9/11: Unanswered Questions (I)

President Bush’s chief counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke has revealed that the CIA under George Tenet attempted to recruit some of the 9/11 "Al Qaeda" terrorists prior to the attack of September 11, 2001, but that after the attempt failed, Tenet and his senior CIA staff covered up the botched recruitment effort. The revelation is yet one more nail in the coffin of what has become the most discredited U.S. government report since the infamous Warren Report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. In fact, the Warren Report received another blow after it was revealed that First Lady Jacqueline revealed in 1964 to historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. that she believed that Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was behind the assassination of her husband in Dallas. The revelations by Mrs. Kennedy and Clarke show that the United States government cannot be trusted to investigate misdeeds carried out with the full knowledge and support of senior officials of the CIA and the White House. The 9/11 attack represents one such high-level government cover-up.

Clarke’s recent revelations about CIA knowledge of Al Qaeda 9/11 cells prior to the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington merely takes one to the shallowest of depths of the rabbit hole of the intelligence world, highly-compartmented cells which carefully planned the attacks and how the mass media would cover the unfolding events.

The one individual who stands tall among those intelligence and law enforcement officers who was aggressively pursuing the criminal network that would carry out 9/11 was FBI counter-terrorism top man John O’Neill. Ever since the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, O’Neill’s pursuit of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda had been dogged. After further terrorist attacks at the Khobar Towers barracks in Dharan, Saudi Arabia; the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; and the USS Cole in Aden harbor, O’Neill’s biggest problem was not Al Qaeda, it was resistance from top officials inside the U.S. government.

The biggest conspiracy theory of them all, the official 9/11 Commission Report concluded that nineteen, mostly Saudi, hijackers, armed with box cutters, were able to defeat a multi-trillion dollar U.S. defense and intelligence system in a matter if mere hours one Tuesday morning in September 2001, has even been partly debunked by the two co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission, former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean and former Indiana Democratic Representative Lee Hamilton. Both have said that their committee was lied to by government officials and that important information was covered up and not released to committee investigators…

Kean’s and Hamilton’s ire would be best suited at being vented against Philip Zelikow, the one-time aide to Bush National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who stated under oath that no one ever expected that passenger planes would be used as weapons. Zelikow was appointed as the executive director of the 9/11 Commission and he had the task of avoiding any investigations that would look at the roles of the CIA, Mossad, the Saudis, and Wall Street interests in crafting the ingredients that permitted the 9/11 attacks to be carried out without a hitch. Zelikow has a storied career at debunking any theory that does not comport with government doctrine, including his many years of attacking anyone who disbelieves the Warren Commission’s myths about the assassination of President Kennedy.

Unfortunately, the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center was not the first time the U.S. government engaged in a massive cover-up of an attack on the buildings. According to U.S. intelligence sources, the FBI and Justice Department sat on volumes of translations of Arabic telephone intercepts gathered before the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center from U.S.- and Sudan-based Muslim militants who once worked for U.S. intelligence in the mujaheddin war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The critical intelligence, which demonstrated a link between the CIA and "Afghan Arab" muhajeddin forces, including those loyal to Osama bin Laden, was never introduced into the trial of the Brooklyn- and Jersey City-based cell that included the blind Egyptian cleric Shaikh Omar Abdul Rahman, Ramzi Yousef, and Eyad Ismail. The New York and New Jersey cell also included Ali Mohammed, a graduate of the U.S. Army’s Special Forces School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, who, while an active duty member of the Special Forces, secretly traveled to Afghanistan to train Bin Laden’s forces and provided him with special intelligence on U.S. "soft targets" for terrorist attacks, and Wadih el-Hage, Osama bin Laden’s personal secretary, who was also a resident of the United States.

Ironically, the two men responsible for the failure to present the surveillance intelligence on the 1993 World Trade Center bombers to the juries and grand juries hearing the charges — the main federal prosecutors for New York City and New Jersey in the bombing case — were Patrick J. Fitzgerald and Michael Chertoff, respectively. Fitzgerald went on to become the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois and cut his teeth indicting and having convicted two successive Illinois governors for corruption, Republican George Ryan and Democrat Rod Blagojevich. Both cases were politically-tainted show trials.

