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Unanswered Questions: Defactualisation of Analysis
Presented by... http://www.unansweredquestions.org/
9/11 "Conspiracies" and the Defactualisation of Analysis
How Ideologues on the Left and Right Theorise Vacuously to Support Baseless SuppositionA Reply to ZNet's 'Conspiracy Theory?' Section
http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm
By Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed*
http://www.globalresearch.org/
Contents
INTRODUCTION 2
I. AUTOMATIC DISMISSAL
OF A LEGITIMATE LINE OF INQUIRY 3
II.
THE "INCOMPETENCE THEORY" OF THE 9/11 INTELLIGENCE
FAILURE 4
III. DAVID CORN AND THE MAGIC
ALL-EXPLANATORY "INCOMPETENCE THEORY" 6
IV. MICHAEL ALBERT KNOWS WHAT BUSH KNEW 8
V. MISCONSTRUING THE ANTHRAX CASE 10
VI. THE INSTITUTIONAL PATTERN OF PROVOCATION FOR
WAR 11
VII. THE IRRATIONALITY OF
ATTEMPTS TO DELEGITIMISE 9/11 INQUIRY 15
VIII. WHITEWASHING THE ISRAELI
MOSSAD 18
IX. WHITEWASHING PEARL
HARBOUR 20
X. WHITEWASHING THE 9/11
INTELLIGENCE FAILURE 22
XI. MISSING
THE POINT 26
CONCLUSIONS 32
NOTES 33
Introduction Acceptance of the official narrative of
what happened on September 11, 2001 has become widespread,
not merely on the right, but also on the left. In this
paper, I take issue with the writings of several
commentators who attempt to forcefully argue firstly that
acceptance of the official narrative is justified, and
secondly that certain kinds of inquiry into anomalies and
inconsistencies in that narrative are illegitimate and
unnecessary. The main bulk of this writing is available
online at a new section at the well-known progressive
website ZNet, and is somewhat representative of the
mainstream approach to 9/11.1 In reviewing the work of
these commentators on 9/11, I analyse in detail the failure
of the U.S. intelligence community in preventing the
Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks; the casual repression and/or
misrepresentation of facts related to 9/11; the failure of
U.S. defence measures on 9/11; the historic and
institutional basis for skepticism about the official
narrative; and some salient facts which illustrate the need
for proper research into the linkages between U.S.
government, military, intelligence, and corporate policy,
and the ease with which the September 11 terrorist attacks
went ahead. Numerous respected
commentators on both the left and right of the political
spectrum have ardently criticised widespread speculation
that the Bush administration had advanced warning of the
September 11th terrorist attacks, sufficient to prevent them
from occurring. When Democrat Party U.S. Congresswoman
Cynthia McKinney called for a full investigation into the
events surrounding September 11 - and particularly into the
warnings received by the U.S. intelligence community
suggesting that the administration may have known more than
it is letting on - she was publicly derided. "We deserve to
know what went wrong on September 11 and why", stated
McKinney. "... Sadly, the United States government is being
sued today by survivors of the Embassy bombings because,
from court reports, it appears clear that the U.S. had
received prior warnings, but did little to secure and
protect the staff at our embassies. Did the same thing
happen to us again?"2 Cynthia McKinney's
comments here echoed her earlier statements in a Pacifica
radio interview: "We know there were numerous warnings of
the events to come on September 11... What did this
Administration know, and when did it know it about the
events of September 11? Who else knew and why did they not
warn the innocent people of New York who were needlessly
murdered?"3 In response, on the right, Bush spokesman
Scott McLellan declared: "The American people know the
facts, and they dismiss such ludicrous, baseless views."4
Bush's press secretary, Ari Fleischer, is quoted: "All I can
tell you is the congresswoman must be running for the hall
of fame of the Grassy Knoll Society."5 Nationally syndicated
right-wing U.S. columnist Kathleen Parker joined the
escalating chorus of condemnation: And on
and on. The right-wing chorus of automatic denunciation
appears to be based on the implicit assumption that the Bush
administration is entirely guilt-free of any sort of role in
implementing policies that may have facilitated the
September 11 attacks, knowingly or unknowingly (McKinney
specifies neither). Unfortunately, leading commentators on
the left-end of the political spectrum appear to have joined
in the obligatory chorus of derision. They are supported in
this by the mainstream assumption that the reason the U.S.
intelligence community failed to prevent the attacks is
simply because of bureaucratic incompetence. That assumption has been adopted
even by the private U.S. intelligence firm Stratfor, which
produces independent intelligence on worldwide affairs. On
September 16th 2002, Stratfor commented: On 20th May,
commenting on the outbreak of controversy in Washington DC
over "what Bush knew and when", Stratfor elaborated on this
perspective in some detail, arguing that the colossal 9/11
intelligence failure was a consequence of the structural
fragmentation of the U.S. intelligence community:
While it is clear that a generally
"fragmented picture of the world" is a likely consequence of
a "bureaucratically fragmented intelligence community", in
itself this does not demonstrate that the capabilities of
that community in developing specific intelligence on
various aspects of the world is completely dysfunctional.
Rather it suggests that the U.S. intelligence community will
find it hard to develop an integrated, coherent
understanding of world affairs and their interrelationships.
What is likely to be developed instead, are somewhat
uncorrelated and/or disconnected pockets of intelligence on
various aspects of world affairs. This, however, obviously
does not entail in itself that the intelligence produced
will be inaccurate with respect to those aspects. On the
contrary, it simply indicates that while the U.S.
intelligence community is capable of developing accurate
intelligence on specific disparate aspects of world affairs,
due to the structural fragmentation among the various
agencies that constitute the intelligence community, a
coherent overall intelligence picture of the world based on
comprehension of the complex influences and interconnections
between these disparate aspects will be extremely hard to
form. Indeed, Stratfor itself grasps this
implication: Clearly, the problem here does not
necessarily relate to the task of focusing and gathering
intelligence on a particular threat to U.S. national
security - rather it relates to the integration of disparate
intelligence into "a coherent worldview": "a single,
integrated, coherent picture" of world affairs. Structural
stumbling blocks thus principally affect the coordination of
the U.S. intelligence community in this respect. Attempting
to account for a U.S. intelligence failure with respect to
the specific issue of developing intelligence on a
particular aspect of world affairs - such as a particular
threat to U.S. national security - on the basis of such
structural stumbling blocks, is therefore theoretically
unwarranted. In other words, while it is certainly
possible that such structural stumbling blocks may have had
some sort of role in any such intelligence failure, to
suppose that they wholly account for the failure without an
in-depth factual analysis of the failure itself (based on
inspecting the collection and analysis of the related data)
is nothing but gratuitous speculation. Indeed, given that
such structural fragmentation principally affects the
integration of intelligence into a "coherent worldview" ("a
single, integrated, coherent picture of what is happening in
the world") it is highly unlikely that this fragmentation
alone would be sufficient to result in a wholesale
intelligence failure on any isolated specific aspect of
world affairs, i.e. a specific threat to U.S. national
security. Stratfor, however, makes the mistake of
extending the scope of the implications of the structural
fragmentation of the U.S. intelligence community to the
community's failure to act with respect to the terrorist
attacks of September 11th - which of course was a specific
threat to U.S. national security. Yet clearly this is
unfounded based on Stratfor's own assessment. Stratfor does
go on to provide a useful examination of the specific ways
in which the relative fragmentation of the U.S. intelligence
community can, and has, affected the integration of analysis
of information, thus preventing the development of a
coherent intelligence product on world
affairs. Without, however, factually
assessing the information on the September 11 terrorist
attacks collected and analysed by the U.S. intelligence
community, it is impossible to know whether this problem of
emphasising collection over and above analysis, was the
principal reason for the intelligence failure. It is further
unlikely that the institutional compartmentalisation of the
U.S. intelligence community contributed to its failure to
develop a coherent perspective on the specific threat to
U.S. national security of Al-Qaeda, because that
compartmentalisation primarily affects the development of "a
coherent worldview" - not a specific aspect thereof. It is
the connection and coordination of intelligence on different
aspects of world affairs into an integrated whole that is
institutionally problematic as a consequence of the
intelligence community's compartmentalisation. Intelligence
on specific issues is not implicated here. It is,
therefore, both theoretically and empirically incorrect for
Stratfor to claim that: "Given this incredible tangle of
capabilities, jurisdictions and competencies, it is a marvel
that a finished intelligence product is ever delivered to
decision makers." This extreme conclusion is contradicted by
the fact that the U.S. intelligence community has a
demonstrable record of success. U.S. military intelligence
expert Richard K. Betts, Director of the Institute of War
and Peace Studies at Columbia University, and former member
of the National Commission on Terrorism, observes in Foreign
Affairs: "Paradoxically, the news is worse than the angriest
critics think, because the intelligence community has worked
much better than they assume... A particularly
pertinent Yale University study by U.S. intelligence expert
Loch K. Johnson - former Assistant to Defense Secretary Les
Aspin and Regents Professor of Political Science at the
University of Georgia - examines how, and how well,
intelligence efforts have guarded and advanced perceived
U.S. interests. Analysing in detail a series of intelligence
successes and failures, Johnson refutes common charges of
ineptitude that have followed embarrassments such as the
Aldrich Ames case. He argues convincingly that the successes
of the CIA and the intelligence community far outweigh such
setbacks. Most crucially, he discusses how even the failures
are often laid at the wrong door: good intelligence has
often been ignored by the upper political echelons of the
Washington bureaucracy.11 In this context, to prematurely
presume in the absence of facts that an intelligence failure
on a specific national security threat is because of
incompetence induced by the institutional
compartmentalisation of the intelligence community, is
unwarranted. On the contrary, as documented by Johnson, most
often such failures are not related to the quality of the
intelligence product itself, but rather because the
political bureaucracy does not act on accurate intelligence
received. Stratfor, at least, admits that: "We remain
certain that if we searched all of the databases and memos
we would find that the U.S. government had collected much of
the information that would have been necessary to prevent
Sept. 11. It was there." Yet the organisation then makes a
logical leap in assuming, without having actually examined
the data itself and what was done with it, that this
information "wasn't collated, integrated, or analyzed and
therefore could not be disseminated." But in light of the
above analysis, there is simply no good reason at all to
assume that this is the case, particularly when we
understand that the institutional compartmentalisation of
the intelligence community only makes it unlikely that the
CIA will be capable of developing "a single, integrated,
coherent picture of what is happening in the world", rather
than any coherent specific threat assessment. Indeed, this
position is supported by the fact that there has been a
string of U.S. intelligence successes in the last decade, in
comparison to which there have been relatively few - though
of course tragic - failures. Cruder renditions of the "incompetence theory"
of the surprising lack of action on the part of U.S.
intelligence in relation to September 11 have come from
partisans of the left. These renditions are articulated in a
much less sophisticated, and even more badly argued, manner
than the position of groups such as Stratfor. Washington
Editor of The Nation, David Corn, for example, argues that:
"... anyone with the most basic understanding of how
government functions (or, does not function) realizes that
the various bureaucracies of Washington - particularly those
of the national security 'community' - do not work well
together."12 Corn fails entirely, however, to specify
exactly in what respect(s) this is the case. Unlike
Stratfor, he does not clarify the nature of particular
structural discontinuities between different bureaucratic
and intelligence agencies and in what way they have problems
integrating. As a consequence, his blanket statement about
the national security community "not working well together"
fails to actually communicate anything significant at all.
