Laden attended an evening salon to describe his exploits fighting in Afghanistan. ...[The prince] remembers young Osama floundering when guests questioned him about the interpretation of religious texts. "Finally, I had to signal with my hands for them to stop it," said the prince. "He really is quite a simple man." (Anonymous 108)

Here we have a rich misfit and fanatic who cannot hold his own in theological debates, which should supposedly be his strongest suit. In Anonymous' view, "the most common form of the Saudis' defamation of Bin Laden is done by having his friends in the kingdom describe him as a gentle, amiable, and relatively unintelligent man." (Anonymous 108) But the yelping detractors of Bin Laden do not stop here. According to Anonymous: "A final side to the effort in the Moslem and Western worlds to denigrate Bin Laden's brains and talents lies in the studied attempt to depict Bin Laden as a simpleton who is directed by that evil terrorist genius Ayman al-Zawahiri, former chief of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and now Bin Laden's deputy in al Qaeda. 'My knowledge of Bin Laden makes me unable to conceive what is happening now,' said Dr. Abdullah al Muayyad, a former director general of the Saudi finance ministry who worked with Bin Laden during the Afghan jihad." (Anonymous 107) Like a good CIA agent, Anonymous tries to make his readers think that the Saudis are passing the buck to the nefarious Egyptians, but this is hogwash. Zawahiri, once again, was a key part of the Sadat assassination, and afterwards was protected by London. The world needs to remember Sadat's widow, Jehan Sadat, recalling in a television interview after 9/11 that Zawahiri, a murderer of her husband, had lived in London for years after that crime, while extradition to Egypt was always refused by the UK. The guess here would be that Zawahiri is a double agent working for MI-6, while Bin Laden is indeed a fanatical, deluded patsy and dupe; at any rate, if this is Bin Laden's mentality, it would make him the ideal type for the role he is presently carrying out.

Anonymous devotes a lyrically fulsome passage to evoking Bin Laden's status as a beloved figure among the Moslems; the Moslem love for Osama, he argues, is

love not so much for Osama Bin Laden the person -- although there is much of that --  but love for his defense of the faith, the life he lives, the heroic example he sets, and the similarity of that example to other heroes in the pantheon of Islamic history. (Anonymous 124)

Anonymous concludes this paean to his hero Bin Laden by favorably comparing the psychotic sheikh to Abraham Lincoln. This is all coming, we recall, from a high-level CIA officer, one of the founding members of the "Manson family," as the original CIA Bin Laden station called itself. If Arabs and Moslems can be convinced that Bin Laden is really their leader, and not a creature of the CIA, then they will never accomplish the modernizing reforms which the progressive nationalists promised. They will spend their time fighting among themselves in the name of re-creating the caliphate. They will be unable to make alliances against the Anglo-Americans with Europe, with the Orthodox, the Hindus, the Buddhists, the Confucians, the atheists, or anybody else; they will self-isolate themselves in endless backwardness. Bin Laden's mass line is, after, all, that it is the duty of every Moslem to kill infidels wherever they are found. If applied literally, this would even cut off all scientific and commercial exchanges in a kind of murderous self-embargo. All these factors will make the Moslem ummah ever so much easier to divide and defeat. No wonder the CIA is so proud of having made Bin Laden a folk hero of the Moslem world, with the help of the 9/11 attacks which the unstable dreamer could never have carried out by himself: literally billions of dollars of publicity for the Saudi misfit have paid off in one of the greatest psychological warfare operations of all time. Any cause that chooses Bin Laden or some similar figure as its leader, we may be certain, is damning itself to a lonely and ignominious defeat at the hands of the laughing CIA kuffar.

Even more notable are the support service which the CIA and it minions continue to provide Bin Laden. Here the evidence is fragmentary but persistent and finally overwhelming. According to CBS News, "the night before the September 11 terrorist attack, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He was getting medical treatment with the support of the very military that days later pledged its backing for the U.S. war on terror in Afghanistan ... Bin Laden was spirited into a military hospital in Rawalpindi for kidney dialysis treatment. (Barry Peterson, "Hospital Worker: I Saw Osama," CBS News, January 29, 2002: www.cbsnews.com ) Before we criticize Pakistan, though, we should realize that the ISI in this case was probably acting on U.S. instructions, as it generally does.

LE FIGARO: BIN LADEN TREATED AT AMERICAN HOSPITAL, JULY 2001

On October 31, 2001, Le Figaro, the leading French conservative newspaper, published a front page story about medical treatment received by Bin Laden in Dubai in the summer before 9/11. This remarkable revelation came in an article by Alexandra Richard entitled "La CIA a rencontre Ben Laden a Dubai. en juillet," (The CIA met Bin Laden in Dubai in July). At around the same time, similar facts were reported by Agence France Presse and Radio France International, the French external broadcasting service. The AFP dispatch read in part:

Bin Laden Underwent Treatment in July at Dubai American Hospital

Osama bin Laden underwent treatment in July at the American Hospital in Dubai where he met a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) official, French daily Le Figaro and Radio France International reported. Quoting "a witness, a professional partner of the administrative management of the hospital," they said the man suspected by the United States of being behind the September 11 terrorist attacks had arrived in Dubai on July 4 by air from Quetta, Pakistan. He was immediately taken to the hospital for kidney treatment. He left the establishment on July 14, Le Figaro said.

During his stay, the daily said, the local CIA representative was seen going into bin Laden's room and "a few days later, the CIA man boasted to some friends of having visited the Saudi-born millionaire."

Quoting "an authoritative source," Le Figaro and the radio station said the CIA representative had been recalled to Washington on July 15. Bin Laden has been sought by the United States for terrorism since the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. But his CIA links go back before that to the fight against Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

Le Figaro said bin Laden was accompanied in Dubai by his personal physician and close collaborator, who could be the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, as well as bodyguards and an Algerian nurse. He was admitted to the urology department of Doctor Terry Callaway, who specializes in kidney stones and male infertility. Telephoned several times, the doctor declined to answer questions. Several sources had reported that bin Laden had a serious kidney infection. He had a mobile dialysis machine sent to his Kandahar hideout in Afghanistan in the first half of 2000, according to "authoritative sources" quoted by Le Figaro and RFI. (AFP, Wednesday October 31, 2001, 2:04 PM)

The CIA was quick to deny these embarrassing facts reported by real investigative journalists, who apparently still exist in France. A spokeswoman at CIA Langley, VA headquarters described the Le Figaro article as "complete and utter nonsense. It's nonsense, it's absurd, it's ridiculous, it's not true." The CIA said it intended to protest to Le Figaro. The American Hospital in Dubai denied that Bin Laden had been a patient. (The Scotsman, November 1, 2001) But the French author Richard LaBeviere countered that Osama Bin Laden had been working for the CIA since 1979, a fact which was generally accepted in Europe. (October 31, 2001) Radio France International stuck to its guns and followed up on its story with further details about Bin Laden's CIA handler and case officer, Larry Mitchell: "The local representative of the CIA who visited Osama Bin Laden last July 12 at the American Hospital in Dubai is called Larry Mitchell. If his visiting card specifies that he is a "consular agent," everyone in Dubai knows, especially in the small expatriate community, that he is working under cover. To say it openly, Larry Mitchell belongs to the 'big house', otherwise known as the CIA. He himself does not hide it." RFI went on: " An expert in the Arab world and especially in the Arabian peninsula, Larry Mitchell is a colorful personality who livens up the somewhat drab evenings of the expatriates of Dubai. One of his friends likes to say that his natural exuberance often gets into classified matters. That is perhaps one of the reasons why he was called back to the United States last July 15. About twenty days after the September 11 attacks, in a statement dated October 5, the CIA dismissed as baseless rumors the story that the agency had had contacts with Bin Laden and his group in the past, especially at the time of the war against the U.S.S.R. in Afghanistan. It happens that this communique of the CIA is in complete contradiction with the earlier official statements of several representatives of the U.S. administration itself." ( http://www.rfi.fr/1 novembre 2001)