Adding to the outrages committed by the U.S. government was the fact that, according to an FBI source, the chief FBI investigator against Al Qaeda in the 1990s, the late John O’Neill, was upset that much of the telephone surveillance of the 1993 bombers was never introduced as evidence and remained un-translated and classified.

Other CIA connections to Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are too numerous to describe. However, one jumps out because it involves a key player in the Donald Rumsfeld Pentagon during the 9/11 attacks. A CIA source involved with the Bosnia Defense Fund, used to collect donations from Arab and Muslim countries for the Bosnian war against Serbia and Croatia, revealed that the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN) was concerned that money transferred by Riggs Bank to the Bosnian Defense Fund’s account at the Central Bank in Sarajevo, was "bleeding" to terrorist elements believed to be linked to Osama bin Laden and "Al Qaeda." Riggs was the major bank serving Saudi ambassador to the U.S. Prince Bandar and his wife Princess Haifa and it was a bank with family ties to George H.W. and George W. Bush.

When the CIA source complained about Bosnia Defense Fund cash falling into the hands of Islamic terrorists, including people linked to bin Laden, he was told by one of the major Bosnia Defense Fund principals to "just make it f*****g happen!"

The Bosnia link to "Al Qaeda" was important. In fact, bin Laden had reportedly not only visited Bosnia, but carried at least one Bosnian diplomatic passport and had interfaced with Bosnian diplomats in Vienna, Austria.

And Mossad’s link to 9/11 cannot be ignored. Two internal U.S. government documents revealed that among the 120 Israeli “art students” who attempted to penetrate the security of dozens of Federal office buildings and who visited the homes of scores of U.S. law enforcement personnel during 2000 and 2001 were some who used addresses and mail drops in southern Florida and Texas near those used by a number of the 9/11 hijackers. The information came from a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Report drafted in June 2001 on the activities of the art students and a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) list of the hijackers and other terrorist suspects, including a known Mossad agent, Dominick Suter, who ran an Israeli moving company in Weehawken, New Jersey. The FBI list was accidentally released in early October 2001 on a Finnish government web site.

Five Israelis working for Suter’s Urban Moving Systems were arrested by police and FBI agents during the later afternoon of 9/11, driving a suspicious van near Giant Stadium in Secaucus, New Jersey. The five Israelis were the only suspects arrested on September 11, 2001 on suspicion of involvement in the 9/11 attacks. All five were deported to Israel without ever having been formally charged. The DEA memo specifically stated that the Israelis casing federal offices and employees’ homes may have had ties to an “Islamic fundamentalist group.”

"Our Purpose was to document the ’Event’"
The five Israelis interviewed on Israeli Talk Show in November 2001.

Even ten years later, the U.S. government and the governments of New York and New York City are dismissing those 9/11 attack veterans who, unlike O’Neill, were fortunate enough to survive the catastrophic attack. Survivors or the World Trade Center collapse and first responders with the New York Police Department, New York-New Jersey Port Authority Police, New York Fire Department, and others were not invited to the tenth anniversary ceremonies at "Ground Zero" on September 11, 2011.

For ten years, the 9/11 attacks, along with those in London, Madrid, Bali, and other locations, have been used by the corporate media to hype government-directed campaigns against civil liberties, human rights, privacy protection, wars of liberation by aspirant ethnic groups and political parties, freedom of expression, and freedom of information. Americans of all ages and backgrounds are now subjected to intrusive body searches at airports that would have been seen as outrageous abuses of government authority fifteen years ago.

As we now reflect back on 9/11, we are told that Bin Laden was killed in a Special Operations assault in Abbotabad, Pakistan. There was little forensic evidence to prove Bin Laden was killed. In any case, most of the members of US Navy SEAL Team 6, which carried out the attack on Bin Laden, were killed recently in an attack on their helicopter in Afghanistan.

As with the assassination of President Kennedy and the Iran-Contra scandal twenty years later, 9/11 will be relegated to the history books as an event shrouded in mystery and short on actual evidence, most of it destroyed or remaining highly-classified, to identify the actual perpetrators.

(To be continued…)