Government complicity in the 9/11 attacks, Part 1

Below is the 9/11 article referred to in the article I posted last week.  The 2006 article was printed by Alliance!, but since the website is down, I will re-post it here.  This is the first of four parts, and explains structural reasons the 9/11 Commission should not be trusted, besides the definite lies and omissions it perpetrated.   

 

US Government Complicity in the 9/11 Attacks

 

There is abundant evidence suggesting that the Bush Administration knew the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001 were coming and did not act to prevent them.  There is also evidence that the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, if not others (such as Israel), also had a role in the crime, and many governments knew something was coming that fall.  As David Ray Griffin, Professor of Philosophy of Religion at California's Claremont School of Theology and prominent 9/11 revisionist researcher points out in his 2004 book, The New Pearl Harbor (NPH), complicit could mean several things.  The amount of US participation in the crimes of 9/11 could range from having covered up what actually happened, with no other crimes having been committed by the government, to participation by only a part of the US government, such as the intelligence agencies, to the attacks having been a completely American operation, planned by the White House (these last possibilities would be false flag black ops). 

 

We cannot say yet what the complete truth is, but a criminal conspiracy of some kind by the Bush Administration looks very likely.  This article summarizes the documented evidence of advanced knowledge of the attacks by the US, Bush and Clinton Administration actions to prevent investigations that would have revealed al Qaida's plans, the lack of evidence supporting the government's list of hijackers, and reasons the US government, and the part of the capitalist elite it represents, might have wanted a massive terrorist attack in 2001, along with evidence that the US government has been willing to kill its own citizens to further past goals.  Future articles will cover evidence of active participation by at least parts of the Saudi and Pakistani governments (other governments had at least advanced warning) and physical 'nuts and bolts' and documentary evidence contradicting the official story of what happened on Black Tuesday. 

 

This is a summary of some of the best evidence against the government's al Qaida conspiracy theories, but it is not an alternative story of what happened.  Some of this evidence could be explained away, but unless all of it has an innocent explanation, Americans should not accept the government's theory. 

 

1.  The 9/11 Report explains little and omits a lot

 

The so-called independent 9/11 Commission attempted to whitewash the evidence, aided by Congress and the dominant media.  There have been several official, and contradictory, US government explanations for various aspects of 9/11 over the last five years.  The Commission produced the current official theory by unscrupulously and brazenly omitting and misrepresenting the evidence (proven in works such as Griffin's The 9/11 Commission Report:  Omissions and Distortions, 2005 (O&C)).  Twenty-five employees of the CIA, Customs Department, Defense Intelligence Agency, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and FBI signed an open letter to Congress about these omissions, saying that "We are aware of significant issues and cases that were duly reported to the Commission by those of us with direct knowledge, but somehow escaped attention," which "renders the report flawed, and casts doubt on the validity of many of its recommendations."  The omissions can be explained by looking at who served in the Commission and how it was created. 

 

The first in-depth investigation was a joint effort by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.  As former Nixon chief counsel John Dean, basically a believer in the official theory, but not ignoring some of the incongruities, describes in Worse than Watergate:  The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush, the Joint Inquiry was an effort to prevent a real investigation.  He says, "such large joint committees are remarkably cumbersome and poor at investigations, and for that reason are rarely used."  In addition, the Administration blocked the investigation and would not let the Joint Inquiry question then Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld or then Secretary of State Powell.  During this period the FBI questioned almost all members of Congress about leaks of 9/11 information and wanted them to submit to lie detectors and turn over phone records and appointment calendars.  Senator John McCain in February 2003 said the Administration had "slow-walked and stonewalled" the investigation (cited by Dean). 

 

For 441 days the Administration resisted the creation of an independent commission with subpoena power, saying that it would harm the "War on Terror."  Bush relented in late November 2002, after gaining the power to appoint the chair, who could block subpoenas.  Even with this control and the composition of the Commission, the White House did as much as it could to forestall the investigation.  Bush was not able to get away with appointing Henry Kissinger, Nixon's Secretary of State and someone deeply involved in the US government's foreign crimes over the past decades, as the chair.  Instead, Thomas Kean was appointed chair, Lee Hamilton (currently on the Iraq Study Group) vice chair, with co-commissioners Richard Ben-Veniste, Fred Fielding, Jamie Gorelick, Slade Gorton, Bob Kerrey, John Lehman, Timothy Roemer, and James Thompson.  Former Democratic congressman and Iraq War supporter Max Cleland of Georgia was originally on the Commission, and was a dissenter on several points, but he resigned when Bush appointed him to the Board of the Export-Import Bank.  Consider the pasts of these commissioners. 

 

Chairman Kean is a Republican former governor of New Jersey and a member of the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and a co-chair of the Century Foundation's Homeland Security Project, which called for an office of homeland security.  Kean is a director and shareholder in Amerada Hess Corporation, which worked with Saudi Arabia's Delta Oil to tap oil around the Caspian Sea in the former USSR.  Delta was involved in unsuccessful negotiations with the Taliban to build a pipeline through Afghanistan to Pakistan, bypassing Russia's existing pipelines and Iran.  For these reasons, Kean has conflicts of interest, and could benefit from the Afghan War and other results of the 9/11 attack.  Kean also spent little time working on Commission work, because he remained president of Drew University and a board and executive committee member in Amerada Hess.    

