9/11: Unanswered Questions & The Strategy of Tension

[Ed Jewett]

9/11: Unanswered Questions (I)

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[TD="class: sh10"]Wayne MADSEN (USA) | 09.09.2011 | 10:10[/TD]
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[TD="align: left"]President Bush's chief counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke has revealed that the CIA under George Tenet attempted to recruit some of the 9/11 "Al Qaeda" terrorists prior to the attack of September 11, 2001, but that after the attempt failed, Tenet and his senior CIA staff covered up the botched recruitment effort. The revelation is yet one more nail in the coffin of what has become the most discredited U.S. government report since the infamous Warren Report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. In fact, the Warren Report received another blow after it was revealed that First Lady Jacqueline revealed in 1964 to historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. that she believed that Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was behind the assassination of her husband in Dallas. The revelations by Mrs. Kennedy and Clarke show that the United States government cannot be trusted to investigate misdeeds carried out with the full knowledge and support of senior officials of the CIA and the White House. The 9/11 attack represents one such high-level government cover-up.

Clarke's recent revelations about CIA knowledge of Al Qaeda 9/11 cells prior to the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington merely takes one to the shallowest of depths of the rabbit hole of the intelligence world, highly-compartmented cells of which carefully planned the attacks and how the mass media would cover the unfolding events.

The one individual who stands tall among those intelligence and law enforcement officers who was aggressively pursuing the criminal network that would carry out 9/11 was FBI counter-terrorism top man John O'Neill. Ever since the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, O'Neill's pursuit of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda had been dogged. After further terrorist attacks at the Khobar Towers barracks in Dharan, Saudi Arabia; the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; and the USS Cole in Aden harbor, O'Neill's biggest problem was not Al Qaeda, it was resistance from top officials inside the U.S. government.

The biggest conspiracy theory of them all, the official 9/11 Commission Reportthat concluded that nineteen, mostly Saudi, hijackers, armed with box cutters, were able to defeat a multi-trillion dollar U.S. defense and intelligence system in a matter if mere hours one Tuesday morning in September 2001, has even been partly debunked by the two co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission, former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean and former Indiana Democratic Representative Lee Hamilton. Both have said that their committee was lied to by government officials and that important information was covered up and not released to committee investigators…

Kean's and Hamilton's ire would be best suited at being vented against Philip Zelikow, the one-time aide to Bush National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who stated under oath that no one ever expected that passenger planes would be used as weapons. Zelikow was appointed as the executive director of the 9/11 Commission and he had the task of avoiding any investigations that would look at the roles of the CIA, Mossad, the Saudis, and Wall Street interests in crafting the ingredients that permitted the 9/11 attacks to be be carried out without a hitch. Zelikow has a storied career at debunking any theory that does not comport with government doctrine, including his many years of attacking anyone who disbelieves the Warren Commission's myths about the assassination of President Kennedy.

Unfortunately, the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center was not the first time the U.S. government engaged in a massive cover-up of an attack on the buildings. According to U.S. intelligence sources, the FBI and Justice Department sat on volumes of translations of Arabic telephone intercepts gathered before the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center from U.S.- and Sudan-based Muslim militants who once worked for U.S. intelligence in the mujaheddin war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The critical intelligence, which demonstrated a link between the CIA and "Afghan Arab" muhajeddin forces, including those loyal to Osama bin Laden, was never introduced into the trial of the Brooklyn- and Jersey City-based cell that included the blind Egyptian cleric Shaikh Omar Abdul Rahman, Ramzi Yousef, and Eyad Ismail. The New York and New Jersey cell also included Ali Mohammed, a graduate of the U.S. Army's Special Forces School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, who, while an active duty member of the Special Forces, secretly traveled to Afghanistan to train Bin Laden's forces and provided him with special intelligence on U.S. "soft targets" for terrorist attacks, and Wadih el-Hage, Osama bin Laden's personal secretary, who was also a resident of the United States.

