Dig Within

As the Boston Marathon bombing continues to dominate the news, several characteristic responses to terrorism are becoming obvious once again.  To begin with, reports of terrorist acts in America have become like the throwing of a mental switch that stops people from thinking.  Emotion is high and critical thought is rare in the midst of the initial media frenzy.  Propaganda has made it easy for people to fear and hate while forgetting facts about the government’s role in terrorism and its tendency to benefit from terrorist acts.  Additionally, the Boston incident has shown again how official accounts of terrorist events tend to change dramatically as time passes.

Immediately after the attacks, the entire city of Boston, an icon of independence and freedom since the American Revolution, was locked down in a frantic search for one scared teenage boy.  The suddenly “infantilized” public responded by accepting an unprecedented police-state occupation of the city.[1]  The mainstream media did not question any of these obviously anti-American actions and reported only the sensationalist viewpoint of the government “protectors.”[2]

The Boston story began to change quickly, however.  For example, just days after the bombing, the mother of the two suspects made some startling remarks about her son’s relationship to the FBI.

“He (Tamerlan) was ‘controlled’ by the FBI, like, for three to five years,” she said, “They knew what my son was doing.  How could this happen?…They were controlling every step of him, and they are telling today that this is a terrorist attack,” she added.[3]

Although surprising, these claims agree with facts known about FBI-sponsored terrorist acts that have played out in the last decade.    In 2011, journalist Glenn Greenwald reported that the cases in which the FBI had supposedly stopped terrorist plots were actually instances of the FBI itself plotting the terrorist acts and entrapping the young suspects.

“None of these cases entail the FBI’s learning of an actual plot and then infiltrating it to stop it.  They all involve the FBI’s purposely seeking out Muslims (typically young and impressionable ones) whom they think harbor animosity toward the U.S. and who therefore can be induced to launch an attack despite having never taken even a single step toward doing so before the FBI targeted them.  Each time the FBI announces it has disrupted its own plot, press coverage is predictably hysterical (new Homegrown Terrorist caught!), fear levels predictably rise, and new security measures are often implemented in response.”[4]

The 1993 WTC bombing was also a case of suspicious FBI activities gone wrong.  As the New York Times reported, it was clear that the FBI was somehow involved in the WTC plot.

“Law-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center, and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, an informer said after the blast.  The informer was to have helped the plotters build the bomb and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by an F.B.I. supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Emad A. Salem, should be used, the informer said.”[5]

In the years leading up to 9/11, the FBI failed miserably at preventing terrorism when preventing terrorism was the FBI’s primary goal.  Moreover, the actions of FBI management suggest that it was facilitating and covering-up acts of terrorism.  When 9/11 happened, some agents accused their own agency of being responsible.[6]

Therefore it is not surprising that the mother of the Boston bombers, who declared that the Bureau had been controlling her son, was labeled as a terrorist suspect just a week after her accusations against the FBI.[7]  Supposedly, the CIA had put her name in its terrorism database months before her sons’ actions in Boston.  This was followed up more recently by vague claims from “U.S. officials” that the mother was recorded by Russian authorities speaking to her son about “the idea of jihad.”[8]  Although these late claims appear to be a matter of the government declaring an unwanted witness to be untrustworthy, the growing myth of the Boston bombing raises a number of interesting questions.

• What could the mother have possibly gained from offering up her two sons as fodder for the terrorism-industrial complex?
• Why didn’t the FBI and CIA immediately report that the mother was a terrorism suspect, instead of waiting two weeks and saying something only after the mother had publicly made accusations against the FBI?
• Why haven’t the mother’s claims with regard to the FBI controlling her sons been investigated by independent reporters in the U.S. mainstream media?
• How does this case relate to reports that the “underwear bomber” was working for the CIA?[9]
• Will the media follow-up on the recent revelations that the Boston suspects were related to a top CIA official?[10]

The U.S. government has fostered and benefited from a fear of terrorism since 9/11.  Realizing this, citizens would do well to remember how quickly their freedoms can be lost in the uproar over even a single, relatively low impact terrorist incident.  The Boston Marathon bombing has reminded us that freedom comes at the price of eternal vigilance.  Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have the ability to control one’s emotional responses and temper the reactions of others.  When the next attack occurs, and as the official account of this incident evolves, people should watch for similarities with the accounts of other terrorist events and question everything they are being told.

The pervasive news surrounding the confirmation hearing of John Brennan, Obama’s nominee for CIA director, is paralleled by another, related story that has been largely ignored by the U.S. media.  That is the story of the man called Abu Zubaydah, whose alleged torture testimony, obtained by the CIA while Brennan was the head of the agency’s Terrorist Threat Center, built the foundation for the official account of 9/11.  This week I spoke to Lee Hamilton, former vice-chairman of the 9/11 Commission, about the serious problems that the government’s new stance on Zubaydah creates for the 9/11 Commission Report.

As stated in my last article on the subject, Zubaydah is at the center of an unraveling of the official account of the 9/11 attacks.[1]  His extensive torture at the hands of the CIA during Brennan’s tenure, which included at least 83 water-boarding sessions, hanging the man naked from the ceiling, slamming him against a concrete wall, and other atrocious experimental techniques, was said to produce valuable evidence about al Qaeda.  However, the government now claims that Zubaydah was never a member or associate of al Qaeda and therefore he could not have known any of the information that the 9/11 Commission attributed to him.

From the start of our conversation, Hamilton told me that he was having trouble remembering Zubaydah.  That was odd considering that an article he and Thomas Kean wrote for the New York Times in 2008, describing how the CIA obstructed the 9/11 investigation, referred several times to Zubaydah specifically.[2]  The article claimed that “Beginning in June 2003, we requested all reports of intelligence information on these broad topics that had been gleaned from the interrogations of 118 named individuals, including both Abu Zubaydah and Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, two senior Qaeda operatives.”  Kean and Hamilton further wrote that, “in October 2003, we sent another wave of questions to the C.I.A.’s general counsel. One set posed dozens of specific questions about the reports, including those about Abu Zubaydah.”

These requests from the 9/11 Commission should have resulted in the release of some revealing records.  That is, while John Brennan was leading the CIA’s Terrorist Threat Center, the agency videotaped the torture of Zubaydah and others, and proceeded to intentionally withhold that information from the 9/11 Commission.  Brennan and CIA director George Tenet were almost certainly involved in the decisions regarding that obstruction.  The two men had worked closely together for years.  As CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia, Brennan often communicated directly with Tenet, avoiding the usual chain of command.  At the time, as an apparent favor to the Saudis, CIA analysts were discouraged from questioning Saudi relationship to Arab extremists.[3]  It seems that Brennan and Tenet had a tendency to protect some terrorist suspects and cover-up the agency’s treatment of others.

It was revealed that when Brennan was the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, in 2005, the CIA had destroyed the torture tapes, most of which featured Zubaydah.[4]  Describing the CIA’s obstruction, Hamilton wrote — “The agency did not disclose that any interrogations had ever been recorded or that it had held any further relevant information, in any form. Not satisfied with this response, we decided that we needed to question the detainees directly, including Abu Zubaydah and a few other key captives.”[5]

Therefore Hamilton remembered very clearly, in 2008, that he had asked the CIA at least twice, in a potentially contentious manner, for information specifically about Zubaydah.  Having not received that information, Hamilton asked the CIA for the opportunity to question Zubaydah directly.  The CIA not only denied these requests, it denied the Commission access to the interrogators who compelled the alleged testimony.  Despite such memorable denials, however, Hamilton cannot seem to recall anything about Zubaydah at all other than his feeling that Zubaydah did not play a significant part in the 9/11 Commission Report.  He told me “I’m a little fuzzy on this but the information that we had from him was not critical to our report.”[6]

Reasons for Hamilton’s new, unconvincing amnesia on the subject might include that the U.S. government recently backed off its claims about this “detainee,” who has been imprisoned by the U.S. for eleven years without charges.  The retractions about Zubaydah create a tension with the 9/11 Commission Report that reveals an obvious need to revise the report.

For example, in response to the habeas corpus petition filed by Zubaydah’s defense team, the government stated that it does not contend that Zubaydah had “any direct role in or advance knowledge of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.”[7]  The same response states that the government no longer claims that Zubaydah was ever “a member of al-Qaida or otherwise formally identified with al-Qaida.”  But footnote 35 to Chapter 5 of the 9/11 Commission Report states the exact opposite.  According to this footnote, “Abu Zubaydah, who worked closely with the al Qaeda leadership, has stated that KSM originally presented Bin Ladin with a scaled-down version of the 9/11 plan, and that Bin Ladin urged KSM to expand the operation with the comment, ‘Why do you use an axe when you can use a bulldozer?’”[8]  That’s pretty extensive and intimate knowledge for someone who was never associated with al Qaeda.

In our talk, I reminded Hamilton that Zubaydah was mentioned over 50 times in the 9/11 Commission Report, and that his alleged torture testimony, along with that of KSM and Ramsi bin Alshibh (both of whom Zubaydah identified as being involved in the attacks), produced the foundation of the official account of 9/11.  Creating the background for the official myth about al Qaeda, Hamilton’s report called Zubaydah an “Al Qaeda associate,” a “long-time ally of Bin Ladin,” a “Bin Ladin lieutenant,” and an “al Qaeda lieutenant.”[9]  Despite these important references, Hamilton told me that he just couldn’t remember Zubaydah, saying “my recollection is really quite vague with regard to him.”

To refresh his memory further, I reminded Hamilton that nine separate dates of Zubaydah’s interrogation were referenced in his report.  After these reminders, Hamilton said that he still had to “stretch his imagination to remember” him.  It seems that if Hamilton had read my article on Zubaydah, which I had sent to him over a week before he agreed to meet and eleven days before we talked, his memory would have returned easily.  Instead, Hamilton’s inability to stretch his imagination on the subject was reminiscent of the “failure of imagination” excuse used by the 9/11 Commission when it proposed an overall explanation for the events of 9/11.

Because the government no longer contends that Zubaydah was in any way associated with al Qaeda and now says that he had no knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, I asked Hamilton if he had an opinion on how Zubaydah could have known so much about al Qaeda as stated in his report.  Bluntly stating “No,” Hamilton suggested that he was not concerned with these contradictions.

Our discussion went into the recent conviction of John Kiriakou, the CIA’s Chief of Counterterrorist Operations in Pakistan after 9/11, who was originally said to be responsible for the capture and initial interrogations of Zubaydah.  Interestingly, Kiriakou’s story has evolved much like that of the official account concerning Zubaydah.  According to people who would know, with regard to Zubaydah “Kiriakou now rather off handedly admits that he basically made it all up.”[10]

Kiriakou has since been heralded as a whistleblower.  And he recently said that, for embracing torture, John Brennan is a terrible choice to lead the CIA.  Kiriakou claimed that he has known Brennan since 1990 and has worked for him twice.  While in the CIA, Kiriakou noted, Brennan “would have had to have been intimately involved in—not necessarily in carrying out the torture techniques, but in the policy, the torture policy.”[11]  It is true that this would seem to make Brennan an especially poor choice but today it is clear that those who engaged in torture, and those who used alleged torture testimony to create false reports, will not be held accountable.

This week I also spoke to Brent Mickum, Zubaydah’s attorney.  Unlike Hamilton, Mickum was very straightforward and convincing.  The information he possesses suggests that Zubaydah was a victim of false claims from the beginning.  Mickum believes there may be alternative reasons why his client, who does not support the murder of innocents or suicide attacks and who repeatedly refused to join al Qaeda, was chosen to become the first, experimental, torture victim.  Mickum expects Zubaydah to be charged sometime this year but cannot say what the charges will be.  The evidence no longer supports claims that Zubaydah conspired with al Qaeda in any way.  Additionally, he cannot be charged as an enemy combatant through the 2006 Military Commissions Act considering that he was captured and tortured years before that law was enacted.

With this in mind, I asked Lee Hamilton if Abu Zubaydah should be allowed to tell his own story now that his illegal detention and torture have proven to be based on falsehoods.  Hamilton said that he would not take a stand on the subject one way or another.  This refusal is yet another reason to suspect that Lee Hamilton will never come clean on the 9/11 Commission’s use of unreliable torture testimony.

Although Hamilton has repeatedly stated publicly that he believes torture is immoral and that the U.S. must take a strong stance against it, his actions and his work speak otherwise.  The glaring problem he faces now is that it is the 9/11 Commission Report that stands as the definitive argument supporting the use of torture.  After all, if not for the alleged torture testimony of Abu Zubaydah and the people he reportedly identified (KSM and Ramsi bin Alshibh in particular) Hamilton’s report would have little evidentiary basis.  Consequently, as the U.S. government strains to come up with charges to apply to Zubaydah after disclaiming his connections to al Qaeda, the Commission’s report remains at risk of being further challenged by whatever charges are ultimately filed.

In a 2004 U.S. Senate hearing, Senator Mark Dayton remarked that “this country and its citizens were completely undefended” for “109 minutes” on 9/11.[1]  Dayton went on to clarify that officials within the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) had covered up the facts about the lack of air defenses by lying to the 9/11 Commission, to Congress and to the American people. And they were not held accountable.

One man was most responsible for both the air defense failures and the lying that covered it up.  U.S. Air Force General Ralph Edward Eberhart had taken over command of NORAD from General Richard Myers in February 2000.  The position included leadership of all air defense operations in North America and, also, the U.S. Space Command.  Therefore, on 9/11, Eberhart was the man most responsible for failure to intercept the four hijacked aircraft over a period of nearly two hours.

