20th Annaversary of the fairytale of Big Lies

[Peter Lemkin]

The Twenty Year Shadow of 9/11 (Part 2): Why Did Key U.S. Officials Protect the Alleged 9/11 Plotters?
By
Aaron Good, Ben Howard and Peter Dale Scott
-
September 13, 2021
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2021/09...s/#respond
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https://covertactionmagazine.com/2021/09...-plotters/



[Source: [url=https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/27/us-intelligence-failure-911-fbi-cia]theguardian.com]
This failure resulted from previous FBI, CIA, and NSA protection for al-Qaeda members connected with the plot.
This is Part II of a startling new three part examination of 9/11 by Ben Howard, Aaron Good and Peter Dale Scott. Part I can be found here.
Before examining the details of the 9/11 plot, it is worth noting the extent to which the CIA, FBI, and NSA have acted to protect members of al Qaeda in the past. The most relevant recent history begins with the 1987 founding of al-Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn, a hub for U.S.-based mujahideen to travel to Afghanistan, and later Bosnia.[1]
Al-Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn which shared the same building as the Al-Farooq Mosque. [Source: apjjf.org]
It originated as an office of Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), an organization financed by Osama bin Laden and founded by Mustafa Shalabi, an Egyptian who would later help bin Laden move to Sudan in 1991.[2]

• Mustafa Shalabi in 1991. [Source: alchetron.com]
  
• Osama bin Laden in the late 1980s. [Source: Aljazeera.com]
  

The Center chiefly supported Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s jihadi organization, Hezb-I-Islami.[3] The Egyptian “blind sheik” Omar Abdel-Rahman was one of the key MAK figures.
Eventually convicted for his role in the 1993 landmarks plot, Abdel-Rahman had previously been granted several visas by CIA officers who were serving as consular officials (presumably under official cover) in U.S. embassies in Sudan and Egypt.[4]
There is much to say about the Al-Kifah Center and its support for American foreign policy goals in Afghanistan and Bosnia. For now, we shall focus on the role that MAK figures played in domestic terror attacks and the protection they received from the U.S. government.
Three of Abdel-Rahman’s followers who were affiliated with the center, including El Sayyid Nosair, conspired to kill Jewish Defense League leader Meir Kahane in Brooklyn on November 5, 1990.[5]

• Omar Abdel-Rahman [Source: washingtonpost.com]
  
• El Sayyid Nosair [Source: historica.fandom.com]
  

