9/11, JFK, and War:
Recurring Patterns in America’s Deep Events
Peter Dale Scott
http://www.peterdalescott.netIn American history there are two types of events. There are ordinary events
which the information systems of the country can understand and transmit. There are also
deep events, or meta-events, which the mainstream information systems of the country
cannot digest. I mean by a “deep event” one in which it is clear from the outset that there
are aspects which will not be dealt with in the mainstream media, and will be studied
only by those so-called “conspiracy theorists” who specialize in deep history.
The events I shall discuss today exhibit continuities with each other and with
other deep events, notably the Iran-Contra affair of the mid 1980s and the Oklahoma City
bombing of 1995. But the two I shall discuss today – the JFK assassination and 9/11 – are
outstanding in this respect: that while they were attributed to insignificant and very
marginal people, they had momentous impact, far more than most daily events by more
important people, in redirecting American history.
If history is what is recorded, then deep history is the sum of events which tend to
be officially obscured or even suppressed in traditional books and media. Important
recent deep events include the political assassinations of the 1960s, Watergate, Iran-
Contra, and now 9/11. All these deep events have involved what I call the deep state, that
part of the state which is not publicly accountable, and pursues its goals by means which
will not be approved by a public examination. The CIA (with its on-going relationships to
drug-traffickers) is an obvious aspect of the deep state, but not the only one, perhaps not
even the dirtiest.
When I talk of a deep state, this term (as opposed to others, like deep politics), is
not my own invention. It is a translation of the Turkish gizli devlet, or derin devlet, a term
used to describe the networks revealed by the so-called Susurluk incident of 1996, when
the victims traveling together in what became a deadly car crash were identified as "an
MP, a police chief, a beauty queen and her lover, a top Turkish gangster and hitman
called Abdullah Catli.” The giveaway was that “Catli, a heroin trafficker on Interpol's
wanted list, was carrying a diplomatic passport signed by none other than the Turkish
Interior Minister himself.”1 He was carrying narcotics with him at the time of the crash.2
1 Adrian Gatton, “The Susurluk Legacy,”
http://adriangatton.com/archive/1990_01_01_archive.html. Both Catli and the terrorist Grey Wolves
network from which he emerged had global intelligence connections. In 1978 “Catli linked up with
notorious Italian right-wing terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie and together they traveled to Latin America and
2
The study of these deep events has slowly become more respectable in the almost
half-century since the JFK assassination. A major reason has been the emergence of the
Internet and other forms of new media, where the same deep events tend to get far more
extensive treatment.3 If the new media come in time to prevail over the priorities of the
old, it is possible that we will see a paradigm shift with respect to what is appropriate for
serious public discourse.
What I have learned over the years is that it is helpful to look at all these deep
events together. This is true for both external reasons (how the nation and its media
handle deep history) and for internal reasons (the content of deep events themselves).
What is particularly disturbing, in the case of the JFK assassination (henceforward
referred to as “JFK”) and 9/11, is the number of similarities that might seem to indicate a
recurring modus operandi or scenario.
While I myself am still open-minded as to how seriously we should interpret these
similarities, we should also open our minds to the alternative: that it was not by chance
that two major events were soon followed, first in 1965 and again in 2003, by America’s
longest military involvements in the nation’s history.
JFK and 9/ll: Possibly Innocent Similarities
I will begin with three similarities which could possibly, especially in the case of the first,
be marginal or irrelevant to how the events themselves unfolded.
1) Stock market speculation:
By this I am not referring to the dip and recovery that followed both events, which is
common after any unsettling news.4 I am referring to the dealings in special stocks which
suggested, in both cases, prior knowledge of what was to come.
In early November 1963, David Harold (“Dry Hole”) Byrd and his investment
partner, James Ling, bought $2 million worth of stock (132,600 shares) in Ling-Temcothe
United States” (Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western
Europe [London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2005], 237-38.
2 Martin A. Lee, “On the Trail of Turkey's Terrorist Grey Wolves,” ConsortiumNews, 1997,
http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/story33.html.
3 Even the vocabularies of the old and new media diverge. A Lexis Nexis search in December 2006 for the
word “parapolitics” in major newspapers yielded five entries, only two of them from the United States. The
same search on Google yielded 86,100 hits. Meanings of “parapolitics”: 1) “A system or practice of politics
in which accountability is consciously diminished” (Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy [New York:
Bobbs Merrill, 1972], 171). 2) interactions between public states and other forms of organized violence; 3)
the intellectual study of parapolitical interactions between public states and other forms of organized
violence. See Robert Cribb and Peter Dale Scott, “Introduction,” in Eric Wilson and Tim Lindsey (eds.),
Government of the Shadows: Parapolitics and Criminal Sovereignty (London: Pluto, 2007).
4 The dip and recovery of the stock market on November 22, 1963 were given prominent attention in
Lincoln Lawrence, Were We Controlled? (University Books, 1967).
3
Vought (LTV), their own defense company. Then in February 1964 LTV received from
the Navy the first major LBJ prime defense contract – for a fighter plane to be used in
limited wars like Vietnam.
5
I have calculated that this $2.5 million insiders’ purchase
was worth $26 million by the end of 1967. Moreover the prescient purchase was about
one hundred times the size of any other insider purchase in aerospace issues in the same
period.6
This does not prove that Byrd and Ling were directly involved in the Kennedy
assassination, but it is likely that Byrd may have had inklings of what was going to
happen. For Byrd owned the Texas School Book Depository building, where Oswald had
been hired as an employee in October 1963. I have hypothesized that Oswald thought he
was there on a surveillance assignment, to report on a fellow worker who was under
investigation by the Dallas Police.
7
Byrd may have been privy to this arrangement, and
have suspected more.
This stock purchase is comparable to the notorious “put option purchases” just
before 9/11 in 2001, in the stock of United Airlines and American Airlines.
8 Here too the
advance purchases suggest special knowledge, but here too the purchasers and the
perpetrators need not have been the same, especially if we accept the indications that
many widely scattered people and agencies had prior indications of the event about to
occur.
9
There were scattered indications that a few people had advance knowledge of the
Kennedy assassination, a fact hard to reconcile with the Warren Commission conclusion
that Oswald, a disgruntled loner, acted on his own. The most significant case was that of
a Southern racist and activist, Joseph Milteer, who correctly predicted to a Miami police
informant, that Kennedy would be shot "from an office building with a high-powered
rifle."
10
But Milteer was not unique.
11
There were also pre-9/11 indications and
5
New York Times, February 12, 1964. The Times estimated that the contract “could run into more than a
billion dollars.”
6 Peter Dale Scott, “The Dallas Conspiracy” (unpublished ms., 1973), Ch. III, 36. Cf. Joan Mellen, “The
Kennedy Assassination and the Current Political Moment,”
http://www.joanmellen.net/truth-2.html.
7 Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998),
242-47.
