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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In 2008, NIST began claiming that its investigation would help ensure the safety of future buildings.  NIST said that such buildings “should be increasingly resistant to fire, more easily evacuated in emergencies, and safer overall” as a result of the WTC investigation.  Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, the Bush Administration cabinet member in charge of NIST at the time, said –

“The lessons learned from the tragic events of 9/11 have yielded stronger building and fire codes for a new generation of safer, more robust buildings across the nation.” [1]

Is this true?  If so, we should be able to see improvements being made to the design and construction processes for tall buildings around the world.  We should also expect that existing buildings would be evaluated for design problems and retrofitted in an urgent manner to ensure that fires do not bring buildings crashing down as they did on 9/11, killing thousands of unsuspecting victims.

Unfortunately, there are no signs that such design evaluations and retrofit projects have occurred. This is a strong indication that the international building community has not taken the NIST WTC reports seriously.

In a few stunning instances, the NIST findings were never considered at all prior to building design and construction.  An example is the new WTC building 7, which was fully completed in 2006. That same year, NlST spokesman Shyam Sunder was saying “We’ve had trouble getting a handle on building No. 7.”[2]  To clarify, in 2006 NIST had no idea what happened to the original WTC 7, a 47-story skyscraper that was not hit by a plane yet collapsed into its own footprint in a matter of seconds on 9/11. Therefore the new, even taller, WTC 7 could not have incorporated any design or construction changes resulting from the NIST investigation. Apparently people still use the building, however, and do not seem bothered by the risk.

How about for other buildings in New York City and elsewhere, including the widely publicized replacement for WTC 1 being completed this year?  In order to answer that question, we should review a little history behind the NIST WTC investigation.

The NIST WTC Investigation

According to NIST, the original Twin Towers were built to meet the 1968 NYC building code requirements.[3]  This code required three hours of fire resistance for the steel column components and two hours of fire resistance for the floor assemblies.  A startling discrepancy here is that the south tower was said to be completely destroyed less than one hour after the fires began.  And what people often don’t realize is that fire is the primary explanation for failure of all three WTC buildings.

NIST did not explain this discrepancy directly.  Instead, the NIST WTC reports, which amount to tens of thousands of pages, reflected the results of computer modeling that proposed three root causes.

• “Widely dislodged” fireproofing – the Twin Towers
• Linear thermal expansion – WTC 7
• “Progressive global collapse” – all three buildings [4]
  

Progressive global collapse was a term that NIST used frequently throughout its investigation despite the fact that no tall building had ever collapsed completely due to fire.  In fact, the only three instances of progressive global collapse for any reason other than demolition occurred all in the same place (at the WTC) at the same time (on 9/11).

With respect to the fireproofing (i.e. insulation) loss in the towers, NIST said –

“The WTC towers would likely not have collapsed under the combined effects of aircraft impact and the extensive, multi-floor fires if the thermal insulation had not been widely dislodged or had been only minimally dislodged by aircraft impact.”

At the time of the 9/11 attacks, the WTC towers were undergoing a fireproofing upgrade to better ensure the buildings’ fire resistance.  In an incredible coincidence, the floors where the full fireproofing upgrades had been completed were the same floors that were struck by the aircraft on 9/11.[5]

The true condition of the fireproofing in the WTC towers at the time of impact has been misrepresented by supporters of the official account.  These official account supporters produce old photos of the fireproofing condition prior to the upgrades.  What they don’t tell you is that the upgraded fireproofing, for example on the impact floors of the north tower, was measured before the attacks and found to be 3.25 inches thick.  This was twice what was required by the NYC code.  What’s more, inspectors found that the adhesion, or bond strength, of the newly installed fireproofing was twice as high as what was required.[6]

How did this newly installed, superior fireproofing in the towers get “widely dislodged” as proposed by NIST?

We don’t know because NIST produced a startling lack of scientific evidence for its central claim that the fireproofing was widely dislodged.  In fact, the only evidence NIST presented for this was a test in which 15 rounds from a shotgun were aimed at various non-representative samples.  A shotgun may have been needed due to the fact that other tests NIST had performed showed the bond strength of the WTC fireproofing to be “considerably greater” than what was expected.[7]

For WTC 7, the root cause cited by NIST was the dislocation of a girder caused by the linear thermal expansion of floor beams.  The expanding composite beams were said to have caused the breakage of over one hundred high-strength bolts and other structural connections, and thereby the failure of a girder supporting a critical column.

However, other scientists submitted public comments to NIST about actual physical tests they had done, which NIST avoided entirely, that indicated such a sequence was not realistic.  “Having conducted numerous fire tests on composite beams, we have never observed this,” wrote Dr. David Proe of Victoria Universty. [8]

As a whole the NIST WTC reports were found to be unscientific and false.[9]  And because the computer models upon which these reports were ultimately based have never been made available to the public, the NIST findings cannot be replicated.

Ignoring NIST’s recommendations

Regardless of the lack of scientific validity of the WTC reports, NIST represents a standard making body of the U.S. government and its findings should compel U.S. professionals to make changes to their practices. To see if building professionals and local government regulators have followed NIST’s lead, we should examine the relevant building codes for any updates resulting from the NIST WTC investigation.

The International Code Council (ICC)’s International Building Code (IBC) provides a general guidance for local code makers in the United States. Following the IBC code is not a requirement for local governments, however.  Translation of the code into local code requirements is strictly a discretionary decision.

Although the ICC praised NIST and its contractors for the hard work that had gone into the NIST WTC investigation, the fact is that ICC did not incorporate relevant changes into its IBC code as a result.

In its 2008 press release on the subject, NIST claimed that the IBC code had changed to “address areas such as increasing structural resistance to building collapse from fire and other incidents; requiring a third exit stairway for tall buildings; increasing the width of all stairways by 50 percent in new high-rises; [and] strengthening criteria for the bonding, proper installation and inspection of sprayed fire-resistive materials.”

Of course, additional and wider exit stairways cannot prevent the catastrophic collapse of a skyscraper from fire.  But NIST was not telling the truth about the ICC having adopted code changes to increase structural resistance to the kinds of building collapse phenomena proposed by the WTC reports.

A 2010 press release from NIST added “better communications” to the list of ICC-adopted recommendations from the WTC investigation.[10]  It’s true that the radios used by firefighters in the WTC were a concern, and were actually known by NYC officials to be faulty as early as 1993.[11]  However, no amount of radio-related code differences would have prevented the unprecedented destruction of the buildings.  Similarly, NIST’s evacuation recommendations had no relevance to the root cause of the WTC destruction.