Because the assertion is devoid of even a minimal attempt at
factual specification of what this implies, it is
effectively vacuous. But as we have seen above, while it is
undoubtedly obvious that the intelligence community suffers
from institutional compartmentalisation, this does not mean
that the community is completely incompetent and
dysfunctional. Rather, as Stratfor admits, it impairs the
functioning of the community in the preparation of
integrated intelligence to develop "a coherent worldview."
Corn's attempt to apply the specific problems that these
agencies have working together due to institutional
compartmentalisation in an extended and general manner is
without any foundation. Indeed, Corn's extreme portrayal
is contradicted by a report in the Washington Post in May
2001 which observed that the two specialised U.S.
intelligence agencies the FBI and the CIA have "in recent
years" developed a very close "working relationship". Former
FBI Director Louis Freeh has been "credited with greatly
improving the FBI's ability to counter terrorist threats",
as well as "for altering the FBI's working relationship with
the CIA, which long had been strained." As noted by CIA
Director George J. Tenet: "Director Freeh's vision,
leadership and commitment have been directly responsible for
the unprecedented strategic partnership between the FBI and
the CIA", a partnership that in the past few years has borne
fruit in a verifiable record of frequent intelligence
successes, outweighing failures. Tenet commented for
instance that: "Very significant successes in the
counterterrorism and counterintelligence areas... are
evidence of the remarkable cooperation that has existed
between our two agencies in recent years."13 That
assessment put forth by the Post and by Tenet is
corroborated by the following conveniently ignored fact,
demonstrating that federal agencies have been working
together very well indeed on the issue of counter-terrorism:
A body of experts known as the Counterterrorism Security
Group (CSG) exists, which was effectively chaired by White
House Counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke. The CSG
constitutes a connecting point for "all federal agencies",
whose members are "drawn mainly from the C.I.A., the
National Security Council, and the upper tiers of the
Defense Department, the Justice Department, and the State
Department," and who meet "every week in the White House
Situation Room." The CSG assesses "all reliable
intelligence" related to counterterrorism received by these
agencies and departments. The CSG was meeting almost every
week in the period prior to the September 11 attacks,
working incessantly on the specific threat of the impending
Al-Qaeda plot.14 Nevertheless, Corn continues: "If there
truly had been intelligence reports predicting the 9/11
attacks, these reports would have circulated through
intelligence and policy-making circles before the folks at
the top decided to smother them for geopolitical gain. That
would make for a unwieldy conspiracy of silence."15 There is
an elementary contradiction between this and Corn's previous
assertion. Here, Corn assumes that there could never have
been any intelligence reports predicting the September 11
attacks, because if there had been, certainly "these reports
would have circulated through intelligence and policy-making
circles". In other words, the reports would circulate around
the intelligence community on the way to reaching the higher
political echelons. That, of course, would require that at
least in some significant respect, the agencies of the
intelligence community are capable of coordinating and
analysing information. Yet in his previous assertion, Corn
assumes in a vague manner that the agencies of the "national
security 'community'" simply do "not work well together".
But these two generalised stances are mutually inconsistent.
The main problem here is that Corn keeps his commentary
within the realm of theory, without actually assessing in a
meaningful manner the available data on warnings of the 9/11
attacks received by the U.S. intelligence community.16 And
as we have shown above, the "incompetence theory" of the
9/11 intelligence failure is devoid of substantial factual
basis. IV. Michael Albert Knows What Bush
Knew This style of "analysis" of the 9/11 intelligence
failure has been adopted by other writers on the left. U.S.
political commentator Michael Albert of ZNet, for example,
states bluntly that: "Supposing we had the means to answer
the question about Bush's foreknowledge of 9/11, it would at
most reveal that U.S. intelligence services lack
competence."17 Albert does not supply any evidence for
why this is the case. Instead, having acknowledged the
existence of a question "about Bush's foreknowledge of
9/11", he supplies a vague and ready-made answer that "at
most", the U.S. intelligence community "lacks competence."
But clearly Albert has no meaningful grasp of the structural
discontinuities between various agencies in the U.S.
intelligence community and what specific problems they
create - instead he assumes the existence of a blanket
wholesale "incompetence", and decides without any factual
basis that this is the only plausible explanation of why the
U.S. government failed to foil the September 11 attack. For
instance, he also flies in the face of the fact noted above,
that on the specific issue of counter-terrorism U.S.
intelligence agencies were very closely coordinating their
operations and information, on a regular basis, in the
months leading up to 9/11. In other words, Albert gives
the impression that he already has the answer to the
question, and thus since the answer "at most" will be
"incompetence", then there is no need to pursue further
inquiry. Unfortunately however, it appears that Albert
arrives at this conclusion without any factual analysis or
inquiry at all: "Of course these agencies lack competence.
Moreover, what good does demonstrating the incompetence of
U.S. intelligence agencies do peace and justice? Should
bolstering surveillance budget allotments be a new
progressive program plank?" Having decided from the outset
that U.S. intelligence agencies "lack competence" - although
like Corn, Albert fails to provide any specific factual
insight into what exactly is implied by this blanket
description - Albert assumes that this undefined
"incompetence" undoubtedly explains the Bush
administration's failure to prevent the September 11
attacks. The way in which this undefined theory of
"incompetence" magically explains all and every anomaly in
the official mainstream 9/11 narrative is
disconcerting. But as discussed above, a proper
understanding of the specific implications of the U.S.
intelligence community's institutional compartmentalisation
does not lead one to the undefined blanket conclusion that
the community suffers from a general "incompetence", but
rather that this compartmentalisation has very precise
connotations for the integration of intelligence information
into "a coherent worldview". In other words, as already
discussed, on both a theoretical level based on analysis of
the structure of the intelligence community as well as on an
empirical level based in part on comparative analysis of the
record of U.S. intelligence successes and failures, the
conclusion that the Bush administration's failure to prevent
the September 11 attacks was simply due to "incompetence" is
premature. Given that most intelligence failures appear
to have resulted not from the inaccuracy of the intelligence
product, but rather from good intelligence being ignored by
the higher political echelon, there is no justification to
simply assume that an "incompetence theory" of the U.S.
failure to foil the 9/11 plot provides a sufficient
explanation of that failure.18 Albert's underlying
assumption of "incompetence" is thus baseless. Ultimately,
we have to investigate the facts surrounding 9/11 before
making a judgment on 9/11 - otherwise our judgment is will
be devoid of any substantial and relevant factual
basis. Albert's essential argument for why "the left"
should stop asking "what Bush knew and when" is circular,
and thus self-defeating. He assumes from the outset that the
intelligence community failed to prevent the 9/11 attacks
simply because of some vague and undefined "incompetence".
He then argues that since that it is the case, anybody
calling for more understanding of "what Bush knew and when"
is falling into the right-wing agenda of saying that since
U.S. intelligence is incompetent, more U.S. dollars should
be thrown at the CIA. He then argues that "the left" should
not become party to a programme to mindlessly increase the
U.S. intelligence and defense budget which will then be used
for more wars and acts of terror worldwide. But Albert's
entire argument rests on the assumption that he already
knows (somehow) the generalities of "what Bush knew and
when" - i.e. that he knows that Bush did not know. In other
words, Albert begins his argument by assuming that he
already knows that Bush failed to foil the attacks due to
intelligence "incompetence", and that since this is the
case, there is no need to ask "what Bush knew and when".
This boils down to an elementary contradiction: We do not
need to ask the question "what Bush knew and when" because
we already know the answer, even though in fact we do not
know the answer at all as evidenced by Albert's total
failure to prove his "incompetence" assumption. As such,
Albert's attempt to convince "the left" that they should not
even bother asking the question "what Bush knew and when" is
based on baldly (and falsely) assuming that he knows the
fundamental essence of the answer, and that since the answer
is "incompetence", it is not worth pursuing. This, of
course, is incoherent. V. Misconstruing
the Anthrax Case Ironically, the only piece of
"evidence" offered by Albert to support his thesis of the
overarching "incompetence" of the U.S. intelligence
community is that: "... these are the U.S. same [sic]
intelligence agencies that can't find the perpetrator of the
recent anthrax attacks, even though the anthrax came from
Fort Detrick, Maryland, and even though, given the skills
required, the number of possible culprits is a handful."
Unfortunately, this particularly factoid is of Albert's own
construction. Anybody who has been following the anthrax
case would be aware of credible evidence that U.S.
intelligence does, in fact, know pretty much who the
perpetrator of the attacks is, but has been prevented from
arresting the individual under high-level government
pressure. This information comes from a leading U.S.
expert on biological warfare, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg,
Director of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Program for
the Federation of American Scientists, and a Research
Professor of Environmental Science at the State University
of New York. Rosenberg, who according to BBC correspondent
Susan Watts has high-level government connections, states
that the FBI had already identified the perpetrator of the
Winter 2001 anthrax attacks, but was "dragging its feet" in
making an arrest and pressing charges, for fear that secret
government activities would be exposed. The Trenton Times
reported that according to Rosenberg, "the Federal Bureau of
Investigation has a strong hunch about who mailed the deadly
letters. But the FBI might be 'dragging its feet' in
pressing charges because the suspect is a former government
scientist familiar with 'secret activities that the
government would not like to see disclosed'."19 The charge
was made in a February 18th address at the Woodrow Wilson
School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton
University. Citing sources she described as "government
insiders" with whom she has been in contact, she testified
that the FBI had known since last October the identity of
the person who mailed lethal quantities of anthrax in
letters to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, Senator
Patrick Leahy, and several media outlets. Her sources
further informed her that although the individual in
question had been interrogated several times, he had not
been arrested. "We know that the FBI is looking at this
person, and it's likely that he participated in the past in
secret activities that the government would not like to see
disclosed," Rosenberg said. "I know that there are insiders,
working for the government, who know this person and who are
worried that it could happen that some kind of quiet deal is
made so that he just disappears from view. "I hope that
doesn't happen, and that is my motivation to continue to
follow this and to try to encourage press coverage and
pressure on the FBI to follow up and publicly prosecute the
perpetrator."20 In light of Rosenberg's
revelations, other experts concur. Steven Block of Stanford
University, for example - an expert on biological warfare -
told the Dallas Morning News that: "It's possible, as has
been suggested, that they may be standing back because the
person that's involved with it may have secret information
that the United States government would not like to have
divulged."21 U.S. investigative journalist and former
National Security Agency official Wayne Madsen, who has also
testified in hearings before U.S. Congress as an expert on
U.S. covert foreign policies, has written a particularly
insightful and comprehensive analysis of the available data
on the anthrax attacks for Counterpunch, described as
"America's best political newsletter" by Out of Bounds
Magazine. Madsen's conclusions are worth noting:
It should be noted
that in this case, again, the evidence suggests that the
failure of U.S. intelligence lies not with the accuracy of
the intelligence product, but with the refusal of the higher
political echelon to act upon it. This is not the place to
undertake a detailed analysis of the anthrax issue, but it
suffices to conclude that Albert clearly has no basic grasp
of this subject. Nevertheless, he comments on it in support
of his argument. Unfortunately, this is representative of
Albert's entire approach to 9/11. He appears to have no
understanding, nor any interest in evaluating the actual
data around 9/11 and related issues such as anthrax, but
still feels ready to comment on them anyway. The simple
problem that this creates is that ultimately, Albert's
commentary on 9/11 ceases to retain credibility. VI. The Institutional Pattern of Provocation
for War Given that a proper analysis of the structure,
capabilities, recent coordination and record of success of
the U.S. intelligence community provides little - if any -
support for the "incompetence theory" of a counterterrorist
intelligence failure, it is likely that the 9/11
intelligence failure was a consequence of the higher
political bureaucracy refraining from acting on
intelligence. In this context, it is perfectly legitimate to
investigate the 9/11 intelligence failure with due
consideration given to both the admittedly unlikely
"incompetence theory", as well as what might be termed "the
political inaction" theory, of which the "foreknowledge
hypothesis" is one variation. Either way, the likelihood
of political inaction being behind the administration's
failure to foil the Al-Qaeda plot, in itself implicates the
existence of a web of strategic and economic influences
acting upon the political establishment, which resulted in
such political inaction. And given that this is a far more
tenable and probable possibility than mere "incompetence",
then it is essential to investigate the matter more
thoroughly - including specifically an evaluation of the
information (and what was done with it) about the 9/11
attacks available to the U.S. intelligence community. It
seems that the fundamental problem here is that the 9/11
intelligence failure is not seriously investigated, nor
understood at all in any meaningful manner by Corn, Albert,
and other similar commentators both on the left and right.
