Re: FN-FORUM: War on Terror

date posted 23rd August 2003 22:29

Im with genious!
----- Original Message -----
From: "Lists" [EMAIL REMOVED]
To: [EMAIL REMOVED]
Sent: Saturday, August 23, 2003 2:49 PM
Subject: Re: FN-FORUM: War on Terror


>
> Yawn. The New American Millennium conspirancy theory (or whatever it's
> called) was on either BBC2 or Channel 4 months ago. Even those three
> comedians whose name escapes me did a thing about it.
>
> We know that US and UK ruling politicians are mad, lying scumbags: our top
> man wants to be Holy Roman Emperor and theirs presumably wants to be King
of
> the Jews. Barking, the lot of them.
>
>
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> Kathy
> http://www.vendetta.co.uk
> +44(0)7005 982 261
> DNRC Minister for Useful but Irritating Information and Trivia
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Matt Thomas" [EMAIL REMOVED]
> To: [EMAIL REMOVED]
> Sent: Saturday, August 23, 2003 10:12 PM
> Subject: RE: FN-FORUM: War on Terror
>
>
>
> September 11 and the Origins of the 'War on Terrorism': A Revisionist
> Account
>
>
> By Dr Stephen J. Sniegoski
>
> I offer here what might be called a moderate revisionist account of the
> September 11 terror and the origin of the U.S. 'war on terrorism.'
>
>
> The official story permeating the major media runs something like this:
> the U.S. war on Afghanistan was simply an ad hoc response to the
> horrific events of September 11, which struck as a bolt from the blue,
> totally unexpected by American security agencies. The Afghanistan war
> emerged overnight as a simple effort to punish, and thus bring to
> justice, the perpetrators of the abominable deeds - namely, the al Qaeda
> terrorist network masterminded by the infamous Osama Bin Laden,
> ensconced in his cave in Afghanistan (accompanied, no doubt, by his
> dialysis machine). Presumably, the punishment of the perpetrators would
> make America safer from terrorism.
>
>
> Because the Taliban government of Afghanistan harbored Bin Laden - the
> official line goes - it was necessary and just for the United States to
> overthrow that regime, which according to the U.S. Department of Justice
> was not actually a government at all but simply a vipers' nest of
> terrorists, as evil as Bin Ladin and al Qaeda. [1] In the event, the
> United States's elimination of the nefarious terrorists had the effect
> of liberating the oppressed Afghan people from tyranny.
>
>
> The media, quoting government sources, identified Bin Laden as the
> likely culprit within hours of the attacks on the Twin Towers. It took
> more time for the story to evolve to the point where the Taliban became
> equivalent in evil with Bin Laden and al Qaeda, but soon enough, the
> whole affair was openly presented as a Manichæan conflict between good
> and evil, even including the claim that the United States was attacked
> because evil folk hate good folk.
>
>
> Manichæan conflict between good and evil
>
> The official line has finally begun to wear thin, and even such
> mouthpieces of Establishment platitudes as Chris Matthews and Michael
> Kinsley are now able to discern that the war is directed toward much
> broader purposes than a simple effort to punish the actual culprits of
> September 11. Kinsley writes: 'But how did the "war on terrorism' change
> focus so quickly from rooting out and punishing the perpetrators of 9-11
> - a task that is still incomplete - to something (what?) about nuclear
> proliferation?' (Parenthesis in original.) [2] In Matthews's view, the
> limited punitive war has been 'hijacked' by people with other, broader
> aims - including, as he specifies, the proposed effort to prevent
> members of the 'axis of evil' from developing weapons of mass
> destruction. Matthews writes:
>
>
> 'A month ago, I knew why we were fighting. You knew why we were
> fighting. We were getting the killers of Sept. 11 before they could get
> us again. If that meant tracking down Osama Bin Laden and his filthy
> gang to the ends of the Earth, we were up to the task.
>
>
> So what happened to that gutsy war of bringing the World Trade Center
> and Pentagon killers to justice? Who hijacked that clear-eyed,
> all-American front of September-to-January and left our leaders mouthing
> this 'axis of evil' line? Who hijacked the firefighters' war of
> righteous outrage and got us reciting this weird mantra about Iran, Iraq
> - and North Korea, of all places?' [3]
>
>
> Kinsley and Matthews make significant (though very obvious) observations
> here. The war is far different from a simple effort to punish those
> responsible for the September 11 atrocities. There is absolutely no
> connection between that event and President Bush's current concern with
> his 'axis of evil.' In fact, the White House does not even attempt to
> make such a connection. As columnist Robert Novak notes, commenting on
> the 2002 State of the Union speech, 'Bush abandoned seeking some
> connection between the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the next step in
> the war on terrorism. Indeed, the nexus between the three rogue nations
> and any kind of terrorism was slender, with the president asserting
> these countries "could provide" weapons of mass destruction "to
> terrorists."' [4]
>
>
> September 11 events given as an excuse
>
> Even the idea that the war has transmuted from its original intent
> represents a revisionist interpretation. And it is a short step from the
> transmutation thesis to the position that the war was never intended to
> be a simple, straightforward 'firefighters' war of righteous outrage'
> and that from the very outset the September 11 events simply gave
> America's foreign policy elites the excuse to put their prewar agendas
> into action. As I will show, American penetration of energy-rich Central
> Asia has been a much-discussed foreign policy objective for some years.
> Moreover, there is evidence that, prior to September 11, the United
> States had actually been making plans to remove the Taliban regime.
>
>
> Further, Zionist elements in the American ruling establishment have
> always sought to direct the United States against the 'terrorist'
> states, which are, not coincidentally, the enemies of Israel. Certainly,
> that - - which has had its tentacles in both the Clinton and George W.
> Bush administrations - has long talked of taking a tougher line toward
> Iran and Iraq, as well as giving greater support to Israel's war on
> 'terrorists.'
>
>
> In short, it is apparent that the war was anything but an overnight
> improvisation to address the September 11 atrocity; rather, the
> September 11 atrocities provided the pretext for the United States to
> put her existing war plans into motion.
>
>
> Anything but an overnight improvisation
>
> There is nothing novel about policymakers taking advantage of certain
> events to achieve a pre-existing agenda. In the 1840s James K. Polk
> exploited the Mexican army's firing on American troops in the disputed
> region of south Texas in order to achieve his goal of acquiring Mexican
> territory by military means. In 1898, the explosion of the battle-ship
> Maine in Havana harbor provided the pretext for American imperialists to
> launch a war to grab overseas colonies, notably including the
> far-distant Philippines. And, of course, in 1941 the Japanese attack on
> Pearl Harbor provided Franklin Roosevelt his long-sought opportunity to
> enter World War II against Germany. If a real incident doesn't present
> itself, it becomes necessary for the crafty politico to fabricate one -
> as Lyndon Johnson did with the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Examples could
> be provided ad infinitum.
