(World News Trust) -- A recent New York Times
article examined how Arabs in the Middle East don’t believe the
official story of what happened on September 11, 2001, and are apt to think the U.S. Government itself had a hand in the terrorist
attacks. The title of the article dismisses the notion, reading: “9/11
Rumors That Become Conventional Wisdom.” But what the Times fails to recognize is that behind many myths lies an element of truth.
The article begins, "Seven years later, it remains conventional wisdom here that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda could
not have been solely responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and
that the United States and Israel had to have been involved in their
planning, if not their execution, too.”
This
is the talk, the article notes, in Dubai, in Algiers, in Riyadh, and in
Cairo. A Syrian man living and working in the United Arab Emirates told
the Times, “I think the United States organized this so that they had an excuse to invade Iraq for the oil.”
This kind of thinking, the Times
tells us, “represents the first failure in the fight against terrorism --
the inability to convince people here that the United States is,
indeed, waging a campaign against terrorism, not a crusade against
Muslims.”
No,
the United States is not waging a crusade against Muslims. But neither is it
waging a campaign against terrorism. No doubt, Ahmed Issab, the Syrian
quoted above, could point out to the Times that this is one of the biggest myths of them all, as the case of Iraq clearly demonstrates.
Iraq
has repeatedly been called “The central front in the war on terrorism”
by President Bush and others. And it certainly became so, as was predicted would occur -- as a result of the U.S. Invasion.
To
speak of myths that have become conventional wisdom, take the notion
that there was an “intelligence failure” leading up to the war on Iraq.
This is pure nonsense. There was no intelligence failure. The simple
fact of the matter, easily demonstrable, is that U.S. Government
officials lied about, misled, spun, and exaggerated the “threat” posed
by Iraq and it’s alleged WMD and supposed ties to al Qaeda. To document
the deceptions employed is beyond our purposes here; suffice to say
that there never was any credible evidence that Iraq still possessed
weapons of mass destruction, or that it had any sort of operational
relationship with al Qaeda. Many people, myself included, were saying
that for many months before the United States invaded, and time certainly
confirmed the truth of what we were trying to warn others about.
And
how can one argue that the war against Iraq was waged to combat
terrorism? What evidence is there of this? We have only the
declarations of benevolent intent from the same people who engaged in a
campaign of deception to convince the American public of the necessity
of the war in the first place. Sure, they say it’s a “war on
terrorism.” But statements of intent are not evidence. Saddam Hussein
was a brutal dictator who terrorized his own people. But the United States
didn’t care about that. After all, our government supported Saddam
during his most heinous crimes; including when he “gassed his own
people,” killing 5,000 people in the village of Halabjah.
Moreover,
it was well predicted by every competent analyst that invading Iraq
would only cause more resentment toward the United States and hatred of its
foreign policies. A war in Iraq would be a “poster” for al Qaeda, many
experts noted, and recruitment at militant schools and terrorist
training camps would only increase as a result. The world would become
an even more dangerous place and acts of terrorism would only increase, they said.
It
would have been welcome had such dire predictions been wrong. But they
weren’t. Acts of terrorism worldwide have increased considerably since
the “war on terrorism” began. A great many of these terrorist incidents
have occurred in Iraq, a country where such heinous crimes were
virtually unknown prior to the U.S. Invasion.
And
there’s the even bigger fact that war itself is terrorism. In fact, the
crime of aggression is even worse than state-sponsored international
terrorism under international law. A war of aggression is “the supreme
international crime”, as defined at Nuremberg, “differing only from
other crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of
the whole.”
But
what about Afghanistan? It’s “the good war,” after all, we’re told.
Even many who opposed the invasion of Iraq were in favor of invading
Afghanistan and overthrowing the Taliban. But there’s an all-too-often
missing context here, too, that should be considered when judging the U.S. military intervention: that the Taliban (and
al Qaeda) is ultimately a creation of U.S. foreign policy.
