The October 16 issue of NY Review of Books has an article by Janine di Giovani titled “Why Assad and Russia Target the White Helmets“. The article exemplifies how western media promotes the White Helmets uncritically and attacks those who challenge the myth.
Crude and Disingenuous Attack
Giovani’s article attacks several journalists by name. She singles out Janine di Giovani and echoes the Guardian’s characterization of Beeley as the “high priestess of Syria propaganda”. She does this without challenging a single article or claim by the journalist. She might have acknowledged that Vanessa Beeley has some familiarity with the Middle East; she is the daughter of one of the foremost British Arabists and diplomats including British Ambassador to Egypt. Giovanni might have explored Beeley’s research in Syria that revealed the White Helmets founder (British military contractor James LeMesurier) assigned the name Syria Civil Defence despite the fact there is a real Syrian organization by that name that has existed since the 1950’s. For the past several years, Beeley has done many on-the-ground reports and investigations in Syria. None of these are challenged by Giovanni. Just days ago Beeley published a report on her visit to the White Helmets headquarters in Deraa.
Giovanni similarly dismisses another alternative journalist, Eva Bartlett. Again, Giovanni ignores the fact that Bartlett has substantial Middle East experience including having lived in Gaza for years. Instead of objectively evaluating the journalistic work of these independent journalists, Giovanni smears their work as “disinformation”. Presumably that is because their work is published at alternative sites such as 21st Century Wire and Russian media such as RT and Sputnik. Beeley and Bartlett surely would have been happy to have their reports published at the New York Review of Books, Newsweek or other mainstream outlets. But it’s evident that such reporting is not welcome there. Even Seymour Hersh had to go abroad to have his investigations on Syria published.
The New McCarthyism
Max Blumenthal is another journalist singled out by Giovanni. Blumenthal is the author of three books, including a New York Times bestseller and the highly acclaimed “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel”. Giovanni describes his transition from “anti-Assad” to “pro-Assad” and suggests his change of perspective was due to Russian influence. She says, “Blumenthal went to Moscow on a junket to celebrate RT’s tenth anniversary. We don’t know what happened during that visit, but afterwards, Blumenthal’s views completely flipped.” Instead of examining the facts presented by Blumenthal in articles such as “Inside the Shadowy PR Firm that’s Lobyying for Regime Change in Syria“, Giovanni engages in fact-free McCarthyism. Blumenthal explained the transition in his thinking in a public interview. He also described the threats he experienced when he started to criticize the White Helmets and their public relations firm, but this is ignored by Giovanni.
Contrary to Giovanni’s assumptions, some western journalists and activists were exposing the White Helmets long before the story was publicized on Russian media. In spring 2015 the basic facts about the White Helmets including their origins, funding and role in the information war on Syria were exposed in my article “Seven Steps of Highly Effective Manipulators“. The article showed how the White Helmets were a key component in a campaign pushing for a “No Fly Zone” in Syria. It confirmed that the White Helmets is a political lobby force.
In spring 2016, Vanessa Beeley launched a petition “Do NOT give the Nobel Peace Prize to the White Helmets“. That petition garnered more support than a contrary petition urging the Nobel Prize committee to give the award to the White Helmets. Perhaps because of that, the petition was abruptly removed without explanation from the Change.org website. It was only at this time, with publicity around the heavily promoted nomination of the White Helmets for a Nobel Peace Prize that RT and other Russian media started to publicize and expose the White Helmets. That is one-and-a-half years after they were first exposed in western alternative media.
White Helmets and Chemical Weapons Accusations
Giovanni ignores the investigations and conclusions of some of the most esteemed American journalists regarding the White Helmets and chemical weapons incidents in Syria.
The late Robert Parry published many articles exposing the White Helmets, for example “The White Helmets Controversy” and “Syria War Propaganda at the Oscars“. Parry wrote and published numerous investigations of the August 2013 chemical weapons attack and concluded the attacks were carried out by an opposition faction with the goal of pressuring the US to intervene militarily. Parry also challenged western conclusions regarding incidents such as April 4, 2017 at Khan Shaykhun. Giovanni breathlessly opens her article with this story while Parry revealed the impossibility of it being as described.
Buried deep inside a new U.N. report is evidence that could exonerate the Syrian government in the April 4 sarin atrocity and make President Trump look like an Al Qaeda dupe.
Legendary American journalist, Seymour Hersh, researched and refuted the assumptions of Giovanni and the media establishment regarding the August 2013 chemical weapons attacks near Damascus. Hersh’s investigation, titled “The Red Line and Rat Line“, provided evidence the atrocity was carried out by an armed opposition group with active support from Turkey. A Turkish member of parliament provided additional evidence. The fact that Hersh had to go across the Atlantic to have his investigation published suggests American not Russian disinformation and censorship.
In addition to ignoring the findings of widely esteemed journalists with proven track records, Giovanni plays loose with the truth. In her article she implies that a UN investigation blamed the Syrian government for the August 2013 attack. On the contrary, the head of the UN investigation team, Ake Sellstrom, said they did not determine who was responsible.
We do not have the evidence to say who did what ….The conflict in Syria is surrounded by a lot of rumors and a lot of propaganda, particularly when comes to the sensitive issue of chemical weapons.
First Responders or Western Funded Propagandists?
Giovanni says, “But the White Helmets’ financial backing is not the real reason why the pro-Assad camp is so bent on defaming them. Since 2015, the year the Russians began fighting in Syria, the White Helmets have been filming attacks on opposition-held areas with GoPro cameras affixed to their helmets.”
In reality, the ‘White Helmets” have a sophisticated media production and distribution operation. They have much more than GoPro cameras. In many of their movie segments one can see numerous people with video and still cameras. Sometimes the same incident will be shown with one segment with an Al Qaeda logo blending into the same scene with a White Helmets logo.
Giovanni claims “The Assad regime and the Russians are trying to neutralize the White Helmets because they are potential witnesses to war crimes.” However, the claims of White Helmet “witnesses” have little credibility. The White Helmet “volunteers” are paid three times as much as Syrian soldiers. They are trained, supplied and promoted by the same western states which have sought to regime change in Syria since 2011. An example of misleading and false claims by a White Helmets leader is exposed in Gareth Porter’s investigation titled “How a Syrian White Helmets Leader Played Western Media” . His conclusion could be directed to Giovanni and the NYReview of Books:
The uncritical reliance on claims by the White Helmets without any effort to investigate their credibility is yet another telling example of journalistic malpractice by media outlets with a long record of skewing coverage of conflicts toward an interventionist narrative.
When the militants (mostly Nusra/al Qaeda) were expelled from East Aleppo, civilians reported that the White Helmets were mostly concerned with saving their own and performing publicity stunts. For example, the photo of the little boy in east Aleppo looking dazed and confused in the back of a brand new White Helmet ambulance was essentially a White Helmet media stunt eagerly promoted in the West. It was later revealed the boy was not injured, he was grabbed without his parent’s consent. Eva Bartlett interviewed and photographed the father and family for her story “Mintpress Meets the Father of Iconic Aleppo Boy and says Media Lied About his Son“.
A Brilliant Marketing Success
The media and political impact of the White Helmets shows what money and marketing can do. An organization that was founded by a military contractor with funding from western governments was awarded the Rights Livelihood Award. The organization was seriously considered to receive the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize just three years after its formation.
The Netflix infomercial “The White Helmets” is an example of the propaganda. The scripted propaganda piece, where the producers did not set foot in Syria, won the Oscar award for best short documentary. It’s clear that lots of money and professional marketing can fool a lot of people. At $30 million per year, the White Helmets budget for one year is more than a decade of funding for the real Syrian Civil Defence which covers all of Syria not just pockets controlled by armed insurgents.
Unsurprisingly, it has been announced that White Helmets will receive the 2019 “Elie Wiesel” award from the heavily politicized and pro-Israel Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. This, plus the recent “rescue” of White Helmets by the Israeli government, is more proof of the true colors of the White Helmets. Vanessa Beeley’s recent interview with a White Helmet leader in Deraa revealed that ISIS and Nusra terrorists were part of the group “rescued” through Israel.
The Collapsing White Helmets Fraud
Giovanni is outraged that some journalists have successfully challenged and put a big dent in the White Helmets aura. She complains, “The damage the bloggers do is immense.”
Giovanni and western propagandists are upset because the myth is deflating. Increasing numbers of people – from a famous rock musician to a former UK Ambassador – see and acknowledge the reality.
If we were to listen to the propaganda of the White Helmets and others, we would encourage our governments to start dropping bombs on people in Syria. This would be a mistake of monumental proportions…
Peter Ford, the former UK Ambassador to Syria, sums it up like this:
The White Helmets are jihadi auxiliaries… They are not, as claimed by themselves and by their supporters… simple rescuers. They are not volunteers. They are paid professionals of disinformation.
Giovanni claims her article is a “forensic take down of the Russian disinformation campaign to distort the truth in Syria.” In reality, Giovanni’s article is an example of western disinformation using subjective attacks on critics and evidence-free assertions aligned with the regime change goals of the West.
This month, Facebook and Twitter deleted the accounts of hundreds of users, including many alternative media outlets maintained by American users. Among those wiped out in the coordinated purge were popular sites that scrutinized police brutality and U.S. interventionism like The Free Thought Project, Anti-Media, Cop Block and journalists like Rachel Blevins.
Facebook claimed that these sites had “broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior.” However, sites like The Free Thought Project were verified by Facebook and widely recognized as legitimate sources of news and opinion. John Vibes, an independent reporter who contributed to Free Thought, accused Facebook of “favoring mainstream sources and silencing alternative voices.”
In comments published here for the first time, a neoconservative Washington insider has apparently claimed a degree of credit for the recent purge and promised more takedowns in the near future.
“Russia, China, and other foreign states take advantage of our open political system,” remarked Jamie Fly, a senior fellow and director of the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund. “They can invent stories that get repeated and spread through different sites. So we are just starting to push back. Just this last week Facebook began starting to take down sites. So this is just the beginning.”
Fly went on to complain that “all you need is an email” to set up a Facebook or Twitter account, lamenting the sites’ accessibility to members of the general public. He predicted a long struggle on a global scale to fix the situation, and pointed out that to do so would require constant vigilance.
Fly made these stunning comments to Jeb Sprague, who is a visiting faculty in sociology at the University of California-Santa Barbara and co-author of this article. The two spoke during a lunch break at a conference on Asian security organized by the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik in Berlin, Germany.
In the tweet below, Fly is the third person from the left who appears seated at the table.
The remarks by Fly — “we are just starting to push back” — seemed to confirm the worst fears of the alternative online media community. If he was to be believed, the latest purge was motivated by politics, not spam prevention, and was driven by powerful interests hostile to dissident views, particularly where American state violence is concerned.
Rise of a neocon cadre
Jamie Fly is an influential foreign policy hardliner who has spent the last year lobbying for the censorship of “fringe views” on social media. Over the years, he has advocated for a military assault on Iran, a regime change war on Syria, and hiking military spending to unprecedented levels. He is the embodiment of a neoconservative cadre.
Like so many second generation neocons, Fly entered government by burrowing into mid-level positions in George W. Bush’s National Security Council and Department of Defense.
In 2009, he was appointed director of the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), a rebranded version of Bill Kristol’s Project for a New American Century, or PNAC. The latter outfit was an umbrella group of neoconservative activists that first made the case for an invasion of Iraq as part of a wider project of regime change in countries that resisted Washington’s sphere of influence.
By 2011, Fly was advancing the next phase in PNAC’s blueprint by clamoring for military strikes on Iran. “More diplomacy is not an adequate response,” he argued. A year later, Fly urged the US to “expand its list of targets beyond the [Iranian] nuclear program to key command and control elements of the Republican Guard and the intelligence ministry, and facilities associated with other key government officials.”
Fly soon found his way into the senate office of Marco Rubio, a neoconservative pet project, assuming a role as his top foreign policy advisor. Amongst other interventionist initiatives, Rubio has taken the lead in promoting harsh economic sanctions targeting Venezuela, even advocating for a U.S. military assault on the country. When Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign floundered amid a mass revolt of the Republican Party’s middle American base against the party establishment, Fly was forced to cast about for new opportunities.
He found them in the paranoid atmosphere of Russiagate that formed soon after Donald Trump’s shock election victory.
PropOrNot sparks the alternative media panic
A journalistic insider’s account of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, Shattered, revealed that “in the days after the election, Hillary declined to take responsibility for her own loss.” Her top advisers were summoned the following day, according to the book, “to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up … Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.”
Less than three weeks after Clinton’s defeat, the Washington Post’s Craig Timberg published a dubiously sourced report headlined, “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news.’” The article hyped up a McCarthyite effort by a shadowy, anonymously run organization called PropOrNot to blacklist some 200 American media outlets as Russian “online propaganda.”
The alternative media outfits on the PropOrNot blacklist included some of those recently purged by Facebook and Twitter, such as The Free Thought Project and Anti-Media. Among the criteria PropOrNot identified as signs of Russian propaganda were, “Support for policies like Brexit, and the breakup of the EU and Eurozone” and, “Opposition to Ukrainian resistance to Russia and Syrian resistance to Assad.” PropOrNot called for “formal investigations by the U.S. government” into the outlets it had blacklisted.
According to Craig Timberg, the Washington Post correspondent who uncritically promoted the media suppression initiative, Propornot was established by “a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds.” Timberg quoted a figure associated with the George Washington University Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, Andrew Weisburd, and cited a report he wrote with his colleague, Clint Watts, on Russian meddling.
Timberg’s piece on was PropOrNot was promoted widely by former top Clinton staffers and celebrated by ex-Obama White House aide Dan Pfeiffer as “the biggest story in the world.” But after a wave of stinging criticism, including in the pages of the New Yorker, the article was amended with an editor’s note stating, “The [Washington] Post… does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings regarding any individual media outlet.”
PropOrNot had been seemingly exposed as a McCarthyite sham, but the concept behind it — exposing online American media outlets as vehicles for Kremlin “active measures” — continued to flourish.
The birth of the Russian bot tracker
By August, a new, and seemingly related initiative appeared out of the blue, this time with backing from a bipartisan coalition of Democratic foreign policy hands and neocon Never Trumpers in Washington. Called the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), the outfit aimed to expose how supposed Russian Twitter bots were infecting American political discourse with divisive narratives. It featured a daily “Hamilton 68” online dashboard that highlighted the supposed bot activity with easily digestible charts. Conveniently, the site avoided naming any of the digital Kremlin influence accounts it claimed to be tracking.
The initiative was immediately endorsed by John Podesta, the founder of the Democratic Party think tank, Center for American Progress, and former chief of staff of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Julia Ioffe, the Atlantic’s chief Russiagate correspondent, promoted the bot tracker as “a very cool tool.”
Unlike PropOrNot, the ASD was sponsored by one of the most respected think tanks in Washington, the German Marshall Fund, which had been founded in 1972 to nurture the special relationship between the US and what was then West Germany.
Though the German Marshall Fund did not name the donors that sponsored the initiative, it hosted a who’s who of bipartisan national security hardliners on the ASD’s advisory council, providing the endeavor with the patina of credibility. They ranged from neocon movement icon Bill Kristol to former Clinton foreign policy advisor Jake Sullivan to ex-CIA director Michael Morrell.
Jamie Fly, a German Marshall Fund fellow and Asia specialist, emerged as one of the most prolific promoters of the new Russian bot tracker in the media. Together with Laura Rosenberger, a former foreign policy aide to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, Fly appeared in a series of interviews and co-authored several op-eds emphasizing the need for a massive social media crackdown.
During a March 2018 interview on C-Span, Fly complained that “Russian accounts” were “trying to promote certain messages, amplify certain content, raise fringe views, pit Americans against each other, and we need to deal with this ongoing problem and find ways through the government, through tech companies, through broader society to tackle this issue.”
Yet few of the sites on PropOrNot’s blacklist, and none of the alternative sites that were erased in the recent Facebook purge that Fly and his colleagues take apparent credit for, were Russian accounts. Perhaps the only infraction they could have been accused of was publishing views that Fly and his cohorts saw as “fringe.”
What’s more, the ASD has been forced to admit that the mass of Twitter accounts it initially identified as “Russian bots” were not necessarily bots — and may not have been Russian either.
“I’m not convinced on this bot thing”
A November 2017 investigation by Max Blumenthal, a co-author of this article, found that the ASD’s Hamilton 68 dashboard was the creation of “a collection of cranks, counterterror retreads, online harassers and paranoiacs operating with support from some of the most prominent figures operating within the American national security apparatus.”
These figures included the same George Washington University Center for Cyber and Homeland Security fellows — Andrew Weisburd and Clint Watts — that were cited as experts in the Washington Post’s article promoting PropOrNot.
Weisburd, who has been described as one of the brains behind the Hamilton 68 dashboard, once maintained a one-man, anti-Palestinian web monitoring initiative that specialized in doxxing left-wing activists, Muslims and anyone he considered “anti-American.” More recently, he has taken to Twitter to spout off murderous and homophobic fantasies about Glenn Greenwald, the editor of the Intercept — a publication the ASD flagged without explanation as a vehicle for Russian influence operations.
Watts, for his part, has testified before Congress on several occasions to call on the government to “quell information rebellions” with censorious measures including “nutritional labels” for online media. He has received fawning publicity from corporate media and been rewarded with a contributor role for NBC on the basis of his supposed expertise in ferreting out Russian disinformation.
Clint Watts has urged Congress to “quell information rebellions”
However, under questioning during a public event by Grayzone contributor Ilias Stathatos, Watts admitted that substantial parts of his testimony were false, and refused to provide evidence to support some of his most colorful claims about malicious Russian bot activity.