Yet despite having no meaningful understanding of this
failure, these commentators are happy to articulate their
opinions on the matter anyway, by putting forth a variety of
circular, inconsistent and/or effectively vacuous
conclusions and statements about the very same failure.
Those very vague conclusions are then taken as good reason
to avoid investigating the 9/11 intelligence failure from
certain angles, such as for instance the distinct
possibility that the political bureaucracy did not act on
good intelligence received. Ultimately then, pure
speculation as a result of lack of understanding of the 9/11
intelligence failure, is used to justify that very lack of
understanding.23 But there are, in fact, very pertinent
reasons not to blindly accept the official "incompetence
theory" adopted by so many in the mainstream, tolerated
barely by elements of the right-wing to save face, and
uncritically parroted by naïve commentators on the left. In
a reply to Michael Albert's ZNet commentary, Canadian social
philosopher Professor John McMurtry at the University of
Guelph refers to these reasons in
detail: "Throughout there is one constant
to this long record of hoodwinking the American public into
bankrolling ever rising military expenditures and periodic
wars for corporate treasure. This decision structure ruled
before and through 9-11, and has escalated after it - to
fabricate or construct shocking attacks on U.S. symbols of
power to provide the pretext and the public rage to launch
wars of aggression against convenient and weaker enemies by
which very major and many-levelled gains are achieved for
the U.S. corporate-military complex. "... Consider this
earlier Republican version of 9-11. 'Operation Northlands'
was a unanimous Joint Chiefs of Staff plan to 'contrive' the
occurrence of an atrocity against U.S. citizens by Castro's
Cuba to justify a full-out U.S. invasion. Its scenarios
included planting bombs and shooting down a U.S. passenger
plane. There are many variations on this structure of
geostrategic thinking. I analyse this regulating pattern in
my new book, Value Wars, from Pluto
Press."24 Here, the essential implications of
McMurtry's point is the following: The possibility that the
Bush administration had ample warning of the September 11
attacks but deliberately refused to act in order to generate
a pretext for the consolidation of the U.S.
corporate-military complex should not be discounted, in
light of the well-documented historical record, which
illustrates that such a policy is nothing new. On the
contrary, McMurtry rightly notes that it is rather
systematic. Given that the same essential decision-making
structure responsible for that history continues to exist
today, it is hardly reasonable to dismiss the need to
discern whether the latest terrorist atrocity against the
U.S. was not merely another element of the same underlying
pattern. But that is exactly what Albert does, by refusing
to even seriously consider whether that is the case -
instead he only assumes the opposite without substantial
basis. U.S. political scientist Professor Steven R. Shalom
of William Paterson University in New Jersey, co-writing
with Michael Albert, extends the same vacuous style of
analysis in a lengthy 'ZNet Instructional' on conspiracy
theories.25 Their paper begins with a detailed discussion
comparing what they consider to be the fundamental elements
of "conspiracy theory" with those of "institutional theory".
Their main concern appears to be to demonstrate that any
consideration of whether the Bush administration played a
deliberate role in facilitating the September 11 terrorist
attacks amounts to indulging in "conspiracy theory", which
most of the time represents "a departure from rational
analysis", which is thus, most of the time, a priori
incorrect - and thus not worth serious
consideration: "... An institutional theory emphasizes roles,
incentives, and other institutional dynamics that promote or
compel important events and, most important, have similar
effects over and over. Institutional theorists of course
notice individual actions, but don't elevate them to prime
causes. The point of an institutional explanation is to move
beyond proximate personal factors to more basic
institutional factors. The aim is to learn something about
society or history, as compared to learning about particular
culpable actors. If the particular people hadn't been there
to do the events, most likely someone else would have. "To
the institutional theorist, the behavior of rogue elements
is far less important than the ways in which the defining
political, social, and economic forms lead to particular
behaviors. An institutional theory of the U.S. missile
attacks on Sudan or the Iran-Contra affair focuses on how
and why these activities arose due to the basic institutions
of U.S. society, not on the personal quirks of a womanizing
Clinton or a loose-cannon Ollie North."
While Shalom and Albert acknowledge that
there are "of course, complicating borderline cases", they
fail to grasp the point articulated by McMurtry, that
so-called conspiratorial behaviour is very often a direct
consequence of a wider framework of institutional dynamics.
Historically, political, social and economic forms in the
United States have frequently led to such behaviour. By
citing several well-known examples from the historical
record, McMurtry highlights the fact that U.S. military
intelligence "has a very long record of contriving attacks
on its symbols of power as a pretext for the declaration of
wars, with an attendant corporate media frenzy focussing all
public attention on the Enemy to justify the next
transnational mass murder. This pattern is as old as the
U.S. corporate state."26 The existence of such a systematic
historical pattern is evidence of a deeply-entrenched web of
institutionalised decision-making structures at the helm of
the U.S. military intelligence community. This institutional
dynamic is what produces the pattern of manufacturing
provocations for war, often by permitting or pushing forward
attacks on symbols of American power. It is thus perfectly
reasonable and legitimate to ask whether the September 11
terrorist attacks were also a late product of the same
institutional dynamic. Shalom and Albert, however, take
issue with the citation of 'Operation Northwoods' as an
example of this institutional dynamic: "Conspiracy
theorists have pointed to the Operation Northwoods document
as proving that U.S. leaders were capable of 9-11. The
document is a recently released top secret 1962 memorandum
from the Joint Chiefs of Staff proposing the staging of
attacks on U.S. targets that would appear to be coming from
Cuba, as a way to justify a U.S. attack on the
island." Whether or not Northwoods is taken as an example
of this institutional dynamic, previous instances of
contriving attacks on U.S. symbols of power as a pretext for
the declaration of wars are systematic enough to demonstrate
that this is a method employed by U.S. decision-making
structures when elite military, political, strategic and
economic considerations converge on making such a method
appear favourable, in terms of meeting elite institutional
interests. Nevertheless, Shalom and Albert argue that
Northwoods is not a relevant example
here: Unfortunately, from the outset Shalom and
Albert mistake the primary value of an analysis of the
Operations Northwoods document to be that the U.S.
decision-making structure is capable of arranging the
killing of its own citizens. One does not need Northwoods to
know, however, that the U.S. decision-making structure views
U.S. citizens as expendable. The willingness of the
government to send ever larger numbers of young soldiers to
their death in the Vietnam War is a single obvious
illustration of that expendability. Other examples are
numerous, such as how the U.S. government has many times
knowingly subjected its citizenry to a dangerous - and
potentially lethal - test of biological weapons.27 The
primary value of analysing the plan hatched by the Joint
Chiefs outlined in the Northwoods document is in providing
proof of the U.S. military intelligence infrastructure's
willingness to resort to the long-standing method of, in
McMurtry's words, fabricating or constructing "shocking
attacks on U.S. symbols of power to provide the pretext and
the public rage to launch wars of aggression against
convenient and weaker enemies by which very major and
many-levelled gains are achieved for the U.S.
corporate-military complex." As George Washington
University's National Security Archive records, Operation
Northwoods "describes U.S. plans to covertly engineer
various pretexts that would justify a U.S. invasion of
Cuba... Indeed, there are enough other
examples from the historical record such as Pearl Harbour
(discussed below), some mentioned by McMurtry, proving
decisively that the U.S. decision-making structure at the
helm of the U.S. military intelligence community is morally
capable of allowing U.S. citizens to be killed to serve
geostrategic interests. Furthermore, simply because
something did not happen in the past, certainly does not
prove the lack of propensity for such an event to occur in
the future, given the necessary conditions. As Shalom and
Albert themselves admit, "it makes sense to develop
institutional theories because they uncover lasting features
with ubiquitous recurring implications. On the other hand,
if an event arises from a unique conjuncture of particular
people who seize extra-systemic opportunities, then even
though institutions undoubtedly play some role, that role
may not be generalizable and an institutional theory may be
impossible to construct." Taking this admission a step
further, it is certainly plausible that as a consequence of
a very institutional dynamic, the system itself develops in
a manner that is not necessarily the same as before, but
institutionalises novel and perhaps unpredictable features.
