wtc 911: Clearly it is the administration's fairy tails and not exposure of the frame-up that is crumbling and blowing away.

[Dick Eastman]

Clearly it is the governments fairy tail and not the
exposure of the frame-up that is crumbling and
blowing away.

Their alibi gone, the killers are still at large, armed
and holding the world hostage.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Karl -----------------
To: "Dick Eastman" <eas...@wolfenet.com>
Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2002 6:04 PM
Subject: WSWS 9 11 Report

People outside of the "major" media are continuing to investigate what
happened both before and after 9 11 and have revealed additional pieces of
the puzzle.

Was the US government alerted to September 11 attack?

Part 1: Warnings in advance

By Patrick Martin
16 January 2002http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/jan2002/sept-j16_prn.shtml

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.

The case of Zacarias Moussaoui ["The strange case of Zacarias Moussaoui: FBI
refused to investigate man charged in September 11 attacks"
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/jan2002/mous-j05.shtml] is only the most
glaring evidence that the September 11 terrorist attacks represent, not
merely a colossal failure on the part of the FBI and CIA, but a refusal to
act that has no legitimate explanation. Not only were there general warnings
of the likelihood of suicide hijackings, but several of the hijackers,
including the man alleged to be the principal organizer, Mohammed Atta, were
under active surveillance by US agents. It is not too much to say that the
terrorists were only able to accomplish their murderous and destructive
mission because US intelligence agencies ignored repeated warnings, refused
to carry out elementary defensive actions and manifested a seeming
indifference to the prospect of a major terrorist attack on American soil.

Added to that is the refusal of any branch of the US government to conduct
any probe into the circumstances of an attack which killed more American
civilians on a single day than any other act of violence in US history.
There has been no serious effort in the four months since September 11 to
investigate, learn lessons and assign responsibility. This by itself is a
demonstration that there are highly placed people in Washington with a great
deal to hide.

Warnings from foreign governments

The governments of at least four countries-Germany, Egypt, Russia and
Israel-gave specific warnings to the US of an impending terrorist attack in
the months preceding September 11. These alerts, while fragmentary, not only
combined to foretell the scale of the attack and its main target, but
indicated that hijacked commercial aircraft would be the weapon of choice.

According to an article in one of the major daily newspapers in Germany,
published just after the destruction of the World Trade Center, the German
intelligence service BND told both US and Israeli intelligence agencies in
June that Middle East terrorists were "planning to hijack commercial
aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and
Israeli culture."

The newspaper cited unnamed German intelligence sources, who said that the
information came through Echelon, the US-controlled system of 120 satellites
which monitors all worldwide electronic communications. Echelon is operated
jointly by the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand,
although its existence is not officially admitted. (Source: Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, September 14, 2001)

The government of Egypt sent an urgent warning to the US June 13, based on a
video made by Osama bin Laden. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak told the
French newspaper Le Figaro that the warning was originally delivered just
before the G-8 summit in Genoa. It was taken seriously enough that
antiaircraft batteries were stationed around Christopher Columbus Airport in
the Italian city. According to Mubarak, bin Laden "spoke of assassinating
President Bush and other heads of state in Genoa. It was a question of an
airplane stuffed with explosives. These precautions then had been taken."
(Source: New York Times, September 26, 2001, "2 Leaders Tell of Plot to Kill
Bush in Genoa," by David Sanger)

According to Russian press reports, Russian intelligence notified the CIA
during the summer that 25 terrorist pilots had been specifically training
for suicide missions. In an interview September 15 with MSNBC, Russian
President Vladimir Putin confirmed that he had ordered Russian intelligence
in August to warn the US government "in the strongest possible terms" of
imminent attacks on airports and government buildings. (Source: From The
Wilderness web site; MSNBC).

The London-based Sunday Telegraph -an arch-conservative newspaper usually
highly supportive of the Bush administration-reported that the Israeli
intelligence service Mossad had delivered a warning to the FBI and CIA in
August that as many as 200 followers of Osama bin Laden were slipping into
the country to prepare "a major assault on the United States." The advisory
spoke of a "large-scale target" in which Americans would be "very
vulnerable." The Los Angeles Times cited unnamed US officials confirming
this Mossad warning had been received. (Source: Sunday Telegraph, September
16, 2001, "Israeli security issued urgent warning to CIA of large-scale
terror attacks," by David Wastell and Philip Jacobson; Los Angeles Times,
September 20, 2001, "Officials Told of 'Major Assault' Plans," by Richard A.
Serrano and John-Thor Dahlburg).

The Independent, a liberal daily in Great Britain, published an article
asserting the US government "was warned repeatedly that a devastating attack
on the United States was on its way." The Independent cited an interview
given by Osama bin Laden to a London-based Arabic-language newspaper,
al-Quds al-Arabi, in late August. About the same time, tighter security
measures were ordered at the World Trade Center, for unexplained reasons.
(Source: Independent, September 17, 2001, "Bush did not heed several
warnings of attack," by Andrew Gumbel).

Despite this series of alerts, no US intelligence agency issued any warning
of a possible attack on a target on US territory in the months leading up to
September 11. The CIA and FBI had issued warnings about likely attacks on
American military bases or embassies in the Middle East, Europe and Asia. On
September 7 the US Department of State issued a worldwide alert about an
impending attack by bin Laden followers, although it was focused on
US-related targets in east Asia, especially Japan, not within the US itself.
As the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator
Richard Shelby, admitted, "This obviously was a failure of great dimension.
We had no specific warning of the US being attacked."

Moreover, the FBI's decision to take no action on Zacarias Moussaoui must be
considered in the light of this continuous stream of warnings from overseas.
The US government was being repeatedly alerted to the danger of devastating
attacks using hijacked commercial aircraft, yet the FBI decided to conduct
no serious investigation into a man, believed by French intelligence to be
linked to Osama bin Laden, who wanted to learn how to steer a 747 jumbo jet,
but not to take off or land. Moussaoui was not even turned over to the FBI
by the Immigration and Naturalization Service until after September 11.

US investigations and concerns

Despite claims that US intelligence agencies had not considered the
possibility of suicide attacks involving commercial airliners before
September 11, there were many indications of such concerns on the part of
the American government over a period of eight years.

An expert panel commissioned by the Pentagon in 1993 discussed how an
airplane could be used to bomb national landmarks. "It was considered
radical thinking, a little too scary for the times," said retired Air Force
Col. Doug Menarchik, who organized the $150,000 study for the Defense
Department's Office of Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict. "After
I left, it met a quiet death." The decision not to publish detailed
scenarios was made partly out of a fear that it could give terrorists ideas,
participants said. A draft was circulated through the Pentagon, the Justice
Department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but senior agency
officials ultimately decided against a public release. (Source: Washington
Post, October 2, 2001, "Before Attack, U.S. Expected Different Hit,
Chemical, Germ Agents Focus of Preparations," by Jo Warrick and Joe
Stephens).

Three incidents of attempted attacks on buildings using airplanes took place
during 1994. The first, in April of that year, involved a Federal Express
flight engineer who was facing dismissal. He boarded a DC-10 as a passenger
and invaded the cockpit, planning to crash the plane into a company building
in Memphis, but was overpowered by the crew. The second came that September,
when a lone pilot crashed a stolen single-engine Cessna into a tree on the
White House grounds just short of the president's bedroom. The third was the
December hijacking of an Air France flight in Algiers by the Armed Islamic
Group. The hijackers had the plane land in Marseilles and ordered it loaded
with 27 tons of fuel, three times the amount required to reach Paris. Their
aim was to crash it into the Eiffel Tower. French special forces stormed the
plane on the ground. (Source: New York Times, October 3, 2001, "Earlier
Hijackings Offered Signals That Were Missed," by Matthew Wald).

In January 1995, Philippine police arrested and tortured Abdul Hakim Murad
in a Manila apartment where bomb-making equipment was found. He told them of
plans to plant timed explosive devices on 11 US airliners simultaneously,
and to crash-land an airplane into CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
The preparations were so far advanced that Murad detailed the specific
flights targeted, most of them trans-Pacific flights which would explode
over the ocean. Murad had attended flying schools in the United States,
earned a commercial pilot's license, and told investigators he was to fly
the plane into CIA headquarters. Another Islamic fundamentalist was to fly a
second plane into the Pentagon. (Source: Washington Post, September 23,
"Borderless Network of Terror, Bin Laden Followers Reach Across Globe," by
Doug Struck, Howard Schneider, Karl Vick and Peter Baker).

