9-11 AND THE SMOKING
GUN Part 1: 'Independent'
commission By Pepe Escobar
"The overwhelming bulk of the evidence was
that this was an attack that was likely to take place
overseas." - White House National Security
Adviser Condoleezza Rice, May 16, 2002
"Bin
Laden Determined to Strike in US." - CIA's August 6,
2001 briefing memo to President George W Bush
"If you invade Iraq you will create a hundred
bin Ladens." - Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak,
January 2003
The 9-11 Commission, according to
its own website, is "an independent, bipartisan
commission created by congressional legislation and the
signature of President George W Bush in late 2002". The
commission is "chartered to prepare a full and complete
account of the circumstances surrounding the September
11, 2001 terrorist attacks, including preparedness for
and the immediate response to the attacks".
A
key consequence of the political theater/media circus
around former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke's
revelations - in his testimony to the commission and in
his best-selling book Against All Enemies - was
to force the White House to "deliver" National Security
Advisor Condoleezza ("Condi") Rice. She is due to
testify to the commission on Thursday - just as the Iraq
occupation is confronted to the ultimate nightmare:
Fallujah as the new Gaza in the Sunni triangle, and an
uprising by the millions of angry, destitute followers
of firebrand Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
But
as far as the 9-11 Commission is concerned, and at least
for the moment, the White House got what it wanted.
President George W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney
will have a private conversation with the commission as
a tandem, not under oath, and behind closed doors. This
testimony won't be recorded. The commission will hardly
have more than two or three hours to ask crucial
questions to both, when it could have at least double
the time to ask questions to each of them separately.
The arrangement of course prevents them from
contradicting each other - a basic premise of any
criminal investigation. It makes sure that the
all-powerful, all-seeing Cheney is the Praetorian Guard
capable of preventing any Bush rhetorical disaster.
Andrew Rice, chair of the 9-11 Commission
Committee of the September 11 Families for Peaceful
Tomorrows organization, is one among millions of
terribly frustrated Americans. He believes that as far
as this official 9-11 Commission is concerned, the "fix
was in" from the beginning. Beverly Eckert, whose
husband died on September 11, adds: "We wanted
journalists, we wanted academics ... We did not want
politicians."
The commission comprises nine men
and a woman, five Republicans and five Democrats. They
include two former governors, a former navy secretary, a
former deputy attorney-general, two former Congressmen,
two former senators and a former White House counsel.
It's a consummate bunch of establishment arch-insiders,
all inter-connected. One wonders how such a body can
possibly investigate what's behind the myriad of
political, military and intelligence interplay. Even the
commission itself has been forced to admit that of the
16 federal agencies covered by its investigation, only
the State Department is being "fully cooperative", with
the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as a distant
second. This is leading to a growing perception, not
only in Washington but in other parts of the world, of a
"hidden agenda". "They seem to be interested in putting
up a good show as a coverup; and of course they're very
worried about damage control," says a diplomat from the
European Union.
Independents in conflict
There are devastating cases of conflict of
interest in the commission. Chairman Thomas Kean may be
the most obvious. The US$1 trillion lawsuit filed in
August 2002 by the families of the victims of September
11 includes two of Kean's business partners among the
accused: Saudi billionaires Khalid bin Mahfouz (who is
Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law, no less), and Mohammed
Hussein al-Amoudi. They are key financial players behind
al-Qaeda: Mahfouz transferred millions of dollars from a
Saudi pension fund to bank accounts in London and New
York linked with al-Qaeda. He is a former director of
BCCI, the bank in the center of a notorious $12 billion
bankruptcy scandal during the presidency of Bush senior.
Kean is director and shareholder of Amerada Hess
Corporation, an oil giant involved in a joint venture
with Delta Oil of Saudi Arabia - which is owned by the
clans of Mahfouz and Amoudi - to explore Caspian Sea
oilfields. Amerada Hess severed the joint venture only
three weeks before Kean was appointed chairman of the
9-11 Commission by his friend George W Bush.
It's unlikely fellow members at the 9-11
Commission will ask Kean to reveal to what extent he was
aware of Mahfouz's links to al-Qaeda; or ask Amerada
Hess to open its books and reveal what kind of deals it
was cooking up with Mahfouz. After all, Bush himself
also had a business connection with Mahfouz, owner of
various investments in Houston, Texas. As to the 28
pages of the joint congressional committee detailing
Saudi support to al-Qaeda, they also seem to have
vanished into thin air.
The commission, for
instance, also will not investigate the foreign policy
that started it all in the late 1970s and early 1980s:
the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA's) full support
to the hardcore international Islamic brigades which
joined the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan -
and then turned against the US after the first Gulf War
in 1991. This would mean that the commission would have
to seriously investigate Secretary of State Colin Powell
and his number two, Richard Armitage, key players in
those 1980s proceedings.