8 Paul Thompson, The Terror Timeline: Year by Year, Day by Day, Minute by Minute (NewYork:
HarperCollins/Regan Books, 2004), 59-60 ;
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timeline&before_9/11=insiderTrading: “In the weeks and days leading up to 9/11, highly irregular stock trading transactions took place,
involving stocks in United Airlines, American Airlines, and a few of the largest WTC tenants. There appear
to have been even bigger trades in gold, oil, and U.S. Treasury bonds. Stock trading irregularities occurred
not just in the U.S., but in European and Pacific region stock markets as well. While the FBI has concluded
that there was no insider trading, German investigators found “almost irrefutable proof of insider trading.”
(Miami Herald, 9/24/01)”
9 Thompson, Terror Timeline, 35-53.
10 Intercepted conversation between Joseph Milteer and Miami Police informant William Somersett. Text
in Peter Dale Scott, Paul L. Hoch and Russell Stetler, The Assassinations, 124ss; 3 AH 448. Later Milteer
4
warnings, far too numerous to enumerate here, of knowledge about an impending attack
using hijacked airplanes.
12
2) A number of senior officers were out of the country, including the Secretary of State
On November 22, 1963, six out of ten cabinet members were on their way to
Japan, including Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon,
Interior Secretary Stewart Udall and Labor Secretary W.W. Wirtz.13
On September 11, 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell and CJCS Henry Shelton
were traveling outside the country, while Attorney General John Ashcroft was also
traveling.14 Powell and Shelton were leading opponents of the Iraq War, and were
eventually ousted, along with Ashcroft.
15
also correctly predicted that there would be “a propaganda campaign put on how to prove to the Christian
people of the world that the Jews, the Zionist Jews, had murdered Kennedy” (Somersett report of Milteer
interview, 11/23/63, as transcribed by Intelligence Unit of Miami Police Department, 11/26/63; quoted in
Dick Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much [New York: Carroll and Graf, 1992], 551). Soon after rightwing
members of Milteer’s milieu, notably Admiral John Crommelin (The Thunderbolt, January 1964, p.
1) and Revilo P. Oliver (American Opinion, February 1964, March 1964) made the anti-Semitic charges
that Milteer had predicted. After 9/11 there was a similar campaign, especially in Muslim countries and
Europe, to blame the 9/11 disaster on the Jews and Israel. See Anti-Defamation League, “Unraveling Anti-
Semitic 9/11 Conspiracy Theories,” September 2, 2003,
http://www.adl.org/anti_semitism/9-11conspiracytheories.pdf.
11 Michael Parenti has written that “Several years ago, on a San Francisco talk show on station KGO, I
heard a listener call in as follows: `This is the first time I'm saying this. I worked for Army intelligence. In
1963 I was in Japan, and the accepted word around then was that Kennedy would be killed because he was
messing with the intelligence community. When word came of his death, all I could hear was delighted
comments like “We got the bastard.”'." (Dirty Truths [San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996], 172-91,
http://www.questionsquestions.net/documents2/conspiracyphobia.html).
12 Thompson, Terror Timeline, 35-53. Particularly disturbing were the reports, some of them from other
nations’ intelligence agencies, that the U.S. apparently failed to follow up on (Thompson, Terror Timeline,
42, 43 (2), 44, 45 (2), 48,
13 "We believe it was by design that Secretary of State (Dean) Rusk, Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon,
Interior Secretary Stewart Udall and Labor Secretary W.W. Wirtz, as well as other administration officials
like White House Press Secretary (Pierre) Salinger, were trapped in an airplane over the Pacific Ocean at
such a critical time" (J. Gary Shaw, with Larry R. Harris, Cover-Up [Austin, TX: Collector's Editions,
1992], 199). The other two Cabinet members aboard were Secretary of Commerce Luther Hodges and
Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman. (
http://four.fsphost.com/crevmore/acretoky.htm)
14 Thompson, Terror Timeline, 400.
15
Both Shelton and Ashcroft had tangled unhappily with Rumsfeld and Cheney before 9/11 (Bob
Woodward, State of Denial [New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006], 18-19 [Shelton], Charlie Savage,
Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy [New York:
Little Brown, 2007], 77-78 [Ashcroft]).
5
3) Commission recommendations to increase power of intelligence agencies, or deep
state
It is worth pointing out that the Commission Reports prepared with respect to
both JFK and 9/11 were tightly controlled and produced the same recommendation: that
the surveillance powers of intelligence agencies should be increased. This was quite
paradoxical in the case of the Warren Report, which concluded both that Oswald was a
loner and that the CIA should have greater powers to conduct surveillance of organized
groups. It was hardly less paradoxical in the case of the 9/11 Report, which concluded its
survey of repeated intelligence failures and Pakistani intrigues with recommendations for
increased intelligence budgets and maintenance of current aid to Pakistan. (In June 2007
Ahmed Rashid blamed the current Pakistani political crisis on the “bad deal” and “blind
bargain” that Washington had made with Musharraf after 9/11.)
16
A truly independent investigation of each event could, and indeed should, have
been highly embarrassing to the CIA. Even in 2007 the CIA is still in non-compliance
with the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act, and withholding documents with
respect to an officer, George Joannides, who supervised the Cuban Revolutionary Student
Directorate (DRE) which had recurring contacts with Lee Harvey Oswald. The CIA
shared nothing with the Warren Commission about its contacts with the DRE (which may
have involved Oswald). Nor did the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA)
learn anything of significance in 1978, when the CIA assigned Joannides to be its
Principal Coordinating Officer working with the House Committee.
17
Similarly in 2001 the 9/11 Commission learned nothing about why, at the time of
the 9/11 attacks, members of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
(PFIAB) were aloft in a National Emergency Airborne Command Post (NEACP), or socalled
“Doomsday Plane.”
18
Neither in 1964 nor in 2003 was there any chance for such
revelations. In 1964 the work of the Warren Commission was carefully constrained by
16 Ahmed Rashid, “America's Bad Deal With Musharraf, Going Down in Flames,” Washington Post, June
17, 2007,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/15/AR2007061502073.html:
“The roots of the crisis go back to the blind bargain Washington made after 9/11 with the regime that had
heretofore been the Taliban's main patron: ignoring Musharraf's despotism in return for his promises to
crack down on al-Qaeda and cut the Taliban loose. Today, despite $10 billion in U.S. aid to Pakistan since
2001, that bargain is in tatters; the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, and al-Qaeda's senior leadership has
set up another haven inside Pakistan's chaotic border regions.”
17 Jefferson Morley, Salon, December 17, 2003,
http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2003/12/17/joannides/index.html; David Talbot, Brothers: The
Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (New York: Free Press, 2007), 386-88.
18 Mark H. Gaffney, “The 911 Mystery Plane,”
http://www.rense.com/general76/missing.htm; citing U.S.