It is thus clear that the CIA was providing vital support services to Bin Laden long after he had allegedly turned into the world's leading anti-American monster. The reality is that Bin Laden and al Qaeda have never stopped serving the CIA strategic agenda, whatever that happened to be. As Thierry Meyssan writes, "In reality, the CIA continued to have recourse to Osama Bin Laden's services against Russian influence as it had done against the Soviets. You don't change a winning team. The' Arab Legion' of Al Qaeda was used, in 1999, to support the Kosovar rebels against the dictatorship in Belgrade. It was also operational in Chechenya, at least until November 2001, as was attested to by the New York Times. (Michael Wines, December 9, 2001) The alleged hostility of Bin Laden against the United States permitted Washington to deny responsibility for these dirty operations." (Meyssan 2002 106-7)

In a discussion of the impact of the anonymous Imperial Hubris CIA tract during the summer of 2004, the Washington Post provided a succinct summary of al Qaeda's strategic services to the CIA: "Al Qaeda' s camps were staffed by veteran fighters who trained insurgents who fought and trained others to fight, not only against the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, but also against national armies in Indian Kashmir, Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Eritrea, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Tajikistan, Egypt, Bosnia, western China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Macedonia, Kosovo, and the Philippines." (Review of Anonymous, Imperial Hubris, Washington Post, July 11, 2004) Notice that all these states were or are targets of U.S. destabilization. And even this list is far from complete; it leaves out Libya, for example.

The Iranian press also noted the strange affinities of al Qaeda for figures who were clearly still on the U.S. payroll. While panning the 9/11 commission report, the Teheran Times observed that none other than KSM, "Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, the reported mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was a longtime associate of Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, a leader of the Afghan Northern Alliance and current ally of the U.S.-backed Afghans president, Hamid Karzai." (Teheran Times, July 27, 2004)

AL QAEDA AND NATO'S BALKAN DRUG RUNNING

Another thing that is known about al Qaeda is that Bin Laden's supposed followers are drug pushers in grand style -- once again a foible they share with MI-6 and CIA. During a fall 2001 strategic briefing, Gwen McClure of Interpol's Criminal Subdivision officially informed a group of parliamentarians from NATO countries that Interpol had evidence that the Bin Laden group "is linked to Albanian gangs who have taken over the growing web of crime across Europe. The investigations of Interpol have also shown that bin Laden deployed one of his top military commanders for an elite KLA unit during the NATO Kosovo war." The Interpol official also stated that a special meeting took place in Albania in the presence of bin Laden, according to Albanian police. Several Algerian terrorists were present at the meeting. "It was during this meeting," the official stressed, "that many structures and networks were established for propaganda and fund raising activities and for providing the Algerian armed groups with logistical support." During and immediately after the Kosovo war, when the KLA took over the Kosovo, heroin and weapons traffic exploded unchecked. The so-called "Albanian mafia" ended up controlling 80% of the heroin distribution in Western Europe, using the NATO Kosovo protectorate as its base. The criminal and the terrorist networks became indistinguishable, with a multiplying destructive effect. "These crime syndicates have formed alliances of convenience and are willing to cooperate or make business arrangements with other organized crime groups," the Interpol official told the parliamentarians. She also said Interpol had evidence of the involvement in the criminal and terrorist activities of the Chechnya terrorists. According to Balkan sources and other records, the man in charge for the Balkan terrorism-organized crime connection was Bin Laden's chief adviser or controller, the head of the Egyptian Jihad, Ayman al Zawahiri. Zawahiri's brother Mohamed was reported to be in Macedonia just after 9/11, leading a gang of ideological mercenaries to launch another major KLA assault against the country. Ayman al Zawahiri was in Albania to playa leading role in the KLA/NATO offensive against Serbia in 1999. (Independent, October 24, 2001) According to some experts, the al Qaeda/KLA united front had taken over the 1980s "Bulgarian connection" or Balkan Route, which involved a gigantic arms-for-drugs traffic with the involvement of numerous NATO, Warsaw Pact, and other intelligence services and various ethnic mafias. The Bulgarian connection had come under intense scrutiny after the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II on May 13 1981. (The Independent, October 24, 2001)

ZAWAHIRI AND NATO'S DARLING, THE KLA

The brother of Bin Laden's second in command, Ayman al Zawahiri, was reported after 9/11 to be taking part in terrorist actions in Northern Macedonia, where NATO's puppet Albanian KLA had started a new terror campaign. The Zawahiri connection surfaced on October 25, 2001, when the "new" KLA in Macedonia, the Albanian National Army (ANA), claimed responsibility for the bombing of the police station and municipal building of Tearce in north Macedonia. Tearce was one of the Macedonian towns -- previously assaulted, occupied and "cleansed" of its Macedonian inhabitants which became the scene of a symbolic policing by a mixed police patrol of ethnic Albanians and Macedonians.

BRITISH TERROR SCHOOLS FOR PATSIES

A window into the London state-sponsored synthetic terror milieu came in December 2001, when British authorities were forced to arrest and question Mark Yates, a self- styled security expert who ran a firearms training camp in Alabama, Yates was suspected of helping Islamic terrorist patsies from Britain who were to hone their marksmanship skills on American soil before going off to fight for Islamic causes around the globe. Yates, a British bodyguard and firearms trainer who had operations in both the United Kingdom and the United States, allegedly offered "live fire" weapons training in America for aspiring holy warriors. British police thought that Yates was involved on the U.S. end of the "Ultimate Jihad Challenge" training program offered on the London market by the Sakina Security Services company, owned by Suleiman Bilal Zain-ul-abidin. Yates, who was also the operations and training director at the Ground Zero firearms training camp outside Marion, Alabama, denied everything. "Ultimate Jihad Challenge" included instruction in "art of bone breaking," and learning to "improvise explosive devices." British Moslems would be given the opportunity to squeeze off up to 3,000 rounds at a shooting range in the United States before heading off to fight for Islamic causes around the world. "All serious firearms training must be done overseas" because of British gun laws, advertising for the course noted. British prosecutors said their investigators had searched Zain-ul-abidin's apartment and seized documents believed to be related to suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network, anti-Semitic material and what appeared to be disabled firearms, including a rifle and two handguns. The Sunday Telegraph reported about another military training course, this time at a secret camp near the village of Yetgoch in southern Wales. Young Moslems and others learned how to use Uzi machine guns at the camp, which was run by Trans Global Security International.