On a merely theoretical basis, therefore, one cannot fully
predict the future (otherwise we would all be political
astrologists), or assume that events will remain stuck
within a particular institutional trajectory. Indeed, there
is good reason to believe that the very institutional
trajectory of the U.S. decision-making structure has
operated in such a manner as to develop and consolidate its
power in progressively new, and even worse, features, than
before. A close analysis of the Cabinet members of the
current Bush administration, for instance, discloses therein
the unprecedented conjuncture of officials representing the
most powerful elements of the U.S. military, intelligence
and corporate complex. Never before has an administration
been so directly wired into the ruthless U.S.
military-industrial complex.29 In that context, it is
perfectly reasonable to consider the possibility that the
September 11 terrorist attacks were the outcome of the same
sort of considerations - rooted in long-standing political,
social and economic forms - that gave rise to the Operation
Northwoods plan, and other previous U.S. operations along
similar lines. VII. The Irrationality of
Attempts to Delegitimise 9/11 Inquiry Shalom and
Albert, however, appear intent on labeling any such inquiry
as a plunge into irrationalism. Discussing the irrational
element of "conspiracy theory", they attempt to show that in
general most "conspiracy theories" are unscientific:
“Where
God's mysterious ways salvage the religious believers'
failed predictions, added layers of conspiracy salvage
disconfirmed conspiracy theories. To the conspiratorial
mind, if evidence emerges contradicting a claimed
conspiracy, it was planted. If further evidence shows that
the first evidence was authentic, then that further evidence
too was planted." This description of such
irrational, unscientific "conspiracy theory" is then applied
to September 11. All those who argue the legitimacy of
investigating whether the Bush administration may have
deliberately facilitated the 9/11 attacks are lumped into
one contrived category of "conspiracy theorists", and
subsequently dismissed for proposing absurd uninteresting
ideas without foundation. This is achieved essentially by
listing a large number of "conspiracy theories" - many of
which are arguably untenable, a few of which are plausible -
and then simply discarding them all as intrinsically absurd
without even attempting to address the matter with a factual
analysis: 1. The World Trade Center was
destroyed not by planes but by explosives. 2. The
planes were not hijacked at all, but commandeered by remote
control by NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense
Command). 3. The planes were hijacked, but the
hijackers were double-crossed and the planes were taken over
by remote control by NORAD. 4. The hijackers were
actually working for the U.S. government. 5. U.S.
intelligence knew about the plot, but intentionally did
nothing so as to cause massive deaths that would mobilize
public support for a war on terrorism that would benefit the
government. 6. The plot was actually organized by
the Mossad. 7. The Mossad knew about the plot, but
did nothing, hoping that the massive deaths would mobilize
public support for Israel's war on the Palestinians. 8. Tower 2 of the World Trade Center was hit by a
missile. 9. There was a joint plot by rogue
elements in the CIA, the Mossad, other U.S. government
agencies, Mobil (being investigated in a criminal case, all
of the evidence against whom was in FBI offices in the World
Trade Center), and Russian organized crime (which profited
especially from Afghan heroin with which the Taliban was
interfering). We should be forthright here. None of the
above strike us as remotely interesting much less
plausible." The entire approach here,
however, is misleading. ZNet began its crusade against 9/11
"conspiracy theories" by criticising the idea of Bush
foreknowledge of the attacks. Shalom and Albert, however,
extend this criticism without warrant by lumping virtually
all angles of analysis of the U.S. role which contradict the
official narrative of 9/11 together, dismissing them all. In
doing so, they also dismiss the distinctly plausible
possibility already noted above that the Bush administration
did receive sufficient warning of the attacks to prevent
them, but failed to act. Crucially, at no point in their
analysis do Shalom and Albert undertake a meaningful
analysis of the relevant facts, which are widely available
on the public record. They give no argument as to why this
possibility is inherently implausible - nor for that matter
do they give any good reason as to why any of the above
theories are inherently implausible, other than asserting
"forthrightly" that this is the case, and qualifying the
assertion by noting that none of these theories happen to
fit in with their personal understanding of "how the world
works". It is only because of this sleight-of-hand that
their discussion appears to take the form of rationality. In
fact, they are merely doing what they themselves criticise
to be unscientific: theorising about 9/11 based on shoddy
long-held but untenable assumptions, without any proper
analysis of the available data. Let us take, for example,
their "conspiracy theory" number 4: 4. The hijackers were
actually working for the U.S. government. At face value,
without bothering to look at relevant credible reports on
this subject, it is easy to dismiss this as "implausible."
But a cursory analysis of relevant facts certainly strongly
suggests that the hijackers had some sort of high-level U.S.
military connection. According to reports in Newsweek, the
Washington Post and the New York Times, after September 11,
U.S. military officials gave the FBI information "suggesting
that five of the alleged hijackers received training in the
1990s at secure U.S. military installations."30 Newsweek has
further elaborated that U.S. military training of foreign
students occurs as a matter of routine, with the
authorisation - and payment - of respective governments,
clarifying in particular that with respect to training of
Saudi pilots, "Training is paid for by Saudi Arabia." The
hijackers, we should note, were almost exclusively Saudi; 15
of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, mostly from wealthy
families: The U.S.
government has attempted to deny the charges despite the
name matches, alleging the existence of biographical
discrepancies: "Officials stressed that the name matches may
not necessarily mean the students were the hijackers because
of discrepancies in ages and other personal data." But
measures appear to have been taken to block public scrutiny
of these alleged discrepancies. On 16th September, news
reports asserted that: Which leads us to wonder: What
on earth has the U.S. military been up to in relation to
Al-Qaeda? Is it not reasonable to consider whether these
hijackers were working for the U.S. government in some way
in light of these reports (especially given that it has
happened before in relation to the U.S. embassy bombings in
1998, the perpetrator of which was a former U.S. Army
Sergeant)? And given the non-response of the FBI to specific
questions on the matter, does this not suggest that they are
hiding something? There is not yet a clear-cut answer to
these questions, but that is exactly why this issues need to
be researched in greater depth. Clearly, this anomaly in the
official narrative, which has broad implications in terms of
the ramifications of U.S. military intelligence policy
toward its Middle East allies, is worth exploring further.
In their arbitrary wholesale rejection of so-called
"conspiracy theories", Shalom and Albert are clearly also
debunking legitimate lines of inquiry that have basis in
fact. VIII. Whitewashing the Israeli
Mossad There are other examples of this. Let us take,
for instance, their two Mossad-related "conspiracy
theories": 6. The plot was actually organized by the
Mossad. 7. The Mossad knew about the plot, but did
nothing, hoping that the massive deaths would mobilize
public support for Israel's war on the Palestinians. By
bluntly stating two variations of the possibility that the
Israeli Mossad had some sort of connection/involvement in
the September 11 terrorist attacks, and then dismissing them
wholesale, Shalom and Albert seem to be suggesting that as
far as "the left" is concerned, any attempt to investigate
the evidence of an Israeli connection to 9/11 is inherently
illegitimate. But by assuming from the outset, without
basis, that the idea of an Israeli connection is
implausible, they actually demonstrate only their ignorance
of history. It is certainly well-documented, for example,
that Israel has quite regularly perpetrated terrorist
attacks against its U.S. and British benefactors. This is
nothing new, as documented by U.S. political commentator
John Leonard in the Afterword to my 9/11 study, The War on
Freedom. Leonard shows that there is in fact a rich history
here, analysis of which discloses a consistent pattern of
provocation. Menachim Begin33 led the 1946 Zionist truck
bombing of Jerusalem's King David Hotel, timed to spur
British troop withdrawals and give Zionist militias a free
hand against the poorly armed Palestinians, taking the lives
of just under 100 British guests.34 Such covert Israeli
intelligence operations have evolved into a sophisticated
pillar of state strategy, from amateur beginnings in the
1950's, when the exploits of some provocateurs became
public. In the Lavon affair, Israeli "private citizens" blew
up American and British property in Egypt, blaming it on the
Muslim Brotherhood, but were caught by the police.35 The
bombing of synagogues in Iraq by Zionists inciting their
brethren to flee to Palestine also became public
knowledge.36 The New Zealand Herald cites the testimony of
an ex-Mossad agent on the Achille Lauro hijacking, who
exposed the atrocity as an Israeli "black propaganda
operation."37 Does this, in itself, prove that the Israeli
military intelligence infrastructure was in some way
involved in 9/11? Of course not. But it proves propensity,
since this infrastructure has a long record of conducting
terrorist attacks - not only against U.S. and British
targets but also against Jews (not to mention Palestinians).
What brings this propensity into the limelight of a proper
contemporary analysis of 9/11 are a number of facts,
documented by Leonard in The War on Freedom, proving beyond
doubt the reality of some sort of dubious Israeli
involvement. Among the pertinent facts he plucks from the
public record, are the following. In the first of a
four-part investigative documentary TV series on the Israeli
connection to 9/11, FOX News correspondent Carl Cameron
reported on how U.S. authorities had detained active members
of an Israeli spy ring operating in the U.S., believed by
authorities to be linked to the 9/11 attacks:
The Weekly Planet reports that
"addresses of many" of the "Arabs under scrutiny by the U.S.
government" systematically "correspond to the specific areas
where the Israelis set up operations." One extremely
pertinent example is "an address for the Sept. 11 hijacking
leader, Mohammad Atta," which is "3389 Sheridan St. in
Hollywood, Fla., only a few blocks and a few hundred feet
from the address of some of the Israelis, at 4220 Sheridan."
The strange coordination between Atta and Israeli
intelligence operatives is not an isolated case. About a
"dozen Israelis, including the alleged surveillance leader,
had been based in Hollywood, Fla., between January and June
[2001] - quite possibly watching Arabs living nearby who are
suspected of providing logistical support to Osama bin
Laden's network." Indeed, ten of the 19 Al-Qaeda hijackers
lived in Florida, bolstering conclusions reported by a FOX
News reporter that "the students-cum-spies might have gained
advance knowledge of aspects of the Sept. 11 terrorists" -
or even worse, may have been directly involved in some
way.39 The respected French journal Le Monde further reports
that there were "more than one-hundred Israeli agents, some
presenting themselves as fine arts students, others tied to
Israeli high-tech companies. All were challenged by the
authorities, were questioned, and a dozen of them are still
imprisoned. One of their tasks was to track the Al-Qaida
terrorists on American territory - without informing the
federal authorities."40 The detained Israelis, in other
words, had been part of an intelligence operation that had
very possibly been tracking the hijackers, and had both the
means and the opportunity to discover the terrorist plot.
Indeed, somewhat ominously, the U.S. government has refused
to disclose already existing "evidence linking these
Israelis to 9-11," ensuring instead that it remains
"classified" (unlike direct evidence of an Al-Qaeda
involvement). Most crucially, if U.S. authorities recognise
the existence of an Israeli connection to 9/11, including
the distinct possibility of foreknowledge (not to mention as
yet undisclosed "tie-ins"), why are Shalom and Albert
arbitrarily dismissing the same? There is no need to comment
on this further - it is clear that the facts speak for
themselves in warranting a further inquiry into an Israeli
linkage to the September 11 attacks. Such an inquiry is
clearly legitimate based on the facts. We do not need to
delve into specific "conspiracy theories", or a discussion
of them, to understand the legitimacy - and necessity - of
such an inquiry, which obviously has broad implications for
the nature of the relationship between the United States and
Israel, as well as the current direction of Israeli
intelligence policy. Ironically then, the "incompetence
theory" of the 9/11 intelligence failure and other issues
related to September 11 adopted by Shalom and Albert, fits
nicely into their own description of an irrational and
unscientific hypothesis: "If the hypothesis flouts prior
knowledge as well as current evidence, and is accepted
nonetheless, then the behavior is often no longer
scientific, nor even rational." It is noteworthy that their
hypothesis not only flouts "prior knowledge" on the historic
pattern of provocation for wars noted by McMurtry, Leonard,
and others, but also completely ignores "current evidence"
available on the 9/11 attacks. As such, their hypothesis is
not only unscientific, it is irrational.
