FEBRUARY 7, 2004

WASHINGTON, D.C. - IN 1962, some of President John F. Kennedy’s military advisors, led by then-Army Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, devised a phony terrorism campaign called Operation Northwoods in an attempt to justify an invasion of Cuba to overthrow Fidel Castro. Among the ideas these U.S. government officials discussed were killing innocent Americans in cities and blaming Cuban “terrorists,” blowing up U.S. ships and blaming Castro, blaming Cuba if the spaceship with John Glenn exploded [as some blamed Arab terrorists for the explosion of the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003], provoking a war by flying a spy plane over Cuba, and paying a Cuban official to attack U.S. forces at the Guantanamo Bay naval base.

     The CIA even paid a Canadian agricultural technician working as an adviser to the Cuban government to infect turkeys there with a virus that would produce the fatal Newcastle Disease. Some 8,000 turkeys died. 1

     Kennedy reportedly rejected the phony campaign and died himself in a suspicious assassination allegedly involving U.S. agents the following year.

     Just one year after JFK’s murder, Lyndon Johnson and U.S. military officials lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident to justify escalating the Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese did attack the USS Maddox in August 1964 but only after the U.S. spied on and attacked North Vietnam. Two days after that, Pentagon officials and Johnson lied about a phony second attack on the Maddox, which later was judged not to have taken place, to gain more support for the war. 2

     In the 1980s, some U.S. government officials came up with Operation Orpheus, a secret plan to provoke a limited nuclear war with the former Soviet Union to cover up Iran-Contra misdeeds and install a military dictatorship in the U.S. Iran-Contra criminal Oliver North, former CIA Director William Casey, and former CIA Director and then-Vice President George Bush Sr. were allegedly heavily involved. In fact, Bush would become president of the provisional military government under the scenario, according to retired Navy Lt. Cmdr. Al Martin, a former officer in the secretive Office of Naval Intelligence. 3

     Casey and Bush were also reportedly involved in the 1980 “October Surprise,” an alleged deal with the Iranian government not to release American hostages until after the presidential election to ensure the Reagan-Bush team’s victory over Jimmy Carter. The hostages were suspiciously released minutes after Reagan’s inauguration. Iran got millions in cash and secret arms shipments, and also benefited from later secret deals during the Reagan administration that were part of the Iran-Contra scandal. 4

     Operation Orpheus was also reportedly rejected by saner heads in the Reagan administration - amazingly, there were a few sane heads there to be found. As for “October Surprise,” well, that apparently happened without a hitch.

     In September 2000, the neo-conservative think tank Project for the New American Century released a report that advocated that the U.S. assert its military dominance over the world to shape “the international security order in line with American principles and interests,” push for “regime change” in Iraq and China, among other countries, and “fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars.” Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, and Lewis Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff, were prominent members of the Washington, D.C.-based organization. 5

     “The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security,” the publication said. “While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” 6

     The report added the U.S. military needed to be transformed to control not just the Middle East and other regions, but space and cyberspace, even to the points of establishing “U.S. Space Forces” and developing biological and electrical weapons. This transformation would likely take a long time “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor,” the authors wrote. 7

     A year later, the group had its “new Pearl Harbor.”

     In October 2002, a year after the U.S. attacked Afghanistan and a few months before its invasion of Iraq, a Pentagon committee recommended the formation of a “super-intelligence body” that would launch operations to “stimulate reactions” among terrorists and states that supposedly had weapons of mass destruction. The body would prod terrorists to action to justify attacks by the U.S. 8

     Welcome to the fine print of Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the larger War on Terrorism.

     Read on at your own risk.

Haunting questions

     In early 2004, I sat in a Congressional hearing room after taking off early from my regular work day. I listened to testimony before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, which formed in 2002 only after much political pressure by family members of victims and a few politicians.

     My mind wandered, as Chairman Tom Kean spoke about various “intelligence failures,” such as not being able to spot terrorist travel documents and senior intelligence officials misusing information, which supposedly helped lead to the tragedies of Sept. 11, 2001.

     I asked myself questions that seemed dangerous to even consider, as I struggled to decide whether I should open such cans of worms. Too late - those doors opened, and I had to enter. There was no turning back.

     Did some American officials really want to avert the terrorist attacks they blamed on Osama bin Laden?

     Or did they want them to occur to help bring about some deeper plans for world domination, much as the 1933 burning of the Reichstag conveniently aided Hitler’s power-mad schemes? [Numerous historians believe that fire was set by the Nazis, who blamed and executed a Dutch Communist.]