In a separate interview with Buzzfeed, Watts appeared to completely disown the Hamilton 68 bot tracker as a legitimate tool. “I’m not convinced on this bot thing,” Watts confessed. He even called the narrative that he helped manufacture “overdone,” and admitted that the accounts Hamilton 68 tracked were not necessarily directed by Russian intelligence actors.
“We don’t even think they’re all commanded in Russia — at all. We think some of them are legitimately passionate people that are just really into promoting Russia,” Watts conceded.
But these stunning admissions did little to slow the momentum of the coming purge.
Enter the Atlantic Council
In his conversation with Sprague, the German Marshall Fund’s Fly stated that he was working with the Atlantic Council in the campaign to purge alternative media from social media platforms like Facebook.
The Atlantic Council is another Washington-based think tank that serves as a gathering point for neoconservatives and liberal interventionists pushing military aggression around the globe. It is funded by NATO and repressive, US-allied governments including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Turkey, as well as by Ukrainian oligarchs like Victor Pynchuk.
This May, Facebook announced a partnership with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) to “identify, expose, and explain disinformation during elections around the world.”
The Atlantic Council’s DFRLab is notorious for its zealous conflation of legitimate online dissent with illicit Russian activity, embracing the same tactics as PropOrNot and the ASD.
Ben Nimmo, a DFRLab fellow who has built his reputation on flushing out online Kremlin influence networks, embarked on an embarrassing witch hunt this year that saw him misidentify several living, breathing individuals as Russian bots or Kremlin “influence accounts.” Nimmo’s victims included Mariam Susli, a well-known Syrian-Australian social media personality, the famed Ukrainian concert pianist Valentina Lisitsa, and a British pensioner named Ian Shilling.
In an interview with Sky News, Shilling delivered a memorable tirade against his accusers. “I have no Kremlin contacts whatsoever; I do not know any Russians, I have no contact with the Russian government or anything to do with them,” he exclaimed. “I am an ordinary British citizen who happens to do research on the current neocon wars which are going on in Syria at this very moment.”
With the latest Facebook and Twitter purges, ordinary citizens like Shilling are being targeted in the open, and without apology. The mass deletions of alternative media accounts illustrate how national security hardliners from the German Marshall Fund and Atlantic Council (and whoever was behind PropOrNot) have instrumentalized the manufactured panic around Russian interference to generate public support for a wider campaign of media censorship.
In his conversation in Berlin with Sprague, Fly noted with apparent approval that, “Trump is now pointing to Chinese interference in the 2018 election.” As the mantra of foreign interference expands to a new adversarial power, the clampdown on voices of dissent in online media is almost certain to intensify.
The corporate media cry crocodile tears over the apparent murder of an elite, CIA-connected “dissident,” while papering over US complicity in Saudi war crimes in Yemen.
“The Saudis may kill 50 Yemeni children on a school bus and get only a few mild rebukes, but killing a prominent man is another story entirely.”
The disappearance and presumed murder of Jamal Khashoggiputs the corrupt relationship between Saudi Arabia and the United States in high relief. The two countries have been partners in crime over many years. Together they used jihadist proxies to make wars in Afghanistan, Libya and Syria that furthered U.S. interests. The brutal Saudi attack on neighboring Yemen could not happen without U.S. diplomatic and logistical support. The Donald Trump presidency has brought the two even closer. The relationship is now a true love affair complete with personal dealings between Saudi royals and the Trumps.
Khashoggi was a member of a prominent Saudi family with strong ties to the royal house. His uncle, Adnan Khashoggi, was an arms dealer involved in the Iran-Contra and BCCI scandals. But Jamal Khashoggi had a parting of the ways with crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman, the de facto ruler, and he left Saudi Arabia in 2017. He was a long time Saudi spokesman, CIA asset and a Washington Post journalist. All of those credentials made him an elite insider in the United States too.
“His uncle, Adnan Khashoggi, was an arms dealer involved in the Iran-Contra and BCCI scandals.”
Khashoggi entered a Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey on October 2ndand was never seen again. According to media reports the Turkish government has audio and video proof that he was murdered and that his body was dismembered and disposed of elsewhere. The Saudis may kill 50 Yemeni children on a school bus and get only a few mild rebukes. But killing a prominent man who has all the right political and intelligence agency connections is another story entirely.
Ordinarily compliant American senators are now going through the motions of asking questions and proposing sanctions or other punishments against the kingdom. Corporate media like the New York Times, Financial Times, CNN and CNBC have dropped out of the Future Investment Initiative meeting which is known as Davos in the desert. The plight of starving Yemenis gets little attention, but a hit job committed openly and without fear of recourse is too much. Liberal sensibilities were offended by the crassness of the act and by the position of the victim.
“The plight of starving Yemenis gets little attention, but a hit job committed openly and without fear of recourse is too much.”
The outrage is coming long after the Saudis began their war crime against Yemen. They have been bombing and starving that country since 2014 and are responsible for an estimated 50,000 deaths. They have blockaded ports and denied access to food and medicine. Yemen is in the midst of a cholera outbreak and millions are displaced refugees.
These atrocities were not enough to put Saudi Arabia on the list of infamy where it belongs. Barack Obama, darling of the liberal imperialists, was only slightly less subservient to the kingdom than Trump is today. The Yemen attack began during his term in office. He continued the tradition of $100 billion defense deals with the feudal monarchy and made the relationship a top priority. He cut short a 2015 visit to India in order to meet the newly crowned King Salman and brought along a who’s who entourageincluding Condi Rice, James Baker, John McCain and Nancy Pelosi. Saudi Arabia was and is a key partner in U.S. imperialism.
Trump differs from Obama and other presidents only in his inability to be diplomatic. When first asked about a possible response to Khashoggi’s disappearance he made it clear that he would do nothing to threaten war contractor profits. In defending the crown prince he mentioned Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheedby name as he dismissed any talk of sanctions.
“Barack Obama was only slightly less subservient to the kingdom than Trump is today.”
Of course Trump style politics provides further complications. Presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner has formed a close friendshipwith Mohammed bin Salman. Kushner’s security clearance gave him access to information which he gave to the crown prince. Kushner is the likely source who turned in Saudi royals, also connected to the CIA, who opposed the de facto ruler. These people were imprisoned, at least one was killed, their assets were seized and many now live under house arrest. Trump publicly supported the move in one of his famous twitter messages.
It is easy to find yet another reason to look askance at Trump and his vulgar and incompetent family but Saudi Arabia will be a U.S. partner in wrong doing no matter who is in the White House. Prince Bandar bin Sultan was known as “Bandar Bush” because of his close relationship with two presidents and their confidantes.
The nuances of keeping friends on a short leash are lost on Trump. Media reports say that the Trump administration was aware that Khashoggi was in danger of being detained but didn’t protect a man who had worked with and for past administrations since the 1990s. The Saudis started a near war with Qatar in 2017 and were supported by Trump in the effort. Qatar is a close ally of Turkey, the country where they chose to disappear Khashoggi. They would not have acted so recklessly unless they were certain of U.S. compliance.
“The Saudis would not have acted so recklessly unless they were certain of U.S. compliance.”
Trump again tears away the veneer of U.S. foreign policy. He is not smart enough to hide the dirty dealings. He doesn’t know when to reign in friends and he encourages rash behavior. But that doesn’t really make him worse than his predecessors. He is just less savvy and incapable of behaving within the norms laid down by tradition.
The hypocrisy doesn’t end with Trump and Kushner. It can be seen in the corporate media who cover for a war crime against Yemen. They are easily bought off by a prince who opens movie theaters and allows women to drive. But they also know who funds the think tanks and who has the connections with their bosses. They may despise Trump but it isn’t for the reasons they ought to dislike him. They are a party to the hypocrisy, as much as the foreign despots or their presidential partners. There are no heroes in this story. There is only a missing man and corruption in high places in two nations.
Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com . Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.
Have you ever noticed how rare sincere apologies are in politics? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Normal people apologize to each other every day, for accidentally interrupting someone or standing in their way, for being inconsiderate or forgetful, for being unable to satisfy a customer’s needs; it’s just a part of life we take for granted at work and at home. But in the highest levels of the most powerful governments on earth, where thousands of human lives can be snuffed out by a single unwise decision and ecosystems and economies destroyed on a whim, apologies are almost unheard of. You only ever see them when a leader is cornered in a complete political checkmate with no other options available to them.
This is because the highest levels of the most powerful governments in the world are dominated by highly manipulative people. If you serve truth, humanity and the world, you are almost certainly delightful to be around and you will almost certainly never have a career in federal politics. The system is set up to serve a ruling class of plutocrats and their lackeys, so the way to get to the top of the political ladder is in the exact opposite direction of serving the weak and defenseless and being truthful and compassionate. To win elections you first need to win the blessing of the ruling class, and the way to do that is by kissing the right asses while regurgitating the right sound bytes whenever the cameras are rolling.
This is why all the top career politicians all seem so fake; the Hillary Clintons, Ted Cruzes and Nancy Pelosis didn’t get to where they’re at by serving truth and justice, they got there by manipulating and deceiving in the service of the powerful. They are not interested in honesty and sincerity, they are interested in getting up another rung on the ladder.
Anyone who has ever had a close relationship with someone who is highly manipulative has probably noticed how they never apologize for anything if they can avoid it, but if you apologize to a manipulator for something they will never, ever let you forget it and will bring it up any time you step out of line. For normal, empathetic people, apologies are a way to improve relations with each other and avoid hurting one another in the future; they’re a way of saying “I understand that I did a thing that hurt you, and I’ll try really hard not to do it again in the future.” Narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths and other chronic manipulators don’t see them that way, since they don’t care if they hurt other people and only care about getting what they want. For a manipulator, an apology is a weapon to use against the person making it, which is why you never see them making apologies of their own.
Comedian and activist Jimmy Dore published a sincere, heartfelt apology today to Mother Jones senior reporter Shane Bauer and comedian/progressive media personality Francesca Fiorentini for some Twitter drama, because that’s what normal human beings do when they regret a transgression they feel they’ve made against someone else. Fiorini responded to Dore’s apology the way normal human beings do, tweeting, “Thanks for this Jimmy. I hope we can begin to patch things up.” Bauer responded to Dore’s apology by tweeting a six-part rant calling for Dore’s termination from The Young Turks and smearing him with a litany of other accusations which have nothing to do with Bauer.
One of these folks is not like the others.
Bauer is one of the most virulent proponents of pro-regime change narratives against the Syrian government, aggressively smearing and attacking anyone who questions official allegations leveled by the US-centralized empire against Iraq’s next-door neighbor. Earlier this year he called on blogging outlet Medium to ban me from its platform for my opposition to regime change interventionism in Syria, tweeting after the deplatforming of a few right-wing writers that “If @Medium is serious about cracking down on conspiracy theorists, it needs to go beyond the alt-right and reign in the garbage published on Syria by people like @caitoz.”
Following widespread public criticism from the left, Bauer then deleted his tweet without retraction and, you guessed it, without apology.
Mother Jones' @shane_bauer has deleted his tweet calling for the corporate censorship of the antiwar left without apology or retraction, so for posterity here is documentation that empire loyalists will never be content with merely silencing right-wingers. pic.twitter.com/6LTVizBtLc
I certainly don’t fault Dore for responding to Bauer the way a normal human being responds to other normal human beings. But Shane Bauer, like other war propagandists, is not a normal human being. Deliberately manipulating people in the service of warfare and imperialism is not a normal thing to do, and it’s not something a healthy empathic person would ever think to do.
In a healthy world, which I firmly believe we are capable of creating, the psychological manipulation of others will be regarded as a perverse intrusion into personal sovereignty and rejected with the same ferocity you’d reject a stranger attempting to insert things into your body. Psychologically manipulating people is unhealthy and immoral, and manipulating them to advance the interests of war profiteers and secretive intelligence/defense agencies is pure evil.
Jimmy Dore did us all a favor by attempting to relate to Shane Bauer like a normal human being, because one of the best ways to get a manipulator to show you what he’s made of is to apologize to him and watch what happens. Learn to spot the manipulators.
Why, after two years of allegations, indictments, and claims to proof of this, that, and the other did the newspaper of record—well, once the newspaper of record—see any need to publish such a piece? My answer is simple: The orthodox account of Russia-gate has not taken hold: It has failed in its effort to establish a consensus of certainty among Americans. My conclusion matches this observation: The orthodox narrative is never going to achieve this objective. There are too many holes in it.
“The information age is actually a media age,” John Pilger, the noted British–Australian journalist, remarked during a symposium four years ago, when the Ukraine crisis was at its peak. “We have war by media; censorship by media; demonology by media; retribution by media; diversion by media—a surreal assembly line of obedient clichés and false assumptions.” Pilger revisited the theme in a piece last week on Consortium News, arguing that once-tolerated, dissenting opinion has in recent years “regressed into a metaphoric underground.”
There are battlefields in Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, and elsewhere, but perhaps the most consequential battle now being fought is for our minds.
Those who dispense with honest intellectual inquiry, healthy skepticism of all media, and an insistence that assertions require supporting evidence should not win this war. The Times piece by Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti—two of the paper’s top-tier reporters—is a case in point: If the Russia-gate narrative were so widely accepted as their report purports, there would have been no need to publish such a piece at this late date.
Many orthodox narratives are widely accepted however among a public that is not always paying attention. The public too often participates in the manufactured consent. Usually it take years for the truth to be widely understood. Sometimes it comes when the U.S. admits it decades later, such as the role of the CIA in the coups in Iran and Chile. Other times it comes through admissions by former U.S. officials, such as former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara about the Vietnam War.
Even Recent Narratives are Fraying
There are more recent examples of official narratives quickly fraying if not starting to fall apart, though Establishment media continues to push them.
For instance, there are serious doubts about who was responsible for alleged chemical weapons attacks in Syria. The most significant was in Eastern Ghouta in August 2013 followed by attacks in Khan Sheikhoun (April 2017) and Douma (April 2018).
The corporate media accounts of each of these attacks have been countered with persuasive evidence against the prevailing view that the government of Bashar al–Assad was to blame. It has been provided journalists (Seymour Hersh ), a scientist (Theodore Postol ), and on-the-ground correspondents and local witnesses. These reports are subject to further verification. But by no means do official narratives stand without challenge.
There is also the case of Malaysian Flight MH–17, shot down over Ukrainian territory in June 2014. The official report, issued a year later, concluded that the plane was downed by Ukrainian rebels using a Russian-supplied missile. The report was faulty from the first: Investigators never visited the site , some evidence was based on a report produced by Bellingcat , an open-source web site affiliated with the vigorously anti–Russian Atlantic Council, and Ukraine was given the right to approve the report before it was issued.
Last week the Russian military disclosed evidence that serial numbers found in the debris at the MH–17 crash site indicate the missile that downed the plane was produced at a Soviet military-production plant in 1986 owned by Ukraine. Let us see further verification of this evidence (although I seriously doubt any Western correspondent will seek any). The official report of 2015 noted the serial numbers, so we know they are authentic, but it did not use them to trace the missile’s provenance.
There is also the seriously muddled case of the poisoning of the Skripals in Britain. Why hasn’t the Western media dug into this story rather than accept at face value the pronouncements of the British government?
A month ago I lamented the damage Russia-gate has done to many of our most important institutions, the press not least among them. What is the corporate media thinking? That once President Trump is dumped, all will return to normal and professional standards will be restored? One can also argue the reverse: that adversarial journalism has returned to the White House beat largely out of personal animus towards Trump and that it will disappear again once a more “normal” president is in office.
As Pilger put it, “This is a seismic shift, with journalists policing the new ‘groupthink,’ as [Robert] Parry called it, dispensing myths and distractions, pursuing its enemies.”
In other words, Establishment journalism has shifted far afield from its traditional ideals of non-partisan, objective reporting and is instead vying for your mind to enlist it in its agenda to promote American interests abroad or one party or the other at home.
We can’t let them get away with it. Our minds are our own.
This story is so complicated and long, I’ve tried to break it into threads of different colors to make it easier to digest. I’ve made separate pages for each thread, in addition to webpages with all the threads together.
Central Asian oil, Enron and the Afghanistan pipelines. For a separate page of these entries only, click here. Information that should have shown what kind of attack al-Qaeda would make. For a separate page of these entries only, click here. US preparing for a war with Afghanistan before 9/11, increasing control of Asia before and since. For a separate page of these entries only, click here. Incompetence, bad luck, and/or obstruction of justice. For a separate page of these entries only, click here. Suggestions of advanced knowledge that an attack would take place on or around 9/11. For a separate page of these entries only, click here. Cover-up, lies, and/or contradictions. For a separate page of these entries only, click here. Israeli “art student” spy ring, Israeli foreknowledge evidence. For a separate page of these entries only, click here. Anthrax attacks and microbiologist deaths. For a separate page of these entries only, click here. Pakistani ISI and/or opium drug connections. For a separate page of these entries only, click here. Bin Laden family, Saudi Arabia corruption and support of terrorists, connections to Bush. For a separate page of these entries only, click here. Erosion of civil liberties and erection of a police state. For a separate page of these entries only, click here.
Names/Abbreviations
For simplicity’s sake I don’t always use the full names and jobs of some of the major people or organizations in this story. For instance, every time I say “bin Laden,” I mean the terrorist Osama bin Laden, not one of his family members. I have standardized the spellings of the Islamic names, even within quotes. Al-Qaeda, for instance, can be spelled many ways, and the person known as Saeed Sheikh has too many name variations and spelling variations to count.
