Dig Within

The author is indebted to the good people at History Commons for their “Complete 9/11 Timeline.”  If a reference is not evident below, it can probably be found there.

A recent interview with former “Counterterrorism Czar,” Richard Clarke, is making a splash in the alternative media.[1]  In this interview, Clarke speculates about CIA malfeasance related to the pre-9/11 monitoring of two alleged September 11 hijackers.  This interview is somewhat interesting due to Clarke’s vague suggestion that the CIA had courted 9/11 suspects as sources, but it is far more interesting for what was not said with regard to Clarke’s personal history and associations.

The seeming point of these new statements from Clarke is that the CIA might have withheld information from him, the FBI, and the Department of Defense (DOD) in the twenty months leading up to the 9/11 attacks.  Clarke is not suggesting that the CIA did this maliciously, but only that his good friend, George Tenet, and two others made a mistake in their approach.  Clarke says of these CIA leaders — “They understood that al Qaeda was a big threat, they were motivated, and they were really trying hard.”  The mild twist that Clarke now puts on the story is that  the CIA’s diligent effort to secure much needed sources within the al Qaeda organization was pursued without any suspicion that these sources might turn out to be “double agents.”

Clarke claims that if the CIA had simply told him, the FBI and the DOD, “even as late as September 4th, [2001]” they would have “conducted a massive sweep, we would have conducted it publicly, we would have found those assholes.  There’s no doubt in my mind.  Even with only a week left.”

There are many obvious problems with these new claims from Clarke.  For one thing, the evidence we have indicates that FBI headquarters did everything it could to protect the alleged 9/11 hijackers in the months leading up to 9/11. Another spectacularly obvious problem is that those “assholes” lived with an FBI asset for at least four months and there are reasons to believe the FBI knew that.  More importantly, Richard Clarke personally thwarted two of the attempts the CIA made to capture Osama bin Laden (OBL) in the two years before 9/11.  It seems disingenuous at best that Clarke would say he didn’t have enough information to capture two of OBL’s underlings in 2000 when he was responsible for preventing the capture of OBL just the year before. 

In an attempt to make sense of these matters, we should take a closer look at Richard Clarke.  His own history might shed some light on why he is trying to confuse us today.

Not just another COG

Clarke began his government career in the Ford Administration’s DOD as a nuclear weapons analyst.  At the time, several characters that were central to the events of 9/11 were in the highest positions of that administration.  Toward the end of that era, White House chief of staff Dick Cheney and DOD secretary Donald Rumsfeld were fighting a war of public perception to preserve the increasingly unpopular aspects of the CIA.  Nuclear policy was a big issue at the time as well, and at least one of Clarke’s closest colleagues in later years, Paul Wolfowitz, worked to present false “Team B” information.

After getting his MA from MIT, Clarke went on to become President Reagan’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence.  In this role, Clarke negotiated US military presence in Egypt, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.  He asked these foreign governments for “access” agreements and the right to enhance existing facilities.  As a result, the US moved large numbers of contractors into Saudi Arabia.  One such contractor, Bernard Kerik, the New York City police commissioner and “9/11 hero” who had worked for Morrison-Knudsen’s Saudi group in the mid-seventies, went back for another three year tour as the “the chief investigator for the royal family of Saudi Arabia.”[2]

During his half a dozen years in Reagan’s State department, Clarke called Morton Abramowitz, the Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research, his boss and mentor.  Abramowitz, who was said to be influential in the career of Clarke, had worked as Assistant Secretary for Defense under Donald Rumsfeld in the seventies when Clarke worked in the DOD.  Abramowitz left his position at State in 1989 to become the Ambassador to Turkey.  The next person for whom Abramowitz was boss and mentor was his Deputy Ambassador, Marc Grossman, who is a 9/11 person of interest according to Sibel Edmonds.

In 1984, Clarke was selected to take part in one of the most highly classified programs of the Reagan Administration.  This was the highly secret Continuity of Government (COG) program run by the National Program Office that continued up to and after the attacks of September 11.[3]  The members of the COG group included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Oliver North, George H.W. Bush, Kenneth Duberstein, James Woolsey, and Richard Clarke.  Although Cheney and Rumsfeld were not government employees throughout the twenty years that Clarke participated in this official government program, they both continued to participate anyway.

COG was developed to install a shadow “government in waiting” to replace the US Congress and the US Constitution in the event of a national emergency like a nuclear war. The first and only time that COG was put into action was when Richard Clarke activated it during the 9/11 attacks.  Clarke had been the one, in 1998, to revise the COG plan to use it as a response to a terrorist attack on American soil.  Apparently, COG and the shadow government these men created are still in play to this day. [4]

In 1989, Clarke was appointed by George H.W. Bush to be the Assistant Secretary of State for Politico-Military Affairs, under James Baker. Clarke was in this position until 1992, and his role was to link the Department of Defense and the Department of State by providing policy in the areas of international security, security assistance, military operations, defense strategy, military use of space, and defense trade.  One important aspect of his job during this time was that Clarke coordinated State Department support of Operation Desert Storm and led the efforts to design the international security structure after the Gulf War.

Throughout the years of the George H.W. Bush Administration, Clarke worked intimately with many people who should be investigated with regard to the events of 9/11 and the crimes that followed. This included:

• James Baker, the Secretary of State who went on to join the Carlyle Group
• Donald Rumsfeld, the State Department “Foreign Policy Consultant” who was Chairman Emeritus of the Carlyle Group at that time, and Secretary of Defense on 9/11
• Dick Cheney, the Reagan Secretary of Defense who, later as Vice President, coordinated the response to the 9/11 attacks
• Paul Wolfowitz, the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy who, in the week before 9/11, ran meetings with Pakistani ISI General Ahmed
• Duane Andrews, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence who left to run SAIC
• Robert Gates, the CIA Director who was implicated in the Iran-Contra crimes and later also worked with SAIC
• Senate Intelligence Committee representatives George Tenet and William Cohen, the latter of whom, in 1997, dramatically reduced the number of jet fighters protecting the US
• And Reagan advisor, Richard Armitage, who participated in the failed air defense teleconference on 9/11

According to his book, Clarke remembers that “Wolfowitz and I flew on to Bahrain, Abu Dhabi and Salaleh” to coordinate relations with the UAE, at Cheney’ request.  Over the following decade, Clarke negotiated many deals with the Emirates, essentially becoming an agent of the UAE, and he was “particularly close to the UAE royal family.”[5] 

Not long after Clarke began going there, the royal family of Abu Dhabi took over full ownership of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).  BCCI is significant relative to 9/11 because it was involved in funding terrorists in the late 1980s 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, relative to BCCI — “You can’t draw a line separating the bank’s black operatives and Pakistan’s intelligence services.”[6]

More importantly, there are strong suspicions that the CIA was involved in the founding of BCCI.[7]  The CIA connection to the origins of the BCCI terrorist network is interesting in this context because the royal family of the UAE was also said to have played a primary role in the creation of BCCI.  As the official US government report on the subject pointed out — “There was no relationship more central to BCCI’s existence from its inception than that between BCCI and Sheikh Zayed and the ruling family of Abu Dhabi.”[8]

As stated before, Clarke’s friends in the UAE royal family not only created the BCCI terrorist network, they took it over when the Bank of England shut it down.  “By July 5, 1991, when BCCI was closed globally, the Government of Abu Dhabi, its ruling family, and an investment company holding the assets of the ruling family, were the controlling, and official “majority” shareholders of BCCI — owning 77 percent of the bank. But since the remaining 23 percent was actually held by nominees and by BCCI’s alter-ego ICIC, Abu Dhabi was in fact BCCI’s sole owner.”[9]

Not long after this, in 1992, Clarke was named to the National Security Council staff as Special Assistant to the President for Global Affairs and chairman of the Interagency Counterterrorism Committee.  One might think that Richard Clarke’s close relationship to the royal family of the UAE, and this new role as the NSC head of counterterrorism, might have posed a slight conflict of interest.  But no one seemed to notice.