IX. Whitewashing Pearl Harbour A particularly stark
example of this is their answer to their self-posed question
"Do all the ignored warnings about 9-11 prove conspiracy or
just incompetence?": Many
things are possible. What we are interested in, however, is
not what was or was not "possible" in relation to September
11th, but what actually happened. Speculation on what could
or could not have been the case is not always helpful in
decisively discerning the reality of the matter. It is, of
course, very easy for both "conspiracy theorists" and
"institutional theorists" to continue sitting in their
respective bubbles of irrelevant "theory" with respect to
9/11, Pearl Harbour, and any other event. None of them,
however, will in reality have the slightest clue what they
are talking about unless they leave the bubble of "theory"
and enter into the domain of factual analysis. Shalom and
Albert, however, like the extreme "conspiracy theorists"
they criticise, completely fail to do this in a meaningful
way. Their dismissal of the "conspiracy theories claiming
FDR knew in advance about Pearl Harbor" is a particularly
illustrative example of this. Instead of discussing the
matter by referral to the documented facts, they cite the
stale hypothetical argument of Roberta Wohlstetter put forth
in 1962. But that sort of blanket dismissal of the case
for President Franklin D. Roosevelt's advanced knowledge of
Pearl Harbour is no longer tenable. The History Channel
(U.S.A.) recently aired a BBC-produced documentary, Betrayal
at Pearl Harbor, which demonstrated using, among other
historical records declassified U.S. documents, that then
U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and his chief military
advisers knew full well that Japan was about to spring a
"surprise attack" on the U.S. under the latter's
provocation, but allowed the attack to occur to justify U.S.
entry into war.41 Detailed documentation of this fact has
been provided by historian Robert Stinnett in his recent
study, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor.
Stinnett served in the U.S. Navy from 1942-46 where he
earned ten battle stars and a Presidential Unit Citation.
Examining recently declassified American documents, he
concludes that far more than merely knowing of the Japanese
plan to bomb Pearl Harbour, Roosevelt deliberately steered
Japan into war with America.42 Other elements of the case have
also been put well by Daryl S. Borgquist, a U.S. Naval
Reserve Public Affairs Officer and a Media Affairs Officer
for the Community Relations Service Headquarters at the U.S.
Department of Justice: "President Franklin D. Roosevelt
requested the national office of the American Red Cross to
send medical supplies secretly to Pearl Harbor in advance of
the 7 December 1941 Japanese attack... '... Shortly before the attack in
1941 President Roosevelt called him [Smith] to the White
House for a meeting concerning a Top Secret matter. At this
meeting the President advised my father that his
intelligence staff had informed him of a pending attack on
Pearl Harbor, by the Japanese. He anticipated many
casualties and much loss, he instructed my father to send
workers and supplies to a holding area at a P.O.E. [port of
entry] on the West Coast where they would await further
orders to ship out, no destination was to be revealed. He
left no doubt in my father's mind that none of the Naval and
Military officials in Hawaii were to be informed and he was
not to advise the Red Cross officers who were already
stationed in the area. When he protested to the President,
President Roosevelt told him that the American people would
never agree to enter the war in Europe unless they were
attack [sic] within their own borders... 'He [Smith] was
privy to Top Secret operations and worked directly with all
of our outstanding leaders. He followed the orders of his
President and spent many later years contemplating this
action which he considered ethically and morally wrong. I do
not know the Kimmel family, therefore would gain nothing by
fabricating this situation, however, I do feel the time has
come for this conspiracy to be exposed and Admiral Kimmel be
vindicated of all charges. In this manner perhaps both he
and my father may rest in peace.'" In a
detailed historical account published by the respected
journal Naval History, affiliated to the U.S. Naval
Institute, Borgquist documents the U.S. government's
foreknowledge and provocation of Japan's attack on Pearl
Harbor, through analysis of many other aspects of the
relationship between the government and the Red Cross.44
Thus, we see how compelling evidence of the U.S.
government's role in both provoking and permitting the
attack on Pearl Harbour is simply ignored by Shalom and
Albert. As a result, their commentary on these matters fails
to retain any credibility. Thus, they ignore a key example
of how the U.S. government and military intelligence
infrastructure has in the past deliberately provoked acts of
terrorism against U.S. targets, anticipating U.S.
casualties, in order to justify military action. X. Whitewashing the 9/11 Intelligence
Failure Unsurprisingly then, their attempt to support
the case for an "incompetence theory" of the 9/11
intelligence failure follows the same method of ignoring the
most compelling facts: "Consider
two clues: “The FAA has a "Red Team" whose job it is to
try to smuggle explosives and weapons past airport
checkpoints to test airport security. According to Bogdan
Dzakovic, a member of the team, airport security failed 90
percent of the tests, but the FAA did nothing about it,
essentially blocking further tests. "A report by
the Library of Congress to the National Intelligence Council
stated: 'Suicide bomber belonging to Al Qaeda's Martyrdom
Battalion could crash land an aircraft packed with high
explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the C.I.A.
or the White House.' "These clues would lead some to
conclude that the president 'must have known': But the
'president' who must have known in these cases was Bill
Clinton. Dzakovic had his tests squelched in 1998 (Blake
Morrison, USA Today, 25 Feb. 2002, pp. A1, A4) and the
Library of Congress study was written during the Clinton
administration (quoted in William Safire, 'The Williams
Memo,' New York Times, 20 May 2002, p. A19). So either
Clinton too was in on the plot (and his top aides, Gore,
Cohen, Albright?) or else it's possible to have received
such reports and still not done anything even though one
wasn't a conspirator." It is worth noting
that this presentation of the "evidence" is nothing but a
laughable straw man. Shalom and Albert thus achieve their
objective of construing any consideration of "what Bush knew
and when" to be absurd, by presenting as extremely weak a
case as possible, and then observing that, of course, the
case is extremely weak. But this is simply another vacuous
circular argument. We will here cite just a few
documented facts from my more extensive study, The War on
Freedom, which demonstrate that the U.S. intelligence
community had developed very precise information on the
September 11 terrorist attacks prior to those attacks,
information which was widely known among U.S.
agencies. The New Yorker reports that according to Richard
A. Clarke, U.S. National Coordinator for Counterterrorism in
the White House, about ten weeks before 11th September, the
U.S. intelligence community was convinced that a terrorist
attack by Al-Qaeda on U.S. soil was imminent. Seven to eight
weeks prior to the 11th September attacks, all internal U.S.
security agencies were warned of an impending Al-Qaeda
attack against the Untied States that would likely occur in
several weeks time: "Meanwhile, intelligence had been
streaming in concerning a likely Al Qaeda attack. 'It all
came together in the third week in June,' Clarke said. 'The
C.I.A.'s view was that a major terrorist attack was coming
in the next several weeks'." On July 5th, Clarke "summoned
all the domestic security agencies-the Federal Aviation
Administration, the Coast Guard, Customs, the Immigration
and Naturalization Service, and the F.B.I." and informed
them "of an impending attack."45 Approximately 4 weeks
prior to 11th September, the CIA took seriously specific
information of an impending Al-Qaeda attack on U.S. soil.
The Associated Press reports that: "Officials also said the
CIA had developed general information a month before the
attacks that heightened concerns that bin Laden and his
followers were increasingly determined to strike on U.S.
soil." A CIA official affirmed that: "There was something
specific in early August that said to us that he was
determined in striking on U.S. soil." AP elaborates that:
"The information prompted the CIA to issue a warning to
federal agencies."46 So it is clear that the U.S.
intelligence community was anxiously anticipating an
imminent Al-Qaeda attack in the next few weeks. But that is
not all. The specific method of the attacks - using planes
as missiles or bombs - was also known by U.S. intelligence.
The U.S. intelligence community received warnings six months
before 11th September, warnings which were repeated again
three months before that date, that "Middle Eastern
terrorists" planned to hijack planes to use as missiles
against prominent American buildings. These warnings were
not ignored or dismissed. On the contrary, they were taken
very seriously by the U.S. intelligence community.
Newsbytes, an online division of the Washington Post,
reported in mid-September that: "The FAZ, quoting unnamed
German intelligence sources, said that the Echelon spy
network was being used to collect information about the
terrorist threats, and that U.K. intelligence services
apparently also had advance warning. The FAZ, one of
Germany's most respected dailies, said that even as far back
as six months ago western and near-east press services were
receiving information that such attacks were being planned.
Within the American intelligence community, the warnings
were taken seriously and surveillance intensified, the FAZ
said."47 The last comment - "Within the
American intelligence community, the warnings were taken
seriously and surveillance intensified" - is crucial. It
clearly indicates that in response to the ECHELON warnings,
the entire U.S. intelligence community - all U.S.
intelligence agencies - were on alert for a hijacking
attempt that would attempt to hurl planes into "symbols of
American" culture. So the U.S. intelligence community knew
both that an Al-Qaeda attack was imminent, and also that the
attack would attempt to use civilian planes as bombs to hit
prominent U.S. targets. John McMurtry cites another
revealing piece of evidence indicating specifically that
U.S. intelligence had been aware that these targets were
located in lower Manhattan - the World Trade Center is of
course the most prominent terrorist target in that district,
particularly since it had already been targeted in the past
by terrorists linked to bin Laden in 1993:
At the same time, U.S.
intelligence was aware that suspected terrorists linked to
Osama bin Laden were training at U.S. flight schools. The
Washington Post reported, for instance, that the FBI had in
fact known this for several years - yet, absolutely nothing
had been done about it: All this information was widely
known in the U.S. intelligence community. U.S. intelligence
operatives were fully aware of their dire implications. But
they were forced into a state of inaction by the studious
passivity of Washington. One active FBI counter-terrorism
investigator, for instance, testifies that it was widely
known "all over the Bureau, how these [warnings] were
ignored by Washington... David Schippers himself told me
in an interview that according to his contacts in the
intelligence community, who had approached him in May 2001
about an impending Al-Qaeda attack from the air on lower
Manhattan, "there are others all over the country who are
frustrated, and just waiting to come out." The frustration
of these intelligence officers, Schippers explained, was
because of the obstructions of a "bureaucratic elite in
Washington short-stopping information," with the consequence
that they have granted "terrorism a free reign in the United
States." All this data, and much more, is extensively
discussed in The War on Freedom. What is clear from this
data is that it is wrong to assume that one agency had one
bit of information, another agency had another, and due to
incompetence either the information was not taken seriously
or it was not connected, or both. On the contrary, the
entire U.S. intelligence community was alerted to the
relevant information, and took it seriously. Given that the
White House Counterterrorism Security Group, coordinating
the findings of all federal agencies, was working
incessantly on the Al-Qaeda plot prior to 9/11, this is not
surprising. A few weeks prior to September 11th 2001, the
intelligence community thus anticipated: an imminent
Al-Qaeda terrorist attack on U.S. soil; the hijacking of
civilian planes to be used as missiles to target iconic
structures symbolic of American power; the targeting of
buildings in lower Manhattan. But preventive action in
response to this precise information - such as apprehending
Al-Qaeda operatives at U.S. flight schools - was blocked
from Washington. The above analysis demonstrates that even
a cursory inspection of some pertinent facts suffices to
discredit the simplistic "incompetence theory". Instead, the
facts clearly indicate that the Washington political echelon
simply refused to act on accurate and precise intelligence
of the impending attacks. Why that might be is another
matter that is also examined in my book.51 But we may derive
some insight into that by noting the acute observations of
U.S. military expert Stan Goff - a former U.S. Army Special
Forces Master Sergeant and Lecturer in Military Science and
Doctrine at West Point Military Academy - who points out
that, contrary to the simplistic and misleading claim of
Shalom and Albert that prior to 9/11 the Bush administration
"already had immense power", in fact "the U.S.'s ability to
dominate the entire planet is unraveling...
