How to Fight Terrorism

A Reading of the 9/11 Commission Report 

PETER DALE SCOTT / California Monthly v.155, n.1, 1sep04

The 9/11 Commission Report [1] has been called "the must-read book of this summer" for Americans. It has also been called a "whitewash" and the "Omission Report." I agree that the book is important, well-written, and worthy of the most serious attention. I also agree that it has serious omissions[2].

It is clear that the 9/11 Commission Report will frame the debate on security discussions. It supplies a solid beginning, above all by defusing allegations that either Iraq or Iran were behind, or even aware of, the 9/11 attacks. (The public may not appreciate the extent to which administration hawks like Donald Rumsfeld and Douglas Feith have sought to link al Qaeda's attack to both countries, beginning in 2001. [3])

The 9/11 Commission should be praised for producing a well-crafted and well-footnoted document that defuses false rumors. It should be praised also for reaching a bipartisan consensus, one that may hopefully begin to produce a more reasonable tone in Congressional debates.

At the same time, the report's omissions distort its recommendations and downplay the urgent need for a new approach in national security policy. Its most serious defect is to ask us to strengthen our covert intelligence agencies, while ignoring the extent to which, by their foolish excesses and incompetent shortcomings, they have contributed to the terrorist menace we face.

Some specific concerns appear to have been answered by the 9/11 Report. It now seems likely, for example, that stock market behavior in airline shares just before 9/11 was not as suspicious as many believed [4]. And, contrary to claims in the movie Fahrenheit 9/11, the arrangements to fly members of the Saudi and bin Laden families out of the U.S. were routinely approved and conducted within the times authorized for flight [5]. The report also makes a very strong case that the hijacker Mohammed Atta did not, as Vice President Dick Cheney still believes to be possible, meet with an Iraqi agent in Prague [6].

The report also disposes of some, but not all, of the concerns raised by books alleging that either the U.S. government itself, or its ally Israel, allowed or even assisted the attacks. These books include Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed's The War on Freedom, David Ray Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor, and Justin Raimundo's The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection [7].

Two years ago, Ahmed wrote that "the best explanation of [9/11] is one that points directly to U.S. state responsibility." [8] Griffin supported the call for in-depth investigation of this possibility, noting that "huge benefits from the attacks of 9/11 were reaped by the institutions that are suspected of complicity in those attacks." Soon after, for example, the CIA's budget is said to have expanded 42 percent to launch a worldwide counter-terrorism program [9].

What lends credence to these concerns is what we have learned about the Bush administration's determination, from its first National Security Council meeting in January 2001, to rid Iraq of Saddam Hussein. This implemented a demand from the neoconservatives in the Project for a New American Century, in a 1998 letter calling for "removing Saddam Hussein from power." The letter was signed by several who joined the top ranks of the new Bush administration, including Rumsfeld, Richard Armitage, Paul Wolfowitz, and others [10]. The same demand in another PNAC study had foreseen that a revolutionary change in U.S. policy was unlikely "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event--like a new Pearl Harbor." [11]

In a footnote, the commission report concedes that on 9/11, as critics have observed, NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command) conducted a "military exercise, Vigilant Guardian, which postulated [i.e. simulated] a bomber attack from the former Soviet Union." [12] This exercise, which occurs once or twice a year, was initially blamed for NORAD's failure to respond on 9/11: "Lt. Col. Dawne Deskins, regional mission crew chief for the Vigilant Guardian exercise, said that everyone at the North East Air Defense Sector, part of NORAD, initially thought the first call they received about the real 9/11 hijackings was part of the war games scenario." [13] The report, however, concludes that NORAD's surprising inability to deal with the hijacked planes was not caused by the exercise; the response was, if anything, "expedited by the increased numbers of staff" available [14].