Similarly, few have noticed that the attacks attributed to al Qaeda began just before the first Bush Administration left office.  It was in December, 1992, that al Qaeda (as such) is said to have first committed an act of terrorism by bombing US troops in Yemen.  Attacks and plots in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and many others places located near the production and transport routes of fossil fuels have been attributed to al Qaeda since that time.[10]

Clarke was not interested in pursuing the BCCI terrorist network and, instead, he had a different approach to combating terrorism.  In 1993, the United States began a practice known as “rendition.”  Throughout the rest of the world, rendition is known as torture.  Interestingly, the policy behind this program was proposed by Richard Clarke, who worked to get “snatch teams” in place to kidnap suspects for torture.  The success of Clarke’s rendition proposal led to today’s US program of secret kidnappings and torture around the world.

In September 1994, high-ranking UAE and Saudi government ministers, such as Saudi Intelligence Minister Prince Turki al-Faisal, began frequent bird hunting expeditions in Afghanistan. It was reported that — “They would go out and see Osama, spend some time with him, talk with him, you know, live out in the tents, eat the simple food, engage in falconing, some other pursuits, ride horses.”  Two members of the UAE royal family that participated in these trips were Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum and Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, ruler of the UAE.[11]

As these UAE meetings with OBL occurred, Clarke’s relationship with the UAE royals blossomed.  At the same time, he engaged in apparent preparations for terrorist events on US soil.  In 1998, he chaired a tabletop exercise in which a Learjet filled with explosives would be flown on a suicide mission into a target in Washington, DC.  At a conference in October 1998, Clarke predicted that America’s enemies “will go after our Achilles’ heel” which is “in Washington.  It is in New York.”  That was quite a prediction.

Clarke had updated the COG plans in early 1998, to ensure that the shadow government would be put in power in the event of a terrorist attack like the one he predicted that year (and that occurred in 2001).  National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, who was later caught stealing documents that had been requested by the 9/11 Commission, was the one to suggest that Clinton create the new Counterterrorism Czar position that Clarke would fill at the time of his prediction.  Berger was also the one to introduce Clarke’s COG partner, James Woolsey, to Clinton.  Woolsey went on to become Clinton’s CIA director.

In early February 1999, Clarke met with Al Maktoum, one of the UAE royals who was known to hunt with Bin Laden, in the UAE.  Al Maktoum was a big supporter of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.  And although people often forget, two of the 9-11 hijackers were citizens of the UAE and the vast majority of money supporting the attacks flowed through the UAE.

The 9/11 Commission Report has six references to the UAE, most of which can be found on page 138. One of these suggests that “but for the cooperation of the UAE, we would have killed Bin Ladin two years in advance of September 11.”

Therefore it is difficult to understand why the leading authority on counterterrorism in the US would be meeting, and maintaining close personal relationships, with the UAE friends of Bin Laden just two years before 9/11.  This was three years after Bin Laden had first declared holy war against the United States,[12] and one year after his more recent such proclamation.[13]

It is more difficult to understand why Clarke was personally behind the failure of two CIA attempts to kill or capture Bin Laden in 1999. The first of these occurred just a few days after Clarke’s visit to the UAE.  The CIA obtained information that OBL was hunting with UAE royals in Afghanistan at the time, and President Clinton was asked for permission to attack the camp.  Clarke voted down that plan, and others within the US government speculated that his ties to the UAE were behind his decision.[14]

The next month, when the CIA had tracked Bin Laden’s whereabouts again and was prepared to take him out during another of the Afghanistan hunting trips, Richard Clarke took it upon himself to alert his UAE friends about the CIA monitoring their meetings with Bin Laden.  Of course, the UAE royals tipped off Bin Laden and the US lost another opportunity to kill or capture its number one enemy.[15]  Considering that CIA plans are top secret national security priorities, and that OBL was wanted for the bombings in East Africa, Clarke’s action should have been seen as treason.

Somehow, Clarke’s two efforts to keep OBL from being captured or killed in 1999 slipped his mind when he testified to the 9/11 Commission.  Apparently, these events were also not important enough for Clarke to mention when recently discussing the two “asshole” hijackers whose presence in the US he now says the CIA kept from him and the FBI.

Who knew about Almihdar and Alhazmi?

Interestingly, although only two of the alleged 9/11 terrorists were said to be from the UAE, those being Marwan al-Shehhi and Fayez Banihammad, others of the alleged hijackers, including Almihdar, Alhazmi, and Ziad Jarrah, spent time in the UAE.  And as stated before, the vast majority of money that financed the attacks flowed through the UAE. 

The new interview with Clarke begins with discussion of the CIA’s monitoring of a January, 2000 meeting in Malaysia among top al Qaeda operatives.  Khalid Almihdar and Nawaf Alhazmi attended the meeting, as did Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and several other al Qaeda leaders.  Clarke claims in the interview that the CIA followed the alleged 9/11 hijackers out of the meeting in Malaysia but then lost them in Bangkok.  Two months later, Almidhar and AlHazmi arrived in Los Angeles, according to the CIA, and Clarke says many CIA agents knew about this.

Clarke claims that the CIA — “stopped [information about Almihdar and Alhazmi] from going to the FBI and the Defense Department.” He then cryptically states — “We therefore conclude that there was a high level decision, in the CIA, ordering people not to share that information” and “I would have to think it was made by the Director [Tenet]”.  To clarify why he suddenly thinks this lack of information sharing was unusual, Clarke says — “You have to understand…we were close friends, he called me several times a day, and shared the most trivial of information.”

But it was not only the CIA that knew about this meeting and the attendees.  According to the Director of the National Security Agency (NSA), Michael Hayden — “In early 2000, at the time of the meeting in Kuala Lumpur, we had the Alhazmi brothers, Nawaf and Salem, as well as Khalid Almihdar, in our sights.  We knew of their association with al-Qaeda, and we shared this information with the [intelligence] community.”  The NSA knew about these guys well before that, however, because an early 1999 NSA communications intercept referenced “Nawaf Alhazmi,” so it was clear that the NSA knew about him for more than two years before 9/11.  Oddly enough, the Washington Post reported that Alhazmi, Almihdar and four of the other alleged hijackers were “living, working, planning and developing all their activities” near the entrance to NSA headquarters in Laurel, Maryland, in the months prior to the 9/11 attacks.[16]

Alhazmi had been seen in San Diego as early as 1996 and he traveled extensively throughout the US, spending time in Cody, Wyoming and Phoenix, Arizona, and making a truck delivery to Canada.  He and Almihdar lived openly in the United States, using their real names and credit cards.  They had season passes to Sea World and the San Diego Zoo and liked to hang out at a nude bar in San Diego.  They went to a flight school there and said they wanted to learn how to fly Boeings.  Instructor Rick Garza of Sorbi’s Flying Club turned down that request because he said they were “clueless”, didn’t even know how to draw an airplane and could not communicate in English.