>
>
> Populace has to be persuaded
>
> So let me simply say that latching onto events to justify the
> implementation of a pre-existing militaristic agenda has long been the
> standard operating procedure of ruling elites, especially in formal
> democracies where a war-averse populace has to be persuaded of the
> righteousness of whatever policy of mayhem and murder government leaders
> intend to pursue. (I should add that in today's context the word
> 'persuaded' is too strong a term, since the contemporary American public
> needs minimal intellectual persuasion. Instead, like the
> less-intelligent creatures of Orwell's Animal Farm, it believes whatever
> story the government and the official media feed it.)
>
>
> Even if only this much were true - that the September 11 events served
> as a pretext to achieve preexisting aims by military action - the
> meaning of the war on Afghanistan would depart radically from the
> conventional public presentation. But going even further, there are
> intimations that the United States (and her close ally Israel) had prior
> knowledge of the impending attack and did nothing to impede it, in order
> to obtain the needed justification for war. Since that more-extreme
> thesis is more difficult to prove, this article will devote considerable
> space to the evidence for it.
>
>
> I acknowledge that my counter-interpretation of September 11 is hardly
> original. While the mainstream media have naturally eschewed it, and
> assiduously, it is quite evident on the Web. [5] In its purest
> conspiratorial form - that the U. S. government had prior knowledge or
> actually facilitated the atrocities - it is most popular on the hard
> Left and the conspiratorial far Right. In its milder form - that from
> its very outset the purpose of the war was to achieve broader goals than
> simply the punishment of those responsible for September 11 - the
> revisionist thesis actually seems to predominate outside the United
> States.
>
>
> Cui bono?
>
> What evidence exists for the revisionist thesis? According to the
> traditional adage, when a crime is committed, the first question to be
> asked is 'Cui bono?' - 'Who benefits?'
>
>
> The Afghanistan war has obviously been advantageous for American Big Oil
> and for policymakers who think in terms of U.S. world hegemony. It has
> enabled the United States to position herself so that she can secure the
> immense oil and gas reserves of Central Asia. The stabilization of
> Afghanistan is a crucial element for the attainment of that prize. [6]
> As a consequence of the war on Afghanistan, it appears that U.S.
> military and political influence will be a permanent fixture in Central
> Asia, a region of key geostrategic importance for American global
> hegemony. Later in this article I will develop at greater length the
> issue of American resources and geostrategic interests.
>
>
> Obviously, the other primary beneficiary has been Israel. For Israel the
> 'war on terrorism' not only provides a green light for the crushing of
> the Palestinian people, entailing their expulsion or total
> bantustanization[7], but also puts American power on the side of Israel
> against her enemies across the entire Middle East. [8] That is because
> the officially designated 'terrorists' and countries that 'harbor
> terrorists' turn out to be the major enemies of Israel. Note that Iran
> and Iraq make up two-thirds of President Bush's diabolical 'axis' and
> that North Korea is mainly included because she supplies weapons to
> those countries. It is interesting to note that the very phrase 'axis of
> evil' was coined by Bush's speechwriter, David Frum, a hyper-Zionist who
> holds dual United States/Canadian citizenship. (It is not apparent that
> the protection of American national interests is foremost in Mr. Frum's
> mind. I think Mr. Frum is one of those people whom the perceptive Joe
> Sobran would never accuse of dual loyalty. I also expect that Mr. Frum's
> single loyalty would not be to Canada.)
>
>
> A policy of militarily restraining and diminishing the military strength
> of her neighbors serves ipso facto to maintain nuclear-armed Israel's
> monopoly of power in the Middle East, which has been the long-standing
> fundamental objective of Israeli foreign and military policy. As
> illustrated in 1981 by her military strike on the Osiraq reactor in
> Iraq, Israel has been willing to use force to maintain her regional
> nuclear monopoly. Long before September 11, the United States was
> actively helping Israel preserve that monopoly by maintaining a
> hypo-critical double standard: ignoring Israel's acquisition of weapons
> of mass destruction while opposing the transfer of even peaceful nuclear
> technologies to others.
>
>
> Israel currently views Iran as the neighboring state most likely to
> develop nuclear weapons, and she has been pushing to have that blocked,
> using the issue of Iran's alleged support of terrorism as the ostensible
> justification for a military attack. Hints are even floating about that
> if the United States doesn't do something, Israel herself will act. [9]
> The initial move of the U.S. military into Afghanistan saw efforts on
> Iran's part to improve relations with the United States, but that
> tentative rapprochement has now been aborted, and for the fundamental
> cause of that one must look at the influence of Israel and her American
> supporters.
>
>
> One crucial point must be clear: a military effort to prevent Iran from
> developing nuclear weapons has nothing to do with an effort to punish
> the perpetrators of the September 11 atrocities, an operation with which
> Iran has cooperated extensively. [10]
>
>
> Interests of Big Oil and Israel converged on Afghanistan issue
>
> It is significant that the interests of Big Oil and Israel converged on
> the Osama/Afghanistan issue. In the past, the interests of the two
> groups have often diverged - with the oil interests seeking to placate
> Israel's oil-producing enemies. It is not clear that either group could
> have achieved success on its own. While the oil interests loom large in
> the Bush administration, Zionist influence reigns supreme in the
> Establishment media. It is unlikely that any major military action could
> succeed without the media's being favorably disposed - witness the
> contributions of a hostile media to the Vietnam fiasco.
>
>
> However, while the interests of Big Oil and Israel coincide on
> Afghanistan, their overall interests are not identical. Big Oil seems to
> desire a more limited war - restricted largely to Afghanistan and
> benefiting from the cooperation of an 'anti-terrorist' coalition of
> 'moderate' Islamic states. Secretary of State Colin Powell appears to be
> the administration spokesman for that position. In contrast, Israel and
> her American supporters want a broader war against 'terrorism' - that
> is, a war against the enemies of Israel. In that corner, one finds
> Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol and the
> Weekly Standard, Charles Krauthammer, William Safire, Richard Perle, and
> neoconservatives in general. [11] Such a 'war against terrorism' would
> work against Big Oil's desire to form a coalition of moderate Islamic
> governments to counter Islamic 'fundamentalism.' Zionists, for their
> part, understand that a coalition of 'moderate' Islamic states in bed
> with the United States could be used to put diplomatic pressure on
> Israel to moderate her policies toward the Palestinians.
>
>
> Benefits from September 11
>
> Other important groups have benefited from September 11, especially the
> Bush administration itself. With the country going nowhere and the
> economy sliding downward, September 11 was a godsend to the beleaguered
> regime. Bush's popularity has soared to astronomical heights. More than
> that, the entire Republican Party has sought to capitalize on the
> popularity of the war. Karl Rove, the president's top political adviser,
> has been urging Republicans to focus on the war theme. [12] Paraphrasing
> Roosevelt aide Harry Hopkins's notorious election-winning formula -
> 'Tax, tax; spend, spend; elect, elect' - a Republican activist jokingly
> said to me: 'Bomb, bomb; elect, elect.' For that matter, even Franklin
> Roosevelt, seeing his popularity flagging, found it necessary to
> transform himself from 'Dr. New Deal' to 'Dr. Win-the-War.'