Department of Defense, News Transcript, "Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with the Washington Post,"
January 9, 2002, posted at
http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2002/t02052002_t0109wp.html; Joe
Dejka, "Inside STRATCOM on September 11: Offutt exercise took real-life twist," Omaha World-Herald,
February 27, 2002. Mark Gaffney has since revised his paper, to suggest that the airborne group was not
PFIAB but a Rumsfeld advisory committee
(
http://journalof911studies.com/volume/200704/Gaffney_911Mystery%20Plane.pdf).
6
former CIA Director Allen Dulles (who had been fired by President Kennedy because of
the Bay of Pigs fiasco).
19
In 2003 the work of the 9/11 Commission, and later the writing
of the 9/11 Report, were tightly controlled by Philip Zelikow, who in October 2001, prior
to becoming the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, had been appointed by
President George W. Bush to PFIAB.
20
It is at least suggestive that both commission investigations were dominated and
restricted by personalities with overt leadership roles in the U.S. intelligence community.
Similarities Suggestive of a Common Modus Operandi
Now we come to similarities, some of them very specific, suggesting that key stages of
both events were pre-designed to a common scenario.
4) Instant Identification of the Culprits:
In the case of Oswald, within fifteen minutes of the assassination and long before
Oswald was picked up in the Texas Theater, the Dallas police put out on the police radio
network, and possibly other networks, a description of the killer – 5’10”, 165 pounds.21
This exactly matched the measurements attributed to Lee Harvey Oswald in Oswald’s
FBI file, and also in CIA documents about him.22
This identification did not match the actual height and weight of the Lee Harvey
Oswald who was picked up in Dallas and charged, which was five foot nine and 140
pounds.23 The 5’10” measurement was also suspect because it was attributed to Howard
Brennan, who saw allegedly someone in the sixth floor window, but only from the waist
up. Brennan subsequently failed to pick out Oswald in a police line-up.24 One concludes
that intelligence files rather than direct observation may have been responsible for the
rapid decision to search for a killer with the exact measurement of 5’ 10”, 165 pounds. It
19 Assistant Attorney-General Nicholas Katzenbach later testified that he was “astounded” that Dulles did
not at least share with the other commissioners what he knew about the CIA’s involvement in relevant
assassination plots at the time (Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (Boston: Richard
Todd/Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 552; citing House Select Committee on Assassinations, Investigation of the
Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Vol. 3, 699-71.
20 University of Virginia News, October 8, 2001,
http://www.virginia.edu/topnews/releases2001/zelikowoct-8-2001.html.
21 Warren Report 5, 17 Warren Commission Hearings 397 (Transcript of Dallas Police Channel One, before
12:45 PM, 11/22/63).
22 E.g. CIA Cable 74830 of 10 Oct 63 to Mexico City,
http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=30335&relPageId=2; reproduced
in John Newman, Oswald and the CIA (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1995), 512.
23 Manning Clements FBI FD-302 of 11/23/63; in Warren Report, 614.
24 Warren Report 5; Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact (Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2006), 10-
13, 78n. After seeing Oswald twice on television, Brennan picked out Oswald in a second lineup (Warren
Report, 143).
7
appears that someone had already determined that Oswald would be the designated
culprit, before there was any evidence to connect him to the crime.
Meanwhile, according to counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke, on 9/11
the FBI already had a list of alleged hijackers by 9:59 am on September 11, when the
south tower collapsed.25 9:59 AM was at least four minutes before Flight United 93 had
hit the ground.
Even before this, shortly after 9:03 AM, Clarke himself had denoted the
organization that would ultimately be blamed, telling Richard Cheney in the White House
that in his opinion “It’s an al Qaeda attack and they like simultaneous attacks. This may
not be over.”
26
This naming of a responsible foreign party corresponds to the press
conference on November 22, 1963, arranged by the Cuban exile group contacted earlier
by Lee Harvey Oswald (the Directorio Revolucionario, or DRE). This press conference
reportedly combined accurate secret information about Oswald with the wild claim that
he “allegedly lived [in Moscow] in home Sov[iet] foreign minister for two months.”
27
(We shall see that, just as the identification of al Qaeda soon led to the invasion of
Afghanistan, so that alleged Oswald-Soviet relationship led to talk of response against the
Soviet Union. The risk of a nuclear war became Lyndon Johnson’s chief talking point in
recruiting Earl Warren and others to serve on the Warren Commission.)
With respect to the FBI’s list of hijackers on 9/11, there were, even within the
bureaucracy, suspicions that the FBI was drawing on pre-9/11 files for its identifications.
"I don't buy the idea that we didn't know what was coming," a former FBI official
with extensive counter-terrorism experience has since said. "Within 24 hours [of
the attack] the Bureau had about 20 people identified, and photos were sent out to
the news media. Obviously this information was available in the files and
somebody was sitting on it."28
Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer of the Pentagon Able Danger had a similar reaction:
We were amazed at how quickly the FBI produced the name and pictures of all 19
hijackers. But then again, we were surprised at how quickly they’d made the
arrests after the first World Trade Center bombing. Only later did we find out that
25 Thompson, Terror Timeline, 13-14.
26
Clarke, Against All Enemies, 2. Paul Thompson erroneously records that Cheney said this to Clarke
(Thompson, Terror Timeline, 396).
27
CIA cable, WAVE 8049 from Miami, 22 Nov. 1963, 222242Z (7:42 PM EST). The cable reported that
the press conference was called for “circa 1300 hours;” this is presumably a typo for “2300 hours,” or 11
PM EST. Strikingly, the CIA reported it had withheld this info from the FBI, to allow the DRE to release it
first.
28 William Norman Grigg, “Did We Know What Was Coming?” New American, 3/11/02,
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/2002/03-11-2002/vo18no05_didweknow.htm.
8
the FBI had been watching some of these people for months prior to both
incidents.”29
In this context of suspicion a former federal prosecutor and another former FBI
agent, Warren Flagg, came forward in 2006 with an alternative explanation – that “the
names of the hijackers, their assignments and their al-Qaida connections” were in the car
left behind at Logan Airport in Boston by Mohamed Atta and his associates.30
It is of course possible that an instantaneous investigation of Atta’s effects would
explain how the FBI could tell Richard Clarke that they had a list of suspected hijackers
by 9:59 AM on September 11. But this would imply that the FBI had the names of all
nineteen hijackers by then, including the four on Flight 93 which had not yet crashed.
Flagg’s claim also drew attention to another striking similarity between JFK and 9/11. In
both JFK and 9/11, we are asked to believe that the designated suspects – Oswald and the
hijackers – facilitated their own detection by implausibly laying paper trails which led
unambiguously to themselves.