This finding can be questioned. It would appear that the chaos at the time the first planes struck occurred because both the civilian and possibly the military operations managers for aircraft were performing that role for the first time in their lives. The two men were the FAA Command Center's national operations manager, Ben Sliney, and the National Military Command Center's deputy operations manager, Admiral-Select Charles Leidig [15]. Leidig told the Commission, "On 10 September 2001, Brigadier General Winfield, U.S. Army, asked that I stand a portion of his duty on the following day." General Winfield thus was freed from his usual post to spend the next morning (9/11) in the Pentagon War Room [16].

Operation Vigilant Guardian would also explain why, when attack fighters were finally launched from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, they headed straight out into the Atlantic. As a pilot told the Commission, "I reverted to the Russian threat. I'm thinking cruise missile threat from the sea." [17]

The coincidence of the date of the exercise and the two inexperienced operations managers has been used to allege high-level U.S. collusion in the attacks. Another explanation could be that the U.S. scheduled the incident for official and legitimate reasons, but that conspirators, either inside or outside the government, leaked the date of Vigilant Guardian to al Qaeda.

Some serious problems not addressed

There are dozens if not hundreds of objections to the official story which the Commission either ignores completely or fails to resolve. Limitations of space allow detailed consideration of just two examples.

World Trade Center 7

Critics, including technical experts, have challenged both the official account of how three World Trade Center buildings--not just the twin towers--collapsed, and also the refusal to allow evidence at the scene to be impounded for forensic analysis. Almost all of the steel was swiftly hauled away, despite the protests of official investigators, and exported as scrap to distant countries. [18]

Particularly baffling was the belated collapse of the 47-story steel-framed building, World Trade Center 7. WTC-7 was 355 feet from the nearest of the two towers hit by planes, yet collapsed into itself some seven hours after the towers fell. The alleged reason was fire. But, as the New York Times observed, "no modern steel-reinforced high-rise in the United States had ever collapsed in a fire" (let alone with the vertical precision of Building 7's destruction). [19]

Photos and videos of the collapse show minor traces of fire near the base of the building, but not enough to break most of the building's windows. [20] Many experts have agreed with the architectural engineer Matthys Levy, author of Why Buildings Fall Down, that the collapse of WTC-7 was "very much like a controlled [implosive] demolition," the kind that takes days if not weeks to prepare. [21] It is hard to imagine that this could be done without alerting at least some occupants of the building. [22]

The tenants of WTC-7 included the CIA, the Department of Defense, Immigration and Natural Services, the Internal Revenue Service, major New York banks, and the Securities and Exchange Commission archive of filings on such sensitive cases as the Enron and WorldCom bankruptcies. [23]

The Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) prepared an extensive report on the WTC disaster. With respect to WTC-7, it said: "The specifics of the fires in WTC-7 and how they caused the building to collapse remain unknown at this time. Although the total diesel fuel on the premises contained massive potential energy, the best hypothesis has only a low probability of occurrence. Further research, investigation, and analyses are needed to resolve this issue." [24]

But the Commission declined to perform the investigation requested by FEMA. [25] Their report instead looks only at the 102 minutes between the first plane attack and the collapses of WTC 1 and 2. [26] They thus ignored a crucial case where the available evidence militates against the official explanation.

We cannot be certain what happened to WTC-7. But, until it is explained, the evidence would seem to suggest that our republic may have faced internal as well as external enemies. The Commission, in this and many other instances, did not wish to address such a disturbing possibility.

The FBI and CIA

The Commission also steps carefully around the embarrassing case of Ali Mohamed, an important al Qaeda agent who (as the Commission was told) "trained most of al Qaeda's top leadership," including "persons who would later carry out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing." [27] There are indications that the 9/11 Report minimized Mohamed's background because Mohamed was almost certainly an out-of-control informant for the FBI. [28]

The standard method of intelligence agencies is to monitor hostile organizations with informants from inside them, i.e. double agents. This is always a dangerous procedure because once people are serving two masters no one can be sure of their true allegiance. Worse, for agents to rise in the criminal network, the CIA or FBI must allow them to commit crimes. [29]