The
U.S. support for the Afghan mujahedeen is well known. But in the
official history the myth is propagated -- regarded as conventional
wisdom -- that this support for the radical militants President Reagan
called “freedom fighters” was a response to the Soviet invasion. In
fact, covert aid began under President Carter six months prior to the Soviet
invasion, and according to Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew
Brzezinski, the purpose was to try to draw the Soviets in to a
conflict -- to give them “their Vietnam war,” as he put it.
So
the CIA financed, armed, and trained -- acting through their
intermediary, Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence agency (ISI) -- the
most radical militants they could find. One Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, for
instance, was the principle recipient of U.S. aid. His name is still in
the media from time to time -- he is now one of the principle enemies
fighting U.S. coalition forces in Afghanistan.
And,
of course, the CIA’s base of operations was in Peshawar, Pakistan.
Religious schools, or madrassas, were established along Pakistan’s
northwest border regions, where recruits were trained and radicalized
to fight the Soviets. In fact, it is from these madrassas that the
movement known as the Taliban would later come -- “Taliban” is the
plural form of “Talib,” Pashto for “student.”
And
another well known figure of the Soviet-Afghan war also set up his base
of operations in Peshawar -- Osama bin Laden. At the very least, the CIA
was knowledgeable of and approved bin Laden’s operations. In fact, the
United States government looked the other way while branches of his organization
established bases of operation within the United States, and may have
even actively supported his efforts with the mindset during the “Cold
War” that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
Before
bin Laden’s organization became known as “al Qaeda,” or “the Base,” it
was known as Makhtab al-Khidamat. Either as an alias or subsidiary
branch, it was also known as Al Kifah. The U.S. Department of the
Treasury has this to say about it: “Makhtab
al-Khidamat/Al Kifah (MK) is considered to be the pre-cursor
organization to al Qaida and the basis for its infrastructure. MK was
initially created by Usama bin Laden’s (UBL) mentor, Shaykh Abdullah
Azzam, who was also the spiritual founder of Hamas, as an organization
to fund mujahideen in the Soviet-Afghan conflict. MK has helped funnel
fighters and money to the Afghan resistance in Peshawar, Pakistan, and
had established recruitment centers worldwide to fight the Soviets.”
One
of those recruitment centers was the Alkifah Refugee Center in
Brooklyn, New York. One of the mosques from which a certain Omar Abdel
Rahman, a.k.a. “the Blind Sheikh,” preached was a few doors down from
Alkifah.
The Sheikh was good friends with Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, and had travelled to Peshawar to meet with the CIA’s favored beneficiary.
Despite
being on the terrorist watch list, Sheikh Omar was allowed to enter the
United States. In fact, his visa was approved by the CIA. The Sheikh
travelled in and out of the country at will and it was the CIA itself
which reviewed and approved his application on at least six separate
occasions.
You read correctly. It was reported in the New York Times,
in several separate stories, that the CIA had approved a known
suspected terrorist, believed to have masterminded acts of terrorism in
Egypt, including the assassination of President Anwar Sadat, and
allowed him into the country, where he helped to recruit young Muslims
through a cell in the organization that would eventually become known
as al Qaeda.
What’s more, that same individual would later be named as one of the masterminds of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
There’s
much more to that story, too -- such as the case of one Ali Mohammed,
terrorist mastermind extraordinaire. If you’ve never heard of him,
that’s perhaps not too surprising. Despite being named as one of the
planners and organizers of the 1993 WTC bombing and having a web of
connections that suggest he was also a principle figure in paving the
way for the terrorist cells that would carry out the 9/11 attacks, his
name is rarely mentioned. That might have something to do with the
embarrassing fact that Mohammed was a Green Beret in the U.S. Army and
at one time or another worked for both the FBI and the CIA.
But
lest we digress down that road too much further, let us return to the
war in Afghanistan. Not everyone agreed after 9/11 that invading
Afghanistan was the correct response to that horrible atrocity. Many of
us argued that waging a war that would certainly result in even more
innocent people being killed would not be justice. Indeed, more Afghan
civilians were killed in the first several months of the war than died
on 9/11. Many more have died since then in the violence that is
ongoing, nearly seven years later.