5) Paper trails laid by the designated suspects to facilitate their identification:
Oswald is supposed in March 1963 to have purchased by mail order, using the
name A. Hidell, the notorious Mannlicher-Carcano rifle that was said to have
assassinated President Kennedy. This was needlessly self-incriminating, when in Dallas
he could have bought a rifle anonymously by walking a few blocks to a gun shop.31 In
August he asked to be interviewed by an FBI agent, to whom he showed a Fair Play for
Cuba Committee card with the name A.J. Hidell, which he had already shown to a New
Orleans police lieutenant. The information was transmitted to the local Office of Naval
Intelligence and to the 112th Army Military Intelligence Group. On November 22, the
name of Hidell in the 112th MIG file was instrumental, perhaps crucial, in clinching the
superficial case against Oswald as an assassin.32
This irrational self-incrimination via paper trail was allegedly repeated in 2001 by
Mohamed Atta, the principal alleged hijacker. In 2006, “a former FBI agent [Warren
Flagg] and a former federal prosecutor … told Newsday that one bag found in Boston
contained far more than what the commission report cited, including the names of the
hijackers, their assignments and their al-Qaida connections.” The former prosecutor
29 Peter Lance, Triple Cross (New York: Regan/HarperCollins, 2006), 383.
30 Newsday, April 17, 2006. The claim that the hijackers had cooperatively supplied their “al-Qaida
connections” seems particularly dubious. After 9/11 Washington was put under considerable pressure by its
allies in the war on terrorism, particularly by Pakistan, to produce evidence showing the involvement of al-
Qaeda in 9/11. At the time “Powell promised to publish such a document, but this did not happen” (Dilip
Hiro, War Without End: The Rise of Islamic Terrorism and Global Response [London and New York:
Routledge, 2002], 318).
31 Scott, Deep Politics, 249.
32 Scott, Deep Politics, 258; Henry Hurt, Reasonable Doubt (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston,
1985), 237.
9
added, "These guys left behind a paper trail…. They had bank accounts. They rented
cars. They had to show what they were doing in the United States.”33
Atta’s trove of information allegedly “provided the Rosetta stone enabling FBI
agents to swiftly unravel the mystery of who carried out the suicide attacks and what
motivated them.”34
The belated appearance in 2006 of the Flagg story has caused some to question it.
However, official allegations point precisely to other instances of paper trails left by the
hijackers. According to the 9/11 Commission Report (532n188), the FBI found an
Express Mail receipt in Nawaf al-Hazmi’s car at Dulles Airport, which led to a package
addressed to Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi of al-Qaeda.
35
As if this might not be enough,
Atta also is said to have left in his motel a FedEx waybill for another package; and the
federal indictment of Moussaoui strongly implied that this package was also collected by
al-Hawsawi.36 The details are given in Newsweek, November 19, 2001:
The paper trail that first led investigators into Ahmed's shadowy financial world
began at the bottom of a motel trash can. On the night of Sept. 10, Atta hunkered
down in room 233 at the Comfort Inn in Portland, Maine. The next morning he
would take a flight to Boston's Logan airport. At the motel, Atta tore up a FedEx
Air Waybill and threw it away. Days later, federal agents searching the motel
found the receipt, from a package mailed in Florida, where Atta and several other
hijackers had lived until days before the bombing. It was addressed to
`Almohtaram,’ Arabic for `The Respected One’ -- the honorific the terrorists gave
33 Newsday, April 17, 2006,
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-uslugg0417,0,3743892.story?coll=ny-homepagebigpix2005.
34 Newsday, April 17, 2006. The belated airing of the Flagg story in 2006 has aroused suspicions that it was
invented to allay the many earlier questions raised about how the FBI learned the names of the alleged
hijackers so quickly (see next section). FBI Director Robert Mueller told the Commonwealth Club of
California on April 19, 2002 that "The hijackers also left no paper trail. In our investigation, we have not
uncovered a single piece of paper – either here in the U.S. or in the treasure trove of information that has
turned up in Afghanistan and elsewhere – that mentioned any aspect of the September 11th plot”
(
http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/speeches/speech041902.htm). But CNN had reported on September 28, 2001,
that “among [Atta’s] belongings they also found the names and phone numbers of possible associates;”
(
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0109/28/ltm.01.html); and that this “information compliments
the release of photos of the suspected hijackers”
(
http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0109/28/ltm.15.html). I am grateful to Jon Gold for bringing these
matters to my attention.
35 This was not the only incriminating evidence that was discovered: “Shortly after September 11, the FBI
arrested a Burns employee from the Washington, D.C. area named Mohammed Abdi. . . . When the FBI
found the car left behind [by] the five 9/11 hijackers [including Nawaf al-Hazmi ] who departed from
Dulles airport near Washington, they discovered a map of the D.C. area with Abdi’s name and phone
number written with a yellow highlighter. . . . Investigators discovered Abdi had removed five Burns
security jackets from his workplace before September 11. He attempted to give them to the Salvation Army
three days after the attack. . . . [Yet] Abdi was never convicted of any crime related to terrorism.” (J.M.
Berger, ed., Ali Mohamed: An Intelwire Sourcebook (Intelwire Press, 2006), 18–20, 32).
36 United States of America vs. Zacarias Moussaoui, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia,
Alexandria Division,
www.usdoj.gov/ag/moussaouiindictment.htm, items 88, 92.
10
to Ahmed [al-Hawsawi]. Investigators believe they sealed the connection when
they got hold of the video of Ahmed picking up the package.
Thus the paper trails laid by both Oswald and the hijackers were crucial to the
first striking similarity I mentioned: the speedy identification of the alleged (or
designated) culprits.
In addition to these documented pre-event paper trails, one’s attention is drawn to
additional dubious evidence discovered ex post facto. In the JFK case, one can cite the
forged bus manifest supplied by the Mexican secret police with Oswald’s name on it, to
show how he returned to the United States (the manifest had been falsified, apparently by
a member of the Mexican President’s staff).
37
In the case of 9/11, the passport of one of
the hijackers, Satam al Suqami, was reportedly discovered that day a few blocks from the
World Trade Center.
38
(There is no reference to this discovery of a passport, later said to
be Mohamed Atta’s, in the 9/11 Commission Report.)
39
6) There were and remain problems about the identity of the designated culprits:
For years researchers have drawn attention to the existence of different weights
and heights in government files on Lee Harvey Oswald (see above), and also to the fact
that the FBI maintained separate files on “Lee Harvey Oswald” and “Harvey Lee
Oswald.”
40
Then in the 1990s, John Armstrong presented a 1022-page case that two
different young men (“Harvey” and “Lee”) shared the identity of Lee Harvey Oswald, for
the benefit of U.S. intelligence.
41
Although not everyone will be persuaded by the whole
of Armstrong’s argument, it is safe to say that both evidence and testimony have been
37 Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. 25, 599; Warren Report, 736; Scott, Deep Politics, 105. Later, on the
basis of a mint bus ticket, the Warren Commission determined that Oswald had returned from Mexico on a
different bus. The ticket was allegedly “discovered” by Marina Oswald in August 1964, one month before
the Report was completed and printed (Warren Report, 736; Warren Commission Hearings, 11, 221; 25,
682).