NORAD is the joint U.S.-Canadian military organization responsible for monitoring and defending the airspace over North America.  Long-standing operating procedures at NORAD, for dealing with airliners that have gone off-course or been hijacked, were not followed on 9/11.  Each of the four flights involved in the 9/11 attacks should have been intercepted when they lost radio contact, deviated from their course, or turned off their transponders.[2]

The procedures for interception were automatic and required no special orders to implement. Through these procedures, interceptor jets had been scrambled 129 times in the year 2000 and 67 times in the year prior to June 2001.  A 1994 government report stated — “Overall, during the past four years, NORAD’s alert fighters took off to intercept aircraft (referred to as scrambled) 1,518 times, or an average of 15 times per site per year. Of these incidents, the number of suspected drug smuggling aircraft averaged … less than 7 percent of all of the alert sites’ total activity. The remaining activity generally involved visually inspecting unidentified aircraft and assisting aircraft in distress.”[3]

On 9/11, the NORAD interception system failed completely and we have been given multiple, conflicting explanations for why that happened.  Considering that there is strong evidence for an alternative hypothesis of insider involvement in 9/11, it is reasonable to assume that an intentional compromising of the U.S. air defenses might have occurred that day.  Adding to this suspicion is the fact that guilt tends to be reflected in false testimony.  And as Senator Dayton said, NORAD officials “lied to the American people, they lied to Congress and they lied to your 9/11 Commission.”[4]

Exactly which NORAD statements were lies and which were not is a matter that is still not clear to this day.  This is partly because the explanations and testimony that are now said to have been false were far more damning to NORAD than the final account, which exonerates NORAD entirely.  Why would NORAD leaders want to lie so as to make their performance look worse?

In order to better determine the facts, investigators should begin with at least three areas of inquiry: 1) the times at which NORAD was notified (or made aware) of the hijackings, 2) the times at which NORAD responded in the form of scrambling jets to intercept, and 3) the instructions given to the interceptor pilots in terms of speed and direction.

NORAD’s ever-changing story

The military’s explanations began with a short description of the response to the hijackings.  Two days after the attacks, General Richard Myers gave this account to the Senate Armed Services Committee, in an official hearing for his confirmation as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS).  He said that no fighter jets were scrambled to intercept any of the hijacked 9/11 flights until after the Pentagon was hit.[5]

Although Myers was not in command of NORAD on 9/11, he should have known two days later if normal procedures had been followed.  As Acting CJCS on 9/11, and as Vice Chairman otherwise, his role was to ensure the president and secretary of defense were informed of critical military matters.

A second story was given a week after the attacks, when NORAD provided a partial timeline of the notifications it had received from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the responses that followed.  General Eberhart reiterated this timeline in testimony to the U.S. Senate a few weeks later and for over two years it stood as the official account.[6]  This timeline said that NORAD had received notification about three of the hijacked planes with plenty of time left to ensure interception and had scrambled jets from multiple bases as the attacks proceeded.

The new timeline showed that NORAD was notified about the hijacking of Flight 175 at 8:43 am, a full twenty minutes before it impacted the south tower of the World Trade Center (WTC).  Moreover, F-15 interceptor jets from Otis Air Force Base (AFB) were said to be airborne by 8:52, having been scrambled in response to the first hijacking.  This allowed twice the time needed for the jets to reach New York City before Flight 175 crashed.

Eberhart added that NORAD was notified about the hijacked Flight 77 coming into Washington at 9:24 am, fourteen minutes before it impacted the Pentagon.  He told the Senate Armed Services Committee (repeatedly) that this was a “documented notification.”[7]  If true, interceptor jets from Andrews AFB, only ten miles from the Pentagon, could have easily reached the errant airliner given this lead time.

Although the military might now use the excuse that Andrews was not technically under the command of NORAD, the 9/11 Commissions says Eberhart’s statement was simply not true.  In fact, both Commission counsel Dan Marcus and Team leader John Farmer were later very blunt about this being a false statement.[8]  Therefore, it is clear that Eberhart should be brought up on a charge of contempt of Congress.  It is illegal to make any materially false statement or representation in testimony to the Unites States Congress.[9]  And that was not the only false statement that Eberhart apparently made to the senators.

In May 2003, Eberhart’s subordinates General Arnold and Colonel William Alan Scott presented a slightly revised version of NORAD’s timeline.  They contradicted the timeline for Flight 175, saying that NORAD was not notified of the hijacking until 9:05, three minutes after the aircraft crashed into the south tower.  This was despite the fact that when asked by a U.S. Senator about “the second hijacked plane somewhere up there” (Flight 175), Eberhart had previously said “Yes, sir. During that time, we were notified.”[10]

Arnold and Scott also revealed for the first time that NORAD was notified about the hijacking of Flight 93 at 9:16 am.  This was 47 minutes before that flight allegedly crashed in Pennsylvania, at 10:03 am.  Obviously, interceptor jets could have easily reached and escorted Flight 93 given this revised timeline.

The fourth and final story from NORAD was the official account given by the 9/11 Commission Report, now supported by NORAD.  In this explanation NORAD received “no advance notice” on any of the last three hijacked airliners.[11]  Instead of 20 minutes of notice on Flight 175, and 14 minutes notice on Flight 77, and 47 minutes notice on Flight 93, we were told that NORAD was not notified about any of them until it was too late.  The military was off the hook entirely.

All the evidence for notifications and response, which had constituted the official account for nearly three years, had been thrown out the window.  In place of these documents and testimonies, new explanations were given for why the scrambled aircraft never reached the hijacked airliners. These included unbelievable claims of communication failures and misdirection of the scrambled jets, as well as the introduction of a never-before mentioned “Phantom 11” scenario.[12]

The 9/11 Commission Report account was supported two years later by an article in Vanity Fair. [13]  Allegedly, the author of the article was given privileged access to audio tapes that were not available to the public.  Although the newly revealed “NORAD tapes” ostensibly bolstered the Commission’s new timeline, credible explanations were never given for throwing out the years of testimony and evidence that supported entirely different timelines.

The changing stories given by NORAD led to placing more blame for the failed air defenses on the FAA.  After NORAD’s 2003 timeline was issued, however, the FAA publicly stated that NORAD had in fact been informed throughout all the developments that morning.  FAA official Laura Brown wrote a memo to the 9/11 Commission in which she stated that FAA shared “real-time information” with NORAD about “loss of communication with aircraft, loss of transponder signals, unauthorized changes in course, and other actions being taken by all the flights of interest, including Flight 77.”[14]

FAA leadership certainly did fail that morning and there are shocking questions to be answered in that regard.[15]  Not the least of these questions is why evidence that might have helped was destroyed by an FAA official after the attacks.[16]  But the multiple stories given by the military indicate that NORAD was at least as culpable as the FAA in the inexplicable lack of air defense. And the facts indicate that NORAD was in the loop earlier than its 2003 timeline suggested, meaning that there is no reasonable explanation for why NORAD-controlled jets did not intercept most, if not all, of the planes hijacked on 9/11.

When questioned by the 9/11 Commission, Eberhart confirmed that if NORAD had been in the loop as the FAA said it was, his people would have been able “to shoot down all three aircraft — all four aircraft.”[17]

Reasons to suspect Eberhart

Investigation of NORAD and its commander Eberhart is warranted, apart from the evidence for lying to Congress.  Additional reasons to focus on Eberhart include the following nine facts.

1. As Commander in Chief of the U.S. Space Command (CINCSPACE), Eberhart was responsible for setting Infocon levels.[18]  Infocon is an alert system that defends against attacks on communications networks within the Department of Defense (DOD).  Just 12 hours before the 9/11 attacks, an order was given to lower Infocon to its least protective level.[19]  Setting Infocon at a lower level made it easier for people to hack or compromise the DOD computer networks, including the air defense system.[20]
   
2. As both CINCSPACE and Commander in Chief of NORAD (CINCNORAD), Eberhart was in charge of many of the highly coincidental military exercises (i.e. war games) that were going on that morning.
3. Eberhart did nothing effective in response to the 9/11 hijackings, despite being present in the military’s teleconference as those hijackings were in progress. He did not order the scrambling of jets, he did not order an escort for Air Force One, and he did not provide leadership.
4. Eberhart also failed to implement military control over U.S. airspace until well after the attacks were over.  Although it was his prerogative to do so, Eberhart did not implement SCATANA, the process of assuming military control over the U.S. airspace, until two hours after the second plane hit the WTC and one hour after the last plane had been destroyed.  Eberhart later said that he had waited until it finally became “obvious” to him that a coordinated terrorist attack was underway.[21]  He told the 9/11 Commission that, although people were telling him to take control of the airspace earlier, he didn’t feel that the military could “provide traffic deconfliction like the FAA has.”[22]
   
5. In the middle of the 9/11 attacks, Eberhart decided to drive between Peterson Air Force Base and NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center (CMOC).  Normally this 12-mile drive takes 30 minutes but it took Eberhart between 45 minutes and an hour to make the drive that morning.  No reason was ever given (or requested) for why Eberhart did not fly directly to CMOC from Peterson, making use of the Cheyenne Mountain helicopter port.  Eberhart made conflicting statements about his reasons for making this trip, saying that he stayed for a while at Peterson because he “did not want to lose communication.”[23]  Nevertheless, Eberhart lost communication at the most important time by leaving at approximately 9:30 am (EST), when two of the hijacked planes were still flying wildly off-course.  His reason for doing this was that things had “quieted down.”[24]
6. While on his way to the CMOC he was in the U.S. military’s air threat call via cell phone.  In this call, at 9:49 am, Eberhart “directed all air sovereignty aircraft to battle stations, fully armed.”[25]  Although this might sound like decisive action, the command apparently grounded all interceptor jets that had not yet taken off due to the fact that “battle stations” is a grounded status.  Other military leaders later gave orders to actually scramble the jets.  And despite his involvement, Eberhart portrayed himself as being out of the loop entirely.  For example, he told the 9/11 Commission that he had “no knowledge of the circumstances that initiated the scramble” of fighter jets from Langley AFB and that he had just “recently” been made aware that it happened (in March 2004).[26]
   
7. Eberhart failed to explain the multiple changes in the account of 9/11 that were given by NORAD.  In fact, he seemed to tell his staff to change the NORAD timeline as much as was needed in order to prevent further questioning about the military’s performance.[27]
   
8. For whatever reasons, Eberhart also gave out false information about the NORAD response to others.  General Richard Myers, acting CJCS that morning, said that Eberhart told him there were “several hijack codes in the system.”  Yet none of the four planes had squawked the hijack code on 9/11 and therefore it is not clear how such codes could have been in the system.[28]
   
9. NORAD failed to cooperate with the 9/11 Commission.  Even as late as March 2004, the Commission was struggling to get basic documents about 9/11 performance from Eberhart’s organization.[29]  In some cases, such as with the after-action reports that follow all military actions, the Commission never received the NORAD documents.

Of all these concerns, it is the military exercises that NORAD was conducting on 9/11 that have drawn the most attention from concerned citizens.  When questioned about them, Eberhart claimed that the impact of the 9/11 exercises on NORAD’s response was that they “at most cost us 30 seconds.”[30]  That was clearly not the case.

NORAD’s coincidental exercises

After several government officials had made incorrect statements about the military’s preparation for hijackings and the use of planes as weapons, General Myers responded to a pointed question on the subject.  He reported that NORAD had practiced “five exercise hijack events,” between November 1999 and October 2000, all of which “included a suicide crash into a high value target.”[31]  Records since released show that NORAD practiced approximately 28 hijack exercise events in the 20 months leading up to 9/11.  At least six of these were focused on hijackings located entirely within the Unites States, which puts to rest the excuse that NORAD was only looking for threats coming from outside of U.S. borders.[32]

One of these exercises, Vigilant Guardian in October 2000, practiced interception of an airliner hijacked for a suicide attack against the 39-story United Nations building in New York City, just a few blocks from the WTC.[33]  Another air defense exercise, called Amalgam Virgo and practiced just three months before 9/11, was accompanied by a planning document that had a picture of Osama bin Laden on the cover.[34]

Many of the military exercises or war games that were occurring on the day of 9/11 were run under the control of CINCNORAD Eberhart.  In fact, Eberhart was in command of the war games that had the greatest impact on the nation’s air defenses.  Of course, he had help.

NORAD is divided into several large areas that cover the U.S. and Canada, one of which is the region of the continental U.S. called CONR, headed on 9/11 by General Larry Arnold.  Within CONR there are three sectors. The 9/11 attacks took place in the airspace monitored by CONR’s Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS). Personnel at NEADS were therefore primarily responsible for trying to coordinate the NORAD response to the hijackings.  CMOC was also an important facility in the response that should have been effective but was not.

At NEADS, Colonel Robert Marr was in charge.  Marr had been in the U.S. Air Force for over 20 years until 1994, at which time he spent a few months in Saudi Arabia as “director of combat operations.”[35]  He then left the military to work two years for a private company called Phoenix Air.  Coincidentally, Phoenix Air provided aircraft for the Amalgam Virgo exercises.[36]  There is also reason to believe that Phoenix Air is associated with Huffman Aviation where the alleged 9/11 hijackers had trained.[37]  After his stint at Phoenix Air, Marr returned to the military as the exercise coordinator at NEADS and, by 9/11, had risen to the position of commander of the facility.

