September
11: After Two Years,
Cover-up Begins To Unravel
By Bill Vann
World
Socialist Web
11 September 2003
Today
marks the second anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
After two years, little more has been revealed publicly about the circumstances
that led to the deaths of 3,000 innocent people than was known the day
after the planes struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. As
the result of a concerted attempt by the Bush administration to stonewall
any serious investigation, these events remain cloaked in mystery. A
myriad of unanswered questions persist about how the most powerful military-intelligence
apparatus in the world failed to either detect such a terrorist plot
or interfere with it once it was launched.
Yet, the traumatic
losses of September 11 have become the touchstone for all of the administrations
policies, invoked as the pretext for two warsand tens of thousands
of deathsin the space of 18 months. They have likewise been used
to justify sweeping attacks on basic democratic rights in the name of
a war on terrorism, as well as the destruction of jobs and
living standards, as ever greater resources are shifted from social
needs to the financing of militarism.
Most recently, President
Bush made the September 11 attacks the principal theme in his speech
Sunday calling for $87 billion to finance open-ended occupations of
Iraq and Afghanistan and to defend his administration against charges
that a policy of illegal military aggression has led to political catastrophe.
Bush repeated the
fantastic suggestion that the war against Iraq was motivated by a nonexistent
link between the Saddam Hussein regime and the September 11 terrorists.
This lie has come to the fore as the original claim that the invasion
was required to eliminate weapons of mass destruction has been universally
discredited.
There is a growing
sense that the policies of the present administrationinstalled
by fraud with the purpose of instituting far-reaching changes designed
to benefit the wealthiest layers of US societyare coming disastrously
unstuck. Disquiet within ruling circles has given rise to increasingly
sharp attacks on the Bush administration both from its political rivals
and its erstwhile allies.
In Britain, where
the Blair governments support for the Iraq war and its lies concerning
alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have provoked mass opposition,
the widening divisions within the establishment have found their expression
in an open attack on the Bush administrations official version
of the September 11 events from a leading member of the ruling Labour
Party.
Michael Meacher,
who until last June was a member of Blairs cabinet and the most
veteran minister within the Labour government, published an article
in the British Guardian that presented a highly disturbing body of evidence
indicating that significant sections within the US state apparatus anticipated
some form of terrorist attack, yet failed to take action to stop it
[see: British official charges US stood down on 9/11].
The material strongly
suggests that, while they may not have anticipated carnage on the scale
of the World Trade Center, these elements welcomed an act of terrorism
that they believed would provide justification for setting into motion
a far-reaching and long-planned agenda of global military aggression.
Meacher raised the question of whether US security operations could
have been deliberately stood down on September 11. If so why,
and on whose authority?
Meanwhile, in the
US itself the Bush administration has conducted a systematic cover-up
of information concerning the September 11 attacks. It routinely invokes
national security to prevent the dissemination to the American
people of information that is obviously already in the hands of those
whom it is supposedly combating in its global war on terrorism.
Censoring the Saudi connection
What the administration
chose to censor from the report issued in July by the joint congressional
committee investigation into intelligence failures preceding the September
11 attacks sheds some light on the nature and motives of this governments
cover-up.
A full 28-page chapter
of the report was reduced to page after page of blank lines, classified
on the pretext of national security. The governments
aim was to suppress information concerning the complicity of the Saudi
government in the suicide attacks. Fifteen of the nineteen people identified
as the hijackers were Saudi citizens.
Following the release
of the report in July, Sen. Bob Graham, ranking Democrat and former
chairman on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee which led the investigation,
indicated that the censored material dealt with active assistance that
Saudi officials rendered to the hijackers and evidence that they were
acting with the knowledge of the ruling monarchy.
High officials
in this government, who I assume were not just rogue officials acting
on their own, made substantial contributions to the support and well-being
of two of these terrorists and facilitated their ability to plan, practice
and execute the tragedy of September 11, Graham said in a television
interview.
Graham was referring
to the extraordinary case of Nawaf al-Hazami and Khalid al-Mihdhar,
two Saudis who were identified as hijackers of American Airlines Flight
77, which was crashed into the Pentagon. Both men were known Al Qaeda
operatives and tracked by US intelligence since 1999. They flew under
their own names to the US after attending a meeting of the Islamist
terrorist group in Malaysia, where they were under CIA surveillance.