The reports of the Welsh training camp rekindled a debate in Britain over how the UK had become a hotbed for military recruitment by radical Islamic elements. Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammed, a firebrand Islamic leader in London, founder of the fundamentalist al-Muhajiroun organization, and Bin Laden's sometime spokesman, said in 2000 that between 1,800 and 2,000 British Moslems were going abroad each year for military training. "We find young men in university classes or mosques, invite them for a meal and discuss ... ongoing attacks being suffered by Moslems in Chechnya, Palestine or Kashmir," Bakri Mohammed said. "We ... make them understand their duty to support the jihad (holy war) struggle verbally, financially and, if they can, physically in order to liberate their homeland." Bakri's al-Muhajiroun group, like al Qaeda, advocated wiping out the world's 50-plus existing Moslem-majority states and replacing them with a single "khilafah" (caliphate), or Islamic state. (Sunday Telegraph, MSNBC, December 27, 2001)

Satellite phone records of a phone used by Osama bin Laden during 1996-98, revealed that "Britain was at the heart of the terrorist's planning for his worldwide campaign of murder and destruction," according to the London Sunday Times. Bin Laden and his most senior aides made more calls to Britain than to any other country; they made more than 260 calls from Afghanistan to 27 numbers in Britain. According to documents from the trial of the U.S. east African embassy bombings, the telephone was bought in 1996 with the help of Dr Sa ad al Fagih, 45, the head of the London-based Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia. Al Fagih had been regularly used by the BBC as an expert on Bin Laden. His credit card was also used to buy more than 3,000 minutes of pre-paid airtime. The records showed calls to ten other countries, the next most frequent after the UK being Yemen. There were no calls to Iraq. (London Sunday Times, March 24, 2002)

AL QAEDA AND LONDONISTAN

The role of London as the leading center of Islamic radicalism has been an open secret for years, but has never been reported by the U.S. controlled corporate media. In the nineteenth century, when Mazzini and Marx operated out of London, the slogan was that "England supports all revolutions but her own." In the post-colonial world, the British have found it to their advantage to encourage violent movements which could be used for destabilizations and assassinations in the former colonies, which their ex-masters did not want to see become strong and effective modern states. Between 1995 and 1999, protests were lodged by many countries concerning the willingness of the British government to permit terror groups to operate from British territory. Among the protestors were: Israel, Algeria, Turkey, Libya, Yemen, India, Egypt, France, Peru, Germany, Nigeria, and Russia. This is a list which, if widely known, might force certain U.S. radio commentators to change their world picture about who is soft on terrorism.

A number of groups which were cited as terrorist organizations by the U.S. State Department had their headquarters in London. Among them were the Islamic Group of Egypt, led by Bin Laden's current right-hand man, Zawahiri, who was a known participant in the plot to assassinate Egyptian President Sadat; this was also the group which had murdered foreign tourists at Luxor in an attempt to wreck the Egyptian tourist industry. Also present in London were Al Jihad of Egypt, Hamas of Palestine, the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) of Algeria (responsible for large-scale massacres in that country), the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), which attacked targets in Turkey, and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (Tamil Tigers) of Sri Lanka, who assassinated Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Ghandi. Sheikh Bakri, Bin Laden spokesman's spokesman, was openly active in London into mid-1998 and later; he gave a press conference after the bombings of the U.S. East African embassies. The killings of figures like Sadat and Rajiv Ghandi should indicate the scale of  the destabilization in developing countries of which some of these groups are capable.

Non-Anglo-Saxon press organs have from time to time pointed up the role of London in worldwide subversion. "The track of ... the GIA leader in Paris leads to Great Britain. The British capital has served as logistical and financial base for the terrorists," wrote Le Figaro on Nov. 3, 1995, in the wake of a murderous terror attack carried out in France. A report by the French National Assembly in October 2001 alleged that London played the key role as clearinghouse for money laundering of criminal and terrorist organizations. On March 3, 1996: Hamas bombed a market in Jerusalem, leaving 12 Israelis dead. A British newspaper reported soon after: "Israeli security sources say the fanatics ... are funded and controlled through secret cells operating here. ... Military chiefs in Jerusalem detailed how Islamic groups raised £7 million in donations from British organizations." (Daily Express, London, March 5, 1996)

In the midst of a campaign of destabilization against Egypt in the mid-1990s, the semi- official organ of the Egyptian government pointed out that "Britain has become the number one base in the world for international terrorism." (Al Ahram, Cairo, September 7, 1996) Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak noted that "... some states, like Britain, give political asylum to terrorists, and these states will pay the price for that." (Al-Hayat, September 18, 1996) British newspapers were also alarmed by the level of Islamic extremist activity they saw around them. By the late 1990s, there were so many Islamic extremists in London that the city had acquired the nickname of "Londonistan." The leading right-wing paper in the UK wrote: "Britain is now an international center for Islamic militancy on a huge scale. ..and the capital is home to a bewildering variety of radical Islamic movements, many of which make no secret of their commitment to violence and terrorism to achieve their goals." (London Daily Telegraph, November 20, 1999) President Putin of Russia saw a direct link between the London Islamic scene and terrorism in his own country. He said in an interview with a German newsmagazine: "In London, there is a recruitment station for people wanting to join combat in Chechnya. Today -- not officially, but effectively in the open -- they are talking there about recruiting volunteers to go to Afghanistan." (Focus, September 2001)

Brixton Mosque was one of the notorious centers for terrorist recruitment in the heart of London. This was the home base of Zacharias Mousawi, the French citizen put on trial in Alexandria, Va. It was also the home of Richard Reid, the shoe bomber of December 2001. Imam Qureshi of Brixton and others were allowed by the British authorities to preach anti-U.S. sermons to the some 4,000 Moslem inmates in British prisons, and thus to recruit new patsies for the world-wide terror machine. According to Bakri, Bin Laden's spokesman, during the late 1990s 2,000 fighters were trained yearly, including many in the U.S. because of the lax firearms legislation. The rival of Brixton Mosque was the equally redoubtable Finsbury Mosque, the home of the Saudi demagogue al Masri, who was finally taken into custody in the spring of 2004. There is every reason to believe that London is one of the main recruiting grounds for patsies, dupes, fanatics, double agents, and other roustabouts of the terrorist scene.

AL QAEDA AND MI-5 AGAINST LIBYA

Muammar Qaddafi of Libya, who had been bombed by the U.S. in the mid-1980s, not coincidentally became a target of al Qaeda. In March 1994, Bin Laden supporters killed 2 German agents in Libya. In November 1996, there was an MI-5 assassination attempt against the Libyan dictator with the help of the local Bin Laden organization, in which several people were killed. Here is a prime example of al Qaeda being employed by UK intelligence for purposes of state sponsored terrorism with the goal of eliminating a political leader who was not appreciated by London. (Hollingsworth and Fielding) The conclusion is clear: al Qaeda is a subsidiary of Anglo-American intelligence.