Alhazmi even worked at a Texaco gas station, although he didn’t need the money because someone in the UAE was regularly sending him thousands of dollars.

The money Alhazmi received was said to come from a UAE citizen named Ali Abdul Aziz Ali (a.k.a. Ammar al Baluchi), who was the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and cousin of Ramzi Yousef.  Apparently, a majority of money that came to the hijackers was transferred through Ali Abdul Aziz Ali or another UAE citizen named Mustafa al-Hawsawi.  The 9/11 Commission reported that Ali “helped them with plane tickets, traveler’s checks, and hotel reservations“, and “taught them about everyday aspects of life in the West, such as purchasing clothes and ordering food.”

Whether he was protecting his UAE friends or not, Clarke failed to act on information about al Qaeda operatives living in the US, just one month before the meeting in Malaysia.  After an al Qaeda “millennium plot” was said to be broken up in Jordan, Clarke authorized an investigation of one of the plotters, Khalil Deek, who lived in Anaheim, CA for most of the 1990s. The investigative team reported to Clarke and the NSC directly in December, 1999, stating that Deek’s next door neighbor was operating an al Qaeda sleeper cell in Anaheim.  No action was taken by Clarke or the NSC.

A few months later, in April 2000, Clarke was quoted in the Washington Post as saying that terrorists – “will come after our weakness, our Achilles Heel, which is largely here in the United States.”  Although this was a bold statement, it was unfortunate that Clarke did not have time to track down and capture the terrorists that he knew were living and plotting in the US.

The bombing of the USS Cole, which took the lives of 17 American sailors, occurred in October, 2000. It was reported by the Washington Post that Almihdar had received training in Afghanistan in 1999 along with the operatives who were responsible for the Cole bombing.  The Guardian reported that the Prime Minister of Yemen accused Almihdar of being “one of the Cole perpetrators.”

At the time, Clarke was part of a high level meeting to discuss the response to the Cole bombing, which included William Cohen, George Tenet, the State Department coordinator for counterterrorism, Michael Sheehan, and several others.  In this meeting, Clarke was the hawk, proposing attacks throughout Afghanistan in response.  None of the voting attendees supported Clarke’s plan and, after the meeting, Sheehan told Clarke – “What’s it going to take to get them to hit al-Qaeda in Afghanistan?  Does al-Qaeda have to hit the Pentagon?”[17]   Once again, that was quite a prediction. 

In May 2001, the CIA gave its photos of the January 2000 Malaysian meeting to an intelligence operations specialist at FBI headquarters.  One of the photos was of Almihdar, who FBI Director Mueller would later say was likely responsible for coordinating the movements of all the non-pilot hijackers.  In June 2001, FBI and CIA officials discussed these photos and one FBI agent remembers that Almihdar was mentioned in these discussions. 

Phoenix FBI agent Ken Williams wrote a memo to FBI headquarters, in July 2001, saying that Bin Laden’s followers were going to flight schools to train for terrorist attacks.  If the FBI had followed through on this, it would have found Alhazmi very easily, as he had been reported as staying in Phoenix with Hani Hanjour over a period of months from January to June 2001. The memo was reviewed by the agency’s Bin Laden and Islamic extremist counterterrorism units, but it has been reported that neither Attorney General John Ashcroft nor newly appointed FBI Director Robert Mueller briefed President Bush and his national security staff about these revelations.  Of course, this was well before the September 4^th date that Clarke now claims was the best chance for him and the FBI to have first found out. 

Zacarias Moussaoui visited Malaysia too, and stayed at the same condominium where the January 2000 meeting took place.  The owner of the condo even signed letters that convinced the INS to allow Moussaoui into the US.  Alhazmi and Almihdar were referenced in papers that the FBI confiscated, in August 2001, from Moussaoui when he was arrested.  FBI headquarters refused multiple requests from the FBI agents pursuing the case to search Moussaoui ‘s possessions.  Those confiscated possessions and papers would have immediately led the FBI agents to Atta, Almihdar, Alhazmi and the other alleged hijackers.

But the FBI had to know about these alleged hijackers well before that, because Alhazmi and Almihdar lived with an FBI informant, Abdussattar Shaikh, for at least four months in late 2000. Shaikh was a “tested” asset working with the local FBI.  Shaikh had regular visits from Mohammed Atta and Hani Hanjour as well, and even introduced Hanjour to a neighbor. [18]

Newsweek reported that, once, when Shaikh was called by his FBI agent handler, Shaikh said he couldn’t talk because Almihdar was in the room. This suggests that the FBI knew full well that this future 9/11 hijacker was living with an FBI asset.  But a more damning fact is that the FBI refused to allow the 9/11 Congressional Inquiry to interview either Shaikh or his FBI handler.

The FBI absolutely knew about the movements of these alleged 9/11 hijackers.  In January, 2001, it was the FBI that gave information to the CIA about how USS Cole bombing operatives had delivered money to al Qaeda planners at the time of the January 2000 Malaysia meeting.  CNN reported, in 2002, that “At that point, the CIA – or the FBI for that matter – could have put Alhazmi and Almihdar and all the others who attended the meeting in Malaysia on a watch list.”

In the new interview, Clarke further speculates that the reason that the CIA information was not shared with him, the DOD and the FBI was because CIA (i.e. Cofer Black as of June, 1999) was courting these two as sources within al Qaeda.  Some might wonder why Clarke never thought of his good friends within the UAE royal family, who met with OBL regularly, as sources on al Qaeda.  Surely people who met with OBL personally in the two years before 9/11, and were big supporters of al Qaeda like Clarke’s friend, Al Maktoum, might have some information to provide!

In any case, Clarke goes on in the interview to suggest that Tenet and Black might have recruited Alhazmi and Almihdar (who had been accused of perpetrating the USS Cole bombing) as inside sources on al Qaeda.  To the CIA’s chagrin, Clarke implies, they at some point became double agents.  It is amazing that Clarke insinuates that Black and Tenet were too dim-witted to see that these two Saudis might also be working for the Saudis.  Clarke appears to be making the absurd suggestion that a CIA director could not predict that the Saudi, who arranged housing for Alhazmi and Almihdar, arranged payments for them, and arranged to move them to San Diego, might have turned them into double agents.