Organizations:
CIA: US Central Intelligence Agency
DEA: US Drug Enforcement Administration
FAA: US Federal Aviation Administration
FDA: US Food and Drug Administration
FBI: US Federal Bureau of Investigations
FEMA: US Federal Emergency Management Agency
ISI: Inter-Services Intelligence, the Pakistani intelligence agency
Mossad: The Israeli intelligence agency
NORAD: US North American Aerospace Defense Command
NSA: US National Security Agency
SEC: US Security and Exchange Commission
Taliban: The rulers of Afghanistan, 1996 – 2001
WTC: World Trade Center
USAMRIID: US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases
Important individuals: Ahmad: General Mahmud Ahmad, Director of the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency Ashcroft: John Ashcroft, US Attorney General under Bush Jr. Atta: Mohamed Atta, lead 9/11 hijacker bin Laden: Osama bin Laden, leader of al-Qaeda terrorist organization Bush: George Bush Jr., US President since January, 2001 Cheney: Richard “Dick” Cheney, US Vice President under Bush Jr. Clinton: Bill Clinton, US President before Bush Jr. Mueller: Robert Mueller, Director of the FBI since July, 2001 Musharraf: General Pervez Musharraf, President of Pakistan since 1999 Powell: Colin Powell, US Secretary of State under Bush Jr. Rice: Condaleezza Rice, US National Security Advisor under Bush Jr. Rumsfeld: Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defense Saeed: Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh (and many variations thereof), ISI agent, al-Qaeda money man and supposed murderer of reporter Daniel Pearl Tenet: George Tenet, Director of the CIA since 1997 under Clinton and remaining under Bush Jr.
The hijackers: There are many spellings and aliases – the names and spellings below are the versions preferred by the FBI. *= Some evidence suggests the identity of this person may be incorrect (see September 16-23, 2001).
American Airlines Flight 11 Waleed Alshehri, 22, from Saudi Arabia * Wail Alshehri, 28, from Saudi Arabia, brother of Waleed Alshehri, had psychological problems * Abdulaziz Alomari, 22, from Saudi Arabia * Satam Al Suqami, 25, from Saudi Arabia Mohamed Atta, 33, from Egypt (the likely pilot) * United Airlines Flight 93 Saeed Alghamdi, 21, from Saudi Arabia (had flight training) * Ahmed Alhaznawi, 20, from Saudi Arabia * Ahmed Alnami, 23, from Saudi Arabia * Ziad Jarrah, 26, from Lebanon (the likely pilot) * United Airlines Flight 175 Ahmed Alghamdi, 22, from Saudi Arabia Hamza Alghamdi, 20, from Saudi Arabia, brother of Ahmed Alghamdi * Marwan Alshehhi, 23, from United Arab Emirates (the likely pilot) * Mohand Alshehri, 22, from Saudi Arabia, possible cousin of Marwan Alshehhi and/or from the same extended family as Wail and Waleed Alshehri Fayez Ahmed Banihammad (Alshehri), 24, from United Arab Emirates (had flight training) American Airlines Flight 77 Khalid Almihdhar, 26, from Saudi Arabia (originally from Yemen, changed citizenship in 1996) * Nawaf Alhazmi, 25, from Saudi Arabia Salem Alhazmi, 20, from Saudi Arabia, brother of Nawaf Alhazmi * Hani Hanjour, 29, from Saudi Arabia (the likely pilot) Majed Moqed, 24, from Saudi Arabia *
December 26, 1979:Soviet forces invade Afghanistan. They will withdraw in 1989 after a brutal 10-year war. It has been commonly believed that the invasion was unprovoked. But in a 1998 interview, Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Adviser, reveals that the CIA began destabilizing the pro-Soviet Afghan government six months earlier, in a deliberate attempt to get the Soviets to invade and have their own Vietnam-type costly war: “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?” The US and Saudi Arabia give a huge amount of money (estimates range up to $40 billion total for the war) to support the mujaheddin guerrilla fighters opposing the Russians.
1987-1989: Michael Springman, the head US consular official in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, later claims that he is “repeatedly told to issue visas to unqualified applicants.” He turns them down, but is repeatedly overruled by superiors. He claims the visas were issued for recruits fighting for bin Laden against Russia in Afghanistan. Springman loudly complains about the practice to numerous government offices but no action is taken. He eventually is fired and the files he has kept on these applicants are destroyed. Springman speculates the issuing of visas to radical Islamic fighters continued until 9/11. 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers getting their visas through his former Jeddah office. A government report later concludes that all of the known hijacker visa applications should have been rejected, and numerous experts say its improbable that more than a few should have been accepted through luck or incompetence.
1988: Bin Laden forms al-Qaeda this year (some reports claim 1989).
1988: Prior to this year, George Bush Jr. is a failed oil man. Three times friends and investors have bailed him out to keep him from going bankrupt. But in this year, the same year his father becomes President, some Saudis buy a portion of his small company, Harken, which has never worked outside of Texas. Later in the year, Harken wins a contract in the Persian Gulf and starts doing well financially. These transactions seem so suspicious that the Wall Street Journal in 1991 states it “raises the question of … an effort to cozy up to a presidential son.” Two major investors in Bush’s company during this time are Salem bin Laden, Osama bin Laden’s father, and Khaled bin Mahfouz. In 1999 bin Mahfouz will be placed under house arrest in Saudi Arabia for contributions he gave to organizations closely linked to al-Qaeda. His sister is married to Osama bin Laden.
August 12, 1988:The first media report appears about Echelon, a high-tech global electronic surveillance network between the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Australia and Britain later admit Echelon exists, but the US still denies it. Echelon is capable of “near total interception of international commercial and satellite communications,” including taps into transoceanic cables. The BBC describes Echelon’s power as “astounding,” and elaborates: “Every international telephone call, fax, e-mail, or radio transmission can be listened to by powerful computers capable of voice recognition. They home in on a long list of key words, or patterns of messages. They are looking for evidence of international crime, like terrorism.” With such data collecting ability, and al-Qaeda the biggest threat for years, how could the US miss hearing of the 9/11 plot?
1993:Bin Laden buys a jet from the US military in Arizona (the Pentagon approved the transaction). This aircraft is later used to transport missiles from Pakistan that kill American special forces in Somalia. He also has some of his followers begin training as pilots in US flight schools.
1993: An expert panel commissioned by the Pentagon privately postulates that an airplane could be used as a missile to bomb national landmarks. In 1994 one of the panel’s experts will write in Futurist magazine: “Targets such as the World Trade Center not only provide the requisite casualties but, because of their symbolic nature, provide more bang for the buck. In order to maximize their odds for success, terrorist groups will likely consider mounting multiple, simultaneous operations with the aim of overtaxing a government’s ability to respond, as well as demonstrating their professionalism and reach.”
February 26, 1993: A bombing attempt to knock down the WTC fails. Six people are killed in the misfired blast. The bombing is organized by Ramzi Yousef, who has close ties to bin Laden. The New York Times later reports that an undercover agent testifies that the FBI knew about the attack beforehand and told him they would thwart it by substituting a harmless powder for the explosives. However, this plan was called off by an FBI supervisor, and the bombing was not stopped. Several of the bombers were trained by the CIA to fight in the Afghan war – the CIA later concludes in internal documents that it was “partly culpable” for this bombing attempt. Two years later, a statement from bin Laden is found that says, “on the second attempt they would be successful.” Security at the WTC doesn’t appear to have been noticeably improved after these revelations, or later.
1994: Three separate attacks this year involve hijacking airplanes to crash them into buildings. A disgruntled Federal Express worker tries to crash a DC-10 into a company building in Memphis but is overpowered by the crew. A lone pilot crashes a small plane onto the White House grounds, just missing the President’s bedroom. An Air France flight is hijacked by a terrorist group linked to al-Qaeda, with the aim of crashing it into the Eiffel Tower, but French Special Forces storm the plane before it takes off.
September 1994: Starting as Afghani exiles in Pakistan religious schools, the Taliban begin their conquest of Afghanistan. CNN reports, “The Taliban are widely alleged to be the creation of Pakistan’s military intelligence [the ISI]. Experts say that explains the Taliban’s swift military successes.” The CIA also worked with the ISI to create the Taliban. A regional expert with extensive CIA ties says: “I warned them that we were creating a monster.” After 9/11, the Wall Street Journal states: “Despite their clean chins and pressed uniforms, the ISI men are as deeply fundamentalist as any bearded fanatic; the ISI created the Taliban as their own instrument and still supports it.” 1995-April 1996: In 1995, the government of Sudan offers the US all of its files on bin Laden and al-Qaeda, but the US turns down the offer. Bin Laden had been living in Sudan since 1991. The Sudanese government collected a “vast intelligence database on Osama bin Laden and more than 200 leading members of his al-Qaeda terrorist network… [The US was] offered thick files, with photographs and detailed biographies of many of his principal cadres, and vital information about al-Qaeda’s financial interests in many parts of the globe.” In April 1996, the US again rejects Sudan’s offer of the files. An American involved in the secret negotiations later says that the offer was blocked by another arm of the federal government: “I’ve never seen a brick wall like that before. Somebody let this slip up… We could have dismantled his operations and put a cage on top. It was not a matter of arresting bin Laden but of access to information… and that’s what could have prevented September 11. I knew it would come back to haunt us.” Sudan again offers the US the files in May 2000, and again is turned down. In 1996 Sudan also offers their files to British intelligence, and are also rebuffed. Sudan makes a standing offer to the British to take the information at any time, but the offer is not taken up until after 9/11.
January 6, 1995: While investigating a possible assassination plan against the Pope, Philippine police uncover plans for Operation Bojinka, an al-Qaeda operation led by 1993 WTC bomber Ramzi Yousef and 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. The plan is to explode 12 passenger planes over the Pacific Ocean simultaneously on January 21, 1995. If successful, up to 4,000 people would have been killed. Plans found for a second phase of attacks are also found. Planes would be hijacked and flown into buildings. The WTC, CIA headquarters, Pentagon and the Sears Tower are specifically mentioned as targets. One pilot, who learned to fly in US flight schools, confesses that his role was to crash a plane into CIA headquarters.
November 13, 1995 and June 25, 1996: Two truck bombs kill five Americans and two Indians in a US-operated training center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.On June 25, 1996, bombs destroy the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 American soldiers and wounding 500. Al-Qaeda is blamed for both of the attacks.
1996: FBI investigators are prevented from carrying out an investigation into Abdullah and Omar bin Laden, two brothers of Osama. The FBI suspected the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) was terrorist organization and Abdullah was the US director of WAMY. Apparently the case involved espionage, murder, and national security. Four of the 9/11 hijackerslater lived only three blocks from the WAMY offices near Washington DC, at the same time the two bin Laden brothers were there. WAMY still has not been put on a list of terrorist organizations in the US, but has been banned in Pakistan. A high-placed intelligence official tells the Guardian: “There were always constraints on investigating the Saudis. There were particular investigations that were effectively killed.” An unnamed US source says to the BBC, “There is a hidden agenda at the very highest levels of our government.”
1996: A paid informant, Aukai Collins, later says provided detailed information about hijacker Hani Hanjour to the FBI at this time. Hanjour was living in Phoenix, Arizona and taking flying lessons. Collins says the FBI “knew everything about the guy.” The FBI denies knowing about Hanjour before 9/11, though they acknowledge that they paid Collins for four years to monitor the Islamic and Arab communities in Phoenix.
1996: The Saudi Arabian government starts paying huge amounts of money to al-Qaeda, becoming its largest financial backer. They also give money to other extremist groups throughout Asia. This money vastly increases the capability of al-Qaeda. US officials later privately complain “that the Bush Administration, like the Clinton Administration, is refusing to confront this reality, even in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks.”
1996:After learning that an al-Qaeda terrorist trained at a US flight school, the FBI visit two flight schools where the terrorist trained. They abandon the investigation when they fail to find any other suspicious students at those schools.
March-May 18, 1996: Pressured by the US to do something about bin Laden, Sudan offers to extradite bin Laden to anywhere he might stand trial. The US decides not to take him because they apparently don’t have enough evidence at the time to charge him with a crime. Saudi Arabia doesn’t want him either. US officials nonetheless insist that Sudan must expel bin Laden. One US intelligence source in the region later states: “We kidnap minor drug czars and bring them back in burlap bags. Somebody didn’t want this to happen.” On May 18, bin Laden and about 150 supporters take a flight to Afghanistan, bringing all of their money, resources and personnel. The US knows in advance that bin Laden is going to Afghanistan, but does nothing to stop him. Sudan’s minister of state for defense later says in an interview: “We warned [the US]. In Sudan, bin Laden and his money were under our control. But we knew that if he went to Afghanistan no one could control him. The US didn’t care; they just didn’t want him in Somalia. It’s crazy.”
June 24, 1996: The Central Asian nation of Uzbekistan signs a deal with Enron “that could lead to joint development of the central Asian nation’s potentially rich natural gas fields.” The $1.3 billion venture teams Enron with the state companies of Russian and Uzbekistan. Two months later, Unocal and Delta Oil of Saudi Arabia come to agreement with state companies in Turkmenistan and Russia to to build a natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan via Afghanistan. They form the CentGas consortium in October 1997.Halliburton, a company with future Vice President Cheney as CEO, announces an agreement to provide technical services and drilling for Turkmenistan.
July 6-August 11, 1996: US officials identify crop-dusters and suicide flights as potential terrorist weapons that could threaten the Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia. Planes are banned from getting too close to Olympic events. During the games, Black Hawk helicopters and US Customs Service jets are deployed to intercept suspicious aircraft over the Olympic venues. Agents monitor crop-duster flights and airports within hundreds of miles of downtown Atlanta.
August 1996: Bin Laden issues a religious decree, authorizing attacks on Western military targets in the Arabian Peninsula. In February 1998, he expands the decree, declaring it the religious duty of all Muslims “to kill the Americans and their allies – civilians and military … in any country in which it is possible.” In May, 1998, bin Laden publicly discusses “bringing the war home to America.”
September 27, 1996: The Taliban conquer Kabul, establishing control over much of Afghanistan. The oil company Unocal is hopeful that the Taliban will stabilize Afghanistan, and allow its pipeline plans to go forward. In fact, “preliminary agreement [on the pipeline] was reached between the [Taliban and Unocal] long before the fall of Kabul.” “Oil industry insiders say the dream of securing a pipeline across Afghanistan is the main reason why Pakistan, a close political ally of America’s, has been so supportive of the Taliban, and why America has quietly acquiesced in its conquest of Afghanistan.”
October 1996: US intelligence learn of an Iranian plot to hijack a Japanese plane over Israel and crash it into Tel Aviv. The plot is never carried out.
1997: Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski publishes a book in which he portrays the Eurasian landmass as the key to world power, and Central Asia with its vast oil reserves as the key to domination of Eurasia. He notes that because of popular resistance to US military expansionism, his ambitious strategy could not be implemented “except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.”
1997: It is later claimed that the special CIA paramilitary teams start entering Afghanistan in this year. In 1999, they place listening devices within range of al-Qaeda’s tactical radios. CIA Director Tenet states that by 9/11, “a map would show that these collection programs and human networks were in place in such numbers to nearly cover Afghanistan. This array meant that, when the military campaign to topple the Taliban and destroy al-Qaeda began [in October 2001], we were able to support it with an enormous body of information and a large stable of assets.”
December 4, 1997: Representatives of the Taliban are invited guests to the Texas headquarters of Unocal to negotiate their support for the pipeline. Future President Bush Jr. is Governor of Texas at the time. The Taliban appear to agree to a $2 billion pipeline deal, but will do the deal onlyif the US officially recognizes the Taliban regime. The Taliban meet with US officials, and the Telegraph reports that “the US government, which in the past has branded the Taliban’s policies against women and children ‘despicable,’ appears anxious to please the fundamentalists to clinch the lucrative pipeline contract.”
1998: According to later closed session congressional testimony by the heads of the CIA, FBI and NSA, al-Qaeda begins planning the 9/11 attacks in this year. In a June 2002 interview, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed also says the planning for the attacks begin at this time.
February 12, 1998: Unocal Vice President John J. Maresca – later to become a Special Ambassador to Afghanistan – testifies before the House of Representatives that until a single, unified, friendly government is in place in Afghanistan the trans-Afghani pipeline will not be built. He suggests that with a pipeline through Afghanistan, the Caspian basin could produce 20 percent of all the non-OPEC oil in the world by 2010.
May 18, 1998: The FBI office in Oklahoma City sends a memo on this day warning that “large numbers of Middle Eastern males” are getting flight training in Oklahoma and could be planning terrorist attacks. The memo is apparently ignored. In 1999 it is learned that an al-Qaeda agent had studied flight training in Norman, Oklahoma. Hijackers Atta and Marwan Alshehhi consider studying at that school in 2000; Zacarias Moussaoui does study at the school in 2001.
August 1998: A CIA intelligence report asserts that Arab terrorists loosely tied to al-Qaeda are planning to fly a bomb-laden aircraft from a foreign country into the WTC. The FBI and the FAA don’t take the threat seriously because of the state of aviation in that unnamed country.
August 7, 1998: Al-Qaeda terrorists bomb the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The bomb in Nairobi, Kenya kills 213 people, including 12 US nationals, and injures more than 4,500. The bomb in Dar es Salaam kills 11 and injures 85.
August 9, 1998: Northern Alliance capital Mazar-e-Sharif is conquered by the Taliban, giving them control of 90% of Afghanistan, including the entire pipeline route. The CentGas consortium, led by Unocal and the Saudi Arabian Delta Oil, is now “ready to proceed” with the gas pipeline that would run through Afghanistan.