NIST had to admit that ICC did not adopt the recommendations that called for building professionals to “address areas such as designing structures to mitigate disproportionate progressive collapse.”[12]

In a January, 2011 letter to NIST, the ICC confirmed that this was still the case.[13]  The only code changes that ICC adopted were:

“1) Luminous egress path marking required; 2) exit stairway enclosures required to be separated by no less than 30 feet; 3) enhanced inspection requirements for Sprayed-on Fire-Resistant Material (SFRM).”

And for buildings higher than 420 feet,

“1)Increased bond strength for SFRM; 2) a second, additional exit stairway, with a minimum separation between stairwells; 3) a requirement to increase structural integrity of exit enclosures and elevator hoist enclosures; 4) redundant sprinkler system risers with alternate floor requirements.”

Of these changes, only the two related to SFRM can be seen as linked to the official account of the collapse of the buildings. But even these changes were not planned for addition to the IBC code until release of the 2012 edition.  Apparently the concerns about the SFRM and its bond strength were not that great.

That might be because it’s tough to see how the SFRM code changes were related anyway.  That is, the ICC changes to require greater fireproofing bond strength cannot be reconciled with the fact that the fireproofing in the alleged failure areas of the towers was already far greater than what the code required.  Yet still the buildings suffered “progressive global collapse,” a phenomenon for which the ICC made no changes.

As for the inexplicable collapse of WTC 7, the ICC made no changes there either. The alleged root cause of floor beam thermal expansion is not addressed by any ICC code change.

How about New York City and government leaders in general?  Were federal and state leaders, municipalities and building professionals willing to put money into the relevant recommendations made by NIST, and thereby endorse the official explanations for what happened at the WTC?  No, they were not.

The current (2008) NYC code includes changes that were said to be modeled after the ICC’s changes, which were said to be a result of the NIST WTC investigation.  However, the actual changes made were not related to NIST’s three root causes of the WTC destruction.  Instead, they focused on “widened stairwells in high-rise buildings, expanded sprinkler systems, and enhanced emergency voice communication systems.”[14]

The NYC building code includes a requirement for SFRM bond strength that clearly does not take the WTC investigation into account.  The requirement is that the bond strength “shall not be less than 150 pounds per square foot (psf).“[15]  The problem is that the bond strength of the fireproofing in the WTC was known to be much higher than this and yet we’re told it was still widely dislodged.

The Port Authority of NY and NJ provided 64 bond strength measurement values to NIST, taken from the fireproofing in the impact and failures zones of the WTC.  NIST even listed these in its report.  None were as low as 150 psf and most were twice that value.[16]  The failure to increase the bond strength requirement in the building code, leaving it at a value that was far lower than what the WTC had in place, indicates that NYC officials are not in the least bit worried about bond strength.

Related to WTC 7, the 2008 NYC code also refers to the need to ensure that the fire-induced expansion of building components (e.g. steel beams) does “not adversely interfere with the system’s capabilities.”[17]  But the 1968 code included similar requirements and even stated that the coefficient of expansion for all building materials needed to be addressed in test reports.[18]

More specifically, the 1968 code that WTC 7 was required to meet stated that the design “shall provide for forces and/or movements resulting from an assumed expansion corresponding to a change in temperature.”  Therefore not only was there no change as a result of the NIST WTC 7 report, given the NIST account we might wonder if the original WTC 7 was constructed outside of the NYC code requirements.

 Another reason the NIST WTC reports are false

Despite its grandiose claims, NIST knows that the building community has ignored the WTC investigation findings.  That’s clear from NIST’s own tracking sheet on its website.  This tracks all 30 recommendations from the NIST WTC investigation and lists the code “outcomes” from each.[19]  As of August 2011, the most recent update, not one NIST recommendation related to progressive global collapse, “widely dislodged” fireproofing, or linear thermal expansion has been adopted.

The two NIST recommendations that call for (unspecified) measures to prevent progressive global collapse have been completely ignored.  Other things like an additional exit stairway, a fire service access elevator, and stairwells with glow-in-the-dark markings are simply not relevant.[20]

NIST might argue that there is one ICC change that calls for fireproofing to have increased bond strength and be installed and inspected correctly.  But since bond strength was not a root cause of the WTC destruction, and measurements just before 9/11 showed that the fireproofing in the impact zones was far better installed and had far better bond strength than what was required, this is a red herring.  That’s not to mention that no tests were ever done to indicate what bond strength was needed to resist flying aircraft debris.

Are tall buildings safer as a result of the NIST WTC report?  No, they are most certainly not. And if people actually understood and believed the official account of what happened at the WTC they would not enter tall buildings because in doing so they would be putting their lives at risk.

The truth, however, is that the NIST WTC investigation was a politically motivated diversion that produced reports which are known to be false.  This fact is re-emphasized by the knowledge that the international building community, including that of New York City, has not adopted code changes that can be traced to the root causes cited by NIST for the WTC destruction.

That question is not welcome in polite conversation.

For example, last August I was invited to appear on National Public Radio (NPR) to discuss the lasting phenomenon of 9/11 skepticism.  The show’s regular host was replaced by a woman who had clearly made up her mind about the subject.  Ironically, throughout the show she made snide comments about “conspiracy theorists” when referring to the millions of people who don’t believe the official conspiracy theory.  Her other guests, from the Hearst Corporation and Canada’s National Post, joined her in using some variation of this phrase every thirty seconds during the hour long show.  As the sole representative of 9/11 skeptics, I was allowed five minutes to speak until it was clear the conversation was not going as intended.[2]

People listening to this verbal turkey shoot must have wondered what happened to NPR.  Had the “P” suddenly been changed to Propaganda?  Possibly, but what is more important to notice is that, when organizations become effective, they are often co-opted by powerful interests that have hidden agendas.  As reported by Robert Parry, the co-opting of National Public Radio by right-wing corporatists is a great example.[3]  Another example of a phenomenon that has long been co-opted by powerful interests for effecting political change is terrorism.

At a minimum, 9/11 skeptics are willing to consider the possibility that the crimes of 9/11 were not just blowback but were what could be called managed blowback, or the co-opting of terrorism.  Support for this reasoning has been strengthened by the knowledge that al Qaeda was an ally of the U.S. in the recent war on Libya and is apparently working on the same side as the U.S. in Syria as well.[4,5]  None of that is surprising given that al Qaeda was born of the CIA-funded Afghan Mujahideen in the 1980s.

Adding to the suspicion that U.S. authorities are behind terrorist acts are the reports that the FBI has planned such terrorism and has engaged in entrapment of the accused “terrorists” in the years since 9/11.[6]  It appears that the CIA has been caught in the same kind of trickery recently.[7]

When applied to the 9/11 attacks, the concept of managed blowback means that there must have been others involved in allowing or encouraging 9/11 to happen for purposes other than simple retribution or symbolic gesture.  Unfortunately, the 9/11 Commission never entertained any such notions.