This was, according to the Pentagon’s DHRA, “the first al-Qaida-related terrorist attack in the United States.”[6]
Nosair alone was accused of the murder by NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph R Borelli.[7]
However, it quickly became clear that Nosair was part of a broader cell. A search of his home led the NYPD to a trove of U.S. Army training manuals, as well as video footage of talks delivered by one Ali Mohamed at the JFK Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg.[8]
Ali Mohamed was an Egyptian with many connections to both the CIA and FBI. After a short stint in the early 1980s as a CIA contract agent ended poorly, he was put on a State Department watch list, preventing him from entering the U.S. Despite this, he entered the U.S. on a CIA-sponsored visa program “designed to shield valuable assets or those who have performed important services for the country.”[9]
[Source: peterlance.com]
While stationed at Fort Bragg, he made trips to Afghanistan (including at least one in 1988) and spent his weekends in the New York City metro area training MAK members, including Nosair.[10]
Despite Ali Mohamed’s ties to Nosair, which would have been easy to deduce from the materials found in Nosair’s home, or from the fact that the FBI observed him training Nosair to shoot in 1989,[11] Ali Mohamed was never arrested.
Instead, he continued to live peacefully in California where he had moved.[12]
This was chiefly because the FBI withheld materials found in the Nosair home from the NYPD’s chief investigating officer, Edward Norris, as well as Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau. The withholding of these materials was not uncovered until after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.[13]
Mohammed Salameh [Source: nydailynews.com]
Though Nosair was acquitted of the Kahane murder in a 1991 trial,[14] he was convicted of assault, coercion, and possession of a gun.[15] He later admitted to his role in the killing and, in 2005, named the convicted 1993 World Trade Center bomber Mohammed Salameh as one of his co-conspirators.[16]
Despite the clear links between Ali Mohamed and the murder of Meir Kahane, he was left alone by the American security services and was able to use his leverage to evade capture by foreign governments as well. In 1993, not long before the bombing of the World Trade Center, he was briefly detained by Canadian authorities when he traveled from his home in California to Vancouver airport to fetch Essam Hafez Marzouk. [17]
Essam Marzouk [Source: historycommons.org]
Marzouk, a close ally of Ayman al-Zawahari and Osama bin Laden, had been detained at Customs for carrying two forged passports. When Mohamed inquired about Marzouk at the Customs office, he too was detained.[18] After interrogation by the RCMP, he finally convinced them to call his contact at the FBI, John Zent. After Zent vouched for him, Mohamed was released.[19]
The protection Mohamed received in 1990 and in 1993 would have grave repercussions. For one, Mohamed trained several members of the cell responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and he had been in communication with them leading up to the attack.[20]
Wreckage from 1993 World Trade Center bombing. [Source: wikipedia.org]
But perhaps even more disturbing was the presence of an FBI informant, Emad Salem, within the cell responsible for the bombing.[21] In fact, Salem was not only an informant—he appears to have been a key element of the plot.
Emad Salem with the Blind Sheikh. [Source: peterlance.com]
And according to The New York Times he was in a position to “thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives.” Instead, the plan to neutralize the bombs “was called off by an F.B.I. supervisor.” The bombing took place, killing six, injuring over 1,000, and causing more than half a billion dollars in damage.[22]
The protection provided to Ali Mohamed again had further devastating consequences, as he played a central role in the August 7, 1998, bombing of the U.S. embassy in Kenya. He was responsible for establishing an al-Qaeda cell in Kenya, and surveilled the U.S. embassy, showing photographs he had taken to bin Laden who then “pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber.”[23] Mohamed was in contact with the FBI leading right up until the bombing, telling an FBI agent in 1997 that “he loved bin Laden and believed in him.”[24]
1998 bombing of U.S. embassy in Kenya. [Source: cnn.com]
On top of this, the NSA was intercepting calls from one of the bombers, Mohamed al-Owhali, who called a key Yemen al-Qaeda operations hub on August 5, 6, and 7—just before the attack.[25]
Mohamed al-Owhali [Source: historycommons.org]
The NSA should have recognized the importance of al-Owhali’s Nairobi safehouse given the number of calls between it and the Yemen hub, a known al-Qaeda operations center. By that point, the agency had been monitoring the Yemen hub for two years. They must have been aware of the calls, and yet said nothing to the FBI or CIA. Nor did the NSA alert the direct target of the plot, the U.S. State Department.
After the bombings, when al-Owhali accidentally survived and was scrambling to escape Kenya, he made a number of calls to the Yemen hub, which in turn made a number of calls to bin Laden himself on August 10th and 11th. These calls clearly indicated the presence of an al-Qaeda agent still in-country, and yet the NSA never informed the FBI or anyone else.[26] The information about these calls only emerged during the embassy bombing trial in early 2001.[27]
It is prudent to wonder at this stage if this information was blocked by the NSA’s “Chop Chain,” a group within the NSA consisting of the director’s top staff and other high-ranking personnel within the NSA.
According to former NSA communications director Tom Drake, the NSA’s Counter-Terror (CT) Shop, a group of about a dozen young analysts, was “issuing reports” about al-Qaeda, one of their areas of responsibility, but “no one was reading them.” These reports presumably included those on al-Owhali’s phone calls detailed above.
Tom Drake [Source: wikipedia.org]
The NSA’s Chop Chain of senior leaders was responsible for reading these reports, and deciding what could be disseminated to the FBI, CIA, or other agencies.[28] In this case, they failed to disseminate highly relevant and time-sensitive reports, which might have prevented the bombing, to any other agency.
Contrary to Drake’s assessment, it seems implausible that the NSA’s senior leadership would not have been aware of CT Shop reports on phone calls coming to al-Qaeda’s Yemen hub from a country where al-Qaeda had just directed a major terrorist attack at U.S. personnel. It would appear, therefore, that the NSA, as well as the FBI, was protecting the al-Qaeda network from exposure and prosecution.
Blee and Black and Tenet
Tom Wilshire [Source: roryoconnor.xyz]
During the 2002 congressional investigation into pre-9/11 intelligence failures, Representative Richard Burr asked Tom Wilshire, CIA Bin Laden Issue Station Deputy Chief, why the CIA failed to inform the FBI about key activities of the alleged 9/11 hijackers in the 18 months leading up to the attack. Wilshire replied that “something apparently was dropped somewhere, and we don’t know where that was.”[29]
In the early weeks of what would become a decades-long coverup, Wilshire was attempting to protect himself and his colleagues by asserting that incompetence, not protection of a joint CIA-Saudi operation, was responsible for the CIA’s failures.
We shall see, however, that Wilshire was not being honest with his reply. In fact, over the past decade, a number of researchers have identified a pattern of deception and obfuscation which implicates not only Wilshire, but also his boss, Richard Blee—the man at the top of the Bin Laden Issue (or Alec) Station.
Richard Blee as a boy. Few known photos exist of him. [Source: historycommons.org]
While Blee has been the subject of scrutiny for at least the past decade from researchers like Kevin Fenton, John Duffy, and Ray Nowosielski, CIA Director Tenet himself has come under suspicion in recent months for his role in protecting at least one person involved in the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole.
Tenet’s actions to promote and protect Richard Blee should be seen in a new light given a) the story of these recently leaked phone calls; and b) prior revelations about Alec Station’s role in protecting USS Cole bombing suspects.
George Tenet [Source: wikipedia.org]
To assess the degree to which the CIA was complicit in the 9/11 attacks, we must place Tenet’s actions in the context of Richard Blee’s behavior.