 

Lee Hamilton replaced the first co-chair, who, like Kissinger, refused to admit his possible conflicts of interest.  Hamilton was a Democratic Congressman from Indiana, serving on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the House Select Intelligence Committee, and a member of the CFR since 1988 or before.  In Congress he helped cover up the CIA's involvement in drug trading in the Iran/Contra scandal, as chair of the investigation, and has been accused of helping to cover up the October Surprise, in which Iran helped Reagan win the White House, by refusing to release US hostages until after the election.  Before the investigation of the October Surprise, Hamilton called a press conference in which he said George H.W. Bush was not involved; Hamilton later admitted to not having consulted the witnesses or the investigating lawyer before absolving Bush.

 

Jamie Gorelick, a Democrat, is vice chair of Fannie Mae and a member of the CFR.  She is on the board of Schlumberger, an oil exploration and drilling company reportedly involved in almost all drilling operations.  Through Schlumberger, Gorelick is an associate of James Baker, of the Iraq Study Group.  Before joining Fannie Mae, Gorelick was Deputy Attorney General (second behind Clinton's Attorney General, Janet Reno), from March 1994 to May 1997.  She co-chaired (with Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet) the Intelligence Community Law Enforcement Policy Board, a group set up to meet quarterly to discuss issues affecting the Attorney General, Director of Central Intelligence, security services, Asst. Sec. of State for Intelligence and Research, and the Defense Department's General Counsel.  In 1998 Gorelick was also on the Central Intelligence National Security Advisory Panel and the President's Review of Intelligence.  Gorelick was part of the legal team defending the Bank of Commerce International (BCCI) and First American, which are connected to Saudis suspected of aiding al Qaida.  She was one of four Commission members given access to some of the White House intelligence documents. 

 

Richard Ben-Veniste is a prominent Democratic lawyer in Washington, DC.  He was Democratic counsel to the Senate Whitewater investigation, in which he shielded Truman Arnold (chief Democratic fundraiser at the time) from investigation, before representing him before the Whitewater grand jury, a conflict of interest.  Truman reportedly transferred a $2 million dollar plane, for a dollar, to Wallace Hilliard, who ran a Venice, Florida flight school where four of the alleged hijackers were trained.  Ben-Veniste also represented Barry Seal, who has been connected to Iran/Contra, the illegal drug trade, and then Governor Bill Clinton's government, flying out of Mena Regional Intermountain Airport, Arkansas (for more about this issue, see The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, a reporter for The Daily Telegraph of the UK).

 

Fred Fielding was a deputy counsel in the Nixon Administration, under John Dean, allegedly involved in the same criminal activities, but Fielding was not jailed.  He was Reagan's White House Counsel.  He advised Karl Rove to delay divesting more than $100,000 dollars in Intel stock, and Rove than broke even the Bush Administration's ethics policies when a merger with a Dutch business was discussed while he and Cheney met with Intel executives. Fielding helped the Bush Administration transition team in 2001, reportedly conducting security clearance checks, that now take 60 days, in 1-2 hours.

 

Republican Jim Thompson is chair of the large Chicago law firm Winston and Strawn, after having been the longest serving governor of Illinois, until 1991.  Thompson headed the transition team of Democratic governor Rod Blagojevich, reportedly "to the astonishment of practically everyone," since Blagojevich had strongly criticized Thompson's leadership (according to journalist Jim Rarey, quoted in Crossing the Rubicon).

 

John Lehman is an investment banker (with Paine Weber) with close ties to the Navy.  He is chair of OAO Technology Solutions, Inc. and JF Lehman & Company, formerly chair of Sperry Marine, and on the board of the Ball Corporation and others.  He was a member of, or associated with the neocon Project for a New American Century (the PNAC, see below).  He was a reserve naval pilot, special counsel and senior staff member to Henry Kissinger in the Nixon Administration, and Secretary of the Navy from '81 to '87.

 

Slade Gorton is a member of the law company Preston, Gates, & Ellis in Seattle, and formerly was a Washington senator. He was on the House Intelligence Committee for two years, according to him, partly because of his friendship with Trent Lott.  One major conflict of interest for Gorton is that on September 13, 2001 he said on public television that he thought the intelligence services could not have prevented the attack and the Seattle Times quotes him as also saying "I doubt we can get too much inside information no matter what we do" (Rubicon). 

 

Tim Roemer might have fewer conflicts of interest.  He was a Democratic member of the House who retired at the end of 2004, after being one of the main House members advocating an independent commission and is given credit for gaining (initial) support for the Commission from the group representing the 9/11 survivors and relatives.  This could be seen as co-opting anger over the handling of 9/11, by bringing support to a Commission apparently designed to bury concerns, rather than honestly answer them.  Roemer was a member of the House Intelligence Committee.       