“Our aim has not been to assign individual blame.  Our aim has been to provide the fullest possible account of the events surrounding 9/11 and to identify lessons learned.”[8]

Yet here we are preparing to assign individual blame to KSM and a few others.

The 183 water-boarding sessions inflicted on KSM undoubtedly caused mental stress on a level that could not possibly lead to gaining useful information.  Instead, his torture was almost certainly meant to eliminate any information he otherwise might have been able to communicate.  We’ll never know because the tape recordings of those torture sessions, upon which the 9/11 Commission Report was indirectly based, were destroyed.[9]

Perhaps that is better than the treatment we gave to the other leading 9/11 suspect.  Last year we murdered Osama bin Laden without a trial and dumped his body at sea before bothering to get any information out of him about the organization he led.  It doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to wonder how many lives might have been saved by the capture and interrogation of that alleged terrorist ringleader.

Some might say that, because the 9/11 Commission pointed to OBL and KSM as being the masterminds behind the attacks, its findings provide adequate legal basis for executing OBL and torturing KSM.  After all, we all know who the enemy is, right?

“We learned about an enemy… [whose] purpose is to rid the world of religious and political pluralism, the plebiscite, and equal right for women. ”[10]

Unfortunately, there is significant evidence that the official conspiracy for 9/11 is not based on fact.  For one thing, the accused men were not the religious zealots that the official myth made them out to be.  KSM himself was reported by the Los Angeles Times to have spent years engaging in behavior that was far from that of a devout Muslim.  “He met associates in karaoke bars and giant go-go clubs filled with mirrors, flashing lights and bikini-clad dancers. He held meetings at four-star hotels. He took scuba-diving lessons at a coastal resort.”  No one suspected him “of being dangerous to anything but his bank account.”[11]

What kind of information could this man have that required 183 water-boarding sessions to eliminate?  How could the 9/11 Commission have possibly mistaken him for a religious fanatic?  Maybe we’ll find out in the coming year as the “open military trial” proceeds.

In the meantime, however, it is clear that other suspects should be considered.  My own research has revealed a few “white guys in ties” who, if properly investigated, will lead to the people most responsible for the 9/11 attacks.  Unlike the officially accused, these guys do not just happen to live on the resource-rich lands that Western corporations and governments so desperately need to control in order to maintain their economies.  Many alternative suspects do have strong links to governments and corporations, however, and were in position to actually accomplish one or more aspects of the attacks.

Would such an alternative group of suspects form a conspiracy that better explains the evidence?  That and other questions will be considered in a forthcoming book called Another Nineteen.  Prior to publication, related research will be made available at the website Another19.com, while the government simultaneously prepares to conduct the trial of KSM and his alleged colleagues.

The attacks of 9/11 were most definitely a conspiracy and discovering the correct explanation will require a theory.  Unfortunately, attempts by official story supporters to use ridicule to prevent consideration of alternative accounts have been successful.  Theatrical media accounts and FBI and CIA-arranged terrorist events have similarly propped up the myth of 21^st century terrorism and our on-again-off-again enemy called al Qaeda.  But there is a lot more to the story.  Some of us are dedicated to revealing more of the truth and if snide labels make people feel more comfortable and ready to look at legitimate suspects, I’ll take the ridicule.

Endnotes:

For many years prior to 9/11, two Americans were in unique positions to originate and frame the national conversation about terrorism.  Those same two people, Brian Michael Jenkins and L. Paul Bremer, played extraordinary roles related to aviation security and World Trade Center (WTC) security in the few years before the 9/11 attacks.  Could Bremer and Jenkins have been front men for a program that hyped the threat of terrorism while at the same time manufacturing terrorist events for political purposes?

If so, it would not have been the first time that the American people were subject to the hard sell of a threat to national security only to discover that the threat was overblown or non-existent.  The Soviet military threat to the U.S. after World War II is now widely known to have been a fabrication hyped for political and financial gains.[1]

The propaganda that drove the Cold War was effective in establishing government policy primarily because it was effective in framing the national conversation about what threats were important to consider, and in controlling the media.  The same has been true for the propaganda driving the War on Terror.  A short review of the people and reports that promoted the Soviet communist threat is helpful in understanding the “Islamic terrorist” threat that has evolved from it.

The communist threat and state-sponsored terrorism

One man, Paul Nitze, was behind the three most important reports that promoted the perception of a Soviet threat against the United States after World War II.  The first of these reports, NSC68, was instrumental in changing the policy of the Truman Administration, which initially did not perceive the Soviets as a major threat.  The second Nitze report was the Gaither Report that, in 1957, said the U.S. had fallen behind the Soviets in nuclear weaponry.

As an investment banker turned top government policy maker, Nitze was clearly a powerful man.  Author Burton Hersh has said that Nitze was one of two people who met quarterly in Frank Wisner’s office to select the missions that would be approved for The Office of Policy Coordination, the CIA’s early covert operations group.[2]

Nitze was also the founder of the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD). This was a political action group that brought about the remilitarization of the U.S. in the 1950s by promoting the ideas in NSC68.  CPD was resurrected in 1975 and 1976 by Cold War hawks, including Donald Rumsfeld, who wanted to eliminate the policy of détente and Soviet containment in favor of another military build-up.  The group was resurrected yet again in 2004 to promote a more aggressive War on Terror.[3]

Author Peter Dale Scott noted a significant difference in process between the first incarnation of the CPD and the second.  As Scott wrote, the first CPD was created by a consensus within the state to mobilize against a Soviet threat that was open to misunderstanding at the time.  The second iteration, however, “was mounted in opposition to a government policy that threatened to establish a more peaceful and less militarized world. In short, the interests being defended were not those of the nation but of the military-industrial complex itself.”[4]

Nitze became the Secretary of the Navy in 1963, serving until 1967, and therefore he was in that position at the time of the 1964 Tonkin Gulf incident.  The resulting Gulf of Tonkin Resolution brought the U.S. military into Vietnam based on claims about an attack on U.S. Navy vessels.  Government records, produced as early as 1968, indicate that Nitze was responsible for suppressing documents that proved the Tonkin Gulf claims made by the U.S. Navy were false.[5]  The U.S. ships were never attacked.

Despite these troubling facts, Nitze went on to serve as Deputy Secretary of Defense from 1967 to 1969. His boss, Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford, essentially left the management of the DOD to Nitze.[6]  But it was Clifford who authored the official report on the 1967 U.S.S. Liberty attack.  Clifford’s report found that the Israeli military was negligent but that the aggression against the Liberty was not pre-meditated.[7]  Many of the survivors maintain that it was deliberate.[8]  Clifford went on to infamy as a leading figure in the terrorist-financing Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).