Later that year, the alleged organizer of the first World Trade Center
bombing, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, was captured in Pakistan, turned over to US
agents and flown back to the United States for trial. On the flight, Yousef
reportedly boasted to FBI agent Brian Parr and the other agents guarding him
that he had narrowly missed several opportunities to blow up a dozen
airliners on a single day over the Pacific and to carry out a kamikaze-type
suicide attack on CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Yousef was
referring to the same plot for which Abdul Hakim Murad had been arrested in
the Philippines. Murad was extradited to the United States, where his
testimony played a major role in Yousef's trial and conviction. (Source:
John Cooley, Unholy Wars, New York, NY, 2000, p. 247).

Early in 1996, US officials had identified crop-dusters and suicide flights
as potential terrorist weapons, and began taking elaborate steps to prevent
an attack from the air during the Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta. Black
Hawk helicopters and US Customs Service jets were deployed to intercept
suspicious aircraft in the skies over the Olympic venues. Agents monitored
crop-duster flights within hundreds of miles of downtown Atlanta. Law
enforcement agents also fanned out to regional airports throughout northern
Georgia "to make sure nobody hijacked a small aircraft and tried to attack
one of the venues," said Woody Johnson, the FBI agent in charge of the
Atlanta office at the time. From July 6 through the end of the Games on
August 11, the FAA banned all aviation within a one-mile radius of the
Olympic Village that housed the athletes. It also ordered aircraft to stay
at least three miles away from other sites beginning three hours before each
event until three hours after each event ended. (Source: Los Angeles Times,
November 17, 2001, "Suicide Flights and Crop Dusters Considered Threats at
'96 Olympics," by Mark Fineman and Judy Pasternak).

As early as 1996 the FBI began investigating the activities of Arab students
at US flight schools. Government officials admitted that "law enforcement
officials were aware that fewer than a dozen people with links to bin Laden
had attended US flight schools." FBI agents visited two flight schools in
1996 to get information about several Arab pilots who received training
there. The two schools were among those attended by Abdul Hakim Murad, who
had told Philippine and US police about plans to fly a hijacked plane into
CIA headquarters. In 1998 FBI agents questioned officials from Airman Flight
School in Norman, Oklahoma about a graduate identified in court testimony as
a pilot for Osama bin Laden. This was the school later attended by Zacarias
Moussaoui. A Washington Post article concludes: "Since 1996, the FBI had
been developing evidence that international terrorists were using US flight
schools to learn to fly jumbo jets. A foiled plot in Manila to blow up U.S.
airliners and later court testimony by an associate of bin Laden had touched
off FBI inquiries at several schools, officials say." (Source: Washington
Post, September 23, 2001, "FBI Knew Terrorists Were Using Flight Schools,"
by Steve Fainaru and James V. Grimaldi).

In the run-up to the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, there was active
consideration of the danger of "a fully loaded, fuelled airliner crashing
into the opening ceremony before a worldwide television audience," according
to former Sydney police superintendent Paul McKinnon. Osama bin Laden was
considered the number one threat, he said. IOC officials said plane-crash
catastrophes have been incorporated into security planning for every
Olympics since 1972. "That was our nightmare scenario," one IOC official
said. There were extensive IOC discussions with the FBI during 2001 in the
course of the security planning for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake
City. (Source: Sydney Morning Herald, September 20, 2001, "Jet crash on
stadium was Olympics nightmare," by Jacquelin Magnay)

The 2000 edition of the Federal Aviation Administration's annual report on
Criminal Acts Against Aviation, published early in 2001, said that although
bin Laden "is not known to have attacked civil aviation, he has both the
motivation and the wherewithal to do so," adding, "Bin Laden's anti-Western
and anti-American attitudes make him and his followers a significant threat
to civil aviation, particularly to US civil aviation." (Source: FAA).

Beginning in early 2001 a trial was held in New York City of four defendants
charged with involvement in the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania. The trial revealed that two bin Laden operatives had received
pilot training in Texas and Oklahoma and another had been asked to take
lessons. L'Houssaine Kherchtou, a bin Laden associate turned government
witness, told the court how he was asked to take flying lessons in 1993.
Another bin Laden aide, Essam al-Ridi, testified that he had bought a
military aircraft for bin Laden and flown it to Sudan. Al-Ridi became a
government witness in 1998, giving the FBI inside information about a
pilot-training scheme three years before the September 11 attack. While the
proceedings of the trial extended from February to July 2001, they did not
produce any heightened alert in relation to US commercial aviation. (Source:
Court transcript available at www.cryptome.org ).

Was the US government alerted to September 11 attack?

Part 2: Watching the hijackers

By Patrick Martin
18 January 2002

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/jan2002/sept-j18_prn.shtml

The United States government maintains the world's largest apparatus for
collecting intelligence and monitoring telecommunications, comprised of
multiple agencies-CIA, FBI, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence
Agency, Defense Signals Intercept Organization, etc.-bankrolled by a secret
budget estimated at a staggering $30 billion a year.

Yet the Bush administration claims, with no dissent from the tame American
media, that this huge national security apparatus had not the slightest
inkling that nearly two dozen men were preparing to hijack commercial
jetliners and crash them into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Nor has
there been any public clamor for the removal of those whose seeming
incompetence, if the official story is to be believed, cost the lives of
nearly 3,000 American citizens.

What has emerged over the past four months, however, is a much different
picture of the events of September 11 and the relation of the US
military-intelligence complex to them. Not only were there frequent advance
warnings, derived both from foreign intelligence services and US
investigations into previous terrorist attacks [Was the US government
alerted to September 11 attack? Part 1: Warnings in advance
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/jan2002/sept-j16.shtml], but the US
government was itself in possession of considerable information from
contemporaneous electronic and physical surveillance of Osama bin Laden and
his associates in the Al Qaeda organization.

Electronic monitoring of bin Laden

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).

US officials have suggested that this access was abruptly cut off after bin
Laden learned that the monitored communications had helped the Pentagon
target a training camp in eastern Afghanistan for the cruise missile strike
ordered by President Clinton. The Al Qaeda leader stopped using telephones
and other electronic devices entirely, they claim, resorting to couriers and
other forms of direct communication which cannot be monitored so easily.

Such claims are dismissed as US disinformation by many knowledgeable
observers. Longtime Egyptian journalist and former government spokesman
Mohammed Heikal, in an interview with a British newspaper, expressed
disbelief that bin Laden and his Al Qaeda group could have conducted the
September 11 attack without the United States knowing: "Bin Laden has been
under surveillance for years: every telephone call was monitored and
Al-Qaeda has been penetrated by American intelligence, Pakistani
intelligence, Saudi intelligence, Egyptian intelligence. They could not have
kept secret an operation that required such a degree of organisation and
sophistication." (Source: Heikal interview with the Guardian, October 10,
2001).

The more sweeping the US government claims about the global scope and
high-level coordination of bin Laden's activities, the less credible is the
claim that electronic monitoring has yielded no results. It would be
practically impossible to avoid any kind of electronic interchange of
information in operating a worldwide network capable of carrying out attacks
in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Europe and the United States.

There have been scattered reports in the press suggesting that bin Laden's
associates, if not the Islamic fundamentalist leader himself, have used
electronic communications devices and these have been monitored by US
agencies.

UPI correspondent Richard Sale, covering the trial of bin Laden followers in
New York City last year, reported that the National Security Agency had
broken bin Laden's encrypted communications. Given that US officials
"believe the planning for the Sept. 11 attacks probably began two years
ago," ( New York Times, October 14, 2001) this suggests that some
information on the preparations for September 11 was available to electronic
intercept. (Source: United Press International, February 13, 2001).

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).

Hatch repeated this assertion in an interview with ABC News the same day,
saying that both CIA and FBI officials had told him the same story. That his
statement was true is demonstrated by the Bush administration reaction.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld publicly denounced the report as an
unauthorized release of classified information. The White House later cited
this leak as grounds for withholding detailed information on US
counterterrorist actions from Congress, although Bush was later compelled to
resume the briefings of a handful of congressional leaders.

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).

Besides the actual communications among the hijackers and their
co-conspirators, there was another electronic tip-off to September 11. It
has been widely reported that during the week before the suicide hijackings,
there was sudden and unexplained speculation in the stock of American and
United airlines. Huge bets were placed that the stock prices of both
airlines would plunge, as did happen after two American and two United jets
were hijacked and crashed. No other airlines saw such speculation, and the
identity of those who placed the thousands of "put" options-bets that a
stock will go down-has not been revealed.

Less well known is the fact that the CIA operates a sophisticated software
system, known as Promis, which monitors such sudden price movements for the
specific purpose of providing advance warning that a particular industry or
corporation may be targeted for a terrorist attack. This software provides
around-the-clock real-time monitoring, so that CIA officials would have been
alerted as early as September 7 that American and United were potential
targets. According to the right-wing, stridently pro-Bush Fox News network,
both the FBI and the Justice Department have confirmed that Promis was in
use last summer for US intelligence gathering. There is no indication that
the CIA warned either the airlines themselves or the US agencies responsible
for domestic security.