August 20, 1998: The US fires approximately 60 missiles at six training camps in Afghanistan and about 20 missiles at a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, Sudan in retaliation for the US embassy bombings. About 30 people are killed in the attacks, but no important al-Qaeda figures. It is later revealed the Sudanese factory had no terrorist connections. Of the six camps targeted in Afghanistan, only four were hit, and of those only one had connections to bin Laden. The missiles were aimed at a “gathering of key terrorist leaders” that actually took place a month earlier, in Pakistan. A US defense analyst later states, “My sense is that because the attack was so limited and incompetent, we turned this guy into a folk hero.”
September 1998: US intelligence finds information that bin Laden’s next operation could possibly involve crashing an aircraft loaded with explosives into a US airport.
October-November 1998: US intelligence learns that al-Qaeda is trying to establish a terrorist cell within the US and are planning to strike a US domestic target.
Autumn 1998: US intelligence hears of a bin Laden plot involving aircraft in the New York and Washington areas. It’s unknown if this is connected to the 9/11 plot or something else.
November 1998: US intelligence learns that a Turkish extremist group loosely connected to al-Qaeda had planned to crash an airplane packed with explosives into a famous tomb during a government ceremony. They were arrested before they could try it.
December 1, 1998: A US intelligence assessment: “[bin Laden] is actively planning against US targets… Multiple reports indicate [he] is keenly interested in striking the US on its own soil… al-Qaeda is recruiting operatives for attacks in the US but has not yet identified potential targets.” Later in the month, a classified document signed by a senior US official states: “The intelligence community has strong indications that bin Laden intends to conduct or sponsor attacks inside the US.”
December 4, 1998:CIA Director Tenet issues a “declaration of war” on al-Qaeda, in a memorandum circulated in the intelligence community. Tenet says, “Each day we all acknowledge that retaliation is inevitable and that its scope may be far larger than we have previously experienced… We are at war… I want no resources or people spared in this effort, either inside CIA or the [larger intelligence] community.” Yet it is later found that few FBI agents had ever heard of the declaration. There is no shift in budget priorities, either. For example, the number of CIA personnel assigned to its Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC) stays roughly constant until 9/11.
December 21, 1998: In a Time magazine cover story entitled “The Hunt for Osama,” it is reported intelligence sources “have evidence that bin Laden may be planning his boldest move yet – a strike on Washington or possibly New York City in an eye-for-an-eye retaliation. ‘We’ve hit his headquarters, now he hits ours,’ says a State Department aide.”
Late 1998: A captured al-Qaeda operative tells the FBI learns of a telephone number in Yemen, in a safe house owned by hijacker Khalid Almihdhar’s father-in-law. US intelligence taps the phone line and learns the house is an al-Qaeda “logistics center” used by agents around the world to communicate with each other and plan attacks. Even bin Laden called the safe house dozens of times. In late 1999 the phone line will lead the CIA to an important al-Qaeda “summit” in Malaysia. It appears al-Qaeda was still using the phone line until a government raid in February 2002. It also appears the US was able to decipher much of al-Qaeda’s code language. For instance, in 1998 they learned “wedding” meant bomb, and the code name for 9/11 was “The Big Wedding.” Why didn’t monitoring of this phone expose the 9/11 attack?
Late 1998: President Clinton signs a directive authorizing the CIA to plan an assassination of bin Laden. The assassination never happens, supposedly because of inadequate intelligence. An officer who helped draw up the plans says, “We were ready to move” but “we were not allowed to do it because of this stubborn policy of risk avoidance… It is a disgrace.”
1999: British intelligence warns US intelligence that al-Qaeda has plans to use “commercial aircraft” in “unconventional ways”, “possibly as flying bombs.”
1999: Mohamed Atta’s telephone is monitored by the Egyptian secret service in this year. They learn that he had visited Afghanistan at least once recently, but it’s not known if the information was shared or when the surveillance stopped.
July 14, 1999: A government informant records a conversation between some illegal arms dealers and Pakistani ISI agents held within view of the WTC. An ISI agent points to the WTC and says, “Those towers are coming down.” He later makes other references to an attack on the WTC. The informant passes these warnings on to Senator Bob Graham and others, but later claims “The complaints were ordered sanitized by the highest levels of government.” Senator Graham admits being “concerned” about this warning before 9/11, but apparently the warning is not passed on. September 1999: A report prepared for US intelligence entitled the “Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism” is completed. It suggests: “Al-Qaeda could detonate a Chechen-type building-buster bomb at a federal building. Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaeda’s Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House.”
December 14, 1999: Al-Qaeda terrorist Ahmed Ressam is arrested trying to enter the US with components of explosive devices. Documents found with Ressam lead to arrests of co-conspirators in New York, Boston and Seattle. These arrests and more in Jordan foil a series of attacks against US targets over the New Year’s weekend. Ressam was to bomb the Los Angeles International Airport. Counterterrorism head Richard Clarke later says, “I think a lot of the FBI leadership for the first time realized that … there probably were al-Qaeda people in the United States.” Yet Clinton’s National Security Adviser Sandy Berger says, “Until the very end of our time in office, the view we received from the [FBI] was that al-Qaeda had limited capacity to operate in the US and any presence here was under surveillance.” No analysis is done before 9/11 to investigate just how big that presence might be.
January 2000:Former PresidentGeorge Bush Sr. meets with the bin Laden family on behalf of the Carlyle Group. He had also met with them in 1998, but it’s not known if he met with them after this.
January-May 2000: The CIA surveils hijacker Mohamed Atta in Germany. He is “reportedly observed buying large quantities of chemicals in Frankfurt, apparently for the production of explosives [and/or] for biological warfare. The US agents reported to have trailed Atta are said to have failed to inform the German authorities about their investigation. The disclosure that Atta was being trailed by police long before 11 September raises the question why the attacks could not have been prevented with the man’s arrest.” The surveillance stopped when he left for the US at the start of June. But “experts believe that the suspect remained under surveillance in the United States.”
January 5-8, 2000: About a dozen of bin Laden’s trusted followers hold a secret, “top-level al-Qaeda summit” in the city of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Plans are made for the 9/11 attacks. The CIA knows it is an al-Qaeda planning meeting and has Malaysia follow, photograph, and even videotape the attendees, but the meeting is not wiretapped. Even before the meeting begins, the CIA learns that hijackers Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi will be attending, and that Almihdhar has a multiple-entry visa for the US good until April 6, 2000. The two already began living in San Diego in November 1999, and the NSA learned earlier in 1999 that Alhazmi is a terrorist. Yet somehow, the CIA fails to notice under after 9/11 that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a top al-Qaeda leader, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and someone the US has been trying to catch since 1995, is at the meeting. Khallad bin Atash, a “trusted member of bin Laden’s inner circle” who was in charge of bin Laden’s bodyguards, also attends, as does top al-Qaeda operative Fahad al-Quso, and a number of terrorists from the Islamic Jihad.Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the would-be 20th hijacker, also attends, but the US says they don’t realize that until after 9/11, despite photographs and video footage of him at the meeting. However, one account says he was recognized at the time of the meeting, which makes it hard to understand why he wasn’t tracked back to Germany and his housemate, hijacker Mohamed Atta. The chances to foil the 9/11 plot based on knowledge of this meeting are many. Had the meeting been wiretapped, presumably the details of the entire 9/11 plot would have been recorded.
January 15, 2000-March 5, 2000: The CIA tracks hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar from the al-Qaeda meeting in Malaysia to Thailand, and then tracks Alhazmi as he flies from Bangkok, Thailand, to Los Angeles, California. The US keeps a watch list database known as TIPOFF, with tens of thousands of names of suspected terrorists – even a “reasonable suspicion” that a person is connected with a terrorist group warrants being added to the database. Almihdhar and Alhazmi are important enough to have been mentioned to the CIA Director several times this month, but are not added to the watch list. Furthermore, “astonishingly, the CIA … [didn’t] notify the FBI, which could have covertly tracked them to find out their mission.” In March 2000, another country tells the CIA that Alhazmi flew to Los Angeles and that Almihdhar was on the same flight. Yet again, the CIA fails to put their names on a watch list, and fails to alert the FBI so they can be tracked, and fails to do either until August 23, 2001.
April 2000: A man walks into an FBI office and claims he had trained in Pakistan as part of a plot with 5 or 6 others to hijack a plane in the US, then pilot it to Afghanistan or blow it up. The individual passes a polygraph test, but the FBI is unable to learn more about the plot.
April-May 2000: Hijacker Marwan Alshehhi boasts of planning an attack to a Hamburg librarian. He says, “There will be thousands of dead. You will think of me… In America something is going to happen.” He specifically mentions the WTC. Meanwhile, at the same time in the US, hijacker Mohamed Atta is even more forthcoming when applying for a $650,000 loan at the Department of Agriculture. Atta says he just arrived from Afghanistan, asks about security at the WTC, discusses al-Qaeda and its need for American membership, says bin Laden “would someday be known as the world’s greatest leader,” threatens to cut the throat of the bureaucrat and steal the money from her safe, asks “How would America like it if another country destroyed [Washington] and some of the monuments in it like the cities in [my] country had been destroyed?,” referring to a government building in Washington, asks “How would you like it if somebody flew an airplane into your friends’ building?”, and so on. Incredibly, neither the librarian nor the bureaucrat warn anyone of what they heard. In June 2002, FBI Director Mueller will say of the hijackers, “There were no slip-ups. Discipline never broke down. They gave no hint to those around them what they were about.”
June 29, 2000-September 18, 2000: On the orders of Pakistani ISI Director Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed, Saeed Sheikh wires about $100,000 to hijacker Atta between these dates using the alias Mustafa Ahmed. Saeed Sheikh, later convinced for kidnapping and murdering reporter Daniel Pearl in February 2002.The role of Mahmood Ahmed and the identity of Saeed Sheikh are briefly reported in the US press in early October, 2001, but since then this remarkable story appears to have been forgotten and there have been attempts to connect the Mustafa Ahmed alias with other people. The financial connection between Saeed and the hijackers continues until the day before 9/11, and it’s likely Saeed gave at least half of the $500,000 or so the hijackers spent in the US for the 9/11 plot.
August-September 2000: An unmanned spy plane called the Predator begins flying over Afghanistan, showing incomparably detailed real-time video and photographs of the movements of what appeared to be bin Laden and his aides. Its use is stopped after a few trials when a Predator crashes. It is decided to arm the Predator with a missile, but delays prevent this from happening before 9/11, and no more unarmed flights are conducted.
August 12, 2000-March 2001: Italian intelligence successfully wiretap the al-Qaeda terrorist cell in Milan, Italy from late 1999 until summer 2001. In a wiretapped conversation from this day, terrorist Abdulsalam Ali Abdulrahman tells terrorist Es Sayed about a massive strike against the enemies of Islam involving aircraft and the sky, a blow that “will be written about in all the newspapers of the world. This will be one of those strikes that will never be forgotten… This is a terrifying thing…” In another conversation, Abdulrahman tells Es Sayed: “I’m studying airplanes. I hope, God willing, that I can bring you a window or a piece of an airplane the next time we see each other.” The comment is followed by laughter. In January 2001, a different terrorist asks Es Sayed about some fake documents: “Will these work for the brothers who are going to the United States?” Sayed responds angrily, saying: “Don’t ever say those words again, not even joking! If it’s necessary … whatever place we may be, come up and talk in my ear, because these are very important things. You must know … that this plan is very, very secret, as if you were protecting the security of the state.” Beginning in October 2000, FBI experts begin helping Italian police analyze the intercepts. Neither Italy nor the FBI understands their meaning until after 9/11, but apparently the Italian government understands enough to give the US an official warning based on these intercepts in March 2001.
September-December 2000: Hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar live with an FBI informant in San Diego. Supposedly, he never told the FBI the hijackers’ names. Neighbors claim that Mohamed Atta and Hani Hanjour are frequent visitors. Neighbors also witness strange late night visits with Alhazmi and Almihdhar, matching reports of neighbors at other buildings the two lived in. For instance, one neighbor says, “There was always a series of cars driving up to the house late at night. Sometimes they were nice cars. Sometimes they had darkened windows. They’d stay about 10 minutes.”
September 15-October 1, 2000: Olympics officials later reveal that “A fully loaded, fueled airliner crashing into the opening ceremony before a worldwide television audience at the Sydney Olympics was one of the greatest security fears for the Games.” During the Olympics, Australia has six planes in the sky at all times ready to intercept any wayward aircraft. In fact, “IOC officials said the scenario of a plane crash during the opening ceremony was uppermost in their security planning at every Olympics since terrorists struck in Munich in 1972.” Bin Laden was considered the number one threat.
October 12, 2000: The USS Cole is bombed in the Aden, Yemen harbor by al-Qaeda terrorists. 17 US soldiers are killed. The Prime Minister of Yemen at the time later claims that hijacker “Khalid Almihdhar was one of the Cole perpetrators, involved in preparations. He was in Yemen at the time and stayed after the Cole bombing for a while, then he left.” John O’Neill and his team of 200 hundred FBI investigators enter Yemen two days later, but are unable to accomplish much due to restrictions placed on them, and tensions with US Ambassador Barbara Bodine. All but about 50 investigators are forced to leave by the end of October. Even though O’Neill’s boss visits and finds that Bodine is O’Neill’s “only detractor,” O’Neill and much of his team is forced to leave in November, and the investigation stalls without his personal relationships to top Yemeni officials. The Sunday Times later notes, “The failure in Yemen may have blocked off lines of investigation that could have led directly to the terrorists preparing for September 11.”
October 24-26, 2000: Pentagon officials carry out a “detailed” emergency drill based upon the crashing of a hijacked airliner into the Pentagon. The Pentagon is such an obvious target that, “For years, staff at the Pentagon joked that they worked at “Ground Zero”, the spot at which an incoming nuclear missile aimed at America’s defenses would explode. There is even a snack bar of that name in the central courtyard of the five-sided building, America’s most obvious military bullseye.” After 9/11, a Pentagon spokesman will say to the press, “The Pentagon was simply not aware that this aircraft was coming our way, and I doubt prior to Tuesday’s event, anyone would have expected anything like that here.”
December 2000-April 2001: According to later German reports, “a whole horde of Israeli counter-terror investigators, posing as students, [follow] the trails of Arab terrorists and their cells in the United States … In the town of Hollywood, Florida, they [identify] … Atta and Marwan Alshehhi as possible terrorists. Agents [live] in the vicinity of the apartment of the two seemingly normal flight school students, observing them around the clock.” Supposedly, around April, the Israeli agents are discovered and deported, terminating the investigation. This is popularly known as “the art student spy ring” because all of the spies claim to be art students, when in fact all had “recently served in the Israeli military, the majority in intelligence, electronic signal intercept or explosive ordnance units.”Other reports suggest the spy ring began in January 2000. Over 200 “students” are eventually expelled from the US. Supposedly, the Mossad waits until late August 2001 before informing the CIA what it learns, and the CIA doesn’t take the warning seriously. The US government later admits that large numbers of young Israelis were expelled, but denies they were spies.
Early December 2000: Terrorist Fahad al-Quso is arrested by the government of Yemen. In addition to being involved in the USS Cole bombing, al-Quso was at the January 2000 Malaysian meeting with hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar. FBI head investigator John O’Neill feels al-Quso is holding back important information and wants him interrogated but the interrogation doesn’t happen because O’Neill had been kicked out of Yemen by his superiors a week or two before. Al-Quso is finally interrogated days after 9/11, and admits to meeting with Alhazmi and Almihdhar in January 2000. One investigator calls the missed opportunity of exposing the 9/11 plot through al-Quso’s connections “mind-boggling.” The CIA has pictures from the Malaysian meeting of al-Quso next to hijacker Khalid Almihdhar, but the CIA doesn’t share the pictures with the FBI, and Alhazmi and Almihdhar remain undetected in the US.
2001: At some point during the year, Julie Sirrs, a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) agent, travels twice to Afghanistan. She claims DIA officials knew in advance about both trips. Sirrs sees a terrorist training center, and meets with Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Massoud, who is assassinated by the Taliban two days before 9/11. She returns with what she later claims is a treasure trove of information, including evidence that bin Laden is planning to assassinate Massoud. However, upon returning, a security officer meets her flight and confiscates her material. The DIA and the FBI investigate her. She says no higher-ups want to hear what she had learned in Afghanistan. Ultimately, Sirrs’ security clearance is pulled and she eventually quits the DIA in frustration.
January 4, 2001:The FBI’s investigation into the USS Cole bombing learns that terrorist Khallad bin Atash had been a principal planner of the bombing, and that two other participants in the bombing had delivered money to bin Atash at the time of the January 2000 meeting in Malaysia. The FBI shares this information with the CIA, and when CIA analysts reexamine pictures from the Malaysian meeting to learn more about this, they find a picture of him standing next to hijacker Khalid Almihdhar. The CIA is aware that Almihdhar entered the US a year earlier, yet they don’t attempt to find him or warn the FBI. CNN later notes that, again, the CIA at least “could have put [Nawaf] Alhazmi and Almihdhar and all others who attended the meeting in Malaysia on a watch list to be kept out of this country. It was not done.” More incredibly, even bin Atash is not placed on the watch list at this time, despite being labeled the principal planner of the USS Cole bombing. In July, the CIA rediscovers bin Atash’s role, and a CIA agent warns the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC), that bin Atash “is a major league killer, who orchestrated the Cole attack and possibly the Africa bombings.” Yet bin Atash is still not put on a terrorist watch list, and hijackers Alhazmi and Almihdhar continue to live openly in the US.
January 21, 2001: George Bush Jr. is inaugurated as the 43rd US President, replacing Clinton.