When Alhazmi and Almihdar arrived in Los Angeles in early 2000, they were met by a strange benefactor named Omar Al-Bayoumi who brought them to Parkwood Apartments in San Diego.  It is Al-Bayoumi that Clarke is referring to when he suggests the — “Saudi has connections to the Saudi government, and some people believe that this guy was a Saudi intelligence officer.  If we assume that this Saudi intelligence officer was the handler for these two, then presumably he would have been reporting to the CIA office in Los Angeles.  There was a strong relationship between the CIA director and the minister of intelligence of Saudi Arabia [Prince Turki al Faisal].”

Better questions about strong relationships

Ignoring Clarke’s own strong relationship to the UAE, and therefore to the BCCI network, support for the Taliban and al Qaeda, and OBL, one interviewer then asked: “How long do you think it would take [the CIA] to decide — this isn’t working”?  Clark replied: “I don’t know. I do know that in August of 2001 they decide they’re gonna tell the FBI.”

This remark refers to the idea that it was not until August 21 that the FBI figured out that al Qaeda operatives were in the United States.  This claim is transparently false as we know they were, at the very least, aware of Moussaoui and the Phoenix memo saying that terrorists were taking flight lessons in the US.  But in August, it was said that an FBI analyst assigned to the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center suddenly determined that Alhazmi and Almidhar had entered the US in January 2000.

Additionally, on August 23, 2001, the Israeli Mossad gave US officials an urgent warning in the form of a list of terrorists known to be living in the US and panning to carry out an attack in the near future.  The list included the names of Alhazmi, Almihdra, Alshehhi and Atta.

An “all points bulletin” was issued that same day, instructing the FBI and other agencies to put Alhazmi and Almihdar on the watch list.  Doing so would have made certain that these two were caught before the attacks.  The FBI did not do so, however.  The FBI did not even use this information to check national databases of bank records, drivers license records or the records of the credit cards that were used to purchase the 9/11 tickets.  These facts seem to render Clarke’s new, vague insinuations moot, because the FBI wasn’t going to act on such information no matter what it was told.

In yet another example, on August 28, a report was received by the New York FBI office requesting that an investigation be conducted “to determine if Almihdar is still in the United States.”  FBI headquarters immediately turned down the request.  An FBI agent wrote an email in response, saying “someday someone will die [because of this]. Let’s hope the [FBI’s] National Security Law Unit will stand behind their decisions then, especially since UBL [Osama bin Laden] is now getting the most protection.”  

All this was before September 4th, the date that Clarke now says would have given plenty of time for him and the FBI to catch Alhazmi and Almihdar, if only they had known the two were in the US. But those of us who have been looking into the events of 9/11 and the history behind those events are not likely to put much credence in Mr. Clarke’s new tale.

Clarke’s most recent interviewers didn’t seem too troubled by his statements though, and one of them finished off asking –“ Have you asked George Tenet, Cofer Black or Richard Blee about any of this after the fact?”  Clarke responded: “No”.

The second interviewer then asked –” Kind of the facts tripped out to you over time, right, over these investigations”?  A smirking Clarke replied — “Took a while.”

For the rest of us, it will still take a while to get to the bottom of all this and Mr. Clarke’s interview does not appear to help.  In the meantime, here are a dozen questions for whoever conducts Clarke’s next interview:

1.  Is the COG plan that you and Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Oliver North, George H.W. Bush, Kenneth Duberstein, and James Woolsey created, and that you implemented on 9/11, still in effect?
2.  Do you have any information on how your friends in the UAE royal family used the terrorist network BCCI after they bought it?
3.  Do you have any explanation for how you could have predicted in 1998, at the same time that you updated the COG plan to be a response to a terrorist attack, that America’s enemies “will go after our Achilles’ heel” which is “in Washington.  It is in New York.”?
4.  When you met with UAE Defense Minister Al Maktoum in February 1999, just days before the CIA planned to kill or capture Bin Laden as he was meeting with UAE royals, who else did you meet with?
5. Why did you vote down the CIA plan to kill or capture Bin Laden while he was hunting with UAE royals in February 1999?
6.  Why did you expose the CIA’s secret plan, without approval from the CIA or the president, to kill or capture Bin Laden in March 1999 as he was meeting with UAE royals again?
7. Don’t you think those two actions on your part were far more detrimental to the United States than any of your current, vague speculations?
8. Did you ever communicate with NSA Director, Michael Hayden, between January 2000 and the attacks of 9/11?  If so, why did you not, in your recent interview, accuse him of withholding information on Alhazmi and Almihdar?  He has spoken openly of having known about their presence in the US and said that he did share it with the intelligence community.
9. Why did you take no action in December 1999, as “Counterterrorism Czar”, when you and the NSC were given evidence that Khalil Deek’s next door neighbor was operating an al Qaeda sleeper cell in Anaheim, CA?
10. You appear to be saying that neither you nor the FBI knew that Almihdar and Alhazmi lived with Abdussattar Shaikh, a tested FBI asset, for at least four months in the year 2000. Is that correct and, if so, don’t you think that contradicts your claim in this interview that – “I know how all this stuff works, I’ve been working it for 30 years. You can’t snowball me on this stuff.”?
11. Do you know why the FBI would not allow Abdussattar Shaikh or his FBI handler to be interviewed as part of the 9/11 investigation?
12. These days, when you’re talking with your UAE friends in your own offices in the UAE, do you ever discuss 9/11, the hijackers that spent their time there, and the UAE money that financed the 9/11 attacks?

Clarke currently works with his COG partner and former CIA Director, James Woolsey, at Paladin Capital, which has offices in New York and the UAE.  Clarke is also the chairman of Good Harbor Consulting, where he is in partnership with many people who are making a fortune off the war on terror.  Good Harbor Consulting has had an office in Abu Dhabi since 2008, and Clarke is known to have a “big footprint” in the UAE.[19]

Of the many unanswered questions about the attacks of September 11, one of the most important is: Why were none of the four planes intercepted?  A rough answer is that the failure of the US air defenses can be traced to a number of factors and people.  There were policy changes, facility changes, and personnel changes that had recently been made, and there were highly coincidental military exercises that were occurring on that day.  But some of the most startling facts about the air defense failures have to do with the utter failure of communications between the agencies responsible for protecting the nation.  At the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), two people stood out in this failed chain of communications.  One was a lawyer on his first day at the job, and another was a Special Operations Commander who was never held responsible for his critical role, or even questioned about it.

The 9/11 Commission wrote in its report that – “On 9/11, the defense of U.S. airspace depended on close interaction between two federal agencies: the FAA and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).”[1]

According to the Commission, this interaction began with air traffic controllers (ATCs) at the relevant regional FAA control centers, which on 9/11 included Boston, New York, Cleveland, and Indianapolis.  In the event of a hijacking, these ATCs were expected to “notify their supervisors, who in turn would inform management all the way up to FAA headquarters.  Headquarters had a hijack coordinator, who was the director of the FAA Office of Civil Aviation Security or his or her designate.”