There were several NORAD exercises planned for 9/11:  Vigilant Guardian and Vigilant Overview, both command post exercises (CPX), and Amalgam Virgo and Amalgam Warrior, which were field training (or FTX) exercises.  All four of these exercises were CJCS approved and sponsored by CINCNORAD Eberhart.[38]  Apollo Guardian was also running on 9/11.  This was an exercise conducted by the U.S. Space Command, meaning Eberhart was in control of that too.

FTX exercises are sometimes what are referred to as SPADEs, meaning “a track is taken out of radar coverage and then re-introduced as an unknown track.”[39]  This exercise feature is interesting given that Flight 77 was lost on radar for a period of time on 9/11 and then reappeared in a way that has not yet been explained.[40]

Amalgam Virgo 02 was a modification of Twin Star, a live-fly joint FAA/NORAD exercise conducted in 1995.  This was described by NORAD exercise design manager Ken Merchant and Major Paul Goddard, the Canadian who was NORAD exercise chief.[41]  According to Goddard, the Twin Star plan was to have interceptor jets scramble and escort a hijacked airliner.  During that exercise, “the fighters never got off on the appropriate heading, and it took them forever to catch up.”[42]

It is interesting to consider that Amalgam Virgo 02, which was said to be only in the planning stages, might actually have been in play on 9/11.  One reason to consider this is that, on 9/11, the fighters “never got off on the appropriate heading, and it took them forever to catch up.”  Another reason is that 9/11 Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste showed considerable interest in Amalgam Virgo 02, as did the 9/11 Commission staff in its request for documents.[43]  According to Ben-Veniste, this was a case in which “NORAD had already in the works plans to simulate in an exercise a simultaneous hijacking of two planes in the United States.”[44]  The plan for Amalgam Virgo 02 was therefore similar to the 9/11 attacks, with multiple, simultaneous hijackings.

Another large-scale exercise being conducted on 9/11 was Global Guardian, a joint nuclear war simulation run by the U.S. Strategic Command (Stratcom) in conjunction with NORAD.  This was essentially a practice for Armageddon that involved live nuclear bombs and at least three airborne command and control airliners called E-4Bs.[45]  The E-4B that was seen circling the White House during the 9/11 attacks might have been part of this exercise.[46]

The 9/11 Commission did not mention most of these exercises in its report.  To the contrary, the report mentioned only Vigilant Guardian and then only one time in a deceptively stated footnote that said “On 9/11, NORAD was scheduled to conduct a military exercise, Vigilant Guardian, which postulated a bomber attack from the Soviet Union.”[47]  This statement is false in several ways, not the least of which is that NORAD was scheduled to conduct at least five exercises on 9/11.  And Vigilant Guardian was not simply an exercise involving one bomber from the former Soviet Union.

Vigilant Guardian (VG) had been in play for several days as of 9/11.  On September 9, it included a scenario in which terrorists hijacked an airliner and planned to attack New York City.  The exercise presented a number of other scenarios based around airliner hijackings and in one of these, the fictitious terrorists threatened to “Rain Terror from the Skies.”[48]

According to the VG planning documents, the 9/11 exercise was to be conducted “sim over live,” meaning the simulated hijackings were to be inserted into the live air control system.  This was repeated in the instructions – “Ensure all tracks of interest (sim or live) are input on the live chart.”[49]  Furthermore, the VG plan was that “All expansions will be Real World.”  Although frequently misunderstood, the term “Real World” does not refer to an actual hijacking, it refers to the use of real aircraft in live-fly exercises.[50]

Due to these confusing circumstances, NEADS staff confused the actual hijackings on 9/11 with the exercises.   As researcher Matthew Everett explained — “What is remarkable… is that at a time when it should have been obvious to them that the U.S. was in the middle of a major terrorist attack, these key personnel [at NEADS] were uncertain whether what was happening was real or simulated.”[51]  The confusion caused much more than a “30 second” problem as Eberhart suggested, because NEADS personnel thought the exercises were continuing well after the attacks.

On 9/11, VG was scheduled to include a simulated hijacking at 9:40 am, within an hour of when Flight 11 struck the WTC.  When they first learned that Flight 11 was hijacked, NEADS staff noted that the “exercise” appeared to be starting an hour early that morning.  The evidence indicates that everyone at NEADS, including Colonel Marr, thought the actual hijackings were exercises.  They even joked about it.[52]  That might have been due to the VG plan stating that the NEADS building where Colonel Marr and company were located was a planned “exercise play area” and everyone there, knowingly or not, was “subject to exercise play.”[53]

NEADS radar scopes were displaying simulated information at least until the time of the Pentagon attack.  The same problem was going on at CMOC, another exercise play area, with radar screens showing false tracks as late as 10:12 am.  In fact, personnel at CMOC called NEADs in an attempt to stop the exercise inputs.[54]  Because those inputs did not stop, it appeared that someone wanted the NEADS and CMOC radar scopes to continue showing false information until after the four planes had been destroyed.

Ken Merchant added that the National Military Command Center (NMCC), located at the Pentagon, regularly participated in NORAD exercises by interjecting emergency action messages (EAMs).[55]  On 9/11 the performance of the NMCC, which plays a critical role in establishing the military chain of command and communicating orders, was remarkably poor.  Officers there lacked any sense of urgency and were completely ineffective with regard to communications.[56]

The disruptive effect of the ongoing NORAD exercises that morning continued until after all the hijacked planes had crashed.  One military newspaper said VG continued until 30 minutes after attacks.[57]  Global Guardian was “formally terminated” at 10:44 am but certain actions taken after that time, including that CMOC blast doors were closed (a needless action in terms of hijacked airliners), suggested that the exercise continued.[58]

Investigating Eberhart

Investigation of Ralph Eberhart and his subordinates would almost certainly reveal more of what the public needs to know. Whether Eberhart or others were part of a conspiracy to attack the United States is not the only reason.  The main purpose would be to understand how such an inexplicable failure to follow the long-standing and most critical procedures of the U.S. defense system could be followed by a string of lies about that inexplicable failure.

Eberhart was among the liars and he was in charge of NORAD at the time.  Was he lying to make himself and his organization look bad, as the 9/11 Commission suggests?  Or is he lying now, along with the 9/11 Commission, in order to remove NORAD’s responsibility and eliminate questioning about 9/11?

A year after 9/11, Eberhart was rewarded for his performance by being placed in charge of the new NORTHCOM organization. He has more recently been praised and honored for his great work on 9/11.  Called a “9/11 hero” despite having been a disastrous failure on that day, he was honored by having the new NORTHCOM headquarters at Peterson AFB named after him.[59]

There is an intangible benefit to consider as well.  Like a number of people who should be investigated for 9/11, Eberhart was a veteran of the only war in which the United States was defeated.  He began his military career as a forward air controller stationed out of Pleiku Air Base in South Vietnam.

Coincidentally, Benedict Sliney, who was in charge of FAA operations on 9/11, was an air traffic controller stationed in Pleiku at about the same time.  Fighting in related operations was Michael Canavan, the FAA’s missing hijack coordinator on 9/11, who was in the 5^th Special Forces Group (SFG).  Also in the 5^th SFG were Brian Michael Jenkins, who as Deputy Chairman of Kroll designed the WTC security systems, and CJCS Hugh Shelton, who was yet another high-level leader missing on 9/11.  Shelton’s temporary replacement that morning, Richard Myers, was a combat pilot in Vietnam.

Along with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, who were high-level leaders in the Nixon administration at the time, all these men were undoubtedly devastated by the defeat in Vietnam.  Cheney and Rumsfeld experienced the only other significant defeat of their careers when President Ford lost the 1976 election a few years later.  Other people who played critical roles on 9/11 and also worked under the Ford Administration included L. Paul Bremer, Frank Carlucci, Rudy Giuliani, and DOD employees Richard Clarke, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Armitage.

The defeats in Vietnam and the 1976 presidential election made their mark on these men.  Years later, the attacks of 9/11 brought all of them a late chance for redemption and victory.  And it made them all heroes.

Eberhart benefited from the 9/11 attacks in more tangible ways as well.  He continued on as head of NORAD and NORTHCOM through 2004.  After that he went on to become the chairman for more than half a dozen stock or bond equity funds, and a board director for a similar number of companies profiting from increased military expenditures, oil and gas services, and “Homeland Security.”[60]

The bottom line is that NORAD officials working for Ralph Eberhart covered up the facts about the lack of air defense on 9/11 by lying to the American people and by failure to cooperate with the 9/11 investigations.  For those reasons alone, Eberhart’s performance that day and the related statements should be thoroughly investigated.  Considering the nine facts presented above about Eberhart’s activities on 9/11, and that Eberhart appears to have violated U.S. law by lying to Congress, that investigation should be performed with the utmost assertiveness including formal charges and the use of subpoenas.

In the summer of 2001, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent Robert Wright, a counterterrorism expert from the Chicago office, made some startling claims about the Bureau in a written statement outlining the difficulties he had doing his job.  Three months before 9/11, he wrote: “The FBI has proven for the past decade it cannot identify and prevent acts of terrorism against the United States and its citizens at home and abroad.  Even worse, there is virtually no effort on the part of the FBI’s International Terrorism Unit to neutralize known and suspected terrorists residing within the United States.”[1]

Revelations since 9/11 have confirmed Wright’s claims.  FBI management did little or nothing to stop terrorism in the decade before 9/11 and, in some cases, appeared to have supported terrorists.  This is more disturbing considering that the power of the FBI over terrorism investigations was supreme.  In 1998, the FBI’s strategic plan stated that terrorist activities fell “almost exclusively within the jurisdiction of the FBI” and that “the FBI has no higher priority than to combat terrorism.”[2]

A number of people are suspect in these failures, including the leaders of the FBI’s counterterrorism programs.  But at the time of Wright’s written complaint, which was not shared with the public until May 2002, the man most responsible was Louis Freeh, Director of the FBI from 1993 to 2001.

Agent Wright was not FBI leadership’s only detractor, and not the only one to criticize Freeh.  The public advocacy law firm Judicial Watch, which prosecutes government abuse and corruption, rejoiced at the news of Freeh’s May 2001 resignation.[3]  Judicial Watch pointed to a “legacy of corruption” at the FBI under Freeh, listing the espionage scandal at Los Alamos National Laboratories, as well as “Filegate, Waco, the Ruby Ridge cover-up, the Olympic bombing frame-up of Richard Jewell, [and] falsification of evidence concerning the Oklahoma City bombing.”[4]

Judicial Watch said that Director Freeh believed he was above the law.  The group went on to say that Freeh was “a man so corrupt he destroyed the office he led, and a man so cowardly he refuses to face the music for the illegalities he has allegedly committed.”[5]  To this was added a claim that the FBI under Freeh was being directed by sinister yet unknown forces.  ”In case after case throughout the 1990′s, the FBI seems to have tailored its investigative efforts to fit somebody’s pre-arranged script. The question is, who wrote that script — and why?”

Freeh became FBI Director on July 19, 1993, just five months after the first WTC bombing, three months after the Waco siege, and one day before the alleged suicide of Hillary Clinton’s former Rose Law Firm associate, deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster.  Freeh’s predecessor was William Sessions.

Prior to his appointment by President Clinton, Freeh was a federal judge.  He had been selected for that position by President George H.W. Bush in 1991.  Before that, Freeh had been an Assistant District Attorney for the Southern District of New York and an FBI field agent.

Freeh was involved with U.S. counter-terrorism efforts for many years prior to his appointment as FBI Director in 1993.  As an FBI agent he worked for the New York Field Office, which led the FBI’s counterterrorism effort.  It was later the lead field office for Bin Laden investigations and was the first to establish a Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) of state and federal law enforcement and intelligence personnel.  Freeh worked there for seven years until he was promoted to Assistant U.S. Attorney in 1981.  Throughout the 1980s, Freeh worked with or for U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani, who was mayor of New York City on 9/11.

Although Clinton was a Democrat, after his appointment as FBI Director Freeh immediately began forming alliances with Republicans in Congress. This apparently caused difficulty between the FBI and Clinton’s White House.  Freeh also developed a secret relationship with his former supporter, former President George H. W. Bush. He used that relationship to communicate with the Saudi royal family without Clinton’s knowledge.[6]

Ignoring or facilitating domestic terrorism

Just five months before Freeh’s appointment as FBI Director, the World Trade Center (WTC) was bombed in an attack that killed six people and wounded a thousand others.  It was blamed on a Pakistani-Kuwaiti by the name of Ramzi Yousef, along with about half a dozen others.  However, as the New York Times reported, it was clear that the FBI was somehow involved as well.

“Law-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center, and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, an informer said after the blast.

The informer was to have helped the plotters build the bomb and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by an F.B.I. supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Emad A. Salem, should be used, the informer said.”[7]

The 1993 WTC bombing was a terrorist operation that had been infiltrated by the FBI but the role that the FBI played in trying to prevent that operation, or allow it to go forward, has never been revealed.  What has been revealed is that forensic data was falsified and “conclusions were altered to help the government’s case.”[8]  These facts were revealed by Frederick Whitehurst, the chemist and supervisory special agent in charge of the FBI’s crime lab who became a whistleblower.  The altered conclusions that Whitehurst described were made under the leadership of Louis Freeh.