January 30, 2001: Hijacker Ziad Jarrah is questioned for several hours at the Dubai International Airport, United Arab Emirates, at the request of the CIA for “suspected involvement in terrorist activities.” He freely admits that he was in Afghanistan for much of the past two months and that he is headed to Florida. US officials were informed of the results of the interrogation before Jarrah left the airport, but he is allowed to go, and he returns to his flight training in Florida. His questioning “fits a pattern of a CIA operation begun in 1999 to track suspected al-Qaeda operatives who were traveling through the United Arab Emirates.”
January 31, 2001: The final bipartisan report of the US Commission on National Security/21st Century, launched in 1998 by then-President Bill Clinton and then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, is issued. The report has 50 recommendations on how to combat terrorism in the US, but all of them are ignored by the Bush Administration. Instead, the White House announces in May that it will have Vice President Cheney study the potential problem of domestic terrorism, despite the fact that this commission had just studied the issue for 2 1/2 years. According to Senator Hart, Congress was taking the commission’s suggestions seriously, but then, “Frankly, the White House shut it down…”
Late January 2001: The BBC later reports, “After the elections, [US intelligence] agencies [are] told to ‘back off’ investigatingthe Bin Ladens and Saudi royals,and that anger[s] agents.”
February 9, 2001: US intelligence tells Vice President Cheney that it has been conclusively proven bin Laden was behind the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole. However, fearful of ending secret pipeline negotiations begun just days after Bush took office, the US does not retaliate against known al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan as Clinton did in 1998. The US also discontinues the covert deployment of cruise missile submarines and gunships on six-hour alert near Afghanistan’s borders that gave President Clinton the option of assassinating bin Laden.
March 2001: A Taliban envoy meets with US officials in Washington and discusses turning bin Laden over. But the US wants to be handed bin Laden directly, and the Taliban want to turn him over for trial in some third country. About 20 more meetings on giving up bin Laden take place up till 9/11, all fruitless.
March 26, 2001: The Washington Post reports on a major improvements of the CIA’s intelligence gathering capability “in recent years.” A new program called Oasis uses “automated speech recognition” technology to turn audio feeds into formatted, searchable text. It can distinguish one voice from another and differentiates “speaker 1” from “speaker 2” in transcripts. Software called Fluent performs “cross lingual” searches, even translating difficult languages like Chinese and Japanese as well as automatically assessing their importance. One week later, the BBC reports that Echelon has become particularly effective against mobile phones, recording millions of calls simultaneously and checking them against a powerful search engine designed to pick out key words that might represent a security threat. Laser microphones can pick up conversations inside buildings from up to a kilometer away by monitoring window vibrations. If a bug is attached to a computer keyboard it is possible to monitor exactly what is being keyed in, because every key on a computer has a unique sound when depressed.However, the government will later report that messages about the 9/11 attacks weren’t translated until after 9/11 because analysts were “too swamped.”
April 8, 2001: Supposedly, Atta flies from the US to Prague, Czech Republic, and meets with an Iraqi spy. But the US and Czech governments later conclude the meeting never happened and Atta never even flew to Europe at the time. But the story is influential – in October 2002, a few days before Congress votes to approve a possible war with Iraq, a poll shows 66% of Americans believe Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks.
April 23-June 29, 2001: The 13 hijackers commonly known as the “muscle” – the brute force to protect the hijacker pilots – first arrive in the US.
May 2001: Around this time, intercepts from Afghanistan warn that al-Qaeda could attack an American target in late June or on the July 4 holiday. However, The White House’s Counterterrorism Security Group does not meet to discuss this prospect. This group also fails to meet after intelligence analysts overhear conversations from an al-Qaeda cell in Milan suggesting that bin Laden’s agents might be plotting to kill Bush at the European summit in Genoa, Italy, in late July. In fact, under Bush, the group only meets twice before 9/11 (June 3 and September 4). Under Clinton, the group met two or three times a week between 1998 and 2000. The White House later “aggressively defend[s] the level of attention, given only scattered hints of al-Qaeda activity.”
May 31, 2001: The Wall Street Journal summarizes tens of thousands of pages of evidence disclosed in a recently concluded trial of al-Qaeda terrorists. They are called “a riveting view onto the shadowy world of al-Qaeda.” The documents reveal numerous connections between al-Qaeda and specific front companies and charities. They even detail a “tightly organized system of cells in an array of American cities, including Brooklyn, N.Y.; Orlando, Fla.; Dallas; Santa Clara, Calif.; Columbia, Mo., and Herndon, Va.” Apparently nothing is done. The 9/11 hijackers had ties to many of these same cities and charities.
June 2001: German intelligence warns the CIA, Britain’s MI6, and Israel’s Mossad that Middle Eastern terrorists are planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack “American and Israeli symbols, which stand out.” German intelligence sources later state the information came from Echelon surveillance.
June 2001: A 60-page internal memo on the Israeli “art student” spy ring is prepared by the DEA’s Office of Security Programs. The memo is a compilation of dozens of field reports, and was meant only for the eyes of senior officials at the Justice Department, but it is leaked to the press around December 2001. The report connects the spies to efforts to foil DEA investigations into Israeli organized crime activity involving the importation of the drug Ecstasy. Salon later suggests this was a cover for the more important goal of spying on Muslim radicals. By the time of the report, the US has “apprehended or expelled close to 120 Israeli nationals.” Twenty more are arrested before 9/11, at least 60 more by the end of 2001, and arrests continue until at least May, 2002.
June 4 , 2001: Three Afghan or Pakistani men living in the Cayman Islands are overheard discussing hijacking attacks in New York City. These men are already being investigated by Cayman and British investigators. On this day, they are taken into custody, questioned and released some time later. This information is forwarded to US intelligence. In late August, an anonymous letter to a Cayman radio station will allege these same men are agents of bin Laden “organizing a major terrorist act against the US via an airline or airlines.” The letter is forwarded to the Cayman government, but it is unknown what they did with it.
June 9, 2001: Robert Wright, an FBI agent who spent ten years investigating terrorist funding, writes a memo that slams the FBI. He states, “There is virtually no effort on the part of the FBI’s International Terrorism Unit to neutralize known and suspected international terrorists living in the United States.” He claims “FBI was merely gathering intelligence so they would know who to arrest when a terrorist attack occurred,” rather than actually trying to stop the attacks. Wright claims the FBI shut down his 1998 criminal probe into alleged terrorist-training camps in Chicago and Kansas City. He says his superiors repeatedly blocked his attempts to shut off money flows to al-Qaeda, Hamas and other terrorist groups. Yet his story is largely ignored by the media because the FBI will not allow Wright to provide details. He is now suing the FBI so he can tell his story.
June 11, 2001: FBI agents from the New York office and Washington headquarters meet with CIA officials to discuss the USS Cole investigation. The FBI agents are shown photographs from the al-Qaeda meeting in Malaysia in January 2000, including pictures of hijackers Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, but are not given copies. “The FBI agents recognized the men from the Cole investigation, but when they asked the CIA what they knew about the men, they were told that they didn’t have clearance to share that information. It ended up in a shouting match.” A CIA official later admits that he knew more about Alhazmi and Almihdhar that he was willing to tell the FBI. The two are still not put on a terrorist watch list.
June 23, 2001: Reuters reports that “Followers of exiled Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden are planning a major attack on US and Israeli interests in the next two weeks.” The report is based on the personal impression of a reporter who interviewed bin Ladenand some of his followers two days earlier. This reporter is quoted as saying: “There is a major state of mobilization among the Osama bin Laden forces. It seems that there is a race of who will strike first. Will it be the United States or Osama bin Laden?”
Summer, 2001: Around this time, the NSA intercepts telephone conversations between al-Qaeda leader Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and lead hijacker Mohamed Atta, but does not share the information with any other agencies. Mohammed is on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist List at the time, and is later considered the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Supposedly, however, the NSA either fails to translate important messages in a timely fashion, or fails to understand the significance of what was translated. The NSA Director later contradicts other senior US officials and claims no calls involving any of the hijackers have been found.
Summer, 2001: An informant tells an FBI field office agent that he has been invited to a commando training course at a camp operated by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The information is passed up to FBI headquarters, which rejects the idea of infiltrating the camp.
July 2, 2001: Indian sources claim that “bin Laden, who suffers from renal deficiency, has been periodically undergoing dialysis in a Peshawar military hospital with the knowledge and approval of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), if not of [Pakistani President] Musharraf himself.” CBS later reports bin Laden had emergency medical care in Pakistan the day before 9/11, again protected by the ISI.
July 4-14, 2001: Bin Laden, the US’s most wanted criminal with a $5 million bounty on his head, supposedly receives lifesaving treatment for renal failure from American surgeon at the American hospital in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Witnesses claim that on July 12, bin Laden meets with CIA agent Larry Mitchell and possibly another agent. The CIA, the Dubai hospital and even bin Laden deny the story; the doctor named refuses to comment. Le Figaro and Radio France International, who broke the story from French intelligence sources, stand by it.The explosive story is prominently and widely reported in Europe, but barely at all in the US.
July 10, 2001: Phoenix, ArizonaFBI agent Ken Williams sends a memo to FBI headquarters and several other FBI offices, warning about suspicious activities of 10 Middle Eastern men taking flight training lessons in Arizona. The memo specifically suggests that bin Laden’s followers might be trying to infiltrate the civil-aviation system as pilots, security guards or other personnel, and recommends a national program to track suspicious flight-school students. The memo is ignored and no action is taken, not even surveillance of the 10 suspected students. One of the students mentioned periodically roomed and trained with hijacker Hani Hanjour for several years in Arizona. In May 2002, Vice President Cheney states that the memo should never be released to the media or public.
Mid-July 2001: FBI counter-terrorism expertJohn O’Neill privately tell an investigator:”The main obstacles to investigate Islamic terrorism were US oil corporate interests and the role played by Saudi Arabia in it … All the answers, everything needed to dismantle Osama bin Laden’s organization, can be found in Saudi Arabia.” O’Neill also believes the White House is obstructing his investigation of bin Laden because they are still keeping the idea of a pipeline deal with the Taliban open.
July 16, 2001: British spy agencies warn that al-Qaeda is in “the final stages” of preparing a terrorist attack in the West. The report states there is “an acute awareness” that the attack is “a very serious threat.” In early August, the British add that the attack will involve multiple airplane hijackings. This warning is included in Bush’s briefing on August 6.
July 20-22, 2001: The G8 summit is held in Genoa, Italy. Acting on warnings that al-Qaeda would attempt to kill Bush and other leaders with “an airplane stuffed with explosives,” Italy surrounds the summit with antiaircraft guns, keeps fighters in the air, and closes off local airspace to all planes. Bush sleeps in an aircraft carrier off the coast. The attack is called off because of the heavy security.
July 21, 2001: Three former US officials meet with Pakistani and Russian intelligence officers in a Berlin hotel. It is the third of a series of back-channel conferences using ex-officials called “brainstorming on Afghanistan.” Department official Lee Coldren passes on a message from Bush officials. He later says, “I think there was some discussion of the fact that the United States was so disgusted with the Taliban that they might be considering some military action.” One specific threat made at this meeting is that the Taliban can choose between “carpets of bombs” – an invasion – or “carpets of gold” – the oil and gas pipelines.
July 26, 2001: CBS News reports that Attorney General Ashcroft has stopped flying commercial airlines due to a threat assessment, but “neither the FBI nor the Justice Department … would identify [to CBS] what the threat was, when it was detected or who made it.” The San Francisco Chronicle later concludes, “The FBI obviously knew something was in the wind … The FBI did advise Ashcroft to stay off commercial aircraft. The rest of us just had to take our chances.” CBS’s Dan Rather later says of this warning: “Why wasn’t it shared with the public at large?”
Late July 2001: The Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakillearns that bin Laden is planning a “huge attack” on targets inside America. The attack is imminent, and will kill thousands. He learns this from the leader of the rebel movement in Uzbekistan, which is allied with al-Qaeda. Muttawakil sends an emissary to pass this information on to the US consul general, and another US official, “possibly from the intelligence services,” as well as a United Nations office. The message is not taken very seriously; one source blames this on “warning fatigue” from too many warnings.
Late July 2001: David Schippers, noted conservative Chicago lawyer and the House Judiciary Committee’s chief investigator in the Clinton impeachment trial, later claims that FBI agents in Chicago and Minnesota contact him around this time and tell him that a terrorist attack is 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 soon pulls them off the terrorist investigation and threatens them with prosecution under the National Security Act if they go public with the information. As a result, they contact Schippers hoping he can persuade the government to take action. Schippers tries to pass the information on to high government officials but apparently his efforts are ignored. Partly in conjunction with Judicial Watch, the public interest law firm, Schippers is now representing at least ten FBI agents in a suit against the US government in an attempt to have their testimony subpoenaed, which would enable them to legally tell what they know without going to jail.
Late July 2001: CBS reports: “Just days after Atta return[s] to the US from Spain, Egyptian intelligence in Cairo says it received a report from one of its operatives in Afghanistan that 20 al-Qaeda members had slipped into the US and four of them had received flight training on Cessnas. To the Egyptians, pilots of small planes didn’t sound terribly alarming, but they [pass] on the message to the CIA anyway, fully expecting Washington to request information. The request never [comes].”
Late summer 2001: Jordanian intelligence warns the US that a major attack, code named The Big Wedding, is planned inside the US and that aircraft will be used.
Late summer 2001: The Guardian later reports, “Reliable western military sources say a US contingency plan existed on paper by the end of the summer to attack Afghanistan from the north.”
August 2001: A Moroccan informant learns that bin Laden is “very disappointed” that the 1993 bombing had not toppled the WTC, and plans “large scale operations in New York in the summer or fall of 2001.” The International Herald Tribune later calls the story “not proved beyond a doubt” but intriguing.
August 2001: Russian President Putin later states that during this month, “I ordered my intelligence to warn President Bush in the strongest terms that 25 terrorists were getting ready to attack the US, including important government buildings like the Pentagon.” He states that suicide pilots are training for attacks on US targets. The head of Russian intelligence also states, “We had clearly warned them” on several occasions, but they “did not pay the necessary attention.” A Russian newspaper on September 12, 2001 claims that “Russian Intelligence agents know the organizers and executors of these terrorist attacks. More than that, Moscow warned Washington about preparation to these actions a couple of weeks before they happened.”
August 2, 2001: The last secret meeting between US officials and the Taliban is held, apparently in a last ditch attempt to secure a pipeline deal. Talks break off, and the US prepares plans to invade and occupy Afghanistan.
August 6, 2001: President Bush receives classified intelligence briefings at his Crawford, Texas ranch indicating that bin Laden might be planning to hijack commercial airliners. The memo read to him is titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US”, and the entire 11 page memo focuses on the possibility of terrorist attacks inside the US. The contents have never been made public. The existence of this memo is kept secret until May 2002. Vice President Cheney later calls the memo just a “rehash” containing nothing new or interesting. But he says Congress and the public should not see it, “because it contains the most sensitive sources and methods. It’s the family jewels.”
August 6, 2001-September 11, 2001: Inside trading based on advanced knowledge of the 9/11 attacks between August 6, if not earlier, and the day of the attack later lead to investigations around the world. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) later announces that they are investigating the trading of shares of 38 companies in the days just before 9/11. Both the SEC and the Secret Service announce probes into an unusually high volume trade of five-year US Treasury note purchases (considered good investments in a world crisis) around this time. These transactions included a single $5 billion trade.German central bank president Ernst Welteke later says his researchers have found “almost irrefutable proof of insider trading,” not only in shares of heavily affected industries such as airlines and insurance companies, but also in gold and oil. Unusual stock transactions of Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurer, is also noted by German investigators. US investigators reports that salvaged computers from within the WTC show that over $100 million was rushed through computers even as the disaster unfolded. Investigators say, “There is a suspicion that some people had advance knowledge of the approximate time of the plane crashes… [and] thought that the records of their transactions could not be traced after the main frames were destroyed.” There are ongoing investigations in Belgium, France, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Monte Carlo, Cyprus, Japan, Italy, Britain and other countries. Apparently all of these investigations are still continuing, except one in Britain which found no evidence of inside trading.
August 8-15, 2001: At some point between these dates, Israel warns the US that an al-Qaeda attack is imminent. Two high ranking agents from the Mossad come to Washington and warn the FBI and CIA that from 50 to 200 terrorists have slipped into the US and are planning “a major assault on the United States.” They say indications point to a “large scale target”, and that Americans would be “very vulnerable.” Later in the month, France gives a warning that apparently “echoes” this one.
August 15, 2001: After only a few days training to fly a 747 at a Minnesota flight school, terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui is arrested and detained in Minnesota on the excuse of an immigration violation. The FBI confiscates his possessions, including a computer laptop, but doesn’t have a search warrant to search through them. Moussaoui acted so suspiciously that a flight school staffer warned the FBI about Moussaoui, saying, “A 747 fully loaded with fuel could be used as a weapon!”One local FBI agent speculates that Moussaoui might “fly something into the World Trade Center.” But Minnesota FBI agents quickly become frustrated at the lack of interest in the case from higher ups, who refuse to allow the agents to ask for a search warrant from a secret court that, in over 10,000 cases from the FBI, that had never turned down a warrant request. French intelligence then gives evidence clearly tying Moussaoui to al-Qaeda, including evidence that he had trained in Afghanistan on several occasions. But an official at FBI headquarters edits out all the information tying Moussaoui to terrorism, and another attempt to apply for the warrant is rejected. One Minneapolis agent warns that FBI headquarters is “setting this up for failure,” and another agent later asks: “Why would an FBI agent deliberately sabotage a case?” A few weeks earlier, the headquarters official handling the Moussaoui case was also sent a copy of the Ken Williams memo warning that al-Qaeda terrorists might be training in US flight schools, but he apparently fails to see the connection. The search warrant is not approved until after the 9/11 attacks. Too late, evidence is found suggesting Moussaoui could be involved in a hijacking involving New York City. One newspaper claims that information on his computer “might have been enough to expose the Hamburg cell, which investigators believe was the key planning unit for 11 September.” FBI agent Coleen Rowley later suggests that if they would had received the search warrant sooner, “There is at least some chance that … may have limited the Sept. 11th attacks and resulting loss of life.”