     Were the ghosts of Operations Northwoods and Orpheus coming home to roost, haunting me and others as we listened in on our latest collective nightmare?

     Why was no one blaming Saudi Arabia, where most of the Sept. 11 terrorists were from and whose royal family reportedly financed bin Laden?

     Why did no one bring up the fact that our CIA financed and trained bin Laden and thousands of other real and potential terrorists in camps in Afghanistan as they fought the Soviets during the Reagan-Bush Sr. administration of the 1980s?

     What responsibility did our government have after those terrorists turned against us?

     Or were some of the terrorists paid by us to turn against us in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union to provide the bogeyman that our military/defense structure always needs to stay in business?

     At the very least, did Bush and others fiddle while the World Trade Center burned?

     Why did Bush strangely tell a joke to the elementary school students immediately after hearing about the second New York City plane crash, and why did he not seem that surprised or concerned?

     Why didn’t Bush leave that damn classroom for some 30 minutes as Americans died horrible deaths?

     I wanted to yell these questions and others to the commission. But I sat in frustrated silence, my mind racing towards a finish line I couldn’t even imagine. It wasn’t the right time or place to make a scene and risk arrest, harassment, and worse.

     Not yet.

Bin Laden supported by Reagan administration’s “Frankenstein factory”

     Contrary to what many Bush administration officials want you to believe, bin Laden was no stranger to the United States, especially the intelligence agencies under the Reagan-Bush Sr. administration.

     Bin Laden, one of 57 children born into one of Saudi Arabia’s richest oil/construction families, received arms, money, and training from the Reagan-Bush Sr. administration as he fought against the Russians in the 1980s in Afghanistan. 9

     Bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan from Saudi Arabia in 1979. He used his experience in the construction trade and money to build bases where the Afghan resistance fighters, or Mujahadeen, could be trained by American and Pakistani agents to help keep the Soviets from controlling Afghanistan. During the 1980s and early 1990s, the CIA reportedly spent an estimated $500 million on such bases and training in Afghanistan. 10

     Only a portion of that was spent on bin Laden’s bases, as bin Laden was not believed to be a major player in the war, The Guardian reported. But bin Laden was loosely connected with the Hezb-i-Islami faction of the mujahideen led by Gulbuddin Hekmat, which was a major factor and received American weapons like Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.

     Focusing only on bin Laden was a mistake, an American official told The Guardian. “The point is that we created a whole cadre of trained and motivated people who turned against us,” he said. “It’s a classic Frankenstein’s monster situation.” 11

     In fact, American officials estimated that from 1985 to 1992, some 12,500 people were trained in bomb-making, sabotage, and urban guerrilla warfare in the camps that the CIA helped form.

     The campaign even included shipping recruits enticed by bin Laden to the U.S. to be trained by the CIA and then returned to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets, said Michael Springmann, who headed the U.S. State Department’s visa bureau in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, during the Reagan-Bush Sr. years.

     “In Saudi Arabia, I was repeatedly ordered by high-level State Department officials to issue visas [to the U.S.] to unqualified applicants,” he told investigative journalist Greg Palast. “I complained bitterly at the time there.....What I was protesting was, in reality, an effort to bring recruits, rounded up by Osama bin Laden, to the United States for terrorist training by the CIA.” 12

     And where did the “recruits” go after the Soviets essentially pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989?

     Many joined bin Laden’s al Qaeda organization.

     As Palast said, “Bin Laden and his bloody brethren were created in America’s own Frankenstein factory.” 13

Roots of bin Laden’s anti-Americanism

     Bin Laden’s beef with the U.S. reportedly began after the Bush Sr. administration asked to launch attacks on Iraqi forces in Kuwait from Saudi Arabia during the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91, and the Saudi government granted the wish.

     The ongoing U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, which increased after 1991, was an “occupation of the land of the holy places,” bin Laden told CNN in 1997. 14

     After bin Laden’s involvement in Saudi groups opposed to the reigning family led by King Fahd, the Saudi government took away bin Laden’s citizenship in 1994 but did not arrest him.

     Two years later, bin Laden issued a fatwah, a religious ruling urging Muslims to kill U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia and Somalia. He gave another in 1998 that called for attacks on American civilians. Bin Laden also admitted to CNN that al Qaeda members killed American troops in Somalia in 1993. He was blamed for the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa, as well as others, but refused to admit guilt in those tragedies. 15

     That’s the official, on-the-surface story. The behind-the-scenes story may be quite different. I mean, am I the only one who thinks it was more than a little suspicious that bin Laden suddenly turned in 1990 on the country that supported his efforts in Afghanistan so much in the 1980s?