According to the French authors Brisard and Dasquie, Bin Laden's controllers had been using him to cause trouble for Qaddafi since the early 1980s, when Bin Laden had demanded permission to set up a base of operations in Libya, but was rebuffed by Qaddafi. "Enraged by Libya's refusal, Bin Laden organized attacks inside Libya, including assassination attempts against Qadaffi," Dasquie told IPS press service. The French authors cited the Islamic Fighting Group, headquartered in London, as the Libyan opposition group most closely allied with Bin Laden. Author Dasquie told IPS, "Qadaffi even demanded that Western police institutions, such as Interpol, pursue the IFG and Bin Laden, but never obtained cooperation. Until this very day [late 2001], members of IFG openly live in London." In 1998, former MI5 officer David Shayler told reporters that the British secret services had financed the assassination attempt against Qadaffi. (Inter Press service, November 15, 2001)

A rare moment of truth about the infrastructure of international terrorism was provided in October 2001 by Qaddafi, who was aware of al Qaeda's track record of attempting to eliminate him in the service of the U.S. and UK. In an appearance on the popular Al-Jazeera program "The Opposite Direction," Qaddafi condemned the 9/11 attacks, and referred to Bin Laden's Arab Afghans as "stray dogs" and terrorists. But then Qaddafi began to talk about the support network for al Qaeda:

I am actually puzzled. I mean, if America were serious about eliminating terrorism, the first capital it should rock with cruise missiles is London.

Interviewer: London!?

Qaddafi: London. It is the center of terrorism. It gives safehousing to the terrorists. I mean, as long as America does not bomb London, I think the U.S. is not serious, and is using a double standard. I mean, on the contrary, London is far more dangerous than Kabul. How could it rock Kabul with missiles and leave London untouched? (Al-Jazeera, Qatar-Tripoli, October 25, 2001)

The interviewer, a former BBC employee, quickly changed the subject before the mercurial dictator could say more. At this time, al Jazeera was closely monitored by all the international wire services, since it had the best reporting from inside Afghanistan. But none of them reported these illuminating remarks from Qaddafi.

NEOCONS' PLAN FOR AL QAEDA'S GLOBAL FUTURE

Voices from the Washington neocon oligarchy leave no doubt that the U.S. establishment's reliance on al Qaeda as its tool for ordering world affairs is intended to be a long-term one. The neocon retired Army colonel Robert Killebrew considers al Qaeda as the "once and future threat, : since he believes that "the al Qaeda we will face in 2010 will be an even more dangerous threat to Americas than the al Qaeda our troops are fighting today." According to Killebrew, "we can expect that within a decade al Qaeda will open one, or possibly several, political fronts in predominantly Islamic states, transforming itself from a deadly but diffuse terrorist movement into implacably hostile governmental factions throughout the Middle East that will pose critical geostrategic challenges to America and our allies.... the political transformation of al Qaeda into a radical pan Islamic movement would divide the world between the progressive West and a number of deeply reactionary, nuclear-armed states, and raise the possibility of far more serious conflict." (Washington Post, August 8, 2004) Here we see the oligarchy's intent of employing the benighted ideology of al Qaeda to organize the Arab and Islamic worlds for their own destruction. As we will see, neocolonial and neo-imperial powers have always feared secular Arab nationalism of the Nasser type, and have been eager to foment fundamentalist alternatives in the hope of perpetuating backwardness and isolation. The big danger for the U.S. has always been that Arab oil producers would reach their own economic development accords with western Europe, Japan, and the larger third world nations, such as Brazil. Al Qaeda fanaticism makes precisely these types of understandings impossible, preventing the forms of cooperation which would do the most damage to U.S.. The U.S. is biggest backer of al Qaeda, in just the same way that the Bank of England, Royal Dutch Shell, the City of London, and Wall Street were the biggest boosters of Hitler: if you know that you may face an adversary, the reasoning goes, then try to make sure that adversary will have a raving, incompetent, fanatical leader who will be structurally incapable of making successful alliances with your other foes.

Perhaps this is what Bush 43, whose family tradition includes grandfather Prescott Bush's implication in the Thyssen Nazi financial infrastructure, meant when he said in late 2001 that the United States has "the best intelligence we can possibly have," and what Porter J. Goss, the Florida Republican who chaired the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in 2001, meant when he denied that any intelligence failure had taken place around 9/11. (R.W. Apple, New York Times, December 14, 2001)

PRELIMINARIES: TERRORISM IN THE 1990s

Guys, now you saw this bomb went off and you both known we could avoid that. -- Emad Salem to the FBI, 1993

Synthetic terrorism is an enterprise that terrorist controllers often choose to escalate gradually, partly to enhance their own technical preparedness, and partly as a means of progressively degrading public intelligence while institutionalizing fantastic lies about what is going on. The Italian terrorism of 1967-1985, for example, which was directed by NATO intelligence, MI-6, the CIA, and SISMI, shows an unmistakable pattern of escalation, inasmuch as each terrorist attack became the stepping stone of the successive one, with an overall tendency towards larger and more complicated operations with higher and higher numbers of victims, reaching a culmination at Bologna in 1980. lf we look at terrorism in the U.S. during the 1990s, we see a similar pattern. One has the impression of looking at a crescendo of terror attacks, in which each new attack introduces new elements which will be important in the attacks to come. It is worth pointing out that, during the 1990s, few if any wealthy oligarchs became victims of terrorism; the dead were almost always the little people, the masses, and so it was to remain on 9/11. In addition, each new distortion accepted by the public increased the overall gullibility of the political system.

THE WORLD TRADE CENTER 1993: THE FBI SET IT UP AND LET IT HAPPEN

The bomb detonated in the underground parking garage at the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993 killed six people, resulted in injuries to a thousand more, and threw lower Manhattan into chaos. At the center of the terror cell was a bombmaker who had been in the Egyptian army. He was also a paid informer and provocateur for the FBl. Other participants in the terror operation had entered the country with the connivance of the CIA, despite the fact that normally they would not have been allowed in. The FBI was aware of every phase of the plot, but refused to exploit numerous opportunities to stop it. The first WTC bomb of 1993 went off with the full complicity of the FBl, which tried repeatedly to pass off the blame to the Sudanese mission to the United Nations. The Kean-Hamilton Commission has nothing to say about this.

A detailed narrative of these events has appeared under the title The Cell. It is a coverup, written by participants in the operation. This book ignores the central and most dramatic event of the entire affair, which was the publication of the tapes secretly made by FBl provocateur Emad Salem of his own conversations with his FBI controllers -tapes which he wisely surmised he might need later as an insurance policy. Salem appears to have been passed from British intelligence to the FBI.

Even without the Salem tapes, The Cell presents a story of criminal incompetence within the FBI. The story starts with the November 1990 assassination in New York City of Rabbi Meir Kahane, an Israeli terrorist leader who had founded the Jewsih Defense League several decades earlier. The accused assassin of Kahane was El Sayyid Nosai, an Egyptian fanatic. But Nosair was not just a drifting fanatic: when the police searched his apartment, "there were training manuals from the Army Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg. There were copies of teletypes that had been routed to the Secretary of the Army and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. How had Nosair come up with those? Clearly, he had a source in a sensitive position in the U.S. military." (Cell 45) Much more likely, his terrorist controller occupied a sensitive position in the U.S. military, as any fool can see.

Nosair's Arabic-language files were said to contain the detailed plan of a series of future terrorist acts, including the 1993 WTC bombing. But the FBI was not interested in having these documents translated; it simply put them into storage and ignored them until it was too late. This vital evidence, according to our authors, "entered a black hole."