38 ABC News, 9/12/01; Associated Press, 9/16/01; Thompson, Terror Timeline, 492. The Guardian later
commented that "the idea that Atta's [sic] passport had escaped from that inferno unsinged would have
tested the credulity of the staunchest supporter of the FBI's crackdown on terrorism." (Guardian, March 19,
2002,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,11209,669961,00.html).
39
However an interesting footnote (563n32) refers to “fraudulent features” in al Suqami’s passport, and
distinguishes it from other hijackers’ passports which “have not been found.”
40
Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics II: The New Revelations in U.S. Government Files, 1994-1995 (Ipswich,
MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2007), 2, 88-89, 129, 142-49.
41
John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee: How the CIA framed Oswald (Arlington, Texas: Quasar Press, 2003),
1022 pages.
11
altered to conceal the anomalies which Armstrong dealt with.
42
Needless to say, there
was no discussion of these anomalies in the Warren Report.
Within two weeks of 9/11, the identities of at least six of the hijackers identified
by the FBI were unclear; men in Arab countries with the same names and histories (and
in at least one case the same photograph) were protesting that they were alive and
innocent.
43
In response to these protests, FBI director Robert Mueller acknowledged on
September 20, 2001, that the identity of several of the suicide hijackers was in doubt.
44
But there is no trace of this doubt, or any discussion whatsoever of the problem, in the
detailed treatment of the alleged hijackers in the 9/11 Commission Report.
45
7) Prior investigations of the eventual suspects were suspended or impeded:
Oswald, who had been on the FBI’s watch list since his travel to the Soviet Union
in 1959, was inexplicably taken off the watch list on October 9, 1963, just after his arrest
in New Orleans and his alleged trip to Mexico City would have made him a candidate for
increased surveillance.46 October 9, the day before the CIA reported to the FBI on
Oswald’s Soviet contact in Mexico City, was the day CIA HQ itself received the news.
42
Scott, Deep Politics II, 143, 145-46; “HARVEY AND LEE: John Armstrong's Documented Study of
Two Oswalds,”
http://home.wi.rr.com/harveyandlee/.
43
The mainstream U.S. press, such as the New York Times, later attributed the confusion about the
hijackers’ identity to the number of different Arabs sharing the same names. But at least five men shared
histories as well as names with the alleged hijackers. Waleed al-Shehri told the BBC “that he attended
flight training school at Daytona Beach in the United States, and is indeed the same Waleed Al Shehri to
whom the FBI has been referring. But, he says, he left the United States in September last year, became a
pilot with Saudi Arabian airlines and is currently on a further training course in Morocco” (BBC,
September 23, 2001). Saeed al-Ghamdi, alive and flying planes in Tunisia, also studied at Florida flight
schools, as late as 2001. According to the London Telegraph (David Harrison, “Revealed: The Men with
Stolen Identities,” September 23, 2001), CNN used his photograph in describing the hijacker with his
name. Abdulaziz al-Omari acknowledged the same date of birth as the accused hijacker al-Omari but
claimed his passport was stolen when he was living in Denver, Colorado (London Telegraph, September
23, 2001; Thompson, Terror Timeline, 497).
44
“Hijack ‘Suspects’ Alive and Well,” BBC, September 23, 2001. The editor of BBC News Online has
since partially retracted the original BBC article (Steve Herrman, “9/11 Conspiracy Theory,” October 27,
2006,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2006/10/911_conspiracy_theory_1.html).
45
9/11 Commission Report, 1–14, 215–42. Discussion in Griffin, 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and
Distortions, 19–23.
46 FBI HQ Supervisor W. Marvin Gheesling was censured and transferred to Detroit “for removing stop on
Oswald in Ident on 10/9/63” (NARA RIF #124-10371-10033; FBI file 62-117290-Admin Folder-V3,
Response to SSC re Gayle Memo 9/30/64, 21,
http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?absPageId=300123). Cf. John Newman,
“Oswald and the Mexico City Tapes,” JFK Lancer Conference, Dallas, November 19, 1999, 3,
http://www.jfklancer.com/backes/newman/newman_3.html: “Now, the day before the Mexico City story
12
This is comparable to the obstruction by the Radical Fundamentalist Unit (RFU)
at FBI Headquarters of the Minneapolis FBI’s efforts to interview the so-called twentieth
hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, especially after Moussaoui’s arrest on August 15, 2001.47
Moussaoui knew most of the other nineteen alleged hijackers who were named in the
hijackings, and an interview of him, if not impeded, could have led to the detention of the
nineteen. A Minnesota Special Agent, Harry Samit, later testified that he wrote FBI
headquarters about seventy memos on Moussaoui between August 16 and September 11,
all to no avail.48
Similarly the CIA failed to tell the FBI that two of the terrorists, Khalid al-Mihdar
and Nawaf al-Hazmi, were in the United States.49 The blocking of the Moussaoui
investigation, and the withholding of the CIA’s information, have both been blamed on
Janet Reno’s so-called Wall memorandum of 1995. But the Wall memo was renewed on
August 6, 2001, by Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson.50
Another example of such obstruction was the curtailment of the Army intelligence
investigation of al-Qaeda through its Able Danger program. According to Paul
Thompson’s Terror Timeline, military lawyers on three occasions forced members of
Able Danger to cancel scheduled meetings with the FBI at the last minute. Lt. Colonel
Anthony Shaffer later complained that “critical counterterrorism information [was] never
passed from SOCOM [Special Operations Command] to the FBI before 9/11; this
information included the original data regarding Atta and the terrorist cells in New York
and the DC area.” Rep. Curt Weldon (R), who in 2005 helped bring to light the existence
of the program, commented, “Obviously, if we had taken out that cell, 9/11 would not
have occurred.”51
hits the FBI they cancel the flash on Oswald. This is an example of what I'm talking about, dimming the
switches.”
47 For details see Terrorist Timeline under “Maltbie,”
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?entity=michael_maltbie: “RFU chief Dave Frasca stops the
Minneapolis office from pursuing a criminal warrant (see August 21, 2001); When French authorities
discover that Moussaoui is connected to the Chechen rebels, RFU agent Mike Maltbie insists that the FBI
representative in Paris go through all telephone directories in France to see how many Zacarias Moussaouis
live there (see August 22, 2001); When RFU agent Rita Flack, who is working on the Moussaoui case,
reads the Phoenix memo suggesting that bin Laden is sending pilots to the US for training, she apparently
does not tell her colleagues about it, even though it was addressed to several of them including Frasca (see
July 10, 2001 and August 22, 2001); The RFU does not provide the relevant documentation to attorneys
consulted about the request. In particular, Flack does not tell them about the Phoenix memo, even though
one of the attorneys will later say she asked Flack if anyone is sending radical Islamists to the US to learn
to fly (see August 22-28, 2001).”
48 Newsday, March 21, 2006,
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-mous214670355mar21,0,2844591.story.