And
those of us who opposed this military action also pointed out that the
people whom the U.S. was gearing up to recruit as its allies in the
fight against the Taliban, the leaders of the so-called Northern
Alliance, were many of the same brutal warlords whom the Afghan people
were so glad to be rid of the first time that they actually welcomed
the Taliban as liberators when the Taliban drove the warlords out.
And
we warned that such action would only destabilize the region further.
Just as the United State's intervention in Afghanistan throughout the 80s -- and
its total abandonment of the country it used as its battlefield in its
proxy war against the Soviet Union; a war that devastated the nation,
killed a million of its inhabitants, and made refugees out of three
million more -- resulted in the “blowback” terrorism of the 90s and of
9/11, so too would yet another major war in Afghanistan sow the seeds
of misery and death and hatred that could only end in more “blowback”
in the future.
Afghanistan,
for instance, is the world’s leading producer of opium poppies. Most of
the world’s heroin is now manufactured from poppies grown in
Afghanistan. The drug trade in Afghanistan initially grew and
flourished during the Soviet-Afghan war. If not actually participating
in the trade itself (for which there is precedent), the CIA at the very
least turned a blind eye while its main assets profited from drug
trafficking and used the proceeds to help fight the war against the
Soviet occupation. Afghanistan became the world’s leading producer of
opium during this period.
Then
the Taliban succeeded in nearly eradicating the crop in 2001. But with
their overthrow, many -- including warlord allies of the United States -- began
profiting once more from the trade. It wasn’t long after the ousting of
the Taliban that experts began warning that Afghanistan was becoming a
narco-terrorist state. Opium production grew to surpass all previous
records. And while there has been some success, mostly in just the past
year, in eradicating the crop from government-controlled provinces,
production has increased in areas now under control of the resurging
Taliban.
Moreover,
members of al Qaeda and the Taliban, most likely including Osama bin
Laden -- who, needless to say, was never caught -- fled into Pakistan,
where they reestablished themselves. The chickens had gone home to
roost. The war on Afghanistan has led directly to the increasing
destabilization of neighboring nuclear-armed Pakistan.
Fortunately,
there is some hope that the principles of democracy might prevail in
Pakistan, where the prevailing public mind is more moderate and who
view the militants and terrorists as a plague upon their land -- a
plague that was allowed not only a place to sustain itself, but to grow
and expand under the government of Pervez Musharraf.
After
9/11, Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf pledged to assist the United States
in its “war on terrorism.” This was an absurdity. Pakistan had been up
to that very day the principle benefactor of the Taliban, and arguably
continued to be long after. Pakistan’s shadowy intelligence agency, the
ISI -- sometimes referred to as a state within a state -- has long been
accused of links to terrorists and acts of terrorism.
In
fact, according to reports in the international media (it only received
one brief mention in the United States, outside of the alternative media, in a
blog on the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal website) -- including Pakistan’s Dawn, the Times of India, Agence-France Presse, the London Times, and the Guardian
-- it was the head of the ISI himself, Gen. Mahmud Ahmed, who was
responsible for authorizing the transfer by Omar Sayeed Sheikh of
$100,000 to 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta.
According
to the reports, the FBI had worked in tandem with India’s intelligence
services to track where the 9/11 “money trail” led to -- until it ended
up leading to the ISI chief himself. Then suddenly the story of the
money trail -- up until then big news -- quietly disappeared from the
headlines. Mahmud Ahmed was even more quietly removed and replaced just
as the story broke.
The
Bush administration opposed any independent investigation of 9/11. It
was only due to tremendous public pressure, with the families of 9/11
victims themselves taking a lead role, that led to the 9/11 Commission
being established -- a commission that only with the greatest cynicism
could one call “independent.” The families submitted lists of questions
for the 9/11 Commission to investigate and answer. One of them had to
do with the alleged financing of the operation by Pakistan’s ISI chief.
The
Commission report is not silent on the matter of financing. No, indeed.
It states that no evidence has emerged indicating the involvement of
any state or government official in the attacks. What’s more, it states
that ultimately the question of who financed the attacks “is of little
practical significance.”