Sheikh Abdel Rahman, known to Kean-Hamilton commission devo1:ees as the blind Sheikh, was a known terrorist, a friend of the CIA's favorite Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and of Osama Bin Laden. He had been placed under house arrest in Egypt. Nevertheless, he was allowed to enter the U.S., coming from Sudan. In the light of the subsequent demonization of the blind Sheikh as one of the key terrorist plotters of the 1990s, we are entitled to ask why he was allowed to come to the us in the first place. The preferred answer: "Abdel Rahman's visa was signed by a CIA officer stationed at the Sudanese consulate, and one theory advanced by FBI agents is that the Agency sponsored his immigration. The CIA, in that scenario, may have wanted to nurture its ties to the Egyptian fundamentalists in order to avoid a replay of Iran in 1979, when the overthrow of the Shah left U.S. intelligence out in the cold. Another theory was that the officer had 'gone bad."' (Cell 54) More likely, the CIA or the moles within it simply wanted to use the Sheikh for terror operations against Egypt and/or the U.S.. As for the Shah, he was deliberately overthrown by the U.S. in the framework of Brzezinski's Islamic fundamentalism strategy, with the CIA as an active participant. (See Dreyfus)

The key wrecker in this episode seems to be one Carson Dunbar, an FBI manager working in the FBI National Security Division who oversaw the activities of the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York City. Salem's two controllers were Louie Napoli and John Anticev, who reported to Dunbar. Even though Salem was supposedly providing good information, Dunbar "was reluctant to trust too much" in him. (Cell 70-71) Salem for his part did not want to wear a wire when talking to his terrorist confreres, since that would mean he would have to testify in court, which would put an end to his career as an infiltrator. Dunbar increasingly insisted that Salem wear a wire, and Salem kept refusing. This then led to the alleged "firing" of Salem as an FBI informant by Napoli, acting under pressure from Dunbar. The cover story" "... many people in the Bureau, especially street agents, blamed Dunbar for dropping Salem." (Cell 75) A more sophisticated interpretation would be that Dunbar was deliberately wrecking the surveillance of the terror cell. Was Dunbar a mole?

When alleged terror planner Ramzi Yousef comes on the scene, the INS inspector at the airport suggests that he be locked up. But by some strange coincidence "there was not enough room in the INS lockup, so he was released with the promise that he would turn up at a hearing later." (Cell 77)

When the terrorists in the cell decide that they need training, they turn to Garrett Wilson, former Army Ranger who worked as a military police officer at a naval base near Philadelphia. Wilson was an agent of NCIS, meaning naval intelligence. The idea was now supposedly that while Wilson provided the training -- allegedly for Jihad in Bosnia, which matched U.S. government policy at the time -- the FBI could monitor the comings and goings of the terrorists, and track each one of them to his home and job. Dunbar once again attempted sabotage: "Dunbar was concerned that the Bureau was training potential terrorists, holy warriors who may not be breaking the law now, but who might one day turn the skills they were acquiring against the U.S. ... Dunbar ... was uncomfortable with the entire mission." (Cell 88) Because of these scruples, Dunbar was able to contrive an outcome in which the terrorist got their training, while the FBI was deprived of the promised harvest of valuable information. On a certain weekend in January 1993, about a month before the WTC bombing, the terrorists had all gathered on a farm near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The FBI had the place staked out and surrounded. All that was needed was the patience to wait until the terrorists got into their cars and drove off for home, and the FBI would know precisely where each of them lived and slept, making it possible to roll up the entire cell on demand. But at this critical moment, Dunbar decided that this was nothing but a waste of manpower. He called all the FBI agents back to New York, preventing them from tailing their suspects home. He also wanted to dump the entire investigation on the FBI's Newark office, washing his hands of it.

The JTTF was just a whisper away from the World Trade Center plot. But once more Dunbar lost patience with the operation ... At that point, JTTF's jihad investigation was effectively dead in the water, killed by an investigative stroke of the pen. ( Cell 91)

The way was now clear for the attack on the WTC a few weeks later. The FBI had thoroughly bungled the case:

There were very few strangers to law enforcement among the men who blew up the World Trade Center. Mohammed Salameh and Mahmoud Abouhalima had been collared by Eddie Norris's detectives after the Rabbi Kahane murder, but then let go under pressure from the NYPD brass. JTTF's people had surveilled a number of the other bombers at the shooting range in Calverton, even before the Kahane case. Emad Salem had become a trusted member of the group's larger circle, with close links to Abdel Rahman, Nosair, Abouhalima and el Gabrowny. He'd been in the thick of the original 'twelve Jewish locations' plot and a hair's breadth away from the actual World Trade Center bombers. Tommy Corrigan's colleagues had tailed several more of their associates to the training camp in Harrisburg just a few months ago. In fact, the last of the surveillances had run up until just a few weeks before the bombing, when one group seemed to be asking the other if they knew how to get detonators ... the two cases were both shut down based on a series of FBI management concerns that were more administrative than exigent. (Cell 98)

Thus far the coverup, which appears damning enough in its own way. But The Cell constitutes only a limited hangout, conceding incompetence in the hopes of obscuring real treason. The procedure is not a new one, having been outlined some four hundred years ago by Paolo Sarpi of Venetian intelligence, who perfected the technique of speaking well of someone while pretending to speak ill. The technique amounts to criticizing a valued asset because he beats his wife, while remaining silent on the fact that he is also a serial killer.

We get far closer to reality with the following article by Ralph Blumenthal from the New York Times which appeared on October 28, 1993:

Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast

Law enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center, and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, an informer said after the blast.

The informer was to have helped the plotters build the bomb and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by an FBI supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Emad Salem, should be used, the informer said.

The account, which is given in the transcript of hundreds of hours of tape recordings that Mr. Salem secretly made of his talk with law-enforcement agents, portrays the authorities as being in a far better position than previously known to foil the February 26th bombings of New York's tallest towers.

Supervisor 'Messed It Up'

After the bombing, [Salem] resumed his undercover work. In an undated transcript of a conversation from that period, Mr. Salem recounts a talk he had had earlier with an agent about an unnamed FBI supervisor who, he said, "came and messed it up."

"He requested to meet me in the hotel," Mr. Salem says of the supervisor.

"He requested to make me testify, and if he didn't push for that, we'll be going building the bomb with a phony powder, and grabbing the people who was involved in it. But since you, we didn't do that."

The transcript quotes Mr. Salem as saying that he wanted to complain to FBI headquarters in Washington about the Bureau's failure to stop the bombing, but was dissuaded by an agent identified as John Anticev.

Mr. Salem said Mr. Anticev had told him, "He said, I don't think that the New York people would like the things out of the New York Office to go to Washington DC."

Another agent, identified as Nancy Floyd, does not dispute Mr. Salem's account, but rather appears to agree with it, saying of the 'New York people': "well, of course not, because they don't want to get their butts chewed."