49 9/11 Commission Report, 269-72; Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to
9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 339-44.
50 Thompson, Terror Timeline, 101.
51
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a1299surprisingpresence; citing Shaffer testimoiny
to US Congress, 2/15/2006. Government Security News, August 2005.
13
Students of the John F. Kennedy assassination have speculated that Oswald’s
name, with or without his knowledge and/or participation, was being used by the CIA in
Mexico as part of a complex operation against Fidel Castro.52 If true, the removal of his
name from the FBI watch list would not be absurd, but understandable, to prevent an
accidental law enforcement interruption of a CIA operation.
In like manner the obstructions of the FBI’s RFU would be understandable if Atta
and Moussaoui or their names were being used as part of a contemporary intelligence
operation. In this case what looks outwardly like senseless and incompetent behavior
would actually be the result of FBI-CIA coordination.53
A superficial distinction between the relevant events of 1963 and 2001 actually
reinforces this possibility. Marvin Gheesling, the FBI Supervisor responsible for
removing the stop on Oswald’s name, was later censured by Hoover for his action.
54
Dave Frasca, the RFU chief who stopped the Minneapolis office from pursuing a criminal
warrant against Moussaoui, was later promoted.55 The difference is attributable to
Hoover’s personal hostility to the CIA and his irritation with members of William C.
Sullivan’s Intelligence Division of FBI (which included Gheesling) who in his eyes were
too cooperative with it. This situation changed with Hoover’s death.
The Role of Double Agents: Lee Harvey Oswald and Ali Mohamed
The last similarity strengthens a hypothesis that would begin to make sense of the
preceding extraordinary similarities between the two cases. It is that surveillance was
suspended because the designated culprits – Oswald and the hijackers – had to be
protected from any law enforcement action that would impede their role in the events that
would be attributed to them. There are two versions of this hypothesis. The first, less
conspiratorial, is that those designated to be culprits had no relation to those in power on
the two disastrous days.
A more likely and sinister version is that they were double agents being directed
by those in power, even if they had no idea of the fate that had been determined for them.
In this case the U.S. deep state would have a motive for limiting the investigation, to
52 E.g. Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1993), esp. 141-42; John
Newman, Oswald and the CIA (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1995), 318-419; Lamar Waldron with Thom
Hartmann, Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for a Coup in Cuba, and the Murder of
JFK (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2006), 531-46.
53 Particularly suggestive in this respect is RFU Agent Michael Maltbie’s weakening of a proposed FISA
application by editing it and removing a statement by a CIA officer that Chechen rebel leader Ibn Khattab
was closely connected to Osama bin Laden (Salon, March 3, 2003; “Michael Maltbie,” Terror Timeline,
August 28, 2001,
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?entity=michael_maltbie).
54 Memorandum of September 30, 1964, from J.H. Gale to Associate FBI Director Clyde Tolson,
http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?absPageId=300123.
55 Coleen Rowley Report, 5; quoted in Steve Moore, “The FBI's Radical Fundamentalist Unit in
Washington D.C.,” Global Research, August 18, 2002,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MOO208B.html.
14
prevent disclosure of the operation with which the double agents were involved. Fifteen
years ago I made the complicated case that Lee Harvey Oswald was just such a double
agent. I hope to demonstrate below that the al-Qaeda trainer for the hijackings, Ali
Mohamed, was also an important U.S. double agent, and that this role had already
resulted in an earlier al- Qaeda conspiracy – the murder in 1990 of the Jewish racist Meir
Kahane – being dismissed, familiarly, consciously, and wrongly, as the work of a “lone
deranged gunman.”
56
In Deep Politics (written in 1992) I explored at some length the possibility that
Lee Harvey Oswald was a possible “double agent…trying to infiltrate the Dallas Cuban
refugee group.”57 I went on to make observations about Oswald as a double agent,
observations that I now consider applicable to 9/11:
The preceding chapter considered the possibility that Oswald was associated with
anti-Kennedy Cubans in order to investigate them on behalf of a federal agency.
But we saw it alleged that Oswald was a double agent collaborating with some of
these groups, either (as I suspect) because he or his handlers shared their goals
[that is, anti-Kennedy goals], or possibly because he or his handlers had been
“turned” by those they were supposed to investigate. Such a possibility was
particularly likely with targets, like Alpha 66, about which the government itself
was conflicted, of two minds.58
It is necessary to recall that Alpha 66 in early 1963 conducted a series of raids,
not just against Cuba, but against Soviet ships in Cuba. It was obviously trying to
shipwreck the US-Soviet understanding on Cuba, thus to torpedo the whole Kennedy
policy of détente with the Soviet Union. Unambiguously the raids met with the total
disapproval of Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department (which cracked down on them and
made a public announcement that they had to cease). At the same time there continued to
be support for Alpha 66 from the CIA.59
Double agents frequently become the stars both of the groups they penetrate and
the government agencies to whom they report. Recently I have written about Ali
Mohamed, who was Washington’s star double agent inside al-Qaeda, and also a chief al-
Qaeda trainer for aircraft hijackings.60 (Mohamed “knew at least three terrorist pilots
personally,” and also “knew the internal procedures of the security company that
maintained two checkpoints used by hijackers at Boston’s Logan airport.”)
61
Triple
56 Newsday, November 8, 1990; discussion in Scott, Road to 9/11, 155-56.
57 Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 252; quoting Lucille Connell, 26 Warren Commission
Hearings 738.
58 Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 257.
59 Warren Hinckle and William Turner, Deadly Secrets: The CIA-Mafia War Against Castro and the
Assassination of JFK (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992), 173-76. Cf. Larry Hancock, Someone
Would Have Talked (Southlake TX: JFK Lancer, 2006), 177-78.
60 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 151-59.
61
J. M. Berger, “Paving the Road to 9/11,” IntelWire.com,
http://intelwire.egoplex.com/unlocking911-1-ali-mohamed-911.html; quoted in Scott, The Road to 9/11, 158.
15
Cross, by Peter Lance, confirms that Ali Mohamed, one of al-Qaeda’s top trainers in
terrorism and how to hijack airplanes, was an informant for the FBI, a one-time asset of
the CIA, and for four years a member of the US Army.62 This special status explains why
one of his protégés, El Sayyid Nosair, was able to commit the first al-Qaeda crime in
America, back in 1990, be caught along with his co-conspirators, and yet be dismissed by
the police and FBI as (and these are actual quotes) a “lone deranged gunman” who “acted
alone.”63
In fact, the FBI was aware back in 1990 that Mohamed had engaged in terrorist
training on Long Island; yet it acted to protect Mohamed from arrest, even after one of
his trainees had moved beyond training to an actual assassination.64 Three years later, in
1993, Mohamed was actually detained in Canada by the RCMP. But he gave the RCMP
the telephone number of his FBI handler in San Francisco, and after a brief call the
RCMP released him.65 This enabled Mohamed to fly later in the year to Nairobi, and
begin to organize the eventual al-Qaeda attacks on the US embassies in Africa.