That’s
right. The 9/11 Commission concluded in its report that it isn’t
important to follow the money trail leading to those ultimately
responsible for this crime. We know for a fact that its members were
made aware of the allegations of ISI involvement, so they can’t claim
ignorance as an excuse. And if the Commission in fact investigated the
allegations and found that they were unsubstantiated, wouldn’t that be
worthy of even a footnote? Instead, the report simply denies with its
silence that the reports even exist and tries to convince its readers
that they needn’t bother to trouble themselves with the question. Don’t
look at that man behind the curtain.
But
again we digress. Despite continuing evidence of Pakistani support for
terrorists and armed militants from within the ISI and Pakistani
military, the United States continued to back Musharraf, a dictator who seized
power in a coup in 1999. The government in Washington continued to
support him even as he held a fraudulent election last year, declared
martial law, suspended the constitution, replaced judges (including on
Pakistan’s Supreme Court) with his own lackeys, and cracked down on
his political opposition -- all in the name of fighting terrorism, a
cynical euphemism he could only get away with under the backing of
those in Washington only too well familiar with employing the same
rhetorical device to push through their own ideologically driven
policies and agendas.
There
is no shortage in history of governments violating human rights and
freedoms in the name of security. That trend continues today, and the
United States is no exception.
Returning
to the point, the fact is that those who argue that the United States is
fighting a “war on terrorism” don’t have a leg to stand on. The very
notion is an absurdity. The world’s leading culprit of state-sponsored
terrorism -- the only country ever to have been found guilty of what
amounts to international terrorism, the “unlawful use of force,” for
its proxy terrorist war against the elected government of Nicaragua
(giving the United States the benefit of the doubt that its actions didn’t
amount to the even greater crime of aggression) by the World Court --
cannot possibly fight a “war on terrorism.”
This would be like Panama declaring under Manuel Noriega (a long-time CIA asset) that it was waging a “war on drugs.”
It’s
an absurdity to even suggest that the “greatest purveyor of violence in
the world today,” as Martin Luther King, Jr., put it during the war
against Vietnam (words that ring even more true today), could be
fighting a “war on terrorism,”, particularly by such means as invading
and bombing other countries. Bringing death, sorrow, and even further
hardship to peoples of other regions does not help bring about an end
of the scourge of terrorism that plagues the Earth. It only contributes
to that scourge.
So let’s return to the Times’
assumption that there is a “campaign against terrorism” going on. This
is a myth. On the opinion of Mr. Ahmed Issab that 9/11 was actually the
result of a plot by the U.S. government to serve as a pretext for
expanding its global hegemony overseas, the author of the piece states,
“It is easy for Americans to dismiss such thinking as bizarre.”
Perhaps the Times
reporter has spent too much time overseas. One needn’t travel to Riyadh
or Cairo to find people who believe just that. There’s no shortage of
Americans who share in that belief.
Such
Americans point to the fact that the so-called neo-conservatives
setting policy in the Bush administration are the same bunch of folks
who had for so long argued that the United States needed a “transformation” of
its military into a force capable of fighting multiple simultaneous
wars to be able to further the goal of global hegemony, particularly
over the energy-rich Middle East and Central Asian regions.
They
point out that plans to overthrow the Taliban existed prior to the 9/11
attacks, and that Iraq -- its people long the victim of the U.S. policy
of “regime change” -- was in the government’s sights immediately after
the attacks, despite there not being any evidence of Iraqi involvement
whatsoever.
They
also point out that there was a consensus among policy-makers that this
“transformation” and the expansion of U.S. global dominance could not
happen without some sort of catalyst -- “like a new Pearl Harbor”, to
use their own words. And these same planners were among those to
compare the 9/11 attacks to the attack on Pearl Harbor after the fact.
September 11, some even said openly, was an “opportunity” to further their
goals for the United States in its foreign policy.
But the Times,
while suggesting the idea is without foundation, says we shouldn’t
dismiss such thinking as that expressed by Mr. Issab. The reason given
is instructive; to do so would be to fail to learn the lesson that the
United States has failed “in the fight against terrorism” to actually “convince
people” in the Middle East “that the United States is, indeed, waging a
campaign against terrorism.”