Ironically, the two men responsible for the failure to present the surveillance intelligence on the 1993 World Trade Center bombers to the juries and grand juries hearing the charges -- the main federal prosecutors for New York City and New Jersey in the bombing case -- were Patrick J. Fitzgerald and Michael Chertoff, respectively. Fitzgerald went on to become the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois and cut his teeth indicting and having convicted two successive Illinois governors for corruption, Republican George Ryan and Democrat Rod Blagojevich. Both cases were politically-tainted show trials.

Adding to the outrages committed by the U.S. government was the fact that, according to an FBI source, the chief FBI investigator against Al Qaeda in the 1990s, the late John O'Neill, was upset that the much of the telephone surveillance of the 1993 bombers was never introduced as evidence and remained un-translated and classified.

Other CIA connections to Bin Laden and Al Qaeda that are too numerous to describe. However, one jumps out because it involves a key player in the Donald Rumsfeld Pentagon during the 9/11 attacks. A CIA source involved with the Bosnia Defense Fund, used to collect donations from Arab and Muslim countries for the Bosnian war against Serbia and Croatia, revealed that the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN) was concerned that money transferred by Riggs Bank to the Bosnian Defense Fund's account at the Central Bank in Sarajevo, was "bleeding" to terrorist elements believed to be linked to Osama bin Laden and "Al Qaeda." Riggs was the major bank serving Saudi ambassador to the U.S. Prince Bandar and his wife Princess Haifa and it was a bank with family ties to George H.W. and George W. Bush.

When the CIA source complained about Bosnia Defense Fund cash falling into the hands of Islamic terrorists, including people linked to bin Laden, he was told by one of the major Bosnia Defense Fund principals to "just make it f*****g happen!"

The Bosnia link to "Al Qaeda" was important. In fact, bin Laden had reportedly not only visited Bosnia, but carried at least one Bosnian diplomatic passport and had interfaced with Bosnian diplomats in Vienna, Austria.

And Mossad's link to 9/11 cannot be ignored. Two internal U.S. government documents revealed that among the 120 Israeli "art students" who attempted to penetrate the security of dozens of Federal office buildings and who visited the homes of scores of U.S. law enforcement personnel during 2000 and 2001 were some who used addresses and mail drops in southern Florida and Texas near those used by a number of the 9/11 hijackers. The information came from a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Report drafted in June 2001 on the activities of the art students and a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) list of the hijackers and other terrorist suspects, including a known Mossad agent, Dominick Suter, who ran an Israeli moving company in Weehawken, New Jersey. The FBI list was accidentally released in early October 2001 on a Finnish government web site.

Five Israelis working for Suter's Urban Moving Systems were arrested by police and FBI agents during the later afternoon of 9/11, driving a suspicious van near Giant Stadium in Secaucus, New Jersey. The five Israelis were the only suspects arrested on September 11, 2001 on suspicion of involvement in the 9/11 attacks. All five were deported to Israel without ever having been formally charged. The DEA memo specifically stated that the Israelis casing federal offices and employees' homes may have had ties to an "Islamic fundamentalist group."

Even ten years later, the U.S. government and the governments of New York and New York City are dismissing those 9/11 attack veterans who, unlike O'Neill, were fortunate enough to survive the catastrophic attack. Survivors or the World Trade Center collapse and first responders with the New York Police Department, New York-New Jersey Port Authority Police, New York Fire Department, and others were not invited to the tenth anniversary ceremonies at "Ground Zero" on September 11, 2011.For ten years, the 9/11 attacks, along with those in London, Madrid, Bali, and other locations, have been used by the corporate media to hype government-directed campaigns against civil liberties, human rights, privacy protection, wars of liberation by aspirant ethnic groups and political parties, freedom of expression, and freedom of information. Americans of all ages and backgrounds are now subjected to intrusive body searches at airports that would have been seen as outrageous abuses of government authority fifteen years ago.