The CIA knew they had entered the country, yet nothing was done to inform
any law enforcement or immigration officials. When one of the mens
visas expired, the State Department quickly renewed it.
According to the
congressional report, once in Los Angeles, they were met by Omar al-Bayoumi,
who is described as someone who had access to seemingly unlimited
funding from Saudi Arabia and was believed by the FBI to be
an intelligence officer for Saudi Arabia or another foreign power.
Bayoumi went to
collect the pair directly from a closed-door meeting in the Saudi consulate
and then took them to San Diego. There they moved in with a man who
was the FBIs chief informant in the city on Islamist groups. Thus,
these two known terrorist operatives were in contact with the CIA, Saudi
intelligence and the FBI in the months leading up to the attacks.
The joint congressional
committee was denied permission to interview the FBI informant.
Further indications
of the connections of both the Saudi ruling family and the Pakistani
military and intelligence apparatus with the September 11 hijackers
have surfaced with the publication of the book Why America Slept,
by Gerald Posner. That Posners thesis is taken seriously within
ruling circles was made clear by a two-page review published in the
September 8 issue of Time magazine.
What Zubaydah told the CIA
Posner cited details
from the US interrogationusing torture and drugsof Abu Zubaydah,
a senior aide to Osama bin Laden, who was captured in Pakistan in March
2002.
Basing himself on
two government sources familiar with the interrogation, Posner reports
that Zubaydah provided his captors with the Rosetta stone of 9/11...
the details of what [he] claimed was his work for senior
Saudi and Pakistani officials.
He reports that
CIA agents, in an attempt to intimidate Zubaydah, took the captured
Al Qaeda operative to two Arab interrogators who posed as Saudi intelligence
agents. When confronted with what he thought were Saudi police his
reaction was not fear, but utter relief, Posner writes. He immediately
gave them phone numbers for a senior member of the Saudi royal familyPrince
Ahmed bin Salmman Abdul Azizand told them he would tell
you what to do.
Zubaydah described
a series of meetings dating back from the early 1990s between himself
and bin Laden, on the one hand; and, on the other, senior Saudi and
Pakistani intelligence officials, including Prince Turki al-Faisl bin
Abul Aziz, the long-time Saudi intelligence chief.
The ties of both
agencies to bin Laden go back to the early 1980s and the US-backed war
against the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan, when bin Laden helped
organize Arab volunteers. It was then that the CIA also established
ties to his Islamic fundamentalist movement, using the Pakistani intelligence
agency, the ISI, as its conduit for US arms and money. It has never
been revealed when the CIAs ties to Al Qaeda were severed.
The Al Qaeda operative
went on to claim that both Saudi and Pakistani intelligence officials
had been warned in advance of September 11 and knew that attack
was scheduled for American soil on that day, though they were
not informed of its targets.
Evidence of the
Pakistani ties to the plot surfaced immediately after September 11,
when it was revealed that Gen. Mahmud Ahmad, chief of the ISI, had ordered
an electronic transfer of $100,000 to Mohammed Atta, the supposed leader
of the hijackers. He resigned in the wake of the attacks, shortly after
the Times of India reported the transfer.
The Bush administration,
writes Posner, once aware of the Saudi, Pakistani connection, decided
that creating an international incident and straining relations
with those regional allies when they were critical to the war in Afghanistan
and the buildup for possible war with Iraq, was out of the question.
Therefore, the administration
sought to conceal the real source of the attacks, while Vice President
Richard Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others pressured
intelligence agencies to manufacture evidence that would pin the blame
on Saddam Hussein. They were determined to turn September 11 into a
pretext for a long-planned war aimed at seizing Iraqs oilfields
and transforming by military force the US strategic position in the
Middle East and internationally.
The CIA blocked
the publication of the material implicating Saudi officials on the grounds
of national security, insisting that it would disrupt relations with
a strategic US ally. This proscription serves, however, to protect the
Bush administration, which has from September 11 on worked to conceal
the Saudi connection.