This appears to have been the case with Mohamed. Three years ago, Larry C. Johnson, a former State Department and CIA official, faulted the FBI publicly for using Mohamed as an informant when it should have recognized that the man was a high-ranking terrorist plotting against the United States. In Johnson's words, "It's possible that the FBI thought they had control of him and were trying to use him, but what's clear is that they did not have control." [30]

In 1993, according to the Toronto Globe and Mail, Ali Mohamed had been picked up by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Canada in the company of an al Qaeda terrorist. [31] Mohamed immediately told the RCMP to make a phone call to the FBI. The call quickly secured his release. The Globe and Mail later concluded that Mohamed "was working with U.S. counter-terrorist agents, playing a double or triple game, when he was questioned in 1993." [32]

The RCMP's release of Mohamed may have affected history. The encounter apparently took place before Mohamed flew to Nairobi, photographed the U.S. Embassy in December 1993, and took the photos to bin Laden. According to Mohamed's confession--after the 1998 bombing of that building, which killed more than 200 people--"Bin Laden looked at the picture of the American Embassy and pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber." [33]

It has been widely reported, and never denied, that after Mohamed first came to the United States from Egypt in the early 1980s he was in contact with the CIA and worked with U.S. Army Special Forces. [34] Mohamed trained the 1993 WTC bombers at an Islamist center in Brooklyn, New York, where earlier he had been recruiting and training Arabs for the U.S.-supported Afghan War. The London Independent has reported that he was on the U.S. payroll at the time he was training the Arab Afghans, and that the CIA, reviewing the case five years after the first WTC bombing, concluded in an internal document that the CIA itself was "partly culpable" in the World Trade Center attack. [35] But the 9/11 Report is utterly silent about Mohamed's links to the CIA and FBI.

The report similarly ignores charges it heard from an FBI translator, Sibel Edmonds, that one of her colleagues "belonged to the Middle Eastern organization whose taped conversations she had been translating for FBI counterintelligence agents." [36] This apparent penetration of the FBI may have involved corruption at higher levels, because when Edmonds reported the problem she was summarily fired. [37] A judge dismissed Edmonds's whistle-blower suit against the FBI, accepting Attorney General John Ashcroft's claim that the case could expose the government's methods and disrupt relations with other nations. [38]

The report further evades the revelations of veteran FBI agent Coleen Rowley, who complained in a widely reported memo of systematic obstruction by FBI headquarters of the investigation of would-be hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui. [39] Rowley's supervisor was similarly upset at the failure of FBI headquarters to answer her requests: told by headquarters that he was being provocative, he replied--before September 11--that he was "trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center." [40]

The failures of the Commission to resolve these matters are serious, and systemic. For, in its recommendations, the report asks us not just to trust the FBI but to strengthen it. However, for a long time there have been revelations that the FBI is a deeply troubled institution, with problems dating back to the era when J. Edgar Hoover promoted sycophants over honest men. [41]

The CIA has problems too. The report radically understates the degree to which al Qaeda itself was a by-product of past CIA covert operations in Afghanistan with the Pakistani intelligence service, ISI, which recruited and trained Islamic extremists to join a jihad against the Soviet Union. [42] Acknowledging this would recognize that the CIA has been engaged in reckless covert adventures abroad that were out of its competence and depth. [43] Simply augmenting its powers--or the power of military intelligence and special operations agencies--will do nothing to prevent the disastrous "blowback" from U.S. covert operations.

These issues are important. America faces a fundamental choice of what and whom to trust in dealing with the challenging crisis of terrorism. Will we deal with the problem primarily by working to resolve issues that provoke conflict and by projecting values that the rest of the world will wish to absorb? Or will we trust primarily in our own power and become increasingly a garrison state and empire, projecting our military and covert strength into further and further corners of the earth, with the increasingly heard formula that "the best defense is a good offense"?

Rhetorically, the report gives support to both approaches. But the thrust of its recommendations is towards the second--to grant still further powers to our huge intelligence agencies and military. In its handling of the facts, the report fails to answer the profound ways in which the events of 9/11 have led many to question those very institutions.

