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3 SPEAKING
FREELY September 11 was a third-rate
operation By Bohdan Pilacinski
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
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In late April of
2001, just five months before the September 11
attack date, Mohamed Atta was stopped for driving
erratically late at night near Ft Lauderdale,
Florida. By then, the pilots all had their
licenses, final-phase planning must have been
under way. Yet, here was Osama bin Laden's field
commander for the entire operation, driving a red
Pontiac (though 15 years old), with Arabic
stickers, and no driver's license, or at least
none he would show.
Warned and lucky, Atta
was told to show up for a court date, with
a license, or a warrant
would go out for his arrest. He got the license
but failed to show. Ten weeks later, he was
stopped for speeding, but unaccountably no
computer coughed up a warrant. Now Florida has
reciprocity; so at least in theory and for no good
reason, the September 11 attack team functioned
its last four months with an arrest warrant out
for their leader in 50 states.
Having
sorted out the contestants in their publicly
touted "mastermind" of the month contest, the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released this
disclosure of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, (so
successfully water-boarded in Pakistan). Zacarias
Moussaoui, who'd presumably attracted Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI) attention by
advising his flight instructor that he wasn't much
interested in take-offs and landings [1], hadn't
been a member of the 9/11 teams at all; he was
being held in reserve. Why? Because he was a
belligerent loud-mouth and hence a security risk.
As he so proved.
Point is, any decent
handler with minimal judgment and authority would
have yanked Moussaoui out of the country within
days of this assessment. But no, he was left
scheming on his own, possibly with consequences
for al-Qaeda more severe than we know ... such as
forcing the attack date.
No license,
sloppy driving, even Arabic stickers; worse, an
unbalanced agent working solo. These aren't just
lapses in the learning curve of an amateur
operation; these are ludicrous standards for
operational security in any clandestine
organization. In the orchestrated fear
campaign pursuant to the attack, we were
systematically inundated with extravagant claims
for al-Qaeda's potency, reach, cohesion,
dedication, vision and Satanic focus. Dr No on
petrodollars! Everything Vladimir Lenin could wish
he'd had or been! Of course much of this has since
- in the jargon of the financial press - been
"subject to downward revision"; yet, to this day,
insistence on al-Qaeda as a formerly monolithic,
then metastasized, demon pathology of epic
capacity for terror and evil, has been virtually
obligatory throughout the US media: left, right
and center.
As late as June 2, 2006,
National Intelligence czar John Negroponte
pronounced al-Qaeda as the biggest threat to
America in the world today. Again, prima facia
evidence to the contrary accumulated from day one.
Why, if the enemy was so formidable, were a
quarter of his assets hanging out over a hayfield
in the middle of nowhere, an hour and a quarter
past the initial strike on the North Tower? Why
were the hijacker's identities rumbled so quickly;
why didn't they have identification documents with
Anglicized, or Europeanized or Latinized names?
And the big tracking question: If they're this
good tactically, how good are they strategically?
Our first clue came in late December.
Having scored perhaps the most spectacular
guerrilla attack in the history of warfare, what
did al-Qaeda do for an encore? Would-be
trans-Atlantic airline bomber Richard Reid, who
couldn't find the bathroom to blow up his shoes.
There are perfectly satisfactory answers
to the above questions and others like them, but
these matter less than what they spell out
collectively. September 11 was a minimalist
operation, funded at the cost of a modest San
Francisco Bay Area condominium, by a small, weak
opponent. At its height, al-Qaeda's external
operations never mounted to better than a
third-rate execution.
Beyond that,
al-Qaeda's been an American-made myth: fear,
credulity ... and hype.
The military and
the intellectuals - the social elements with
perspective - were not that impressed, (the FBI
and terrorism professionals were hysterical).
Al-Qaeda wasn't even the first suspect; the
initial law enforcement sweep was scattershot, and
rolled up a large Israeli spy ring along with all
the Arab males and foreigners. [2] New York was
wounded but sober. It was the American TV audience
that was blown away.
On closer examination
- all publicly available information - every
Washington-generated myth about al-Qaeda erodes or
vaporizes. Here are two.
Myth number
one: A fanatical brotherhood of
impenetrable loyalty. As early as 1995, Moroccan
and British intelligence tried to turn an al-Qaeda
pilot into a double agent. L'Housssaine Kherchtou
returned from his flying duties in Africa to find
his pregnant wife begging in the streets of
Khartoum (Sudan) for money to fund a cesarean
section. He petitioned al-Qaeda for US$500 to
cover the procedure ... and was denied. His
loyalties faded, but he refused to turn. (Bin
Laden was away and the Saudis had confiscated his
assets. Al-Qaeda was suddenly bankrupt. A series
of defections ensued). In the end, Kherchtou
became the star witness in the New York trial
which convicted four al-Qaeda terrorists in the
bombing of the two US embassies in Africa. No
deals ... this of his own free will. He's now in
witness protection.
On to middle
management: Ramzi bin al-Shiba, would-be pilot and
hijacker, but for a US entry visa, became instead
the 9/11 liaison between the Hamburg cell and
al-Qaeda central. Worth $25 million to the US.
With his bodyguards dead, taken without resistance
after a three-hour gun battle with Pakistani
police.