In other words, the United States is losing the propaganda war.
The Times
notes that many Arabs are convinced that the United States and Israel were
actually behind the 9/11 attacks. “The rumors that spread shortly after
9/11 have been passed on so often that people no longer know where or
when they first heard them. At this point, they have heard them so
often, even on television, that they think they must be true.”
It
is indeed a disturbing trend, for whole groups of people to believe
something is true just because it is repeated on television again and
again. Take, for another example, the widely held belief among
Americans that Iraq was a threat to the United States and had weapons of mass
destruction. One poll taken by the Washington Post showed that as many 70 percent of Americans actually believed that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks.
But let’s get back to the rumors the Times tells us Arabs have come to regard as fact.
“First
among these,” the article continues, “is that Jews did not go to work
at the World Trade Center on that day. Asked how Jews might have been
notified to stay home, or how they kept it a secret from co-workers,
people here wave off the questions because they clash with their
bedrock conviction that Jews are behind many of their troubles and that
Western Jews will go to any length to protect Israel.”
Of
course, it is true that it is an urban legend that no Jews went to work
at the WTC on September 11. But that myth seems to have sprung from the
fact that there were indeed reports that Jews working in the building
were warned of the coming attack. One is tempted to dismiss this with
the assumption that it is propaganda from Arab media sources. In fact,
it was an Israeli paper, Haaretz, that reported that
workers at Odigo, an Israeli owned messaging service company with an
office four blocks from the WTC, had received warnings that very day of
an impending attack.
The Washington Post
followed up on the report, saying that officials at Odigo “confirmed
today that two employees received text messages warning of an attack on
the World Trade Center two hours before terrorists crashed planes into
the New York landmarks.” Despite the fact that Odigo said it had the IP
address of the sender and was working with the FBI to track down
whoever was responsible, to the best of my knowledge it was never
reported that they either succeeded or failed in doing so.
Incidentally, Odigo was partnered with another Israeli company called Comverse.
Fox
News reported in a series of reports on the uncovering of a massive
Israeli spy ring operating in the United States, saying that, “There is no
indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9-11 attacks, but
investigators suspect that they may have gathered intelligence about
the attacks in advance and not shared it.” One investigator told Fox
News, “Evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified, I cannot
tell you about evidence that has been gathered.”
As
many as 60 Israelis were detained on suspicion of their participation
in the spy ring. Part of their operation involved supposed “art
students” trying to get into the homes of government personnel,
including members of the military, the DEA, FBI, and other law
enforcement and intelligence personnel, under the guise of selling art.
Fox
News also revealed that “virtually all call records and billing in the
United States are done for the phone companies by Amdocs Ltd., an Israeli-based
private communications company.” According to Fox News, the National
Security Agency (NSA) has warned U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement
numerous times about the potential security breaches that this
situation could make possible.
Reporter
Carl Cameron also noted that Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, had
warned the United States of a possible attack prior to 9/11, but that the
warning “was nonspecific and general, and [investigators] believe that
it may have had something to do with the desire to protect what are
called sources and methods in the intelligence community; the suspicion
being, perhaps those sources and methods were taking place right here
in the United States.”
The
third report in the series reported on another Israeli company that
“provides wiretapping equipment for law enforcement.” The company?
Comverse Infosys. But there were fears about the system Comverse
provided because “wiretap computer programs made by Comverse have, in
effect, a back door through which wiretaps themselves can be
intercepted by unauthorized parties. Adding to the suspicions is the
fact that in Israel, Comverse works closely with the Israeli
government, and under special programs, gets reimbursed for up to 50
percent of its research and development costs by the Israeli Ministry
of Industry and Trade.”
“But,”
Cameron added, “investigators with the DEA, INS and FBI have all told
Fox News that to pursue or even suggest Israeli spying through Comverse
is considered career suicide.”