A similar case occurred in April 1995, when the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City (OKC) was bombed, killing 168 people including 19 children.  Investigators have since learned that the FBI played a role in that bombing as well.  Reasons that the OKC bombing was suspicious include the fact that there were secondary explosives found in the building that were not reported as part of the official account.  And as with the events of 9/11, the FBI immediately confiscated, and refused to release, security videos that would have revealed what actually happened.[9]

Freeh’s colleague and personal friend, Larry Potts, was the FBI supervisor who was responsible for the tragedies at Ruby Ridge in 1992, and Waco in 1993.  Potts was then given responsibility for investigating the Oklahoma City bombing.[10]  Later it was claimed by one of the convicted conspirators that lead bomber Timothy McVeigh was actually acting under the direction of Potts.[11]  As an apparent reward for Potts’ performance, in May 1995 Freeh promoted him to be his number two man as Deputy Director of the FBI.  Two months later, Freeh removed Potts from that position due to public outrage at the appointment.

On the FBI links to the OKC bombing, author Peter Dale Scott wrote — “One such case of a penetrated operation “gone wrong” in 1993 might be attributed to confusion, bureaucratic incompetence, or the problems of determining when sufficient evidence had been gathered to justify arrests. A repeated catastrophe two years later raises the question whether the lethal outcome was not intended.”[12].

The result of the OKC bombing in governmental terms was the passage of a new anti–terrorism law in April 1996.  This was a bill that would be mirrored by the USA Patriot Act six years later, and it was described as representing an assault on civil liberties.  The Houston Chronicle called the bill a “frightening” and “grievous” attack on domestic freedoms. But Louis Freeh supported it.

Because many Congressional representatives opposed the bill, it was passed only after having been watered down.  In Freeh’s words, it had been “stripped… of just about every meaningful provision.”[13]  Freeh’s call for this legislation to be more restrictive of civil liberties must be considered with the fact that his agency was accused of facilitating the event that precipitated the legislation.

One of the obstacles often cited as a root cause for the FBI not doing its anti-terrorism job effectively was “the Wall.”  This was a set of procedures that restricted the flow of information between law enforcement officers pursuing criminal investigations and officers pursuing intelligence information via the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).  The procedures, set out in a 1995 memo from deputy attorney general (and future 9/11 Commissioner) Jamie Gorelick, were seemingly intended to prevent the loss of evidence, due to technicalities, that might be obtained via a FISA warrant.[14]  Because such losses were never actually experienced, later claims about “the Wall” appear to be weak excuses to explain why information was not shared or actions were not taken.

In July 1996, TWA Flight 800 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean just after taking off from JFK Airport in New York, killing all 230 people on board.  Freeh later claimed that “No one knew what brought it down.”[15]  Curiously, the FBI took over the investigation despite the fact that the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) had priority over the investigation as established by law.  FBI agents then blocked attempts by the NTSB to interview witnesses.[16]

One month after the explosion, chemists at the FBI crime laboratory in Washington found traces of PETN, an explosive component of bombs and surface-to-air missiles, in the wreckage.[17]  Despite this, in November 1997, the FBI closed its investigation and announced that “No evidence has been found which would indicate that a criminal act was the cause of the tragedy of TWA flight 800.”[18]

This reversal of findings was led by Freeh and Jamie Gorelick.  After meeting with Freeh and Gorelick, James Kallstrom, the agent in charge of the New York office where the TWA 800 investigation was being handled, produced several unlikely explanations for the detection of the PETN.  Although none of these hypotheses was probable, the FBI was able to convince the media to change the story.[19]

Louis Freeh was leading the FBI during the investigation into the 1993 WTC bombing, at the time of the OKC bombing, and at the time of the crash of TWA Flight 800.  All of these events suggest the facilitation, or cover-up, of terrorist acts by the FBI.  However, these were not the only indications that Louis Freeh was leading an agency that facilitated terrorism.

Ignoring or facilitating “Islamic” terrorism

Before leaving his position in the summer of 2001, Freeh was responsible for overseeing more than a dozen failures related to “Islamic” terrorism and the alleged 9/11 hijackers.  Here are the first nine.

1. Between 1989 and 1998, Ali Mohamed was an FBI informant. He was also a U.S. Army Special Forces sergeant and al Qaeda’s primary trainer.[20]  According to U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, Mohamed “trained most of al Qaeda’s top leadership – including Bin Laden and Zawahiri – and most of al Qaeda’s top trainers. He gave some training to persons who would later carry out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.”[21]  Mohamed had been an FBI informant, since at least 1992, and was previously a CIA “contract agent.”  In a move indicative of U.S. oversight, he transitioned directly from the U.S. Special Forces to fighting and training the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.[22]  When he was arrested in 1998, Mohamed was allowed to plea bargain and, to this day, he has never been brought to trial.
2. In early 1995, Freeh was behind the cancelation of a raid on a suspected terrorist-financing organization.  Recent legislation had enabled plans for the raid and prosecution of The Holy Land Foundation in Arlington, Texas.  But Freeh stopped the raid using the dubious excuse that it would alienate Arabs in the United States.[23]  Holy Land was finally raided just after 9/11 and, years later, it was convicted of providing material support to a terrorist organization.[24]
   
3. In May 1995, FBI agents wrote a memo about what they had learned in their interrogation of Abdul Hakim Murad, a Kuwaiti who allegedly helped bomb the WTC in 1993.  Murad told the FBI about another plan to hijack multiple airliners in Asia and crash them into buildings in the U.S., including the WTC.  Inexplicably, the FBI memo omitted all of the details the agents had learned about this plot, called Operation Bojinka.[25]  In 1996, Murad was convicted of crimes related to Bojinka yet, as author Peter Lance wrote, the FBI seemed to “go out of its way to avoid even a hint of the plot that was ultimately carried out on 9/11.”[26]
   
4. Gregory Scarpa Jr was an organized crime figure who, when imprisoned for an unrelated crime in 1996, was located in a cell between Ramzi Yousef and Abdul Hakim Murad.  Working undercover for the FBI, Scarpa was able to gain significant information about an active al Qaeda cell in New York City, and a “treasure trove of al Qaeda plans.”  After working closely with Scarpa to gain the intelligence, Freeh and his subordinates ended up calling the whole thing a “hoax” and buried the information. [27]
5. On May 15, 1998, an FBI pilot sent his supervisor in the Oklahoma City FBI office a memo, warning that he had observed “large numbers of Middle Eastern males receiving flight training at Oklahoma airports in recent months.”  The memo went on to suggest that these people were planning terrorist activities.  It was sent to the Bureau’s Weapons of Mass Destruction unit but no action was ever taken.[28]
   
6. In September 1999, FBI agents showed up at Airman Flight School in Norman, OK, to investigate the school’s training of Ihab Ali Nawawi. A suspect in the 1998 embassy bombings who was supposedly the personal pilot of Osama bin Laden, Nawawi had been arrested in Orlando four months before.[29]  He has been in U.S. custody ever since but has never been brought to trial.  Despite the investigation of Nawawi and the 1998 warning from an OKC FBI pilot, the FBI apparently never thought to keep a closer eye on Airman Flight School.  Zacarias Moussaoui and several alleged 9/11 hijackers trained or were seen at the school in 2000 and 2001.
7. In October 1999, Hani El-Sayegh, a suspect in the 1996 Khobar Towers Bombing, was deported from a prison in Atlanta to Saudi Arabia.  This was the result of an agreement between Freeh and Prince Naif, Saudi Arabia’s interior minister. After his deportation, El-Sayegh was reportedly tortured as FBI agents watched and submitted questions to his Saudi interrogators. David Vine from the Washington Post remarked — “Such practices are sharply at odds with Freeh’s oft-stated message about the FBI’s need to respect human dignity and the tenets of democracy while fighting crime.”[30]  Another problem with this incident was that the U.S. had control over a suspect in the 1996 terrorist murder of 19 U.S. servicemen and yet, instead of bringing that suspect to trial, they sent him back to Saudi Arabia. A reporter from Time magazine expressed the problem this way: “Run that one by again: The United States doesn’t want to try a man suspected of a bomb attack that killed Americans—and they’re sending him home?!”[31]  It is presumed that El-Sayegh was ultimately executed by the Saudis.[32]
   
8. In April 2000, a Pakistani from England named Niaz Khan told the FBI that he was recruited by al Qaeda, trained in Pakistan to hijack planes and sent to the U.S. for a terror mission, as were several pilots.  Khan said that he told the FBI, about a year before 9/11, that al Qaeda planned to hijack airliners in the United States.[33]  The FBI confirmed that Khan passed two polygraphs. Yet FBI headquarters supposedly didn‘t believe Khan and sent him home to London.
9. When two of the alleged 9/11 hijackers, Khalid Al-Mihdhar and Nawaf Al-Hazmi, came to the U.S. in January 2000, they immediately met with Omar Al-Bayoumi, a suspected Saudi government spy and an employee of a Saudi aviation company.  Al-Bayoumi, who had been the subject of an FBI investigation in 1998 and 1999, became a very good friend to the two alleged hijackers, setting them up in an apartment and paying their rent.[34]  Al-Mihdhar and Al-Hazmi then moved in with a long-time FBI asset, Abdussattar Shaikh, who had been working closely with the Bureau on terrorism cases since 1994.  Apparently the FBI was not able to make a timely connection between its suspect Al-Bayoumi or its informant Shaikh and the two alleged 9/11 hijackers they supported for two years prior to 9/11.  In 2003, the FBI gave Shaikh $100,000 and closed his contract.[35]
   

From these nine incidents, we know that FBI management under Freeh was not working to prevent “Islamic” terrorism in the years before 9/11.  These examples also suggest that the FBI was suppressing and ignoring information about terrorism, perhaps for the purpose of protecting or co-opting the related terrorist networks.  As for al Qaeda, author Lawrence Wright wrote that, in the late 1990s, “Director Freeh repeatedly stressed in White House meetings that al Qaeda posed no domestic threat. Bin Laden didn’t even make the FBI’s most wanted list until June 1999,” nearly a year after the embassy bombings.[36]

Robert Hanssen, a veteran FBI counterintelligence agent, was arrested for espionage in February 2001.[37]  Freeh claimed the CIA and FBI worked very well together to catch Hanssen.  Apparently there was no difficulty, of the type later cited by the 9/11 Commission, that prevented collaboration between the two agencies.

It was claimed that Hanssen, while betraying his country for financial gain, sold a special software program called PROMIS to the Russians.  William Hamilton, the president of Inslaw, the company that manufactured PROMIS, said that the Russians then sold the program to Osama bin Laden and that it might have played a part in facilitating the 9/11 attacks.[38]  This claim was also reported by The Washington Times and it was said that the software would have given Bin Laden the ability to monitor US efforts to track him down and also the ability to monitor electronic-banking transactions, enabling money-laundering operations.[39]

PROMIS had a history going back over two decades.  In the 1980s, Oliver North of Iran-Contra fame had used the software to create lists of national security threats in conjunction with the secretive Continuity of Government (COG) program.  In an interesting coincidence, before his death British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that “Al Qaeda” was not really a terrorist group but a database of international Mujahideen and arms smugglers used by the CIA and Saudis.[40]

The Justice Department oversight committee on the use of PROMIS included Rudy Giuliani and, therefore presumably, Louis Freeh.  The lawyer for Inslaw, in its legal dealings with the Justice Department, was Roderick M. Hills, who would shortly thereafter be Frank Carlucci’s boss at Sears World Trade.

Investigator Michael Ruppert and his colleagues have proposed that software programs evolving from PROMIS were used on 9/11 to disable the U.S. air defenses.  This hypothesis involves Mitre Corporation and its contractor PTech, which were known to be operating at the Pentagon on projects that affected the operability of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) systems.[41]  It is not clear how a database program might have evolved into an executable aviation control program, but there are other reasons to consider PTech.

After 9/11, the FBI did not report known links between PTech and its Saudi investor Yassin al Qadi to the U.S. Customs Department investigation into terrorist financing.  This concealment was despite PTech having contracts with many U.S. agencies controlling sensitive information, including the FBI, and Al-Qadi being declared a terrorist financier.  It is also known that PTech director Yaqub Mirza had contacts at high levels within the FBI.[42]

Working for the Bush Administration

The month before Hanssen’s arrest, George W. Bush was inaugurated as President. The only cabinet-level figure to be retained from the outgoing Clinton administration was CIA Director George Tenet, who was said to be a long-time friend of George H. W. Bush. But Freeh stayed on as well until his unexpected resignation in May that year.  Freeh did not give specific reasons for leaving at the time and he remained in the position until June 25.

Having been FBI Director for eight years, Freeh had put most of the FBI’s leadership in place.  This included his deputy as of 1999, Thomas Pickard, who would go on to be acting director of the FBI from June to September 2001.  It also included Dale Watson, head of the FBI’s counterterrorism program as of 1999, and the people in his organization.  Watson had worked with Freeh in the New York FBI office years before and had worked on the investigations into the U.S. embassy bombings and the bombing of the USS Cole.  Between FBI assignments, in 1996 and 1997, Watson had been the Deputy Chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center.

Working for Watson in the FBI’s counterterrorism division was Michel Rolince, the head of the International Terrorism Operations Section (ITOS).  Under Rolince were the heads of the Usama Bin laden Unit (UBLU) and the Radical Fundamentalism Unit (RFU).

Three major FBI failures relating to “Islamic” terrorism occurred during the early months of 2001.

