20th Annaversary of the fairytale of Big Lies

[Peter Lemkin]

According to journalist Ahmed Rashid, Massoud was “intensely disliked by the State Department for his … closeness to Iran.”[50] Most significantly, Massoud was dead set against U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan.[51] Yet in 2000, the preparations against Afghanistan rolled on, ramping up as U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) began working directly with the military of Uzbekistan.[52]
Damage from bombing of USS Cole in October 2000 by al-Qaeda. [Source: video.foxnews.com]
October of 2000 saw the bombing of the USS Cole by al-Qaeda forces off the coast of Yemen. In response, Richard Blee pressed the lame duck President Clinton to authorize expanding the Uzbek venture into a joint attack force that would include the Northern Alliance. Clinton refused. Under the new Bush administration, U.S.-led talks with the Taliban resumed. Despite open threats to the Taliban made by U.S. representatives at the talks, no political and/or pipeline deal was struck.
On September 4, 2001, the Bush cabinet held a meeting on NSPD-9, a plan for military action against Afghanistan. On September 9th, the main obstacle for any U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was removed when Northern Alliance chief Ahmed Massoud was assassinated by al-Qaeda suicide bombers.
The murder was ordered by the “blind sheik” Abdel-Rahman, a prisoner in U.S. custody. Abdel-Rahman was under close U.S. surveillance; so was his contact with Muslim radicals abroad, a New York postal worker named Ahmed Abdel-Sattar. Thus, the U.S. government almost certainly knew about the order and apparently allowed the assassination to happen.[53]
The next day, September 10th, Bush officials held another meeting to discuss the NSPD-9 plans for military action against Afghanistan. On the following day, the world witnessed the terror spectacle of September 11, 2001.

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1. Aaron Good, “American Exception: Hegemony and the Dissimulation of the State,” Administration and Society 50, no. 1 (2018): 4–29, https://doi.org/10.1177/0095399715581042. ↑
   
2. In the wake of 9/11, many letters containing weaponized anthrax were mailed to a number of Americans, including media figures and elected officials. Several people were killed and many more were injured. The attacks were erroneously linked to Iraq and contributed to the campaign for the launching of the Iraq War. They also served to hasten the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act since two of the targets were U.S. senators who were holding up passage of the bill. Though the letters were deceptively drafted to look like they were drafted by Islamist terrorists, the source of the Anthrax was later determined to be the U.S. government. The U.S. attempted to pin the blame for the false flag anthrax letter attacks on a “lone nut” U.S. scientist named Steven Hatfill. When he succeeded in proving his innocence, another “lone nut” U.S. scientist, Bruce Ivins, was identified as the culprit. The case was brought to an end when Ivins died as the result of an apparent suicide, but many observers do not believe that Ivins could have done what the government was accusing him of. See Graeme MacQueen, The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy (Atlanta: Clarity Press Inc., 2014). ↑
   
3. Eric Holder, “Response to Senator Rand Paul” (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Attorney General, March 4, 2013), https://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/Br...sponse.pdf. ↑
   
4. Niels Harrit, “The Mysterious Frank Taylor Report: The 9/11 Document That Launched US-NATO’s ‘War on Terrorism’ in the Middle East,” Global Research, March 21, 2018, https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-myster...st/5632874. ↑
   
5. Gareth Porter, “U.S. Refusal of 2001 Taliban Offer Gave Bin Laden a Free Pass,” Inter Press Service (Washington, D.C., May 3, 2011), http://www.ipsnews.net/2011/05/us-refusa...free-pass/. ↑
   
6. Most infamous was the use of a document about uranium from Niger that had already been deemed a forgery before being cited by the president in a speech during the run-up to the Iraq War. ↑
   
7. Nasser Saghafi-Ameri, “The Emerging NATO: Impact on Europe and Asia,” in Europe and Asia: Perspectives on the Emerging International Order, V.P. Malik and Erhard Crome, eds. (New Delhi: Lancer Publishers & Distributors, 2006), 153. ↑
   
8. Julio Godoy, “U.S. Policy towards Taliban Influenced by Oil – Authors,” Inter Press Service (Paris, November 15, 2001), http://www.ipsnews.net/2001/11/politics-...l-authors/. ↑
   
9. Peter Dale Scott and Aaron Good, “Was the Now-Forgotten Murder of One Man on September 9, 2001, a Crucial Pre-Condition for 9/11?” CovertAction Magazine, December 9, 2020, https://covertactionmagazine.com/2020/12...-for-9-11/. ↑
   
10. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, “The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States” (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2004), 214, https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/repo...rt_Ch5.htm. ↑
    
11. 105th Congress, “Iraq Liberation Act of 1998” (1998), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW...ubl338.pdf. ↑
    
12. “O’Neill: Bush Planned Iraq Invasion before 9/11,” CNN, January 14, 2004, https://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/01/10/oneill.bush/. ↑
    
13. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 30. ↑
    
14. Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, 146. ↑
    
15. Thomas Donnelly, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century” (Washington D.C.: PNAC, 2000), https://archive.org/details/RebuildingAm...s/mode/2up. ↑
    
16. Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, 211. ↑
    
17. Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, 24-25. ↑
    
18. Donnelly, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century,” 51. ↑
    
19. Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (New York: Owl Books, 2005), 51. ↑
    
20. Robert Dreyfuss, “What Is the Muslim Brotherhood, and Will It Take Over Egypt?” Mother Jones, February 11, 2011, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/what-is-the-muslim-brotherhood/. ↑
    
21. Dreyfuss, “What Is the Muslim Brotherhood, and Will It Take Over Egypt?” ↑
    
22. Ian Johnson, “Our Secret Connections with the Muslim Brotherhood,” The New York Review of Books, March 10, 2011, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/03...id=1265108. ↑
    
23. Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: Gallery Books, 2019), 260. ↑
    
24. Melanie Colburn, “America’s Devil’s Game with Extremist Islam,” Mother Jones, 2006, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/200...ist-islam/. ↑
    
25. “Mission and History,” Center for Afghanistan Studies (Omaha, NE, n.d.), https://www.unomaha.edu/international-st...istory.php. ↑
    
26. Stone and Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States, 486-487. ↑
    
27. Colburn, “America’s Devil’s Game with Extremist Islam.” ↑
    
28. Colburn, “America’s Devil’s Game with Extremist Islam”; Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game, 240-241. ↑
    
29. Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game, 264-266. ↑
    
30. Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy, 2nd ed. (London: Zed Books, 2015), 97-98. ↑
    
31. Jon Schwarz, “A New Biography Traces the Pathology of Allen Dulles and His Appalling Cabal,” The Intercept, 2015, https://theintercept.com/2015/11/02/the-...hessboard/. ↑
    
32. Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 30. ↑
    
33. Aaron Good, “American Exception: Hegemony and the Tripartite State” (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2020), 165-166, https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/521. ↑
    
34. Jonathan Marshall, “Saudi Arabia and the Reagan Doctrine,” Middle East Report, no. 155 (November 1988): 12–17, https://doi.org/10.2307/3012078. ↑
    
35. Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 163-165. ↑
    
36. Scott, The Road to 9/11, 149-150, 151-152. ↑
    
37. Martin Bright, “MI6 ‘Halted Bid to Arrest Bin Laden,’” The Guardian, November 9, 2002, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/200...vidshayler. ↑
    
38. James MacDougall, “A New Stage in U.S.-Caspian Sea Basin Relations,” Central Asia 5, no. 11 (1997), https://www.ca-c.org/dataeng/st_04_dougall.shtml. ↑
    
39. Saghafi-Ameri, “The Emerging NATO: Impact on Europe and Asia,” 153. ↑
    
40. Michael Klare, Blood and Oil (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2004), 135-36, citing R. Jeffrey Smith, “U.S. Leads Peacekeeping Drill in Kazakhstan,” The Washington Post, September 15, 1997. ↑
    
41. Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, 121. ↑
    
42. Scott and Good, “Was the Now-Forgotten Murder of One Man on September 9, 2001, a Crucial Pre-Condition for 9/11?” ↑
    
43. Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 69. ↑
    
44. “The Great Gas Game,” The Christian Science Monitor, October 25, 2001, https://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1025/p8s1-comv.html. ↑
    
45. Ahmed Rashid, “Epicentre of Terror,” Far Eastern Economic Review 163, no. 19 (2000), 18. ↑
    
46. Scott, The Road to 9/11, 131. ↑
    
47. Phil Hirschkorn, “Trial Reveals a Conspiracy of Calls, But Only Tidbits about Bin Laden,” CNN, April 16, 2001, https://web.archive.org/web/20010808073944/http://www.cnn.com/LAW/trials.and.cases/case.files/0012/embassy.bombing/trial.report/trial.report.04.16/index.html. ↑
    
48. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 459. ↑
    
49. Thomas E. Ricks and Susan B. Glasser, “U.S. Operated Secret Alliance With Uzbekistan,” The Washington Post, October 14, 2001, https://web.archive.org/web/20080821044925/http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A55834-2001Oct13. ↑
    
50. Rashid, “Epicentre of Terror,” 17. Massoud also had strong supporters at State, notably former U.S. Ambassador to Kabul Peter Tomsen. The real split was over Pakistan, and over the pro-Pakistan CIA. Massoud was taking aid from India, while Pakistan was supporting the Taliban, partly to develop a strong Muslim radical presence against Karimov in Uzbekistan. When the DOD came in, this split was subordinated to the goal of bringing in U.S. troops. But what to do about Pakistan divided Washington then and still does. ↑
    
51. Peter Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, and the Failure of Great Powers (New York: Public Affairs, 2013), 597-598, 796 n25. Journalist Pepe Escobar also confirmed this to our coauthor Aaron Good in personal correspondence. ↑
    
52. Ricks and Glasser, “U.S. Operated Secret Alliance With Uzbekistan.” ↑
    
53. Scott and Good, “Was the Now-Forgotten Murder of One Man on September 9, 2001, a Crucial Pre-Condition for 9/11?” ↑