The Report's recommendations

Thus the report, though well-written and useful, has limitations and defects, which are reflected by similar defects in its proposals for policy changes. This is significant, because both Senator Kerry and President Bush are indicating that their policies will be in the direction of implementing the report's recommendations.

And of course its security proposals are even more important in the context of warnings of major new al Qaeda attacks, and when we read of unknown officials drawing up plans to suspend the November elections [44] or even to invoke the emergency suspension-of-government programs. [45]

The report, taken as a whole, is a critique of America's implementation of its counter-terrorist policies, and not of those policies' goals and instrumentalities. But the report can be read to reach a radically different conclusion: that terrorism has now become too important to be left to the counter-terrorists.

We see pages devoted, for example, to debates on how to kill Osama bin Laden. But the facts in the report make it abundantly clear that, even without bin Laden, we would have had roughly the terrorist problem we now have, and perhaps even the 9/11 plot. (Khalid Shaikh Mohammed conceived the 9/11 plot when he was affiliated, not with bin Laden, but with a competing warlord who was part of the CIA's anti-Soviet campaign in Afghanistan, the formerly Saudi- and U.S.- supported Abdul Rasul Sayyaf.) [46]

The secrecy of intelligence agencies, though necessary in some areas, has become very counterproductive. On an operational level, it makes it easy for special interests to falsify intelligence input, and not be corrected. We saw this recently with Ahmed Chalabi's advice on Iraq, and with the false story linking the hijacker Mohammed Atta to that country. [47]

It can be shown that these same skills were ultimately used by al Qaeda, whose members were among the trainees, to bring down U.S. helicopters, first in Somalia and then Iraq. [48]

We need to admit what the report does not: The secret powers of our government helped to create this enemy, whose presence is now invoked to further augment our government's secret powers. If we now want to reduce the threat of terrorism, we must look in a different direction.

What is urgently needed is not a reinforcement of Washington's inner citadels of secret decision-making, but a totally different and more open approach. America's true strength is not its military and paramilitary resources, but what Harvard professor Joseph Nye has called its soft power--its ability to influence the rest of the world culturally, and by example. [49]

The report does recognize the need to build better relations with Islam, but its recommendations in this area are nebulous at best. [50] It does not address the obvious: that the net effect of the Bush administration's hard responses in Afghanistan and Iraq has been to lower America's reputation drastically in the Muslim world, and to make it much more difficult for American businesses to work safely there. [51]

Ultimately, America's strongest resource is its people. The best antidote to Islamic terrorism will come when the chief contact of Muslims abroad is with American people, not soldiers breaking down doors or bombing from the air.

And there are three smoldering conflicts grievous to Muslims whose toxic side effects are now poisoning the entire globe: conflicts over Chechnya, Kashmir, and Palestine. For the United States to use its constructive energies to resolve just one of these crises would do far more to reduce terrorism than the creation of any number of new competing centers and directorates in Washington.

References

1) The 9/11 Commission Report - The Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (Washington: GPO, 2004); trade edition published by W.W. Norton. The Report is available on line at http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf. A useful index is available at http://www.insightful.com/products/infact/911/  

2) The 911 Report's mixed performance and polarized reception invite comparisons with the Warren Report in 1964. Like the Warren Report, the 911 Report will probably supply a serious beginning, rather than closure, to debate about a traumatic event in U.S. history. The Warren Commission properly supported its case by publishing not only its Hearings but its exhibits admitted in evidence. To date, the 911 Hearings are available online, but much of the evidence cited in footnotes is likely to remain confidential.

Both Reports immediately produced highly polarized reactions between those who endorsed their findings and those who rejected them. After 40 years, there is now a growing understanding of the Warren Report’s dilemma: how it produced generally useful documentation that both rejected many false rumors and supported two untenable lies – namely, that both President’s killer (Lee Harvey Oswald) and Oswald’s killer (Jack Ruby) were disgruntled and neglected loners. (In fact Oswald was the focus of several highly active intelligence files when the President was killed; and Ruby’s mob connections were so rich that he was once a Potential Criminal Informant or PCI for the FBI.)

