- The revelations over the past two weeks about advance
warnings of the September 11 terrorist attacks have focused particularly
on the role of Zaccarias Moussaoui, the Islamic fundamentalist arrested
last August in Minneapolis. Moussaoui is the only person facing criminal
charges for allegedly playing a role in the attacks that destroyed the
World Trade Center and killed more than 3,000 people.
-
- Fragments of a May 22 letter from Colleen Rowley, an
official in the Minneapolis FBI office, to FBI Director Robert Mueller
were reported in the press last week. Virtually the entire text of the
letter is published in the current issue of Time magazine and posted on
its web site, www.time.com. The letter documents not merely incompetence
and bureaucratic indifference, but active opposition to an investigation
of Moussaoui, sabotage so obvious that it led Minneapolis FBI personnel
to joke that agents of Osama bin Laden must have penetrated the J. Edgar
Hoover building.
-
- Ever since September 11 the Bush administration has steadfastly
maintained its opposition to any investigation into the circumstances leading
up to the suicide hijackings, while offering shifting and contradictory
explanations of how it was possible for terrorists to seize control of
four commercial airliners simultaneously and hit the World Trade Center
and Pentagon.
-
- At first the White House, FBI and CIA claimed that the
attacks came as a bolt from the blue, taking the US government totally
by surprise, despite its vast intelligence apparatus employing hundreds
of thousands of personnel. Anyone who questioned this claim, especially
in view of the longstanding ties between the US intelligence services and
Osama bin Laden, the alleged inspirer of the attacks, was branded a "conspiracy
theorist."
-
- The administration launched its long-planned war against
Afghanistan, bombing and then invading that impoverished country, killing
thousands of people - from Taliban rank-and-file soldiers to civilians
in peasant villages and urban centers - who had no demonstrable connection
to the destruction of the World Trade Center.
-
- In the name of the "war on terrorism," the
administration drafted and pushed through Congress legislation that vastly
expanded the powers of the government to spy on, arrest and imprison both
American citizens and immigrants. These new powers were needed, according
to Attorney General Ashcroft and other Bush spokesmen, to prevent a repetition
of the "surprise attack" of September 11.
-
- One lie replaces another
-
- Then came the revelation this month that September 11
was not such a surprise. Press reports compelled the White House to admit
that Bush had been briefed on August 6, 2001 - more than a month before
the attacks on New York and Washington - about Al Qaeda threats to hijack
US commercial airliners.
-
- The official story changed abruptly. Instead of no advance
warning, White House and FBI spokesmen now claimed there had been too many
warnings. The evidence had been plentiful, but so fragmentary that no one
was able to put it together in time to forestall the hijackings.
-
- With undisguised contempt for public opinion, the White
House offered a new cover story that directly contradicted the old one
that the White House had maintained for eight months. The new version,
however, failed to explain why Bush & Co. had concealed the August
6 briefing and other evidence of advance warnings for months on end.
-
- The American media dutifully swallowed the new set of
lies without protest. Press accounts were filled with references to the
failure to "connect the dots," as though elaborate mental gymnastics
were required to see the relationship between a warning of Islamic fundamentalist
activity at US pilot-training schools (from the Arizona FBI) and the arrest
(by the Minneapolis FBI) of Moussaoui, an Islamic fundamentalist who paid
cash to be trained to fly a Boeing 747 while he could not even pilot a
small plane.
-
- This new cover story lasted barely a week before it was
exploded by Rowley's 13-page letter to Mueller and the Senate Intelligence
Committee. Among other things, Rowley revealed that the local FBI reports
from Arizona and Minneapolis had ended up on the desk of the same official
at FBI headquarters, David Frasca, head of the Radical Fundamentalists
Unit. Even on the morning of September 11, as the Minneapolis FBI agents
were watching television coverage of the suicide attacks on the Twin Towers,
Frasca called Rowley to tell her not to proceed with an investigation of
Moussaoui because Minneapolis might "screw up" something else
going on elsewhere in the country.
-
- Nor were these the isolated actions of a single misguided
official. Rowley points out, "Despite FBI leadersí full knowledge
of all the items mentioned herein ... the SSA [supervisory special agent],
his unit chief, and other involved HQ personnel were allowed to stay in
their positions and, what's worse, occupy critical positions in the FBI's
SIOC Command Center post-September 11th. (The SSA in question actually
received a promotion some months afterward!)"
-
- Rowley's letter confirms that there was extensive discussion
within the government on the danger of hijackings by Islamic fundamentalists,
although the public was not informed. Repeated efforts to investigate were
being thwarted. Top-level FBI officials were protecting Moussaoui and his
confederates, running interference for him when his own reckless and impulsive
conduct brought him to the attention of the authorities. The question is,
why?
-
- The CIA and Islamic fundamentalism
-
- There are two possible explanations. The first is that
Moussaoui and others were being protected because they were engaged in
operations that had the support of the US government - in Chechnya or other
territories of the former Soviet Union, in Bosnia, or elsewhere. Moussaoui
himself was active in recruiting Islamic fundamentalists to fight in Chechnya
against the Russian army.
-
- CIA Director William Casey initiated the recruitment
of Islamic fundamentalists from around the world to go to Afghanistan in
the 1980s to fight in the decade-long guerrilla war against the Soviet
military intervention. They received training in terrorist tactics, including
the planting of bombs, from US intelligence agents. This was the milieu
out of which Osama bin Laden - himself a collaborator with the CIA in Afghanistan
- recruited the initial forces for his Al Qaeda organization.
-
- After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, many of
these fighters, most of them Arabs, were allowed entry into the United
States as a reward for their services in the war. In the aftermath of the
Persian Gulf War, some of these Islamic fundamentalists turned against
the US government, bombing the World Trade Center in 1993 and carrying
out other attacks on US targets overseas. The phenomenon of former CIA-backed
guerrillas using their US training to attack American targets became known
as "blowback."
-
- Many Islamic fundamentalists continued to make common
cause with American imperialism, particularly in Bosnia, Chechnya, and
other brutal guerrilla wars on the periphery of the former Soviet bloc.
The US intelligence apparatus worked closely with these forces, particularly
in Bosnia, Kosovo and Albania, but also in Chechnya and the former Soviet
republics of Central Asia. US administrations regularly denounced the Russian
military intervention in Chechnya - a position taken by George W. Bush
as a candidate, which he abandoned only after September 11 in pursuit of
Russian support for the US intervention in Central Asia.
-
- It is thus quite possible that top US intelligence officials
were aware of Moussaoui's role as a recruiter for the Islamic fundamentalist
forces fighting Russian troops in Chechnya and sought to protect him from
the attentions of lower-level FBI agents.
-
- There is a second possibility, which largely coincides
with the first, but with the sinister addition that the alliance of the
CIA with Islamic fundamentalist terrorists may have included actions within
the United States itself. In other words, the US intelligence apparatus
was aware at some level of the unfolding plans for terrorist strikes against
US targets, and let them proceed in order to provide a suitable pretext
for the military action that the Bush administration and the Pentagon were
planning to undertake in Central Asia.
-
- http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/may2002/sept-m29.shtml
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