by Wayne MadsenSeptember 2011

from VoltaireNet Website

Part 110 September 2011

10 years after the September 11 attacks, theUnited States government has made it clearthat it had something to hide. From the White House counter-terrorismadvisor to the co-chairs of the NationalCommission of investigation, one after the otherkey political figures have stepped forward todisassociate themselves from an official versionthat simply does not add up. Wayne Madsen flashes back to this massivecover-up operation.

President Bush’s chief counter-terrorism adv iserRichard Clarke

President Bush’s chief counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke has revealed that the CIA under GeorgeTenet 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. governmentreport 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 in1964 to historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. that she believed that Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson wasbehind the assassination of her husband in Dallas.

The revelations by Mrs. Kennedy and Clarke show that the United States government cannot be trusted toinvestigate misdeeds carried out with the full knowledge and support of senior officials of the CIA and theWhite 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 NewYork and Washington merely takes one to the shallowest of depths of the rabbit hole of the intelligenceworld, highly-compartmented cells which carefully planned the attacks and how the mass media would coverthe unfolding events.

The one individual who stands tall among those intelligence and law enforcement officers who wasaggressively pursuing the criminal network that would carry out 9/11 was FBI counter-terrorism top manJohn O’Neill.

Ever since the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, O’Neill’s pursuit of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaedahad been dogged.

After further terrorist attacks at,

the Khobar Towers barracks in Dharan, Saudi Arabia

the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania

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 Report concluded that nineteen,mostly Saudi, hijackers, armed with box cutters, were able to defeat a multi-trillion dollar U.S. defense andintelligence system in a matter if mere hours one Tuesday morning in September 2001, has even been partlydebunked by the two co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission, former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean andformer Indiana Democratic Representative Lee Hamilton.

Both have said that their committee was lied to by government officials and that important information wascovered 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 toBush National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who stated under oath that no one ever expected thatpassenger 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 anyinvestigations that would look at the roles of,

the CIA

Mossad

the Saudis

Wall Street interests,

...in crafting the ingredients that permitted the 9/11 attacks to 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 theassassination of President Kennedy.

Unfortunately, the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center was not the first time the U.S. governmentengaged 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 ofArabic telephone intercepts gathered before the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center from U.S.- andSudan-based Muslim militants who once worked for U.S. intelligence in the mujaheddin war against theSoviet 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 JerseyCity-based cell that included,

the blind Egyptian cleric Shaikh Omar Abdul Rahman

Ramzi Yousef

Eyad Ismail

The New York and New Jersey cell also included Ali Mohammed, a graduate of the U.S. Army’s SpecialForces 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 alsoa resident of the United States.

Ironically, the two men responsible for the failure to present the surveillance intelligence on the 1993 WorldTrade Center bombers to the juries and grand juries hearing the charges - the main federal prosecutors forNew 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 indictingand having convicted two successive Illinois governors for corruption,

Republican George Ryan

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, thechief FBI investigator against Al Qaeda in the 1990s, the late John O’Neill, was upset that much of thetelephone surveillance of the 1993 bombers was never introduced as evidence and remained un-translatedand classified.

Other CIA connections to Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are too numerous to describe. However, one jumps outbecause 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 Muslimcountries for the Bosnian war against Serbia and Croatia, revealed that the Treasury Department’s FinancialCrimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN) was concerned that money transferred by Riggs Bank to theBosnian Defense Fund’s account at the Central Bank in Sarajevo, was "bleeding" to terrorist elementsbelieved 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 Haifaand 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 Islamicterrorists, including people linked to bin Laden, he was told by one of the major Bosnia Defense Fundprincipals 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, butcarried 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 topenetrate the security of dozens of Federal office buildings and who visited the homes of scores of U.S. lawenforcement personnel during 2000 and 2001 were some who used addresses and mail drops in southernFlorida 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 theactivities of the art students and a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) list of the hijackers and otherterrorist suspects, including a known Mossad agent, Dominick Suter, who ran an Israeli moving company inWeehawken, 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 fiveIsraelis were the only suspects arrested on September 11, 2001 on suspicion of involvement in the 9/11attacks.

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 havehad ties to an “Islamic fundamentalist group.”

"Our Purpose was to document the ’Event’"The five Israelis interviewed on Israeli Talk Show in November 2001.

Even ten years later, the U.S. government and the governments of New York and New York City aredismissing those 9/11 attack veterans who, unlike O’Neill, were fortunate enough to survive the catastrophicattack.

Survivors or the World Trade Center collapse and first responders with the New York Police Department, NewYork-New Jersey Port Authority Police, New York Fire Department, and others were not invited to the tenthanniversary 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 beenused 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 wouldhave 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 k illed in a Special Operations assault inAbbotabad, Pakistan.

There was little forensic evidence to prove Bin Laden was killed. In any case, most of the members of USNavy SEAL Team 6, which carried out the attack on Bin Laden, were killed recently in an attack on theirhelicopter in Afghanistan.