How many hijackers were known?

According to the official Bush administration account of the terrorist
attacks, only 2 of the 19 alleged suicide hijackers were known to US
authorities before September 11. These two, Kahlil Almihdhar and Nawaf
Alhamzi, had been placed on an FBI "watch list" at the request of the CIA,
after Almihdhar was linked to a bin Laden operative in Malaysia.

Innumerable accounts in the American media sought to answer the questions
that were inevitably raised by this version of events. How was it possible
for two men being sought by the FBI and CIA, with alleged ties to the man
the US government had branded the most dangerous terrorist in world, to buy
expensive first-class one-way tickets for an airline flight, then board and
hijack a jetliner on September 11?

Almihdhar and Alhamzi apparently lived in southern California, in the San
Diego area for nearly two years, leaving and reentering the United States at
least once-only a few weeks before the "watch list" alert was issued.
According to one press report, Alhamzi was even listed in the San Diego
phone book-a fact that certainly calls into question the media portrayal of
the suicide hijackers as master conspirators who covered their tracks and
were essentially undetectable. (Source: Washington Post, December 29, 2001).

Whatever the circumstances in which these two future hijackers escaped
detection, however, the basic premise of the official story-that these two
were the only hijackers identified as terrorist suspects before September
11-is false. Several other hijackers or men now believed to be their
accomplices had come to the attention of US police and intelligence agencies
before the destruction of the World Trade Center, but they were allowed to
go their way.

There is the strange case of Ziad Samir Jarrah, one of the suspected
hijackers on board the United Airlines jet that crashed in Pennsylvania.
Officials in the United Arab Emirates acknowledge that Jarrah arrived in the
UAE on January 30, 2001, after two months in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and
was questioned for several hours at Dubai International Airport, at the
request of the US government. He was then permitted to leave, traveling on
to Hamburg via Amsterdam. Later he flew to the United States.

Despite official US interest sufficient to have him detained in the UAE, he
was allowed to enter the country and then enrolled in a flight school.
Jarrah was stopped for speeding on Interstate 95 in Maryland on September 9,
two days before the hijacking, ticketed and released. The Maryland State
Police apparently ran his name through their computers and found nothing. In
response to post-September 11 inquiries, FBI and CIA officials claimed that
neither agency had been aware of Jarrah or placed him on any watch list,
although some US government agency had sought his detention eight months
before in Dubai. (Sources: Chicago Tribune, December 14, 2001; Baltimore
Sun, December 14, 2001).

Newsweek magazine, in its special edition published immediately after the
September 11 attack, made a startling claim about ties between the hijackers
and the American national security apparatus. Citing US military sources,
Newsweek reported that "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." Three had listed addresses at the
Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida when they applied for driver's
licenses or car registrations. Another trained at the Air War College in
Montgomery, Alabama, while the fifth took language instruction at Lackland
Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. The three men who trained at Pensacola
were named as Saeed Alghamdi and Ahmad Alnami, both aboard United Flight 93,
which crashed in Pennsylvania, and Ahmed Alghamdi, aboard United Flight 75,
which hit the south tower of the World Trade Center.

FBI officials told the office of Senator Bill Nelson (D-Florida) that the
agents assigned to the World Trade Center/Pentagon case were "investigating
any connection to the military facility," but that no determination had been
made, because of uncertainty over whether the hijackers had stolen the IDs
of other Middle East visitors to the US, especially from Saudi Arabia.
Pensacola has been the site of military training for foreign aviators,
including many from Saudi Arabia and other US clients in the Middle East.

Saudi officials also sought to dispute the reports that 15 of the 19
hijackers were Saudi citizens, but these have proven to be true. There has
been no further press reporting on the Pensacola story, either in Newsweek
itself, which never did a follow-up, or any other major media outlet.

The case of Mohammed Atta

Even more extraordinary is the treatment of Mohammed Atta, the alleged
ringleader of the hijackings. Atta was reportedly an object of attention for
the Egyptian, German and American police and yet traveled without hindrance
between Europe and America throughout 2000 and 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).

Part 3: The United States and Mideast terrorism

By Patrick Martin
22 January 2002

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/jan2002/sept-j22_prn.shtml

An essential aspect of the official version of the attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon-which maintains that these attacks came as a
complete surprise to the US government and its intelligence apparatus-is the
claim that the CIA and other intelligence agencies relied too heavily on
electronic surveillance rather than on-the-spot agents infiltrated into the
terrorist organizations.

As a result, so the story goes, without agents among the Islamic
fundamentalists, the CIA and FBI were unable to discover the plans of Osama
bin Laden and forestall them. The absence of American agents is simply
asserted, without any examination of the evidence. The argument is largely
circular. The very success of the attack on September 11 is taken to prove
that the US government had no agents in the milieu which supported the
hijackers.

There are two assumptions here: first, that US agents could not penetrate
the terrorist circles; and second, that American agents would have
intervened to stop an attack had they learned of it in advance. Both these
assumptions are questionable.

The official claim of "no human intelligence" about September 11 is of
course difficult to analyze or refute on the basis of empirical or forensic
evidence. It is in the nature of such activities that they take place in
secret, and remain largely unknown to the public. But the credibility of
this claim can be judged in the light of the historical record of the
relationship between American imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism.

The United States has been deeply involved in the Middle East for more than
half a century, and in Afghanistan for more than two decades. US
intelligence agencies have had long and intimate ties with Islamic
fundamentalists and encouraged them to engage in terrorist violence. Without
this US role there would have been no al Qaeda, bin Laden would have
remained a construction magnate in Saudi Arabia, and September 11 would
never have taken place.

The origins of the mujahedin

Those who carried out the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were not
even born when the US government first began to sponsor violent Islamic
fundamentalists and use them against political opponents in the Middle East.
As far back as the 1950s, the United States and its main Arab client state,
Saudi Arabia, gave financial support to fundamentalist groups like the
Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. US officials backed the fundamentalists against
the pan-Arab nationalism of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, as well as against
socialist elements in the Arab working class, especially in the Saudi
oilfields.

One analyst of this process writes: "It was during the 1958-60 period that
the US State Department began to exaggerate the communist threat to the
Middle East, and the ARAMCO CIA, and indeed the Beirut and Cairo CIAs, began
supporting Islamic fundamentalist groups as a counterweight to Nasser. In
part, this was an extension of Kim Roosevelt's earlier successful use of
Muslim elements (Fadayeen Islam) against leftists in Iran. The anti-Nasser
Muslim Brotherhood was funded, religious leaders were prodded to attack the
USSR for its anti-Muslim ways (Said K. Aburish, The Rise, Corruption and
Coming Fall of the House of Saud, St. Martin's Press, New York, NY, 1996, p.
161).

This relationship expanded quantitatively and qualitatively with the
outbreak of civil war in Afghanistan. Even before the invasion of the
country by the Soviet Union in December 1979, the United States had decided
to give financial and military backing to the Islamic fundamentalist parties
engaged in guerrilla warfare against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul,
which had come to power in an April 1978 military coup.

US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski hoped that a full-scale war
in Afghanistan would prove as debilitating for the USSR as the Vietnam War
had been for the United States. The Carter administration began to pour in
weapons and money, especially favoring the most right-wing Islamic
fundamentalists, those who became the ideological forebears of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden.

Carter's successor Ronald Reagan enthusiastically embraced the
fundamentalists. He hailed as "freedom fighters" political organizations
that sought to establish a state based on a medieval version of Islamic law:
a religious dictatorship which practiced slavery, oppression of women and
barbaric mutilations for alleged lawbreakers.

But the man who really deserved the title of "founding father" of al Qaeda
was Reagan's CIA director, William Casey. It was Casey who initiated the
campaign to recruit Islamic militants from all over the world to come to
Afghanistan and fight in the anti-Soviet cause. Islamic fundamentalists from
dozens of countries-from Morocco to Indonesia, and including even some black
Muslims from the United States-traveled to Afghanistan under CIA auspices,
received training in weapons and explosives from CIA trainers and went into
combat with US-supplied arms.

Osama bin Laden himself was a product of this process. He first went to
Afghanistan in the early 1980s as a sympathizer of the Afghan mujahedin,
using his knowledge of construction to help build roads, bases and other
facilities, paid for with a combination of his own and US money. It was in
Afghanistan that he made the contacts among Islamic fundamentalists
worldwide which made possible the organization of later terrorist attacks on
US targets. What the Bush administration and the American media today
demonize as a global conspiracy of Islamic extremists is thus a Frankenstein
monster created by the American government itself.