That this began
in the immediate aftermath of the attacks has been underscored by an
article published this month in Vanity Fair detailing the extraordinary
measures taken to spirit some two dozen members of the bin Laden family
out of the country. The article quotes former administration adviser
Richard Clarke, who acknowledges that the White House organized this
rescue effort, allowing private planes to fly the bin Ladens even as
all other nonmilitary and non-emergency aviation was grounded.
Under conditions
in which Arab and Muslim immigrants were being rounded up and indefinitely
detained on the flimsiest of evidence, the bin Ladens were not even
seriously questioned before being placed on a charter jet for Saudi
Arabia. The article indicates that FBI officials believed some of those
sent out of the country may have had knowledge about terrorist operations.
The suppression of Bushs briefing
The second area
of the congressional investigation subjected to censorship concerned
the well-known question, What did the president know, and when
did he know it? An appendix to the congressional intelligence
report, entitled Access Limitations Encountered by the Joint Inquiry,
states that the White House and the CIA refused to release the contents
of the presidents daily briefing, which could have shown how much
specific evidence Bush received about a threatened attack in the months
leading up to September 11. CIA personnel were barred even from discussing
the way in which the briefs are prepared. The CIA cited national security
and White House executive privilege.
Inadvertently,
the report stated, the committee got hold of some contents of an Aug.
6, 2001 briefing. This included FBI judgments about patterns of
activity consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types
of attacks; as well as information acquired in May 2001 that indicated
a group of Bin Ladin [sic] supporters was planning attacks in the Untied
States with explosives.
The same report
includes a footnote citing statements by National Security Adviser Condoleezza
Rice claiming that this same briefing consisted merely of an analytical
report dealing with an historical overview of bin Ladens
movement. It was not a warning, she falsely stated in a
May 2002 press briefing. The joint committee inquiry was barred from
questioning Rice.
The final report
includes 15 pages detailing areas in which access to information was
either denied, limited or delayed by the administration. It notes that
in most cases government employees brought to testify were pre-briefed
on what they could and could not say, and were accompanied by lawyers
from their agencies, who frequently instructed them not to answer questions.
Leaders of the independent
commission on 9/11 headed by New Jerseys former Republican Governor
Thomas Kean issued an extraordinary protest in July charging the Bush
administration with similar obstructionism. Kean accused the administration
of intimidating witnesses and blocking access to key documents. Bush
had opposed the formation of the panel, claiming it would be a distraction
from the war on terrorism.
This systematic
government stonewalling of all inquiries into September 11 has been
largely ignored by the US media. Yet it is the clearest indication that
the Bush administration fears that any unfettered investigation into
the events of that day would pose a mortal political threat. What is
it so determined to hide?
The obvious question
raised is whether elements within the US state apparatus were informed
in advance that some form of terrorist action was planned by Al Qaeda
and decided not necessarily knowing the massive scale of the planned
destruction to let it proceed, with the aim of creating a pretext
for launching already planned wars.
To this day there
has been no truthful disclosure concerning the governments knowledge
of and response to the September 11 attacks. No one has been held accountable
for what would on the surface appear to be the most catastrophic intelligence
failure in US history.
The revelations
that have surfaced through the tightly restricted official inquiries
and in the pages of a press that is cowed and corrupted only begins
to shed light on what are undeniably criminal actions by the administration.
It is becoming increasingly
clear that the authors of the September 11 attacks were intimately linked
to both the Saudi and Pakistani intelligence agencies, both of which
have long shared close ties with the CIA, as did Osama bin Laden himself
during the period of the anti-Soviet campaign in Afghanistan.
Yet the Bush White
House deliberately concealed these connections, taking active measures
to protect not only the Saudi regime, but also the bin Laden family,
with which both George W. Bush and his father enjoyed lucrative business
ties. It then launched a false propaganda campaign aimed at convincing
the American people that Iraq was to blame for the attack and war was
necessary. The result is an occupation in which US soldiers and Iraqis
are dying daily.
The struggle against
war and occupation as well as the defense of democratic rights demands
the organization of a genuinely independent inquiry into the events
of September 11. Such an exposure can only be mounted as part of the
independent political mobilization of the working class, in the United
States and internationally.