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Gold9472
03-11-2006, 12:03 PM
What did they know before 9/11?

http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/features/tm_objectid=16800245&method=full&siteid=50082&headline=what-did-they-know-before-9-11--name_page.html

Duncan Higgitt, Western Mail
Mar 11 2006

The trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the only man to have ever been charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks, began in the US this week. He will claim that had he told US authorities about the attacks prior to events happening, they would have done nothing. Duncan Higgitt asks how much was known prior to the attacks - and how important it is now....

LIHOP and MIHOP probably don't mean much to people on this side of the pond. However, conspiracy theorists will know that they stand for let it happen on purpose, and make it happen on purpose.

They are terms, it is claimed, that are in use by top level US administration officials that mean, "We know what's going on - are we going to let it take its own course, or are we going to push it down that path?"

While it is taken as indisputable fact on a vast number of websites and chatrooms that the White House at least knew 9/11 was in the wind, for one man the difference between foreknowledge and ignorance could mean life or death.

Zacarias Moussaoui, the only man to have ever stood in the dock for the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, which claimed the lives of 2,986 people, has already pleaded guilty to six counts of conspiracy involving the 9/11 plot.

Defending himself, the "20th hijacker" (the other 19 died in the four hijacked planes while Moussaoui was in jail after being arrested by immigration officials) is expected to argue that he knew less than the US authorities about the attacks and he said nothing in the belief that officials would not have acted on any information he passed on.

The trial, which could last up to three months, has taken years to get to court, partly because Moussaoui, a French-Moroccan, has attempted to get senior al-Qaeda figures captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere to take the witness stand, a move that has sparked a fierce debate about the fundamentals of a right to a fair trial and how it contrasts with America's current priority, homeland security.

It is the biggest court case going on in the US at present. Chris Wood, a Welsh lawyer, has his firm based at the back of the Alexandria Federal District Courthouse, just outside Washington DC,where Moussaoui's trial is taking place.

He said, "The area around the courthouse is literally teeming with news people for a block or so, their huge support trucks are parked along the main road, and special cops armed with high- power guns are all over the shop.

"The courthouse is a few miles from the Pentagon, hence why it is used for the high-profile cases - it is near DC, but outside DC, so any attack on the courthouse will not directly impact on DC."

It is difficult to get into 9/11 without becoming swamped with conspiracy theories. Perhaps this is not surprising when looking at other seismic events in recent US history, such as the Kennedy assassination.

Paul Rogers, a professor in Peace Studies at the University of Bradford, argues that while there were intelligence shortcomings back in 2000-1, the problem is that "the whole 9/11 situation has been surrounded by all kinds of conspiracy theories that have been massively aided by distribution through the internet".

But did the US government have foreknowledge of the attacks? Labour peer Donald Anderson, the former Swansea East MP who recently headed the powerful Foreign Affairs Committee, doesn't believe there is a straightforward answer.

"It would be absolute dynamite if the US government knew chapter and verse what was going to happen before it did, but those in the intelligence business will tell you that their work is often a case of lots of dots that you need to join up to make a picture.

"I would say that there were one or two dots," Lord Donaldson said.

Prof Rogers, whose book Losing Control first examined the rise of the new kind of Islamist terrorism through incidents like the first World Trade Centre bombing in 1993 and a plan by Algerian extremists the following year to crash a fully-laden jet in Paris that was averted by the French authorities, believes the presidency's emerging character is a key indicator.

"In the run-up to the attacks, the Bush administration was on a high. They had got out of Kyoto and were reversing from a number of other treaties. There was a real feeling that the new American century was going at full tilt.

"So 9/11 was a real body blow. They had no idea how al-Qaeda had developed. Very few people realised that we were in an era of asymmetrical warfare, we had not woken up.

"Even though there had been these previous attacks, there was a feeling in the US that they would not be attacked in that way. Taking control of a plane with kitchen knives? It was like something out of a Tom Clancy novel."

The report of The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, better known as the 9/11 Commission, and established and conducted amid much controversy, highlighted this attitude among government officials. It concluded that the attacks were "a shock but not a surprise".