August 21, 2001: Walid Arkeh, a Jordanian serving time in a Florida prison, warns FBI agents of an impending terrorist attack. He had befriended three important al-Qaeda figures in a British jail from September 2000 to July 2001. Bin Laden had telephoned one of them over 200 times prior to 1998. Arkeh tells the FBI that he had learned from these three that “something big was going to happen in New York City,” and they had called the 1993 attack on the WTC “unfinished business.” Tampa FBI agents determine that he had associated with these al-Qaeda agents, but nonetheless don’t believe him then or even after 9/11. One agent responds to his warning by saying: “Is that all you have? That’s old news.” The agents fail to learn more from him, but they do pass his warning to the FBI office in New York that is in charge of investigating al-Qaeda. In May 2002 he tells his story to different FBI agents. They are stunned, and later officially deem his warning valid. One says to him: “Let me tell you something. If you know what happened in New York, we are all in deep shit. We are in deep trouble.”
August 22, 2001: Counter-terrorism expert John O’Neill, the government’s “most committed tracker of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network of terrorists,” quits the FBI. He says it’s partly because of the recent power play against him apparently led by Tom Pickard, then interim director of the FBI, but also because of repeated obstruction of his investigations into al-Qaeda. He never hears the CIA warning about hijackers Alhazmi and Almihdhar sent out just one day later nor Ken Williams’ flight school memo, nor of Walid Arkeh’s warning, nor about the arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui, nor is he at a June meeting when the CIA revealed some of what it knew about Alhazmi and Almihdhar. The next day he begins a new job as head of security at the WTC. He dies in the 9/11 attack, one day after moving into his office inside the WTC.
August 23, 2001: According to German newspapers, the Mossad gives the CIA a list of 19 terrorists living in the US and say that they appear to be planning to carry out an attack in the near future. It is unknown if these are the 19 9/11 hijackers or if the number is a coincidence. However, four names on the list are known and are names of the 9/11 hijackers: Nawaf Alhazmi, Khalid Almihdhar, Marwan Alshehhi, and Mohamed Atta.The Mossad appears to have learned about this through its “art student” spy ring. Yet apparently this warning and list are not treated as particularly urgent by the CIA and also not passed on to the FBI.
August 23, 2001: The CIA finally notifies the State Department, INS, Customs Service, and FBI that hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar be put on the terrorism watch list, which watches for them on any flight to or from the US (but not domestic flights). The CIA also requests that Khallad bin Atash be added to the watch list – eight months after he was known to have been the main planner of the Cole bombing. However, the FBI and other agencies are not told this is an urgent matter, and according to the Wall Street Journal, the search “consisted of little more than entering their names in a nationwide law enforcement database that would have triggered red flags if they were taken into custody for some other reason.” The FBI also fails to check national or state credit card, car registration, driver’s license or bank account databases. All of these would had positive results. Alhazmi’s name was even in the 2000-2001 San Diego phone book, listing the address where he and Almihdhar may have been living off and on until about September 9, 2001. The INS and State Department are not asked to help find the two; both later strongly suggest they could have found them. Although the FBI determines that Almihdhar had previously listed a Los Angeles address, FBI offices in Los Angeles and San Diego are not asked to assist in the search for the two until after 9/11.
August 24, 2001: Frustrated with lack of response from FBI headquarters about Zacarias Moussaoui, the Minnesota FBI asks the CIA for help. The CIA sends messages to stations and bases overseas requesting information about Moussaoui, stating that he might be “involved in a larger plot to target airlines traveling from Europe to the US,” and calls him a “suspect 747 airline attacker” and a “suspect airline suicide hijacker.” In contrast, on September 4, the FBI sends out a message about Moussaoui to the intelligence community and the FAA, but doesn’t suggest he’s a threat or possibly part of a larger plot, and doesn’t ask for any action or help. The FAA decides the warning is not important enough to pass on to the airlines. A terrorist turned informant held by the FBI Seattle knew Moussaoui from an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, but because of the vague FBI message the Seattle FBI doesn’t know to ask the informant about Moussaoui until after 9/11.
August 24-29, 2001: The 19 hijackers book their flights for 9/11, all use their real names. Most pay using credit cards on the internet. An official later states that had the FAA been properly warned about the watchlist on hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, “they should have been picked up in the reservation process.” Almihdhar in turn was in charge of arrangements for 13 other hijackers, and Alhazmi met regularly with Mohamed Atta.
August 28, 2001: The FBI’s New York office recommends that an investigation be launched “to determine if [Khalid] Almihdhar is still in the United States,” but FBI headquarters immediately turns the idea down on the grounds that there should be a wall between criminal investigations and intelligence work. One FBI agent expresses his frustration in an e-mail the next day, saying, “Whatever has happened to this – someday someone will die – and wall or not – the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain ‘problems.’ Let’s hope the [FBI’s] National Security Law Unit will stand behind their decisions then, especially since the biggest threat to us now, UBL [Usama bin Laden], is getting the most ‘protection.”‘
August 30-September 4, 2001: According to Egyptian President Mubarak, Egyptian intelligence warns American officials that bin Laden’s network is in the advanced stages of executing a significant operation against an American target, probably within the US. He says he learned this information from an agent working inside al-Qaeda.
Early September 2001: The NSA intercepts “multiple phone calls from Abu Zubaida, bin Laden’s chief of operations, to the United States.” The timing and information contained in these intercepted phone calls has not been disclosed.
Early September 2001: According to British inside sources, “shortly before September 11,” bin Laden contacts an associate thought to be in Pakistan. The conversation refers to an incident that will take place in the US on, or around 9/11, and discusses possible repercussions. In another conversation, bin Laden contacts an associate thought to be in Afghanistan. They discuss the scale and effect of a forthcoming operation; bin Laden praises his colleague for his part in the planning. Neither conversation specifically mentions the WTC or Pentagon, but investigators have no doubt the 9/11 attacks were being discussed.
Early September 2001: Bin Laden moves his training bases in Afghanistan “in the days before the attacks.” Presumably this is noticed by US spy satellites.
Early September 2001: Attendees of a New York mosque are warned to stay out of lower Manhattan on 9/11. The FBI’s Joint Terrorist Task Force interviews dozens of members of the mosque, who confirm the story. An agent in the 9/11 investigation later claims the news “had been out on the street” and the number of leads turning up later is so “overwhelming” that it is difficult to tell who knows about the attacks from secondhand sources and who knows about it from someone who may have been a participant. On September 6, a child in a class of Pakistani immigrants points towards the WTC, and says: “Do you see those two buildings? They won’t be standing there next week.” The FBI later confirms the event. One official at the school says many Arab-American students have come forward with their own stories about having prior knowledge before 9/11: “Kids are telling us that the attacks didn’t surprise them. This was a nicely protected little secret that circulated in the community around here.” Police say that on September 10, a sixth-grade student of Middle Eastern descent in Jersey City, New Jersey, warns his teacher to “to stay away from lower Manhattan because something bad was going to happen.” A few days before 9/11, a Seattle security guard of Middle Eastern descent tells an East Coast friend on the phone that terrorists will soon attack the US; the FBI later verifies the story. Three presumed terrorists talk threateningly in a Florida bar the night before the attacks, one saying: “Wait ’til tomorrow. America is going to see bloodshed.” In June 2002, FBI Director Mueller will claim: “To this day we have found no one in the United States except the actual hijackers who knew of the plot…” In February 2002, CIA Director Tenet claims the 9/11 plot was “in the heads of three or four people” and even most of the hijackers didn’t know the targets or that it would be a suicide attack until just before the attack.
September 3, 2001: Author Salman Rushdie, the target of death threats from radical Muslims for years, is banned by US authorities from taking internal US flights. He says the FAA told his publisher the reason was because it had “intelligence of something about to happen.” One newspaper states, “The FAA confirmed that it stepped up security measures concerning Mr. Rushdie but refused to give a reason.”
September 6-10, 2001: Suspicious trading occurs on American and United, the two airlines used in the 9/11 attacks, but no other airlines. The New York Stock Exchange sees “unusually heavy trading” in the stocks for these two airlines “and related stocks.” The Chicago Board Options Exchange sees a drastic imbalance between purchases of put options (a speculation that the stock will go down) versus call options (a speculation the stock will go up). One analyst says: “I saw put-call numbers higher than I’ve ever seen in 10 years of following the markets…” On September 29, 2001, $2.5 million in put option profits on American Airlines and United Airlines are reported unclaimed, presumably to avoid being caught. “To the embarrassment of investigators, it has also emerged that the firm used to buy many of the ‘put’ options … on United Airlines stock was headed until 1998 by ‘Buzzy’ Krongard, now executive director of the CIA.” Krongard was chairman of Alex Brown Inc., which was bought by Deutsche Bank. Krongard was head of the Bankers Trust, a private client business handling investments of the extremely wealthy. The Chicago Board Options Exchange also sees suspicious trading on Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, two of the largest WTC tenants, with numbers so unusual that one expert states,”This would be one of the most extraordinary coincidences in the history of mankind if it was a coincidence.” On September 10, the trading ratio on United Airlines is 25 times greater than normal at the Pacific Exchange. According to CBS News, by the afternoon of September 10, “alarm bells were sounding over unusual trading in the US stock options market.” It has been documented that the CIA and many other intelligence agencies monitor stock trading in real time using highly advanced programs to look for such warnings. So presumably CIA should have had advance warning something unusual was happening with American and United Airlines.
September 7, 2001: A priest famous for his expertise on the Muslim world is told at a wedding in Todi, Italy of a plot to attack the US and Britain using hijacked airplanes as weapons. He isn’t told time or place specifics. He immediately passes what he knows to a judge and several politicians.
September 8-11, 2001: Saeed Sheikh, associated with both al-Qaeda and the Pakistani ISI, transfers money from the United Arab Emirates to Mohamed Atta in Florida on September 8 and 9. On September 9, three hijackers, Atta, Walid Alshehri and Marwan Alshehhi, transfer about $15,000 back to Saeed’s account. Apparently the hijackers were giving money meant for the 9/11 attacks that they didn’t use. Saeed then flies from the United Arab Emirates to Karachi, Pakistan on 9/11. These last minute transfers are touted as the “smoking gun” proving al-Qaeda involvement in the 9/11 attacks, because of Saeed’s al-Qaeda ties. But shouldn’t it also be a “smoking gun” proving ISI involvement in 9/11?
September 9, 2001: General Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, is assassinated by two men posing as journalists. Massoud was far and away the most popular and powerful figure opposing the Taliban, and would have been the natural choice the lead the country had he lived. His killers are connected to both al-Qaeda and the Pakistani ISI. It is widely believed that the killing was a preemptive strike to prevent a resurgence of the Northern Alliance after the 911 attacks. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, an expert on Afghanistan, claims he immediately saw Massoud’s assassination as a sign that “something terrible was about to happen” but the 9/11 attacks happen just a few hours before he is to meet to warn top White House officials about this.
September 9, 2001: It is later reported that on this day, bin Laden calls his mother and said, “In two days, you’re going to hear big news and you’re not going to hear from me for a while.” US officials later tell CNN that they had been monitoring calls between bin Laden and his mother for years.
September 9, 2001: A “game plan to remove al-Qaeda from the face of the Earth” is placed on Bush’s desk for his signature. The plan deals with all aspects of a war against al-Qaeda, ranging from diplomatic initiatives to a military invasion in Afghanistan. According to NBC News reporter Jim Miklaszewski, the “directive outlines essentially the same war plan … put into action after the Sept. 11 attacks. The administration most likely was able to respond so quickly to the attacks because it simply had to pull the plans ‘off the shelf.'” Bush was expected to sign it but still hadn’t done so by 9/11. Sandy Berger, Clinton’s National Security Advisor, has stated, “You show me one reporter, one commentator, one member of Congress who thought we should invade Afghanistan before September 11 and I’ll buy you dinner in the best restaurant in New York City.” In July 2002, British Prime Minister Tony Blair will state: “To be truthful about it, there was no way we could have got the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened on September 11.”
September 9-10, 2001: Donald Rumsfeld threatens to urge a veto if the Senate proceeds with a plan to divert $600 million from missile defense to counter-terrorism. The next day, Attorney General Ashcroft rejects a proposed $58 million increase in financing for the bureau’s counter-terrorism programs. On the same day, he sends a request for budget increases to the White House. It covers 68 programs, but none of them relate to counter-terrorism. He also sends a memorandum to his heads of departments, stating his seven priorities – none of them relating to counter-terrorism. This is more than a little strange, since Ashcroft stopped flying public airplanes in July due to terrorist threats and he told a Senate committee in May that counter-terrorism was his “highest priority.”
September 10, 2001: Amr Elgindy, a notorious inside trader on the financial markets, orders his broker to liquidate his children’s $300,000 trust account fearing a sudden crash in the market the next day. He tells his stock broker that the Dow Jones average, then at 9,600, will fall to below 3,000. Elgindy is later arrested along with two FBI agents. Government prosecutors claim the FBI agents were using their FBI positions to feed him inside information on various corporations. They also claim Elgindy had foreknowledge about the 9/11 attacks.
September 10, 2001: Hijacker Mohamed Atta calls Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the operational planner of the 9/11 attacks, in Afghanistan. Mohammed gives final approval to launch the attacks. This call is monitored and translated by the US, though it isn’t known how quickly that takes and details of the conversation haven’t been released.
September 10, 2001: At least two messages in Arabic are intercepted by the NSA:”The match begins tomorrow” and “Tomorrow is zero hour.” They were sent between someone in Saudi Arabia and someone in Afghanistan. The NSA claims that they weren’t translated until September 12, and that even if they were translated in time, “they gave no clues that authorities could have acted on.” These are only two of about 30 pre-9/11 communications from suspected al-Qaeda operatives or other militants referring to an imminent event, including “There is a big thing coming,” “They’re going to pay the price” and “We’re ready to go.” The NSA Director later claims the “NSA had no [indications] that al-Qaeda was … planning an attack on US soil.”
September 10, 2001: US officials later admit American agents had infiltrated al-Qaeda cells in the US, though how many and how long they had been in al-Qaeda remains a mystery. On this day, electronic intercepts connected to these undercover agents hear messages such as: “Watch the news” and “Tomorrow will be a great day for us.” At least until February 2002, officials claimed the “CIA failed to penetrate al-Qaeda with a single agent.”
September 10, 2001: Two days after 9/11, Newsweek reports: “The state of alert had been high during the past two weeks, and a particularly urgent warning may have been received the night before the attacks, causing some top Pentagon brass to cancel a trip. Why that same information was not available to the 266 people who died aboard the four hijacked commercial aircraft may become a hot topic on the Hill.” Far from becoming a hot topic, the incident is never mentioned in the media again, except in the next issue of Newsweek.
September 11, 2001: In Israel, two employees of Odigo, Inc., an Israeli paging company, receive warnings of an imminent attack on the WTC around two hours before the first plane hits the WTC. Odigo has its headquarters two blocks from the WTC. Israeli security and the FBI are notified immediately after the 9/11 attacks begin. The two employees claim not to know who sent the warnings. The company suggests the warning may have been sent to a larger audience.
September 11, 2001: The 9/11 attack: four planes are hijacked, two crash into the WTC, one into the Pentagon, and one crashes into the Pennsylvania countryside. More than 2,800 people are killed.
September 11, 2001: A CIA team at the National Reconnaissance Office, an agency that runs many of the nation’s spy satellites, runs “a pre-planned simulation to explore the emergency response issues that would be created if a plane were to strike a building. Little did they know that the scenario would come true in a dramatic way that day.” The simulation was to start at 9:00 A.M., four miles from where one of the real hijacked planes took off. The government calls the simulation a “bizarre coincidence.”
September 11, 2001: At the time of the 9/11 attacks, and at least until the second crash into the WTC, Pakistani ISI Director Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed is meeting in Washington, DC, with the chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, Senator Bob Graham and Representative Porter Goss (who is also a former CIA clandestine operations agent). Both later head the joint House-Senate investigation into the 9/11 attacks, and claim there is no 9/11 “smoking gun.” Also present are Senator John Kyl and the Pakistani ambassador to the US, Maleeha Lodhi. All of the people named in this meeting also met in Pakistan a few weeks earlier. As previously mentioned, Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed ordered $100,000 sent to hijacker Mohamed Atta in 2000.The New York Times says the terrorist threat from bin Laden is being discussed in the meeting when the 9/11 attacks begin.
September 11, 2001: A National Public Radio correspondent states: “I spoke with Congressman Ike Skelton – a Democrat from Missouri and a member of the Armed Services Committee – who said that just recently the director of the CIA warned that there could be an attack – an imminent attack – on the United States of this nature. So this is not entirely unexpected.”
September 11, 2001: Hours after the 9/11 attacks, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld is given information that three of the names on the airplane passenger manifests are suspected al-Qaeda operatives. The notes he composes at the time are leaked nearly a year later. Rumsfeld writes he wants the “best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL. [Usama bin Laden] Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.” It is later revealed that shortly after 9/11, Rumsfeld sets up“a small team of defense officials outside regular intelligence channels to focus on unearthing details about Iraqi ties with al-Qaeda and other terrorist networks.” It has continued to sift “through much of the same databases available to government intelligence analysts but with the aim of spotlighting information the spy agencies have either overlooked or played down.”