This history is well understood by the more conscious strategists for
American imperialism. Zbigniew Brzezinski suggested cynically a few years
ago that the emergence of al Qaeda was an acceptable price to further US
interests in the Middle East and internationally. He told a French
newspaper: "Which was more important in world history? The Taliban or the
fall of the Soviet empire? A few over-excited Islamists or the liberation of
Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?" (Interview with Vincent Javert
in Le Nouvel Observateur, January 15-21, 1998)

Al Qaeda and the CIA

Bin Laden, as is now widely reported, turned against the United States in
1991-92 after the deployment of large numbers of American troops in Saudi
Arabia in the course of the Persian Gulf War. The official story is that
this marked the end of all contacts between US intelligence agencies and the
Islamic fundamentalists who would go on to form al Qaeda.

Here our analysis necessarily moves into an area where established facts are
few and far between, and inference and probability must be relied on. Is it
credible that the CIA, after a decade of the most intimate ties with the
Afghan mujahedin, was suddenly cut off from all information and unable to
determine what its erstwhile protégés were doing?

The servile American media has never challenged Bush administration,
Pentagon or FBI spokesmen on this subject, and one should not hold one's
breath until a highly paid American journalist puts his job on the line by
asking such questions. But the long-term, close-knit relationship between
the CIA and the Afghan mujahedin makes the sudden drying up of all sources
of intelligence unlikely.

The CIA is in the business of knowing its collaborators intimately, and it
worked with bin Laden and his supporters and followers for a dozen years.
Even today, after a decade of increasing hostilities, those described by US
government sources as key bin Laden aides are for the most part drawn from
the Egyptian and Saudi Islamic fundamentalists radicalized during the war in
Afghanistan. The CIA knew their families, their weaknesses and their vices,
and it has never been squeamish about using such information to compromise
individuals and secure cooperation with its purposes.

That is not to say that there was not a real conflict between bin Laden and
the US government, or that al Qaeda is simply a front organization. It is
not necessary to resort to such a conspiracy theory to reject the claim that
the US government had no idea of the plans being laid by the terrorist
group. It is the official version which is preposterous and far fetched: the
claim that the most extensive and well-financed intelligence apparatus in
the world could not make a dent in an organization consisting largely of its
former employees.

Despite the current official mystification, bin Laden & Co. were a far more
accessible target than, say, such Stalinist-ruled regimes as North Vietnam
or North Korea. The CIA has cultivated sources among the Islamic
fundamentalists since the 1950s. Moreover, friendly intelligence services,
including at least those of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan-to say nothing
of Israel-would have had their own contacts as well.

The role of agents provocateurs

It is critical to consider September 11 in the context of earlier terrorist
attacks on American targets, particularly the 1993 bombing of the World
Trade Center and the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In
both these attacks, it has come to light that American agents provocateurs
played a central role. This casts doubt on the claims that US intelligence
was unable to penetrate al Qaeda. And it raises the question whether similar
agents had some connection to September 11.

Those charged in the 1993 World Trade Center attack and for a subsequent
conspiracy to blow up other targets in New York City were mostly former
guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan who entered the United States with the
covert assistance of US intelligence agencies. Among them was a former
Egyptian intelligence agent and US government informer, Emad Salem, who was
identified as a principal instigator of plans to bomb targets in the New
York City area.

Salem and the FBI claimed that he had functioned as an informer in 1991-92
and then again from April 1993 on, but not during the period of the actual
organization of the March 1993 bomb blast which killed six people and
destroyed the sub-basement area of the twin towers. This was a transparent
effort to avoid questions being raised about why the FBI, tipped off by its
informant, did nothing to stop the attack.

In the 1998 events, it was revealed that the US government received advance
warning of the Kenya bombing two weeks before it took place. During the
trial last year of four men charged in the bombings, defense lawyers were
able to demonstrate that US officials did not pass on the warnings to the
personnel of the threatened embassies, thus contributing to the high death
toll, especially among local civilians who were in or near the facilities at
the time of the blasts.

As with at least one of the warnings about September 11, this information
came through the Israeli intelligence service Mossad. Moreover, one of those
charged in the Kenya and Tanzania bombings was a former Green Beret sergeant
and special warfare instructor, Ali A. Mohamed, another former Egyptian
security officer who was brought into the United States under a special CIA
program to provide citizenship for key informants. Although Mohamed
supposedly turned against the US government because of the 1991 Gulf War, he
was still serving as a government informant as late as 1995.

No doubt most of those who participated in the 1993 World Trade Center
bombing, the bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and
similar outrages, were Islamic fundamentalists who believed that they were
somehow striking a blow against the US government. But in the murky world of
agents, double agents, and agents provocateurs, they may well have been used
to serve the purposes of American imperialism, which has utilized terrorist
attacks-and above all September 11-as the pretext for carrying out military
actions overseas and attacks on democratic rights at home.

Terrorist attacks on innocent civilians, whatever the motivation or pretext,
are politically reactionary. Moreover, because terrorism substitutes the
armed action of a tiny minority for a struggle to develop the political
consciousness of the masses, it is much easier for imperialist agents to
feign sympathy and penetrate and manipulate the organization involved. From
this political standpoint, the claim that US intelligence was unable to
infiltrate al Qaeda is not believable.

Some curious connections

Perhaps the murkiest aspect of September 11 is establishing the actual
relationship between bin Laden himself and the US government. He was, of
course, a CIA asset for more than a decade. He is one of several dozen sons
of a Saudi construction billionaire whose family has longstanding ties to
the United States and, in particular, to the family of George W. Bush. (The
bin Ladens were investors in the Carlyle Group, the multibillion-dollar
venture capital firm which employs the president's father, the former
president, as a well-paid "rainmaker," drumming up business in the Middle
East. They sold their holdings in the firm after September 11.)

As late as 1996, more than four years after Osama bin Laden announced his
intention to drive the US out of Saudi Arabia, the US government declined an
offer by Sudan to extradite him. US officials suggested there was not enough
evidence to convict bin Laden of terrorist actions in a US court. Even after
the 1998 embassy bombings made him a household name, the CIA had surprising
difficulty in locating him in Afghanistan.

Last October 31, the French daily newspaper Le Figaro -one of the country's
more conservative journals-published a sensational story claiming that bin
Laden had met with CIA officials at some point during a nearly two-week
stay, July 4-14, 2001, at the American Hospital in Dubai, in the United Arab
Emirates, where he was treated for kidney disease.

The report was roundly denied by US and UAE officials, and there is no way
to verify it independently. But the newspaper is certainly well-connected.
One of its major investors is the Carlyle Group, the private equity firm
which directly links the Bush family and the bin Laden family.

There are other indications that the relations between the US government and
Islamic terrorists are not as they appear in the American media.

There is the case of Nabil al-Marabh, who was caught at the Niagara Falls,
New York border crossing in June 2001, stowed away inside a tractor-trailer
with a forged passport, and was turned back to Canada by US immigration
officials. "Nine months earlier, he had been identified to American
intelligence agents as one of Osama bin Laden's operatives in the United
States. American customs agents knew about money he had transferred to an
associate of Osama bin Laden in the Middle East. And the Boston police had
issued a warrant for his arrest after he violated probation for stabbing a
friend with a knife." Al-Marabh was released on bail in Canada, and later
arrested near Chicago after the September 11 attacks. While he was jailed in
Canada, "Marabh boasted to his cellmates that he was 'special' to the
F.B.I." ( New York Times, October 5, 2001)

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.

Part 4: The refusal to investigate

By Patrick Martin
24 January 2002

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/jan2002/sept-j24_prn.shtml

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.

Republicans block bipartisan commission

The initial response in Congress to September 11 was to move toward the
formation of an independent commission, with members appointed by the
congressional leadership and the White House, to review the events leading
up to the attack, including the obvious failure of US intelligence agencies
to forestall or prevent the suicide hijackings. The House Intelligence
Committee included such a proposal in its draft of the appropriations bill
for US intelligence operations. Then the White House stepped in.

On October 6, the House of Representatives voted to approve the intelligence
budget, with a huge increase in spending, while backing off from calls for
an investigation into the unpreparedness revealed on September 11. The
Republican House leadership moved to limit the commission's authority,
putting forward an amendment to strip the commission of subpoena powers and
the right to grant immunity to witnesses, and shifting its focus to an
examination of "structural impediments" to the collection and analysis of
intelligence information. In other words, instead of an investigation into
the failure of the CIA and FBI to prevent September 11, the commission's
mandate would be to propose broad new powers for the spy agencies.

The congressional Republicans were clearly carrying out the wishes of the
Bush administration. Democrats declined to push for a roll-call vote on the
issue, allowing the Republican plan to pass on a voice vote. The New York
Times wrote: "There is little appetite in Washington now for a postmortem on
the government's failure to detect and defeat the plot."