>
>
> Also benefiting from the war and its accompanying fever is the
> once-denigrated military-industrial complex, which naturally will expand
> in size and prestige. An influential, though often overlooked, element
> of that complex are the old Cold Warriors (and the institutions that
> house them), who need an Enemy to justify their existence. Many of those
> people would face unemployment should there ever be a 'peace scare.'
> [13]
>
>
> However, these latter two groups - Republican politicos and the
> military-industrial complex - serve largely as auxiliaries in the
> pro-war movement, rather than as seminal forces. They would tend to
> support any war, anywhere. The point is that while these groups are
> predisposed to support war per se, they have not determined the specific
> parameters of this particular war with its focus on Central Asia and on
> Israel's enemies. [14]
>
>
> Foreknowledge
>
> How did it happen that the September 11 tragedy led to developments long
> sought by Big Oil and by Israel? Were the terrorist attacks really a
> bolt from the blue - truly fortuitous - a case of pure serendipity? Or
> is there any evidence that the U.S. government and Israel had prior
> knowledge of the impending terrorist strikes but allowed them to take
> place or perhaps even facilitated them?
>
>
> Even operatives of the Establishment media recognize the improbability
> of September 11's coming as a complete surprise. As Howard Kurtz wrote
> in the Washington Post: 'How could we not have known? How is it that
> America was totally blindsided by the Sept. 11 attacks?' [15]
>
>
> As Bill Clinton might put it, it all depends on what 'we' means. In
> fact, considerable evidence has come to light suggesting that certain
> Americans, and others, were not blindsided at all.
>
>
> Instant messages to Israel
>
> Employees in the Israel office of the instant-messaging firm Odigo
> received messages from the company's New York office warning of the
> terrorist aerial strikes about two hours before they occurred.
> Originally it was stated that the World Trade Center was specifically
> mentioned, but that was later denied. [16]
>
>
> Stock-market speculation
>
> Just prior to September 11, sudden and unexplained speculation occurred
> in the stock of American and United airlines. An inordinate number of
> 'put' options - bets that a stock will go down - were placed on those
> two listings. No other airlines saw such speculation. Similar 'put'
> options were placed on the stock of various companies - including
> Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley - that were housed in the World Trade
> Towers. Since it is common for stocks of companies that suffer tragedies
> to plunge, this stock speculation would imply that someone had
> foreknowledge of the horrific event. American intelligence should have
> been aware of the abnormal speculation, since the CIA and other
> intelligence agencies monitor stock trading closely. [17]
>
>
> It is interesting that many of the 'put' options on United Airlines were
> purchased through Deutschebank/AB Brown, a firm managed until 1998 by
> the current executive director of the CIA, A.B. 'Buzzy' Krongard. [18]
>
>
> Private warnings
>
> Some people outside the intelligence organs seem also to have gotten
> warnings. For example, San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown was scheduled to
> fly to New York City on the morning of September 11, but he claimed
> later that he received a call the night before from his 'security people
> at the airport' telling him that he should be extra-cautious about air
> travel on the eleventh. [19] The FAA prevented the author Salman
> Rushdie, who is under special protection because of threats on his life,
> from flying to the United States during the week leading up to September
> 11, and Rushdie connects that prohibition to terror warnings in the
> possession of the government. [20] In August 2001, Drs. Garth and Mary
> Nicolson, a husband-and-wife medical team who are among the foremost
> Gulf War Syndrome investigators, reported to Department of Defense and
> National Security Council officials that a number of personal friends in
> the intelligence and diplomatic communities had told them that a
> terrorist attack on the Pentagon would take place on September 11. [21]
> And CounterPunch, the newsletter edited by Alexander Cockburn and
> Jeffrey St. Clair, reported that the extremely influential and
> well-connected investment firm Goldman Sachs circulated an internal memo
> in its Tokyo office on September 10 advising all employees to avoid any
> U.S. government buildings because of a possible terrorist attack. [22]
>
>
> It is highly significant that knowledge of the planned aerial onslaught
> seems to have leaked outside the terrorist network, for if outsiders
> knew about the planned attack, one would not expect the CIA itself to be
> excluded from that knowledge. Bin Laden and his associates had been
> funded and trained by the CIA in the war against the Soviet Union. It is
> hard to fathom how the CIA, the best-financed intelligence organization
> in the world, would be unable to secure information on an organization
> made up of its former employees.
>
>
> Public warnings
>
> The fact of the matter is that it was public knowledge that Osama Bin
> Laden was planning terrorist acts in the United States. On June 23,
> 2001, Reuters dispatched a story headlined 'Bin Laden Fighters Plan
> Anti-U.S. attack,' with this lead sentence: 'Followers of exiled Saudi
> dissident Osama Bin Laden are planning a major attack on U.S. and
> Israeli interests.' And a June 25 UPI dispatch stated: 'Saudi dissident
> Osama Bin Laden is planning a terrorist attack against the United
> States.' [23]
>
>
> Warnings to the U.S. government
>
> Dire warnings flowed to the U.S. government from various sources.
> Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak claims to have warned the United States
> 12 days prior to September 11 that 'something would happen.' [24]
> According to Russian news reports, Russian intelligence notified the CIA
> during the summer that 25 terrorist pilots had been specifically
> training for suicide missions. In an interview September 15 with MSNBC,
> Russian -President Vladimir Putin confirmed that in August he had
> ordered Russian intelligence to warn the United States 'in the strongest
> possible terms' of imminent terrorist strikes on airports and government
> buildings. [25] According to a story in the Frankfurter Allgemeine
> Zeitung, U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies received warning signals
> in the early summer that Middle Eastern terrorists were planning to
> hijack commercial aircraft and use them as weapons to destroy important
> symbols of American and Israeli culture. [26] German police have
> confirmed that an Iranian man phoned the U.S. Secret Service from his
> deportation cell in Germany to warn of the planned terrorist assault on
> the World Trade Center. [27]
>
>
> U.S. was aware of hijacked-planes scenario
>
> A key aspect of the official story is that while U.S. authorities did
> expect acts of terrorism in the United States, the hijacked-planes
> scenario was completely unforeseen. The truth is, however, that
> terrorist use of hijacked planes had been talked about for some time. As
> columnist Robert Novak pointed out in his column of September 27: 'From
> the moment of the September 11th attacks, high-ranking federal officials
> insisted that the terrorists' method of operation surprised them. Many
> stick to that story. Actually, elements of the hijacking plan were known
> to the FBI as early as 1995 and, if coupled with current information,
> might have uncovered the plot.' [28]
>
>
> In January 1995, police in the Philippines arrested Abdul Hakim Murad,
> an associate of Ramzi Yousef, leader of the group involved in the 1993
> World Trade Towers bombing. Under interrogation, Murad spoke of a plan
> by the Ramzi group to hijack a commercial airliner and crash it into CIA
> headquarters in Virginia. Murad, who had attended flight schools in the
> United States, said that he was going to be the pilot. Filipino
> investigators also turned up evidence that commercial buildings in San
> Francisco, Chicago, and New York City were to be targeted. That
> information was passed on to the FBI. [29]
>
>
> Notably, U.S. security officials had considered and prepared for
> possible attacks by suicide planes during the Atlanta Summer Olympics in
> 1996. [30] Furthermore, measures to avert suicide airliner crashes were
> in effect during the 2000 Olympics in Sydney and were on track for the
> 2002 winter games in Salt Lake City. As a matter of fact, International
> Olympic Committee officials have revealed that suicide plane-crash
> scenarios had been considered in their security planning for every
> Olympics since 1972. [31] In addition, the FAA's Criminal Acts against
> Civil Aviation report for 2000 warned that Bin Laden and his followers
> were a threat to U.S. civil aviation. [32] Finally, since 1996 the FBI
> had made numerous inquiries about suspected Bin Laden associates' taking
> flight training in the United States and abroad. [33]
>
>
> U.S. monitored Bin Laden's conversations
>
> U.S. authorities acknowledge that they electronically monitored Bin
> Laden's conversations in the past, but the official story maintains that
> Bin Laden stopped engaging in electronic communication after he learned
> that monitored communications had aided the U.S. cruise missile strike
> on his Afghanistan training camp in 1998. However, some knowledgeable
> observers reject that account. For example, the eminent Egyptian
> journalist and former government spokesman Mohammed Heikal, in an
> interview with the British newspaper The Guardian, maintained that 'Bin
> Laden has been under surveillance for years: every telephone call was
> monitored and al Qaeda has been penetrated by American intelligence,
> Pakistani intelligence, Saudi intelligence, Egyptian intelligence. They
> could not have kept secret an operation that required such a degree of
> organisation and sophistication.' [34]
>
>
> Moreover, in February, 2001, UPI terrorism correspondent Richard Sale
> reported that U.S. intelligence agencies were able to monitor some of
> Bin Laden's electronic communications. [35] If, as the official story
> has it, the September 11 events required long-term planning, it would
> seem likely that American intelligence picked up some information about
> the plan.
>
>
> Official claims of an intelligence blackout in the run-up to September
> 11 seem odd in light of other official claims that U.S. intelligence was
> able to successfully monitor the Bin Laden network's electronic
> communications immediately after the attacks. According to Newsweek
> magazine, the key reason that the authorities identified Bin Laden as
> the culprit was that U.S. intelligence picked up communications among
> his associates relaying the message: 'We've hit the targets.' [36]
>
>
> Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah gave a similar account to the Associated
> Press on September 11, claiming that U.S. government monitors had
> overheard two Bin Laden aides celebrating the successful terrorist
> strike. [37] Hatch repeated the story to ABC News the same day, adding
> that he had received the information from both CIA and FBI officials.
> The validity of Hatch's story was confirmed by the hostile reaction of
> Bush administration officials, with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
> condemning the unauthorized disclosure of allegedly classified
> information. [38]
>
>
> It's hard to deny that Bin Laden would have to rely heavily upon
> electronic communications in order to direct a global terrorist
> operation. And if U.S. intelligence agencies were able to monitor his
> communications immediately after the September 11 attack, it is
> difficult to believe that they were totally unable to do so before that
> time.
>
>
> Hijackers were known to authorities
>
> Interestingly, the suicide hijackers were actually known to U.S.
> authorities, and they seem to have made little effort to conceal their
> identities. For example, the FBI placed two of the hijackers, Kahlil
> Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhamzi, on an FBI 'watch list' on August 23, after
> the CIA received information linking the pair to Bin Laden. But the
> authorities somehow failed to pass along that information to the
> airlines, and the two were able to buy first-class one-way airline
> tickets, and then board and hijack a jetliner on September 11. [39]
>
>
> The case of Ziad Samir Jarrah, one of the suspected hijackers aboard the
> United Airlines jet that crashed in Pennsylvania, has its oddities also.
> Authorities in the United Arab Emirates detained and questioned Jarrah
> at the Dubai International Airport after he arrived there from Pakistan
> on January 30, 2001. The request for the interrogation had been made by
> the U.S. government. According to an unnamed United Arab Emirates
> official: 'The Americans told us that he was a supporter of terrorist
> organizations, that he had connections with terrorist organizations.'
>
>
> Jarrah was allowed to leave the U.A.E., traveling on to Hamburg via
> Amsterdam. Later he flew to the United States. Despite the interest of
> U.S. authorities in him and his activities and his connections, Jarrah
> was allowed to enter the country. He then enrolled in a flight school.
>
>
> Jarrah was stopped for speeding in Maryland on September 9, two days
> before the hijacking. The Maryland State Police apparently ran his name
> through their computers but, inexplicably enough, found nothing on him.
> They issued him a ticket and allowed him to proceed. [40]
>
>
> The strange case of Mohammed Atta
>
> Mohammed Atta, the alleged ringleader of the terrorist strike team, was
> reportedly an object of attention for Egyptian, German, and American
> authorities, and yet managed to travel without hindrance between Europe
> and America throughout 2000 and 2001. U.S. agents in Germany had
> monitored Atta's group there before September 11; after the attacks,
> according to the British paper The Observer, 'A team of agents
> dispatched by the FBI to Germany has been focusing on the northern city
> of Hamburg, where three of the men who died in the planes and four
> others who were on the FBI's initial list of suspects studied at
> universities.' Atta 'was under surveillance between January and May last
> year [2000] after he was reportedly observed buying large quantities of
> chemicals in Frankfurt, apparently for the production of explosives and
> for biological warfare.' [41]
>
>
> Atta came to the attention of U.S. authorities several times in 2001. On
> January 10, 2001, he was allowed to enter the United States on a tourist
> visa, even though he admitted to immigration officials that he would be
> attending flight school, an activity that requires a student visa. The
> executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association told
> the Washington Post that 'nine times out of ten' a person in that
> situation would have been denied entrance. Oddly enough, federal
> immigration police overlooked Atta's visa status violation even though
> he had previously been under FBI surveillance for stockpiling
> bomb-making materials. [42]
>
>
> During the summer of 2001, the FBI discovered that Atta received a wire
> transfer of $100,000 from an account in Pakistan alleged to be
> controlled by a representative of Osama Bin Laden. [43] It is difficult
> to understand how such a large sum of money could be transmitted with
> impunity to someone under FBI surveillance.
>
>
> The strange case of Zacarias Moussaoui
>
> The government's seeming lack of interest in the case of Zacarias
> Moussaoui is also very strange. On January 3, 2002, Moussaoui was
> arraigned on terrorism conspiracy charges in connection with the
> September 11 attacks. He had been arrested in Minnesota on August 16
> after officials of a flight school there alerted the FBI of his
> suspicious behavior. Though lacking the most basic flying skills, he was
> seeking flight training on a commercial jet simulator. Moreover, he
> reportedly did not want to learn how to take off or land, only how to
> steer the jet while it was in the air. Moussaoui was detained by the
> Immigration and Naturalization Service on charges of violating the terms
> of his visa.