1. The first was on March 7, 2001 when, during trial proceedings for the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa, FBI agent Stephen Gaudin read aloud in court a phone number that had been used by the alleged al Qaeda plotters to plan and execute the embassy attacks.[43]  This was the phone number of the “Yemen Hub,” which doubled as the home phone of Ahmed Al-Hada, the father-in-law of alleged 9/11 hijacker Khalid Al-Mihdhar.  According to U.S. officials, the same phone was purportedly used for planning the USS Cole bombing and, later, the 9/11 attacks.  The phone number was also published in the British weekly the Observer, just five weeks before 9/11.  As author Kevin Fenton wrote: “Any of the Observer’s readers could have called the number and asked for a message to be forwarded to Osama bin Laden.”[44]  This widely reported FBI gaffe should have alerted al Qaeda to U.S. knowledge of its secret Yemen operations center while also ensuring that anyone listening would know the exact al Qaeda phone number being monitored by U.S. intelligence. Despite this major tip-off, al Qaeda continued to use the phone to plan the 9/11 attacks, until “only weeks before 9/11.”[45]  Why did the Bureau not work to intercept the calls made in the months and weeks before 9/11 and use them to help stop the attacks?
2. The FBI had Mohamed Atta and one of his colleagues under surveillance in early 2001, according to an FBI informant.  The informant later said he was a “million percent positive” that the 9/11 attacks could have been stopped if the FBI had gone after Atta at the time.  Instead, FBI handlers steered the informant away from Atta.[46]
   
3. Several FBI agents, including Dina Corsi, Margaret Gillespie, Doug Miller and Mark Rossini, were involved in a concerted attempt to hide information about Al-Mihdhar and Al-Hazmi from other intelligence officers who almost certainly would have captured the suspects.  These acts of inexplicable secrecy included not sharing cables on the subject, not sharing photographs of the suspects, misrepresenting “the Wall” restrictions, and misrepresenting comments from the National Security Law Unit.[47]
   

The FBI agents noted in the last example were all assigned as liaisons to the CIA’s Alec Station unit, focused on Osama Bin Laden.  It is interesting that neither Richard Blee, the head of that unit at the time, nor Rodney Middelton, the head of the FBI’s UBLU, were ever interviewed by independent journalists about these critical issues.  Middleton left the FBI the day before 9/11, and Blee went on to be named CIA station chief in Kabul as the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan began.

Between April and September 2001, several major changes occurred in the FBI’s counterterrorism program.  In May, the head of the RFU was replaced by Dave Frasca, who would go on to be a central character in the obstruction of opportunities to identify and capture the alleged hijackers.  At the same time, Louis Freeh announced his resignation despite not having another job.

Freeh left the FBI on June 25, 2001 with nowhere to go.  It was said that he approached acting New Jersey Governor Donald DiFrancesco and offered to serve, without salary, as the state’s anti-terrorism “czar”.  This would have brought Freeh close to the 9/11 attacks in NYC but it didn’t happen.  Instead, Freeh was apparently doing nothing for the three months before 9/11, or at least doing nothing that we know about. Freeh then took a job as director, counsel, and ethics officer at credit card issuer MBNA.

The final three 9/11-related failures that can be attributed to Freeh, through the subordinates he put in place, are as follows.  If any of these had been handled appropriately, the alleged 9/11 hijackers would have been caught and their plans foiled.

1. On July 10, 2001, Phoenix FBI counterterrorism agent Ken Williams sent FBI headquarters what is called the “Phoenix Memo,” warning that Osama bin Laden was sending students to U.S. flight schools.  Williams listed cases of suspected Arab extremists training in Arizona flight schools and urged the FBI to search for such cases in other cities.  The FBI failed to respond to the memo at all and it was dismissed as speculative.  As 9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerrey would later point out about the memo – “had it gotten into the works at the—up to the highest possible level, at the very least, 19 guys wouldn‘t have gotten onto these airplanes with room to spare.”[48]
2. In mid-August 2001, Zacarias Moussaoui was arrested in Minnesota.  The FBI agents who made the arrest called Moussaoui a “suspected airline suicide attacker.”  The agents requested permission to search Moussaoui’s belongings, including his laptop computer, but they were denied that permission.  A week later the FBI supervisor in Minneapolis, trying to get the attention of those at FBI headquarters, said he was trying to make sure that Moussaoui — “did not take control of a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center.”[49]  Still, FBI headquarters denied the field agents’ requests.  In May 2002, one of the agents, Coleen Rowley, described this obstruction.  She wrote that FBI headquarters personnel – “ …continued to, almost inexplicably, throw up roadblocks and undermine Minneapolis’ by-now desperate efforts to obtain a FISA search warrant, long after the French intelligence service provided its information and probable cause became clear. HQ personnel brought up almost ridiculous questions in their apparent efforts to undermine the probable cause.  In all of their conversations and correspondence, HQ personnel never disclosed to the Minneapolis agents that the Phoenix Division had, only approximately three weeks earlier, warned of Al Qaeda operatives in flight schools seeking flight training for terrorist purposes!  Nor did FBIHQ personnel do much to disseminate the information about Moussaoui to other appropriate intelligence/law enforcement authorities. When, in a desperate 11th hour measure to bypass the FBIHQ roadblock, the Minneapolis Division undertook to directly notify the CIA’s Counter Terrorist Center (CTC), FBIHQ personnel actually chastised the Minneapolis agents for making the direct notification without their approval!”[50]
   
3. Finally, on August 23, 2001, less than three weeks before 9/11, the CIA formally told the FBI that Al-Mihdhar and Al-Hazmi might be in the United States.  But even though the two alleged hijackers had their names listed in the San Diego phone book and had been living with an FBI informant, the Bureau supposedly could not find them.

FBI agent Robert Fuller, only recently transferred to UBLU, claimed to take the August information and use it to search databases looking for Al-Mihdhar and Al-Hazmi but he claims to have found nothing.  Fuller had another JTTF officer help him to search a database run by Choicepoint, the company known for purging Florida voters in the 2000 presidential election.[51]  The Justice Department IG report says Fuller did an NCIC criminal history check, credit checks, and a motor vehicle records search.  But the 9/11 Commission Report clearly contradicted this, saying “Searches of readily available databases could have unearthed the drivers licenses, the car registration, and the telephone listing” all of which were in Al Mihdhar and Al Hazmi’s names.[52]

Later it was noted that “the hijackers had contact with 14 people known to the FBI because of counterterror investigations prior to 9/11.”[53]  This was known to the 9/11 Commission as its staff director made a clear statement about how close the FBI was to catching the alleged hijackers.  “Rather than the hijackers being invisible to the FBI, they were, in fact, right in the middle of the FBI‘s counterterrorism coverage,” said Eleanor Hill.  “And yet, the FBI didn‘t detect them.”[54]

All of this certainly seems to suggest that FBI headquarters and Director Freeh had sufficient information to track and capture the alleged 9/11 hijackers.  Freeh’s close association with the Saudis is also troubling considering the role of suspected Saudi spy Al-Bayoumi.  The company Al-Bayoumi worked for, Dalla Al-Baraka, was owned by Saleh Abdullah Kamel, reportedly a member of the “Golden Chain” financiers of Osama bin Laden. And the wife of Freeh’s friend Prince Bandar was reported to have sent funding to the alleged hijackers through Al-Bayoumi’s wife.[55]

In his resignation speech, Freeh praised the integrity of George W. Bush and dedication of Dick Cheney.  “President Bush has brought great honor and integrity to the Oval Office.  It was equally an honor to be appointed by his father to serve as a federal judge.  I also wish to thank Vice President Dick Cheney for conducting an effective transition process and for his dedication to duty in serving the Nation,” said Freeh.[56]

Going on, Freeh thanked his colleagues at the CIA and emphasized how well the two agencies had worked together.  “Through the leadership of Director George Tenet, we have forged an unprecedented relationship with the men and women of the Central Intelligence Agency in the counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism arenas,” he claimed.  “This, in turn, has enabled us to place greater emphasis on counter-intelligence [and] counter-terrorism.”[57]

These remarks are in direct contradiction to the 9/11 Commission Report, which placed blame for the failure to track down and capture the alleged hijackers on two root causes.  The first was that, although the “system was blinking red,” the FBI and CIA were not working well together, partly because of “the Wall” of procedures that supposedly prevented adequate information sharing between the agencies.  The second presumed root cause was that the information needed to stop the attacks did not rise high enough within the FBI and CIA to ensure action would be taken.  Neither of these excuses is believable, given the examples already reviewed.

At the end of Freeh’s tenure as director, the FBI was under severe criticism from all directions.  Patrick J. Leahy, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee whose office would a few months later be one of the targets of the anthrax attacks, said, “There are some very, very serious management problems at the FBI.”[58]  Richard J. Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, said, “It’s hard to believe the situation has deteriorated and disintegrated the way it has. How did this great agency fall so far so fast? The FBI has been starved for leadership.”[59]

Nine days after Freeh announced his retirement, the FBI told Timothy McVeigh’s attorneys that it had failed to give them about 3,000 pages of documents related to the OKC bombing investigation.  “Self-righteous and sanctimonious, Freeh never admitted a personal mistake. He never pointed out his own role in the McVeigh debacle.”[60]

If there is nothing to hide, why hide it?

Testifying before the 9/11 Congressional Inquiry in October 2002, Freeh said: “I am aware of nothing that to me demonstrates that the FBI and the intelligence community had the type of information or tactical intelligence which could have prevented September 11th. In terms of the FBI’s capability to identify, investigate and prevent the nineteen hijackers from carrying out their attacks, the facts so far on the public record do not support the conclusion that these tragic events could have been prevented by the FBI and intelligence community acting by themselves.”[61]

This assessment contradicts that of FBI agent Robert Wright, whose written warning prior to 9/11 was ignored.  Wright later stated that:  “September the 11th is a direct result of the incompetence of the FBI’s International Terrorism Unit. No doubt about that.  Absolutely no doubt about that. You can’t know the things I know and not go public.” Agent Wright was prohibited by the U.S. Justice Department from telling all he knew about the pre-9/11 FBI failures.  But he added: “There’s so much more. God, there’s so much more. A lot more.”[62]

Why did the FBI, if it had nothing to hide, go into full-blown cover-up mode immediately after the attacks?  For example, FBI agents confiscated all of the surveillance videos which would have shown what happened at the Pentagon.[63]  The Bureau harassed witnesses in Florida who suggested that the alleged hijackers were not the devout Muslims the official account made them out to be.[64]  In Pennsylvania, FBI agents took control of the United 93 crash site and intentionally ignored eyewitness testimony that contradicted the official account.[65]  At the WTC debris collection site, FBI agents were caught stealing evidence.[66]

The FBI also went to great lengths to avoid cooperating with the Joint Congressional Inquiry.  For example, the Bureau refused to allow the interviewing or deposing of Abdussatar Shaikh, the FBI informant who had lived with alleged hijackers Al-Mihdhar and Al-Hazmi.[67]  Through the FBI’s maneuvering, Shaikh was never required to testify.  The FBI also tried to prevent the testimony of Shaikh’s FBI handler, which occurred only secretly at a later date.

The protection of Abdusttar Shaikh by the FBI makes no sense considering that the Bureau encouraged the torture of other suspects, like Hani El-Sayegh.  Reputed al Qaeda associate Abu Zubaydah, who was later found to have nothing to do with al Qaeda, had already been tortured many times to gain information related to 9/11 while Shaikh was allowed to negotiate his entire removal from the 9/11 investigation.[68]

The FBI also failed to cooperate with the 9/11 Commission.  According to author Philip Shenon, the FBI was “as uncooperative with the 9/11 Commission as it had been in the Congressional investigation” and was “painfully slow to meet the Commission’s initial request for documents and interviews.”[69]

The only reasonable explanation for FBI management’s behavior in the decade before 9/11 and in the ensuing investigations is that they were somehow complicit in the attacks. But why would Freeh and the FBI want to support the activities of alleged terrorists?

We know that the accused 19 hijackers could not have accomplished most of what needs explaining about 9/11.  They could not have disabled the U.S. air defenses for two hours, they could not have made the U.S. chain of command fail to respond appropriately, and they could not have caused the destruction of the three tall buildings at the WTC.  However, the myth of al Qaeda was a necessary part of the official account and was able to provide a grain of truth in an otherwise unbelievable story.

In 2006, Freeh joined George Tenet on the board of a company that had been flagged, but never investigated, for 9/11 insider trading.[70]  He also became the personal attorney for Saudi Prince Bandar who, as stated before, was implicated through his wife in financing of the alleged hijackers.  Recently Freeh has been trotted out to pass judgment on the late coach Joe Paterno.  But he is in no position to pass judgment on others.

Under Louis Freeh, the FBI failed miserably at preventing terrorism when preventing terrorism was the FBI’s primary goal.  Moreover, the actions of FBI management suggest that it was facilitating and covering-up acts of terrorism throughout the time that Freeh was the Bureau’s director.  Fifteen examples have been cited here from the time of Freeh’s tenure and three other examples were given from the time just after he left, when it was unclear why he left or what he was doing.  Add to these examples the fact that the FBI took extraordinary measures to hide evidence related to the 9/11 attacks and it becomes abundantly clear that Mr. Freeh should be a prime suspect in any honest investigation.

There are many connections between the events of 9/11 and Oklahoma City.  Some of these connections revolve around the alleged 9/11 hijackers, the “20^th hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui, and a couple of airports around Oklahoma City.  Looking closer at the airport connections reveals startling coincidences with regard to the people who ran World Trade Center (WTC) security company Stratesec, as well as CIA Director George Tenet’s mentor, David Boren, who is currently the co-chairman of President Obama’s Intelligence Advisory Board.

