After years of reporting on the Global War on Terror,
many questions behind the US attacks remain unresolved
Afghanistan
was bombed and invaded because of 9/11. I was there from the start, even before
9/11. On August 20, 2001, I interviewed commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, the
“Lion of the Panjshir,” who told me about an “unholy alliance” of the Taliban,
al-Qaeda and the ISI (Pakistani intel).
Back
in Peshawar, I learned that something really big was coming: my article
was published by Asia Times on August 30. Commander
Massoud was killed on September 9: I received a terse email from a Panjshir
source, only stating, “the commander has been shot.” Two days later, 9/11
happened.
And
yet, the day before, none other than Osama bin Laden, in person, was in a Pakistani hospital in Rawalpindi, receiving
treatment, as CBS reported. Bin Laden was proclaimed the perpetrator already at
11am on 9/11 – with no investigation whatsoever. It should have been not
exactly hard to locate him in Pakistan and “bring him to justice.”
In December 2001 I was in Tora Bora
tracking bin Laden – under B-52 bombers and side by side with Pashtun
mujahideen. Later, in 2011, I would revisit the day bin Laden vanished forever.
One year after 9/11, I was back in
Afghanistan for an in-depth investigation of the killing of Massoud.
By then it was possible to establish a Saudi connection: the letter of
introduction for Massoud’s killers, who posed as journalists, was facilitated
by commander Sayyaf, a Saudi asset.
For
three years my life revolved around the Global War on Terror; most of the time
I lived literally on the road, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, the
Persian Gulf and Brussels. At the start of ‘Shock and Awe’ on Iraq, in March
2003, Asia Times published my in-depth investigation of which neo-cons concocted
the war on Iraq.
In
2004, roving across the US, I re-traced the Taliban’s trip to Texas, and how a top priority,
since the Clinton years all the way to the neo-cons, was about what I had
baptized as “Pipelineistan” – in this case how to build
the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline, bypassing Iran and Russia, and
extending US control of Central and South Asia.
Later on, I delved into the hard questions the 9/11
Commission never asked, and how Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign was totally
conditioned by and dependent on 9/11.
Michael Ruppert, a CIA whistleblower, who may – or may
not – have committed suicide in 2014, was a top 9/11 analyst. We exchanged a lot of information,
and always emphasized the same points: Afghanistan was all about (existent)
heroin and (non-existent) pipelines.
In 2011, the late, great Bob Parry
would debunk more Afghanistan lies. And in 2017, I would
detail a top reason why the US will never leave Afghanistan: the heroin rat line.
Now, President
Trump may have identified a possible Afghan deal – which the Taliban, who
control two-thirds of the country, are bound to refuse, as it allows withdrawal
of only 5,000 out of 13,000 US troops. Moreover, the US ‘Deep State’ is absolutely against any
deal, as well as India and the rickety government in Kabul.
But Pakistan and
China are in favor, especially because Beijing plans to incorporate Kabul into
the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and have Afghanistan admitted as a member
of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, thus attaching the Hindu Kush and the
Khyber Pass to the ongoing Eurasia integration process.
Praying for a Pearl
Eighteen years after the game-changing
fact, we all remain hostages of 9/11. US
neocons, gathered at the Project for the New American Century, had been praying
for a “Pearl Harbor” to reorient US foreign policy since 1997. Their prayers
were answered beyond their wildest dreams.
Already in The Grand Chessboard, also published in 1997, former National Security
Adviser and Trilateral Commission co-founder Zbigniew Brzezinski, nominally not
a neocon, had pointed out that the American public “supported America’s engagement in
World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor.”
So,
Brzezinski added, America “may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on
foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely
perceived direct external threat.”
As an
attack on the homeland, 9/11 generated the Global War on Terror, launched at
11pm on the same day, initially christened “The Long War” by the Pentagon,
later sanitized as Overseas Contingency Operations by the Obama administration.
This cost trillions of dollars, killed over half a million people and branched out into
illegal wars against seven Muslim nations – all justified on “humanitarian
grounds” and allegedly supported by the “international community.”
Year after year, 9/11 is essentially a You Have The Right
to Accept Only The Official Version ritual ceremony, even as widespread
evidence suggests the US government knew 9/11 would happen and did not stop it.
Three days
after 9/11, the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that in June 2001, German
intelligence warned the CIA that Middle East terrorists were “planning to
hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of
American and Israeli culture.”
