Part 1: Warnings in advance
By Patrick Martin 16 January 2002
It is not necessary to postulate an all-embracing conspiracy, extending from the White House to the airline security personnel who let the armed hijackers board the planes, to believe that there is much more to the story of the September 11 attacks than the American public has been told so far. Certainly the least likely and least credible explanation of that day’s events is that the vast US national security apparatus was entirely unaware of the activities of the hijackers until the airliners slammed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
According to this official version, voiced most crudely by FBI Director Robert Mueller immediately after the event, no one in the US government had the slightest idea of the identities of the September 11 hijackers, the methods they would employ, or the targets they would choose. A careful review of the information that has come to light, in bits and pieces, since September 11, demonstrates that these claims are not merely tenuous, but clearly, obviously and knowingly false. (...) http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/jan2002/sept-j18_prn.shtml Part 2: Watching the hijackers
By Patrick Martin 18 January 2002
(...) It is well known that the National Security Agency at one time had virtually complete access to the electronic communications of bin Laden and his associates. In the period leading up to the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, the monitoring was so extensive that NSA officials used to play back telephone conversations between bin Laden and his mother to impress visiting dignitaries-and help boost their congressional appropriations.
By one account, the NSA had recorded virtually every minute of conversations on a satellite telephone which bin Laden was using in Afghanistan. The laptop device was purchased in New York City for the Al Qaeda leader, who used all of its more than 2,000 prepaid minutes phoning supporters in dozens of countries-a fact that suggests that he was less than the world's greatest conspirator. (Source: Los Angeles Times, September 21, 2001, "Hate Unites an Enemy Without an Army," by Bob Drogin; Chicago Tribune, September 16, 2001, "Bin Laden, associates elude spy agency's eavesdropping," by Scott Shane) (...) The clearest suggestion of successful US monitoring of Al Qaeda communications-and the closest to the September 11 attacks-was the statement by Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, a conservative Republican with wide contacts in the national security establishment. He told the Associated Press on September 11 that the US government was monitoring bin Laden's communications electronically and had overheard two bin Laden aides celebrating the successful terrorist attack. "They have an intercept of some information that included people associated with bin Laden who acknowledged a couple of targets were hit," he told AP. (Source: Associated Press, September 11, 2001, "World Trade Center collapses in terrorist attack," by David Crary and Jerry Schwartz) (...) There were several other media reports of similar successful monitoring of Al Qaeda communications. The German magazine Der Spiegel said that officers from the German intelligence service BND intercepted phone conversations between two bin Laden supporters. NBC News reported October 4 that bin Laden called his mother two days before the World Trade Center attack and told her, "In two days you're going to hear big news, and you're not going to hear from me for a while." NBC said that a foreign intelligence service had recorded the call and relayed the information to the US. Such reports must be considered cautiously, especially coming as they did on the eve of the launching of US air strikes on Afghanistan. But it is impossible to avoid the conclusion: if US intelligence agencies could obtain such information after September 11, they were able to do so before that date. (Source: Toronto Globe & Mail, October 5, 2001) (...) According to a report on the German public television channel ARD, Atta was the subject of telephone monitoring by the Egyptian secret service, which had learned that he had made at least one recent visit to Afghanistan from his home in Hamburg, Germany. The German program, broadcast November 23, said that the American FBI had monitored Atta's movements for several months in 2000, when he traveled several times from Hamburg to Frankfurt and bought large quantities of chemicals potentially usable in making explosives. Atta's name was also mentioned in a Hamburg phone call between Islamic fundamentalists monitored by the German police in 1999. The BBC, commenting on the German report, said, "The evidence ... reinforces concerns that the international intelligence community may have known more about Atta before September 11 than was previously thought, but had failed to act." (Source: British Broadcasting Corporation report, November 26, 2001)
Atta came to the attention of US authorities on several occasions in the course of 2001. In January he was allowed to reenter the United States after a trip to Germany, despite the fact that he was in violation of his visa status. He landed in Miami January 10 on a flight from Madrid, on a tourist visa, although he told immigration inspectors that he was taking flying lessons in the US, for which an M-1 student visa is required. Jeanne Butterfield, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told the Washington Post, "Nine times out of 10, they would have told him to go back and file [for that status] overseas. You're not supposed to come in as a visitor for pleasure and go to work or school." The recipient of this indulgent treatment, it must be emphasized, had previously been under FBI surveillance for stockpiling bomb-making materials! (Source: Washington Post, October 28, 2001)
According to a report on Canadian television, Atta had been implicated in a terrorist bombing in Israel and the information passed on to the United States before he was first issued a tourist visa. (Source: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, September 14, 2001, reported by Diana Swain from Vero Beach, Florida)
Atta made other trips to Europe, returning to Germany in May and visiting Spain in July, each time returning to the United States and being admitted by US customs and immigration. Another British press report notes that Atta "was under surveillance between January and May last year after he was reportedly observed buying large quantities of chemicals in Frankfurt, apparently for the production of explosives and for biological warfare. The US agents reported to have trailed Atta are said to have failed to inform the German authorities about their investigation. The disclosure that Atta was being trailed by police long before 11 September raises the question why the attacks could not have been prevented with the man's arrest." (Source: The Observer, September 30, 2001)
During the summer of 2001, Atta received a wire transfer of $100,000 from an account in Pakistan allegedly controlled by a representative of Osama bin Laden. This transfer has been cited repeatedly by US officials as proof that bin Laden inspired the September 11 attacks, but they have not explained how such a large sum of money could be transmitted with impunity to someone under FBI surveillance. Another remarkable fact: according to an Indian newspaper, the man who actually authorized the wire transfer to Atta was General Mahmud Ahmed, head of the Pakistani intelligence agency ISI, the principal sponsor of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Ahmed was forced to resign after India made his role public and it was confirmed by the FBI. Coincidentally or not, Ahmed was in Washington, DC on September 11, for consultations with American intelligence officials. (Source: CNN report, October 1, 2001; The Times of India , October 11, 2001).