We know now that when Lyndon Johnson pressured Earl Warren and others to join the Warren Commission, he spoke of the need to prevent a nuclear war. This could have flowed from much more dangerous lies that in fact had already mobilized some parts of the U.S. security establishment for military retaliation: namely, that Oswald had killed the President on order from either Castro or the Soviet Union. I believe that the CIA and FBI also took command of the Warren Commission investigation for their own pressing reasons: to prevent disclosure of their embarrassing relationships to Oswald. Former CIA Director Allen Dulles' dominance of the Warren Commission process probably helps to explain the Warren Report's most striking anomaly. It first concluded "that Oswald acted alone" (p. 22), and then recommended that the CIA should coordinate with the Secret Service and FBI the surveillance of "organized groups" (p. 463). This quickly led to Operation Chaos, the CIA's illegal surveillance of domestic anti-war groups in the 1960s. 

3) In December 2001 the New York Times reported that leaked “United States intelligence reports” showed links over many years between Iran and al Qaeda. The next month Zalmay Khalilzad said that “quite a few” al-Qaeda members were in Iran (Reuters, January 18, 2002). On February 3, 2002 Rumsfeld told ABC that “Iran has been permissive and allowed transit through their country of al-Qa’ida.” Richard Perle, no longer head of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board but still close to Cheney, wrote in September 2003 in National Review Online, “The divisions and distinctions of the past no longer make sense; the terror mafias are working together, and their missions are defined by the states that protect, arm, fund, and assist them: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.” According to his AEI neocon colleague Michael Ledeen, Iran is the “lynchpin of the terror network” and routinely hosts or organizes meetings of the network’s major leaders. See Jim Lobe, “Zarqawi Letter Complicates War Hawks Efforts to Link al Qaeda with Hussein, Iran;” http://www.fpif.org/pdf/gac/0402zarqawi.pdf. The Report (p. 241) finds “strong evidence” that Iran did facilitate this transit, and adds that “this topic requires further investigation.” But this matter is hardly a causus belli. On a more important level, it “found no evidence that Iran or Hezbollah was aware for what later became the 9/11 attack.” 

4)Report, 172, 499. 

5) Report, 329-30, 556-57. 

6) Report, 228-29. Cf. CNN, 6/18/04, "Cheney blasts media on al Qaeda-Iraq link," http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/18/cheney.iraq.al.qaeda/: "Asked if Iraq was involved in 9/11, he said, ‘We don't know." "What the commission says is they can't find evidence of that," he said. "We had one report, which is a famous report on the Czech intelligence service, and we've never been able to confirm or to knock it down."’ 

7) Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Freedom (Joshua Tree, CA: Tree of Life Publications, 2002); David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2004); Justin Raimundo, The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection (New York: Universe, 2003). 

8) Ahmed, 290; quoted in Griffin, 127. 

9) Griffin, 127-28. This budget increase is corroborated by the Washington Post: "The [CIA]'s budget expanded slowly in the late 1990s, to reach about $3 billion before the 2001 attacks, but Tenet was able to secure at least $1.5 billion more in the aftermath, in an implicit endorsement of the new path on which he immediately set the agency. The entire national foreign intelligence budget, which Tenet divulged in 1998 was $26.7 billion, has evidently grown to about $40 billion since then, said Steven Aftergood, an analyst at the Federation of American Scientists" (Washington Post, 6/4/04, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14026-2004Jun3.html). 

10) James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans (New York: Viking, 2004), 238. 

11) Project for a New American Century, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf, p. 51 (63). 

12) Report, 458. 