Unfortunately, Shalom and
Albert are only able to argue their case by refusing to
conduct a meaningful analysis of the relevant facts. By
keeping their "analysis" within a bubble of theory rooted in
false assumptions, they attempt to justify why "the left"
should remain within the same bubble and not bother looking
at the facts and their implications. Once again, this only
shows that as commentators on the September 11 attacks, they
retain no credibility, since they have no significant grasp
of the related data. While they rightly criticise the
automatic "Obviously the World Trade Center attack was a
U.S. government hoax"-conspiracy-bandwagon, they fall into
the opposite extreme of uncritically buying into the
official 9/11 narrative of 'Obviously the World Trade Center
attack was not foiled because of U.S. incompetence.' The
reality is far more complex. Picking and choosing one's
facts according to what conveniently fits into the
pre-established framework of one's pre-determined
"conspiracy theory" or "institutional theory", is simply a
recipe for being alienated from the real world. XI. Missing the Point The rest of Shalom
and Albert's analysis continues to studiously miss the
point, as usual by ignoring facts in an effort to justify
why "the left" should also not bother to investigate the
facts. They attempt to take on, for example, 9/11
"conspiracy theories" about President Bush allowing the
attacks to go ahead by ensuring that the U.S. Air Force
failed to respond on time. But they do not even attempt to
assess the principal anomalies surrounding this whole issue,
which have led many commentators to conclude that the
official, magical, all-explanatory, undefined, catch-phrase
"incompetence" is not sufficient to explain the scale of the
breakdown of U.S. defence measures on September 11. The
principal anomaly has, once again, been aptly and concisely
articulated by Professor McMurtry: Veteran
journalist George Szamuely - former editorial writer for The
Times, The Spectator, and the Times Literary Supplement; as
well as an associate at the Manhattan Institute, editor at
Freedom House, research consultant at the Hudson Institute,
and a contributor to Commentary, American Spectator,
National Review, the Wall Street Journal, National Interest,
American Scholar among many others - pinpoints the
fundamental problem in the official narrative with further
elaboration: In this context, the official
"incompetence theory" of this inexplicable lack of adherence
to mandatory standard operating procedures on the part of
the National Military Command Center begins to fall apart.
Award-winning Canadian journalist and media analyst Barry
Zwicker - former correspondent for the Toronto Sun and the
Globe and Mail, and currently a media critic on CBC-TV,
CTV's News1, and Vision TV -
observes: "Whatever
the explanation for the huge failure, there have been no
reports, to my knowledge, of reprimands. This further
weakens the 'Incompetence Theory.' Incompetence usually
earns reprimands. This causes me to ask - and other media
need to ask - if there were 'stand down'
orders."55 Again, this is a legitimate line
of inquiry deserving of further attention. Within the strict
hierarchy of decision-making in the U.S. military
establishment, standard operating procedures cannot be
systematically violated unless an appropriate command to do
so is received from above, and would normally not be
violated without severe reprimand and immediate
rectification. Military experts such as Stan Goff have
asserted that the issue needs to be investigated, noting of
the Bush administration's attempts to pretend procedures
were followed that: "There is a story being constructed
about these events". Goff also observes: "[A]t a very bare
minimum... we've either got a criminal conspiracy or we've
got criminal negligence on the part of this Administration.
But in either case, there are parts of this thing that could
have been prevented but nobody did a thing."56 Given the
nature of the massive collapse of almost all related defence
measures on September 11, involving the violation of
standard operating procedures, it is reasonable to
investigate the matter further to discern whether the cause
was likely to be, as is the obvious deduction, stand down
orders - an admittedly plausible explanation in context with
the convincing evidence for Washington's deliberate inaction
in response to intelligence warnings. Similar concerns
apply to the official version of Osama bin Laden's
relationship to the United States. Instead of taking note of
anomalies suggesting that the U.S. relationship to Osama is
far more complex than the conventional wisdom would have us
believe, Shalom and Albert ridicule simplistic straw man
fallacies such as that bin Laden's "former ties to the
U.S... reveal the secret roots of a conspiracy." But they
ignore facts indicating that the U.S. government's attitude
to Al-Qaeda is not as hostile as the mainstream may presume.
It is well-known, for instance, that Al-Qaeda receives
millions of dollars in financial support from members of the
Saudi royal family - Saudi Arabia of course being a major
client regime of the United States - perhaps including the
bin Laden family which is under investigation by the FBI for
funding Osama.57 Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative
journalist Seymour Hersh reports in the New Yorker that:
"Since 1994 or earlier, the National Security Agency has
been collecting electronic intercepts of conversations
between members of the Saudi Arabian royal family, which is
headed by King Fahd... Furthermore, the NSA intercepts "have demonstrated to
analysts that by 1996 Saudi money was supporting Osama bin
Laden's Al Qaeda and other extremist groups in Afghanistan,
Lebanon, Yemen, and Central Asia, and throughout the Persian
Gulf region." According to one senior U.S. intelligence
official, the Saudi regime had "gone to the dark
side."58 "The younger
Bush made his first million 20 years ago with an oil company
partly funded by Salem Bin Laden's chief U.S.
representative... Young George also received fees as
director of a subsidiary of Carlyle Corporation, a little
known private company which has, in just a few years of its
founding, become one of Americas biggest defence
contractors. His father, Bush Senior, is also a paid
advisor. And what became embarrassing was the revelation
that the Bin Ladens held a stake in Carlyle, sold just after
September 11... Bush Jr.'s order
to "back off" the bin Laden family and Saudi royals followed
previous orders dating back to 1996 - the year when Saudi
funding of Al-Qaeda was uncovered - frustrating efforts to
investigate the latter. The London Guardian has elaborated
that: "FBI and military intelligence officials in Washington
say they were prevented for political reasons from carrying
out full investigations into members of the Bin Laden family
in the U.S. before the terrorist attacks of September 11...
Clearly, neither Saudi Arabia nor
President Bush, are interested in genuinely cracking down on
the funding of Al-Qaeda. That is clear from the blocks on
Saudi terror connections imposed by Bush and his
predecessors, for years. It is clear from the behaviour of
Saudi royals, for years. The implications are even more
damning when we consider credible reports that the bin Laden
family, with whom the Bushes have very close financial ties,
also funds Osama bin Laden.61 There is little doubt then
that the Bush administration is effectively conniving with
the Saudi support of Al-Qaeda terrorism, by allowing it to
continue and even worse, actively protecting it from
investigation by repeatedly obstructing U.S. intelligence
inquiries. There are dire implications here that need to be
investigated, perhaps in terms of the role international
terrorism might play in providing a pretext for foreign and
domestic policies, where otherwise a pretext could not be
found. Is that why successive U.S. administrations tolerate
the financial support of Al-Qaeda by their key clients? To
what extent does the web of strategic and economic interests
behind the decision-making structure responsible for U.S.
foreign policy in the Middle East lead successive
administrations to form and protect regional alliances which
are intrinsically unstable, despite knowing the domestic
consequences and dangers in terms of international
terrorism? Again, even a cursory inspection of a few
relevant facts clarifies the legitimacy and necessity of
this line of inquiry, and demonstrates that questioning the
official narrative about the relationship between bin Laden
and the U.S. is perfectly reasonable. Shalom and Albert
move on from this to tackle the question of "looking at who
benefits to see who must be responsible - doesn't that imply
conspiracy?... Their attempt here
to equate "looking at who benefits to see who must be
responsible" with a penchant held by "mystery writers" is
disingenuous. As they themselves admit, looking at who
benefits is "often useful, but hardly definitive". But if we
are at all mildly interested in understanding 9/11, then we
will have to therefore admit the usefulness of asking the
question "who benefits?", and therefore the usefulness of
analysing specific evidence for whether the prime
beneficiaries contributed to the crime from which they
benefited. But Shalom and Albert sidestep that implication
by equating the "who benefits?" principle with
conspiratorial mystery writing. Indeed, no one is claiming
that "who benefits?" as an isolated principle is
automatically an all-explanatory catchphrase for all
historical phenomena! Again, as usual Shalom and Albert fail
to deal with the essentials of the argument and hence only
refute another pathetic straw man. In fact, "who
benefits?" is a standard forensic question that is used by
law enforcement officials when investigating a crime, in the
attempt to isolate the main suspects. Of course, this
forensic principle is not used to solve the crime, and
therefore not definitive! But it is used as at least one
basic criterion of gathering a legitimate/likely list of
suspects to be investigated. There is nothing irrational,
conspiratorial, or mysterious about this entirely normal
method of initial forensic inquiry. Based on that method, it
is reasonable to investigate the role of the Bush
administration and the U.S. military-corporate complex, if
any, in the September 11 attacks, with an open and impartial
attitude - since they are the most direct, primary
beneficiaries. Shalom and Albert also fail to acknowledge
that the issue of who benefits from 9/11 does provide a
plausible explanation of why the Bush administration would
refuse to act on accurate intelligence of an impending
Al-Qaeda attack (an issue which they refuse to analyse in
any meaningful manner). It is of course possible that they
did not anticipate the extent of the destruction the 9/11
attacks would cause, as McMurtry notes:
Rather, Shalom and Albert
present the forensic principle of "who benefits?" as if it
is offered as the only piece of evidence that "implies
conspiracy". In fact, this standard forensic principle gives
us a good reason to ask the question of whether the most
immediate and direct beneficiaries - the Bush administration
and the U.S. military-industrial complex - of the 9/11
attacks were in some way involved in those attacks. In
other words, it gives us good reason to begin an
investigation into the subject, rather than fanatically
dismiss the issue without any serious consideration, as
Shalom and Albert do, and ask "the left" to do. Most
crucially, the key point that they ignore is that the "who
benefits?" principle, connected to the available data
indicating that the Washington political echelon refused to
act on accurate intelligence on the impending Al-Qaeda
attack, provides a plausible explanation of that studious
inaction, both prior to 9/11 and on the very day of the
attacks. That indeed is the assessment of leading U.S.
intelligence expert Tyrone Powers, a former FBI Special
Agent specialising in counterterrorism - now Professor of
Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice at Anne Arundel County
Community College and Director of the Institute for Criminal
Justice, Legal Studies and Public Service. I corresponded
with Powers about the 9/11 intelligence failure in the
aftermath of the recent controversy on Capitol Hill about
"what Bush knew, when". He told me that in his view, based
on the facts that have recently surfaced on the public
record, there was "credible information from the FBI, CIA
and foreign intelligence services that an attack was
imminent". The information indicated that an Al-Qaeda
hijacking attempt was probable. But no measures were
enforced by the Bush administration - such as increasing
security measures at airports in accordance with
long-standing recommendations - to prevent such
hijackings. Powers puts this in context with what he
describes as the "consequentialism" inherent to the decision
making process of leaders, which he has witnessed firsthand
in his intelligence and counter-intelligence background:
"... on occasion, [damaging] acts are allowed if in the
minds of the decision-makers, they will lead to 'greater
good'," and as long as the damage is contained within
certain limits. Powers further refers to a variety of
combined institutional influences and issues: pressure on
intelligence agencies to vastly reduce their powers; concern
over the "blowback" from the controversies of the
Presidential election; the desire on the part of elements of
the intelligence community to "reconstitute the CIA" after
its perceived "emasculation by the Clinton administration";
the belief among these elements that such a reconstitution
required "a need, a demand and a free hand that would be
given by a democratic Congress [only] if there was a
National outcry". He then told me that: "My experience tells
me that these incidents would have reached the level at
which the 'consequentialism' thought process would have been
made a real option" - in other words, that elements of the
intelligence community and the administration may have
deliberately failed to act in the belief that the resultant
damage would contribute to a "greater good", providing a
pretext for such policies as the reconstitution of the CIA.