     Am I the only one who thought it was more than a little suspicious that Saddam Hussein, who our government and intelligence agencies supported with training and weapons about as much as they did bin Laden during the 1980s, suddenly decided to invade Kuwait in 1990 and give the U.S. military a reason to beef up the defense budget once again?

     Am I the only one who thought it was more than a little suspicious that both bin Laden and Hussein took such actions in the same year that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall and Soviet Union in 1989, just when many Americans were talking about what to do with the peace dividend?

     Our military needed some new bogeymen. And I wondered if CIA contractors bin Laden and Hussein answered the call.

Bin Laden’s family ties to Bush clan

     The bin Laden family had direct dealings with the Bush clan.

     For instance, bin Laden’s late older brother, Salem, hired Bush family friend James Bath as a U.S. agent in 1976. Bath reportedly used money from Salem to open a partnership with Bush Jr. in Arbusto Energy, a Texas oil company Bush formed in 1977. 16

     Bath has said that he invested his own money in Arbusto, not Salem money, but the fact was he was being paid by Salem, among others, at the time. 17

     Then there was the BCCI connection. BCCI was a Pakistani-operated institution reportedly used by U.S. intelligence agents to funnel money to bin Laden and others in Afghanistan as they fought against the Soviet-backed government in the 1980s, according to author Jim Marrs. BCCI, which was closed by federal investigators in 1991 after suffering some $10 billion in losses, allegedly helped Bush Jr. gain an interest in Harken Energy. 18

     Bush Jr. made a suspicious stock sale two months before Saddam Hussein sent Iraqi troops into Kuwait, causing some to speculate he was tipped off by his family’s Middle Eastern connections. Bush sold two-thirds of his Harken stock, netting himself nearly $1 million in profit. The stock dropped after the Iraqi invasion began. 19

     During the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91, the Bush Sr. administration paid Binladen Brothers Construction - now the Saudi Binladen Group - to help build airfields for U.S. aircraft. The family reportedly did not disown Osama bin Laden until 1994, when he was officially stripped of Saudi citizenship. When he left Saudi Arabia, Osama took inherited assets from the family business worth as much as $250 million - so some of that 1990-91 U.S. money went to Osama, once again. 20

     The bin Laden firm later was hired to construct an American air base in Saudi Arabia, despite the fact that Osama had been blamed for terrorist acts such as the truck bombing of the Khobar Towers at the Dhahran base, which killed 19 Americans in 1996. 21

     Another close connection between bin Laden and the Bush family was the former’s investment in The Carlyle Group, a huge international investment and defense firm. Carlyle directors at various times have included Bush Sr., former Reagan Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci, former Bush Secretary of State James Baker, and former Reagan aide and GOP operative Richard Darman. Bush Jr. at one time was a director of a Carlyle subsidiary.

     Carlyle officials have said they stopped dealing with that family since Sept. 11, 2001. But before that occurred, Bush Sr. himself visited the bin Laden family in Saudi Arabia twice on Carlyle’s behalf. 22

Other Saudis enrich Bush clan

     The Bush family also had a long history of involvement with other Saudis. The Saudi royal family itself was a key investor in Carlyle.

     “Saudi Prince Waleed bin Talal employed Carlyle as investment banker in his purchase of 10 percent of Citicorp’s preferred stock,” Palast told Buzzflash.com. “The choice of Carlyle for the high-fee work was odd, as the group is not an investment bank. One would almost think the Saudi potentate wanted to enrich Carlyle’s connected payrollers.” 23

     In addition, Bush Jr.’s Harken Energy was saved by Sheik Abdullah Bakhsh, a Saudi billionaire, and by the Emirate of Bahrain, who gave Bush’s company an “extraordinary off-shore oil concession,” Palast said. “Bush’s teeny-weeny Texas dry-land operation was chosen over Amoco Oil,” Palast said. 24

     The fact that Bush would probably have gone bust without the Saudi royal payments created a poisonous situation, Palast said. “It influenced a policy that ordered our intelligence agencies to say, ‘Hands off the Saudis, hands off the Persian Gulf potentates, we must not annoy them with investigations of their funding terrorist groups,’“ he said. 25

The Saudi Arabia Sept. 11 connection

     To justify attacking Iraq in 2003, Bush and others tried to link Iraq to al Qaeda.

