9/11 Commission

My purpose in publishing this essay is to introduce a perspective, relevant to the debates about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, that thus...

So the 'holiday season' has brought us a rehash of the recent attack on 9/11 skepticism from the schizophrenic www.counterpunch.org. Apparently at Counterpunch, if you are a commentator with a fair amount of intellectual/political capital, you can write articles that suggest the 9/11 attacks were helped by US complicity. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair will be happy to publish it on the front page (see any number of Paul Craig Roberts' articles posted there, for instance). To the rest of us ordinary people, Cockburn offers the back of his hand at the suggestion of complicity (see http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11282006.html). 'Nutty conspiracy theorists', all. Yet his own diatribe contains the crucial admission which certifies the importance of 9/11 skepticism. More on that in a subsequent post. For now, here are two 'nutty' pieces from Peter Dale Scott and Peter Lance on the amazing career of terrorist and US government employee, Ali Mohamed. What Lance's work shows, undeniably and foremost, is that the 9/11 attacks were the entirely foreseeable consequences of US covert politics as usual. It is the policy of US intelligence to employ literally anyone, be they murderers of heads of state, terrorist trainers or planners of a plot to blow up the World Trade Center, if it is determined that they are useful as 'strategic assets'. Not 'capture and bring to justice', but 'employ and protect from prosecution'. That's not 'blowback', it's complicity in terror before and after the fact. It also reminds us that due to the longstanding and plentiful ties US intelligence has to terrorists at any given moment in time, those terrorists are always available to be used or framed should US intelligence ever see fit to use or frame them. For anything. And those of us on the outside - meaning virtually everybody, including most others within the intelligence apparatus and certainly including those in Congress who supposedly have 'oversight' as well as the public - can never know with a sufficient degree of confidence that they've gotten the full story on a deeply covert operation. Remember, even the much-celebrated 'independent, nonpartisan and thorough' 9/11 Commission was denied direct access to Khaled Sheikh Mohammed and the other supposed masterminds of the plot. The Commissioners were not permitted to ask direct questions of the accused. Instead, they (laughably) were told to submit their questions which the CIA promised they would hand deliver and submit the answers to the Commissioners. How helpful! And how unsatisfactory. And how standard. Back to the current case. If Lance and Scott are correct, Ali Mohamed is guilty if conspiring to kill Anwar Sadat and Meir Kahane, and blow up the WTC in 1993. He lived in Osama Bin Laden's home, declared his 'love' for him publicly to Patrick Fitzgerald before the 1993 WTC bombing, trained Al Qaeda terrorists, and no doubt figured in a host of other capital crimes. So who was he ultimately working for during the different phases of his career as a terrorist murderer? Since the final sources are the terrorists themselves and the covert intelligence types who employed them and who make a career of telling lies, how on earth can you know what to believe? That's the world of 'intelligence'. You can't reliably find the bottom of it from the outside. How again does this benefit the people? We hope readers will focus more on facts, and less on the speculative conclusions drawn by Lance. It's baffling how he can claim that Mohamed 'bamboozled' or 'snookered' his handlers right after Lance claims Mohamed told Fitzgerald he loved Bin Laden and could make an 'operation' happen in an instant. The indisputable facts are that Mohamed was permitted the space by his US sponsors to train terrorists and hatch plots, for whatever reason. That's the important thing, not Lance's speculation on how he was able to outsmart his handlers. Better that we leave open the question of just how Mohamed was able to bring this off, as Scott does, in concluding that: "It's time to confront the reality that these (US intelligence) agencies themselves, and their own sponsorship and protection of terrorist activities, have aggravated the greatest threats to our national security."

“The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes.”- - Justice Felix Frankfurter It used to be the three branches - congress, the executive, and the courts - that we...