A
fourth installment in the series noted that the number of Israeli
citizens that had been detained as suspected members of a foreign
intelligence operation was nearly 200, and that most of them had been
deported. Most “had served in the Israeli military, which is compulsory
there. But they also had, most of them, intelligence expertise, and
either worked for Amdocs or other companies in Israel that specialize
in wiretapping.”
The Jewish newspaper, Forward,
reported that “In recent years two reports, one by the Government
Accounting Office, the other by the Defense Intelligence Agency, warned
against Israeli economic and military espionage activity in the United
States. In addition, the FBI conducted an investigation during the late
1990s into alleged Israeli wiretapping of the White House, the State
Department and the National Security Council. The investigation ended
in May 2000 without any result, according to The New York Times.”
Then
there were the reports of the five dancing Israelis who were arrested
after behaving suspiciously upon witnessing the burning towers from New
Jersey. The five were witnessed by their white van videotaping or
taking photos of the smoking buildings and celebrating. The FBI put out
an alert on the vehicle after a witness reported its license plate
number, which was registered to a company called Urban Moving Systems,
an Israeli owned company.
When
they were found, the driver told the arresting officers, “We are
Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The
Palestinians are the problem.” The suspects’ names came up in a search
of the national intelligence database and they were suspected of
conducting an intelligence operation. Forward noted
that Urban Moving was a “company with few discernable assets that closed
up shop immediately afterward and whose owner fled to Israel.”
Forward
also noted the Israeli “art students” who had been detained on
suspicion of espionage, and added that “a counterintelligence
investigation by the FBI concluded that at least two” of the Israelis
seen celebrating the attacks on the World Trade Center “were in fact
Mossad operatives.”
Reports
such as these naturally fueled any number of conspiracy theories
surrounding the events of 9/11. But the fact remains that despite two
so-called “investigations” into 9/11, first the Joint Inquiry and then
the 9/11 Commission, countless questions remain yet unanswered about
just about every facet of the attacks.
Many
of the alleged hijackers, to name just one further notable example,
have been reported by reputable news agencies, such as the BBC, as
being alive and well.
The New York Times
article continues: “Americans might better understand the region,
experts here said, if they simply listen to what people are saying --
and try to understand why -- rather than taking offense. The broad view
here is that even before Sept. 11, the United States was not a fair
broker in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and that it capitalized on the
attacks to buttress Israel and undermine the Muslim Arab world.
“The
single greatest proof, in most people’s eyes, was the invasion of Iraq.
Trying to convince people here that it was not a quest for oil or a war
on Muslims is like convincing many Americans that it was, and that the
9/11 attacks were the first step.”
“There
are Arabs who hate America, a lot of them, but this is too much,”
Hisham Abbas, a student at Cairo University told the Times. “And look
at what happened after this -- the Americans invaded two Muslim
countries. They used 9/11 as an excuse and went to Iraq.”
Of
course, under the prevailing assumption that defines the framework for
the article, such ideas, though perhaps “conventional wisdom” in the
Middle East, should be considered merely “rumors.”
The conventional wisdom, on the other hand, that the United States is fighting a “campaign against terrorism,” is accepted by the Times without question -- it is simply an article of faith. Yet the conventional wisdom shared by the Times
that there is no truth to the “rumors” that many people in the Middle
East believe is belied by the facts. In many cases, there are elements
of truth behind the myths that deserve our attention and demand answers
to the reasonable questions they precipitate.
Americans
would do well to take the above advice, given by experts in the Middle
East and relayed to us through the New York Times, into consideration;
to try to listen to what people in the Middle East are saying, and to
understand.
If
we ever truly wish to engage in a campaign against terrorism, that
would be an elementary first step and a worthy alternative to spreading
even more violence.
Jeremy
R. Hammond is an independent researcher and writer whose articles have
appeared on numerous alternative news websites. He maintains a website,
www.yirmeyahureview.com,
dedicated to critical analysis of U.S. foreign policy, particularly
with regard to the U.S. “war on terrorism” and the Middle East. He
currently resides with his wife in Taiwan. You may contact him at
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Last update : 11-11-2008 22:58
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