Page 2 of
3 SPEAKING
FREELY September 11 was a third-rate
operation By Bohdan
Pilacinski
Ahmad Shah Massoud, the
alliance's brilliant commander and only figure
capable of keeping the alliance together. Only
because the "French TV journalists", with their
cameras full of explosives, had been detained
incommunicado waiting for their interview was the
assassination three weeks late. But for that one
turn of fate, by 9/11 the Taliban would have been
mopping up America's only available proxy ground
force. The Americans would have had to invade in
winter and do their own fighting - in the snow,
and on the ground as in Iraq.
As Professor
Michael Doran wrote in Political Science
Quarterly, "Bin Laden engineered the decapitation
of the Northern Alliance in order to throw it into
such disarray that it would be useless to the
United States as an
instrument of retribution." [8] Which raises the
question: Why crowd the planning so tightly, with
no margin for error? Why 9/11? Why not 10/11, or
just before winter? And if 9/11, why not delay
American resolve by whatever means, including
confusion; consolidate and maintain the
initiative?
How difficult would it have
been to use misleading identities? To procure
them, then cover them with airfares? To smuggle a
20th hijacker across the border? Would it have
justified the additional risks? The short answers
are: Easily, fairly easily, fairly easily, and no.
Al-Qaeda acted rationally within its limitations
... which were severe.
By 2001, America
had won the Cold War, owned the future, had no
enemies, and security was lax. That was then. Five
years later, on August 1, 2006, the Associated
Press reported that undercover investigators had
entered the US using fake documents at nine border
crossings on both the Mexican and Canadian borders
repeatedly that year. Same in 2003 and 2004. On
May 5, 2006, on "All Things Considered", National
Public Radio reported that very convincing fake
IDs - driver's licenses and social security cards
- could be had on any number of street corners in
Los Angeles for $100. The Los Angeles Police
Department vouched for the quality. Criminals
including a murderer, "have walked out of police
stations" with these.
The hijackers all
boarded showing legitimate US driver's licenses,
which deflected any potentially embarrassing lines
of inquiry regarding country of origin. The
pilots, of course, had licenses from living here.
Two hijackers paid a Salvadoran in a convenience
store parking lot $50 each to vouch for them as
Virginia residents, which was all Virginia
required; they then vouched in turn for five new
arrivals - "muscle" in the plot. Keep it simple
...
Getting fake IDs might have been easy.
Using them courted unforeseeable risks. Non-Arabic
names call for non-Arabic language skills; 13 of
the men were new arrivals, 12 of them Saudis.
Dealing with unfamiliar criminal elements,
especially outside one's own ethnic group, can
also generate unforeseeable complications. And
finally, paying for the tickets ... cash is a
security tip-off; a convincing set of credit card
trails would have required some finesse and the
infrastructure wasn't there.
So the 9/11
teams didn't cover their identities and obliterate
their trail because they couldn't. It was beyond
their competence. But if al-Qaeda couldn't expect
to stall American mobilization, why hadn't central
command delayed the attack date to follow on the
Taliban offensive? [9]
Assuming the CIA
video found in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, is genuine
[10], bin Laden was notified of the 9/11 attack
date six days in advance. Stateside, attempted
ticket purchases (though unsuccessful as they
failed a credit check), began 33 days in advance.
This would mean compartmentalization was so
extreme that al-Qaeda central did not determine,
control or know the attack date.
In fact,
the record argues that bin Laden had long pressed
for a much earlier attack, but Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed and Atta had resisted. So it seems that
in the planning stage, the 9/11 plot was unrelated
to ongoing events in Afghanistan, and in its final
stage, was not strategically coordinated with the
Taliban's offensive against the Northern Alliance.
Conversely, it's unlikely the Taliban
leadership even suspected al-Qaeda's intent. The
French intelligence documents referred to above
maintain the Taliban leadership consented to the
"tactical" hijacking of American commercial
airliners; but as noted in follow-up commentary,
hijacking an airplane prior to September 11 meant
forcing it "to land at an airport to conduct
negotiations" - for which there were standard
procedures. [5] Peter Bergen, CNN's terrorism
analyst, flatly states that Taliban leader Mullah
Omar was not informed, certainly not of a plan to
fire-bomb American targets, and would have vetoed
such had he known. [11]
Was there a
strategy behind 9/11? According to Abu Hafs,
al-Qaeda's military commander and bin Laden's
closest confederate, it was to provoke an American
invasion of Afghanistan. [12] But an American
invasion, of an exhausted and divided country,
without the knowledge or consent of one's ally and
host, expecting him to destroy the "second
superpower" as the mujahideen had the first? With
supply lines from where? Russia, which was
crushing Chechnya? Pakistan, where Musharraf was
and is a balancing act? This is a strategy? It's a
regional civil war or it's nothing.
The US
overran Afghanistan, destroyed bin Laden's ally
and his base, and garnered the sympathy of most of
the Muslim world. Would it had stopped there. Bin
Laden has succeeded not for his strategy, but
because the US overreached and unmasked itself in
Iraq.
In all the government and media
hyperbole about the terrorist threat, the most
hystericized has been al-Qaeda's imminent
procurement of a nuclear weapon. They tried to buy
one from the Russians, we're told. They were
scammed in Sudan buying uranium and were probably
scammed repeatedly thereafter. But they still want
a nuclear weapon? The entire subject of terrorist
nukes has been framed in nearly unrestrained
speculation. Intent is far from capability.