In 1969, Nitze and his mentor, Dean Acheson, began to tutor aspiring politicos that had been recommended by their colleague Albert Wohlstetter of the University of Chicago and the RAND Corporation.  Under Nitze’s supervision, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz had their introduction to the workings and power structure of the U.S. government.[9]

The Tonkin Gulf non-event was undoubtedly an example of false flag manipulation for political purposes and the Liberty incident appears to have been a major cover-up of an attack upon U.S. servicemen. State-sponsored terrorism was already a well-established fact by then, however. For example, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff approved a plan called Operation Northwoods in 1962.

Operation Northwoods called “for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. [This would provide] the public and international backing they needed to launch their war.”[10]  The signed documents are available today and because of this we know that high level U.S. government representatives conspire, on occasion, to commit crimes against the American people for the purpose of starting wars.[11]

Although Operations Northwoods was rejected by President Kennedy, the plan becomes more interesting historically when one considers the ensuing activities of the members of the JCS who approved that plan.  For example, JCS chaiman Lyman Leminitzer went directly from approving Operation Northwoods in 1962 to become Supreme Allied Commander in Europe (SACEUR), from 1963 to 1969, putting him in charge of NATO forces.  According to author Daniele Ganser, the SACEUR ran an agency called the Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC) that was responsible for coordinating Operation Gladio.[12]

Gladio was a well-coordinated covert campaign of terrorism directed by the U.S. and other Western governments against their own populations. Hundreds of innocent people were killed or maimed in terrorist attacks which were then blamed on leftist subversives or other political opponents.  Italian General Paolo Inzerilli commanded the Italian forces of Gladio from 1974 to 1986 and he later said that “the omnipresent United States dominated the secret CPC that directed the secret war.”[13]

From NATO and CPC headquarters in Paris, and later Brussels, the U.S. played a leading role in arming and coordinating the terrorist groups in various European countries from 1960 into the late 1980s.  Run largely by the US, Britain and Belgium, other NATO countries involved included Germany, France, Italy, Denmark, Norway, The Netherlands, Portugal, Turkey, and Greece.  The terrorist attacks of Gladio were coupled with terror propaganda in order to drive public and political will to fund and support ever-increasing military preparation and response to the perceived communist threat.

Incidentally, Donald Rumsfeld was the U.S. Ambassador to NATO in 1973 and 1974 and was living and working amidst the Gladio planners in Brussels during the height of that program’s operations.  Alexander Haig became SACEUR as Rumsfeld left Brussels, and he remained in that position until 1979.  Haig was a White House colleague of Bremer, Jenkins and Rumsfeld before and after his time as SACEUR.

Paul Nitze got his chance to oversee the third major report that hyped the Soviet threat thanks to another Operations Northwoods signatory. The project known as Team B was initiated through the actions of President Ford’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, led by Operation Northwoods signatory George Anderson.  Team B was a re-evaluation of existing CIA (or Team A) data, by a small group of “outside experts” led by Richard Pipes, that falsely portrayed the Soviet military threat as persistent and growing when all objective evidence said the opposite.  The initiative was approved by CIA Director George H.W. Bush, and Nitze and Wolfowitz were among the lead advisors.

While Rumsfeld was in Brussels, a European “network of private-sector spies” called Cercle Pinay decided to export its propaganda techniques to the United States.  Cercle Pinay operated during the Cold War era to provide “covert funding, black propaganda, and …connections to planned coups de etat” for a private intelligence network that was composed of “rogue agents of the international Right.”[14]

In 1974 the British part of the Cercle complex worked to create a transatlantic bridgehead of its propaganda front, the Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC), called the Washington Institute for the Study of Conflict (WISC).  In April 1975, WISC was formally founded.  ISC, staffed by former MI6 agents, “put over the intelligence community’s views to the press under the guise of a neutral academic research body.”  WISC followed suit in the States.

WISC joined forces with an existing propaganda machine based in New York, and founded by William Casey and CPD member Frank R. Barnett, called the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC).   At the same time, the roles of NItze and the other Team B champions of the military-industrial complex grew under the Ford and Reagan administrations.

The last meeting of Cercle Pinay occurred in December 1979, and was attended by William Colby, Federal Reserve Bank chairman Paul Volcker, and Heritage Foundation president Edwin Feulner.  The operations of the Cercle complex were redirected by the new head of the French SDECE, Alexandre de Marenches.  It was de Marenches who then led the formation of the Safari Club.  De Marenches also recommended William Casey as CIA director to Ronald Reagan, and became friends with the Belgian-American propagandist Arnaud de Borchgrave, who was later a shareholder in Stratesec.[15]

As with Nitze’s leadership of the three primary reports on the Soviet threat, two men were primary leaders of the terrorism-related commissions in the years leading up to 9/11.  These men were Brian Michael Jenkins and L. Paul Bremer.  With the help of Nitze and others, Bremer and Jenkins transformed the Soviet threat into a threat of “international terrorism” in the 1970s and 1980s, and further transformed that threat into today’s widely held belief in “Islamic terrorism.”  To better understand the roles that Bremer and Jenkins played related to 9/11, and as terror propagandists, we should examine their personal histories.

Brian Michael Jenkins

From 1989 to 1998, Jenkins was the deputy chairman of Crisis Management for Kroll Associates. Kroll directed the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ) response to the 1993 World Trade Center (WTC) bombing in terms of security upgrades. As stated by the PANYNJ program manager for WTC security systems, Douglas G. Karpiloff — “After the bombing, we had the top security consultants in the nation, Kroll Associates, do a complete security analysis for us, and we followed their recommendations.”[16]

During this time, Jenkins reviewed the possibility of airliners crashing into the Twin Towers.[17]  As the leader of the WTC threat assessment, Jenkins was later questioned about plans that might have been made to avoid what happened on 9/11.  Jenkins said –”We knew there was no realistic way to protect the skyscrapers from a suicide mission. We couldn’t very well mount missile batteries above the Windows on the World restaurant.”[18]

Jenkin’s history as a special operations officer and long-time right-wing political advisor contributed to criticism of his role at the WTC.  Not long after the 1993 bombing it was reported that Jenkins was “trotted out” to explain the threat we faced.  Described as one of “the hoariest holdovers from the era of Reagan ‘roll, back,’ RAND’s Brian Jenkins was both an apologist for and one of the architects of the contra war against Nicaragua–a terror war aimed primarily at the civilian population and infrastructure.”[19]

Jenkins played a critical role in planning for future terrorist events at the WTC, including having reviewed the possibility of airliner crashes before they actually happened on 9/11.  Coupled with the claims that he participated in planning and implementing a “terror war” in Central America during the 1980s, these facts should make him a subject of considerable examination with respect to 9/11.