The hijack coordinator would then “contact the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center (NMCC)” and “the NMCC would then seek approval from the Office of the Secretary of Defense to provide military assistance.  If approval was given, the orders would be transmitted down NORAD’s chain of command [to the interceptor pilots].”[2]

The 9/11 Commission Report (The Report) indicated that the military was eventually notified about all the hijackings but none of those notifications were made in time to intercept the hijacked aircraft.  The Report also contradicted a good deal of testimony given on the subject by suggesting that earlier statements made by military leaders, in testimony to the Commission, were “incorrect.”  The corrections to these statements led to a reassessment of how much time the military actually had to respond to requests for interception from the FAA.  Ultimately, The Report stated that, “NEADS air defenders had nine minutes’ notice on the first hijacked plane, no advance notice on the second, no advance notice on the third, and no advance notice on the fourth.”[3]

The Report does not place blame for the failure to intercept on any specific people in the chain of communications, but it specifically exonerates “NEADS commanders and officers” and “individual FAA controllers, facility managers and Command Center managers.”  In fact, The Report goes so far as to praise these people for how well they did.[4]  Curiously, the hijack coordinator at FAA headquarters was not mentioned in the list of those who were exonerated.

The ATCs did notify their management as required, but further notification to FAA headquarters (FAA HQ) was apparently riddled with delays.  FAA HQ got plenty of notice of the four hijacked planes but failed to do its job.  One of the most glaring examples was demonstrated by the failure of FAA HQ to request military assistance for the fourth hijacking, that of Flight 93.

On page 28, The Report says: “By 9:34, word of the hijacking had reached FAA headquarters.” Despite this advance notice, Flight 93 “crashed” in Pennsylvania sometime between 10:03 and 10:07.

To put this in perspective, at 9:34 it had been over 30 minutes since a second airliner had crashed in the World Trade Center (WTC).  It was known that a third plane was hijacked and it was about to crash into the Pentagon.  Everyone in the country knew we were under a coordinated terrorist attack via hijacked aircraft because, as of 9:03, mainstream news stations including CNN had already been televising it.

That was the situation when FAA HQ was notified about a fourth hijacking.  Given those circumstances, an objective observer would expect the highest level of urgency throughout all levels of government in response to that fourth hijacking.  But FAA management did not follow the protocol to ask for military assistance.  The 9/11 Commission contends that FAA HQ gave air defenders no notice whatsoever of the hijacking of Flight 93 until after the plane had been destroyed.  For whatever reasons, the FAA’s Command Center (located in Herndon, VA) did not request military assistance either.  In fact, neither the Command Center nor FAA HQ contacted NMCC to request military assistance for any of the hijacked planes.

Therefore it seems reasonable to look at the people whose roles were most important in this failed chain of communications.  Once the entire country was aware that we were under attack and that planes were being hijacked and used as weapons, the two people who were most important to the FAA’s response were 1) the person running the FAA’s national Command Center and 2) the hijack coordinator at FAA headquarters.

It turns out that these two people were both new to their jobs.  In fact, it was the first day on the job for Benedict Leo Sliney, the national operations manager at FAA’s Command Center.

Benedict Sliney

Benedict Sliney was an ATC in the US Air Force during the Vietnam War and, after that, worked at the FAA for the first half of his professional career.  In the 1980s, Sliney went on from the FAA to work as an attorney and continued in that career throughout the 1990s.  He worked for several law firms during this time, handling various kinds of cases, and he was a partner in some of those firms.

Sliney’s clients included financial investors who were accused of Securities and Exchange violations.  In one 1998 case, he represented Steven K. Gourlay, Jr., an employee of Sterling Foster.  It was reported that Sterling Foster was “secretly controlled” by Randolph Pace and was at the center of “one of the most notorious scams ever.”[5]  Sliney got Gourlay’s charges dropped in 1998 but, in a related 2002 case, Gourlay pled guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud, mail fraud and wire fraud, and was sentenced to six months in prison.[6,7]

In the summer of 2000, Sliney represented Merrill Lynch in a case in which the delay of the transfer of clients’ funds to Smith Barney was said to have “caused their investments with Merrill, Lynch to lose some $638,000 in value.”  Sliney was able to get Merrill Lynch off the hook.[8]

For whatever reasons, Sliney decided to leave his lucrative law career behind just months before 9/11 in order to return to the FAA.  It was reported that Jack Kies, FAA’s manager of tactical operations, offered Sliney the job of Command Center national operations manager.  Instead, Sliney asked to work as a specialist and he started in that role.  Kies offered Sliney the national operations manager position again six months later and Sliney accepted.[9] His first day on the job was 9/11/01.

On 9/11, others present at the FAA’s Command Center outranked Sliney.  Interviews of those others, however, including Linda Schuessler and John White, confirm that Ben Sliney was given the lead in the Command Center’s response to the hijackings that day.  Despite that critical role, Sliney is mentioned only one time in the narrative of the 9/11 Commission report.

According to the summary of his interview for the investigation, Sliney was first notified of “a hijack in progress” sometime between 8:15 and 8:20 EDT.  This was about the same time as communications were lost with American Airlines Flight 11, the first of the planes to be hijacked, and it was about 30 minutes before that plane crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center (WTC).  It was nearly two hours before Flight 93 was destroyed in Pennsylvania.  Incredibly, according to Sliney’s interview, it was not until after a second confirmed hijacking occurred and two planes had crashed in the WTC (nearly an hour after he learned about the first hijacking) that Sliney “realized that the hijackers were piloting the aircraft.”[10]

After the second tower was hit, Sliney responded by asking for a military response via the special military outfit assigned to the FAA’s Command Center,  the Air Traffic Services Cell (ATSC).  This was at approximately 9:06 am.  At the time, one of the three military officers in the ATSC called the NMCC and that officer was told that “senior leaders” at the NMCC are “in a meeting to determine their response” to the attacks, and will call back.[11] As this example shows, there are at least as many unanswered questions about what went on at the NMCC that morning as there are about what happened at the FAA.[12]

Several of the FAA’s top people confirmed that the military was engaged and knew about the hijackings early on.  This included Jeff Griffith at the Command Center and Monte Belger, the FAA’s acting Deputy Administrator, who was present at FAA Headquarters.  Belger stated that — “There were military people on duty at the FAA Command Center, as Mr. Sliney said. They were participating in what was going on. There were military people in the FAA’s Air Traffic Organization in a situation room. They were participating in what was going on.”[13]

Sliney’s interview summary is full of phrases like he “did not recall” and “was not aware,” although he did recall “being informed” that interceptors were eventually launched (too late).  Apparently, Sliney didn’t even know what the fighters would do if they were launched.  He recalled thinking: “Well, what are they going to do?”  Additionally, in an apparent defensive posture, Sliney claimed, “definitively that he did not receive a request to authorize a request to the military for assistance.”[14]

One might think that the national operations manager for the FAA’s Command Center would not need a “request to authorize a request for military assistance” and that he might know what military assistance would entail.  But Sliney’s interview summary suggests that he did not even know what the protocol was for requesting military assistance in the event of a hijacking.  Sliney’s understanding on 9/11 “and today” (two years later, when the interview was conducted) was that an FAA request for military assistance “emanates from the effected Center…directly to the military.”  That is, Sliney supposedly was not aware of any role that the FAAs’ Command Center or FAA HQ might have had in the request for interception of hijacked aircraft.  This appears to be in contradiction to the protocol given by the 9/11 Commission report and it is definitely in contradiction to the concept of a “hijack coordinator.”