13) Michael Kane, “9/11 War Games – No Coincidence,” http://inn.globalfreepress.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=387; citing Newhouse News, 1/25/02, http://www.newhousenews.com/archive/story1a012802.html. Col. Marr at the Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) in Rome, N.Y. also wondered if the hijack report was "Part of the exercise?" (Aviation Week & Space Technology, June 3, 2002; http://www.aviationnow.com/content/publication/awst/20020603/avi_stor.htm). 

14) Report, 158. 

15) “Ben Sliney arrived for his first day of work as national operations manager” (James Bamford, A Pretext for War [New York: Doubleday, 2004], 42). Leidig told the 911 Commission about the difficulty he had establishing even an insecure link with FAA: “even that link kept failing” ( http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0604/062104c1.htm ). For more on this total confusion, see Report, 36, 38, 463. 

16) Bamford, 65. 

17) Report, 27. Cf. Air Force, Journal of the American Air Force Association, February 2002, http://www.afa.org/magazine/Feb2002/0202norad.asp: "NORAD was caught off guard on Sept. 11. The monitoring of threats went on as usual that day but NORAD operators were looking outward from U.S. borders, seeking incoming danger.” NORAD initially put out a press release stating that the fighters from Langley (129 miles from Washington) were only 105 miles from Washington when AA 77 hit the Pentagon (http://web.archive.org/web/20020615115751/http://www.norad.mil/presrelNORADTimelines.htm). The Report (27) disagrees, saying “The Langley fighters were about 150 miles away” (i.e. further away than when they took off). The Report notes (34, 44) that a number of other statements offered the Commission by NORAD officers in public testimony were “incorrect.” 

18) Griffin, 20. 

19) For steel to melt, there must be a temperature of about 2,770 degrees Fahrenheit. The maximum temperature in an open fire from refined kerosene (jet fuel) is about 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit. The oxygen-deprived WTC fires, giving off much black smoke, were "probably only 1,200°F or 1,300°F" (Thomas Eagar, NOVA, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/wtc/collapse.html). Yet clean-up crews reportedly found "hot spots of molten steel" in the WTC debris (Griffin, 20; cf. 22). 

20) http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/June2004WTC7StructuralFire&CollapseAnalysisPrint.pdf. 

21) Matthys Levy, author of Why Buildings Fall Down [New York, Norton, 1994], on NOVA, 4/30/02, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2907_wtc.html). Cf. Jerry Russell, Ph.D.: “Controlled demolitions have a striking and characteristic appearance of smooth, flowing collapse. As your eyes will tell you, [all three of] the World Trade Center collapses looked like controlled demolitions” (“Proof Of Controlled Demolition At The WTC,” http://www.attackonamerica.net/proofofcontrolleddemolitionatwtc.htm). Another coincidence is that the president of Controlled Demolition, Inc. wrote the plan for the clean-up at the WTC site (Griffin, 20). 

22) Controlled demolition requires the prior drilling of up to hundreds of holes, which are then separately filled with explosives to engineer a carefully timed progressive detonation sequence. One demolition of 17 buildings required 7,242 holes, 1,825 lb of explosives, 8,640 blasting caps and 37,200 ft of detonating cord. Even the partially destroyed Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City required 420 holes (Controlled Demolition, Inc. website, http://www.controlled-demolition.com/default.asp?reqMode=1&reqLocId=7&reqItemId=20030317124730). 

23) INN World Report, http://inn.globalfreepress.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=219. Files were destroyed in an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 cases. Among the destroyed documents were ones that may have demonstrated the relationship between Citigroup and the WorldCom bankruptcy (National Law Journal, 9/17/01; http://www.nylawyer.com/news/01/09/091701e.html). Believers in the controlled demolition theory have pointed to the extra security shifts put in for two weeks before 9/11, and the fact that a principal in the security firm for the WTC (Securacom) was the President’s younger brother Marvin Bush (Griffin, 180, at footnote 82). Their suspicions are enhanced by the rapid and illegal removal of the wreckage from this site. It was not a question of searching for survivors; the building had been empty for hours at the time of its collapse. 