Independent investigators have shown that there are striking links between the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City (OKC) and the events of 9/11.[1, 2]  Recently, many 9/11 investigators have become more interested in learning the truth about the OKC bombing after being exposed to the excellent film A Noble Lie.[3]

The OKC investigations have revealed eyewitnesses accounts of the sighting in Oklahoma of Mohamed Atta and five other 9/11 hijacker suspects.[4]  Last year, an article in the Oklahoma Gazette confirmed that records show Atta, Marwan Al-Shehhi, Nawaf Al-Hazmi and Zacarias Moussaoui all “either visited or lived in Oklahoma from July 2000 to August 2001.”[5]

Between February and August of 2001, Zacarias Moussaoui lived in Norman, Oklahoma and attended Airman Flight School at Max Westheimer Airport, which is owned and operated by the University of Oklahoma.  Moussaoui even lived in a university dormitory.  According to Moussaoui’s indictment, Atta and Al-Shehhi had visited the same flight school in July, 2000, but did not take classes there.

Westheimer Aiport is just three miles northwest of Norman and was originally a U.S. Navy flight training field.  A squadron of the Civil Air Patrol (CAP), a federally supported, non-profit corporation that serves as the official civilian auxiliary of the U. S. Air Force, still gathers at Westheimer every week.[6]  Coincidentally, several of the alleged 9/11 hijackers rented apartments in Delray Beach, Florida from a member of CAP.  One of the apartments was said to be “a meeting ground for terrorists.”  The CAP member landlord, Mike Irish, turned out to be the first intended victim of the October 2001 anthrax attacks.  One of his employees actually died from the anthrax.[7]

In 2005, Airman Flight School shut down due to its inability to pay rent and the university newspaper revealed the name of the company that had leased the building. “The airport building is owned by the University of Oklahoma. A Cleveland County District Court order had granted possession of the building to the current landlord, Baker Hughes, Inc., of Houston, which leases the building from OU.”   Baker Hughes is an oil services company that is among an elite few making a killing off of the Iraq War.[8]

Dale Davis, the vice president of Airman Flight School, said FBI agents showed up at the facility asking questions about Moussaoui and had been there before.   “Davis said FBI agents had visited his school just two years earlier to inquire about Ihab Ali Nawawi, who took flight training there in 1993 and was later charged in connection with the 1998 US Embassy bombings in Africa, which were blamed on bin Laden’s group.  Davis also confirmed that Atta and another suspected hijacker, Marwan al-Shehhi, visited Airman Flight School, staying overnight at the school’s dormitory in the nearby Sooner Inn, before deciding to train at another facility.”[9]

Weeks after 9/11, however, FBI Director Robert Mueller repeated his false assertion that federal authorities had no idea that terrorists were using U.S. flight schools to train for piloting commercial airliners. ”There were no warning signs that I’m aware of that would indicate this type of operation in the country,” he said.[10]  Apparently he had forgotten about the famous July 2001 Phoenix memo and several other related warnings focused on that exact risk.[11]

Established in 1989, Airman Flight School was owned by Jerry Carroll and Brenda Keene.  Apparently Carroll and Keene bilked a number of their students out of their life savings as the flight school was going under.  But the service was very good in some cases, considering that — “Flight instructor Juan Carlos [Merida] picked up Moussaoui at Will Rogers World Airport when he came to Oklahoma and took him back to the airport when he left.”[12]

Airman’s students sued Carroll and Keene when the business collapsed, along with KJB Flight Management, an entity of which Keene and David Batton were principals. KJB had tried to buy Airman and was managing the school until it closed.[13]  David Batton was, at one time, the Cleveland County Assistant District Attorney.  The Panamanian Juan Carlos Merida, who had picked up and dropped off Moussaoui from the airport, was later represented by Batton in legal proceedings related to suspicion of terrorism.[14]

Wiley Post and Hangar 8

According to FBI summary documents, Mohamed Atta was also spotted at nearby Wiley Post Airport in Bethany, Oklahoma within six months of the 9/11 attacks.  An employee at private aviation company Million Air witnessed Atta flying at Wiley Post Airport along with two other alleged 9/11 hijackers, Marwan Al-Shehhi and Waleed Al-Shehri.[15]  Other FBI summary documents indicate that Saeeed Al-Ghamdi was also seen flying in to Wiley Post Airport on an unspecified date and that Hani Hanjour had made inquiries to a company in The Netherlands that ran a flight school out of Wiley Post Airport.[16]

The suburb of Bethany is just seven miles west of Oklahoma City and a little over 20 miles from Norman.  Wiley Post, located in Bethany, is one of three airports owned and operated by the Oklahoma City Department of Airports.  Westheimer Airport in Norman, run by the university, provides a fourth option for public airport access.

Hangar 8 of Wiley Post Airport was, until 2005, the home of Aviation General, the aircraft company owned by Kuwaiti-American Corporation (KuwAm) and run by Wirt Dexter Walker III.  KuwAm and its WTC security company Stratesec had strong connections to the Kuwaiti royal family, which benefited from 9/11 through the ouster of Saddam Hussein. The companies were also strongly linked to the Bush family network and to people who came from deep-state U.S. intelligence backgrounds.[17]  Like his fellow KuwAm director Robert Dudley van Roijen, Walker is the son of a CIA officer.  He is also a suspect in 9/11 insider trading.[18]

Aviation General was the parent of two wholly-owned subsidiaries: Commander Aircraft Company, which manufactured Commander-brand aircraft, and Strategic Jet Services, which provided aircraft brokerage and refurbishment services.  Aviation General, Commander Aircraft, and Strategic Jet Services were all located in Hangar 8 of Wiley Post Airport.

Wiley Post Airport has approximately 24 hangars and Hangar 8 is set off away from the rest.[19]  Although Aviation General and its subsidiaries all went bankrupt or were sold off in the few years after 9/11, Hangar 8 still houses three businesses.  These include Jim Clark & Associates, Valair Aviation, and Oklahoma Aviation.

Jim Clark & Associates is an aircraft sales and brokerage firm, similar to Strategic Jet Services, and is located in Hangar 8.  The company shared a phone number (405-787-6222) with another aircraft company called Sundancer Enterprises, out of Norman, OK.

Valair Aviation is an aircraft service company also located in Hangar 8.  This is a service center that works on Commander-brand aircraft, the kind that Wirt Walker’s Commander Aircraft Company had manufactured there.  Valair started as a division of Aero Commander, which was a subsidiary of Rockwell International and Gulfstream. By the year 2000, Valair (called the Service Center) had also become specialized in servicing Raytheon aircraft.

At first glance, the most interesting of these new Hangar 8 companies is the flight school called Oklahoma Aviation.  This is due to an incredible coincidence regarding the young man who now runs the company, Shohaib Nazir Kassam.

Oklahoma Aviation first appeared on the internet in March, 2001 although the website was only one page with the company name for the first year.  The company was officially founded in February 2004 by Tom Kilpatrick, the son of famous Oklahoman John Kilpatrick Jr., who had been president of the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce.

Tom Kilpatrick didn’t know anything about aviation, so he hired Shoiam Kassam to be the Chief Flight Instructor and Rob Rothman as Assistant Chief Flight Instructor.  Rothman was a recent graduate of the University of Oklahoma and member of the Civil Air Patrol. Rothman is now an officer in the U.S. Air Force stationed in Pensacola, Florida.  The Air Force base is located at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola which, coincidentally, was the address used by several alleged 9/11 hijackers on their driver’s licenses.[20]

In March 2007, Oklahoma Aviation was purchased by another famous son of Oklahoma, Clayton Healey.  Clay had just come off the ranch as a cowboy in 2003 and started AIC Title Service, which focused on aircraft company closures.  Clay’s father was Skip Healey, a well known Republican National Committee member and oil company executive.  The Healey’s were grandnephews of Lew Wentz, who had opened Oklahoma up to the oil industry.

By 2008, Oklahoma Aviation had the best airplanes around.[21]  And somehow young Shoaib Kassam came to be listed as the owner of the company.[22]  The Chief Flight Instructor today is Marcus Buchanan, who in 1998 was a student at the Airline Training Academy (ATA) in Orlando, Florida.  This is the same ATA that went bankrupt while robbing its students and was then found to have financial connections to Wally Hilliard, who owned Huffman Aviation, where Atta and friends went after deciding not to train in Oklahoma.[23]  Buchanan went from ATA to be a flight instructor at the University of Oklahoma’s Department of Aviation before moving to his current job in Hangar 8.

The part of this story that seems more incredible is that Kassam was, in March 2006, a government witness against Zacarias Moussaoui.  He was actually Moussaoui’s flight instructor.  To emphasize, the guy who is now occupying Wirt Walker’s offices in Hangar 8 at Wiley Post Airport not only knew Zacarias Moussaoui, he was the primary flight instructor of the “20^th hijacker” at Airman Flight School.

Kassam moved to Norman in 1998, at the age of 18, coming from Mombassa, Kenya.  He was originally from Pakistan.  Two years after he arrived in Norman, he completed his training to become a flight instructor.  He was only 21 years of age when he spent 57 hours (unsuccessfully) trying to train Zacarias Moussaoui to fly.

During his testimony and cross-examination in the Moussaoui trial, Kassam was asked many times about Moussaoui’s religion.  Both the prosecutor and the defense attorney were very interested in whether Moussaoui was a devout Muslim.  After repeated questioning, Kassam said that yes, he thought that Moussaoui considered himself a Muslim.

“Q. And you mentioned that he was trying to get you back into the faith?

A. No. He just talked about, you know, church, I mean, sorry, mosques and going to pray and fasting, and just things like that.”[24]

There seemed to be some confusion on this issue in the courtroom. But Kassam was useful to the prosecution in that he confirmed that Moussaoui also called himself Zuluman Tangotango.  This allowed prosecutors to introduce a mountain of emails from the address “pilotz123@hotmail,” purportedly belonging to Zuluman Tangtango.  The email evidence played a significant role in Moussaoui’s conviction.

Kassam also remembered seeing Atta and Al-Shehhi at Airman.  A student at the time of Atta and Alshehhi’s visit, Kassam recalled bumping into them when they were being given a tour of the Airman facility.

The history of Aviation General was, like that of Stratesec and the other companies that Wirt Walker ran, a record of well-financed business failure. As of 1998, Aviation General was losing millions of dollars every year.  With very humble positive returns, the year 2000 results were the best in the company’s history, according to Walker.

In September 2000, John DeHavilland of British Aerocraft joined as CEO of Strategic Jet Services.  Three months later, Walker’s president at Aviation General, Dean N. Thomas, died suddenly at a young age.[25]  And by August 2001, Aviation General was reporting million-dollar losses again.

In late 2002, Strategic Jet Services “discontinued its operations and began the process of dissolving the company.”[26]  Commander Aircraft Company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy at the same time, and that was changed to Chapter 7 in January 2005. Commander Aircraft left Oklahoma in September 2005 to move to an “undisclosed location.”  In an odd shell game reminiscent of the Stratesec dealings, what was left of Aviation General was sold to Tiger Aircraft, a small company with Taiwanese investors that went bankrupt in 2006.

Oklahoma Aviation was a flight school that was just getting off the ground in 2005, as it took over Hangar 8 from Aviation General and soon had the best planes.  This was the opposite of the apparent financial fortunes of the Aviation General companies that all went belly up that year.  And it was also unlike Airman Flight School which, although it was in the same area and same business as Oklahoma Aviation, shut down in 2005 because it could not pay the rent.

David Boren

On the morning of 9/11, CIA Director George Tenet was having breakfast in Washington with his long-time mentor, former Oklahoma Senator David Boren.  While a Senator, Boren was the longest serving chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI).  According to Tenet, Boren plucked him from obscurity in 1987 to serve first as his aide and then, later as the staff director for the SSCI.

Boren was a member of the Yale secret society Skull & Bones, like George W. Bush was five years later.  After serving four years as Governor of Oklahoma and 15 years in the U.S. Senate, he became the President of the University of Oklahoma, a position he has held since 1994.  Boren lives in Norman where his university housed Airman Flight School, and where the alleged 9/11 hijackers sought training and Moussaoui lived and trained.

Boren went from his breakfast meeting with Tenet to join James Woolsey in helping to produce the media story.  Although the CIA and FBI didn’t seem to have any idea what to look for prior to 9/11, Boren certainly seemed to know what the 9/11 attacks were all about as soon as they happened.

While being interviewed on September 11, Boren said:

“I think you have to have bin Laden on the suspect list. You probably have some nation states that ought to be on the suspect list as well [Iraq, for example]. You know, looking at this, it’s very clear– and I think this hopefully will give us leads to trace back and find and affix responsibility– the training that had to have been there by those who took over the aircraft, the ability to pilot the aircraft. It appears that perhaps they were piloting the aircraft, the knowledge to turn off the transponders that would make it very difficult to trace these aircraft from the ground and through our air control system.

These were people that were highly trained; they knew what they were doing. It was all very carefully coordinated. So we’re dealing with people with a lot of sophistication here. Some of that training and some of that preparation is bound to have left clues that hopefully we’ll be able to thread through pretty quickly.”[27]

There certainly were a lot of clues, and many of them seemed to implicate David Boren and his university.  Boren had no intention of mentioning those clues, however.   He didn’t mention that the airport run by the university where he was president had been training Zacarias Moussaoui to fly.  He also failed to point out that Mohamed Atta and other alleged 9/11 hijackers had called, emailed and visited his airport in the two years before 9/11.  Additionally, it might have been of interest to the listeners that the FBI had showed up several times over the years to talk to the people at Airman Flight School, located at Boren’s airport, about the training of terrorism suspects.