Salem was later given $1.5 million by the FBI to keep his mouth shut. This extraordinary article, and the transcripts upon which it is based, leave no doubt that a faction within the FBI was determined to have the first WTC bombing take place, aru:1 sabotaged any and all serious law enforcement efforts which non-witting FBI personnel and New York police undertook in good faith to try to avoid this disaster. FBI managers wanted a real bomb, and at the same time wrecked the surveillance operation that had been watching the terrorist cell. So far as is known, none of the FBI moles involved has ever been called to account. The Kean-Hamilton commission has nothing whatever to say about this "intelligence failure." In any sane society, the active participation of the FBI in the first WTC bomb plot conspiracy would have been the occasion for the breakup of this dysfunctional agency, or at the very least a thorough purge of the officials involved. The silence of the 9/11 commission on this matter is yet another indicator of its moral and conceptual bankruptcy.

OKLAHOMA CITY

The attack on the Federal Building in Oklahoma City killed 168 people, and marked a definite escalation in the pattern of synthetic terrorism. Here many of the components of the 9/11 attacks were experimented with and tested, partly to gauge the degree to which the public would believe that the techniques being used were what the FBI claimed that they were. Local media coverage concurred that there had been more than one explosion at the Federal Building, and at first the national media attempted to suggest that a Middle East terror organization had been involved. Soon Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were arrested, and McVeigh in particular was subjected to a thorough demonization by the controlled corporate media. The casualties and building damage were attributed according to the official account to a single truck bomb containing some 4,800 pounds of ammonium nitrate transported in a Ryder van, and parked in front of the building. All reference to multiple explosions soon disappeared. Retired Brigadier General Benton Partin of the U.S. Air Force, an expert in explosives, including nuclear detonations, came forward with a convincing analysis showing that the official explanation was physically impossible, given what is known about the propagation of a shock wave through the atmosphere. Air, Partin stressed, is a very inefficient coupling mechanism when it comes to directing such a shock wave against heavily reinforced concrete beams and columns. Blast damage potential, according to his analysis, decreases more rapidly than an inverse function of the cube of the distance, so there was no way that a fertilizer bomb could have accounted for the extensive damage observed. Partin concluded:

"The Murrah Federal Building was not destroyed by one sole truck bomb. The major factor in its destruction appears to have been detonation of explosives carefully placed at four critical junctures on supporting columns within the building. The only possible reinforced concrete structural failure solely attributable to the truck bomb was the stripping out of the ceilings of the first and second floors in the 'pit' area behind columns B4 and By. Even this may have been caused by a demolition charge at column B3. It is truly unfortunate that a separate and independent bomb damage assessment was not made during the cleanup -- before the building was demolished on May 23 and hundreds of truck loads of debris were hauled away, smashed down, and covered with dirt behind a security fence .... All ambiguity with respect to the use of supplementing demolition charges and the type of truck used could be quickly resolved if the FBI were required to release the surveillance camera coverage of this terribly tragic event." ( www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/OK/PARTIN/ok2.htm )

Soon after the explosion, Controlled Demolition Inc. was called in to destroy those parts of the building which had remained standing, and to speedily dispose of all the rubble of the building. This, of course, prefigures the blatant tampering with a crime scene which became the hallmark of Mayor Giuliani's approach to the World Trade Center.

We need have no illusions about Gen. Partin, who belonged to a dubious organization called the Rushmore Foundation, which occupied itself with working with and studying the right-wing militias that proliferated during the 1990s. Partin made special reference to the problems posed by tampering with the crime scene in a July 30, 1995 letter to GOP Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. Here Partin wrote that "no government law enforcement agency should be permitted to demolish, smash, and bury evidence of a counterterrorism sting operation, sabotage, or terrorist attack without a thorough examination by an independent, technically competent agency. If an aircraft crashed because of a bomb, or a counterterrorism sting or an FAA controller error, the FAA would not be permitted to gather and bury the evidence. The National Transportation Safety Board would have been called in to conduct an investigation and where possibly every piece of debris would have been collected and arrayed to determine cause of failure." But nobody in power was willing to protect the crime scene or force the FBI to disgorge the evidence it had sequestered. The suggestible public had been given a spectacular example of how fragile steel-reinforced concrete buildings are supposed to be in the delusional world of synthetic terrorism, and the precedent of bringing in Controlled Demolition to destroy the evidence had also been established for all to see. These advances on the part of the terrorist controllers would become components in the future synthetic terrorism of 9/11.

Before leaving Oklahoma City, we should recall that the prevalent form of counter-gangs which were fielded during the 1990s by the intelligence agencies of the U.S. and Britain was precisely these right wing militias. They were a widespread phenomenon during that decade but now, from the point of view of the controlled corporate media, they have simply disappeared. But such a large recruiting ground for trained manpower does not disappear from one decade to the next. Some of the case officers who directed the duped rank and file of the right-wing militias have doubtless found their way into the clandestine ops/special forces element which made its contribution to 9/11.

TWA 800

On July 17, 1996, TWA flight 800, a Boeing 747, crashed off the coast of Long Island, killing all 230 persons on board. Pierre Salinger, the former White House press secretary to President Kennedy and a former ABC newsman, soon came forward with the charge that the plane had been destroyed by a U.S. Navy missile which had gone astray. At a press conference in Paris, Salinger offered a 69-page document and a set of radar images to bolster his case. The FBI, Pentagon and federal air safety investigators simply rejected this theory, which spread through the Internet following the July 17, 1996 crash. National Transportation Safety Board Chairman James Hall called Salinger's allegations "irresponsible." Salinger claimed the 'missile' was fired during a "super- secret" U.S. Navy exercise off Long Island and was meant to target a Tomahawk missile, but hit Flight 800 instead when it "lost its lock on its original target." They alleged that the missile was either a kinetic energy missile or a continuous rod missile; the continuous rod missile would "slice through" the plane. Salinger alleged that witnesses monitoring secret Navy anti-terrorism exercises heard a male voice say, "Oh, my God, I just hit that plane." Salinger also asserted that two Russian satellites active above the scene of the disaster had recorded images showing a missile hitting the TWA aircraft. Salinger's personal stature makes it necessary to take his charges seriously, but this case has remained clouded by mystery. (CNN, March 13, 1997)

U.S. SPECIAL FORCES SERGEANT ALl MOHAMED: BIN LADEN'S PERSONAL ASSISTANT

The other detail about the 1993 WTC bombing which we need to know is that the bombers were in fact trained by the picaresque Sergeant Ali Mohammed of the United States Army Special Forces. At different stages of his colorful career, Mohamed worked, or seemed to work, for the Egyptian Army, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the CIA, the FBI, the U.S. Army Special Forces, the al Kifah Refugee Services Office, the Afghan mujaheddin and Osama Bin Laden.

Ali Mohamed was born in Egypt in 1952. He attended the Military Academy in Cairo and gained promotion in the Egyptian Special Forces and military intelligence, rising to the rank of major. In 1981 he came to train with the U.S. green berets at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. While still in Egypt, he had become associated with the blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman, who was allegedly part of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. It was four officers from Ali Mohamed's unit who carried out the October 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Ali Mohamed was attending courses in Fort Bragg at the time, and he was never implicated in the plot. But, supposedly because he was considered a sympathizer with the assassins, Ali Mohamed was obliged to resign his commission.

In 1984, Ali Mohamed began working as a security adviser for Egypt Air. He tried to go to work for the CIA, but after a short time on the job he was dumped for having unreported contacts with Hezbollah, and his name was placed on the State Department watch list. Despite this, he was nevertheless allowed to enter the U.S. in 1986. Ali Mohamed married an American woman who worked in Silicon Valley, and became an American citizen, despite his well-established terrorist  links.