September 11, 2001: Hours after the attacks, five Israelis are arrested for “puzzling behavior” related to the WTC attacks.Neighbors alerted the police after seeing them film the burning WTC from the roof of a building, then shouting in what was interpreted as cries of joy and mockery. One man was found with $4,700 in cash hidden in his sock, another had two passports on him, and a box cutter was found in the van they were driving when arrested. Investigators say that “There are maps of the city in the car with certain places highlighted… It looked like they’re hooked in with this. It looked like they knew what was going to happen.” One of these Israelis later says, “Our purpose was to document the event.” ABC News later reports that the FBI determined at least two are Mossad agents, and that all were on a Mossad surveillance mission. The FBI holds them on immigration violations and interrogates them for weeks. They are released on November 20, 2001 as part of a deal with the Israeli government. The owner of the moving van company they all worked for flees to Israel on September 13 and is still wanted by US authorities. The FBI later claims that none of them had any advanced knowledge of the 9/11 attacks.
September 11, 2001: An FAA memo written on the evening of 9/11 suggests a man on Flight 11 was shot and killed with a gun before the plane crashed into the WTC. The memo, based on information from a flight attendant’s phone call, stated “that a passenger located in seat 10B shot and killed a passenger in seat 9B… The passenger killed was Daniel Lewin, shot by passenger Satam Al Suqami.” Lewin is later identified as a former member of the Israel Defense Force Sayeret Matkal, Israel’s most successful special-operations unit, a deep-penetration unit with a record of infiltrating then destroying terrorist plots. Officials later deny the gun story and suggest that Lewin was probably stabbed to death instead.
September 12, 2001: The government’s initial response to the 9/11 attacks is there was no evidence whatsoever that bin Laden planned an attack in the US. “There was a ton of stuff, but it all pointed to an attack abroad,” says one official. Furthermore, in the 24 hours after the attack, investigators have been searching through “mountains of information,” “but the vast electronic ‘take’ on bin Laden, said officials who requested anonymity, contained no hints of a pending terror campaign in the United States itself, no orders to subordinates, no electronic fund transfers, no reports from underlings on their surveillance of the airports in Boston, Newark and Washington.”
September 12, 2001: The passport of hijacker Satam Al Suqami is found a few blocks from the WTC. The Guardian says, “the idea that [this] passport had escaped from that inferno unsinged [tests] the credulity of the staunchest supporter of the FBI’s crackdown on terrorism.” (Note the passport did not belong to Atta, as is sometimes claimed.)
September 13-19, 2001: Members of bin Laden’s family and important Saudis are flown out of the US. The New York Times explains, “The young members of the bin Laden clan were driven or flown under FBI supervision to a secret assembly point in Texas and then to Washington from where they left the country on a private charter plane when airports reopened three days after the attacks.” A Tampa Tribune article describes a flight carrying Saudi royalty from Tampa, Florida to Lexington, Kentucky on September 13, while the ban on all nonmilitary flights in the US is still in effect. Witnesses describe multiple 747’s with Arabic lettering on their sides are already in Lexington, suggesting another secret assembly point. It appears that the FBI were able to only interview the bin Ladens and Saudis only briefly, if at all. The existence of such flights during this ban is now unfortunately often called an urban legend.
September 14, 2001: FBI Director Mueller describes reports that the hijacker pilots had received flight training in the US as “news, quite obviously,” adding: “If we had understood that to be the case, we would have – perhaps one could have averted this.” It is later discovered that contrary to Mueller’s claims, the FBI had interviewed various flight school staffs about Middle Eastern terrorists on numerous occasions, from 1996 until a few weeks before 9/11. Three days later he says, “There were no warning signs that I’m aware of that would indicate this type of operation in the country.”
September 14, 2001: The Director of the Air National Guard claims that in 1997, the number of air forces bases defending the US with fighters on 24-hour alert is reduced from over 100 to only 7. This is done to reduce expenses. On 9/11, supposedly there are only 14 fighters (2 at each base) in the entire US ready to defend against an attack, and, as one newspaper puts it, “they no longer included any bases close to two obvious terrorist targets – Washington, DC, and New York City.” The Director explains this is why jets failed to scramble towards the hijacked aircraft for so many minutes. There is evidence suggesting additional bases on the East Coast had fighters on 24-hour alert on 9/11. But if the story is even remotely accurate, why didn’t Bush increase the number of fighters on alert in response to an increasing number of warnings of hijackings and suicide attacks from the air?
September 15, 2001: CIA Director Tenet briefs Bush with a military plan to conquer Afghanistan that was developed before 9/11 (mostly in May 2001), and is nearly exactly the same as the plan eventually used to conquer Afghanistan. In contrast, the Defense Department is caught relatively unprepared and has to defer to the CIA plans. Tenet then divulges a top secret document called the “Worldwide Attack Matrix,” which describes covert operations against al-Qaeda in 80 countries that are either underway or now recommended. The actions range from routine propaganda to lethal covert action.
September 15-17, 2001:Articles in the New York Times, Washington Post and other newspapers suggest that at least seven of the 9/11 hijackers had training in US military bases. Four were at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, and three of those listed that base as their permanent address on their driver’s licenses. The media drops the story after the Air Force makes a not-very-definitive statement, saying that while the names are similar, “we are probably not talking about the same people.” But the military fails to provide any information about the individuals whose names supposedly match those of the alleged hijackers, making it impossible to confirm or refute the story.
September 16-23, 2001: Reports appear in many newspapers suggesting that some of the people the US says were 9/11 hijackers are actually still alive. The London Times reports, “Five of the hijackers were using stolen identities, and investigators are studying the possibility that the entire suicide squad consisted of impostors.”People with the same names and other biographical information of the hijackers speak to the press and governments in the Middle East and claim they were nowhere near the US on 9/11. In some cases, their passports and/or photos appear to have been stolen and used by the hijackers. In a secret report to banks, the US even suggests that one hijacker, Khalid Almidhar, is still alive. However, in November 2001, FBI Director Mueller states, “We at this point definitely know the 19 hijackers who were responsible,” and says that they were sticking with the names and photos released in late September. The Salem Alhazmi still alive in Saudi Arabia says the FBI photo of hijacker Salem Alhazmi is of him, and other details of the hijackers appear to refer to obviously stolen information.
Late September-Early October, 2001: Leaders of Pakistan’s two Islamic parties negotiate bin Laden’s extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for the 9/11 attacks. Bin Laden would be held under house arrest in Peshawar and would face an international tribunal, which would decide whether to try him or hand him over to the US. This plan has both bin Laden’s approval and that of Taliban leader Mullah Omar. However, the plan is vetoed by Pakistan’s president Musharraf who says he “could not guarantee bin Laden’s safety.” But it appears the US did not want the deal: a US official later says that“casting our objectives too narrowly” risked “a premature collapse of the international effort [to overthrow the Taliban] if by some lucky chance Mr. bin Laden was captured.”
October 7, 2001: The US begins bombing Afghanistan. Note that shortly after 9/11 former Pakistani Foreign Secretary Niaz Naik claimed that in July 2001 he was told by senior US officials that a military action to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan would “take place before the snows started falling in Afghanistan, by the middle of October at the latest.”
October 7, 2001: Pakistani ISI Director Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed is replaced after the FBI establishes that he had ordered Saeed Sheikh to transfer $100,000 into hijacker Mohamed Atta’s bank account prior in 2000. The story is widely reported by Pakistani newspapers, and even by the Wall Street Journal, which says US government sources helped them to confirm the story. The Times of India says: “A direct link between the ISI and the WTC attack could have enormous repercussions. The US cannot but suspect whether or not there were other senior Pakistani Army commanders who were in the know of things. Evidence of a larger conspiracy could shake US confidence in Pakistan’s ability to participate in the anti-terrorism coalition.” However, the story is quickly forgotten, and has never been mentioned in the US media since.
October 27, 2001:Furious government intelligence officials accuse the NSA of destroying data pertinent to the 9/11 investigation. They claim that possible leads aren’t being followed because of the NSA’s lack of cooperation.
December 12-15, 2001: Fox News broadcasts a remarkable series about the Israeli “art student” spy ring: “There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9/11 attacks, but investigators suspect that the Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it.” “Investigators within the DEA, INS and FBI have all told Fox News that to pursue or even suggest Israeli spying … is considered career suicide.” A highly placed investigator says there are ‘tie-ins’ between the spy ring and 9/11. But when asked for details, he flatly refuses to describe them, saying, ‘evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It’s classified information.'” When a government source is asked if the Israeli spies knew about the 9/11 attacks before they happened, he responds: “The principal question is ‘how could they have not known?'”
January 24, 2002: Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle later claims that on this day, Vice President Cheney calls him and urges that no 9/11 inquiry be made. Bush repeats the request on January 28, and Daschle is repeatedly pressured thereafter. Newsweek summarizes one of these conversations: “Bush administration officials might say they’re too busy running the war on terrorism to show up. Press the issue… and you risk being accused of interfering with the mission.”
February 6, 2002: CIA Director Tenet tells a Senate hearing that there was no 9/11 intelligence failure. When asked about the CIA record on 9/11, he says, “We are proud of that record.”
March 2002: Reuters, Le Monde, Salon and others report that many spies in the uncovered Israeli “art student” spy ring seemed to have been trailing some of the 9/11 hijackers. For instance, five Israeli spies are intercepted in the tiny retirement community of Hollywood, Florida, living at the address 4220 Sheridan Street, and four 9/11 hijackers are known to have lived in the same town at 3389 Sheridan Street. Salon claims Israeli spies appear to have been in close proximity to at least 10 of the 19 9/11 hijackers. However, a short Washington Post article completely denies the existence of any Israeli spy ring, and the New York Times has never mentioned the spy ring at all. By mid-March, Jane’s, the respected British intelligence and military analysis service, notes: “It is rather strange that the US media seems to be ignoring what may well be the most explosive story since the 11 September attacks – the alleged breakup of a major Israeli espionage operation in the USA.” Forward, the largest Jewish audience publication in the US, admits that there has been an Israeli spy ring in the US, saying “Israelis in the United States [were] spying on a common enemy, radical Islamic networks suspected of links to Middle East terrorism.”
April 19 , 2002: FBI Director Mueller states: “In our investigation, we have not uncovered a single piece of paper—either here in the United States or in the treasure trove of information that has turned up in Afghanistan and elsewhere—that mentioned any aspect of the September 11 plot.” He also claims that the attackers used “extraordinary secrecy” and “Investigators have found no computers, laptops, hard drives or other storage media that may have been used by the hijackers, who hid their communications by using hundreds of pay phones and cell phones, coupled with hard-to-trace prepaid calling cards.” Yet the Wall Street Journal previously reported, “A senior FBI official says investigators have obtained hundreds of e-mails in English and Arabic, reflecting discussions of the planned Sept. 11 hijackings,” USA Todayreported investigators have recovered a ”substantial” number of e-mails by the hijackers “coordinat[ing] their activities,” a letter by a hijacker discussing the plot has been found, and so on.
May 8, 2002: FBI Director Mueller: “There was nothing the agency could have done to anticipate and prevent the [9/11] attacks.”
May 15 , 2002: CBS reveals that President Bush had been warned about al-Qaeda domestic attacks in August 2001. Bush had repeatedly said that he had “no warning” of any kind. White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer had stated that while Bush had been warned of possible hijackings, “The president did not – not – receive information about the use of airplanes as missiles by suicide bombers.” The Guardian will state a few days later, “the memo left little doubt that the hijacked airliners were intended for use as missiles and that intended targets were to be inside the US … ‘Conspiracy’ begins to take over from ‘incompetence’ as a likely explanation for the failure to heed – and then inform the public about – warnings that might have averted the worst disaster in the nation’s history.”
May 16 , 2002: Vice President Cheney states: “my Democratic friends in Congress … need to be very cautious not to seek political advantage by making incendiary suggestions, as were made by some today, that the White House had advance information that would have prevented the tragic attacks of 9/11.” He calls such criticism “thoroughly irresponsible … in time of war” and states that any serious probe of 9/11 foreknowledge would be tantamount to giving “aid and comfort” to the enemy.
May 16 , 2002:National Security Advisor Rice states: “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile,” adding that “even in retrospect” there was “nothing” to suggest that. In contrast, former CIA Deputy Director John Gannon has stated that scenario has long been taken seriously by US intelligence: “If you ask anybody – could terrorists convert a plane into a missile? – nobody would have ruled that out.” Rice also states, “The overwhelming bulk of the evidence was that this was an attack that was likely to take place overseas.” Rice later concedes that “somebody did imagine it” but says she didn’t know about such intelligence until well after this conference.
May 16 , 2002: The major airlines claim they were never warned of a specific hijacking threat, and were not told to tighten security. For instance, an American Airlines spokesman states the airline ”received no specific information from the US government advising the carrier of a potential terrorist hijacking in the United States in the months prior to Sept. 11, 2001. American receives FAA security information bulletins periodically, but the bulletins were extremely general in nature and did not identify a specific threat or recommend any specific security enhancements.”
May 17 , 2002: CBS anchorman Dan Rather claims that he and other journalists haven’t been properly investigating since 9/11: “There was a time in South Africa that people would put flaming tires around people’s necks if they dissented. And in some ways the fear is that you will be necklaced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck. Now it is that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions.” Three months later, the executive vice-president and general manager of CNN International states: “Anyone who claims the US media didn’t censor itself is kidding you … And this isn’t just a CNN issue – every journalist who was in any way involved in 9/11 is partly responsible.”
May 23, 2002: President Bush says he is opposed to establishing a special, independent commission to probe how the government dealt with terror warnings before 9/11. In September 2002 he changes his stance in the face of overwhelming support for the idea, but in October he sabotages an agreement that Congress had reached to establish the commission. The legislation is then delayed until after the midterm elections in early November. After Republicans win control of the Senate, a much weaker commission is finally approved by Congress in mid-November. In contrast to the previous agreement, Bush now appoints the committee head, and Democrats cannot issue subpoenas without at least one consenting Republican.
May 30, 2002: Afghanistan’s interim leader, Hamid Karzai, Turkmenistan’s President Niyazov, and Pakistani President Musharraf meet in Islamabad and sign a memorandum of understanding on the trans-Afghanistan gas pipeline project. Karzai (who formerly worked for Unocal) calls Unocal the “lead company” in building the pipeline. The Los Angeles Times comments, “To some here, it looked like the fix was in for Unocal when President Bush named a former Unocal consultant, Zalmay Khalilzad, as his special envoy to Afghanistan late last year.” Since then, construction has yet to start, due to continuing violence between warlords along the pipeline route.
June 7, 2002: President Bush states, “Based on everything I’ve seen, I do not believe anyone could have prevented the horror of September the 11th.” Five days earlier, Newsweek reported that FBI agents had prepared a detailed chart showing how they could have uncovered the terrorist plot if the CIA been told them what it knew about the hijackers Almihdhar and Alhazmi sooner. One FBI official says, “There’s no question we could have tied all 19 hijackers together.”
July 23, 2002: The New York City government decides that the audio and written records of the Fire Department’s actions on 9/11 should never be released to the general public. Senior fire officials want to material released and say they were never told that their remarks would be kept confidential.
August 2, 2002: It is revealed that the FBI is questioning and investigating the members of the Senate and House intelligence committees about 9/11-related information leaks. Members of these committees have been investigating the FBI for its 9/11 failures. Congresspeople express “grave concern” for this historically unprecedented and possibly unconstitutional move. A law professor states, “Now the FBI can open dossiers on every member and staffer and develop full information on them. It creates a great chilling effect on those who would be critical of the FBI.” Senator John McCain says, “What you have here is an organization compiling dossiers on people who are investigating the same organization.” The FBI asks senators to take lie detector tests, and turn over phone records, appointment calendars and schedules. One senator says the FBI is “trying to put a damper on our activities and I think they will be successful.”
September 11, 2002: On the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, The New York Times writes, “One year later, the public knows less about the circumstances of 2,801 deaths at the foot of Manhattan in broad daylight than people in 1912 knew within weeks about the Titanic, which sank in the middle of an ocean in the dead of night.” A former police commissioner of Philadelphia, says: “You can hardly point to a cataclysmic event in our history, whether it was the sinking of the Titanic, the Pearl Harbor attack, the Kennedy assassination, when a blue-ribbon panel did not set out to establish the facts and, where appropriate, suggest reforms. That has not happened here.”
September 18-October 17, 2002: The Congressional joint committee 9/11 inquiry holds public hearings. The committee was formed in February 2002 but suffered months of delays. The first head of the inquiry was forced to resign after being caught trying to hire a CIA employee who had failed an agency polygraph test as an inquiry staffer. The inquiry is widely seen to be limited by political considerations, but the hearings lead to new interest in an independent commission. The Washington Post reports, “lawmakers from both parties … [protest] the Bush administration’s lack of cooperation in the congressional inquiry into Sept. 11 intelligence failures…” The committee’s director testifies that “the President’s knowledge of intelligence information relevant to this inquiry remains classified even when the substance of that intelligence information has been declassified.” She adds that “the American public has a compelling interest in this information and that public disclosure would not harm national security.”
October 17, 2002: The directors of the US’s three most famous intelligence agencies, the CIA, FBI and NSA, testify before a Congressional inquiry on 9/11. All three say no individual at their agencies has been punished or fired for any of missteps connected to 9/11. Senator Carl Levin says “People have to be held accountable.”