In August 2001, President Putin ordered Russian intel to
tell the US government “in the strongest possible terms” of imminent attacks on
airports and government buildings, MSNBC revealed in an interview with Putin
that was broadcast on September 15 that year.
No US government agency has released any information
on who used foreknowledge of 9/11 in the financial markets. The US Congress did
not even raise the issue. In Germany, investigative financial journalist Lars
Schall has been working for years on a massive study detailing to a great
extent insider trading before 9/11.
Mr Mueller, I presume
Robert Mueller
was the Director of the FBI from 2001 to 2003. He was appointed by President
Bush only one week before 9/11. Three days after 9/11, Mueller said, “there
were no warning signs that I’m aware of” pointing to the possibility of
airplanes crashing into buildings.
In fact FBI
agents repeatedly accused HQ of blocking myriad investigations before 9/11 that
could have prevented it.
In a devastating book, The FBI Accomplice of 9/11 (Documents), written in
French and recently translated into English, Patrick Pasin painstakingly tracks
all warnings on record: not
only to the FBI, directly, but also including the by now notorious “August 6
memo,” which referred to planned attacks involving multiple airplane
hijackings. Then National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice famously dismissed
the memo as “very vague,” “very non-specific” and “nothing really new here.”
Pasin meticulously aims to prove that the FBI knew all
there was to know about indications toward the possibility of a 9/11. But then
the bureau silenced them; buried them; made them disappear; fell into a
prolonged comma; and, in quite serious instances, may have even forged false
evidence, as in arguably fabricating a list of Muslim hijackers, complete with
the finding of indestructible passports, and forging impossible phone calls
placed at 30,000 feet.
Trump knows buildings
Discrediting
the official, immutable 9/11 narrative remains the ultimate taboo. Hundreds of architects and engineers engaged in meticulous
technical debunking of all aspects of 9/11’s official story are summarily
dismissed as “conspiracy theorists.”
In the afternoon of 9/11, Donald Trump
the real estate developer (not yet President of the United States) was interviewed by phone by Channel 9 in New York.
Fasten your
seat belts, because this is incandescent. The serial money quotes start rolling
at 5:20:
Channel 9:
“There is a great deal of questions about whether or not the damage and the
ultimate destruction of the buildings was caused by the airplanes, by architectural
defect or possibly by bombs, or after-shocks. Do you have any thoughts on
that?”
Donald
Trump: “It wasn’t architectural defect. The World Trade Center was always known
as a very, very strong building. Don’t forget that it took a big bomb in the
basement [in 1993]. Now the basement is the most vulnerable place, because that
is your foundation and it withstood that. And I got to see that area about 3 or
4 days after it took place, because one of my structural engineers actually
took me for a tour because he did the building. And I said ‘I can’t believe
it’. The building was standing solid and half of the columns were blown out.
This was an unbelievably powerful building if you know anything about
structure. It was one of the first buildings that was built from the outside.
The steel, the reason the WTC had such narrow windows is that in between all
the windows you had steel on the outside of the building. That’s why when I
first looked at it you had big, heavy I-beams. When I first looked at it I
couldn’t believe it because there was a hole in the steel. And this was steel
that was … you remember the width of the windows of the World Trade Center,
folks, I think that you know, if you were ever up there, they were quite narrow
and in between was this heavy steel. I said: How could a plane, even a 767 or
747 or whatever it might have been, how could it possibly go through the steel?
I happen to think that they had not only a plane,
but they had bombs that exploded almost simultaneously. [italics mine].
Because I just can’t imagine anything being able to go through that wall. Most
buildings are built with the steel on the inside around the elevator shafts.
This one was built from the outside, which is the strongest structure you can
have. And it was almost just like a can of soup.”
Channel 9: “You know…we were looking at pictures all
morning long of that plane coming into Building #2. And when you see that
approach the far side, then all of a sudden within another millisecond the
explosion pops out the other side.”
Donald
Trump: “Right. I just think that there was a plane with more
than jet fuel.” [italics mine]
Donald Trump may be extremely controversial – and all
things for all people. But one thing the former real estate developer and
current President of the United States does know about is building
construction.
Serious questions
In contrast, skepticism rooted in Greek
and Latin tradition came up with arguably the best documentary on 9/11: Zero,
an Italian production. Just as arguably the most stimulating book on 9/11 is
also Italian: The Myth of September 11, by Roberto Quaglia, which
offers a delicately nuanced narrative of 9/11 as a myth structured as a movie.
The book became a huge hit in Eastern Europe.