In addition to the confusion about the Command Center’s role in requesting military assistance, it seems there was only one person at FAA headquarters who was authorized to request military assistance.  On 9/11, Ben Sliney was told that no one could find that one person.  Sliney later recounted his experience learning of that fact in this way.

“I said something like, ‘That’s incredible. There’s only one person. There must be someone designated or someone who will assume the responsibility of issuing an order, you know.’ We were becoming frustrated in our attempts to get some information. What was the military response?”[15]

Michael Canavan

The hijack coordinator at FAA headquarters, Lt. Gen. Michael A. Canavan, had been in his position for only nine months and would leave the job within a month of 9/11.  Surprisingly, although Mike Canavan was mentioned in the 9/11 Commission report, he was not cited for his role as the FAA’s hijack coordinator, a role that was at the center of the failure to intercept the planes on 9/11.

Instead of being mentioned as the hijack coordinator, Canavan was in The Report because he had been the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which ran the military’s counterterrorism operations and covert missions.  The Report described Canavan’s part in the the failure to follow-through on a carefully laid-out 1998 CIA plan to capture Osama bin Laden (OBL) in Afghanistan.  Canavan was quoted as saying that the plan put tribal Afghanis at too much risk and that the “operation was too complicated for the CIA.”[16]

Nearly the entirety of Canavan’s career was in military special operations.  He was a Special Forces soldier for many years and before he was JSOC Commander he was Special Operations Commander for the US European Command (SOCEUR), which included operations throughout Africa as well.  Canavan was SOCEUR from 1994 to 1996 and JSOC Commander from 1996 to 1998.

JSOC is a successor organization to the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), which was a secret government-funded organization authorized by the National Security Council in 1948. The OPC was led by CIA director Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner, a State Department official who wielded unprecedented power due to his position in New York law and financial circles.  The JSOC was created in 1980 by the Pentagon and run by Ted Shackley’s OPC colleague, Richard Stillwell.  According to author Joseph Trento, JSOC quickly became “one of the most secret operations of the US government.”[17]

Creation of the JSOC was, ostensibly, a response to the failed 1980 hostage rescue attempt in Iran called Operation Eagle Claw.  JSOC immediately went on to engage in an “array of highly covert activities” by way of “black budgets.”[18] This included operations in Honduras and El Salvador which supported the illegal wars associated with the Nicaraguan rebels called the Contras.

In 1987, JSOC was assigned to a new military command called the US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) that came about through the work of Senator William S. Cohen.  Senator Cohen went on to become the Secretary of Defense from 1997 to 2001 and it was he who led the Quadrennial Defense Review of 1997 that reduced the number of fighters actively protecting the continental US from 100 to 14.[19] Cohen is now chairman of The Cohen group, where he works with his Vice Chairman, Marc Grossman, whom FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds says figures prominently in the information she has been trying to provide.

Interestingly, Hugh Shelton was the commander of SOCOM during the same years that Canavan was the commander of JSOC.  Shelton went on to become the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), which is the highest position in the US military.  He was in that position on September 11^th and was, like Canavan, curiously absent for just the morning hours on that day.[20]

In any case, it seems odd that Michael Canavan occupied what turned out to be the most important position relative to the failure to intercept the hijacked planes on 9/11 and was also involved in evaluating plans to capture OBL just three years earlier.  Apart from the coincidence that he was selected as the most qualified person for both of those very different positions, he was also a central figure in these two different reasons why the 9/11 attacks were said to have succeeded.

When he first started the job as FAA’s hijack coordinator, just nine months before the attacks, Canavan was in charge of running training exercises that were “pretty damn close to [the] 9/11 plot,” according to John Hawley, an employee in the FAA’s intelligence division.[21] In his comments to the 9/11 Commission, Canavan denied having participated in any such exercises and the Commission apparently didn’t think to reconcile the conflicting comments it had received from Hawley and Canavan on this important issue.

That’s not surprising in light of the fact that Canavan’s treatment by the 9/11 Commission was one of uncritical deference.  Reading through the transcript of the related hearing gives the impression that the Commission members were not only trying to avoid asking the General any difficult questions, but they were fawning over him.

Lee Hamilton began his questioning of Canavan by saying “You’re pretty tough on the airlines, aren’t you?”[22] As with many of the statements and reports made by Hamilton, however, the evidence suggests that the opposite is true.

In May 2001, Canavan wrote an internal FAA memorandum that initiated a new policy of more lax fines for airlines and airports that had security problems.  The memo suggested that, if the airlines or airports had a written plan to fix the problem, fines were not needed.  For whatever reason, the memo was also taken to mean that FAA agents didn’t even have to enforce corrections as long as the airline or airport said they were working on it.  Canavan’s memo was repeatedly cited as a cause of failure to fix security problems in the months leading up to 9/11.[23,24]

Canavan’s job as hijack coordinator was clearly the most important link in the communications chain between the FAA and the military.  But the 9/11 Commission did not address this hijack coordinator position in terms of how it was fulfilled on 9/11, and did not mention the alarming fact that we don’t know who actually handled the job of hijack coordinator on the day of 9/11.  We don’t know because Canavan said he was in Puerto Rico that morning and claimed to have missed out on “everything that happened that day.”[25]

Here is Canavan’s exact statement to the Commission, in response to a question from Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste, whose questions were, like Hamilton’s, rather submissive.

“Here’s my answer — and it’s not to duck the question. Number one, I was visiting the airport in San Juan that day when this happened. That was a CADEX airport, and I was down there also to remove someone down there that was in a key position. So when 9/11 happened, that’s where I was. I was able to get back to Washington that evening on a special flight from the Army back from San Juan, back to Washington.  So everything that transpired that day in terms of times, I have to — and I have no information on that now, because when I got back we weren’t — that wasn’t the issue at the time. We were — when I got back it was, What are we going to do over the next 48 hours to strengthen what just happened?”[26]

One might think that the Commissioners would have expressed surprise at Canavan’s rambling, somewhat incoherent claim that he was just not available during the events of 9/11.  We would certainly expect the Commissioners to have followed up with detailed questions about who was in charge that day with respect to the most important role related to the failed national response.  But that was not the case.  Instead, Ben-Veniste redirected the discussion while “putting aside the issue.”  None of the other Commissioners said a word about Canavan being missing that day or even asked who was filling in for him as the primary contact between the FAA and the military with regard to hijackings.  And, of course, the 9/11 Commission report did not mention any of it at all.

In the interest of finding out what happened we should return to the failure of FAA HQ to request military assistance for Flight 93.  We should ask — what was FAA HQ doing with this information for those 30 minutes in the absence of the one person who was charged to do something about it?  Apparently, for fifteen minutes nothing was done.  But after fifteen minutes, according to the 9/11 Commission report, the conversations were going nowhere.

At 9:49, according to The Report, this was the exchange between the FAA Command Center and FAA HQ.

Command Center:  Uh, do we want to think, uh, about scrambling aircraft?

FAA Headquarters:  Oh, God, I don’t know.

Command Center:  Uh, that’s a decision somebody’s gonna have to make probably in the next ten minutes.