>
>
> Local FBI investigators in Minneapolis immediately viewed Moussaoui as a
> terrorist suspect and sought authorization for a special
> counterintelligence surveillance warrant in order to search the hard
> drive of his home computer. Higher-level officials in Washington
> rejected the request, claiming there was insufficient evidence to meet
> the legal requirements for the warrant. On August 26, French
> intelligence notified FBI headquarters that Moussaoui had connections to
> Osama Bin Laden, but even that revelation had little effect. A special
> counterterrorism panel of the FBI and CIA concluded that there was
> insufficient evidence to show that Moussaoui represented any threat, and
> he was not even transferred from INS detention to FBI custody until
> after September 11. [44] In an analysis published December 22, the New
> York Times commented that the Moussaoui case 'raised new questions about
> why the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies did not
> prevent the hijackings.' [45]
>
>
> What did the U.S. government know?
>
> In early August, the CIA informed the White House and other high
> government officials that Osama Bin Laden intended to mount a terrorist
> attack in the United States. [46] In its September 24 issue, Newsweek
> made the startling revelation that on September 10, 'A group of top
> Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning,
> apparently because of security concerns.' [47] That would imply that
> some federal officials knew of the exact timing of the attack. It
> appears that while federal officials might have made use of such
> knowledge to save their own skins, they had no desire to actually
> prevent the terrorist attack from taking place; or, to be more precise,
> that certain government officials at the highest levels had no desire to
> prevent it from taking place.
>
>
> David P. Schippers, noted Chicago lawyer and the House Judiciary
> Committee's chief investigator in the Clinton impeachment trial, has
> charged that elements of the U.S. government had foreknowledge of the
> September attack. He claims that lower-echelon FBI agents in Chicago and
> Minnesota contacted him about a month and a half before September 11 and
> told him that a terrorist attack was going to occur in lower Manhattan.
>
>
> According to Schippers, the agents had been developing extensive
> information on the planned attack for many months. However, the FBI
> command pulled them off the terrorist investigation and threatened them
> with prosecution under the National Security Act if they went public
> with the information. As a result, some of them went to Schippers in
> hopes of prompting someone influential to persuade the government to
> take action. Schippers tried to pass the information on to high
> government officials - including some in the attorney general's office -
> but his efforts apparently were ignored. One would have thought that
> Schippers's background would have made him a credible witness,
> especially in the eyes of the intelligence and security appointees of a
> Republican regime.
>
>
> He is now representing at least ten of the FBI agents in a suit against
> the U.S. government in an attempt to have their testimony subpoenaed,
> which would enable them to legally tell what they know and legally get
> it on record. [48]
>
>
> Alleged terrorists acted like boobs
>
> In an interview that appeared on January 13 in the Berlin daily
> Tagesspiegel, Andreas von Bülow - who served on a parliamentary
> commission that oversaw the three branches of German intelligence from
> 1969 to 1994 - finds the modus operandi of the alleged terrorist
> highjackers to be very suspicious. In particular, he regards the clues
> that they left behind to be very amateurish, if not idiotic. He
> describes them as 'assailants who ... leave tracks behind them like a
> herd of stampeding elephants. They made payments with credit cards with
> their own names; they reported to their flight instructors with their
> own names. They left behind rented cars with flight manuals in Arabic
> for jumbo jets. They took with them, on their suicide trip, wills and
> farewell letters, which fell into the hands of the FBI, because they
> were stored in the wrong place and wrongly addressed. Clues were left
> like behind like in a child's game of hide-and-seek, which were to be
> followed.' [49]
>
>
> How could terrorists who were capable of secretly carrying out a very
> complicated plan, undetected beforehand, leave evidence behind that even
> the Keystone Cops could detect? Or was the evidence left behind for the
> express purpose of incriminating the Bin Laden network?
>
>
> Reporter Robert Fisk points out that the alleged evidence does not mesh
> with the notion that the terrorist highjackers were devoted Muslims.
> Fisk writes: 'If the hand-written, five-page document which the FBI says
> it found in the baggage of Mohamed Atta, the suicide bomber from Egypt,
> is genuine, then the men who murdered more than 7,000 innocent people
> believed in a very exclusive version of Islam - or were surprisingly
> unfamiliar with their religion.' [50]
>
>
> Other strange revelations
>
> Two other pieces of evidence frequently cited by conspiratorial
> believers are most intriguing but are of uncertain validity. One odd
> case is that of a 35-year-old American by the name of Delmart Edward
> 'Mike' Vreeland II. Vreeland claims to be a lieutenant in a U.S. Navy
> intelligence unit and says he knew in advance about the September 11
> attacks. He has been imprisoned in Canada since December 2000, being
> initially arrested on fraud-related charges. While in prison, he tried
> to warn Canadian authorities about possible terrorist attacks on New
> York and the Pentagon, as well as on targets in Ottawa and Toronto, but
> was ignored. He then wrote the warning on a piece of paper, sealed it in
> an envelope, and handed it to jail guards a month before the attacks.
> The guards opened the letter on September 14 and immediately forwarded
> the information to Ottawa.
>
>
> American law-enforcement officials want Vreeland returned to the United
> States, where he would face fraud-related criminal charges in five
> states. Vreeland and his lawyers are fighting extradition, claiming that
> a return to this country could mean his death. [51] The entire story is
> fascinating, but Vreeland does appear to be a con artist. [52] That he
> was in naval intelligence and was involved in various secret operations
> seems implausible. His prediction of the attacks could have been a lucky
> guess.
>
>
> More intriguing are remarks that Tom Kennedy, a member of the Federal
> Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) National Urban Search and Rescue
> Team, made during a nationally telecast interview with CBS News anchor
> Dan Rather on September 13. Kennedy told Rather that FEMA sent the Urban
> Search and Rescue Team to New York City on Monday night, which was the
> night before the attacks occurred!
>
>
> Kennedy recounted: 'We're currently one of the first teams that was
> deployed to support the City of New York in this disaster. We arrived on
> late Monday night [September 10] and went right into action on Tuesday
> morning' [September 11]. FEMA officials said Kennedy misstated his
> team's arrival date. Kennedy has never been reached for comment. The
> easy explanation is that this was a slip of the tongue, but since the
> interview took place on September 13, it would seem that Kennedy must
> have fallen victim to an extremely poor memory - perhaps signaling
> early-onset Alzheimer's Syndrome. [53]
>
>
> Bush administration hindered Bin Laden probes
>
> FBI and military intelligence officials in Washington have claimed that
> they were prevented for political reasons from carrying out full
> investigations into members of the Bin Laden family and Saudi activities
> in the United States before the attacks of September 11. [54] FBI deputy
> director John O'Neill, who for years led U.S. investigations into Bin
> Laden's al Qaeda network, resigned in August 2001 in protest over the
> obstruction. [55]
>
>
> Ironically, after his resignation O'Neill took a new job as head of
> security at the World Trade Center. He died on September 11.