Born in 1942 and commissioned in the infantry at the age of 19, Jenkins was a Special Forces soldier who saw action in many covert operations of the 1960s.  He was in Guatemala in 1965, the year that U.S. security adviser John P. Longan arrived and, “along with a Guatemalan Army élite, launched Operation Cleanup, a death squad operation that throughout 1966 effected kidnappings and assassinations that killed the leaders of Guatemala’s labor unions and peasant federations.”[20]

Jenkins was also part of the 7^th Special Forces occupation of the Dominican Republic, in which only “around 75 members of E company of the 7th Special Forces Group were deployed.”[21]  Jenkins then went on to serve with the 5th Special Forces Group in Vietnam where he lived in the countryside among villagers, “trying to recruit as many as possible into a pro-U.S. counter-guerrilla force.”[22]

During this time Jenkins signed on as a field consultant for the RAND Corporation.  He became well known for a confidential 1968 paper he wrote for RAND entitled “The Unchangeable War.”[23]  Jenkins cited nine obstacles to a U.S. victory in Vietnam and suggested the war could be lost due to these symptoms of the military’s “institutional rigidity.”  He also pointed out that his boss, General Cleighton Abrams, was in charge of a pacification program run by Robert Komer, who was credited with managing the mass murder project known as the Phoenix Program and later became a WISC member.

In a 1971 paper that described the last ditch effort to “Vietnamize” the war, Jenkins thanked his RAND colleagues Romer and Fred Ikle.[24]  As a pioneer in psychological operations, Ikle had written reports and memoranda for RAND through the 1960s.  It seems reasonable to wonder if Jenkins was also a psychological operative and if he was part of the Phoenix Program, as is suspected of Richard Armitage.

In 1972, at the age of 30, Jenkins launched RAND’s terrorism research program.  He was “summoned to Washington by the Nixon administration and asked to help set up a Cabinet-level committee to deal with the terrorism threat.”[25]  Two years later, Jenkins wrote that terrorism sometimes works.  He also made clear that the ability to engage in terrorism was not limited to foreigners, but that even U.S. soldiers could be seen as terrorists if they killed civilians.  Jenkins wrote about “government terror” and how national governments would begin to employ terrorists as surrogates.[26]

Jenkins further explained that –“Terrorism is aimed at the people watching, not at the actual victims.  Terrorism is theater.”[27]  He believed that one objective of terrorism was “to enforce obedience and cooperation. This is the normal objective of state or official terrorism” and that “success demands the creation of an atmosphere of fear and the seeming omnipresence of the internal security apparatus.”[28]

Jenkins wrote papers with WISC member George K. Tanham and was published not only by RAND but also through Crane Russak Company, which published papers by WISC member James Theberge, NSIC propagandist Frank R. Barnett., and Paul Nitze.

A 1976 paper by Jenkins described a RAND summit meeting on terrorism that included such luminaries as Andrew Marshall.  In this paper, Jenkins argued for the more flexible military that Rumsfeld later promoted, and he called for the creation of a new kind of special operations unit, just like the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) that succeeded the OPC a few years later, to collaborate with the CIA to address terrorism.  It was also suggested that U.S. counterterrorism collaboration with the British, West Germans and Israelis should continue.[29]

In 1981, Donald Rumsfeld became Chairman of the Board for the RAND Corporation, a role he remained in until 1986 and filled again from 1995 to 1996.  As Rumsfeld took over at RAND, Jenkins reviewed media exaggeration of terrorist events and the psychological impact of that coverage.  He wrote – “The media exaggerate the strength of the terrorists, creating the illusion of their omnipresence.”  At the same time, he reviewed public support, via poll responses, for a “special world police force” to combat terrorism.[30]

Around this time, Jenkins began to advocate for using terrorism to psychologically manipulate civilian populations. As an advisor in the construction of a counterinsurgency program in El Salvador, Jenkins recommended that traditional methods be supplemented by the use of propaganda to discredit insurgents as “terrorists.”  In another 1984 paper, Jenkins recommended that the U.S. engage in low-intensity warfare against Nicaragua through a proxy army.  Such actions fall within Jenkins’ own definition of state sponsored terrorism.[31]

By 1986, Jenkins was among a small group that advised Secretary of State George Shultz on matters of terrorism.  It was said that “his trips to Washington became more frequent. He also spent time with CIA Director William J. Casey, Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger and other administration advisors.”[32]  That same year Bremer became the new Ambassador at Large for Counter-terrorism and Richard Armitage was working as the lead counter-terrorism representative for the Department of Defense.

In 1988, it was beginning to become clear that the image of a Soviet threat could no longer be sustained.  The Soviet empire was crumbling economically and that fact could not be glossed over.  At the time, Jenkins began suggesting that long-proclaimed Soviet responsibility for terrorism was not based on evidence but was politically required in the Reagan era.  Jenkins believed that blaming the Soviets going forward could only hurt the anti-terrorism efforts.  A new enemy was needed.

The problem was that a new enemy of Soviet caliber was not evident at the time.  Libya was again blamed for the December 1988 Lockerbie bombing, but the predecessors to al Qaeda, were still working for the CIA in Afghanistan.  In fact, Richard Armitage was meeting and working with the Pakistani ISI and the Mujahideen, parts of which would later be known as al Qaeda.[33]

Between 1988 and 1998 the U.S. /al Qaeda connection grew, as evidenced by the recruiting done in U.S. centers like al-Kifah in New York, and by the revelations about al Qaeda’s operative Ali Mohamed. Known as a key planner for the first WTC attack in 1993 and a trainer for the 9/11 plot, Mohamed was a U.S. Army drill sergeant and an informant for the FBI.  He was allowed to move freely in and out of the U.S. for many years and when detained, he was allowed to plea-bargain.[34]

U.S. protection of operatives like Mohamed was one way to ensure an increase in terrorism.  But to transform the primary threat from one of a monolithic Soviet or communist empire to a more flexible, non-state terrorist organization like al Qaeda, significant amounts of inter-government communication coupled with public propaganda was required.  That is, we needed official commissions to assess and report on the new threat.

In 1996, Jenkins was appointed to the “White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security,” joining Vice President Gore, Stratesec director James Abrahamson, former CIA director John Deutch, and FBI director Louis Freeh.  One recommendation of the Commission urged all-civilian implementation of Global Positioning System (GPS) devices provided by the Defense department.[35]  Other recommendations focused on the passenger profiling and technology related to hijacking prevention.

In 1999 Jenkins co-authored a book entitled Aviation Terrorism and Security with British professor Paul Wilkinson.[36]  Wilkinson was a terrorism propagandist for the Cercle Pinay and ISC, the parent organization of WISC.[37]  He often made public presentations with ISC leaders, including Brian Crozier, Robert Moss and Hans Josef Horchem, head of the German terror propaganda outlet.