Concretely, in narrative shorthand:
Already under surveillance, KSM'S top in-house
bomb maker (who was good), got himself busted
because his lab caught fire. [13] Bin Laden's
attempts to assemble a team of foreign scientists;
to procure necessary materials, technologies and
workable plans; let alone to establish production
facilities, never got past the wishful thinking
stage.
The proper question asked nowhere
in the press is what, in the decade that Russia
was on its knees, as the Russian army sold itself
for food, as a Russian admiral sank his fleet in
Vladivostok harbor for scrap, while Russia
regressed to a barter economy and everything was
for sale; in this decade of Russia's collapse and
chaos and gangster capitalism, what did al-Qaeda
with all its alleged petrodollars actually get?
Nothing. We already know they got no
spooks. Weapons? All leftovers from America's
proxy war against the Red Army in Afghanistan in
the 1980s. Sophisticated communications equipment?
None. And well before 9/11, Russia was supplying
the Northern Alliance.
And they got no
intelligence. Neither al-Qaeda nor the Taliban was
prepared for the American assault. It's unlikely
anyone there even read Jane's Defence Weekly.
That's your ... deep threat with global reach.
The American people have been far, far too
impressed with a hole in the middle of New York
City. Al-Qaeda's capability was to damage those
buildings and to kill several hundred people; to
trap or destroy the top 15 floors was the most
that they hoped for. [14]. The collapse of the
twin towers was entirely a function of their
structural engineering.
Imagine a large
zipper opening from the top. Three floors -
crashed and weakened by fire - create a slider of
some 15 floors above. On every floor, the outer
sheath is held in tension to the tower's core by
steel floor joists beneath a concrete tray. As the
"slider" hits the floors, the joists give and pull
the sheath in after them. With every floor, the
"slider's" weight and speed increases, pulling the
next floor in and down before it. Very clean, and
unforeseen, and emphatically not al-Qaeda's doing.
The remaining loose thread in this
narrative, the fate of flight 93 which crashed in
Pennsylvania, again illustrates both the
intelligence and the vulnerability of the plot.
It's self evident that minimum exposure
maximizes odds of mission success in a surprise
attack by a weak opponent on a strong one; and the
plan was for a near synchronous takeoff. But
flight 93 was delayed 40 minutes, and took off as
the first plane crashed the North Tower. So - an
hour and three quarters of hang time in red alert,
but still doable; target approach would be from an
unforeseen direction.
The hijacking was
executed as late as possible, as the plane neared
the north-south flight corridor of
Detroit-Washington, DC, which dictated a sharp
left turn. Had the takeoff been on time, this turn
would have been executed before there'd been any
reason for alarm on the ground; and with the
transponder off, it might well have gone
undetected. Instead, ground radar stayed on track
despite losing the transponder signal (which is
harder); and feedback from the ground leaked back
onto the plane through cell phone conversations.
[15].
That's it. That's how big and bad
and deep al-Qaeda was. This is the platform for
America's "war on terror", which migrated so
glibly onto the biggest remaining oil field in the
Middle East. By comparison, Columbian drug cartels
had secure routes for money, drugs and personnel;
near untraceable money laundering operations; and
one lost a half-built, 100- foot submarine to
police in a suburb of Bogota. Russian documents
were found at the site. [16].
Al-Qaeda's
leadership was rolled up in fairly short order
because it was few to begin with. The Economist
now says, "Al-Qaeda probably never had more than a
few hundred committed members." [17]. Ted Galen
Carpenter of the libertarian Cato Institute tells
us to get some perspective: "The closest
historical analogy for the radical Islamic
terrorist threat ... is the violence perpetrated
by anarchist forces during the last third of the
19th century." [18].
Even the current
official line, that al-Qaeda was a cohesive
organization since gone to seed, is just half
true. For example, Spanish police concluded there
was no link between al-Qaeda and the Madrid
bombings of 2004. Bin Laden never controlled Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi or "al-Qaeda in Iraq". [19].
After a four-year investigation, the LA Times'
Terry McDermott concluded:
Al-Qaeda itself was never the huge
organization its opponents sometimes portrayed.
Its core was at most a couple hundred men. [It]
sat at the center of ... a web of other
like-minded organizations spread across the
globe ... but was never in any sense in control
of [them].
The tight, operational
group around bin Laden was quite small. Then,
McDermott's view on the brunt of this article:
One underappreciated aspect of
al-Qaeda operations was how crude many of them
were. Intelligence analysts sometimes cited the
plans' complexity and sophistication, as if
blowing up buildings or boats or vehicles was
high-end science. In fact, many al-Qaeda plots
have been marked by the haphazardness of their
design and execution. Over the years, many of
the plots seemed harebrained at worst,
ill-conceived at best, pursued by ill-equipped
and unprepared, inept men. Some were almost
comical in their haplessness: boats sank, cars
crashed, bombs blew up too soon. Some of the men
virtually delivered themselves to police. The
gross ineptitude of the execution often
disguised the gravity of the intent, and hid,
also, the steadfastness of the plotters. [20].
A threat, but not a danger, was the
likely view of Western intelligence agencies. But
the plot succeeded for one big reason which the
American public holds in denial; it walked through
a
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
