A Devastating Blow to the Bush Regime's Credibility
Gandalf Grey
Bin Laden's Doomsday plan
By Paul McGeough, Chief Correspondent and agencies
June 18, 2004
Americans were confronted yesterday with the unabridged horror of Osama bin
Laden's original plans for September 11, and witnessed a devastating assault
on the credibility of the White House campaign to justify war in Iraq by
linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda and the attacks in New York, Washington
and Pennsylvania.
Americans will be chilled by an independent commission's reconstruction of
what might have been - a Doomsday attack by 10 hijacked aircraft across the
US, with the synchronised mid-air explosion of more aircraft over the
Pacific.
The additional hijacked aircraft would have been crashed into nuclear power
plants and symbolic buildings on both coasts. On one commercial jet all of
the male passengers were to have been murdered before the plane was landed
as a grotesque show-and-tell for the media at a big US airport.
The reconstruction, the damnation of the Bush effort to hold Saddam
responsible, and the commission's detailed portrait of life and business in
al-Qaeda were based on more than 1000 interviews, including records of the
interrogation of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay since their capture by US
forces in Afghanistan in the war that followed the September 11 attacks.
The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States is not
scheduled to make its final report public until July 26, only three months
before the US presidential vote.
But a report by its investigative staff concludes with conviction: "We have
no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaeda co-operated on attacks against
the United States."
The report kicked the legs from under another long-held White House
justification for war when it declared that there was no evidence to support
the theory that the lead hijacker, Mohammed Atta, had met an Iraqi
intelligence agent in Prague before the attacks.
Going even further, it left the White House exposed by reporting that bin
Laden had "explored possible co-operation with Iraq" while he was based in
Sudan in the early 1990s.
He had requested space in Iraq for training camps and sought assistance in
procuring weapons, but these efforts "do not appear to have resulted in a
collaborative relationship".
The inquiry's investigators say that bin Laden apparently scaled back to a
four-aircraft attack on September 11 because he worried that the original
plan was too complex to pull off.
Estimating that the final plan cost no more than $US550,000 ($800,000), they
portray in graphic detail how ragged its execution was.
"The 9/11 conspirators confronted operational difficulties, internal
disagreements and even dissenting opinions within the leadership of
al-Qaeda," the investigators say, detailing clashes over targets, timing and
scope of the long-planned attacks.
Meanwhile, FBI and CIA officials giving evidence on the last hearing days of
the inquiry, appointed by President George Bush, warned that al-Qaeda
operatives were preparing fresh attacks inside the US.
While conceding that they knew little about al-Qaeda's capacity in the US,
the officials insisted that functioning terrorist cells were still operating
in the country.
Authorities had probably prevented a few aviation attacks since 2001, but
"there are operatives involved in those plots that we still cannot account
for", one of the officials told the 10-man commission.
An FBI special agent, Mary Deborah Doran, who has specialised in the
al-Qaeda investigation, said the terrorist network could still look for help
from sympathisers in the US.
But Ms Doran emphasised that any large-scale terrorist attack would require
new operatives who had been infiltrated into the US. "The threat comes from
outside," she said.
The Bush Administration is already under pressure over the failure of
another of its justifications for the Iraq war - the supposed existence of
weapons of mass destruction in the country that might have been channelled
to terrorist groups.
In recent weeks it has also been criticised over the abuse and torture of
prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere.
Responding to the new disclosures, Senator John Kerry, the presumptive
Democratic presidential nominee, said that the Bush Administration had
"misled America ... it had reached too far".
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"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so
long as I'm the dictator." - GW Bush 12/18/2000.
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that
we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic
and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
---Theodore Roosevelt
"For us to get bogged down in the quagmire
of an Iraqi civil war would be the height of foolishness."
---Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, 1991