As a primary terrorism advisor for Margaret Thatcher, Wilkinson was invited to speak at the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism (JCIT) in July 1979, along with Benjamin Netanyahu, Team B members Richard Pipes and George Keegan, Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson, and George H.W. Bush.

As author Nafeez Ahmed wrote in The War on Truth,

“the JCIT established the ideological foundations for the ‘War on Terror.’  The JCIT’s defining theme was that international terrorism constituted an organized political movement whose ultimate origin was the Soviet Union”.[38]

Later, in 1999 and 2000, Jenkins served as an advisor to the National Commission on Terrorism, led by L. Paul Bremer, otherwise known as the “Bremer Commission.”  Details of that Commission’s findings are related below.

Jenkins was also made a primary advisor to the Hart-Rudman Commission, another of the major terrorism related commissions chartered to evaluate the new threat.  Members of the Hart-Rudman Commission included Lee Hamilton, who would later become vice-chairman of the 9/11 Commission, and Lynne Cheney, who would quit the commission apparently due to other members not agreeing with her claim that a war with China was the biggest threat to the U.S..[39]

The Hart-Rudman Commission reported in January 2001 that “America will become increasingly vulnerable to hostile attack on our homeland, and our military superiority will not help us.” The Commission also predicted that — “Space will become a critical and competitive military environment” and called for “the creation of a new independent National Homeland Security Agency.”[40]

After 9/11, in a 2002 pamphlet called “Countering al Qaeda,” Jenkins wrote – “Al Qaeda constitutes the most serious immediate threat to the security of the United States.” He thanked Bremer.

L. Paul Bremer

Bremer is most well known for being the Iraq Occupation governor after the 2003 U.S. invasion and for having made many of the decisions that drove Iraqi society into a spiraling downturn.  But the man can easily be seen as the most important figure in the U.S. assessment of terrorism prior to 9/11.

Oddly enough, Bremer was at the WTC on 9/11.  His employer at the time of the attacks, insurance giant Marsh & McLennan, occupied the exact eight floors of the north tower impact zone.  In October 2000, Bremer took a job as the CEO of Marsh Political Risk Practice and he had an office in the south tower.  Exactly what political risks he was assessing at the time are not known, but he was in precise position to help take advantage of the political win on 9/11.

On the day of the attacks, he was interviewed on NBC television and stated that Osama bin Laden was responsible and that possibly Iraq and Iran were involved too, and he called for the most severe military response possible. Google removed the interview video from its servers three times, and blocked it once.[41]

Bremer was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1941, making him just a year older than Jenkins.  He was educated at Ivy League prep schools including Phillips Academy a few years before George W. Bush.  Like Bush, Bremer also graduated from Yale University, in 1963.  He went on to earn a Certificate of Political Studies in 1964 from the Institut D’Etudes Politiques of the University of Paris, and then went on to Harvard for an MBA.

In 1966 he joined the Foreign Service, which sent him first to Kabul, Afghanistan, as a general services officer. He was later assigned to Blantyre, Malawi, as economic and commercial officer, from 1968 to 1971.

At the time, the CIA was putting its agents in Foreign Service offices in order to ensure diplomatic immunity, and to provide security for the files and communications. History had led to the “establishment of small to very large contingents of American intelligence officers in most of our embassies and consulates throughout the world.”[42]

Bremer was in Malawi when it was essentially a police state, and only a few years after Frank Carlucci was assigned to the same general area.  Carlucci was urgently expelled from Tanzania by that country’s president after the U.S. was accused of using white mercenaries to attack from neighboring regions.[43]  Carlucci was formally referred to as a “Foreign Service” agent, yet was also expelled from both Congo and Zanzibar for subversive activities.

During the 1970s, Bremer held various domestic posts with the State Department, including as an assistant to Henry Kissinger from 1972 to 1976. He was Deputy Chief of Mission in Oslo from 1976-79, during the time that Alexander Haig was SACEUR.

Bremer returned to the US to take a post of Deputy Executive Secretary of the Department of State from 1979 to 1981.  Interestingly, a 1979 letter to Bremer was seized in the US embassy in Tehran during the revolution. The letter, written two months before the U.S. hostages were taken, assured Bremer that “our interest in continued access to Iran’s oil should be safeguarded by the new government’s ability to maintain order in the oil fields and its need for earnings.”[44]

In 1981 Bremer was made Executive Secretary and Special Assistant to Alexander Haig.  Shortly after Haig’s resignation in June 1982, senior officials in the State Department were told by Bremer, who “runs the nuts-and-bolts operations of the department,” to prepare brief memos on key issues to bring Mr. Shultz up to date.[45]  As Schultz settled in as the new Secretary of State, he specifically chose to retain Bremer and Lawrence Eagleburger among his top aides.

Ronald Reagan appointed Bremer as Ambassador to the Netherlands in 1983 and Bremer stayed in that position until 1986. The secret wars of Gladio proceeded in The Netherlands while Bremer was there, as they had in Norway when he was Deputy Chief of Mission in that country.[46]

In 1986, Reagan brought Bremer back to the U.S. by appointing him Ambassador-at-Large for Counterterrorism as well as Coordinator for Counterterrorism.  William Casey and the others in the Reagan administration had been meeting with Brian Jenkins that year on the terrorist threat.  At the time, Libya’s leader Muammar Qaddafi was cited the greatest purveyor of terrorism.  This might have had something to do with Qaddafi’s attempts to convert his oil trade from U.S. dollars to a new African gold dinar. But the bombing of a Berlin discotheque was blamed on Libya and the U.S. bombed the country in response.

While Bremer was the Ambassador to the Netherlands and then the State Department’s counterterrorism lead, Paul Nitze was Special Advisor to the President and Secretary of State on Arms Control.  Nitze went on to serve in a similar role for George H.W. Bush, but Bremer resigned to join Kissinger Associates as Managing Director.

As Bremer resigned, the New York Times reported that Reagan’s Clint Eastwood-style talk about fighting terrorism had come to little or nothing in terms of justice.  During Bremer’s tenure only one terrorist was ever brought to the U.S. for trial, and he was small potatoes.  Abu Nidal was cited as the “most notorious practitioner of terror in the Middle East” yet no indictment for Nidal was issued.[47]

Kissinger Associates had a number of meetings with BCCI representatives, perhaps while Bremer worked there.  BCCI was involved in funding terrorists and was linked to the Pakistani intelligence network, from which several alleged 9/11 conspirators came, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In fact, Time magazine reported that — “You can’t draw a line separating the bank’s black operatives and Pakistan’s intelligence services.”[48]  As the BCCI scandal came to a crescendo, Bremer and his colleagues at Kissinger Associates refused to provide documents requested by the Senate investigators.[49]

At the time of the February 1993 WTC bombing, Bremer made a remark similar to that Jenkins made, in terms of the difficulty in preventing terrorism at the WTC.