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/jan2002/sept-j22_prn.shtml
Part 3: The United States and Mideast terrorism
By Patrick Martin 22 January 2002
(...) Then there is the report which appeared September 24 in Newsweek. The weekly magazine reported that on September 10 "a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns." This suggests that some level of the American state had knowledge, not only of the imminence of the attack, but even of its exact timing. Needless to say, no major American publication has followed up this report.
And what is one to make of an article that appeared in the Washington Post September 23, on the newspaper's front page, under a double headline: "Investigators Identify 4 to 5 Groups Linked to Bin Laden Operating in US. No Connection Found Between 'Cell' Members and 19 Hijackers, Officials Say"?
The article reports that the FBI had identified multiple al Qaeda groups operating "for the last several years" in the United States, but found no connection between them and the 19 hijackers who carried out the September 11 attack. This is an astonishing admission, given that the entire US military campaign against Afghanistan has been predicated on holding Osama bin Laden responsible for the suicide hijackings. The article continues:
"The FBI has not made any arrests because the group members entered the country legally in recent years and have not been involved in illegal activities since they arrived, the officials said.
"Government officials say they do not know why the cells are here, what their purpose is or whether their members are planning attacks. One official even described their presence as 'possibly benign,' though others have a more sinister interpretation and give assurances that measures are in place to protect the public."
Here the mind boggles: amid a nationwide dragnet, with hundreds of Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans rounded up and questioned for no other reason than their national origin and religion, the FBI tells the principal daily newspaper in the nation's capital that it has not arrested known collaborators of Osama bin Laden because they have done nothing wrong since they arrived in the US. Their presence may even be "benign," an astonishing adjective to use after the murder of nearly 3,000 people.
The Post article was written jointly by Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus, a fact which adds to its significance. Woodward needs no introduction to those familiar with the Watergate scandal. He was the recipient of the most famous leak in US history, obtaining inside information about Nixon's actions in Watergate from a source Woodward dubbed "Deep Throat," never identified but believed to be a top official in the national security apparatus. Walter Pincus is a national-security reporter for the Post, covering the CIA and Pentagon. He worked as a CIA operative in the 1960s, as a member of the National Student Association, a fact which was only revealed two decades later.
An article by these two individuals, given the prominence of front-page publication in the Washington Post, should be understood as a semiofficial hint by the US intelligence services that their relationship with Osama bin Laden is considerably more complex than that presented in the propaganda which now dominates the media.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/jan2002/sept-j24_prn.shtml
Part 4: The refusal to investigate
By Patrick Martin 24 January 2002
This series has reviewed evidence that US intelligence agencies had ample advance information about the September 11 attacks, from specific details of the methods and the likely targets to the identities of a number of the hijackers, including the alleged principal organizer, Mohammed Atta. There are other troubling and unresolved issues, such as the failure to scramble air defense fighters in time to intercept any of the jetliners.
>From a political standpoint, however, there is a piece of evidence which
outweighs all others in suggesting that the real story of September 11 has
yet to be told: the refusal of the Bush administration and Congress to
conduct any investigation into the terrorist attacks and the government
response to them.
More than four months after the largest single act of mass murder ever to take place on US soil, there have been no congressional hearings, no investigating commission has been announced, and calls for such a panel have been largely ignored. Even internal FBI investigations have been shelved. This inaction is extraordinary and has no legitimate political explanation. It stinks of political cover-up. (...)