Two weeks later, Republican Senator John McCain and Democratic Senator
Joseph Lieberman declared in a television appearance on "Meet the Press"
that they supported the establishment of an independent commission to
investigate the September 11 attack. Lieberman cited, among other examples,
the precedent of the special commission which investigated military
preparedness after Pearl Harbor. The Democrat said he expected the Bush
administration to support such a proposal.

But on November 21, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence
Committee and his Republican counterpart, Robert Graham of Florida and
Richard Shelby of Alabama, said that they would forego any investigation
into the failure to predict or prevent the World Trade Center and Pentagon
attacks until sometime in 2002. House leaders also agreed to wait until the
new year. Graham said it would not be appropriate to conduct such a probe
during the war in Afghanistan, and Shelby described an investigation as a
diversion. Both senators said they had been in contact with the White House,
which agreed with their decision to put off any hearings.

During the same period the FBI moved to put an end to any serious criminal
investigation into the suicide hijackings. The New York Times reported
October 8: "The Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation
have ordered agents across the country to curtail their investigation of the
Sept. 11 terrorist attacks so they can pursue leads that might prevent a
second, possibly imminent, round of attacks, senior law enforcement
officials said."

Shortly thereafter two senior FBI officials decided to retire. Neil J.
Gallagher announced he would leave his position as head of the national
security division. Thomas J. Pickard, the day-to-day chief of the
investigation into the September 11 attacks, told the agency October 31 that
he would also quit. Both retirements took effect November 30.

Pickard had handled many previous terrorism investigations for the FBI and
was only 50 years old. His abrupt departure under wartime conditions is
therefore all the more extraordinary. Under other circumstances the media
might have denounced this as tantamount to desertion of duty, or conversely
praised his ouster as an example of the FBI cleaning house after a
disastrous failure. Instead, the retirement of the man principally
responsible for the investigation into September 11 drew almost no media
attention.

The Pearl Harbor precedent

The refusal to conduct an investigation into September 11 has been variously
justified on the grounds that such a probe would be inappropriate in wartime
or that it would become an exercise in partisan finger-pointing.

As the experience of the Clinton administration showed, there is hardly any
reluctance in today's Washington to engage in scapegoating and the use of
investigations to fight out political differences. One can only imagine what
the response of congressional Republicans would have been had September 11
occurred in 2000 instead of 2001. But as New York Times columnist R.W. Apple
observed December 14, "so far surprisingly few people inside government or
out have been willing to accuse the agencies of falling down on the job. And
there has been no chorus of voices calling for the head of George J. Tenet,
the director of central intelligence."

As for the argument that wartime precludes a major investigation, the Pearl
Harbor precedent completely refutes it. Within a month of the attack,
Roosevelt appointed a commission headed by Supreme Court Justice Owen
Roberts to investigate the conduct of military officers at Pearl Harbor. The
commission took testimony, issued its findings and had the two commanding
officers at Pearl Harbor censured, ending their careers, without the
slightest detriment to the US war effort.

If it was possible for the US government to conduct an investigation while
engaged in an unprecedented military mobilization against two powerful
adversaries, imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, why is it impossible today,
when the supposed enemy is a small band of terrorists based in the poorest
country in the world?

The White House and its apologists made heavy use of the precedent of World
War II to justify Bush's issuance of an executive order to try alleged
terrorists before secret military tribunals, citing the case in which
Roosevelt approved a military tribunal to deal with eight captured German
saboteurs. But they ignore the example of World War II when it comes to an
investigation into the supposed "sneak attack" of September 11.

(The example of the Roosevelt's tribunals is perhaps inadvertently
revealing, however, since he ordered the closed-door trial not because of
military necessity in wartime, but because top intelligence and military
officials faced political embarrassment. Two of the eight saboteurs turned
themselves in to the authorities after they arrived in the US, but the FBI
initially refused to believe their account, terming their first telephone
contact a "crank call." FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wanted to conceal this
negligence, while the War Department wanted to keep quiet about the ease
with which the eight had been landed in Florida and Long Island by German
U-boats-a fact obvious to the Nazi high command, but unknown to the American
public.)

A new push for an investigation

On December 20, two months after their initial comments, McCain and
Lieberman unveiled legislation to establish a bipartisan 14-member
commission of inquiry modeled on the Warren Commission or the Pearl Harbor
investigation. Four members would be selected by Bush, and ten more by
congressional leaders of both parties. McCain suggested former senators Gary
Hart and Warren Rudman as possible co-chairmen, since they chaired a
previous commission which predicted in 1999 that in a future terrorist
attack "Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large
numbers."

McCain said that he and Lieberman had gone public with their plan because
"there is resistance inside all of these agencies to an independent
investigation."

Explaining why a joint investigation involving both the executive and
legislative branches was necessary, McCain said, "Neither the administration
nor Congress is capable of conducting a thorough, nonpartisan, independent
inquiry into what happened on September 11."

Anne Womack, a White House spokeswoman, gave a noncommittal response to the
proposals, repeating the Bush administration's excuse for inaction. "We look
forward to reviewing them," she said. "Right now, the president is focused
on fighting the war on terrorism."

The New York Times, in reporting the new calls for an independent
investigation, said that "for Democrats, a senior Congressional aide said,
the government's confused response to the anthrax sent in letters to
Senators Tom Daschle, Democrat of South Dakota, and Patrick J. Leahy,
Democrat of Vermont, had hit home in the Senate and prompted more interest
in a thorough examination of the government, including its apparent lack of
plans to fight bioterrorism."

We are entitled to interpret this Aesopian language in the light of what we
know about the anthrax attacks, which involved highly potent spores obtained
from a secret US Army germ warfare program. The anthrax attacks were an
attempt to destroy the congressional Democratic leadership. This is
recognized by some of the Democrats, and likely McCain as well, impelling
them to make this very tentative and cautious rejoinder.

It would be foolish to place any confidence in such half-hearted steps. The
history of Democratic Party responses to state provocations and attacks on
democratic rights shows a steady downward curve over the past quarter
century: from the limited exposures of Watergate and the Church commission
into CIA and FBI crimes in 1973-1976, to the failure to break through Reagan
administration stonewalling over the Iran-Contra affair in 1987, to
prostration in the face of the right-wing campaign to destabilize the
Clinton administration, which culminated in impeachment.

Provocation and war

The information summarized in this series represents only facts made public
in the US and international media. The public does not have access to the
far more voluminous data, based on electronic intercepts, secret
surveillance and other sources, which was available to the entire American
intelligence apparatus during the period leading up to September 11. But
even this limited selection demonstrates the falsity of US claims that the
World Trade Center was an unforeseeable surprise attack.

In examining any crime, a central question must be "who benefits?" The
principal beneficiaries of the destruction of the World Trade Center are in
the United States: the Bush administration, the Pentagon, the CIA and FBI,
the weapons industry, the oil industry. It is reasonable to ask whether
those who have profited to such an extent from this tragedy contributed to
bringing it about.

Those who believe it is inconceivable that the US government could carry out
such an action would be well advised to learn from history. In nearly every
war since the United States first emerged as a world power a century ago,
the ruling class has seized on events or atrocities of a similar kind to
overcome the instinctive reluctance of the American people to become
involved in overseas conflicts.

In some instances the casus belli was wholly fabricated, as in the 1964 Gulf
of Tonkin incident which led to passage of a congressional resolution
authorizing massive US intervention in Vietnam. Or the pretext may have been
an accident-the explosion that destroyed the battleship Maine in Havana
harbor in 1898, which set the stage for the Spanish-American War. But in the
majority of cases the event chosen to trigger war was subject to a degree of
manipulation behind the scenes by the US government.

The sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 was the foreseeable result of the
Wilson administration's decision to allow passenger liners to carry arms
shipments for the British-French side in World War I. When a German
submarine torpedoed the ship, with the loss of 1,200 lives, the resulting
public outrage helped fuel US entry into the war. Pearl Harbor likewise was
foreseen by the Roosevelt administration-if not the specific date and
location, certainly the likelihood of a preemptive Japanese attack-once the
US cut off all shipments of oil and scrap metal to Japan in the summer of
1941.

A cruder case of manipulation is the August 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait,
which became the occasion for the large-scale-and seemingly
permanent-deployment of American troops and warplanes in the Persian Gulf
and Arabian peninsula.

Throughout the 1980s, Saddam Hussein was a de facto military ally of the
United States, receiving US intelligence information and US-approved weapons
shipments to aid his war against Iran. After Iran was compelled to accept a
cease-fire in 1988 largely favorable to Iraq, the main US (and Saudi)
concern was to prevent Baghdad, with its battle-tested million-man army,
from dominating the Persian Gulf.