     But an easier link to al Qaeda would be Saudi Arabia.

     Some 15 of the 19 terrorists who hijacked the four planes on Sept. 11 were from Saudi Arabia. No one was from Iraq - the other four were from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Lebanon.

     Al Qaeda had also forged alliances with like-minded fundamentalist groups such as jihad groups in Saudi Arabia, according to the U.S. government. But such groups in Iraq were not on that list. 26

     And of the 158 terrorism suspects being held at the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in early 2002, well more than half - 100 - were Saudi citizens. 27

     Still, Interior Minister Prince Nayef told The Associated Press in February 2002 that Saudi Arabia was not responsible for the actions of the Sept. 11 hijackers, that the Islam practiced in that country was not of the extremist kind practiced under the Taliban. Nayef suspiciously added that bin Laden was a “tool” of others, rather than the mastermind of the attacks, but he declined to say who he thought was the mastermind. 28

     How could Nayef say that bin Laden was but a “tool,” then claim that his government had no other knowledge of the attacks? He had to have some information that U.S. officials didn’t since most American officials said bin Laden was the mastermind.

     That was the same Nayef who urged a subordinate to withhold evidence from the police that showed members of the royal family hiring prostitutes, according to wiretapped conversations collected by the U.S. National Security Agency. 29

     Some blamed the roots of the Sept. 11 attacks on Saudi Arabia for, among other things, not jailing bin Laden when it had the chance in the early 1990s. “The Saudis produced 15 of the 9/11 hijackers, they exported bin Laden rather than jailing him, and they provide huge amounts of money to terrorists’ organizations,” said one post to the blog of DanielPipes.org. 30

     Pulitizer Prize-winning American journalist Seymour Hersh and Project Censored Award-winning British journalist Palast confirmed the payments by the royal Faud government to al Qaeda.

     “The NSA intercepts have demonstrated to analysts that by 1996 Saudi money was supporting Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda and other extremist groups in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Yemen, and Central Asia, and throughout the Persian Gulf region,” Hersh wrote in The New Yorker. 31

     Palast added that “much of the money paid by the Saudis was not to support al Qaeda but extorted by Osama as a kind of protection pay-off: Here’s some loot, now leave our Rolls Royces alone in Riyadh, and go play in Afghanistan.” 32

Bush protects his friends, the Saudis

     So with such ties between bin Laden and the Saudi government, why did Bush not go after the Saudis after Sept. 11?

     The reasons came down to money and Saudi leaders’ long-standing relationships with U.S. military and political leaders, weapons dealers, and oil companies.

     King Fahd’s regime was a major financial backer of the Reagan administration’s anti-Communist campaign in Latin America and of the Afghan-Soviet war in the 1980s. Saudi officials have contributed millions of dollars to U.S. charities, which also bought support.

     American construction and oil companies landed billions of dollars’ worth of contracts every year from Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer - Iraq ranked second. Among those U.S. contractors was Halliburton, the Texas-based oil firm, when it was headed by Cheney. 33

Bush blocks CIA, FBI investigations of Saudis before Sept. 11

     In January 2001, shortly after Bush took the White House, U.S. intelligence agencies were told to “back off” from investigating the bin Laden family and the Saudi royal families, Palast said. 34

     In early 2001, some FBI agents wanted to check into two members of the bin Laden family, Abdullah and Omar. They heard the pair worked with the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, which the FBI labeled as “a suspected terrorist organization.” The governments of India and the Philippines also tied WAMY to terrorist acts. But FBI senior managers told agents not to pursue the bin Ladens, Palast said. 35

     Palast said he located the former home of Abdullah and Omar in a Washington, D.C., suburb that was close to an office of WAMY and near where four of the Sept. 11 hijackers were listed as having lived.

     After Bush took office, there was also a “major policy shift” at the National Security Agency, Palast said.