As we now reflect back on 9/11, we are told that Bin Laden was killed in a Special Operations assault in Abbotabad, Pakistan. There was little forensic evidence to prove Bin Laden was killed. In any case, most of the members of US Navy SEAL Team 6, which carried out the attack on Bin Laden, were killed recently in an attack on their helicopter in Afghanistan.

As with the assassination of President Kennedy and the Iran-Contra scandal twenty years later, 9/11 will be relegated to the history books as an event shrouded in mystery and short on actual evidence, most of it destroyed or remaining highly-classified, to identify the actual perpetrators.

(to be continued)

http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/20...ons-i.html

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9/11: The Ultimate Triumph of the Strategy of Tension

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[TD="class: sh10"]Wayne MADSEN (USA) | 10.09.2011 | 00:00[/TD]
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[TD="align: left"]After years of employing the fascistic "strategy of tension" in Western Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, the neo-conservatives who dominated the Bush administration on the eve of September 11, 2001, were confident that the ultimate act of destroying the World Trade Center in New York and bombing the Pentagon, in addition to destroying a yet unknown target by United flight 93 shot down by U.S. Air Force fighter-interceptors over Pennsylvania would bring about the sea change foreseen by the neo-conservatives.

What the neo-conservative cabal, through their propaganda outlets like Fox News and The Washington Post, brought forth after their long-awaited "New Pearl Harbor," was their reference to America's "new normal," the de facto imposition of a crypto-fascist dictatorship that overturned the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law, and onset of the "clash of civilizations," the final showdown between Islam and Judeo-Christianity. The geo-social-political "Armageddon" hoped for by such neo-fascist philosophers as Professors Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis would be a final battle that would see the downfall of Islamic governments and regimes from Morocco to Indonesia and the triumph of "western civilization." In fact, "western civilization" is code for the twin pillars of capitalist-backed militarism and Zionism.

The "strategy of tension" employed by NATO stay-behind networks in Europe from the 1960s to the present day is defined by Swiss professor of contemporary history Daniele Glaser as the method by which "world powers divide, manipulate, and control public opinion using fear, propaganda, disinformation, psychological warfare, agents provocateurs, and false flag terrorist actions" to achieve their ultimate goals. The September 11, 2001, false flag attacks in New York and Virginia succeeded in laying the groundwork for a concerted disinformation, psychological warfare, and propaganda campaign that, ten years following 9/11, are being cited by the corporate media as having" changed the world." Even the date, 9/11, was chosen as a psychological warfare tool, 911 being the emergency phone number used by Americans to call for assistance from law enforcement and other emergency responders.

George Orwell's "tele-screen," the means by which Big Brother largely maintained control over public opinion by hyping non-existent threats to public safety, became real in the minutes following the 9/11 attacks when the corporate new channels, all seemingly pre-programmed for the terror event, began instilling fear in the minds of Americans and people around the world. In the months after 9/11, anyone who questioned the official version of events was painted as a disloyal "conspiracy theorist." However, there were thousands of more facts presented by those who contradicted the official version of 9/11 than any dubious explanations presented in the official 9/11 Commission report and other government documents, including those from the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

The corporate news channels, led by Fox News, concocted unbelievable threats following 9/11, including exploding bombs being placed inside cows, terrorist frogmen coming ashore on America's beaches, Al Qaeda attacking shopping malls in the United States, and Arab terrorists infiltrating Latin American human smuggling routes from Mexico. All of the fear stories were rank nonsense and not based on any facts.

After the anthrax postal system attacks on Congress and the media, which ensured the quick passage by Congress of the unconstitutional USA-PARIOT Act, the failed attempt by a shoe bomber to bring down a plane flying from Paris to Miami, and a later attempt by a Nigerian flying from Amsterdam to Detroit to set off explosive material in his underpants, the public was conditioned to accept anything as a potential threat to security and safety. Nothing was mentioned about Israel's role in the anthrax attacks and the two failed airplane bombings. The only individuals arrested on 9/11 for suspicion that they were involved in the 9/11 attacks were five employees of Weehawken, New Jersey-based Urban Moving Systems. FBI agents who visited the firm's warehouse in Weehawken not only found bomb-making materials but traces of anthrax. The owner of the firm, Dominick Suter, was later discovered in a joint CIA-FBI counter-intelligence database to be a Mossad agent. Some of the Israeli "movers" arrested were also found to be in the database.