A series of conflicts ensued, largely provoked by Kuwait. The oil-rich
emirate demanded immediate repayment of billions in war loans to Iraq, while
at the same time draining oil from the Rumaila field, which lies largely on
the Iraqi side of the border, thus putting Iraq in a severe financial
squeeze. In retaliation, Saddam Hussein engaged in saber-rattling
declarations, describing Kuwait as the lost nineteenth province of Iraq,
stolen from the country by British imperialism.

The US response to this conflict was notably reserved. In her now-famous
meeting with Saddam Hussein the month before the Iraqi invasion, US
Ambassador April Glaspie declared that Iraq's dispute with Kuwait was a
matter for those two to resolve for themselves, with no role for the United
States. Meanwhile, on the orders of Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, General Norman Schwarzkopf drew up plans for a massive US
military intervention in the Persian Gulf aimed against Iraq. War-gaming of
this plan was completed in July 1990, within days of the Glaspie-Hussein
meeting.

There is ample reason to believe that the US tacitly encouraged an Iraqi
attack so as to provide a pretext for smashing the Iraqi military and
realizing a long-desired goal of US foreign policy, the establishment of a
dominant American military position in the oil-rich Persian Gulf. In the
same way, the Bush administration has used the World Trade Center
catastrophe as the opportunity for deploying American military forces in
Central Asia and the Caspian basin, a region of vast untapped oil reserves
which is expected to become the Persian Gulf of the twenty-first century.

US officials were quoted after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait to the effect
that they had not thought that Saddam Hussein would seize the whole country.
In other words, they encouraged his appetites, expecting only a border
conflict which would bring the US in as an arbiter and thus strengthen its
role in the Gulf region. A similar miscalculation may have been involved in
the September 11 hijackings, whose consequences were far more devastating
than might have been expected.

It is not possible to determine, based on the facts currently available, the
exact degree of advance knowledge the American government possessed about
the World Trade Center catastrophe. But the question deserves the most
thorough investigation.

Alternative explanations-that the FBI and CIA were guilty of ineptitude so
spectacular that it amounts to criminal negligence-do not place the US
government in a much better light. The American people are being asked to
give their blind trust for an unlimited and open-ended campaign of military
action by a government which either permitted, or proved incapable of
preventing, the slaughter of thousands of its own citizens.

==============

EURASIAN NATIONS FORCED TO ERRECT A "NEW IRON" CURTAIN
TO HOLD BACK U.S. AGGRESSION

Failure of CFR foreign policy could not be more complete.

Only a return to the non-interventionist anti-globalist policies
advocated by Patrick Buchanan and Ralph Nader will restore
peace, order and prosperity to international political and economic
relations -- and restore the world's confidence in America and
what it stands for.

Raimondo gives the lay of the geopolitical landscape.
There are many more sites with information on the Saudi
situation following Raimondo's essay. ( I haven't read them.)

===============================

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/InfoTimes/message/1259
THE WAR AGAINST THE SAUDIS
What's behind Washington's split with Riyadh?
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j012302.html

by JUSTIN RAIMONDO

Washington is all atwitter over what appears to be a sea-change on the
foreign policy front: evidence of a developing rift between the US and
Saudi Arabia, its most loyal Arab ally. Since World War II, Washington
and the House of Saud have enjoyed a lucrative and seemingly permanent
alliance, in which the former provided protection against enemies at
home and abroad, while the latter provided a steady stream of oil
profits for politically-favored American companies. The US went to war
against Iraq, in 1991, and stationed close to half a million US troops
on the Arabian peninsula, supposedly to protect Riyadh from a threat
posed by Saddam Hussein. Now, it appears, the events of September 11
have produced a split in this formerly rock-solid relationship, with
talk of an impending Saudi demand for a US withdrawal. The Washington
Post reports that

"Saudi Arabia's rulers are increasingly uncomfortable with the U.S.
military presence in their country and may soon ask that it end ..
Senior Saudi rulers believe the United States has 'overstayed its
welcome.'"

DEMOCRATS TAKE THE LEAD

The response to this has been fierce, and Congressional Democrats have
been particularly bellicose, with Senator Joseph Lieberman, a putative
presidential contender, going so far as to declare that a "theological
iron curtain" was falling over the Arab world, including Saudi Arabia.
Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan), powerful chairman of the Senate Armed
Services Committee, took up this "cold war" theme with some particularly
hot rhetoric, saying he had "an uneasy feeling" that the Saudis were
coddling Islamic terrorists and that American forces were "not
particularly wanted" there:

"They act as though somehow or another they're doing us a favor. And I
think the war against terrorism has got to be fought by countries who
really realize that it's in everybody's interest to go after terrorism.
I think we may be able to find a place where we are much more welcome
openly, a place which has not seen significant resources flowing to
support some really extreme, fanatic views."

Levin and Lieberman were joined by Rep. Ike Skelton, top Democrat on the
House Armed Services Committee, who averred that the Saudis "need to
cleanse the place of potential terrorist groups."

'FORBIDDEN TRUTH'

This fusillade comes as the climax of a furious post-9/11 anti-Saudi
propaganda campaign that has gone into overdrive in recent weeks. From
noting that most of the alleged hijackers were identified as Saudi
nationals to screaming headlines about a dispute between a visiting
Saudi princess and her maid, the anti-Saudi jihad has become an
intellectual paradigm for the theoreticians of a new cold war.
Neoconservative ideologues such as Daniel Pipes and Stephen Schwartz,
see Wahabism as the totalitarian flavor of the new millennium, just as
the varieties of socialism (Stalinism and Nazism) were the scourge of
the twentieth century. This view has been popularized - indeed, one
might say novelized - by a new book, written and published inside of a
few weeks, Bin Laden, The Forbidden Truth, by Jean-Charles Brisard and
Guillaume Dasquie, described by the Los Angeles Times as

"A dense, conspiracy-minded portrait of Saudi-dominated banks, companies
and tycoons, all allegedly interconnected, that they maintain have
helped fund Bin Laden's holy war."

THE APOSTATES

This Saudi-devil theory, which posits that we ought to have bombed
Riyadh in addition to Kabul, is senseless if we compare it with the
facts. For Bin Laden is an avowed enemy of the House of Saud, and is
pledged to their overthrow. As Peter L. Bergen points out in Holy War,
Inc.: Inside the Secret World Of Osama bin Laden:

"Bin Laden also believed the House of al-Saud, the family that has ruled
Arabia for generations, were 'apostates' from Islam. Apostasy is a grave
charge to level against the Saudi royal family, who style themselves the
protectors of the two holiest places in Islam, Mecca and Medina, and
practice the most traditional form of Sunni Islam."

In addition Bergen relays the charge of Khaled al-Fawwaz, an Al Qaeda
sympathizer who helped arrange Bergen's interview with Bin Laden, that
"several assassination attempts have been mounted against [Bin Laden] by
Saudi intelligence services." Al Qaeda's holy war against the US
military presence on the Arabian peninsula makes a particular target of
those who invited the Americans in - the House of Saud.

THE MARLARKEY FACTOR

Brisard and Dasquie basically say that the Americans let 9/11 happen
because of a "softness" on the Saudis on account of the influence of Big
Oil in American politics. This is what supposedly motivated the Bushies
to enter into secret negotiations with Bin Laden prior to September 11.
The popularity of the Brisard-Dasquie book in France is understandable,
as it blames the Americans for the disaster that befell them, but the
lesson really ought to stand for the Europeans as well, says M. Dasquie:

"The U.S. is not the only one. The question is why developed countries
need to do commercial deals with Saudi Arabia and if those commercial
deals are why they must close their eyes about the reality of the Saudi
Arabian kingdom. Since the 18th century, Saudi Arabia has been focused
on conquering the world."

Such an overweening ambition would be difficult to hide, but isn't it
funny how nobody ever noticed it before? And another thing: this
"forbidden truth" theory being a lot of marlarkey, what, then, is the
real reason for the anti-Saudi propaganda campaign, so ably and
relentlessly conducted by a broad coalition of neoconservatives (the
Weekly Standard, Commentary, the New York Post) and liberal Democrats
(Lieberman, Levin, the New Republic)?

TARGET: BUSH I

The interest of congressional Democrats in the "Forbidden Truth" thesis
is understandable, especially if they can make the charge of "secret
negotiations" stick. If the Bush administration was not only "soft" on
terrorism but even somehow protected their Saudi allies from scrutiny by
law enforcement agencies, then who benefits? The Bush family, long tied
to the Saudis, is fair game once the "Forbidden Truth" conspiracy theory
becomes the conventional wisdom: George Herbert Walker Bush, reviled by
some for his pro-"Arabist" policies, is the particular target of this
left-wing hate campaign.

OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS

The neocons, no friends of Bush pere, also have much to gain. They blame
the father for not "finishing the job" and concluding the Gulf war
prematurely, even as they exhort and try to shame the son into a
military confrontation not only with Iraq, but with nearly the entire
Islamic world. Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol didn't waste much
time after 9/11, quickly mobilizing a phalanx of intellectuals and other
policy wonks calling for an all-out invasion of a whole list of Arab
nations: not only Iraq, but also Iran and Syria - and I'm sure none of
the signers would object to the addition of Saudi Arabia.

Okay, so at least two groups of ideologues - and I can think of a few
more - on the right and the left have some interest in propagating the
"Forbidden Truth" scenario, but, by themselves, these people are just a
bunch of writers, policy wonks, and political hacks, without the
resources to do anything but bloviate. The real power - that is, the
money power - behind the anti-Saudi campaign are the same financial
interests that have profited from the Saudi-US alliance lo these many
years: the Rockefeller family, the controlling factor in the
Arabian-American Oil Co., Aramco. And therein lies a story..

THE ROCKEFELLER CONNECTION

In return for US aid and support for the House of Saud, King Ibn Saud
granted Aramco a monopoly over the production of Saudi oil at the end of
World War II. Aramco is a consortium of companies, with Exxon, Mobil,
and Socal - all Rockefeller-connected - granted 70 percent ownership,
and Texaco granted the rest. A premier example of crony capitalism, the
Rockefeller-Saudi alliance translated into multi-millions in subsidies
through the Export-Import Bank, so that the King could build his own
personal railroad from his capital to the summer palace. Franklin
Roosevelt took money out of the war budget to prepare the way for
Rockefeller's pipelines. In return, the Saudis granted the US an airbase
at Dharan, conveniently near the oil fields. Smalltime capitalists hire
private security guards to protect their property, but the big boys -
or, at least, some of them - have the use of the American military.

AN ENDURING ALLIANCE

The Saudi-Aramco relationship has endured a lot. There was a phony
"nationalization" of Aramco in the 1970s, when Nasserite and Baathist
socialism were all the rage on the Arab "street": the Saudi government
took over Aramco, formally, but then immediately turned around and
granted the Aramco-Rockefeller consortium the exclusive contract to
"manage" the operation. Under this new deal, the consortium would get
the lion's share of Saudi oil, with the rest going to Petromin, the
state-owned company. As Murray N. Rothbard succinctly summed it up:

"It all boils down to a happy case of the 'partnership of industry and
government' - happy, that is, for the Saud family and for the
Rockefeller oil interests."

TURNING ON A DIME

This was the rock upon which the US-Saudi alliance was founded, and
anyone who questioned the necessity, wisdom, or cost of this
friendship - let alone calling for a US withdrawal - was roundly
denounced as a foolish "isolationist." Now, the same people who hailed
the Gulf war and the imperative of defending the Saudi oil fields, have
turned on a dime, and are not only calling the historic friendship into
question, but openly wondering if the Saudis are enemies.

How to explain this sudden about-face by the chattering classes, the
political mavens, and now a growing number of mostly Democratic
politicians? I say - follow the money!

Oh, but "everything's changed!," they cry. How can you be so cynical?
Don't you know that skepticism is out and earnestness is in? Be that as
it may, I can only report the facts as I see them, and what I can tell
you is that everything changed well before September 11, 2001, as far as
the Rockefeller oil interests in Saudi Arabia were concerned.

TURNING POINT

The pivotal event occurred without much public notice, on September 23,
1998, during Crown Prince Abdullah's visit to the US, where he met with
the presidents of the major US oil companies, "with whom he exchanged
cordial talks and reviewed issues pertaining to petroleum affairs," as
the Saudi embassy website delicately phrases it. But the reality lurking
beneath the veneer of diplomatic phrases was a lot rougher: according to
widespread reports in the Arab media, the Prince basically told the
Aramco consortium that their monopolistic state-privileged status was
about to be revoked. A very interesting piece by Adel Darwish in the
Middle East Analyst purports to give us the inside scoop on the Prince's
message to this gathering:

"During a private, hour-long meeting on Saturday 23 September at the
house of Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan in McLean, Virginia,
with senior executives representing seven American oil companies: The
four American oil giants Mobil Corp, Exxon Corp, Texaco Inc. and Chevron
Corp. (which established the Arabian American Oil Co now known as Saudi
Aramco, in the 1930s) the other three were Atlantic Richfield Co.,
Conoco Inc. and Phillips Petroleum Co.

"According to sources close to the meeting, [the] Prince [told] the
executives to submit directly to him a study of 'recommendations and
suggestions' about the role their companies could play in the
exploration and development of both existing and new oil gas fields,
said one participant in the meeting. The same source said that the
executives appeared 'shocked' by the major policy reversal. Saudi Arabia
began nationalizing its oil industry in 1973 and has adamantly excluded
foreign oil companies from production operations ever since."

SHOCKWAVES

Adamantly excluded but for the Aramco consortium, that is - until now.
Abdullah, the heir apparent to the invalid King Fahd, is a modernizer
who has decided that it's time to throw open the doors of free
competition and let the free market take over. The deal was off. The
Rockefeller stranglehold on Saudi oil production was about to end,
announced the Prince, and this surely sent waves of shock through his
audience. Indeed, the shockwaves are still being felt today, as the US
ponders not only withdrawing its troops from the Saudi kingdom, but
whether our longtime ally is really our deadly enemy.

ABDULLAH TO ARAMCO: 'THE PARTY'S OVER'

The Saudis, usually close-mouthed about business matters and subtle
policy shifts, were more than forthcoming in broadcasting their
declaration of independence. Prince Abdullah went to the trouble of
granting an unusual interview, in which he said exactly what happened at
that historic meeting:

"In 1998 I had a chance to meet with a number of executives from major
oil companies. We had discussed the investment opportunities in the
Kingdom especially in light of its stability and the availability of
huge oil and gas reserves. I had indicated to them, at that time, that
we welcome, and we will be willing to look into, any investment ideas
that might be of benefit to both sides."

THE SAUDIS AND THE 'SILK ROAD'

Abdullah's vision of a modernized Saudi Arabia is to be financed by a
new arrangement with Western oil companies, and an opening up of the
Saudi economy to competitive foreign investment. He boasted of receiving
proposals "from 18 of the top oil companies in the world" worth a total
exceeding one hundred billion dollars and ranging from "production,
processing, transporting and distributing of gas to refining,
transporting and marketing of oil and building the required
infrastructure." The Prince went on to politely but firmly declare his
defiance:

"All this will take us a long way towards the creation of a solid and
integrated economy that realizes the full economic potentials of the oil
and gas industry and will open new and wide investment opportunities for
the Saudi private sector. And it is important to keep in mind that money
invested in projects in Saudi Arabia means less money available for
investment in competing projects elsewhere."

TWO CAN PLAY

A very interesting comment, that last: what are these "competing
projects"? This is none other than the Transcaucasian "Silk Road"
pipeline project, slated to extend from the Caspian Sea oilfields to
Turkey, and perhaps down through Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean. This
project has long been on the drawing boards, and the Clinton
administration took it up with alacrity, even going so far as to set up
a special department to facilitate its creation. If the foreign oil
companies were going to try to go around them, said the Prince in so
many words, then two could play that game:

Q: "Your Royal Highness what about Saudi Aramco? Will it assume a new
role following the formation of the council and the invitation of the
international oil companies?"

A: "We are proud of Aramco's achievements through the years and our
dealings with foreign companies will never be at the expense of Aramco.
I believe the presence of these companies will strengthen Aramco and
sharpen its competitive edge. Aramco, has, I believe, the administrative
and technical expertise and know-how that enable it to compete
effectively with these companies."

FREE MARKET ECONOMICS 101

With the price of oil steadily falling, Abdullah is strapped for cash.
Darwish cites Yehya Sadowski, associate professor of Middle East studies
at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, who says the
Saudis exhausted their capital assets paying off the US for the cost of
the Gulf War. Faced with the looming prospect of bankruptcy, and
increasing competition in the oil market from South America and Central
Asian states of the former Soviet Union, Abdullah's choice was made out
of necessity: the alternative is continued stagnation and the indefinite
postponement of modernization.

In any case, the glee with which the heir presumptive to the Saudi
throne delivered a lecture on free market economics to the leading
capitalists of the West should be shared and appreciated by free
marketeers everywhere.

A LESSON LEARNED

In spite of the Prince's reassurances that the Rockefellers would get
their fair share - and no more - it is doubtful that the assembled
Aramco executives were all that appreciative of the little lesson in
Economics 101. Their great unhappiness is what is really driving this
anti-Saudi hysteria. Oh, you've got to modernize, say the globalist
policy wonks, you've just got to open your borders to free trade and
open up your markets to free competition: let the market rule! This is
the advice routinely given, but, when it is finally taken, the reaction
is a concerted campaign of calumny and vilification.