It criticised a vast swathe of organisations, from the Federal Aviation Authority and immigration through the intelligence community and Congress, up to both the Bush administration and the Clinton one before it.

It concluded, "The most important failure was one of imagination. We do not believe leaders understood the gravity of the threat."

It quoted George Tenet, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (who later left his job after Weapons of Mass Destruction were never found in Iraq) as saying that in the run-up to the attacks, "The system was blinking red."

The Commission found, "During the spring and summer of 2001, US intelligence agencies received a stream of warnings that al-Qaeda planned, as one report put it, 'something very, very, very big'."

Random information - with the benefit of hindsight - could have been used to draw a picture of a "planes operation", as its overall planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed called it.

But agencies began tightening up security outside the US, believing any attack would be something similar to that on the USS Cole in 2000, or the 1998 American embassies bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

As one official put it, "No analytic work foresaw the lightning that could connect the thundercloud to the ground".

The commission report specifically highlighted the failure to monitor hijackers Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, who both died when American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon. They were being tailed when they were lost in Bangkok airport, before arriving in Los Angeles in January 2000. They were able to live openly in San Diego because intelligence officials had not told the FBI about their presence. Neither did the officials reveal that Mihdhar was linked to the USS Cole attack, nor did they make any attempt to find him and Hazmi in the United States.

It was also critical of the intelligence services for failing to tie in Moussaoui, who was attempting to get himself fast-tracked for airline pilot training when he was arrested, to warnings of an attack.

Immigration was criticised for failing to discover false statements on visa applications, not recognising fraudulent passports, not including names from terrorist watch lists on no-fly lists, and failing to search airline passengers identified by its anti-terrorist computer screening system.

As well as this series of errors and inadequate procedures, both the White House and Congress were taken to task for failing to devote enough attention to international terrorism - the report called the latter's interest in it "episodic". It also concluded that both, together with the intelligence community, had failed to adapt to the new Islamist threat and remained very much caught up in Cold War strategy.

The report was published in July 2004 into a world much changed as a consequence of the attacks and, perhaps even more so, by the war in Iraq. Coming almost three years after 9/11, many steps had already been taken to prevent a repeat attack, and the Commission subsequently found its credibility being questioned - in much the same way as the Warren Commission report into the Kennedy assassination was.

End Part I

Gold9472
03-11-2006, 12:04 PM
Now the Moussaoui trial will again focus on some of these shortcomings. If it is to remain a credible defence, it will attach no importance to notions of LIHOP and MIHOP. There will be many among the relatives of those killed - 1,100 of whom have never been identified or properly buried - looking for further answers, but whether the hearing will dig down and find the truth or just clog the air with the dust it dislodges remains to be seen.

Certainly the issue of what really happened has not gone away for the American public, whose appetite for new theories remains undimmed.

The internet is stuffed with stories of Israeli and Iraqi involvement, profiteering, war triggering and other far-fetched tales which take a number of incredulous assumptions, such as the existence of a nefarious world order and a huge number of people in the loop, as their starting point.

One theory claims Larry Silverstein signed a 99-year lease for the World Trade Centre complex just seven weeks before it was destroyed and subsequently trousered a $3.5bn insurance payment. But it doesn't point out that it will cost Silverstein around $8bn to rebuild the site, in addition to mounting court fees and an annual $120m lease.

Similar theories claim a host of figures, from the president and his brothers on down, stood to make financial capital from the deaths of close to 3,000 people, and pay little regard to the fact that there are easier and far less illegal ways of making money.

The bulk of the theories surround the collapse of the Twin Towers. Most people - and many experts - simply cannot believe that the two structures would collapse not only in the time that they did, but the way they came down. Some believe follow-up bombs were placed at the base of the towers to ensure their collapse.

However, there are some interesting anomalies. Shortly after 9/11, David Schippers, chief prosecutor in the Clinton impeachment, said he was contacted by three FBI agents who mentioned a terrorist attack in September, using a nuclear device in Lower Manhattan. He claims it was common knowledge in the FBI but suppressed by superiors there.

Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was aware of a threat. He revealed to talk show host Larry King that at 8am on September 11, he told a group of Congressmen that "sometime in the next two, four, six, eight, 10, 12 months there would be an event that would occur in the world that would be sufficiently shocking that it would remind people again how important it is to have a strong healthy defence department."

While some government officials said it had been unimaginable prior to the attacks that hijacked planes would be used as weapons, it emerged in the 9/11 Congressional Inquiry that intelligence officers had been told of such an idea at least 12 times in seven years.

The attacks had a huge impact on world economic markets, throwing them into chaos and losing billions of dollars off the price of shares.

But there were a few people getting rich off them. Harvey Pitt, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose job it is to police stock and shares dealings, said it had discovered that the number of "put options" purchased on American and United Airlines in the days before 9/11 was six times higher than normal. A put option is an agreement where, for a fee, one party will agree to purchase shares at a fixed price within a certain time frame. It works like a bet on the market.

The New York Stock Exchange also reported that short sales (shares that you borrow to sell) in UAL Corp, whose chief subsidiary is United Airlines, rose 40%, while American Airlines' parent AMR Corp share sales increased 20%, and aircraft manufacturer Boeing Corp rose by 37%.

There was also some remarkably prescient movement on financial organisations. Put options were purchased for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, which occupied 22 storeys in the World Trade Centre, while Merrill Lynch, which is headquartered nearby, saw a 1,200% increase in put options in the four days before 9/11. It was also reported that $2.5m profits made trading options went unclaimed at re-insurers Munich Re, while investigators from the US Secret Service contacted a number of bond traders over large purchases of five-year Treasury notes - one of the best investments in the event of a world crisis.

While there is no concrete evidence that these activities demonstrated a foreknowledge of events, they add fuel to the fire of the conspiracy theorists. And they appear to be winning the battle.

In a 2004 poll, 49.3% of New York City residents and 41% of citizens from the wider New York area believe the US Government "knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act".

There is also a third theory on 9/11 foreknowledge and its consequences.

Kenneth J Dillon, a historian and former Department of State intelligence analyst, calls it "Anomalous Mistake-driven Opportunity Creation". He says AMOC occurs when an official commits an error so monumentally inept that few will believe he or she did it. Dillon has claimed that Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney match this criteria in ignoring the "blinking red" system and, if there has been any conspiracy, it has been to hide their incompetence. In light of his administration's woeful response to the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina, this doesn't seem too fanciful.

So with the spotlight about to be turned once more on it, is the US government concerned that what happened almost five years ago will be brought up again?

Dr Paul Moorcraft, who formerly worked for the Ministry of Defence and is now the director of the Centre for Foreign Policy Analysis, recently spent time in Washington, meeting with intelligence contacts and other officials. He doesn't think so.

"I didn't have a single conversation about 9/11, and it never cropped up. It's almost as if it's ancient history. Everyone there was far more concerned about how the hell they are going to get out of Iraq, and what they are going to do about Iran," he said.

"There was no talk of the Moussaoui trial.

I'm not sure what can be achieved by raking over 9/11 now. We have new problems to face now. The world has changed a lot in five years."

Lord Anderson agrees.

"It's water under the bridge, we've moved on. There's been a lot of discussion about rendition recently. I saw something in Le Monde, which pointed out that two of the very top al-Qaeda figures (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, captured in Pakistan in 2003, and Abu Zubaydah, ranked third on the US list of al-Qaeda suspects after Osama Bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, and caught in Pakistan in 2002) have disappeared into a black hole.

"As for 9/11, that caravan has moved on."

Prof Rogers thinks the attacks are no longer considered a high priority.

"Nine/Eleven remains significant, because it set off the War on Terror, and it's what the Bush administration harks back to, to justify its actions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"But it still has big implications for the future, because you cannot maintain control in such a fractured world without tackling the underlying causes.

"I call what we are doing 'liddism'. We are just keeping a lid on what's happening, rather than getting to the problems underneath."

End