Former national
security adviser to Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski,
also one of the key members of the Council on Foreign
Relations, was the mastermind behind the building of an
Islamic network in Afghanistan - as part of a huge,
covert CIA operation. To a large extent, the modern
Islamic jihad exists thanks to Brzezinski. There are
four members of the Council on Foreign Relations in the
commission. There's hardly any chance of them
investigating their fellow Brzezinski.
The
commission's executive director, Philip D Zelikow, is a
crucial player. This is the man who directs all the
investigative research of the commission. On October 5,
2001 - two days before the beginning of the bombing of
Afghanistan - he was appointed as one of the three
members of Bush's foreign intelligence advisory board.
Zelikow is the ultimate Bush insider.
Andrew
Rice says that Zelikow "worked with these people and now
he is defending them". Zelikow also worked for Jim
Baker, former secretary of state of Bush senior. He
spent three years on Bush senior's National Security
Council. He is close to Bush junior, and even closer to
Condi Rice: they worked together, and he even co-wrote
two books with her.
Commissioner Jamie S
Gorelick is very close to CIA director George Tenet. No
wonder: she works on the CIA's National Security
Advisory Panel, as well as on the president's Review of
Intelligence. Tenet is one of the masterminds of the
Bush administration "war on terror". This means no
chance for the commission to investigate dubious covert
operations by the CIA which may foment terrorism instead
of fighting it.
Commissioner Fred Fielding is a
former White House counsel during Reagan's time, at the
time of the Iran-Contra scandal. He is very close to all
major players in the Bush administration, in fact one of
the White House men in the commission alongside Zelikow.
Commissioner John Lehman was navy secretary
under Reagan. He served alongside two of the
commission's key witnesses: Deputy Secretary of State
Richard Armitage and former counterterrorism head
Richard Clarke. He is close to all major players in the
Bush administration and also a member of the Council on
Foreign Relations, with very close personal ties to
Henry Kissinger. Lehman is Kissinger's man in the
commission.
Commissioner Timothy J Roemer is a
former member of the Intelligence Committee's task force
on Homeland Security and Terrorism and the joint inquiry
on 9-11 of the Senate and House. He is very close to
Congressman Porter Goss and Senator Bob Graham, who
co-headed the joint inquiry. Graham and Goss, as we will
see on part 2 of this series, have very suspicious links
to former Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence director
Lieutenant General Mahmoud Ahmad.
If the
intellectual masterminds of the "war on terror" in the
Council on Foreign Relations won't be investigated,
neither will be those members of the Project for a New
American Century (PNAC). PNAC was prophetic in the sense
that even before the Bush administration, in a 2000
white paper, their members were betting on "some
catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl
Harbor" so the American people would support their
agenda of global politico-military dominance. All
neo-conservative superstars - like Cheney, Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz,
Richard Perle - are members of PNAC (see Asia Times
Online, March 20, 2003, This war is brought to you by
...)
Clarke writes about their
obsession on page 30 of his book: "I realized with
almost a sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz
were going to try to take advantage of this national
tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq." On page
231, Clarke recalls in vivid detail an April 2001
meeting where Wolfowitz is obsessed with Iraq, while the
CIA dismisses the Wolfowitz-peddled notion of Iraqi
terrorism and the State Department agrees with Clarke's
assessment of al-Qaeda as "a major threat" and "an
urgent priority".
Andrew Rice could not but be a
serious critic of the commision: "It is not about
transparency, it is just there to appease the public.
But it won't appease me or many other family members. We
need a truly independent commission that is outside the
realm of government. The worst case scenario is that I
fear this could be a whitewash and a coverup." The final
report of the commission won't be published until April
2005 - long after the November presidential election.
Clarke , Condi and the Bush
doctrine Clarke insists that he explicitly warned
the Bush administration about al-Qaeda as early as
January 25, 2001, five days after the inauguration: "It
was very explicit. [Condoleezza] Rice was briefed ...
and Zelikow sat in.". Clarke said that he gave Condi
Rice a detailed memo on how to fight al-Qaeda, based on
CIA briefings and lots of information collected under
the Bill Clinton administration. On page 229 of his
book, he writes: "... her facial expression gave me the
impression she had never heard the term [al-Qaeda]
before."
In 2002, the White House had to admit
on the record that the August 6, 2001 president daily
briefing (PDB) quoted at the start of this article said
that al-Qaeda might use hijacked planes in an attack
inside the US. A portion of this PDB, written by the
CIA, predicted that al-Qaeda would launch an attack "in
the coming weeks" and that it "will be spectacular and
designed to inflict mass casualties against US
facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been
made. Attack will occur with little or no warning." So
Bush knew: he's supposed to have read the PDB while on
holiday in Crawford, Texas. But Bush has claimed
executive privilege and the White House has refused to
release the full text of the PDB.