>
>
> Big Oil - and Big Policy
>
> Since their motives for war differ, it is necessary to discuss the
> actions of Big Oil and Israel separately. (Israel's moves - and movers -
> will be examined in the fourth and concluding part of this article.)
> President Bush and his top advisors, most significantly Vice President
> Dick Cheney, have had close connections with major oil companies. And
> major oil interests have for some time been eyeing the vast, largely
> untapped oil and gas resources of the Caspian Basin and Central Asia.
>
>
> The Caspian Sea reserves comprise 10 percent of the world's known supply
> - worth about $5 trillion at today's prices. However, Central Asia's oil
> and gas reserves are land-locked, which means that the energy wealth
> must be sent through long pipelines to reach global markets. Control of
> Afghanistan is valuable not because of any oil or gas reserves of her
> own but because of her crucial geographic location. Potential transit
> routes for oil and natural gas exports from Central Asia to the Arabian
> Sea run through Afghanistan. American oil companies have sought to lay
> such a pipeline across that country, but political stability must first
> be established in the turbulent region.
>
>
> Afghanistan's key role
>
> The value of Afghanistan, however, far transcends the oil-pipeline
> issue. Elie Krakowski, a former Department of Defense specialist on
> Afghanistan, points out that Afghanistan has traditionally been, and
> remains, a key area in global power politics:
>
>
> Why then have so many great nations fought in and over Afghanistan, and
> why should we be concerned with it now? In short, because Afghanistan is
> the crossroads between what Halford MacKinder called the world's
> Heartland and the Indian subcontinent. It owes its importance to its
> location at the confluence of major routes. A boundary between land
> power and sea power, it is the meeting point between opposing forces
> larger than itself. Alexander the Great used it as a path to conquest.
> So did the Moghuls. An object of competition between the British and
> Russian empires in the 19th century, Afghanistan became a source of
> controversy between the American and Soviet superpowers in the 20th.
> With the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has become an important
> potential opening to the sea for the landlocked new states of Central
> Asia. The presence of large oil and gas deposits in that area has
> attracted countries and multinational corporations. Russia and China,
> not to mention Pakistan and India, are deeply involved in trying to
> shape the future of what may be the world's most unchangeable people.
> Because Afghanistan is a major strategic pivot what happens there
> affects the rest of the world.' [56]
>
>
> U.S. control over Central Asia
>
> Leftist critics of American imperialism frequently portray American
> policy as based simply on the desire for corporate profits - in the case
> of Central Asia, profits from oil. And their argument contains an
> element of truth. Most Persian Gulf countries place stringent
> restrictions on American investment, which means that Central Asia is
> one of the few remaining growth regions for U.S. oil companies. [57]
> Undoubtedly some individuals profit monetarily from those restrictions;
> but the policies that American state officials pursue go far beyond
> providing mere personal wealth for themselves or their cronies.
>
>
> American policies reflect certain geopolitical beliefs - connected to
> the economic interests of particular groups, indeed, but not necessarily
> related to the immediate financial gain of particular policymakers. The
> United States, or at least her foreign-policy elite, sees a need for the
> United States to dominate Central Asian energy resources as she
> dominates the Persian Gulf oil fields. Obviously, the development of
> those energy resources will mean financial gain for American investors.
> But control of the area will also enhance U.S. global power, and such
> control is thus a critical part of a geostrategic strategy to achieve
> global hegemony.
>
>
> U.S. geostrategic models
>
> Among the higher circles, views differ on how best to achieve the agreed
> goal of American dominance of Central Asia. Opinions fall along a
> continuum between two contrasting foreign-policy models: competitive and
> cooperative. According to the competitive model, other powers are
> adversaries in the quest for world power and wealth. It's a zero-sum
> game - anything that benefits the United States's adversaries
> automatically harms the United States. America's goal is to achieve
> world hegemony - any lesser achievement would leave the United States
> vulnerable to her enemies. To achieve hegemony America must act
> unilaterally. In particular she must monopolize the world's crucial
> energy sources to keep that wealth out of the hands of potential enemies
> such as Iran, Russia, and China.
>
>
> One of the foremost articulators of the competitive position is Zbigniew
> Brzezinski, national security advisor in the Carter administration. In
> his 1997 work The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its
> Geostrategic Imperatives, Brzezinski portrays the Eurasian landmass as
> the linchpin for world power, with Central Asia being key to the
> domination of Eurasia. [58] For the United States to maintain the global
> primacy that Brzezinski equates with American security, the United
> States must, at the very least, prevent any possible adversary, or
> coalition of adversaries, from controlling that crucial region. And, of
> course, the best way for the United States to prevent adversaries from
> controlling a region is to control it herself. [59] With considerable
> prescience, Brzezinski remarks that, because of popular resistance to
> U.S. military expansionism, his ambitious strategy could not be
> implemented 'except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely
> perceived direct external threat.' [60]
>
>
> The second model envisions cooperation, rather than competition, in
> seizing and managing the resources of Central Asia. The idea that
> cooperation with Russia and China in an expanded world state-capitalism,
> with its (notional) concomitant prosperity, would enhance world peace
> closely resembles the old Kissinger/Rockefeller 1970s vision of détente
> with the Soviet Union. Better transport and communications links in the
> Central Asian region could transform presently isolated countries into
> key trading centers at the crossroads of Europe and Asia - reminiscent
> of the Silk Road of the Middle Ages. U.S. officials predict the 21st
> Century Silk Road running through Central Asia will include railroads,
> oil and gas pipelines, and fiberoptic cables. [61]
>
>
> One twist on the cooperation thesis has it that energy production in
> Central Asia, hinging on cooperation between the United States and
> Russia, is intended to lessen the industrial world's dependence on the
> unstable Middle East. Making Central Asia safe for state-managed
> capitalistic development aimed at enhancing the prosperity of the great
> powers entails, of course, the suppression of trouble-some destabilizing
> elements such as Islamic fundamentalism and ethnic nationalism. [62]
>
>
> It appears that actual U.S. policy in Central Asia leans toward the
> competitive model, but with elements of cooperation.
>
>
> U.S. policy toward Afghanistan
>
> Whereas U.S. officials now portray the Taliban as the essence of evil,
> that was not their prevailing view in the past. It certainly was not
> their view in the first part of 2001, when the United States saw the
> Taliban as a friendly government, and negotiated with it as such.
>
>
> Officially the United States condemned the Islamic groups that used
> Afghanistan as their base for terrorism, and officially the United
> States demanded the extradition of Osama Bin Laden to face trial in the
> August 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. (After the
> 1998 bombings, the Clinton regime even launched missile strikes on Bin
> Laden's guerrilla camps.) Although the record is convoluted and murky,
> it seems that, while the United States wanted to apprehend Bin Laden,
> she also sought to improve relations with the Taliban government, and
> that the latter goal often took precedence. Alternatively, one might
> argue that although Washington preferred to use negotiation to turn the
> Taliban against terrorism and achieve the stability necessary for
> regional energy exploitation, she had for some years considered the
> military option to remove the Taliban.