FAA Headquarters:  Uh, ya know everybody just left the room.

The Commission report says that ineffectual discussions about scrambling aircraft were still occurring at FAA HQ twenty minutes after it had received notification of the fourth hijacking.

At 9:53 am, “FAA headquarters informed the Command Center that the deputy director for air traffic services was talking to Monte Belger about scrambling aircraft.”

Apart from contradicting Benedict Sliney’s testimony that an FAA request for military assistance “emanates from the effected Center…directly to the military,” this part of the 9/11 Commission report never mentions who the “deputy director for air traffic services” was.  Tape recordings suggest that it was someone named Peter.  This might have been Peter  H. Challan, an engineer who had worked for the FAA since 1969 and had been Deputy Associate Administrator for Air Traffic Services since July 1999.  But the Deputy Director of Air Traffic Services that day was Jeff Griffith.  Monte Belger was the Deputy Administrator for the FAA, second in command to the FAA Administrator, Jane Garvey.  Belger and Griffith later denied they ever had a conversation about scrambling aircraft, despite the 9/11 Commission stating this as fact.

Jane Garvey was also present during the failed response at FAA HQ.  She was the FAA Administrator from 1997 to 2002 and coincidentally, in the years before that, had been the director of Logan International Airport in Boston, where two of the flights took off on 9/11.  Apparently Garvey’s record as director for the Logan airport, which had for many years the worst security record of any major airport, was not a problem for her nomination to the top job at FAA.  It was Garvey who appointed Canavan to his role as Associate Administrator for Civil Aviation Security and, therefore, hijack coordinator.

In any case, in the absence of the hijack coordinator the FAA was completely incompetent in terms of communicating the need to intercept the hijacked planes on 9/11.  Officially, the only notice of the hijackings to the military came directly from the FAA centers, bypassing both the Command Center and FAA HQ.   Boston Center reached the North East Air Defense Sector (NEADS) at 8:37 to request help with the first hijacking, and New York Center notified the military of the second hijacking at 9:03.  NEADS only found about the third hijacking at 9:34 by calling the Washington center to ask about Flight 11, and the military was said to have first learned about the hijacking of Flight 93 from Cleveland Center at 10:07.   Still, none of the planes were intercepted.

9/11 and Special Operations

Although Michael Canavan was unavailable to perform his critical job function on 9/11, he was fully involved in the response to the attacks.  Just two days later, he attended a “Principals Committee Meeting” chaired by Condoleezza Rice that included all of Bush’s “war cabinet.”[27] This meeting set the stage for how the new War on Terror would be conducted.

Canavan later cashed in on the windfalls of the resulting wars and the privatization of military operations when he hired on at Anteon International Corporation as president of its Information Systems Group.  In doing so he joined a number of prominent defense department alumni, including his former special operations colleague, SOCOM commander and JCS chairman Hugh Shelton, who was on the board of directors at Anteon.

Since 9/11, covert activities have been encouraged at a much higher level but, prior to 9/11, SOCOM was not supposed to conduct covert operations.  Therefore, JSOC worked intimately with the CIA’s clandestine division called the Special Activities Division (SAD).  Canavan led those kinds of operations in northern Iraq, Liberia and Bosnia.  He ran special operations in Croatia in 1996 and, according to President Clinton, was the one who identified Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown’s body after Brown’s plane crashed there.[28]

JSOC regularly works with foreign intelligence agencies, including the Mossad.[29] It has been involved with hijackings, for example that of the Achille Lauro and TWA Flight 847.  It has also operated from bases in foreign countries, such as Saudi Arabia, for many years.[30] Presidential Decision Directive, PDD-25, gave JSOC one of the rare exemptions from the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which means that JSOC can legally conduct its missions within the US.[31]

In the “War on Terror”, the special mission units of JSOC have been given the authority to pursue secret operations around the world.  JSOC effectively operates outside the law, capturing and killing people with or without the knowledge of the host countries in which it operates.  JSOC missions are always low-profile and the US government will not acknowledge any specifics about them.

Reporter Seymour Hersh has reported that the JSOC was under the command of Vice President Dick Cheney after the attacks.[32] Hersh also claimed that the leaders of JSOC “are all members of, or at least supporters of, the Knights of Malta” and that “many of them are members of Opus Dei.”[33] The ties between the Knights of Malta and high-level US intelligence personnel, including William Casey and William Donovan, have been well-documented.[34] Such accusations have also been made of Louis Freeh, who headed the FBI from 1993 to June 2001 and would have worked closely with Canavan and Shelton in the pursuit of special operations targets.

Other special operations leaders who were involved in the lack of response on 9/11 included Richard Armitage, who was present on the Secure Video Teleconference (SVTS) during the attacks.[35] This was the White House meeting chaired by Richard Clarke, which the 9/11 Commission said convened at 9:25 and included leaders of the CIA, the FBI, the FAA, as well as the departments of State, Defense and Justice.   Even with all those leaders in on the call, nothing was done to stop Flight 93 from “crashing” that morning, approximately 40 minutes after the call began.  Instead, we were left completely undefended.

Like Canavan and Shelton, Armitage was involved in special operations in Vietnam and later was reportedly involved in several of the most well-known covert operations in US history, including the Phoenix Program and the Iran-Contra crimes.[36] Although he had spent many years in the Defense department, he was Deputy Secretary of State on 9/11.  After the invasion of Iraq, he was identified as the one who betrayed CIA agent Valerie Plame by revealing her identity, apparently in retaliation for her husband’s attempt to set the record straight on weapons of mass destruction.  Armitage admitted he revealed Plame’s identity but claimed it was done inadvertently.[37]

Another special operations soldier who testified to the 9/11 Commission and played a significant role with regard to the airlines and facilities prior to 9/11 was Brian Michael Jenkins.  While Shelton and Canavan were running SOCOM and JSOC, Jenkins was the deputy chairman of Kroll when that company was designing the security system for the World Trade Center (WTC) complex.[38]

Jenkins was appointed by President Clinton to be a member of the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security, where he collaborated with James Abrahamson of WTC security company Stratesec, and FBI director (and alleged Opus Dei member) Louis Freeh.  In 1999 and 2000, Jenkins served as an advisor to the National Commission on Terrorism, led by L. Paul Bremer, who went on to be an executive of WTC impact zone tenant, Marsh & McLennan, and then the Iraq occupation governor.  Jenkins returned to the RAND Corporation where he had previously worked with Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Frank Carlucci of The Carlyle Group, and Paul Kaminski of Anteon.

Lieutenant Colonel John Blitch was yet another special operations soldier who played a big part in the events immediately following 9/11.  Blitch spent his career in the US Army’s Special Forces and was said to have retired just the day before 9/11 to become an employee of Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).   Immediately following the attacks, he was put in charge of the team of robotic machine operators that explored the pile at Ground Zero, using devices that had previously been used for elimination of unexploded ordnance.

 Conclusions

Despite being given plenty of notice about the four planes hijacked on 9/11, FAA management did not request military assistance to ensure the planes were intercepted before they crashed.  The 9/11 Commission attributes this to a string of gross failures in communication between the FAA and the military on 9/11.  However, The Report places no blame on any of the people who were involved and doesn’t even mention the one person who was most important to this chain of communications.