     Investigators were ordered to back off from reviewing Saudi Arabian financing of terror networks, especially the Saudi royals. Osama was the exception, but agents could not look too closely into his finances, Palast said. 36

U.S. helps evacuate bin Laden family after Sept. 11

     Another odd development was how some U.S. officials reportedly helped in the evacuation of 24 members of Osama bin Laden’s family from the United States three days after the terror attacks. FBI agents even took family members to a secret assembly point, and they left on a private charter plane, The New York Times reported. 37

     Bush himself allegedly met with Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. believed to have organized the exodus, just two days after the attacks, Scotland’s Edinburgh Evening News reported. Bin Sultan was reportedly so close to Bush he was known as “Bandar Bush.” 38

     After Sept. 11, the Saudi royal family publicly denied giving money to al Qaeda, contrary to NSA wiretaps and other sources. Still, Bush supported his friends, who agreed to allow U.S. forces to use a command-and-control center in Saudi Arabia to go after the Taliban. “As far as the Saudi Arabians go, they’ve been nothing but cooperative,” Bush said at a Sept. 24 news conference. 39

     In 2002, Bush even welcomed Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, who effectively ruled the country since King Fahd suffered a stroke in 1995, as a special guest at his ranch. Abdullah reportedly threatened to penalize the U.S. on oil prices because of its Israeli support, but Bush was nothing but upbeat publicly about the meeting.

     “One of the really positive things out of this meeting was the fact that the Crown Prince and I established a strong personal bond,” Bush said to reporters. “I had the honor of showing him my ranch. He’s a man who’s got a farm and he understands the land, and I really took great delight in being able to drive him around in a pickup truck and showing him the trees and my favorite spots.” 40

     Well, isn’t that special? But what about the Saudi link to Sept. 11?

     “Right after 9/11, [Abdullah] was one of the strongest voices of condemnation,” Bush replied. “He understands how devious Osama bin Laden has been. He knows that - that anybody who - you know, that a strategy by some would be to split the United States and Saudi Arabia.....We’re not going to let that happen. So he’s been very strong in the condemnation of terror, for which I’m grateful.”

     So who do you believe, Hersh and Palast, who have a history of exposing governmental lies, or Bush, who has a history of telling such lies?

     A few months after Bush’s statements, Saudi Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz, Prince Turki al-Faisal bin Abdul Aziz, and Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir died in an eight-day period. The trio was believed to be intermediaries of payments between the Saudi royal families and Osama bin Laden. Ahmed died at age 43 from a heart attack, Turki died in a car crash, and Fahd died of “thirst” while traveling east of Riyadh. 41

     About a year after those deaths, the House-Senate committee investigating Sept. 11 released its report. Some 28 pages were deleted. Numerous Congress members said they referred to, among other aspects, the Saudi royal payments to bin Laden. 42

Prior warnings of Sept. 11

     Some Internet sites, such as www.unansweredquestions.org and www.wanttoknow.info, have developed excellent timelines of events that show the Bush administration, CIA, and others had ample warnings before the Sept. 11 tragedy, though the warnings did not forecast the exact date.

     Between 1998 and 2000, spies in Afghanistan reported bin Laden’s location three times. Each time, former President Bill Clinton approved an attack, but he was rebuked by top CIA officials, according to The New York Times. 43

     In August 1998, lower level CIA agents even reported that Arab terrorists planned to fly a bomb-filled aircraft into the World Trade Center. An airport was also mentioned as a target. CIA Director George Tenet issued a “declaration of war” on al Qaeda in December 1998, but other agencies failed to adequately follow up on the declaration. For instance, on Sept 10, 2001, the FBI only had one analyst assigned full time to al Qaeda. 44

     In fact, when Clinton launched cruise missiles against some bin Laden bases in Afghanistan in 1998 in retaliation for the bombing of U.S. embassies in Africa, Republicans like Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Rep. Jim Gibbons of Nevada charged him with waging a “wag the dog” scheme to divert attention from their favorite person, Monica Lewinsky. Such criticism came even after CIA and Pentagon officials said bin Laden was not only responsible for the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa but was planning more terrorist attacks against Americans. If more Republicans had supported the mission, perhaps there would have been enough political will to actually stop bin Laden well before Sept. 11, 2001. 45

     In August 2000, French intelligence sources confirmed a man arrested in Boston by the FBI was an Islamic militant and a member of al Qaeda. The FBI knew the man was taking flying lessons and was in possession of technical information on Boeing aircraft. 46

     It’s fair to criticize Clinton for failing to do more about terrorism during his presidency - for example, Clinton could have stared down those who asked him questions about Monica and said he had more important things to do - like do something to stop bin Laden. But it’s also fair to criticize 1990s Congressional Republican leaders, who seemed more interested in Clinton’s sex life than bin Laden’s deadly plans, for the same failure.

     And it’s fair to criticize Bush and many other Republicans for their failures to act on numerous warnings they received about bin Laden before Sept. 11, 2001.