ACCIDENTALLY ON PURPOSE

After years of close military cooperation between the two countries, a
female pilot pops up who objects to settled rules on proper attire while
serving in the Saudi kingdom - and becomes a feminist icon overnight.
All of a sudden, we hear from Andrew Sullivan about the persecution of
homosexuals under the strictures of Sharia law, a cause that somehow
previously escaped his attention. Virtually overnight it is discovered
by all sorts of instant "experts" that Wahabism, the official state
religion of our longstanding ally, is the equivalent of Nazism if not
outright devil-worship. That this sudden awakening to the alleged "Saudi
threat" occurred in tandem with the Rockefeller's acrimonious (and
costly) break with the House of Saud is, of course, the purest
coincidence.

THE NEW COLD WAR

A number of public figures have weighed in on this potentially explosive
issue: Bill Clinton warned against the withdrawal of US troops from the
region (surely an argument in favor), while Neil Bush urged the Saudis
to make a better case for themselves. But the momentum is all the other
way, and, while the administration is denying that any withdrawal is
being contemplated, clearly the Bush people are speaking only for
themselves. For if and when Abdullah asks the US to set a departure
date, this is sure to set off a new round of renewed Saudi-bashing, one
that the new cold warriors look forward to with gusto - and which the
rest of us have good reason to fear.

A GREAT DANGER

The dissolution of the Rockefeller oil monopoly, and the creation of a
truly independent Saudi Arabia, with freer markets and without the
burden of justifying the presence of foreign troops on its soil, will
strengthen the forces of modernization and expand the margins of freedom
in the Middle East. That is why the withdrawal of US forces would be a
giant step forward in defeating the Bin Ladens of this world. It is a
divorce that will benefit both: however, all divorces contain some
bitterness, no matter how outwardly amicable, and it is going to be all
too easy for the War Party to segue straight into an adversarial
relationship with our former ally. And therein lies a great danger.

THIRSTY FOR BLOOD

With Max Boot of the War Street Journal complaining about the paucity of
American casualties in Afghanistan, clearly our bloodthirsty hawks were
disappointed in the brevity of the Afghan campaign, and yearn for more.
The same arguments made by the warhawks of National Review for an
invasion of Iraq could be applied with even more force to an alleged
"threat" from Riyadh. As our foreign policy tends inexorably toward an
all-out assault on the entire Arab world, the Saudis will take the place
of the Soviets in the demonology of the new cold war - at least that is
the hope in certain quarters.

THE VENTRILOQUISTS

When Crown Prince Abdullah called off his sweetheart deal with Aramco,
he incurred the wrath of some very powerful people, and it was only
natural that they would seek revenge. Speaking through Jeff Jacoby - in
an act of ventriloquism that no doubt had the dummy-columnist's full
cooperation - the Aramco-Rockefeller consortium delivered this
"ultimatum" to their former business partners:

"We would make it clear to the Saudi princes that we expect their full
cooperation no matter where the war on terrorism takes us. And if it
takes us to a land war in Iraq, Saudi Arabia will make its military
bases available for staging the invasion.

"Will the Saudis refuse? Will they protest that complying with our
demands will mean the toppling of their regime? Either way, our course
will be clear: We will seize and secure the oil fields."

How convenient.

"But our purpose would not be plunder."

Oh, of course not!

"We would appoint a respected, pro-Western Muslim ally to run the oil
industry in trust for the Muslim world."

I imagine Aramco has a few suggestions.

"No longer would the petro-wealth of Arabia be used to advance Islamist
fanaticism and terror - or to maintain a decadent royal family in
corrupt opulence. It would be used, rather, to promote education,
health, and democracy throughout the Middle East."

- and to fill the coffers of the Rockefellers and their corporate
allies, who won't allow the prize of oil-rich Araby to escape their
grasp quite so readily.

"The Gulf's great riches, now a well spring of disorder and unrest,
could be transformed into a force for decency, stability, and peace."

The Gulf's great riches, in other words, will stay right where they are:
securely deposited in Armaco's bank account. So the revenge of the
Rockefellers plays itself out on the world stage: they'll retain their
monopoly on the largest known oil reserves - one way or the other.

BUSH PAYS THE PRICE

So far, President Bush has made it plain that he does not mean to wage
war on Islam, and for that he is being made to pay a price. While his
State Department is struggling to undo the damage done by the anti-Saudi
media and the Lieberman-Levine assault in Congress, a grand coalition of
left and right is pushing for World War III in the Middle East - a war
that, given the presence of Pakistan and India (not to mention Israel)
in the equation, could quickly go nuclear.

[Copyright 2002 Antiwar.com]

==================================================

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PLUTOCRATIC MAFIA PLANS TO STEAL SAUDI OIL
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/InfoTimes/message/1259

THE WAR AGAINST THE SAUDIS
What's behind Washington's split with Riyadh?
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j012302.html

BUSH-BLIAR CONTINUE TO SHED BLOOD FOR OIL
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/InfoTimes/message/1258

U.S. Senator Carl Levin Wants U.S. Out Of Saudi Arabia
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/fr/609288/posts

Saudis Tell U.S. To Get Out -
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4338874,00.html

Saudis Feel Unfairly Tarred With a Terrorist Brush
They believe that U.S. policy, not the kingdom's religion-based society,
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http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/fr/610355/posts

Saudi Prince warns of dire consequences if Saudi Arabia does not end its
dependence on oil income.
Prince says economic reforms crucial for Saudi Arabia.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/fr/612227/posts

Friday night 20/20's Brian Ross will interview the maid of Saudi
princess Buniah Al-Saud. The princess was arrested last month on charges
of abuse and theft.
http://www.icflorida.com/partners/wftv/news/2002/ross_interview_0118.htm
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King Ibn Saud
Ibn Saud restored the Arabian state of his ancestors, founded the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and ensured its prosperity.
http://www.arabies.com/Special%20Report/Ibn%20Saud.htm

September 27, 1998: Crown Prince Abdullah Stays On In Washington DC
http://www.saudiembassy.net/press_release/98_spa/visit98.html#bus

The Middle East Internet News Network
The Complicated Middle East Relation with the West
http://www.mideastnews.com

SAUDI ARABIA ON THE VERGE OF A TRANSITIONAL PERIOD
http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/watch/Policywatch/policywatch1998/307
.htm

Central Asia: Pipeline Superhighway Replaces The Silk Road
http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/1997/11/F.RU.971119122709.html

Testimony by U.S. Ambassador Richard L. Morningstar, Special Advisor to
the President and Secretary of State for Caspian Basin Energy Diplomacy,
Before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on International Economic Policy,
Exports and Trade Promotion.
http://www.treemedia.com/cfrlibrary/Library/policy/morningstar.html

Top Gun McSally Sues U.S.
http://www.thegully.com/essays/US/politics_2001/011210_mcsally_women.htm
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Colonel and highest-ranking female fighter pilot] sued her boss, Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the U.S. government, for forcing American
servicewomen in Saudi Arabia, when off the base, to ride in the back
seat of cars and wear the "abaya," a traditional, black, head-to-toe
robe, and for forbidding them from leaving the base unless accompanied
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Bill Clinton (the Con-Artist) Says U.S. Still Needs Troops in Saudi
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Neil Bush Tells Saudis to Waste More Money on Futile Lobbying
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between their country and this one.
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DEATH & THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
WSJ editor Max Boot bemoans lack of American casualties in Afghanistan
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j111901.html

PLUTOCRATIC MAFIA THREATENS SAUDI ARABIA THROUGH ITS DUMMY COLUMNIST
Jeff Jacoby: Time to Give Saudis an Ultimatum
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But U.S. and Saudi Arabia will Divorce each other Very Soon
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Saudi Time Bomb?
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saudi

Saudis Angry at U.S. Military Rule on Women's Dress
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/fc/World/Saudi_Arabia
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20020123/ts/saudi_usa_women_dc_3.html

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Bush Wants to Continue his Military Occupation of Saudi Arabia - the
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U.S. Combat of 'Terrorist Financing' is Exasperating the Saudis
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/opinion/23_01_02_c.htm

Time to Say Goodbye to Saudi Arabia Mess
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The Washington Post reported last week that Saudi Arabia is poised to
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Fine, let's do it. There are reasons aplenty.

Can the Arab World come together in the face of American contradictions?
http://www.palestinechronicle.com
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Time for the Arabs to Talk Tough to the U.S.
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Mulla George War Bush pushing his slave General Pervez Musharraf, a
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Pakistan Says Indian Government Sponsors Terrorism
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Indian Religious Meeting Points Out: "Islam Does Not Tolerate Terrorism"
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Arab News
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