Another relevant point of interest was that, just the month before, Boren had personally brought the former CIA Station Chief in Berlin to the university to teach in the Political Science department. David Edger, who had been involved in orchestrating another September 11th tragedy, the Coup in Chile, joined the faculty at the University of Oklahoma at Boren’s invitation.  Edger’s most recent responsibility at the CIA was the monitoring of the Hamburg al-Qaeda cell, which included Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehi, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and Ziad Jarrah.[28]

What are the odds that David Boren could have been so clueless about the training of al Qaeda operatives under his own nose?  What are the odds that Zacarias Moussaoui’s primary trainer at Boren’s airport is now occupying the offices of Wirt D. Walker’s former businesses in Hangar 8 at Wiley Post Airport?  Maybe we should find out.

Abu Zubaydah, a man once called al-Qaeda’s “chief of operations,” appears to be at the center of an unraveling of the official myth behind al Qaeda.  After his capture in early 2002, Zubaydah was the first “detainee” known to be tortured.  The information allegedly obtained from his torture played a large part in the creation of the official account of 9/11 and in the justification for the continued use of such torture techniques.  Yet in September, 2009, the U.S. government admitted that Zubaydah was never a member or associate of al Qaeda at all.  These facts raise an alarming number of questions about the veracity of our knowledge about al Qaeda, and the true identity of the people who are said to be behind the 9/11 attacks.

Unlike other alleged al Qaeda leaders, including Khlaid Sheik Mohammed and Rasmi bin Alshibh, Zubaydah has never been charged with a crime.  As these other leading suspects await their continually-postponed military trial, Zubaydah is instead being airbrushed out of history.  Why would the U.S. government want us to forget Zubaydah, the first and most important al Qaeda operative captured after 9/11?

The 9/11 Commission called Zubaydah an “Al Qaeda associate,” a “long-time ally of Bin Ladin,” a “Bin Ladin lieutenant,” and an “al Qaeda lieutenant.”[1] The Commission’s claims were somewhat contradictory in that Zubaydah was, in the Commission’s report, represented as both an al Qaeda leader and simply a terrorist colleague who collaborated in the training and recruiting of operatives.  For example, the Commission reported that Zubaydah “helped operate a popular terrorist training camp near the border with Pakistan” [Khalden Camp], and that Bin Laden had an agreement with Zubaydah to “conduct reciprocal recruiting efforts whereby promising trainees at the camps would be invited to join al Qaeda.”  It was unclear why a “Bin Laden lieutenant” would need such a reciprocal agreement with Bin Laden.

Other claims made by the 9/11 Commission were that “KSM and Zubaydah each played key roles in facilitating travel for al Qaeda operatives,” and that “Zubaydah had been a major figure in the millenium plots.” These claims are supported primarily by the torture testimony of Zubaydah and others, and by Zubaydah’s “diary.”

In an amazing turnabout in 2009, an attorney for Zubaydah wrote in The Guardian that the majority of the accusations against Zubaydah were understood by all parties to be false.  In fact, he wrote, they “were known to be false when uttered.“[2]  Attorney Brent Mickum said that his client, said to be the “number three man in al Qaeda,” was never a member or associate of al Qaeda and that — “These facts really are no longer contested: [Zubaydah] was not, and never had been, a member of either the Taliban or al-Qaida. The CIA determined this after torturing him extensively.”  In fact, he “was never a member or a supporter of any armed forces that were allied against the United States,” and he was never the “head of a military camp that trained terrorists. That allegation is false at all levels.”

It turns out that Mickum’s report was correct and that “Abu Zubaydah’s supposed relationship with al-Qaida is a complete myth.”[3]

We know this because, as of September 2009, the U.S. government agreed that Zubaydah was never an al Qaeda operative.  During Zubaydah’s habeas corpus petition, the government admitted that Abu Zubaydah had never been a member of al-Qaeda, nor involved in the attacks on the African embassies in 1998, or the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.[4]  The motion, filed by the U.S. government, states:

…the Government has not contended in this proceeding that Petitioner [Zubaydah] was a member of al-Qaida or otherwise formally identified with al-Qaida.

Respondent [The United States Government] does not contend that Petitioner was a “member” of al-Qaida in the sense of having sworn a bayat (allegiance) or having otherwise satisfied any formal criteria that either Petitioner or al-Qaida may have considered necessary for inclusion in al-Qaida. Nor is the Government detaining Petitioner based on any allegation that Petitioner views himself as part of al-Qaida as a matter of subjective personal conscience, ideology, or worldview.

The Government has not contended in this proceeding that Petitioner had any direct role in or advance knowledge of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

… the Government has not contended that Petitioner had any personal involvement in planning or executing either the 1998 embassy bombings… or the attacks on September 11, 2001.

In his article that same year, attorney Mickum went on to point out that the torture tapes, which the CIA had first lied to the 9/11 Commission about and then destroyed, had a lot to do with Zubaydah.  Mickum wrote:  “the videotapes of his torture were destroyed. Just recently, the government revealed that 90 of the 92 videotapes that the CIA destroyed related to our client.”  Not only that, Mickum went on to say that the U.S. government has removed all “reference to my client from the charge sheets and factual returns of other prisoners whose cases were being prosecuted. Abu Zubaydah has been linked to nearly 50 prisoners and former prisoners through media accounts and official Guantanamo Bay documents. Of these, approximately two dozen have either had their charges dropped or have been released from custody.”  They have, essentially, “airbrushed Abu Zubaydah out of history.”

Obviously this attempt to remove a key 9/11 accomplice from history must make a significant difference to the official account of 9/11.  We would expect that major revisions to the 9/11 Commission Report would be necessary given the knowledge that the man never had a connection to al Qaeda.

In order to better understand just how much Zubaydah meant as a primary source for the official account of 9/11, we must review the extensive claims made about Zubaydah by the U.S. government and mainstream media  over the years.  We’ve seen that the 9/11 Commission (falsely) called Zubaydah an “al Qaeda lieutenant.”  The Joint Congressional inquiry did the same, calling him “al-Qa’ida leader Abu Zubaydah,” and the “Bin Ladin lieutenant captured in March 2002.”  As late as 2006, the Justice Department’s Inspector General report on the 9/11 attacks called Zubaydah a “Bin Laden lieutenant.”

When Zubaydah was captured, in March 2002, U.S. government officials touted him as the biggest catch of the War on Terror, at least until the capture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM).  FBI Director Robert Mueller stated that Zubaydah’s capture would help deter future attacks.[5]  White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said that Zubaydah could provide a treasure-trove of information about al-Qaeda.[6]  Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed that Zubaydah was “a man who knows of additional attacks”, who has “trained people to do this”, and was a big fish who had a fountain of knowledge.[7]

The extensive allegations against Zubaydah went on and on, and included that he was:

• along with KSM, one of “Al Qaeda’s top operational managers” – “Counterterrorism Czar”Richard Clarke, in his book Against All Enemies
• “sinister” and “there is evidence that he is a planner and a manager as well. I think he’s a major player.” – Former State Department director of counter-terrorism, Michael Sheehan [8]
  
•  “extremely dangerous” and a planner of 9/11. – State Department legal advisor John B. Bellinger III in a June 2007 briefing.[9]
  
• a trainer, a recruiter, understood bomb-making, was a forger, a logistician, and someone who made things happen, and made “al-Qaeda function.” – Former CIA station chief, Bob Grenier [10]
  
• “a close associate of UBL’s, and if not the number two, very close to the number two person in the organization. I think that’s well established.” -Donald Rumsfeld [11]
  
•  “a very senior al Qaeda official who has been intimately involved in a range of activities for the al Qaeda.” – Donald Rumsfeld [12]
  
• a “very senior al Qaeda operative.” – Donald Rumsfeld
• a “key terrorist recruiter and operational planner and member of Osama bin Laden’s inner circle.” – White House spokesman Ari Fleischer [13]
  
• someone whose capture was a “very serious blow” to al-Qaeda and therefore one of al-Qaeda’s “many tentacles” was “cut off.” – White House spokesman Ari Fleischer
•  “one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States.” –President George W. Bush [14]
  
•  “one of al-Qaeda’s top leaders” who was “spending a lot of time as one of the top operating officials of al Qaeda, plotting and planning murder.” –President George W. Bush [15]
  
•  “al Qaeda’s chief of operations.” – President George W. Bush [16]
  
• “one of the top three leaders” in al-Qaeda. – President George W. Bush [17]
  
• someone whose interrogation “led to reliable information”, a “prolific producer” of information, with whom originated roughly 25 percent of the information on al Qaeda that came from human sources. – Michael Hayden [18]
  
• one of three individuals “best positioned to know about impending terrorist atrocities.” – Michael Hayden [19]

As the myth of Zubaydah grew, it was reported that he was –

• “worth a ton of guys at Gitmo.”[20]
  
• a “senior bin Laden official” and the “former head of Egypt-based Islamic Jihad.”[21]
  
• “played a key role in the East Africa embassy attacks.”[22]
  
• listed as a “trusted aide” to bin Laden with “growing power.”[23]
  
• in control of al-Qaeda.[24]
  
• an aide of bin Laden who ran training camps in Afghanistan and “coordinated terror cells in Europe and North America.”[25]
  
• a “key terrorist recruiter, operational planner, and member of Osama Bin Laden’s inner circle.”[26]
  
• “bin Laden’s CEO”,[27] and “a central figure in Al Qaeda”[28]
  
• Bin Laden’s “travel planner.”[29]
  
• “one of a handful of men entrusted with running the terrorism network in the event of Osama bin Laden’s death or capture.”[30]
  
• a senior bin Laden lieutenant who was believed “to be organizing al Qaida resources to carry out attacks on American targets.”[31]
  
• the fourth ranking member of al Qaeda behind Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Muhamed Atef.[32]
  
• someone who knew the identities of “thousands” of terrorists that passed through al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan [33]
  
• a colleague of Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber.[34]
  
• one of bin Laden’s top planners of terrorist operations who knew of al Qaeda plots and cells.[35]
  
• the “connection between bin Laden and many of al-Qaida’s operational cells.”[36]
  
• the source of information that UAL Flight 93 was intended to hit the White House.[37]

Because we now know that Zubaydah was never an al Qaeda operative, or even an al Qaeda associate, we are forced into the stunning realization that all of this was false.  The questions that should arise from that realization include:  How much of what we know about al Qaeda, and how much of the War on Terror, was built on the torture testimony of a man who clearly could not have known anything about al Qaeda at all?

Originally, we were told that it was Zubaydah who first identified KSM as the Bin Laden associate called “Mukhtar.”  This was according to Ali Soufan, the FBI official who first interrogated him at a secret CIA site in Thailand.  Soufan also claimed that Zubaydah said KSM was the “mastermind” behind the 9/11 attacks.  In his 2007 book, CIA director Tenet went further, claiming that “interrogating Abu Zubaydah led to Ramsi bin al Shibh.”[38]

But as we know now, the CIA reportedly told Abu Zubaydah during his interrogation that they discovered he was not an al-Qaeda fighter, partner, or even a member.[39]  Still, KSM and Bin Alshibh were caught and tortured too.

The 9/11 Commission Report was largely based on third-hand accounts of what these tortured detainees said, with “two of the three parties in the communication being government employees.”[40]  The Commission itself wrote that “Chapters 5 and 7 rely heavily on information obtained from captured al Qaeda members.”[41]  The truth is, however, that more than half of the 9/11 Commission Report is based on completely unreliable torture testimony to which the Commission had absolutely no access – not even through interviews with the interrogators.  KSM’s torture is referred to 221 times in the report, and that of Bin Alshibh is referred to 73 times.  The Commission used one or more of these “interrogations” as its source a total of 441 times in its report footnotes.

The U.S. government admits that Zubaydah was water-boarded 83 times and KSM was water-boarded 183 times.  Given that most people cannot stand a few seconds of this torture, it is apparent that these sessions were not meant to gain information and were, perhaps, meant to eliminate information through the destruction of the victim’s mind.  Through the brief statements his defense team has been allowed to make, Zubaydah has also described how he was kept for long periods in a cage he called “a tiny coffin.”[42]

The torture of Zubaydah was specifically used to support claims about Bin Laden’s plans and actions, al Qaeda’s policies, the recruitment of the hijackers and other al Qaeda operatives, and details about the leaders who planned 9/11.[43]  According to author Jane Meyer, CIA agent John Kiriakou said “Zubaydah openly admitted his role in the September 11 attacks and claimed to regret having killed so many Americans.”[44]  Apparently, the 9/11 Commission didn’t think this latter claim to be credible although it promoted other dubious information supposedly generated by the torture of these suspects.

Given the apparent “mistakes” related to Zubaydah being represented as an al Qaeda leader, there appears to be some serious revision required in the official account of 9/11. However, realistically, at this late date the information attributed to Zubaydah cannot likely be untangled from the official myth behind the War on Terror and the associated actions of the U.S. government.  That’s because the torture of Zubaydah was used in support of unprecedented policy changes and actions.

• President Bush personally used the perceived value of Zubaydah’s capture and torture to justify the use of the CIA’s torture techniques as well as the detention of suspects in secret CIA prisons around the world.[45]

• The U.S. government used the questionable intelligence obtained from Zubaydah in order to justify the invasion of Iraq. Officials stated that the allegations that Iraq and al-Qaeda were linked through training people on the use of chemical weapons came from Zubaydah. There was no independent verification of these claims.[46]

• Zubaydah’s torture testimony was also used to justify the use of military tribunals, moving the trial of alleged al Qaeda suspects out of the open civil courts. President Bush asked Congress in a speech in September 2006 to formulate special rules in order to try Abu Zubaydah via military commission in Guantanamo Bay.[47]  In fact, in late April 2002 less than one month after Abu Zubaydah’s capture, Justice Department officials stated Abu Zubaydah “is a near-ideal candidate for a tribunal trial.”[48]  Ironically, Zubaydah may be the only leading suspect to never face trial.