November 11, 2002: It is revealed that while the government didn’t ban box cutters, the airlines’ own rules did. It had been widely reported the hijackers used box cutters because they were legal. It now appears pepper spray was also banned, and like box cutters, should have been confiscated. There is evidence the hijackers used pepper spray as well. It has been reported that nine of the hijackers were given special security screenings on 9/11, and six of those had their bags checked for weapons.
The past is not dead; it is people who are sleeping. The current night and daymares that we are having arise out of murders lodged deep in our past that have continued into the present. No amount of feigned amnesia will erase the bloody truth of American history, the cheap grace we bestow upon ourselves. We have, as Harold Pinter said in his Nobel address, been feeding on “a vast tapestry of lies” that surrounds us, lies uttered by nihilistic leaders and their media mouthpieces for a very long time. We have, or should have, bad consciences for not acknowledging being active or silent accomplices in the suppression of truth and the vicious murdering of millions at home and abroad.
But, as Pinter said, “I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.”
No one is more emblematic of this noble effort than David Ray Griffin, who, in book after book since the attacks of 11 September 2001, has meticulously exposed the underside of the American empire and its evil masters. His persistence in trying to reach people and to warn them of the horrors that have resulted is extraordinary. Excluding his philosophical and theological works, this is his fifteenth book since 2004 on these grave issues of life and death and the future of the world.
In this masterful book, he provides a powerful historical argument that right from the start with the arrival of the first European settlers, this country, despite all the rhetoric about it having been divinely founded and guided, has been “more malign that benign, more demonic than divine.” He chronologically presents this history, supported by meticulous documentation, to prove his thesis. In his previous book, Bush and Cheney: How They Ruined America and the World, Griffin cataloged the evil actions that flowed from the inside job/false flag attacks of September 11, while in this one—a prequel—he offers a lesson in American history going back centuries, and he shows that one would be correct in calling the United States a “false flag empire.”
The attacks of 11 September 2001 are the false flag fulcrum upon which his two books pivot. Their importance cannot be overestimated, not just for their inherent cruelty that resulted in thousands of innocent American deaths, but since they became the justification for the United States’ ongoing murderous campaigns termed “the war on terror” that have brought death to millions of people around the world. An international array of expendable people. Terrifying as they were, and were meant to be, they have many precedents, although much of this history is hidden in the shadows. Griffin shines a bright light on them, with most of his analysis focused on the years 1850-2018.
As a theological and philosophical scholar, he is well aware of the great importance of society’s need for religious legitimation for its secular authority, a way to offer its people a shield against terror and life’s myriad fears through a protective myth that has been used successfully by the United States to terrorize others. He shows how the terms by which the U.S. has been legitimated as God’s “chosen nation” and Americans as God’s “chosen people” have changed over the years as secularization and pluralism have made inroads. The names have changed, but the meaning has not. God is on our side, and when that is so, the other side is cursed and can be killed by God’s people, who are always battling el diabalo.
He exemplifies this by opening with a quote from George Washington’s first Inaugural Address where Washington speaks of “the Invisible Hand” and “Providential agency” guiding the country, and by ending with Obama saying “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.” In between we hear Andrew Jackson say that “Providence has showered on this favored land blessings without number” and Henry Cabot Lodge in 1900 characterize America’s divine mission as “manifest destiny.” The American religion today is American Exceptionalism, an updated euphemism for the old-fashioned “God’s New Israel” or the “Redeemer Nation.”
At the core of this verbiage lies the delusion that the United States, as a blessed and good country, has a divine mission to spread “democracy” and “freedom” throughout the world, as Hilary Clinton declared during the 2016 presidential campaign when she said that “we are great because we are good,” and in 2004 when George W. Bush said, “Like generations before us,we have a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom.” Such sentiments could only be received with sardonic laughter by the countless victims made “free” by America’s violent leaders, now and then, as Griffin documents.
Having established the fact of America’s claim to divine status, he then walks the reader through various thinkers who have taken sides on the issue of the United States being benign or malign. This is all preliminary to the heart of the book, which is a history lesson documenting the malignancy at the core of the American trajectory.
“American imperialism is often said to have begun in 1898, when Cuba and the Philippines were the main prizes,” he begins. “What was new at this time, however, was only that America took control of countries beyond the North American continent.” The “divine right” to seize others’ lands and kill them started long before, and although no seas were crossed in the usual understanding of imperialism, the genocide of Native Americans long preceded 1898. So too did the “manifest destiny” that impelled war with Mexico and the seizure of its land and the expansion west to the Pacific. This period of empire building depended heavily on the “other great crime against humanity” that was the slave trade, wherein it is estimated that 10 million Africans died, in addition to the sick brutality of slavery itself. “No matter how brutal the methods, Americans were instruments of divine purposes,” writes Griffin. And, he correctly adds, it is not even true that America’s overseas imperialistic ventures only started in 1898, for in the 1850s Commodore Perry forced “the haughty Japanese” to open their ports to American commerce through gunboat diplomacy.
Then in 1898 the pace of overseas imperial expansion picked up dramatically with what has been called “The Spanish-American War” that resulted in the seizure of Cuba and the Philippines and the annexing of Hawaii. Griffin says these wars could more accurately be termed “the wars to take Spanish colonies.” His analysis of the brutality and arrogance of these actions makes the reader realize that My Lai and other more recent atrocities have a long pedigree that is part of an institutional structure, and while Filipinos and Cubans and so many others were being slaughtered, Griffin writes, “Anticipating Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s declaration that ‘we don’t do empire,’ [President] McKinley said that imperialism is ‘foreign to the temper and genius of this free and generous people.’”
Then as now, perhaps mad laughter is the only response to such unadulterated bullshit, as Griffin quotes Mark Twain saying that it would be easy creating a flag for the Philippines:
We can have just our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones.
That would have also worked for Colombia, Panama, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Nicaragua, and other countries subjugated under the ideology of the Monroe Doctrine; wherever freedom and national independence raised its ugly head, the United States was quick to intervene with its powerful anti-revolutionary military and its financial bullying. In the Far East the “Open Door” policy was used to loot China, Japan, and other countries.
But all this was just the beginning. Griffin shows how Woodrow Wilson, the quintessentially devious and treacherous liberal Democrat, who claimed he wanted to keep America out of WW I, did just the opposite to make sure the U.S. would come to dominate the foreign markets his capitalist masters demanded. Thus Griffin explores how Wilson conspired with Winston Churchill to use the sinking of the Lusitania as a casus belli and how the Treaty of Versailles’s harsh treatment of Germany set the stage for WW II.
He tells us how in the intervening years between the world wars the demonization of Russia and the new Soviet Union was started. This deprecation of Russia, which is roaring at full-throttle today, is a theme that recurs throughout The American Trajectory. Its importance cannot be overemphasized. Wilson called the Bolshevik government “a government by terror,” and in 1918 “sent thousands of troops into northern and eastern Russia, leaving them there until 1920.”
That the U. S. invaded Russia is a fact rarely mentioned and even barely known to Americans. Perhaps awareness of it and the century-long demonizing of the U.S.S.R./Russia would enlighten those who buy the current anti-Russia propaganda called “Russiagate.”
To match that “divine” act of imperial intervention abroad, Wilson fomented the Red Scare at home, which, as Griffin says, had lasting and incalculable importance because it created the American fear of radical thought and revolution that exists to this very day and serves as a justification for supporting brutal dictators around the world and crackdowns on freedom at home (as is happening today).
He gives us brief summaries of some dictators the U.S has supported, and reminds us of the saying of that other liberal Democrat, Franklin Roosevelt, who famously said of the brutal Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, that “he may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s our son-of-a-bitch.” And thus Somoza would terrorize his own people for 43 years. The same took place in Cuba, Chile, Iran, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, etc. The U.S. also supported Mussolini, did nothing to prevent Franco’s fascist toppling of the Spanish Republic, and supported the right-wing government of Chiang-Kai Shek in its efforts to dominate China.
It is a very dark and ugly history that confirms the demonic nature of American actions around the world.
Then Griffin explodes the many myths about the so-called “Good War”—WW II. He explains the lies told about the Japanese “surprise” attack on Pearl Harbor; how Roosevelt wished to get the U.S. into the war, both in the Pacific and in Europe; and how much American economic self-interest lay behind it. He critiques the myth that America selflessly wished to defend freedom loving people in their battles with brutal, fascist regimes. That, he tells us, is but a small part of the story:
This, however, is not an accurate picture of American policies during the Second World War. Many people were, to be sure, liberated from terrible tyrannies by the Allied victories. But the fact that these people benefited was an incidental outcome, not a motive of American policies. These policies, as [Andrew] Bacevich discovered, were based on ‘unflagging self-interest.’
Then there are the conventional and atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nothing could be more demonic, as Griffin shows. If these cold-blooded mass massacres of civilians and the lies told to justify them don’t convince a reader that there has long been something radically evil at the heart of American history, nothing will. Griffin shows how Truman and his advisers and top generals, including Dwight Eisenhower and Admiral William D. Leahy, Truman’s chief of staff, knew the dropping of the atomic bombs were unnecessary to end the war, but they did so anyway.
He reminds us of Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright’s response to the question whether she thought the deaths of more than 500,000 Iraqi children as a result of Clinton’s crippling economic sanctions were worth it: “But, yes, we think the price is worth it.” (Notice the “is,” the ongoing nature of these war crimes, as she spoke.) But this is the woman who also said, “We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall . . .”
Griffin devotes other chapters to the creation of the Cold War, American imperialism during the Cold War, Post-Cold War interventions, the Vietnam War, the drive for global dominance, and false flag operations, among other topics.
As for false flag operations, he says, “Indeed, the trajectory of the American Empire has relied so heavily on these types of attacks that one could describe it as a false flag empire.” In the false flag chapter and throughout the book, he discusses many of the false flags the U.S. has engaged in, including Operation Gladio, the U.S./NATO terrorist operation throughout Europe that Swiss historian Daniele Ganser has extensively documented, an operation meant to discredit communists and socialists. Such operations were directly connected to the OSS, the CIA and its director, Allen Dulles, his henchman James Jesus Angleton, and their Nazi accomplices, such as General Reinhard Gehlen. In one such attack in 1980 at the Bologna, Italy, railway station, these U.S. terrorists killed 85 people and wounded 20 others. As with the bombs dropped by Saudi Arabia today on Yemeni school children, the explosive used was made for the U.S. military. About these documented U.S. atrocities, Griffin says:
These revelations show the falsity of an assumption widely held by Americans. While recognizing that the US military sometimes does terrible things to their enemies, most Americans have assumed that US military leaders would not order the killing of innocent civilians in allied countries for political purposes. Operation Gladio showed this assumption to be false.
He is right, but I would add that the leaders behind this were civilian, as much as, or more than military.
In the case of “Operation Northwoods,” it was the Joint Chiefs of Staff who presented to President Kennedy this false flag proposal that would provide justification for a U.S. invasion of Cuba. It would have involved the killing of American citizens on American soil, bombings, plane hijacking, etc. President Kennedy considered such people and such plans insane, and he rejected it as such. His doing so tells us much, for many other presidents would have approved it. And again, how many Americans are aware of this depraved proposal that is documented and easily available? How many even want to contemplate it? For the need to remain in denial of the facts of history and believe in the essential goodness of America’s rulers is a very hard nut to crack. Griffin has written a dozen books about 11 September 2001, trying to do exactly that.
If one is willing to embrace historical facts, however, then this outstanding book will open one’s eyes to the long-standing demonic nature of the actions of America’s rulers. A reader cannot come away from its lucidly presented history unaffected, unless one lives in a self-imposed fantasy world. The record is clear, and Griffin lays it out in all its graphic horror. Which is not to say that the U.S. has not “done both good and bad things, so it could not sensibly be called purely divine or purely demonic.” Questions of purity are meant to obfuscate basic truths. And the question he asks in his subtitle—Divine or Demonic?—is really a rhetorical question, and when it comes to the “trajectory” of American history, the demonic wins hands down.
I would be remiss if I didn’t point out one place where Griffin fails the reader. In his long chapter on Vietnam, which is replete with excellent facts and analyses, he makes a crucial mistake, which is unusual for him. This mistake appears in a four page section on President Kennedy’s policies on Vietnam. In those pages, Griffin relies on Noam Chomsky’s terrible book—Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and US Political Culture (1993), a book wherein Chomsky shows no regard for evidence or facts—to paint Kennedy as being in accord with his advisers, the CIA, and the military regarding Vietnam. This is factually false. Griffin should have been more careful and have understood this. The truth is that Kennedy was besieged and surrounded by these demonic people, who were intent on isolating him, disregarding his instructions, and murdering him to achieve their goals in Vietnam. In the last year of his life, JFK had taken a radical turn toward peace-making, not only in Vietnam, but with the Soviet Union, Cuba, and around the globe. Such a turn was anathema to the war lovers. Thus he had to die. Contrary to Chomsky’s deceptions, motivated by his hatred of Kennedy and perhaps something more sinister (he also backs the Warren Commission, thinks JFK’s assassination was no big deal, and accepts the patently false official version of the attacks of 11 September 2001), Griffin should have emphatically asserted that Kennedy had issued NSAM 263 on October 11, 1963, calling for the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam, and that after he was assassinated a month later, Lyndon Johnson reversed that withdrawal order with NSAM 273. Chomsky notwithstanding, all the best scholarship and documentary evidence proves this. And for Griffin, a wonderful scholar, to write that with the change from Kennedy to Johnson that “this change of presidents would bring no basic change in policy” is so shockingly wrong that I imagine Griffin, a man passionate about truth, simply slipped up and got sloppy here. For nothing could be further from the truth.
Ironically, Griffin makes a masterful case for his thesis, while forgetting the one pivotal man, President John Kennedy, who sacrificed his life in an effort to change the trajectory of American history from its demonic course.
It is one mistake in an otherwise very important and excellent book that should be required reading for anyone who doubts the evil nature of this country’s continuing foreign policy. Those who are already convinced should also read it, for it provides a needed historical resource and impetus to help change the trajectory that is transporting the world toward nuclear oblivion, if continued.
If—a fantastic wish!—The American Trajectory: Divine or Demonic? were required reading in American schools and colleges, perhaps a new generation would arise to change our devils into angels, the arc of America’s future moral universe toward justice, and away from being the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, as it has been for so very long.
Edward Curtin is a sociologist and writer who teaches at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and has published widely.
Facebook has deleted all of my posts from July 2017 to last week because I am, apparently, a Russian Bot. For a while I could not add any new posts either, but we recently found a way around that, at least for now. To those of you tempted to say “So what?”, I would point out that over two thirds of visitors to my website arrive via my posting of the articles to Facebook and Twitter. Social media outlets like this blog, which offer an alternative to MSM propaganda, are hugely at the mercy of these corporate gatekeepers.
Facebook’s plunge into censorship is completely open and admitted, as is the fact it is operated for Facebook by the Atlantic Council – the extreme neo-con group part funded by NATO and whose board includes serial war criminal Henry Kissinger, Former CIA Heads Michael Hayden and Michael Morrell, and George Bush’s chief of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, among a whole list of horrors.
The staff are worse than the Board. Their lead expert on Russian bot detection is an obsessed nutter named Ben Nimmo, whose fragile grip on reality has been completely broken by his elevation to be the internet’s Witchfinder-General. Nimmo, grandly titled “Senior Fellow for Information Defense at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab”, is the go-to man for Establishment rubbishing of citizen journalists, and as with Joseph McCarthy or Matthew Clarke, one day society will sufficiently recover its balance for it to be generally acknowledged that this kind of witch-hunt nonsense was not just an aberration, but a manifestation of the evil it claimed to fight.
There is no Establishment cause Nimmo will not aid by labeling its opponents as Bots. This from the Herald newspaper two days ago, where Nimmo uncovers the secret web of Scottish Nationalist bots that dominate the internet, and had the temerity to question the stitch-up of Alex Salmond.
Nimmo’s proof? 2,000 people had used the hashtag #Dissolvetheunion on a total of 10,000 tweets in a week. That’s five tweets per person on average. In a week. Obviously a massive bot-plot, eh?
When Ben’s great expose for the Herald was met with widespread ridicule, he doubled down on it by producing his evidence – a list of the top ten bots he had uncovered in this research. Except that they are almost all, to my certain knowledge, not bots but people. But do not decry Ben’s fantastic forensic skills, for which NATO and the CIA fund the Atlantic Council. Ben’s number one suspect was definitely a bot. He had got the evil kingpin. He had seen through its identity despite its cunning disguise. That disguise included its name, IsthisAB0T, and its profile, where it called itself a bot for retweets on Independence. Thank goodness for Ben Nimmo, or nobody would ever have seen through that evil, presumably Kremlin-hatched, plan.
No wonder the Atlantic Council advertise Nimmo and his team as “Digital Sherlocks”
Nimmo’s track record is simply appalling. In this report for the Atlantic Council website, he falsely identified British pensioner @Ian56789 as a “Russian troll farm”, which led to Ian being named as such by the British government, and to perhaps the most surreal Sky News interview of all time. Perhaps still more remarkably, Nimmo searches for use of the phrase “cui bono?” in reference to the Skripal and fake Douma chemical weapons attacks. Nimmo characterises use of the phrase cui bono as evidence of pro-Assad and pro-Kremlin bots and trolls – he really does. Most people would think to consider cui bono indicates a smattering more commonsense than Nimmo himself displays.
It is at least obvious cui bono from Nimmo’s witchfinding – the capacious, NATO and CIA stuffed pockets of Ben Nimmo himself. That Facebook allows this utterly discredited neo-conservative charlatan the run of its censorship operations needs, given Facebook’s pivotal role in social media intercourse, to concern everybody. The freedom of the internet is under fundamental attack.
After the Crash 