     Clinton even said he warned Bush before he left office in 2001 that bin Laden was the biggest security threat the U.S. faced. Clinton said Bush maintained that Iraq was a bigger threat than bin Laden. 47

Bush given general warnings about a possible attack beforehand

     Bush himself was given general warnings before Sept. 11, 2001, about a possible attack against the United States. But his administration’s actions and inaction about warnings in the months before that tragedy were baffling, to say the least.

     For example, a plan that the Clinton administration devised to attack al Qaeda was shelved for eight months by Bush and was only approved a week before the Sept. 11 attacks. 48

     Eleanor Hill, the staff director of the joint House-Senate committee that looked into Sept. 11, testified in September 2003 before the House Select Committee on Homeland Security that the National Security Agency alone reported 33 “communications indicating a possible, imminent terrorist attack in 2001.”

     “During the spring and summer of 2001, the intelligence community experienced a significant increase in the information indicating that bin Laden intended to strike United States interests in the very near future,” Hill said. 49

     In the spring of 2001, reports by officials from the U.S. Army War College, Energy Department, and other government agencies advocated war with Iraq to control its oil and to hide the reasons for the war to increase public support, according to Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald.

     One report was commissioned by Florida heist frontman Jim Baker and given to Cheney. 50

     By Feb. 2002, two former Unocal Oil employees, Hamid Karzai and Zalmay Khalizad, had become interim president of Afghanistan and U.S. envoy, respectively. Large American military bases were built on the route of a projected pipeline to carry oil and natural gas through Afghanistan from the landlocked Caspian Sea. 51

     The Asian Development Bank, which wants to finance the proposed $3.5 billion project, spent millions on feasibility studies along the recommended route from Herat to Kandahar by early 2004, syndicated columnist and cartoonist Ted Rall wrote. The U.S.-led governing coalition also promised to make paving a highway along that route the country’s top rebuilding priority. 52

More warnings

     In May 2001, top U.S. security officials again rejected Sudan’s offer of a file on bin Laden and al Qaeda. They had rejected the offer since 1995. A senior CIA official called it “the worst single intelligence failure in this whole terrible business.....It is reasonable to say that had we had this data we may have had a better chance of preventing the attacks,” the London Observer reported. 53

     In June 2001, German intelligence agents reportedly warned the CIA and Israel that Middle Eastern terrorists were “planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture.” During that summer, Russian President Putin made similar warnings to U.S. officials. 54

     In addition, FBI managers dismissed field operatives’ warnings of bin Laden operatives in U.S. flight schools that same summer. The FBI claimed that it had insufficient forces to track down the leads, but during the same time, the bureau squandered tens of thousands of agent hours going after Wen Ho Lee, a Los Alamos scientist who was never charged with spying. 55

     Despite those warnings and others, Bush administration officials insisted after Sept. 11 that they didn’t know about the possibility of commercial planes being flown into buildings. “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile,” National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice said on May 16, 2002. 56

     Why did Rice tell such an obvious lie? That alone should be enough to get her fired.

     In July 2001, a CIA agent reportedly visited bin Laden as he received kidney treatment at a hospital in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. 57

     That same month, former Pakistan Foreign Secretary Niaz Naik was alerted by American officials that military action against Afghanistan would be launched by that October, unless bin Laden was captured and handed over to the U.S., according to author Jim Marrs. 58

     In August, Israeli Mossad agents traveled to Washington and warned the FBI and CIA that up to 200 terrorists had slipped into the U.S. and planned a major assault there. 59

     The Mossad even gave the CIA a list of terrorists, and four of the names were Sept. 11 hijackers, including their leader, Mohammed Atta. 60

     Also that August, an FBI supervisor said he was trying to keep a hijacker from “flying a plane into the WTC,” according to a Senate report. His bosses criticized him for notifying the CIA, according to another FBI agent. 61

     In May 2002, FBI Agent Robert Wright formally accused his bosses of deliberately halting investigations that might have prevented the tragedy. He was threatened with retribution if he talked to Congress. 62

     That same month, Agent Coleen Rowley, Minneapolis chief division counsel, wrote a memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller, accusing Mueller and other top FBI officials of “a delicate and subtle shading/skewing of facts” related to the Sept. 11 investigation. Rowley was involved in the investigation of Zaccarias Moussaoui, a French-Moroccan who was arrested in August 2001 on immigration charges after he acted suspiciously while training at a flight school. He was later linked to al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 plot. 63