Mohamed’s trainees were all members of the Al-Kifah Center in Brooklyn, which
served as the main American recruiting center for the Makhtab-al-Khidimat, the
“Services Center” network that after the Afghan war became known as al-Qaeda.66 The
Al-Kifah Center was headed in 1990 by the blind Egyptian Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman,
who like Ali Mohamed had been admitted to the United States, despite being on a State
Department Watch List.67 As he had done earlier in Egypt, the sheikh “issued a fatwa in
America that permitted his followers to rob banks and kill Jews.”68
It would be wrong to think that Ali Mohamed was training Nosair and his fellow
Islamists to fight Russians in Afghanistan. Nosair’s defense attorney argued this
vigorously in a second trial of Nosair, the so-called New York landmarks case of 1995.
69
However the Soviets had totally withdrawn from Afghanistan by February 1989, and
62 Lance, Triple Cross, xxvii, etc.
63 Newsday, 11/8/90; quoted in Peter Lance, 1000 Years for Revenge (New York: Regan Books/ Harper
Collins, 2003), 35; New York Times, 12/16/90.
64 Lance, 1000 Years for Revenge, 29-37.
65 Lance, Triple Cross, 123-25.
66 Robert Dreyfuss, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (New
York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2005), 278; John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America,
and International Terrorism (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 87-88; Lance, 1000 Years for Revenge, 29-31;
Independent, 11/1/98.
67 Rahman was issued two visas, one of them “by a CIA officer working undercover in the consular section
of the American embassy in Sudan” (Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama
bin Laden [New York: Free Press, 2001], 67). FBI consultant Paul Williams writes that Ali Mohamed
“settled in America on a visa program controlled by the CIA” (Paul L. Williams, Al Qaeda: Brotherhood of
Terror [[Upper Saddle River, NJ]: Alpha/ Pearson Education, 2002], 117). Others allegedly admitted,
despite being on the State Department watch list, were Mohamed Atta and possibly Ayman al-Zawahiri
(Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism
[Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2005], 205, 46).
68 Wright, The Looming Tower, 177.
69 United States v. Omar Ahmad Ali Abdel Rahman et al., S5 93 Cr. 181
(MBM), 19122; in Berger, Ali Mohamed, 205. 217.
16
Mohamed was training Nosair in July 1989, at a time when the U.S. government, to
paraphrase what was just said about 1963, was of two minds about what to do in
Afghanistan.
The CIA was backing Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a major heroin trafficker with his
own heroin labs, as part of the ISI’s puppet alternative to the secular, anti-Islamist
government in Kabul, which the Russians left behind.70 Meanwhile a State Department
official, Edmund McWilliams, with middle-level backing in Washington, objected that
“Pakistani intelligence and Hekmatyar were dangerous allies,” and that the United States
was making an important mistake by endorsing ISI’s puppet Afghan government.71 But
Ali Mohamed’s training, both in Afghanistan and later around New York, was precisely
designed to strengthen the Arab Afghans in Brooklyn who were allied with Hekmatyar.72
Ali Mohamed’s trainees became involved in terrorist activities in other parts of
the world. One of them, Anas al-Liby, became a leader in a plot against Libyan president
Mu’ammar Ghadafi. Anas al-Liby was later given political asylum in Great Britain,
despite suspicions that he was a high-level al-Qaeda operative.73 As the French authors
Brisard and Dasquié point out, Ghadafi’s Libya in 1998 was the first government to ask
Interpol to issue an arrest warrant for Osama bin Laden. They argue that Osama and al-
Qaeda elements were collaborating with the British MI-5 in an anti- Ghadafi
assassination plot.74
Another of Ali Mohamed’s trainees, Clement Rodney Hampton-El, accepted
money from the Saudi Embassy in Washington to recruit Muslim warriors for Bosnia.75
70 Steve Coll, Ghost Wars (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 195. In retrospect, the decision to back
Hekmatyar against Najibullah appears to have been disastrous. As Ahmed Rashid predicted accurately in
1990, “If Afghanistan fragments into warlordism, the West can expect a flood of cheap heroin that will be
impossible to stop …Afghanistan's President Najibullah has skillfully played on Western fears of a drugs
epidemic by repeatedly offering co-operation with the DEA and other anti- narcotic agencies, but the West,
which still insists on his downfall, has refused. If President [George Herbert Walker] Bush and Margaret
Thatcher continue to reject a peace process, they must prepare for an invasion of Afghan-grown heroin in
Washington and London” (Ahmed Rashid, “Afghanistan heroin set to flood West,” Independent (London),
3/25/90: “In early 1988 the State Department negotiators had been preparing to accept an end to CIA
assistance.” They then reversed themselves and held out for a matching of Soviet and CIA support to the
two factions. Apparently the policy shift was motivated by an unscripted remark by Reagan to a television
interviewer (Coll, Ghost Wars, 176-77).
71 Coll, Ghost Wars, 196; cf. 197-202; Barnett Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan (New Haven:
Yale UP, 2002), 251. McWilliams’ argument found support among mid-level State Department officials in
Washington; “Still, the more State Department officials mouthed the McWilliams line, the more Langley
argued the contrary” (Coll, Ghost Wars, 197).
72 Cf. Lance, Triple Cross, 20, 66.
73 Lance, Triple Cross, 104-05. In May 2000 al-Liby’s house in Britain was raided; and the police
discovered an al-Qaeda terror manual which was largely written and translated by Ali Mohamed.
74 Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié, Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Diplomacy and the
Failed Hunt for Bin Laden (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press/ Nation Books, 2002), 97-102, 155-59.
Anas al-Liby was trained in terrorism by the triple agent Ali Mohamed, while Mohamed was still on the
payroll of the U.S. Army (Peter Lance, Triple Cross: How Bin Laden's Chief Security Adviser Penetrated
the CIA, the FBI, and the Green Berets [New York: Regan, 2006], 104; see also Chapter IX).
75 United States v. Omar Ahmad Ali Abdel Rahman et al., Federal Court, SDNY, 15629-30, 15634-35,
15654, 15667-68, 15671, 15673; Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad, 72-74; J.M. Berger, “Al Qaeda Recruited
17
He was also allowed to go to Fort Belvoir, where an Army major gave him a list of
Muslims in the US Army whom he could recruit.76 Fort Belvoir was the site of the
Army’s Land Information Warfare Activity (LIWA), whose Information Dominance
Center was “full of army intelligence `geeks’” targeting Islamic jihadists.