24) FEMA, World Trade Center Building Performance Study, Chap. 5, Sect. 6.2, “Probable Collapse Sequence,” italics added; http://www.fema.gov/library/wtcstudy.shtm, quoted in Griffin, 22. 

25) In 2002 Congress authorized an investigation of the WTC collapse by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the US Commerce Department. It is scheduled to report in late 2004 (http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/factsheet/nist_investigation_911.htm) 

26) Report, 285. 

27) Testimony of Patrick J. Fitzgerald, U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois, 6/16/04. It is also clear that the Commission did nothing when Fitzgerald told it, "From 1994 until his arrest in 1998, [Mohamed] lived as an American citizen in California, applying for jobs as an FBI translator and working as a security guard for a defense contractor." Whatever the exact relationship of Mohamed to the FBI, it is clear from the public record that it was much more intimate than simply sending in job applications. See Peter Dale Scott, "9/11 Commission Misses FBI's Embarrassing Al Qaeda Dealings," Pacific News Service, 6/24/04, http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=2e24aeacc97518c20d3136c87d457910. 

28) In Mohamed’s plea bargain testimony, as summarized on a U.S. State Department website, he revealed that in late 1994 the FBI ordered him to fly from Kenya to New York, and he obeyed. “I received a call from an FBI agent who wanted to speak to me about the upcoming trial of United States v. Abdel Rahman [in connection with the 1993 WTC bombing]. I flew back to the United States, spoke to the FBI, but didn't disclose everything that I knew." (Judy Aita, “Ali Mohammed: The Defendant Who Did Not Go to Trial," 5/15/01; U.S. Department of State, International Information Programs, http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/pol/terror/01051502.htm). 

29) Cf. Peter Dale Scott, “Made in the U.S.A. - How the U.S. Manufactures Terrorists,” Pacific News Service, Sept. 19, 2001; http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=ef9e5d2b80208d9b52a9ceed585098d1. 

30) San Francisco Chronicle, 11/04/01. 

31) His companion, Essam Marzouk, is now serving 15 years of hard labor in Egypt after having been arrested in Azerbaijan. As of November 2001, Mohamed had still not been sentenced and was still believed to be supplying information from his prison cell. 

32) Globe and Mail, 11/22/01, http://www.mail-archive.com/hydro@topica.com/msg00224.html. 

33) Mohamed’s plea bargain testimony, loc. cit.; quoted in New York Times, 8/5/04. 

34) "Mohamed" worked briefly as a CIA informant in the early 1980s" (Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc. [New York: Free Press, 2001], 67). From 1987 to 1989, Mohamed "walked the halls of the U.S. military's top warfare planning center at Fort Bragg for more than two years as an Army sergeant” (Raleigh News & Observer, 11/14/01, http://www.s-t.com/daily/11-01/11-14-01/a01wn017.htm). “He was assigned to the U.S. Special Operations Command in Fort Bragg, the home of the Green Berets and the Delta Force, the elite counterterrorism squad" (San Francisco Chronicle, 11/4/01). 

35) Andrew Marshall, Independent, 11/1/98, http://billstclair.com/911timeline/1990s/independent110198.html: "Mr. Mohamed, it is clear from his record, was working for the U.S. government at the time he provided the training: he was a Green Beret, part of America's Special Forces…. A confidential CIA internal survey concluded that it was 'partly culpable' for the World Trade Centre bomb, according to reports at the time." Cf. Bergen, Holy War, Inc.,127-36. 

36) Washington Post, 6/19/02; quoted in Raimundo, 59. In a public letter to the Commission, Sibel Edmonds has since complained about problems it omiited or neglected to address in the Report. Among these: “After the terrorist attacks of September 11 we, the translators at the FBI's largest and most important translation unit, were told to slow down, even stop, translation of critical information related to terrorist activities so that the FBI could present the United States Congress with a record of 'extensive backlog of untranslated documents,' and justify its request for budget and staff increases. While FBI agents from various field offices were desperately seeking leads and suspects, and completely depending on FBI HQ and its language units to provide them with needed translated information, hundreds of translators were being told by their administrative supervisors not to translate and to let the work pile up.” ( http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0802-06.htm ). 