>
>
> U.S.-Taliban relations can be roughly divided into four periods, though
> there is much overlap:
>
>
> * From perhaps two years before the Taliban captured the capital city of
> Kabul in 1996 until the embassy bombings in August 1998 the United
> States was, at the very least, covertly friendly toward the Taliban.
>
>
> * From August 1998 to the beginning of the Bush administration in
> January 2001, the U.S. attitude toward the Taliban cooled, and
> Washington made plans to eliminate Osama Bin Ladin; at the same time,
> however, some covert cooperation with the Taliban may have continued.
>
>
> * After the present U.S. regime took power, it attempted to improve
> relations with the Taliban but abandoned that approach in August 2001,
> owing to a paucity of results, and made concrete preparations to remove
> the Taliban militarily.
>
>
> * And after the September 11 tragedy, of course, the U.S. regime
> implemented the military option to eliminate the Taliban regime.
>
>
> Oil companies' interests
>
> American oil companies had cozied up to the Taliban from the time it
> took over Kabul in 1996. In 1996, the U.S. oil company Unocal (Union Oil
> of California) reached an agreement with the Taliban to build a
> pipeline, but the continuing Afghan civil war prevented that project
> from getting started. According to Ahmed Rashid, a Central Asia
> specialist and author of Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and
> Fundamentalism in Central Asia, 'Between 1994-96 the U.S. supported the
> Taliban politically through its allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia,
> essentially because Washington viewed the Taliban as anti-Iranian,
> anti-Shia, and pro-Western.' From 1995 to 1997, Rashid says, 'U.S.
> support was driven by the UNOCAL oil/gas pipeline project.' [63] Private
> companies conducted the actual negotiating, but their actions were
> 'encouraged by the U.S. government.' [64]
>
>
> In May 1997 the New York Times wrote: 'The Clinton Administration has
> taken the view that a Taliban victory ... would act as a counterweight
> to Iran ... and would offer the possibility of new trade routes that
> could weaken Russian and Iranian influence in the region.' [65] The Wall
> Street Journal opined that Afghanistan could provide 'a prime
> transshipment route for the export of Central Asia's vast oil, gas, and
> other natural resources.'
>
>
> 'Like them or not,' the Journal continued, 'the Taliban are the players
> most capable of achieving peace in Afghanistan at this moment in
> history.' [66]
>
>
> The U.S. government's main objective in Afghanistan was to consolidate
> the position of the Taliban regime, which would be friendly to the
> United States, in order to exploit the oil and gas reserves in Central
> Asia. Moreover, Washington saw the Taliban as the enemy of Iran, which
> had her own proxy in Afghanistan - the Northern Alliance.
>
>
> Military support for the Taliban came from Pakistan's intelligence
> agency, the ISI (Inter Services Intelligence). In fact, the Taliban was
> a virtual creation of Pakistani intelligence, which viewed Afghanistan
> as a potential client state. [67] The United States, in turn, supported
> Pakistan as a counterweight to Iran.
>
>
> Throughout the period when the United States took a favorable stance
> toward the Taliban, the Taliban was massacring civilians, oppressing
> women, and, in general, depriving the Afghan people of their basic
> liberties. It was those very same horrors that the United States, after
> September 11, 2001, would cite as justification for her use of military
> force to overthrow the tyrannical regime and, presumably, liberate the
> downtrodden populace.
>
>
> Amnesty International, which was concerned not with gas and oil
> concessions but rather with the Taliban's violations of human rights,
> commented negatively about Washington's apparent friendliness toward
> that regime. According to Amnesty International, 'Many Afghanistan
> analysts believe that the United States has had close political links
> with the Taliban militia. They refer to visits by Taliban
> representatives to the United States in recent months and several visits
> by senior U.S. State Department officials to Kandahar including one
> immediately before the Taliban took over Jalalabad.' [68]
>
>
> U.S. backing of the Taliban
>
> After the 1998 embassy bombings, the Clinton administration does seem to
> have moved to a position of opposition to the Taliban, pushing the UN
> Security Council to adopt UN Resolution 1267, which called on the
> Taliban to hand over indicted terrorist Osama Bin Laden and to deal with
> the issue of terrorism. Economic sanctions were imposed to pressure the
> Taliban to comply. The United States also engaged in some covert
> operations on Afghanistan's borders and within the country itself, aimed
> at ultimately removing the regime. [69]
>
>
> But still Washington seems to have mixed its opposition with covert
> support. The International Herald Tribune reported that in the summer of
> 1998, 'the Clinton administration was talking with the Taliban about
> potential pipeline routes to carry oil and natural gas out of
> Turkmenistan to the Indian Ocean by crossing Afghanistan and Pakistan.'
> [70]
>
>
> In 1999, Rep. Dan Rohrabacher, a Republican who was a senior member of
> the House international relations committee, with oversight
> responsibility on policy toward Afghanistan, complained that 'there is
> and has been a covert policy by this [Clinton] administration to support
> the Taliban movement's control of Afghanistan.' Rohrabacher surmised
> that U.S. policy was 'based on the assumption that the Taliban would
> bring stability to Afghanistan and permit the building of oil pipelines
> from Central Asia through Afghanistan to Pakistan.' [71]
>
>
> In July 2000, Rohrabacher pressed his charge that the United States was
> aiding the Taliban in his testimony on global terrorism before the
> committee. Rohrabacher said: 'We have been supporting the Taliban
> because all of our aid goes to the Taliban areas, and when people from
> the outside try to put aid into areas not controlled by the Taliban,
> they are thwarted by our own State Department.'
>
>
> He continued: 'Let me state for the record [that] at a time when the
> Taliban were vulnerable, the top person in this administration, Mr.
> [Karl F.] Inderfurth [assistant secretary of state for South Asian
> affairs], and [Secretary of Energy] Bill Richardson personally went to
> Afghanistan and convinced the anti-Taliban forces not to go on the
> offensive. Further-more, they convinced all of the anti-Taliban forces
> and their supporters to disarm and to cease their flow of support for
> the anti-Taliban forces.' [72]
>
>
> U.S. humanitarian aid to Afghanistan did help prop up the Taliban
> regime. The United States provided an estimated $113 million in
> humanitarian aid to Afghanistan in 2000 and a comparable sum in 2001
> prior to September 11. [73]
>
>
> Taliban do not submit
>
> In 2001, the new Bush administration greatly expanded American efforts
> to come to terms with the Taliban on oil and terrorism. From February to
> August, the Bush regime conducted detailed negotiations with Taliban
> diplomatic representatives, meeting several times in Washington, Berlin,
> and Islamabad. A recent book by French intelligence analysts
> Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, Bin Laden: The Forbidden
> Truth, tells that story and tells it well. [74]
>
>
> But the Taliban balked at any pipeline deal and refused to eliminate the
> terrorist camps in their country. Instead of serving as a pliable
> government that could provide requisite stability for American
> exploitation of energy resources, the Taliban were exporting their
> revolutionary Islamic fundamentalism to nearby Central Asian countries,
> thus destabilizing the entire energy-rich region. According to Brisard
> and Dasquie, U.S. negotiations with the Taliban broke down in August
> after a U.S. negotiator threatened military action against the Taliban,
> telling them to accept the American offer of 'a carpet of gold, or
> you'll get a carpet of bombs.' [75]
>
>
> Preparations for military action
>
> Months before August 2001, however, the United States had been making
> plans to remove the Taliban. In this connection, note that it is not
> unusual for a country to have a multifacted foreign policy, with
> contingency plans that vary widely. In any case, the United States seems
> to have sought to solve her differences with the Taliban through
> negotiations, while at the same time making plans to remove the regime
> if negotiations failed.