In her famous
May 16, 2002 press conference, Condi Rice said: "I don't
think anybody could have predicted that these people
would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade
Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon,
that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a
hijacked airplane as a missile." Apparently Rumsfeld
could have predicted it. Speaking to the 9-11 Commission
last month, Rumsfeld said he, personally, didn't know.
But he admitted having received "a civil aviation
circular that people did know ... They sent it out on
June 22, 2001".
Rumsfeld may know much more than
he's willing to admit. According to a report on the US
army's Internet site, a simulation of a plane crashing
on the Pentagon was carried 10 months before September
11. Rumsfeld told the 9-11 Commission, under oath, that
"he did not know" about this simulation, which was
conducted by the Emergency Management Team at the
Pentagon and involved a lot of employees. The simulation
could have been just one more in an endless series of
coincidences. Or it could be part of the planning for an
event the Pentagon - or at least his director -
knew was going to happen.
After the
outbursts of the Clarke-smearing campaign - brutal even
by the standards of the Bush White House - it has
emerged that Condi Rice is also contradicted by none
other than the all-powerful Dick Cheney. The White House
insists that it did know exactly what it was doing
before September 11. And Rice said the White House
counterterrorism czar was indeed "in the loop". But
Cheney said that Clarke was "not in the loop" - the
ultimate Washington put-down. So who was outlooped,
Clarke or Condi?
Clarke's central accusation is
relatively mild. He says that the Bush administration
was lost in space as far as al-Qaeda was concerned
because of its ideological fixation on Saddam Hussein.
This may have generated non-stop character assassination
from the Bush camp, but the fact is Clarke has produced
no smoking gun. Essentially, the only major
difference between Clarke and the neo-cons is that
Clarke was obsessed with bin Laden, while the neo-cons
were obsessed with Saddam. Both bin Laden and Saddam, as
we know, are former CIA assets.
On page 243 of
his book, Clarke qualifies as "somewhat off the mark"
the critique of Bush as "a dumb, lazy rich kid". But
then he crucially adds: "I doubt that anyone ever had
the chance to make the case to him that attacking Iraq
would actually make America less secure and strengthen
the broader radical Islamic terrorist movement.
Certainly he did not hear that from the small circle of
advisors who alone are the people whose views he
respects and trusts." Condi Rice has always been in
favor of regime change in Iraq.
In an article
she wrote to Foreign Affairs in early 2000, Rice
outlined what amounted to be a semi-official Bush
foreign policy platform. She lists five key foreign
policy priorities. Only the last one made any mention of
terrorism. Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, Afghanistan,
madrassas in Pakistan, al-Qaeda-style financial
networks, Islamist sleeper cells in America, Spain and
Germany, none of this is even mentioned. Rice only talks
about North Korea, Iraq and Iran - which two years
later, in early 2002, would graduate to "axis of evil"
status. She is in favor of regime change in Iraq. And
her top policy recommendation is national missile
defense - aimed at rogue states.
Sibel Edmonds,
a former FBI wiretap translator, fluent in English,
Turkish, Farsi and Azerbaijani and with top-secret
security clearance, told Salon news publication that she
is nothing but outraged: "Especially after reading
Condoleezza Rice where she said, 'we had no specific
information whatsoever of domestic threat or that they
might use airplanes'. That's an outrageous lie. And
documents can prove it's a lie." Edmonds wants the
commission to ask real questions to FBI director Robert
Mueller when he testifies later this month: "Like, in
April 2001, did an FBI field office receive legitimate
information indicating the use of airplanes for an
attack on major cities? And is it true that through an
FBI informant, who'd been used [by the bureau] for 10
years, did you get information about specific terrorist
plans and specific cells in this country? He couldn't
say no." Edmonds' recent interviews also raise the
fascinating possibility that al-Qaeda penetrated
internal security both at the Pentagon and at the State
Department. In this case, are the moles still in place?
The Bush administration as a whole took over the
media to tell everyone how they had identified the
al-Qaeda danger long ago - so they could not be accused
of passive responsibility on September 11. But the
single evidence of these later allegations was the long
build up to the post-September 11 war on Afghanistan.
What this actually means is that the war on Afghanistan
cannot possibly be described any more as an act of
legitimate defense. As to the Bush doctrine of
preventive war, which was nothing more than a rhetorical
artifact in the first place, it has become a significant
casualty of the Clarke-White House shouting match. The
doctrine has only lasted enough time to allow the Bush
administration to attack Iraq.
It is expected
that the 9-11 Commission will keep rolling a huge data
bank of unconnected "intelligence failures" and
instances of lack of dialogue between FBI and CIA. In
the end, it's fair to assume there will be a fall guy to
be blamed for all these "intelligence failures". It's
also fair to assume it won't be one of the big guns.
TOMORROW: Part 2: A real smoking gun in
Pakistan
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