One of the most important people involved was Benedict Sliney, who had, just before 9/11, left a lucrative law career defending Wall Street financiers to return to work as a specialist at the FAA.  It was his first day on the job.  With regard to ensuring military interception of the hijacked planes, he said he did not receive a “request to authorize a request.”  Sliney also claimed to not know that FAA management at the Command Center, where he was in charge, or FAA HQ, had any role in requests for military assistance.   This is in contradiction to the stated protocol in the 9/11 Commission report and also the idea of an FAA “hijack coordinator.”

The FAA hijack coordinator was Michael Canavan, a career special operations commander who had come to the civilian FAA job only nine months before 9/11.  According to an FAA intelligence agent, one of the first things Canavan did in that job was lead and participate in exercises that were “pretty damn close to the 9/11 plot.”  He was also known within the FAA for writing a memo just a few months before 9/11 that instituted a new leniency with regard to airport and airline security.

With regard to the communication failures, Canavan offered the unsolicited excuse that he was absent during the morning hours of 9/11, in Puerto Rico.  The 9/11 Commission did not pursue this excuse nor did it ask who was filling the critical hijack coordinator role in Canavan’s absence.  In fact, the 9/11 Commission report didn’t address the hijack coordinator role at all.  The Report mentioned Sliney only once in the entire narrative and did not refer to Canavan in his role as hijack coordinator.

When a new, honest investigation is finally convened, it should look into why a lawyer, who knew how to handle evidence and get financiers off the hook, was experiencing his first day on the job as national operation manager at the FAA.  And If 9/11 was a “special operation” as many people now suspect, that investigation might consider that a number of special operations specialists were in place to ensure that the operation went off without a hitch and was not discovered.  Long-time special operations leaders like Michael Canavan, Hugh Shelton, Brian Michael Jenkins, and Richard Armitage played critical parts with respect to the facilities, events, and official story of 9/11.  These facts seem worth investigating.

References

[1] The 9/11 Commission Report, page 14

[2] The 9/11 Commission report, pages 17 to 18

[3] The 9/11 Commission report, page 34

[4] Ibid

[5] Matthew Goldstein, When Bad Scams Go Good, The Wall Street Journal, May 21, 2001, http://www.smartmoney.com/investing/stocks/when-bad-scams-go-good-10573/

[6] NASD Regulation, Inc. Office of Dispute Resolution, Arbitration No. 9644952

[7] Westlaw citation WL 31426028, United States District Court, S.D. New York, No. 00 CR 91-11 RWS, Oct. 28, 2002

[8] United States District Court, E.D. New York, 103 F.Supp.2d 579, Downes v. O’Connell, 103 F.Supp.2d 579 (2000)

[9]  Lynn Spencer, Touching History: The Untold Story of the Drama That Unfolded in the Skies Over America on 9/11, Free Press, 2008, page 2

[10]  9/11 Commisison memorandum for the record, Interview with Benedict Sliney, May 21, 2004

[11]  History Commons 9/11 Timeline page for John Czabaranek, http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=john_czabaranek_1

[12]  Matthew Everett, The Repeatedly Delayed Responses of the Pentagon Command Center on 9/11, 911blogger.com, November 7, 2010, http://911blogger.com/news/2010-11-07/repeatedly-delayed-responses-pentagon-command-center-911

[13]  History Commons 9/11 Timeline page for Monty Belger, http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=monty_belger

[14]  9/11 Commisison memorandum for the record, Interview with Benedict Sliney, May 21, 2004

[15]  History Commons 9/11 Timeline page for Ben Sliney, http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=ben_sliney

[16] The 9/11 Commission report, page 113

[17] Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine, Rowan & Littlefield, 2010

[18] Harvey M. Sapolsky, Benjamin H. Friedman, Brendan Rittenhouse Green, US military innovation since the Cold War: creation without destruction, Taylor & Francis Publishers, 2009

[19] History Commons 9/11 Timeline profile for William S. Cohen, http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=william_s._cohen

[20] History Commons 9/11 Timeline profile for Henry Hugh Shelton, http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=henry_h._shelton

[21] 9/11 Commission Memorandum for the Record (MFR) on John Hawley interview, October 8, 2003, http://media.nara.gov/9-11/MFR/t-0148-911MFR-00608.pdf

[22] Transcript of 9/11 Commission public hearing of May 23, 2003, 9/11 Commission Archive, http://www.9-11commission.gov/archive/hearing2/9-11Commission_Hearing_2003-05-23.htm

[23] Andrew R. Thomas, Aviation Security Management: Volume 1, Greenwood Publishing Group, page 78, http://terrortalk.org/myfiles/Terrorism%20Books/Aviation%20Security%20Management.pdf

[24] Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, FAA Culture of Bureaucracy Stymies Security Reform Efforts, Critics Say, Los Angeles

[25] History Commons 9/11 Timeline profile for Mike Canavan, http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=mike_canavan#a830faahijackcoordinator

[26] Interview of Michael Canavan, 9/11 Commission Public Hearing, May 23, 2003, http://www.9-11commission.gov/archive/hearing2/9-11Commission_Hearing_2003-05-23.htm

[27] 9/11 Commission Report, footnote 36 to Chapter 10

[28] White House press briefing by Leon Panetta, January 10, 1996

[29] Gordon Thomas, Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad, Thomas Dunne Books, 1995, pp 309-310

[30] John T. Carney, Benjamin F. Schemmer, No Room for Error: The Story Behind the USAF Special Tactics Unit, Presido Press, 2002, p 232

[31] Graeme C. S. Steven, Rohan Gunaratna, Counterterrorism: a reference handbook, ABC-CLIO, 2004, p 230

[32] Abbas Al Lawati, ‘You can’t authorise murder’: Hersh, Gulf News, May 12, 2009, http://gulfnews.com/news/region/palestinian-territories/you-can-t-authorise-murder-hersh-1.68504

[33] Blake Hounshell, Seymour Hersh unleashed, Foreign Policy, January 18, 2011, http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/01/18/seymour_hersh_unleashed

[34] Matthew Phelan, Pulitzer Prize Winner Seymour Hersh And The Men Who Want Him Committed, WhoWhatWhy.com, Feb 23, 2011, http://whowhatwhy.com/2011/02/23/pulitzer-prize-winner-seymour-hersh-and-the-men-who-want-him-committed/

[35] Summary of 9/11 Commission interview with John Flaherty, Chief of Staff for Secretary of Transportation, Norman Mineta, April 2004

[36] Spartacus Educational webpage for Richard Armitage, http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKarmitage.htm

[37] CNN Politics, Armitage admits leaking Plame’s identity, September 08, 2006, http://articles.cnn.com/2006-09-08/politics/leak.armitage_1_novak-and-other-journalists-cia-officer-valerie-plame-patrick-fitzgerald?_s=PM:POLITICS

[38] Kevin R. Ryan, Demolition Access To The WTC Towers: Part Two – Security, 911Review.com, August 22, 2009, http://911review.com/articles/ryan/demolition_access_p2.html