>
>
> Washington had considered projecting its military power into the Central
> Asian region for some years. For example, in 1997, U.S. Special Forces
> took part in the longest-range airborne operation in American history,
> to reach Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in order to engage in joint military
> operations with military forces from Russia and the former Soviet
> Central Asian republics. U.S. News and World Report opined that this
> demonstration of America's military muscle was primarily aimed at
> 'Iran's Islamic-fundamentalist regime. But it also could be seen as a
> warning to other potential rivals, including China and the
> fundamentalist Taliban militia of Afghanistan.' [76]
>
>
> After the September 11 attack, it transpired that the United States and
> Uzbekistan had been sharing intelligence and conducting joint covert
> operations against the Taliban for two to three years. That prior secret
> relationship helps explain the rapid emergence of the post-September 11
> military partnership between the two countries, making Uzbekistan a base
> for launching attacks on Afghanistan. [77] Furthermore, since 1997
> special military units of the CIA had been inside Afghanistan, working
> with Taliban opposition forces. Not only did the CIA work with the
> anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, it also helped establish an anti-Taliban
> network in southern Afghanistan, the area of the Taliban's greatest
> support. [78]
>
>
> With the advent of the Bush administration in 2001, U.S. officials
> settled on concrete plans for military action, in cooperation with other
> countries, to remove the Taliban regime. Significantly, some information
> on those plans leaked to the public before September 11. On March 15,
> 2001, the British-based Jane's International Security reported that the
> new U.S. regime was working with India, Iran, and Russia 'in a concerted
> front against Afghanistan's Taliban regime.' India was supplying the
> Northern Alliance with military equipment, advisors, and helicopter
> technicians, the magazine said, and both India and Russia were using
> bases in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan for their operations.
>
>
> 'Several recent meetings between the newly instituted Indo-U.S. and
> Indo-Russian joint working groups on terrorism led to this effort to
> tactically and logistically counter the Taliban', Jane's reported.
> 'Intelligence sources in Delhi said that while India, Russia, and Iran
> were leading the anti-Taliban campaign on the ground, Washington was
> giving the Northern Alliance information and logistic support.' [79]
>
>
> According to a June 26, 2001, article in the Indian public-affairs Web
> magazine Indiareacts.com, the United States, Russia, Pakistan, and India
> made a pact for war against the Taliban. Iran was considered a covert
> participant. The powers planned to begin the war in mid October. [80]
>
>
> A similar story, reported by the BBC on September 18, was provided by
> Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani foreign secretary. He said he was told by
> senior U.S. officials in mid July that military action against
> Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October. The broader goal
> was the removal of the Taliban and the installation of a compliant
> pro-American regime. According to Naik, he was told that the United
> States would launch her operation from bases in Tajikistan, where
> American military advisors were already in place. [81]
>
>
> Four days later, on September 22, The Guardian newspaper confirmed
> Naik's account and added that Pakistan had passed a warning of the
> impending attack to the Taliban. The story implied that the warning may
> have spurred Osama Bin Laden to launch his attacks, stating that 'Bin
> Laden, far from launching the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New
> York and the Pentagon out of the blue 10 days ago, was launching a
> preemptive strike in response to what he saw as U.S. threats.' The
> warning to Afghanistan came out of a meeting of senior U.S., Russian,
> Iranian, and Pakistani officials at a hotel in Berlin in mid July. [82]
>
>
> Pretext
>
> Despite her preparations for war, the United States couldn't just launch
> an attack on Afghanistan; U.S. officials required a compelling pretext
> in order to mobilize the American public into supporting a war in that
> faraway, and, to most people, unknown land. As Brzezinski had
> acknowledged, American military expansion into Central Asia could not be
> undertaken 'except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely
> perceived direct external threat.' [83] Even more importantly, an
> irresistible provocation was needed to prevent strong opposition to such
> a war in Iran and Pakistan. Support - or, in the case of Iran,
> acquiescence - was seen as necessary to allow for the successful conduct
> of such a war.
>
>
> Was September 11 just a fortuitous event that meshed perfectly with U.S.
> strategic designs for foreign oil resources and with actual U.S.
> military planning? Such serendipity does occasionally occur. However,
> even if the 9-11 attacks were such a case, they would still deserve to
> be placed in historical and political context, since they allowed the
> United States to capitalize upon them by implementing a preexisting
> military agenda. Hitler may not have started the Reichstag fire, but he
> certainly intended to become dictator and was able to exploit the fire
> to achieve his goal; and that would be worth putting in context. But the
> official media portrayal of the 'war on terrorism' as simply an effort
> to remove the evil people who attacked America is contextless. The aims
> of the war are quite different. If the terrible tragedy of September 11
> had not served as a pretext for America's war policy, something else
> probably would have, though undoubtedly less effectively.
>
>
> But given the evidence presented in this article, it is also conceivable
> that high U.S. officials had advance knowledge of a terrorist attack and
> decided to let it proceed, perhaps without envisioning the magnitude of
> the destruction, in order to provide a catalyst for their already
> planned war in Afghanistan. (We can probably exclude from that knowing
> circle President Dodo, who doesn't seem to have a clue as to what's
> going on beyond believing that we are good and they are bad.)
>
>
> Israel's involvement
>
> As important as the interest of Big Oil is, the success of America's
> foreign policy requires the backing of the supporters of Israel, who
> hold a dominant place in the official media. Israel's supporters in
> America, unsurprisingly, constitute the vanguard of those who are
> working to enlarge the war into one against Israel's enemies. But Israel
> is more than simply a beneficiary of the 9-11 attack. Considerable
> evidence exists that Israel had some connection to the attack, at least
> to the extent that her intelligence agents possessed prior knowledge of
> it.
>
>
> For years stories have circulated that Israeli agents - especially those
> of Israel's foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad - have infiltrated
> Arab terrorist networks and have sometimes actually involved themselves
> in deceptive terroristic activities designed to appear as the work of
> Arabs. For example, it has been claimed - by Victor Ostrovsky, for one -
> that the Mossad had foreknowledge of the attack on the U