The five Israeli "movers" were witnessed celebrating and videotaping the aerial attacks on the World Trade Center, minutes after the first plane struck, from their vantage point at Liberty State Park, across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan. It was an Israeli aviation security company, ICTS International, replete with ex-Mossad and ex-Shin Bet officers in its management, that handled airport security at Paris's Charles de Gaulle Airport and Amsterdam's Schipol International Airport, where Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber" and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the "underwear bomber," attempted their amateurish bombing attempts on American Airlines flight 63 and Northwest Airlines flight 253, respectively. ICTS also shared security responsibilities at Boston's Logan Airport on September 11, 2001, the airport where American Airlines flight 11 was allegedly hijacked by Mohammed Atta and flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

In pushing the neo-conservative notion of the "clash of civilizations," there was no mention made by the Israeli-influenced corporate media about the numerous connections of Israel to the 9/11 attacks. Nineteen Arab hijackers, 16 of whom hailed from Saudi Arabia, was the official story and there would be no deviation from the official line. Even statements by Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak on American television that 9/11 was beneficial to Israel were ignored by the media. Those who were brave enough to point out Israeli connections to 9/11 were intimidated by the old canard that they were "anti-Semitic."

Some corporate news stations that reported on suspicious Israeli intelligence activities in the months prior to 9/11 saw their stories "tombstoned" on the Internet. A four-part series on the Israeli activity aired by Fox News quickly disappeared from its website. Similar stories, such as the following, also quickly evaporated into the ether:

"10/02/2001 - Fifteen People Arrested in March in Dallas, Suspected of Casing Federal Buildings. 11 News reported how people claiming to be Israeli art students' might be trying to sneak into federal buildings and defense sites, and even doing surveillance. In Dallas, the so-called students hit early this year at the city's FBI building, the Drug Enforcement Administration and at the Earle Cabell Federal building, where guards found one student wandering the halls with a floor plan of the building."

Osama bin Laden, the accused mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was a character directly out of Hollywood central casting. Bin Laden initially denied he had anything to do with the attacks. In an interview carried by the September 28, 2001 edition of the Pakistani newspaper Ummat Karachi Bin Laden stated, "I have already said that I am not involved in the September 11 attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act." Even FBI director Robert Mueller stated, the "FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11."

Few media outlets reported on Bin Laden's longstanding ties to the U.S. intelligence community, links that were maintained after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. According to classified documents from French intelligence, Al Qaeda and Bin Laden had still been under the operational control of U.S. and British "security services" until 1995, fully two years after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. As of 1996, the U.S. State Department continued to refuse to list Al Qaeda as a terrorist organization. Bin Laden's past ties to the CIA may have sealed his fate. Just as with others who worked for the CIA and were then discarded like garbage, including Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Qaddafi, Osama Bin Laden may have been used as a convenient decoy by the actual perpetrators of 9/11, those who wanted to blame Arabs and Muslims as part of their grand schemes" the Project for the New American Century that hoped for a "new Pearl Harbor," those who wanted a "clash of civilizations" between Judeo-Christianity and Islam, and those who saw a continued strategy of tensions to bring about their agenda. The strategy of tension would not end with 9/11 and would be repeated in the following years in Madrid, London, Bali, Beslan, Jakarta, Istanbul, Casablanca, Mumbai, and Oslo…

The real architects of 9/11 are still at-large and continue their strategy of tension campaign. On September 11, 2011, many of the key perpetrators will gather at the "Ground Zero" site in New York to publicly honor those who were killed in the attacks, but privately celebrate their accomplishments over the last ten years. The corporate media will continue to propagate the myth of 9/11 and the public, they hope, will continue to accept the official version of the events.

http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/20...on-ii.html
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