“There is just going to be less security at a place like the World Trade Center than at the Congress, the White House or the Supreme Court,” said Bremer.  ”It is easier to move around in New York, and it is easier to create a great amount of terror there.”[50]

Again, it seems odd that the American who knew the most about terrorism would remark about the danger to the WTC and then be located in exactly that dangerous spot on 9/11.  It is also curious that his colleague Jenkins, who was perhaps the second most well-known U.S. terrorism expert and who designed the security system for the WTC complex, would make a similar statement about the inability to protect the WTC.

In 1996, while still working for Kissinger Associates, Bremer wrote a scathing article about Clinton’s lack of focus on terrorism.  In this article, Bremer called on Clinton to enforce a strong, ten step plan to address terrorism through uncompromising action.  “These are not options” he wrote.[51]  Apparently Bremer did not see the irony in his comment about options with respect to his own company’s refusal to cooperate with the Senate investigation into the terrorist financing BCCI.

In 1996, the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, located near the headquarters of Saudi Aramco, were bombed.  Contrary to claims that al Qaeda was behind the bombing, the U.S. blamed Hezbollah al-Hejaz for the attack.

The U.S. government had attributed only four terrorist attacks to al Qaeda prior to 9/11, cited in a 2002 State Department list and re-published in 2004.[52]  Those attacks were a series of bombings in Yemen in December 1992, the shooting down of U.S. helicopters in Somalia in 1993, the bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, and the U.S.S. Cole incident in 2000.

In August 1998, two U.S. embassies in Africa were bombed and the attacks were attributed to Osama bin Laden (OBL) and the as-yet unreported group called al Qaeda.  The US government responded with bombings of Sudan and Afghanistan and, with help from the New York Times, began to drum up an intense myth about OBL and al Qaeda.

”This is, unfortunately, the war of the future,” Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright said. ”The Osama bin Laden organization has basically declared war on Americans and has made very clear that these are all Americans, anywhere.”

NSA Samuel Berger: ”This is an evil that is directed at the United States. It’s going to persist.”

Under Secretary of State Thomas R. Pickering: ”We are in this for the long haul.”[53]

State Department representative James Foley: ”A new era, in effect, is upon us. It’s imperative that the American people understand and prepare themselves for facing this kind of a threat into the 21st century for as long as it’s necessary to face the threat.”

In retrospect, it is surprising that this was the first ever reference to al Qaeda in the New York Times, only three years before 9/11.  The first New York Times reference to “Ussama bin Laden” was In April 1994.

However, the first media reference to “al Qaida” was six months after the CIA’s Alec Station started, in August 1996 by UPI.  Alec Station, which focused on the pursuit of OBL, began operations in February 1996.  But the 9/11 Commission suggested that the CIA had knowledge about al Qaeda four or five years before that.  It is not clear why the New York Times did not pick up on al Qaeda as a threat until just a few years before 9/11, and ten years after the CIA had.

More surprising is that The Washington Post did not report on al Qaeda until June 1999, and the reporting was highly speculative about the power behind this new threat.

 “The indictment describes bin Laden as the leader, or “emir,” of al Qaeda, a “global terrorist organization” with tentacles that allegedly reach from his hideout in the mountains of Afghanistan to followers in Texas, Florida and New York.

…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. Only eight of the 17 suspects are alleged to have been in Kenya and Tanzania around the time the embassies were bombed.” [54]

These statements should be compared to those of Bremer made a year earlier. Bremer was completely confident where the Post was skeptical.

”This is a crusade he’s on,” said L. Paul Bremer

”There is a quantum difference in the way bin Laden looks at terror,” he said. ”What we are seeing is a shift to terrorism on a more theological basis, to groups that are not after precise political goals. When you start to embrace goals as broad as bin Laden’s, you are no longer constrained by the number of casualties you incur. You are now in a different game.”

“‘There’s no such thing as eliminating terror, any more than eliminating crime. What we’re in for, if we’re serious about it, is the kind of sustained effort it took during the cold war — not months, not years, but decades.”[55]

As of that moment, the U.S. had found its new Soviet caliber threat on which to base a new militarization of the country.  It is interesting, however, that Bremer made sensationalist claims of a “crusade” and a “quantum difference” yet a year later The Washington Post was reporting that the government’s case against this new terror group was “largely circumstantial.”

In any case, Bremer was selected for a leading role in several of the ensuing terrorism commissions.  First, he was appointed to the Gilmore Commission, chaired by Virginia Governor James Gilmore.  Donald Rumsfeld was originally a member of the Gilmore Commission as well.[56]  The vice chairman was James R. Clapper, the current director of national intelligence. Coincidentally, James Abrahamson, director of WTC security company Stratesec, later hired Clapper as his fellow director at the satellite spy company Geo-Eye.

The Gilmore Commission was a federally-sponsored effort with RAND oversight that was chartered to assess readiness, and evaluate the terrorism response programs and coordination between federal, state, and local governments.   In total the Commission ultimately “made 164 recommendations regarding the domestic response to terrorism. Of those 164 recommendations, all have been adopted in whole or in part by the Congress and the Federal Government.”[57]

Unfortunately, despite the Commission’s 1999 claim that “All terrorist acts are crimes”[58] the greatest terrorist attack on American soil would happen two years later and would not be treated as a crime.  This could be because the Gilmore Commission excluded “acts of violence committed by bona fide state agents” and therefore we were all free to assume what the 9/11 Commission eventually concluded – that no government supported the 9/11 conspirators.

The Gilmore Commission found no evidence of U.S. sponsored terrorism or state manipulation of policy through violence despite the 1990 revelations of Operation Gladio, the 1997 revelations about Operations Northwoods, and the Tonkin Gulf non-event, which was widely known to be false as of the mid-1990s.

Bremer was then appointed Chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism by House Speaker Dennis Hastert in 1999. Other members of the Commission included Jenkins, Fred Ikle, James Woolsey, Maurice Sonnenberg, and Jane Harman.  In July 1999, the sole Muslim nominee for Bremer’s commission was removed after complaints from certain political action groups.[59]  Apparently, the practical outcome of equating Islam with terrorism was already a foregone conclusion.