However, Powers emphasises that this policy would have been
the result of a "miscalculation" - a failure to anticipate
the extent of this damage: "But the amount of destruction
wrought on a civilian population shocked even the advocates
of this policy." In other words, the U.S. intelligence
community had sufficient information of an impending
Al-Qaeda hijacking attack, Powers argues reviewing the
available evidence, but was probably blocked from
undertaking preventive action from above. Elements of the
Bush administration, he suggests, may have done so to
protect or further their perceived interests - the "greater
good" - perhaps in justifying domestic and foreign policies
they are now pursuing.63 If a U.S. intelligence expert of
Powers' standing believes that this is a more plausible
explanation of the available facts than the "incompetence
theory", how can Shalom and Albert dismiss it as not
"remotely interesting, much less plausible"? Their stance is
simply irrational. The rest of the comments made by Shalom
and Albert in their 'ZNet Instructional' are rooted in the
body of fallacies, mistaken assumptions, vacuous analysis,
and avoidance of facts that they amass in their previous
observations. The fundamental problem with their work, and
with the work of others who adopt the same frame of ideas,
is that they do not appear to have any sort of handle on the
facts - nor do they appear to have any "interest" in
analysing them, basically due to their fundamental faith in
the accuracy of the official 9/11 narrative. Starting
from the effective assumption that they know that Bush did
not know, they attempt to convince "the left" that therefore
we should not bother investigating the matter. The same
circular principle is applied wholesale to every other
gaping hole in the official 9/11 narrative. This, of course,
does not do ZNet - an otherwise brilliant social justice
resource - nor anyone else for that matter, any justice. As
we have seen above, even a cursory inspection of the facts
suffices to show that investigating the U.S. government role
in relation to the September 11 terrorist attacks is a
legitimate line of inquiry. Furthermore, it is clear that
the facts pose a considerable challenge to the conventional
wisdom about the 9/11 attacks, exposing glaring anomalies
that need to be addressed. These anomalies in the mainstream
version of events suggest a much wider picture of
long-standing institutional corruption, involving the
intertwined relationship between the interests of the U.S.
military-corporate complex and the operation of
international terrorism.64
I. Automatic Dismissal of
a Legitimate Line of Inquiry"After all, we hold thorough public
inquiries into rail disasters, plane crashes, and even
natural disasters in order to understand what happened and
to prevent them from happening again or minimizing the
tragic effects when they do. Why then does the
Administration remain steadfast in its opposition to an
investigation into the biggest terrorism attack upon our
nation?
"She's
black, which means people give her a pass lest they be
perceived racist... None of which is to suggest that Cynthia
McKinney is a terrorist, or a terrorist sympathizer, or even
a socialist rabble-rouser who despises her own country. On
the other hand, using McKinney's own talent for inferential
dot-connecting, she just might be."6
II. The "Incompetence Theory" of the 9/11
Intelligence Failure"We
have no doubt that, after the databases have been searched,
it will be found that U.S. intelligence had plenty of
information in some highly secure computer. The newspapers
will trumpet, 'CIA knew identity of attackers.' That will be
only technically true. Buried in the huge mounds of
information perhaps once having passed across an overworked
analyst's desk, some bit of information might have made its
circuit of the agencies. But saying that U.S. intelligence
actually 'knew' about the attackers' plots would be
overstating it. Owning a book and knowing what's in it are
two vastly different things."7
"The Central Intelligence Agency, as the name
suggests, was founded to centralize the intelligence
function of the United States. It was a good idea then and
it is a good idea now. Unfortunately, it is an idea that has
never been truly implemented and from which, over time, the
government has moved intractably away. A centralized
intelligence capability is essential if the United States is
to have a single, integrated, coherent picture of what is
happening in the world. A bureaucratically fragmented
intelligence community will generate a fragmented picture of
the world. That is currently what we
have."8
“It is unclear whether any of
these agencies completely understand their own internal
vision, let alone that they are able to transmit a
comprehensive picture to the CIA (which is supposed to
integrate all this into a coherent world view and serve it
up to the president and other senior officials for action)."
"... [T]he U.S. intelligence system
is overwhelmingly geared toward the collection, rather than
the analysis, of information. The result is inevitable: a
huge amount of information is gathered, but it is never
turned into intelligence... The collection capacity of the
United States, both technical and human, is vast. But it is
deliberately and institutionally compartmentalized in such a
way that prevents a coherent perspective from
emerging."9
"Contrary to
the image left by the destruction of September 11, U.S.
intelligence and associated services have generally done
very well at protecting the country. In the aftermath of a
catastrophe, great successes in thwarting previous terrorist
attacks are too easily forgotten - successes such as the
foiling of plots to bomb New York City's Lincoln and Holland
tunnels in 1993, to bring down 11 American airliners in Asia
in 1995, to mount attacks around the millennium on the West
Coast and in Jordan, and to strike U.S. forces in the Middle
East in the summer of 2001."10
III.
David Corn and the Magic All-Explanatory "Incompetence
Theory""And this raises
the question of whether the FBI may be dragging its feet
somewhat and may not be so anxious to bring to public light
the person who did this.
"... the FBI has never been keen to identify
the perpetrator because that perpetrator may, in fact, be
the U.S. Government itself. Evidence is mounting that the
source of the anthrax was a top secret U.S. Army laboratory
in Maryland and that the perpetrators involve high-level
officials in the U.S. military and intelligence
infrastructure... Forget unfounded conspiracy theories. The
evidence is overwhelming that the FBI has consistently shied
away from pursuing the anthrax investigation [under
government pressure]."22
“Shocking attacks on symbols of
American power as a pretext for aggressive war is, in fact,
an old and familiar pattern of the American corporate state.
Even the sacrifice of thousands of ordinary Americans is not
new, although so many people have never died so very fast...
The basic point is that the U.S. 'secret government' (Bill
Moyers' phrase) has a very long record of contriving attacks
on its symbols of power as a pretext for the declaration of
wars, with an attendant corporate media frenzy focussing all
public attention on the Enemy to justify the next
transnational mass murder. This pattern is as old as the
U.S. corporate state - from the sinking of the battleship
Maine to start the Spanish-American War in 1898, through the
fabricated attack on the U.S. battleship Maddox in the Gulf
of Tonkin in August 1964 along with the fabricated attack by
Egypt on the client-state Israel in 1967, to a reiteration
of the same general pattern in setting up the War Against
Iraq from 1991 on - a war that has murdered by bombing and
embargo intent an average of 5000 Iraqui children every
month since. This executive branch war is still in motion.
It started and it continues by the same overall pattern as
9-11. In the case of Iraq, the war was precipitated by the
green light given by the U.S. Ambassador, April Glaspie, who
said that the U.S. was 'neutral' regarding the climaxing
dispute over oilfields between Iraq and Kuwait just before
Saddam ordered troops into Kuwait. 'Saddam fell into the
trap' were the insider words of Jordan's foreign minister
after the event.
“Conspiracy theorists begin
their quest for understanding events by looking for groups
acting secretly, either outside usual institutional norms in
a rogue fashion, or, at the very least to manipulate public
impressions, to cast guilt on other parties, and so on.
Conspiracy theorists focus on conspirators' methods,
motives, and effects. Personalities, personal timetables,
secret meetings, and conspirators' joint actions claim
priority attention. Institutional relations largely drop
from view.
“But... the Joint Chiefs didn't call for
killing U.S. citizens. They did propose sinking a boatload
of Cuban refugees (though we don't know whether the Joint
Chiefs would have arranged for a U.S. vessel to fortuitously
be on hand to pick up the refugees in the water), but with
regard to the shoot down of a plane filled with U.S. college
students, the plan was to switch an actual planeload of
students with an 'unmanned' drone that would be shot down,
supposedly by Cuba. Elsewhere, Operation Northwoods proposes
blowing up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay in a 'Remember the
Maine' replay, but explicitly refers to a 'non-existent
crew'. The document also suggests attacks on Cuban refugees
in the United States 'even to the extent of wounding.' So if
this document is supposed to show us what U.S. officials are
morally capable of, it seems to suggest that they are
capable of lying, deceit, conspiring to wage a war of
aggression - but not killing U.S. citizens. Moreover, as far
as we can tell, the plan proposed by the Joint Chiefs was
rejected by the U.S. civilian leadership."
"These proposals - part of a secret
anti-Castro program known as Operation Mongoose - included
staging the assassinations of Cubans living in the United
States, developing a fake 'Communist Cuban terror campaign
in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in
Washington,' including 'sink[ing] a boatload of Cuban
refugees (real or simulated),' faking a Cuban airforce
attack on a civilian jetliner, and concocting a 'Remember
the Maine' incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban
waters and then blaming the incident on Cuban
sabotage."28
"... it is a basic requirement of scientific
beliefs that they be in principle falsifiable, that there be
the possibility of disconfirming evidence. If a scientific
hypothesis predicts X, and instead not-X occurs (and recurs
repeatedly with no off-setting explanations for the
discrepancy), then the hypothesis ought to be doubted. If
the hypothesis flouts prior knowledge as well as current
evidence, and is accepted nonetheless, then the behavior is
often no longer scientific, nor even rational...
“Here are some of the leading 9-11
conspiracy theories:
"U.S. military sources have given
the FBI information that suggests five of the alleged
hijackers of the planes that were used in Tuesday's terror
attacks received training at secure U.S. military
installations in the 1990s. Another of the alleged hijackers
may have been trained in strategy and tactics at the Air War
College in Montgomery, Ala., said another high-ranking
Pentagon official. The fifth man may have received language
instruction at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Tex.