In 1986, Ali Mohamed enlisted in the U.S. Army Special Forces, despite still being on the watch list. He was recruited by Lt. Col. Steve Neely to give lectures on Islamic culture and politics to the anti- in Laden units being trained at Fort Bragg.

In 1987, Ali Mohamed told Lt. Col. Neely that he wanted to use a 30-day leave to go to Afghanistan, where guerrilla warfare was raging against the Soviet Red Army occupiers. This might have created a grave incident with the Soviets, and Lt. Col. Neely sent a report about Mohamed's plan to his superiors, who failed to intervene. When Mohamed came back from Afghanistan, he told Lt. Col. Neely that he had taken part in combat and had wiped out more than one Russian patrol. Neely composed a report on Mohamed's findings about the Soviet spetsatz special forces. Ali Mohamed left the army when his enlistment expired, but he remained in the reserves. Ali Mohamed was in the Fort Bragg 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) throughout this period. A retired special ops source has stated that particularly this unit involves a virtual lifetime, informal membership; "they never drop off the radar screen." From 1989 to 1992-93, Ali Mohamed gave paramilitary training in the New York City area to the "Islamic terror" clique convicted for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. It was he who trained Nosair, and he might also have been the source of the secret documents found in Nosair's apartment. (The Cell 140 ff) The training took place at an Islamist center in Brooklyn. According to the London Independent, a CIA internal review conducted in 1998 would reveal that the Agency was "partly culpable" for the WTC bomb of 1993.

Another of Sgt. Ali Mohamed's supervisors at Fort Bragg was Col. Norville de Atkine of the Fort Bragg Special Forces School, who later turned up as the co-author with anti- Moslem agitator Daniel Pipes - -appointed by Bush to the board of the U.S. Institute of Peace -- in a 1995 piece entitled "Middle Eastern Studies: What Went Wrong" in Pipes' Middle East Quarterly.

Ali Mohamed now attempted once more to go to work for the CIA. Starting in 1990, he attempted to enter the FBI as a translator. During his interview process he told the FBI about a passport- forging operation run by Hamas, and became an FBI informant. Twice during the early 1990s, Ali Mohamed brought the person the corporate media today call Bin Laden's right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to the U.S. for fund-raising tours in California. The second tour came in 1995, exactly the time Zawahiri and his brother were beginning the mujahideen deployment into the Balkans under protection of corrupted networks within NATO. This channel became a key component of the NATO-run KLA guerrillas in Kosovo. Also in 1995, Ali Mohamed had applied for a security job in the high security area of a Department of Defense subcontractor near his home in Santa Clara, CA. He was interviewed three times by the Defense Security Service (DSS). Ali Mohamed's friend in Santa Clara, Abu El-Dahab, ran a phone patch communications link for the alleged "bin Laden Network" around the world.

In 1991, Ali Mohamed worked as a personal assistant to Osama Bin Laden, helping with security and other matters when Bin Laden moved his operation from Pakistan to Khartoum, Sudan. Ali Mohammed performed other services for Bin Laden. "In 1992, I conducted military and basic explosives training for al Qaeda in Afghanistan," Ali Mohamed told U.S. authorities in 1999. "I also conducted intelligence training for al Qaeda. I taught my trainees how to create cell structures that could be used for operations." (The Cell 145) Supposedly the FBI, in the person of agent John Zindt, got its first news of al Qaeda from an interview with Ali Mohamed in May 1993. Toward the end of the 1990s, the FBI would arrest Ali Mohamed as the prelude to putting him on the permanent payroll as an informer.

In 1993, Ali Mohamed, who was traveling in the company of an al Qaeda terrorist, was arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP); the FBI intervened, with Ali Mohamed's FBI case officer asking the RCMP to release Mohamed. According to the Toronto Globe and Mail, Ali Mohamed was "working with U.S. counter-terrorist agents, playing a double or triple game, when he was questioned in 1993."

Patrick J. Fitzgerald who prosecuted Ali Mohamed twice as U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois, told the 9/11 commission that Ali Mohamed was a top al Qaeda agent who "trained most of al Qaeda's top leadership" including "the persons 'who would later carry out the 1993 World Trade center bombing."

Ali Mohamed was put on trial in 2000 for his role in the 1998 bombings of U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which the Washington establishment had rushed to blame on Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda, in part because of their sophisticated coordination. Ali Mohamed was allowed to cop a plea bargain. As part of the deal, Mohamed revealed that he had trained the 1993 WTC bombers. According to a State Department summary of Ali Mohamed's testimony, he was ordered by the FBI in 1994 to fly from Kenya to New York, and he complied. He was debriefed by an FBI agent in the context of the upcoming trial of the blind Sheikh Abdel Rahman on charges stemming from the 1993 WTC attack. Mohamed stated: "I flew back to the United States, spoke to the FB1, but I didn't disclose everything that I knew."

After Ali Mohamed had been released by the RCMP on orders from the FBI, he flew to Nairobi, Kenya, where he photographed the U.S. Embassy. According to Mohamed's 2000 confession, "Bin Laden looked at the picture of the American Embassy and pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber." [3] Another cluster of attacks ascribed to Bin Laden was the bombings of U.S. East African embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

In the 9/11 commission's report we read: "As early as December, 1993, a team of al Qaeda operatives had begun casing targets in Nairobi for future attacks. It was led by Ali Mohamed, a former Egyptian army officer who had moved to the 1Jnited States in the mid-1980s, enlisted in the U.S. Army, and became an instructor at Fort Bragg. He had provided guidance and training to extremists at the Farouq Mosque in Brooklyn, including some who were subsequently convicted in the February 1993 attack on the World trade Center." (68)

Since September 11th, many publicly available leads pointing to Bin Laden in fact draw on the corrupted investigation and trial results from the 1993 WTC and 1998 African embassy bombings, a timeframe in which Ali Mohamed was in repeated contact with the FBI and Department of Defense, and was permitted to operate in the modus operandi of an officially sanctioned rogue intelligence operative. Ali Mohamed must be considered one of the most successful double agents of the party of international terror ensconced in the U.S. government.

EGYPTAIR 990: THE DEBUT OF GLOBAL HAWK?

October 31, 1999 was Halloween, and this day was marked by the mysterious crash of Egyptair flight 990, a Boeing 767 bound from New York's JFK to Cairo. At a little before 2 AM, the plane abruptly descended from its normal altitude of 33,000 feet and, after some desperate maneuvers, crashed into the sea. The U.S. government, in the person of the National Transportation Safety Board, alleged that the plane had been deliberately crashed by Co-pilot Gameel al-Batouti. The U.S. case was built on the cockpit voice recorder, which, the NTSB claimed, had registered Batouti's Islamic prayer, "I rely on God," just before the plane started its dive, and again at several points on the way down. Batouti was thus accused of being the first Islamist suicide pilot of the current phase. The Egyptian government rejected this explanation, and demanded a more objective investigation.