77
Hampton-El’s recruiting for Bosnia was part of a larger operation. Numbers of
Arab Afghans were trained for Bosnia, and later for the Kosovo Liberation Army, by
Ayman al-Zawahiri, the top associate of Osama bin Laden in al-Qaeda, and also a close
ally of his fellow Egyptian, Ali Mohamed.78 (Ali Mohamed had sworn allegiance to al-
Zawahiri in 1984 while still in Egypt, and he twice arranged for al-Zawahiri to come to
stay with him in California for fund-raising purposes.)79
Meanwhile US intelligence veterans like Richard Secord helped bring Arab
Afghans recruited by Hekmatyar to Azerbaijan, in order to consolidate a pro-western
government there.80 And in 1998 the US began bombing Kosovo in support of the
Kosovo Liberation Army, some of whose cadres were both trained and supported in the
field by al-Qaeda’s “Arab Afghans.”81
So Ali Mohammad’s activities intersected with US covert operations, and this fact
appears to have earned him protection.82 Jack Blum, former special investigator for the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, commented that
One of the big problems here is that many suspects in the [1993] World Trade
Center bombing were associated with the Mujahedeen. And there are components
U.S. Servicemen: Testimony Links Plot To Saudi Gov't,” Intelwire.com,
http://intelwire.egoplex.com/hamptonel010604.html.
76 United States v. Omar Ahmad Ali Abdel Rahman et al., Federal Court, SDNY, 15629-30, 15634-35,
15654, 15667-68, 15671, 15673; Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad, 72-74; J.M. Berger, “Al Qaeda Recruited
U.S. Servicemen: Testimony Links Plot To Saudi Gov't,” Intelwire.com,
http://intelwire.egoplex.com/hamptonel010604.html.
77 Lance, Triple Cross, 331.
78 Marcia Christoff Kurop, “Al Qaeda’s Balkan Links,” Wall Street Journal, 11/1/01: “For the past 10
years…Ayman al-Zawahiri has operated terrorist training camps [and] weapons of mass destruction
factories throughout Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Bosnia.”
79 Lance, Triple Cross, 11, 194-98.
80 Peter Dale Scott, “The Background of 9/11: Drugs, Oil, and U.S. Covert Operations,” in David Ray
Griffin and Peter Dale Scott (eds.), 9/11 & American Empire, 75-76.
81 Yossef Bodansky, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America (Roseville: Prima, 2001), 298,
397-98.
82 Cf. Robert Friedman, Village Voice, 3/30/93: “In the aftermath of the bombing, many are wondering why
there wasn't a comprehensive, wide-ranging investigation of Meir Kahane's murder. One possible
explanation is offered by a counterterrorism expert for the FBI. At a meeting in a Denny's coffee shop in
Los Angeles a week after the Kahane assassination, the 20-year veteran field agent met with one of his top
undercover operatives, a burly 33-year-old FBI contract employee who had been a premier bomber for a
domestic terrorist group before being `turned’ and becoming a government informant. `Why aren't we
going after the sheikh [Abdel Rahman]?’ demanded the undercover man. `It's hands-off,’ answered the
agent. `Why?’ asked the operative. `It was no accident that the sheikh got a visa and that he's still in the
country,’ replied the agent, visibly upset. `He's here under the banner of national security, the State
Department, the NSA [National Security Agency], and the CIA.’"
18
of our government that are absolutely disinterested in following that path because
it leads back to people we supported in the Afghan war.83
What agency would have been interested in protecting Mohamed? The CIA
claimed to have ceased using him as an operative back in 1984.84 Yet in 1988 Ali
Mohamed flew from Fort Bragg to Afghanistan and fought there, while he was on the US
Army payroll. His commanding officer didn’t like it, but Mohammad was apparently
being directed by another agency.85 Ten years later, in 1998, a confidential CIA internal
survey concluded that it was “partly culpable” for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing,
carried out by some of Ali Mohamed’s trainees.86
After a plea bargain, Ali Mohamed eventually pleaded guilty in 2000 to having
organized the bombings of US embassies in Africa, but as of 2006 he had still not yet
been sentenced.87
9) The Cover-Up Modus Operandi: The Culprit “Acted Alone”
Unambiguously Mohamed’s trainees became involved, almost immediately, in
terrorism on US soil. In November 1990, three of Mohamed’s trainees conspired together
to kill Meir Kahane, the racist founder of the Jewish Defense League. The actual killer,
El Sayyid Nosair, was caught by accident almost immediately; and by luck the police
soon found his two co-conspirators, Mahmoud Abouhalima and Mohammed Salameh,
waiting at Nosair’s apartment. They found much more:
There were formulas for bomb making, 1,440 rounds of ammunition, and manuals
[supplied by Ali Mohamed] from the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at
Fort Bragg marked “Top Secret for Training,” along with classified documents
belonging to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. The police found maps and drawings
of New York City landmarks like the Statue of Liberty, Times Square – and the
World Trade Center. The forty-seven boxes of evidence they collected also
included the collected sermons of blind Sheikh Omar, in which he exhorted his
followers to “destroy the edifices of capitalism.”88
All three had been trained by Ali Mohamed back in July 1989 at a rifle range,
where the FBI had photographed them, before terminating this surveillance later in the
83 Robert I. Friedman, Village Voice, 3/30/93.
84 Lance, Triple Cross, 16.
85 Lance, Triple Cross, 43: “Ali Mohamed defied his commanding officer and prepared to go [to
Afghanistan] anyway. At that point, it seems clear that he was serving two sets of masters at Bragg.”
86 Andrew Marshall, Independent, 11/1/98.
87 Lance, Triple Cross, 3, 7. The CIA has shown through the years the lengths it will go to, to prevent
having its sometime assets testify in open court. Cf. Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 36; Peter Dale
Scott, Drugs, Contras and the CIA: Government Policies and the Cocaine Economy. An Analysis of Media
and Government Response to the Gary Webb Stories in the San Jose Mercury News (1996-2000) (Los
Angeles: From the Wilderness Publications, 2000), 39-40, etc.
88 Lance, 1000 Years, 34.
19
same month.89 The U.S. Government was thus in an excellent position to arrest, indict,
and convict all of the terrorists involved, including Mohamed.
Yet only hours after the killing, Joseph Borelli, Chief of NYPD detectives, struck
a familiar American note and pronounced Nosair a “lone deranged gunman.”90 Some
time later, he actually told the press that “There was nothing [at Nosair’s house] that
would stir your imagination…..Nothing has transpired that changes our opinion that he
acted alone.”91
Borelli was not a lone deranged official in this matter. His position was also that
of the FBI, who said they too believed “that Mr. Nosair had acted alone in shooting Rabbi
Kahane.” “The bottom line is that we can't connect anyone else to the Kahane shooting,"
an F.B.I. agent said.”92
The initial reaction of the NYPD had been that Nosair was part of a conspiracy.93
This impression was strengthened when a detective discovered that Borelli’s car had been
moved after Nosair was arrested. As a result, according to the District Attorney
prosecutor on the case, William Greenbaum, “We sensed a much bigger conspiracy, and
we were sure that more than one person was involved.”94
How then to explain the ultimate assu