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

Part 2The Ultimate Triumph of the Strategy of Tension

12 September 2011

The attacks of September 11 are a continuationof the strategy of tension. They represent nothing new in Washingtonpolicies, if not an escalation to extend thisstrategy on a global scale. They provided thepretext for setting up an internationalmonitoring system and to further the expansionof imperial wars. From this point of view, the commemoration ofthe tenth anniversary was used by the sponsorsof the attacks to pose once more as victims, allthe better to persevere with their goals.

Obama underscored the continuity of his policies with those of his predecessorby celebrating with him the tenth anniv ersary of the September 11 attacks

and of imperial globalization...

After years of employing the fascistic “strategy of tension” in Western Europe, the Middle East, Africa, andLatin 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 bombingthe Pentagon, in addition to destroying a yet unknown target by United flight 93 - shot down by U.S. AirForce 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,” thede 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 SamuelHuntington and Bernard Lewis would be a final battle that would see the downfall of Islamic governments andregimes 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 presentday is defined by Swiss professor of contemporary history Daniele Ganser as the method by which “worldpowers divide, manipulate, and control public opinion using fear, propaganda, disinformation, psychologicalwarfare, 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 fora 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, 9/11 being the emergency phone numberused 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 publicopinion by hyping non-existent threats to public safety, became real in the minutes following the 9/11attacks when the corporate new channels, all seemingly pre-programmed for the terror event, began instillingfear in the minds of Americans and people around the world. In the months after 9/11, anyone whoquestioned 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 9/11than any dubious explanations presented in the official 9/11 Commission report and other governmentdocuments, including those from the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee and the National Institute ofStandards and Technology (NIST).

The corporate news channels, led by Fox News, concocted unbelievable threats following 9/11, includingexploding bombs being placed inside cows, terrorist frogmen coming ashore on America’s beaches, AlQaeda attacking shopping malls in the United States, and Arab terrorists infiltrating Latin American humansmuggling 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 byCongress of the unconstitutional USA-PATRIOT Act, the failed attempt by a shoe bomber to bring down aplane flying from Paris to Miami, and a later attempt by a Nigerian flying from Amsterdam to Detroit to set offexplosive material in his underpants, the public was conditioned to accept anything as a potential threat tosecurity and safety.

Nothing was mentioned about Israel’s role in the anthrax attacks and the two failed airplane bombings. Theonly individuals arrested on 9/11 for suspicion that they were involved in the 9/11 attacks were fiveemployees of Weehawken, New Jersey-based Urban Moving Systems. FBI agents who visited the firm’swarehouse 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 databaseto 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 TradeCenter, minutes after the first plane struck, from their vantage point at Liberty State Park, across the HudsonRiver from lower Manhattan.

It was an Israeli aviation security company, ICTS International, replete with ex-Mossad and ex-Shin Betofficers in its management, that handled airport security at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport andAmsterdam’s Schipol International Airport, where Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber” and Umar FaroukAbdulmutallab, the “underwear bomber,” attempted their amateurish bombing attempts on American Airlinesflight 63 and Northwest Airlines flight 253, respectively.

ICTS also shared security responsibilities at Boston’s Logan Airport on September 11, 2001, the airportwhere American Airlines flight 11 was allegedly hijacked by Mohammed Atta and flown into the North Towerof the World Trade Center.

In pushing the neo-conservative notion of the “clash of civilizations,” there was no mention made by theIsraeli-influenced corporate media about the numerous connections of Israel to the 9/11 attacks. NineteenArab hijackers, 16 of whom hailed from Saudi Arabia, was the official story and there would be no deviationfrom the official line.

Even statements by Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak on American television that 9/11 was beneficialto Israel were ignored by the media. Those who were brave enough to point out Israeli connections to 9/11were 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 to9/11 saw their stories “tombstoned” on the Internet. A four-part series on the Israeli activity aired by FoxNews 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 FederalBuildings. 11 News reported how people claiming to be ‘Israeli art students’ might be trying tosneak 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 DrugEnforcement Administration and at the Earle Cabell Federal building, where guards found onestudent 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 Hollywoodcentral 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 BinLaden 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 Iconsider 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 thatwere 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 underthe operational control of U.S. and British “security services” until 1995, fully two years after the 1993 WorldTrade Center bombing. As of 1996, the U.S. State Department continued to refuse to list Al Qaeda as aterrorist 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

Muammar Qaddafi,

...Osama Bin Laden may have been used as a convenient decoy by the actual perpetrators of 9/11, thosewho wanted to blame Arabs and Muslims as part of their "grand schemes” the Project for the New AmericanCentury 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

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 topublicly honor those who were killed in the attacks, but privately celebrate their accomplishments over thelast ten years.

The corporate media will continue to propagate the myth of 9/11 and the public, they hope, will continue toaccept the official version of the events.

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