Of this incident, the 9/11 commission writes: "In late 1999, a great deal of discussion took place in the media about the crash off the coast of Massachusetts of Egyptair Flight 990, a Boeing 767. The most plausible explanation that emerged was that one of the pilots had gone berserk, seized the controls, and flown the aircraft into the sea. After the 1999-2000 millennium alerts, when the nation had relaxed, Clarke held a meeting of his Counterterrorism Security Group devoted largely to the possibility of a possible [sic] airline hijacking by al Qaeda." (345) Clarke, as we see, was always anxious to build up the reputation of al Qaeda in the U.S. government. The 9/11 commission also does not mention that this flight carried a group of Egyptian military officers who had just been trained in the United States to fly Apache helicopters, despite strenuous objections on the part of the government of Israel. (von Bulow 207 ff; 264 n. 204)

This case became widely known because of an article by William Langewiesche in the Atlantic Monthly which was published shortly after 9/11 ("The Crash of Egyptair 990," November 2001). According to Langewiesche, the supposed "suicide bomber" was a 60-year old bon vivant three months away from his retirement. He was married and had five children, one of whom was a girl who suffered from lupus but who had been receiving successful treatment in Los Angeles. Batouti had a comfortable home in Cairo and a vacation home by the Mediterranean. He was carrying with him an automobile tire he had bought in New Jersey the day before, and had a number of Viagra samples to distribute to his friends as gifts. Any attempt to depict this man as a suicide pilot is destined to shipwreck on the shoals of absurdity.

According to Langewiesche's tendentious account, at 1:48 the flight's pilot, Captain Habashi, went to the bathroom, leaving Batouti alone at the controls. At 1:48:30 an unintelligible sound was recorded on the CVR, which he claims was "control it" or "hydraulic." The word was probably in English, with three syllables, and the accent was on the second syllable. What this might mean remains a mystery. Then Batouti repeated four times as the aircraft descended: "I rely on God."

Absolutely no Cockpit Voice Recorders from 9/11 have ever been made available in full to the general public or to researchers; the FBI and the government obviously have a great deal to hide. If those CVRs could speak, they might sound something like this dialogue:

Habashi: What's happening? What's happening?
Batouti: I rely on God. I rely on God.
Habashi: What's happening, Gameel? What's happening?
Habashi: What is this? What is this? Did you shut the engines?
Habashi: Get away in the engines! ...shut the engines!
Batouti: It's shut.
Habashi: Pull! Pull with me! Pull with me! Pull with me!
[Silence]

Perhaps Egyptair 990 was no longer under the control of its pilots, but was now being remotely controlled by the U.S. Force's Global Hawk system, the same technology used to guide the Predator drone used in Afghanistan about which Richard Clarke had so much to say at the 9/11 commission in Apri1 2004. Perhaps Egyptair 990 was the Boeing 767 chosen for the dress rehearsal for 9/11. In the light of subsequent events, this hypothesis is far more credible than the absurd explanation espoused by the NTSB and its minion, Langewiesche.

It was later found from the Flight Data Recorder that the elevators on the tail were split, with one in position to lower the nose of the plane, and the other positioned to raise it. "The ailerons on both wings had assumed a strange upswept position, normally never seen on an airplane." (46) These anomalies did not interest the NTSB, which had espoused the "suicide pilot" thesis.

The Egyptian representatives at the NTSB proceedings pointed out that when Batouti idled the engines, it was to keep from gaining speed as the plane had begun its dive. When he cut the engines, Batouti was carrying out the prescribed restart procedure, because he erroneously believed -- based on the low oil pressure warning light that was flashing in the cockpit -- that the engines had flamed out. Habashi was apparently under the same impression. When Habashi called on him to pull, Batouti did so, as the FDR showed. Despite so much uncertainty, the U.S. government arrogantly pushed forward with its own improbable version of the event -- Vice President Al Gore reportedly angered Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak during his state visit to Washington by making a crack about "the suicide flight." The reality may have been the debut of Global Hawk as a system for synthetic terrorism.

Tarek Selim, the chief pilot of Egypt Air, told a British reporter that the plane was going so fast that it must somehow have lost its tail assembly. Selim called the FBI's theory that one of the pilots had deliberately crashed the plane in a suicide action as "ridiculous" and "nonsense." Selim's view was that the Egyptian aircraft "had been brought down by either a bomb or a missile that hit the plane's tail." (Al-Ahram Weekly, The Guardian, November 26, 1999)

As for Langewiesche, the primitive level of his propaganda style can be seen in the passage in which he attempts to win his readers' gullible devotion for the NTSB. According to its apologist Langewiesche, the NTSB is shielded from the political currents of Washington; it "represents the most progressive American thinking on the role and character of good government " (44) Langewiesche goes on: "In part because the NTSB seems so lean, and in part because by its very definition it advocates for the 'right' causes, it receives almost universally positive press coverage. The NTSB is technocratic. It is clean. It is Government Lite." (44) Egypt Air, by contrast, is portrayed as a sinister enterprise, operating out of Stalinist-style office buildings, which refuses to be privatized. Our reporter's lack of impartiality could hardly be more evident. Of course, the specialty of the NTSB in the 1990s was to run interference for the asset-strippers and corporate wreckers who had taken over the freight railways of this country with every intention of running them into the ground while extracting the maximum of loot from the deteriorating fixed capital. They did this by ruling that trainwrecks were human error, and not the fault of the railroads. One such case was the February 17, 1996 crash of a freight train with a local commuter train on the Chesapeake and Ohio tracks near Silver Spring, Maryland. Eleven persons were killed and 24 were injured when an Amtrak train collided with a Maryland Rail Commuter (MARC) train. The cause of the crash was clearly the railroad's lack of upkeep on the signal system, but the NTSB ruled that the cause was human error -on the part of the engineer who was dead. The NTSB is mandated by law to provide a timely accident investigation for all fatal transportation mishaps in the U.S. or involving U.S. carriers abroad; so far the NTSB has failed to report on the four plane crashes believed to have occurred on 9/11. Perhaps it is not so well insulated from dirty Washington politics as it would like to make people think. Langewiesche established his credentials for dishonesty so well in this article that he was immediately assigned to cover the WTC crime scene, where he managed to write 200 pages without saying anything about the illegal removal of evidence in a criminal case that was going on all around him, as we will soon see.

AMERICAN 587

Two months after 9/11, American Airlines Flight 587 -- an Airbus 300-600 -- left John F. Kennedy International Airport en route to the Dominican Republic. Less than three minutes after takeoff, the aircraft crashed in a blazing inferno in the heart of a Queens neighborhood. All 265 people aboard perished. According to the NTSB, the tail fin and rudder of the plane sheared off as it accelerated. This was the second deadliest crash in U.S. history, but it also "was the first example where we had an in-flight failure of a major structural component of an aircraft that in fact was made of composite materials," said National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Chairwoman Marion Blakey.

In the case of American Airlines Flight 587, federal officials seemed interested in avoiding the question of terrorism, and so they released detailed information about the cockpit voice recorder within less than 36 hours. (Philadelphia Daily News, November 15, 2001) While this crash also remains very suspicious, and exhibits some technical parallels to Egyptair 890, it appears impossible to come to a definite conclusion at this time as to what causes were involved.

_______________

Notes:

3. Peter Dale Scott, "9/11 Commission Misses FBI's Embarrassing al Qaeda Dealings," www.dissidentvoice.org , June 27, 2004.

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