• In addition to justifying the use of illegal torture techniques, the Bush administration used Zubaydah’s capture as justification to accelerate its domestic spying program.  The claim was that it would allow quick action on the phone numbers and addresses seized during Zubaydah’s capture.[49]

A second member of Abu Zubaydah’s defense team recently wrote another article that was published in the mainstream media. In this article, attorney Amanda Jacobsen points out that:

“U.S. officials have said that Abu Zubaida was a senior al-Qaeda terrorist. They claimed that he was the ‘No. 3 man’ in al-Qaeda, its chief of operations, who worked directly with Osama bin Laden. They said that he was personally involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and every other major al-Qaeda operation and knew the details of future attack plans.

But all of these assertions were wrong.”[50]

Now that the US government has admitted that it has no case against Abu Zubaydah and that he was never associated with al Qaeda, will they release him?  As attorney Mickum requested, will his client be allowed to tell his own story?  More importantly, will the official accounts of 9/11 be reviewed to extricate claims allegedly made by and about Zubaydah so that those false claims do not to provide additional false direction in War on Terror?

No, almost certainly not.

As with the court order to classify “any statements made by the accused” in the trials of KSM and other suspects,[51] if this man is allowed to speak we may find that his mind has not been completely obliterated through the torture we inflicted upon him.  And we may find that the official myth of 9/11 and al Qaeda will not hold up against the open and un-tortured testimony of the people alleged to have committed the crimes of 9/11.  In the end, it seems that the Zubaydah case is a threat to al Qaeda itself as well as a public admission that some lies must be kept under wraps in order to maintain the overall deception that supports the War on Terror.

Twelve years ago, the American warship USS Cole was the target of a successful terrorist attack when it made a brief stop in the port of Aden, Yemen.  This was one of only four attacks attributed to al Qaeda prior to 9/11, according to a 2004 U.S. government report.[1]  Like 9/11, there are numerous unanswered questions about the Cole bombing and, as with 9/11, little or no justice has been done.  This article examines a few of the unanswered questions in an attempt to make sense of the background story that was later used to produce and justify the official account of 9/11.

The al Qaeda attack that was said to precede the bombing of the Cole was the August 1998 bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa.  A year later, in 1999, the Washington Post described how people were not convinced by the case made by U.S. officials against al Qaeda.

“But for all its claims about a worldwide conspiracy to murder Americans, the government’s case is, at present, largely circumstantial. The indictment never explains how bin Laden runs al Qaeda or how he may have masterminded the embassy bombings.”[2]

Although the Washington Post and a U.S. government indictment could not, in 1999, convincingly explain how al Qaeda operated, today there is an enormous amount of historical “chatter” available to consider.  Some of it is based on investigations into the year 2000 Cole bombing and details surrounding the al Qaeda “operations hub” in Yemen.  Still, the government’s account of the Cole attack remains unconvincing and problematic.

According to the official account, the Cole, a nearly new, state-of-the-art destroyer, had just come into the Aden port for refueling when it was attacked in broad daylight by two men in a rubber dinghy filled with explosives.  Seventeen sailors were killed and 49 others were wounded.

Much has been said about one of the two alleged “masterminds” of the Cole attack, Tawfiq (Khallad) Bin Attash, who has been incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay for nine years while awaiting a U.S. military trial related to the 9/11 attacks.  Several points are often overlooked regarding Bin Attash and his devious plan, however.  These include that he was a handicapped teenager at the time of his alleged involvement in the African bombings, and that the Cole plan he created a year later was, at best, a very simplistic scheme which required an extraordinary amount of luck to have any chance of success.

The evidence against Bin Attash centers on information obtained through his torture, and that of others, and communications intercepted by the National Security Agency.  After being captured by U.S. forces in 2003, Bin Attash was said to have confessed to planning the Cole attack as well as that of the failed attempt on the USS The Sullivans in early January, 2000.  Officials had not been aware of the attempt on the The Sullivans prior to November, 2000, through the interrogation of another suspect.

The Sullivans was the target of a similar bombing plan in the port of Aden.  It was not sunk, however, because the masterminds did not bother to calculate how much weight the rubber dinghy could hold and therefore they overloaded it with explosives and it sank as it began to move toward the ship.  According to terrorism historian Dennis Piszkiewicz, one of the bombers then left in disgust but the rest stayed on and, when they went for help, their outboard motor was stolen from the sunken boat.  Despite the insulting turn of events, they “took the next ten months to buy back their stolen motor, repair the water damage, and prepare for another attack, this time on the USS Cole.”[3]  This historical description suggests an incredible lack of sophistication on the part of the terrorists — almost a Three Stooges scenario — and certainly nothing that would lead to the use of the word “mastermind.”

Regardless, it is important to understand that there was never a plan to attack the Cole specifically.  Due to the very short period of time that the ship was in port for refueling, it would have been impossible for the attackers to have known in advance that it would be there without having gained some kind of official knowledge about the refueling plan.  Although U.S. officials have suggested that perhaps Yemeni authorities tipped-off the terrorists to the incoming vessel, it is still difficult to believe that the suicide bombers and their appropriately packed rubber dinghy (with repossessed motor) could have been made ready on such short notice.  A conspiracy of information sharing involving the private Yemeni refueling company is also possible but has been rule out by official reports.

Apparently the plan masterminded by the 20-year old Bin Attash was to have a pre-loaded rubber dinghy at the ready so that the next U.S. warship entering the port might provide an opportunity for success.  Since January 1999, U.S. ships had come into the port to refuel 27 times, or approximately once per month.  Because al Qaeda could not possibly know when that monthly visit might occur (barring the US government conspiracy theory that the Yemeni government was in on it too), the mastermind’s suicidal associates would need to be sitting in the dinghy full of explosives round the clock in order to have any real chance to respond.

In actuality, the plan required that the conspirators depend on a significant amount of luck as well.  According to a Congressional Research Service report on the Cole attack, before the destroyer arrived at Aden “for its brief refueling stop” the Cole was “required to file a force-protection plan for the visit.”  According to this plan, at the time of the attack the Cole was operating under a heightened state of readiness against a potential terrorist attack. This state of readiness (threat condition Bravo) included steps that were specifically intended to provide protection against attack by small boats.[4]

The captain of the Cole, Kirk Lippold, later recalled that his ship was moving quickly through the area and stopped for refueling at 9:30 am in Aden.  Lippold described the situation in which the attack occurred by saying –

“We’d arranged for three garbage barges to come out. And by around 11 o’clock that morning, two boats had come out and the crew was unloading trash. I was turned back to my desk and doing routine paper work when at 11:18 in the morning, there was a thunderous explosion.”[5]

Lippold clarified –

“The first thing that went through my mind was one of these rafts clearly got alongside and has blown up. It turns out, it wasn’t.  The two garbage barges that had been alongside the ship had left at about 11:15 transiting back across the harbor. What we didn’t know is Al-Qaeda had been in that port for a number of months observing us, observing Navy ships and the third barge that came out masqueraded as the garbage barge.  We were operating under peace time rules of engagement. It didn’t exhibit what we call hostile intent like aiming guns at us or hostile act like shooting at us. So, people thought naturally, it was the third garbage barge, came down the side of the ship, two guys were in it, stood up and even waved to the crew. It came to the exact same spot in the middle of the ship where the previous barge have been and then initiated the explosion.”[6]

This is a very remarkable story.  Lippold claims that he ordered three garbage barges to come out and pull alongside his destroyer so that his crew could put out the trash.  Two such garbage barges came out and the trash was unloaded.  Then a third came out but it was not a barge at all, it was a rubber dinghy filled with explosives. Of course, anyone who knows what a garbage barge looks like – a huge flat steel boat – knows that it looks nothing like a rubber dinghy.  But since the two terrorists in the dinghy were waving as they prepared to commit suicide, and were not shooting at anyone, nobody thought twice about it.  And despite the Cole’s force protection plan that ensured the crew would take every measure to prevent terrorist attacks, the dinghy was allowed to pull up right next to the ship and blow a huge hole in the port side.

Captain Lippold failed to take about a dozen required safety precautions on the day of the Cole attack.  Despite these facts, Lippold and his crew received no punishment.[7]

The Yemeni government certainly could not have caused the leadership of a U.S. Navy vessel to be so nonchalant about security, and therefore the U.S. government’s hints that there was a conspiracy between the Yemenis and the bombers carries less weight.  Interested 9/11 researchers might also note that just one “Three Stooges” dinghy was able to intercept a U.S. destroyer in less than two hours that day, but the entire U.S. Air Force could not intercept even one of the four hijacked airliners on 9/11 in the same time frame.

In any case, one might think that reliance on gross malfeasance on the part of a U.S. Navy vessel would not make for a good terrorist plan.  In fact, that would be a poor plan even for a twenty year old kid, which is what mastermind Bin Attash was in January 2000 when he came up with it.  But apparently it worked without a hitch.  Perhaps that’s why the 9/11 Commission gave so much credit to Bin Attash.  The Commission’s report called him a “senior security official for Bin Ladin,” and a “veteran mujahid,” and mentioned his name 110 times within the report’s narrative and 150 times in the notes.  This should be compared to the report’s references to the FAA’s national operations manager (only once) and its hijack coordinator (twice, and neither instance was related to his being the hijack coordinator).

Coincidentally, on 9/11 the Cole’s Captain Lippold was at CIA headquarters, receiving an off-the-record briefing on what the agency knew before, during and after the Cole attack.  Lippold recalled that he told an assistant deputy director, only 20 minutes before the first plane struck the WTC, that — “America doesn’t understand. I believe it’s going to take a seminal event probably in this country where hundreds if not thousands die before Americans realize we’re at war with [Osama bin Laden].”[8]  Minutes later, that seminal event began.

Several 20-year-old kids were said to be involved in the 9/11 attacks.  In fact, the average age of the alleged hijackers on a couple of the planes was only 22 years, and the official accounts depend on these youngsters for a lot of the historical background.  For example, twenty year old Salem al-Hazmi was said to have had a “relatively long history with al Qaeda.”[9]  Twenty-year-olds Ahmed al-Haznawi and Hazma al-Ghamdi were said to have been (teenage) warriors in Chechnya.

One thing about kids is that overall they have much less history which can be challenged through examination of the evidence provided by experiences and relationships.  What we know about them comes from brief periods of their independence for which the official investigations provide all the information.  This ability to control the story could be why, since 9/11, we have seen the FBI caught in several attempts to entrap teenagers in terrorist plots manufactured by the FBI itself.[10]

Interestingly, a Yemeni government official’s investigation into the Cole bombing came to an alarming and contradictory conclusion in July, 2001.  It suggested that the U.S. government bombed its own ship in order to provide a pretext for military or covert action.  The leading Egyptian newspaper reported that a senior Yemeni security official claimed that “there was evidence that the US itself was responsible for the explosion as part of a conspiracy to take control over the port of Aden.”[11]  The Yemeni’s investigation determined that “one explosion happened from within the destroyer, along with another, external, explosion that hit the body of the destroyer, as a result of the booby-trapped dinghy.”

Years later, the President of Yemen repeated a similar claim, saying on national television that the U.S. had plans to invade and occupy Aden after the bombing.  These back and forth accusations and insinuations continued.  There were claims that the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, Barbara Bodine, was sympathetic to the Yemenis and obstructed the investigation led by the FBI.  And not long after the Yemen president’s claim of a U.S. plan for occupying Aden, CIA officer Robert Baer claimed that he “was given information by a Saudi military contact that a Saudi merchant family had funded the USS Cole bombing and that the Yemeni government was covering up information related to that bombing.”[12]

The end result was that the investigation into the Cole bombing collapsed completely.  A few defendants had been convicted in Yemen but all of them escaped or were freed by the government.[13]  Only two of the alleged planners remain in custody of the U.S. government, Bin Attash and his alleged colleague Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was labeled “al-Qaeda’s operations chief in the Arabian Peninsula.”  Al-Nashiri is said to have confessed under torture to being the second mastermind of the Cole bombing.

What little we know about what happened on October 12, 2000 in the port of Aden is not comforting.  We know that 17 sailors were killed by a terrorist plot that, on its face, was simply absurd.  Two men in a rubber dinghy waited for a monthly visit by a U.S. warship and then depended on the crew of that warship to mistake their approach, in broad daylight, for that of a garbage barge.  The terrorists also depended on the leaders of that U.S. vessel, which was in a heightened readiness against a terrorist attack, to disregard a dozen safety measures required by the force protection plan that the ship had filed for the visit.  All of this was dreamed up by the 20-year old Bin Attash and his colleagues who had only recently bought back their stolen outboard motor so that the plan could go forward.

Meanwhile Captain Lippold has gone on to write a book and join the board of directors for the Homeland Security industry company, HALO Defense Systems.  The U.S. has been accused by Yemeni officials of facilitating and/or profiting from the attack and has declined to punish the captain for his apparent gross negligence.  Instead, the vague and unconvincing story of the Cole attack has been used by the 9/11 Commission and the mainstream media as one of the most significant pieces of historical background supporting the official account of what happened on 9/11.