37) Raimundo, 59. 

38) Capitol Hill Blue, 8/2/04. However FBI Director Robert Mueller revealed in July 2004 that "A classified Justice Department investigation determined that [Edmonds’] allegations of security lapses in the FBI's translator program were at least partly responsible for her firing” (ibid.) Cf. New York Times, 7/29/04; http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/29/politics/29fbi.final.html. 

39) Time, http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,249997,00.html; quoted in Raimundo, 61; cf. Report, 275. It appears that the Commission did not interview Rowley or those she accused (Report, 540-41). 

40) Report, 275. Since I wrote the above, a third FBI whistle-blower, Mike German, has complained publicly that his superiors blocked his proposals to infiltrate a pro-Islamist organization, “botched the investigation, falsified documents to discredit their own sources, then froze him out” (New York Times, 8/2/04, A15). 

41) In a Public Letter to the Commission, Sibel Edmonds has since complained about problems it omitted or neglected to address in the Report. Among these: “After the terrorist attacks of September 11 we, the translators at the FBI's largest and most important translation unit, were told to slow down, even stop, translation of critical information related to terrorist activities so that the FBI could present the United States Congress with a record of 'extensive backlog of untranslated documents', and justify its request for budget and staff increases. While FBI agents from various field offices were desperately seeking leads and suspects, and completely depending on FBI HQ and its language units to provide them with needed translated information, hundreds of translators were being told by their administrative supervisors not to translate and to let the work pile up.” (http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0802-06.htm). 

42) The Report’s sections on the rise of al-Qaeda begin with the year 1988, the year of the termination of the CIA’s operation in Afghanistan. An initial paragraph about the U.S. effort, which does not mention the CIA, ends with the misleading statement that “Bin Ladin and his comrades…received little or no assistance from the United States” (Report, 56). (This ignores, for example, the recruiting and training of fighters by Ali Mohamed in Brooklyn, New York, while allegedly on the U.S. payroll.) 

43) This is not so much a charge against the officers of the CIA, many of whom have opposed reckless adventures, as against the secret powers conferred on the CIA, which have recurringly proved an irresistible temptation to adventurers like William Casey in high places. See Peter Dale Scott, "The CIA's Secret Powers: Afghanistan, 9/11, and America's Most Dangerous Enemy." Critical Asian Studies, 35:2 (2003), 233-258. 

44) Austin Chronicle, 7/30/04; http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2004-07-30/pols_hightower.html. 

45) We have learned recently that Cheney and Rumsfeld have been part of a "national security apparatus" associated with these programs “over three decades…even when [both men] were out of the executive branch of government” (James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet [New York: Viking, 2004], 145.) 

46) Report, 146-50. 

47) Report, 228-29. 

48) Peter Dale Scott, “CIA Training of Islamists Haunts GIs in Iraq,” Pacific New Service, 11/26/03, http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=596adeec77f4e134799a1f540d6af825. 

49) Joseph S. Nye, Jr., The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), 9. 

50) Report, 374-79. 

51) As the Report notes, since the invasions “favorable ratings for the U.S. have fallen from 61% to 15% in Indonesia and from 71% to 38% among Muslims in Nigeria" (Report, 375; quoting Pew Global Attitudes Project report). Meanwhile the unfavorability ratings for our President are 90 percent in Morocco and 96 percent in Jordan (New York Times, 8/2/04, A21). 

California Monthly is a publication of the California Alumni Association. Contact: P.O. Box 2569, Redondo Beach  CA  90278-2569. 1-877-225-2586, socal_office@alumni.berkeley.edu  

source: http://www.alumni.berkeley.edu/Alumni/Cal_Monthly/September_2004/How_to_fight_terrorism.asp 29aug04