 

Bob Kerrey was appointed to the Commission by former Senate minority leader Tom Daschle, and was a very pro-Iraq War Nebraska Democrat, who aided the Administration's efforts to use the attack to justify its plan to attack Iraq.  Kerrey was vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a major supporter of CIA Director George Tenet.  He was the only high-ranking Democrat on the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an American group related to the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), which published a policy document in the fall of 2000 in which it said its recommendations might take a new Pearl Harbor for implementation.  In 1998 Kerrey voted for the Iraqi Liberation Act and was close to the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmed Chalabi, who was convicted in absentia to 22 years imprisonment for bank fraud in Jordan.  Kerrey published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal calling for war with Iraq and pushing the claim that Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi agent in Prague, Czech Republic, a claim denied even by the 9/11 Commission. 

 

For these reasons the Commission was from the beginning compromised and full of conflicts of interest, for which it has been condemned by many.  The actual work of the Commission was mostly done by the staff, many with ties to the government agencies being investigated by the Commission, and headed by executive director Philip D. Zelikow, a Republican with close connections to the Administration.  He appears to have been an insider for the Administration.  In April 2004 Newsweek reported that he faxed a warning to the White House to let Condolezza Rice testify or face public outrage.  He argued in September 2002 that the US should attack Iraq to protect Israel.  Zelikow was on Bush I's National Security Council, working with Rice as an aid to National Secuity Advisor Brent Scowcroft.  Later he directed the Aspen Study Group, working with Rice, Scowcroft, Cheney, and Wolfowitz.  During the 90's he collaborated with Rice on a book on German unification, supporting the first Bush's policies.  From 2001 until he joined the Commission in 2003, Zelikow was on G.W. Bush's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.  Rice asked Zelikow to help her in the transition and Zelikow advised the Administration on terrorism intelligence and spoke about al Qaida on several occasions with then Former US National Coordinator for Counterterrorism Richard Clarke, who served in both the Clinton and Bush II Administrations.  

 

In light of these conflicts, consider Zelikow's power as executive director.  Paul Sperry wrote an article for www.antiwar.com (March 31, 2004) stating that Zelikow "arguably has more sway than any member [of the Commission], including the chairman.  Zelikow picks the areas of investigation, the briefing materials, the topics for hearings, the witnesses, and the lines of questioning for witnesses.  In effect, he sets the agenda and and runs the investigation" (quoted in O&C).  Many of the staff reports went directly into the Commission report, which was edited by Zelikow.  Zelikow was one of the handful of Commission members allowed to read the famous Presidential Daily Brief of August 6, 2001 and only Gorelick and Zelikow had access to many White House briefings.  Repeated requests by the Family Steering Committee for the 9/11 Commission for Zelikow to be removed were denied.  The best the Commission could do with these conflicts of interest (and in other cases) was to have Zelikow recuse himself when the Commission considered the Clinton-Bush transition process.   In March 2004 the Committee said that it was "deeply disturbed to learn about" Zelikow's participation in transition briefings with Sandy Berger and Rice, in which Berger said al Qaida was the biggest security threat to the USA.  Zelikow refused to investigate revisionist theories about 9/11, "outrageous conspiracy theories," comparing investigation to "whacking moles" (Global Outlook magazine issue 10 and O&C). 

 

Much of this information is reported in Michael C. Ruppert's Crossing the Rubicon (Rubicon), which argues that the 9/11 attacks were a desperate attempt by the corrupt elite to create a pretext for policies to safeguard and expand the USA's global dominance in the face of the impending Peak Oil crisis.  Peak Oil is the point at which oil production peaks, after which there will be increasing shortages, because oil is basically a non-renewable resource; other hydrocarbons also have peaks.  Capitalism requires increasing production, and that will not be possible if oil runs out and is not quickly replaced by other energy sources.  Some argue that it will be very hard to replace oil, but either way, capitalism is not a system that plans well for the future and human needs.  Ruppert argues that Peak Oil largely explains the Bush Administration's foreign policy and relates to growing fascism at home.  Michael Ruppert is a former Los Angeles police detective who blew the whistle on a CIA operation allegedly bringing illicit drugs into the US to finance the supply of weapons to Iranian Kurds, and was subsequently harassed out of the LAPD.      

 

Even if the 9/11 Commission really "sought to be independent, impartial, thorough, and nonpartisan" (from The 9/11 Commission Report (9/11C)) in carrying out its mandate to "make a full and complete accounting of the circumstances surrounding the attacks, and the extent of United States prepardness for, and response to, the attacks," it would have had a hard time doing so.  It was given only $3 million dollars, compared to $5 million to study legalized gambling in 1996 and $50 million to study the destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia.  The Administration refused the Commission's request for an allocation of $11 million dollars, but eventually raised the budget to $9 million.  The deadline for the Commission's report was May 2004, and the Administration stalled on security clearances and releasing documents for months.  All of the commissioners, most of whom already had experience in intelligence oversight and sensitive information, were not cleared to see secret information until March 2003.  The Commission was mandated to build upon the Congressional Joint Inquiry's report, but that was not made available until late July 2003.  Executive branch organizations, such as the Justice Department, stalled on releasing documents even longer, government employees had to testify in the presence of watchers from their agencies, and Bush refused to testify under oath or in person.