The “Bremer Commission” based its report on interviews with a number of people who were seen as experts on terrorism.   This included Richard Armitage. Marion Bowman, Richard Clarke, Stephen Cambone, FBI director Louis Freeh, Robert Gates, Jenkins’ RAND cohort Bruce Hoffman, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, soon-to-be acting FBI director Thomas Pickard, Michael Rolince, Michael Sheehan, CIA director George Tenet, and Jenkins’ fellow propagandist and JCIT attendee, Paul Wilkinson.

To clarify how oddly coincidental this interview list was, one should remember that the number of U.S. intelligence failures to capture the alleged 9/11 hijackers was astounding.[60]  And many of the people mentioned above, including Richard Clarke, George Tenet, Louis Freeh, Marion “Spike” Bowman, Michael Rolince and Thomas Pickard played critical roles in those astounding failures.  Others on the list, like Armitage, Casey protégé Gates, Rumsfeld sidekick Cambone, and Cheney assistant Libby, benefited from the 9/11 attacks through unprecedented political gain.  Wilkinson’s presence is simply evidence that the Bremer Commission was a propaganda operation from the start.

Surprisingly, according to the Commission’s vice chairman Maurice Sonnenberg, the Bremer Commission essentially wrote the USA Patriot Act.  Sonnenberg boasted that 20 of the Commission’s 25 recommendations made it into that controversial and poorly reviewed legislation.

A member of what has been referred to as the closest thing America has to a “formal aristocracy,” Sonnenberg described the reasons for terrorism against the U.S. very simply.  “And why do some people out there hate America? We’re the top dog,” he said. “Everybody hates the top dog.”[61]

Sonneberg’s company, Bear Stearns, went on to be at the center of the 2008 financial meltdown, requiring tens of billions in bailout money, and is currently facing a number of securities and investment fraud charges.[62]  These irregularities point to what could be called financial terrorism, as well as the fact that, occasionally, the “top dog’s” formal aristocracy needs to be bailed out by the little people.

The Bremer Commission recommendations included a plan to transfer power to the Department of Defense “during a catastrophic terrorist attack or prior to an imminent attack.”  Another recommendation was to prepare a manual on how to implement legal authority at the federal, state and local levels in case of a catastrophic terrorist attack.  Yet another was to institute annual exercises under the direction of the national coordinator for terrorism (Richard Clarke) for counterterrorism and consequence management during such an event.

Journalist James Risen noted, just after the Bremer report was issued, that one of the recommendations called “on the Central Intelligence Agency to drop its human rights guidelines on the recruitment of terrorist informants.”[63]  That recommendation was clarified by a commission led by propagandist Arnaud de Borchgrave that same year — “It is clear also that FBI and CIA guidelines about recruiting terrorists as informants must be simplified to make it easier to recruit terrorists to provide information.”[64]

As the Bremer Commission report was being issued, Bremer appeared on PBS’ Frontline television program to discuss the report’s claim that international terrorism was an increasingly lethal threat to the United States.[65]  Joining Bremer was Larry Johnson, a former CIA covert operative and State Department expert on terrorism.

Johnson’s remarks during this program were interesting:

“What has happened is once the threat of the Soviet Union disappeared, we’ve got a lot of national security bureaucracies and other bureaucracies that are looking for a way to justify their existence, and many are scrambling to get the counter terrorism bonanza.”

On the same program the year before, Johnson was asked if the U.S. government was hyping the threat of terrorism.  Johnson replied –

“They’re grossly exaggerating the problem. They are hyping it. They shouldn’t be talking about rising terrorism…. what they should be saying is, “There’s one individual out there that really doesn’t like us…”  Johnson named OBL as that individual and clarified that “the problem is this: the Saudi Arabian government, not just Osama bin Laden but many people in Saudi Arabia, have been sending money to radical Islamic groups for years.”[66]

Only two months before 9/11, Johnson was even clearer.

“Americans are bedeviled by fantasies about terrorism. They seem to believe that terrorism is the greatest threat to the United States and that it is becoming more widespread and lethal. They are likely to think that the United States is the most popular target of terrorists. And they almost certainly have the impression that extremist Islamic groups cause most terrorism…. None of these beliefs are based in fact….”
[67]

Of course, the 9/11 Commission came to the opposite conclusions.  And Johnson now works with Barry McDaniel, the former COO of Stratesec.[68]

In October 2000 Bremer took his new job as CEO of Marsh Political Risk.  There are few coincidences more startling than this – the man most responsible for fomenting the fear of terrorism in the United States went directly to a job working in the WTC towers less than a year before 9/11.  Bremer’s office was in the South Tower.  In an interview with CNN after the Sept 11 attacks, Bremer claimed that his office was located “above where the second aircraft hit.”

Just days after the 9/11 attacks Bremer was chosen to co-chair the Heritage Foundation’s Homeland Security Task Force, which created a blueprint for the White House’s Department of Homeland Security.  On this task force was Edwin Meese and, again, Fred Ikle.  The report called for considerable increases in military spending that were not related to terrorism, including much of which Cheney and Rumsfeld had desired before 9/11.

Bremer also started a new division of Marsh & McLennan, which went on to purchase Kroll Associates as well, called Marsh Crisis.  At the same time, a company called Control Risks merged with Bremer’s Marsh Crisis.[69]  Based out of London, Control Risks had been one of the most prominent “terrorism research” outlets supported by Cercle Pinay and its propaganda branch, the ISC.[70]

In 2003, Bremer was selected by Donald Rumsfeld to become the Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority of Iraq (the Iraq Occupation Governor). His “mistakes” there were monumental.[71]  Bremer’s closest aides during his tenure in Iraq included Clayton McManaway, previously an operative within Robert Komer’s Phoenix Program.

Bernard Kerik, who was New York City Police Commissioner on 9/11, was appointed by George W. Bush to be Minister of the Interior for Iraq and Senior Policy Advisor to Bremer.  Assigned to train the new Iraqi police, Kerik’s work in Iraq was widely recognized as a dismal failure. By the time his remarkably short assignment was over, he had offended the US. military and left the newly forming Iraqi police force in shambles.

Bremer was not without his small successes, however.  At the time of the wildly sensationalized capture of Saddam Hussein from a “spider hole,” Bremer proclaimed — “Ladies and gentlemen… we got him!”[72]  Of course, the man Bremer had previously told us was behind the deadly terrorist network called al Qaeda, and the crimes of 9/11, was never captured.  Instead, OBL was killed by the JSOC which quickly dumped his remains in the sea seven and a half years later.

Bremer and Jenkins have gone on to lend their voices in support of the never-ending War on Terror.  In fact, Jenkins’ assessment today is that — “We are not going to end terrorism, not in any future I see.”[73]  However, considering what we know about these men, their strong links to terror propagandists, and their extraordinary roles with respect to 9/11, it seems an end to terrorism might begin simply through a more close examination of L. Paul Bremer and Brian Michael Jenkins.