Serious questions suggest quite plausible suspects
to be investigated regarding 9/11, far more than 19 Arabs with box cutters. Ten
years ago, in Asia Times, I asked 50 questions, some of them extremely detailed,
about 9/11. After reader demand and suggestions, I added 20 more. None of these questions were
convincingly addressed – not to mention answered – by the official narrative.
World public
opinion is directed to believe that on the morning of 9/11 four airliners,
presumably hijacked by 19 Arabs with box cutters, traveled undisturbed – for
two hours – across the most controlled airspace on the planet, which is
supervised by the most devastating military apparatus ever.
American
Airlines Flight 11 deviated from its path at 8.13am and crashed into the first
World Trade Center tower at 8.57am. Only at 8.46am did NORAD – the North
American Aerospace Defense Command – order that two intercepting F-15s take off
from Otis military base.
By a curious coincidence a Pentagon war
game was in effect on the morning of 9/11 – so air-controllers’ radars may have
registered only ‘ghost signals’ of nonexistent aircraft simulating an air
attack. Well, it was much more complicated than that, as demonstrated by professional pilots.
‘Angel was next’
World public
opinion is also directed to believe that a Boeing 757 – with a wingspan of 38
meters – managed to penetrate the Pentagon through a six-meter-wide hole and at
the height of the first floor. A Boeing 757 with landing gear is 13 meters
high. Airliners electronically refuse to crash – so it’s quite a feat to
convince one to fly five to 10 meters above the ground, landing gear on, at a
lightning speed of 800 kilometers an hour.
According to
the official narrative, the Boeing 757 literally pulverized itself. Yet even
after pulverization, it managed to perforate six walls of three rings of the
Pentagon, leaving a two-meter wide hole in the last wall but only slightly
damaging the second and third rings. The official narrative is that the hole
was caused by the plane’s nose – still quite hard even after pulverization. Yet
the rest of the plane – a mass of 100 tons traveling at 800 kilometers an hour
– miraculously stopped at the first ring.
All that
happened under the stewardship of one Hani Hanjour, who three weeks before had
been judged by his flight instructors to be incapable of piloting a Cessna.
Hanjour, nonetheless, managed to accomplish an ultra-fast spiral descent at 270
degrees, aligning at a maximum 10 meters above ground, minutely calibrating the
trajectory, and keeping a cruise speed of roughly 800 kilometers an hour.
At 9.37am, Hanjour hit precisely the
Pentagon’s budget analysts’ office, where everyone was busy working on the mysterious
disappearance of no less than $2.3 trillion that Defense Secretary Donald “Known
Unknowns” Rumsfeld, in a press conference the day before, said could not be
tracked. So, it’s not only Boeings that get pulverized inside the Pentagon.
World public opinion is also directed to
believe that Newtonian physics was suspended as a special bonus for WTC 1 and 2
on 9/11 (not to mention WTC 7, which was not even hit by any plane). The slower
WTC tower took 10 seconds to fall 411 meters, starting from immobility. So it
fell at 148 kilometers an hour. Considering the initial acceleration time, it
was a free fall, not the least impeded by 47 massive, vertical steel beams that
composed the tower’s structural heart.
World public
opinion is also directed to believe that United Airlines Flight 93 – 150 tons
of aircraft with 45 people, 200 seats, luggage, a wingspan of 38 meters –
crashed in a field in Pennsylvania and also literally pulverized itself,
totally disappearing inside a hole six meters by three meters wide and only two
meters deep.
Suddenly, Air Force One was “the only plane in the sky.” Colonel Mark Tillman,
who was on board, recalled: “We get this report that there’s a call saying
‘Angel’ was next. No one really knows now where the comment came from – it got
mistranslated or garbled amid the White House, the Situation Room, the radio
operators. ‘Angel’ was our code name. The fact that they knew about ‘Angel,’
well, you had to be in the inner circle.”
This means that
19 Arabs with box cutters, and most of all their handlers, surely must have
been “in the inner circle.” Inevitably, this was never fully investigated.
Already in
1997, Brzezinski had warned, “it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger
emerges capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America.”
In the end, much to the despair of US neocons, all
the combined sound and fury of 9/11 and the Global War on Terror/Overseas
Contingency Operations, in less than two decades, ended up metastasized into
not only a challenger but a Russia-China strategic partnership. This is the
real “enemy” – not al-Qaeda, a flimsy figment of the CIA’s imagination,
rehabilitated and sanitized as “moderate rebels” in Syria.