Both were former Saudi Air Force pilots who had come to the
United States, according to the Pentagon source... NEWSWEEK
visited the base early Saturday morning, where military
police confirmed that the address housed foreign military
flight trainees... It is not unusual for foreign nationals
to train at U.S. military facilities. A former Navy pilot
told NEWSWEEK that during his years on the base, 'we always,
always, always trained other countries' pilots. When I was
there two decades ago, it was Iranians. The shah was in
power. Whoever the country du jour is, that's whose pilots
we train.' Candidates begin with 'an officer's equivalent of
boot camp,' he said. 'Then they would put them through
flight training.' The U.S. has a long-standing agreement
with Saudi Arabia - a key ally in the 1990-91 gulf war - to
train pilots for its National Guard. Candidates are trained
in air combat on several Army and Navy bases. Training is
paid for by Saudi Arabia."31
"Officials would not
release ages, country of origin or any other specific
details of the three individuals." This situation seems to
have continued up to the time of writing. Even Senate
inquiries into the matter have been studiously ignored by
government law enforcement officials, who when pressed, have
been unable to deny that the hijackers were training at
secure U.S. military installations. When Senator Bill
Nelson, for instance, in outrage asked the FBI whether the
hijackers were being trained by the U.S. military, they
refused to give a definitive answer, instead admitting that
"they are trying to sort through something complicated and
difficult."32
"A handful of active Israeli military were
among those detained, according to investigators, who say
some of the detainees also failed polygraph questions when
asked about alleged surveillance activities against and in
the United States [emphasis added]... investigators suspect
that they [sic] Israelis may have gathered intelligence
about the attacks in advance, and not shared it. A highly
placed investigator said there are - quote - 'tie-ins'. But
when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them,
saying, - quote - 'evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11
is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has
been gathered. It's classified information.' Fox News has
learned that one group of Israelis, spotted in North
Carolina recently, is suspected of keeping an apartment in
California to spy on a group of Arabs who the United States
is also investigating for links to
terrorism."38
“Actually, ignored
warnings prove neither. It is possible, for example, that
there were many warnings but that these warnings were not
readily distinguishable from the thousands of other
intelligence reports being received at the same time.
Despite the conspiracy theories claiming FDR knew in advance
about Pearl Harbor, it remains the case that the most
compelling explanation for the missed warnings in 1941 was
the inability to detect the significant information from the
noise. (This is the argument of Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl
Harbor: Warning and Decision, 1962.)"
"Lieutenant
Commander Arthur McCollum, a U.S. Naval officer in the
Office of Naval Intelligence, saw an opportunity to counter
the U.S. anti-war movement by provoking Japan into a state
of war with the U.S., and triggering the mutual assistance
provisions of the Tripartite Pact. Memorialized in a secret
memo dated October 7, 1940, McCollum's proposal called for
eight provocations aimed at Japan. President Roosevelt acted
swiftly, and throughout 1941, implemented the remaining
seven provocations. The island nation's militarists used the
provocations to seize control of Japan and organize their
military forces for war against the U.S., Great Britain, and
the Netherlands. During the next 11 months, the White House
followed the Japanese war plans through the intercepted and
decoded diplomatic and military communications intelligence.
At least 1,000 Japanese radio messages per day were
intercepted by monitoring stations operated by the U.S. and
her Allies, and the message contents were summarized for the
White House. The intercept summaries from Station CAST on
Corregidor Island were current-contrary to the assertions of
some who claim that the messages were not decoded and
translated until years later-and they were clear: Pearl
Harbor would be attacked on December 7, 1941, by Japanese
forces advancing through the Central and North Pacific
Oceans."43
“Don C.
Smith, who directed the War Service for the Red Cross before
World War II and was deputy administrator of services to the
armed forces from 1942 to 1946, when he became
administrator, apparently knew about the timing of the Pearl
Harbor attack in advance. Unfortunately, Smith died in 1990
at age 98. But when his daughter, Helen E. Hamman, saw news
coverage of efforts by the families of Husband Kimmel and
Walter Short to restore the two Pearl Harbor commanders
posthumously to what the families contend to be their
deserved ranks, she wrote a letter to President Bill Clinton
on 5 September 1995. Recalling a conversation with her
father, Hamman wrote:
“One of the main
arguments for foreknowledge of 9-11 is that any rational
person looking at the warnings and evidence accumulated by
U.S. officials before 9-11 would have concluded that an
attack was going to occur. To not have put in motion
measures to stop it therefore proves complicity.
"U.S. and
Israeli intelligence agencies received warning signals at
least three months ago that Middle Eastern terrorists were
planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to
attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture,
according to a story in Germany's daily Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ).
"Perhaps most remarkably, there had been
direct warnings from the Republican Party's own past Chief
Investigative Council for the House Judiciary Committee to
the closed decision circuits of Congress and the Bush
administration. Representing F.B.I. special agents suing the
U.S. Justice Department (along with Washington-DC Judicial
Watch), David Philip Schippers reported in Houston on
October 10 on the 'Alex Jones Talk Show' that these agents
knew of a plan of bin Laden's network to attack Lower
Manhattan with 'commercial airlines as bombs' long before
9-11, but were blocked from investigative and preventative
action by F.B.I. and U.S. Justice Department command, and
threatened with prosecution under the National Security Act
if they published this information. Attorney-General
Ashcroft himself, reports Schippers, refused to return calls
on this matter to his fellow senior Republican for four
weeks before 9-11."48
“Federal authorities
have been aware for years that suspected terrorists with
ties to Osama bin Laden were receiving flight training at
schools in the United States and abroad, according to
interviews and court testimony... A senior government
official yesterday acknowledged law enforcement officials
were aware that fewer than a dozen people with links to bin
Laden had attended U.S. flight
schools."49
"All indications are
that this information came from some of [the FBI's] most
experienced guys, people who have devoted their lives to
this kind of work. But their warnings were placed in a pile
in someone's office in Washington... In some cases, these
field agents predicted, almost precisely, what happened on
September 11th. So we were all holding our breath... hoping
that the situation would be
remedied."50
"This is just part of a historical evolution
that is at some point inevitable and I think it's about to
happen. I think what they're doing now is not something
they're doing out of a position of strength but out of a
position of desperation and panic. These are very panicked
kind of moves in a sort of broad overall view of things
which makes them exceedingly dangerous. I think historically
we can go back and see that when big capital gets in trouble
and the market's not working for them anymore they have to
find a way, cause right now there is a worldwide production
over-capacity that's created a recession that's about to go
deep and about to go long and one of the ways that they've
traditionally gotten themselves out of that is to liquidate
a bunch of that capital and the best way to liquidate
capital real fast is war. That's the way they correct the
problem they use non-market mechanisms to correct for a
fallen rate of profit within a market economy. And I think
what's even more dangerous is we are looking at this huge
imperial power that's the United States right now and
they're trying to control everything at once and their
empire is beginning to unravel on them and I think what is
particularly dangerous for people like me and probably
people like y'all and a lot of your listeners is that in the
process of doing this they're going to have to exercise more
and more despotic measures at home to step on
resistance..."52
"Although
U.S. airforce interceptions of hijacked planes are normally
only minutes-long, there was a stand-down of these automatic
interception actions for all of the hijacked planes of 9-11,
without one airforce plane turning a wheel for over two
hours. The terrorists circled jumbo jets known to be
hijacked around the military air-command's front yard
airspace until after all three of the buildings had been
dive-bombed. Yet no disciplinary process nor formal
investigation by the Pentagon, the F.B.I., Congress or the
mass media was undertaken despite all the stunning breaches
of defence routine, which together provided an open passage
for the long-planned attack."53
"Passenger jet hijackings are
not uncommon and the U.S. government has prepared detailed
plans to handle them. On Sept. 11 these plans were ignored
in their entirety... Here are the FAA regulations concerning
hijackings: 'The FAA hijack coordinator...on duty at
Washington headquarters will request the military to provide
an escort aircraft for a confirmed hijacked aircraft... The
escort service will be requested by the FAA hijack
coordinator by direct contact with the National Military
Command Center (NMCC).' Here are the instructions issued by
the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on June 1, 2001:
'In the event of a hijacking, the NMCC will be notified by
the most expeditious means by the FAA. The NMCC
will...forward requests for DOD assistance to the Secretary
of Defense for approval.'... The U.S. is supposed to
scramble military aircraft the moment a hijacking is
confirmed."54
“Throughout the northeastern United
States are many air bases. But that morning no interceptors
respond in a timely fashion to the highest alert situation.
This includes the Andrews squadrons which have the longest
lead time and are 12 miles from the White house.
"The intercepts depict
a regime increasingly corrupt, alienated from the country's
religious rank and file, and so weakened and frightened that
it has brokered its future by channelling hundreds of
millions of dollars in what amounts to protection money to
fundamentalist groups that wish to overthrow it."
President George W. Bush had,
for example, blocked intelligence investigations into Saudi
terror connections prior to September 11. Here are just two
credible press reports on this matter. BBC Newsnight
reported high-level blocks on U.S. investigations into bin
Laden-related terror connections, based on what appear to be
attempts to protect U.S. corporate interests - including the
fact that President Bush Jnr.'s fortune was built on doing
business with the Saudi bin Laden family: I received a phone call from
a high-placed member of a U.S. intelligence agency. He tells
me that while there's always been constraints on
investigating Saudis, under George Bush it's gotten much
worse. After the elections, the agencies were told to 'back
off' investigating the Bin Ladens and Saudi royals, and that
angered agents... FBI headquarters told us they could not
comment on our findings."59
"U.S. intelligence agencies have come under
criticism for their wholesale failure to predict the
catastrophe at the World Trade Centre. But some are
complaining that their hands were tied... High-placed
intelligence sources in Washington told the Guardian this
week: 'There were always constraints on investigating the
Saudis.' They said the restrictions became worse after the
Bush administration took over this year. The intelligence
agencies had been told to 'back off' from investigations
involving other members of the Bin Laden family, the Saudi
royals, and possible Saudi links to the acquisition of
nuclear weapons by Pakistan. 'There were particular
investigations that were effectively
killed.'"60
“First of all, we know from
mystery writers that there is often more than one suspect
with a motive. Does the U.S. government gain from 9-11? Yes.
Does Israel? Yes. But what about Russia (which now has a
freer hand in Chechnya)? Yes also. How about China? Yes,
also, with its free hand in Xinjiang, and the far lower
likelihood that the United States will try to isolate it. If
one goes through history and uncritically and mechanically
applies the 'who benefits?' principle, one finds it a poor
guide to understanding."
"Shocking attacks on symbols of American
power as a pretext for aggressive war is, in fact, an old
and familiar pattern of the American corporate state. Even
the sacrifice of thousands of ordinary Americans is not new,
although so many people have never died so very fast. This
scale of the 9-11 massacre is what makes most people doubt
that even the ilk of Cheney, Rumsfield and Bush Jr. could be
complicit in such a crime. There is a point to be made here.
It is indeed likely that the deaths were not anticipated
because of the unexpected tidal downsweep of igniting jet
fuel through the Twin Tower elevator shafts. Even the most
experienced New York firefighters were astonished by the
building collapses that thus
occurred."62
Conclusions
* Nafeez
Mosaddeq Ahmed is a British political scientist and human
rights activist. He is Executive Director of the Institute
for Policy Research & Development (IPRD) http://www.globalresearch.org/ based in
Brighton, UK, and the author of the explosive new 9/11
expose 'THE WAR ON FREEDOM: HOW AND WHY AMERICA WAS
ATTACKED, SEPTEMBER 11, 2001'.
Executive Director
Institute
for Policy Research & Development
Suite 414, 91 Western
Road
Brighton, East Sussex
BN1 2NW
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