Consider: This fount of
information knew what he'd face and might reveal.
With three hours to give orders that he's not to
be taken alive and/or to prepare his own death, he
gave himself up with predictable consequences. The
gravest of which was a trail leading to the
apprehension six months later of al-Qaeda's
operational chief, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed (KSM).
On the run with just one guard, surprised
asleep at 3 am, he got off a few rounds with his
Kalashnikov before he was overpowered. His cell
phones gave him up. Though he'd juggled 30
numbers, or maybe only 10, American and Pakistani
intelligence had gotten enough of them to either
triangulate his location or to trace his last
call. Such, anyway, is the official story, which
was extremely useful to both President George W
Bush and President Pervez Musharraf for different
reasons at the time. He's now at Guantanamo. [3].
I don't mean to imply in an abbreviated
presentation that al-Qaeda's operatives caved like
dominoes; they didn't. But the myth of
impenetrability was likely a function of, and
cover for, a debased post-Cold War CIA. As The
Atlantic reported in February of 1998, the agency
was running on bureaucratic rot. Their
intelligence stank, their agents were bought,
their case officers were self-promoting liars, and
their division heads knew no languages. Nearly
everyone with integrity had quit. [4]. As recently
reported by Le Monde and belying Washington's post
factum claims of impenetrability, well before 9/11
French intelligence had penetrated al-Qaeda's
Afghan training camps from three directions, one
of them "up to the command structures".
A
specific alert to the CIA's Paris station, dated
January 5, 2001, of the certainty of al-Qaeda's
commitment to hijack American planes, never
reached the appropriate analysts within the agency
and has left no trace in any American post 9/11
investigations. [5] And even as far back as the
Afghan campaign, everything ran through Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), without which
the Americans were lost.
Relatively
speaking, the Hamburg cell was of exceptional
quality and mostly self-motivated. As for the
rest, for every half competent operative there's a
glaring embarrassment. Reid, Moussaoui ...
consider the 20th hijacker:
One short,
al-Qaeda's aspirants kept getting turned away as
potential economic migrants. The key to US entry
was a Saudi passport. In August, with the attack
plan on hold, al-Qaeda finally got a Saudi as far
as Orlando (Disney World). He arrived on a one-way
ticket, with no credit cards, and insufficient
money to cover his one-week vacation. Then he
couldn't keep his story straight. He never got
past airport security. [6] Again, they send a bozo
out on his own. Where's the handler on this?
On the last leg of the plan - a plan five
years in the making - the embarrassments really
stack up. Days before the attack, Atta et al got
drunk and started a row in a Florida oyster bar.
Then they left a pile of flight manuals in a motel
room. Then they abandoned rental cars with more
Arabic paraphernalia. And then Atta's idiotic
suitcase, with that bizarre will, and a roadmap
for an investigation. Why did that suitcase exist?
Why wasn't it packed with generic clothes and
toilet articles?
The trail up the East
Coast was one a blind dog could follow; so thick
the FBI believed the hijackers wanted to be known.
Esprit de corps, we were told, they're weird that
way. But the sloppiness went further. One small
delay at the jetport in Portland, and Atta and
Omari would have missed their flight in Boston.
It would have taken very little more: a
minder to stay cool in the oyster bar, cover
tracks and pick up loose ends; return a rental car
which was a credit card trail; very little extra
to minimize exposure.
Did they want to be
known? Al-Qaeda has never claimed its attacks. Bin
Laden denied knowledge and responsibility for
almost four years, by which time the whole world
believed it his doing anyway. And was being known
a tactical advantage or disadvantage to al-Qaeda?
The evidence argues there was an al-Qaeda
infrastructure in Hamburg, in Afghanistan, in
Pakistan. There was nothing on American soil. No
handlers, no minders, no oversight. A near total
absence of tradecraft and a minimal knowledge of
terrain. (In San Diego, Nawaf al-Hamzi and Khalid
al-Mihdhar actually rented a bedroom from a top
FBI counterterrorism informant). [7] The one thing
the hijackers did right was keep their mouths
shut; but not a trained spook in the entire
organization in so much as a consulting capacity;
not even a fundamentalist moonlighting from the
ISI. There was no depth.
No depth and no
breadth ... this introduces Washington's second
al-Qaeda myth.
Myth number
two: Al-Qaeda's deep threat with global
reach. Traditionally, as any moviegoer knows, a
top priority of a clandestine operation is to
cover identities. Suppose the passenger lists on
the four crashed planes hadn't revealed a quota of
five Arabic names each (except for flight 93,
which had four)? The evidence, after all, was
going up in smoke; the hijackers all expected to
incinerate themselves. From the site in New York,
we don't even have a set of teeth.
Absent
a pattern on the passenger lists, how would this
have stretched the investigation? How long would
it have been delayed? And when the FBI finally
located 19 nonexistent passengers, ciphers all,
what then? What effect might lengthened exposure
to the unknown have had on the American public?
What advantage, if any, might a lengthened and
confused investigation have yielded al-Qaeda in
Afghanistan?
These begin as tactical
questions but turn into strategic ones.
In
September of 2001, in northern Afghanistan, the
Taliban were about to finish off the Northern
Alliance, which militarily was a spent force. On
September 9, bin Laden's assassins got to
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