In short, by February 14, the Times of India was officially touting the Saeed/Ansari duo rather than the Saeed/General Ahmad coupling.

Yet this was not the Times of India's first mention of Ansari in connection with Omar Saeed and the 9/11 money trail. That first mention dates, in fact, to Tuesday January 22, 2002 - the day of the Calcutta attack, and exactly one day before Daniel Pearl's disappearance. Here, then, was the Times of India's initial account of the Saeed/Ansari connection:
"[Indian] CBI Director P C Sharma told visiting FBI Chief Robert S Mueller that Ansari, who claimed responsibility for [today's Calcutta] attack, had taken a ransom of Rs 37.5 million to free shoe baron Parthapratim Roy Burman through hawala channels to Dubai, CBI sources said. Out of this amount, Omar [Saeed] ... had sent $100,000 to Atta through telegraphic transfer, CBI sources said."
Thus, by January 22, not only was FBI Director Robert Mueller on scene in India, but he was reportedly apprised of the Ansari/Saeed/Money Trail by Indian authorities. Conveniently, Ansari had claimed responsibility for the attack that very day, and his subsequent deportation to India from Dubai was also conveniently timed with the subsequent arrest of Omar Saeed for the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl. As Mueller's FBI was also reportedly on hand to trace the Pearl kidnapping back to Omar Saeed, it is reasonable to deduce from these facts an alternative explanation for Mueller's January 22 visit - namely, that Mueller was "on hand" to coordinate this final leg of the Omar Saeed cover-up story, bringing in Ansari by way of the well-timed Calcutta attack, and then employing his colleagues in Indian intelligence to feed the Times of India its corrective "take" on the Omar Saeed/Money Trail Story.

With the Calcutta operation in place, in conjunction with the Pearl kidnapping, Omar Saeed would now be nicely set up for his initial January 27 resurrection in the British Telegraph, to be followed days later in the American media through his February 5 "outing" in connection with the Pearl kidnapping. I do not mean to imply by this that the Calcutta attack and the Pearl kidnapping were conducted for the sole purpose of establishing a cover-up legend. Far from it. Covert operations - particularly those with propaganda value - are often "loaded up" with a number of multi-faceted, yet related, objectives. In this way, a "rogue ISI" element could be established as standing against the interests of the U.S./Pakistani War On Terrorism, and Omar Saeed in this light could then be presented as standing at the center of the very nexus between this rogue ISI and the al-Qaida terror network that had already declared its opposition to India in Kashmir.

On July 15, 2002, Omar Saeed was sentenced to die by a Pakistani court. By this time, all contingencies had long been covered. The confusion surrounding the identity of the pseudonym Mustafa Ahmad could provide a "plausible" explanation as to why the media neglected - even after Saeed's February 12 "arrest" - to consistently link him to the money trail, which by then had long taken a backseat to the Official Bin Laden Videotape Confession of December 13. Moreover, by linking Saeed up with all that post-9/11 terror activity, Saeed's pre-9/11 role would be effectively minimized. Most importantly, the mainstream media would - as of this writing - observe an iron-clad rule for reporting on Saeed - that is, never mention Saeed, al-Qaida, the money trail, the ISI, and General Ahmad in the same article. In those articles that would mention Saeed's links with the money trail, they would also now mention his links to al-Qaida but omit any mention of General Ahmad. Where those articles mentioned Saeed's links with the ISI, they would omit mention of the money trail and General Ahmad. Of those articles that mentioned General Ahmad and the ISI, General Ahmad would be tagged as "pro-Taliban" while "rogue" elements in his ISI would then be linked to al-Qaida - with any mention of Saeed and the money trail safely omitted. Now, with the Ansari angle credibly in place, it is a safe bet that the mainstream media - probably courtesy of Time Magazine - will one day "put it all together" for us, detailing how Ansari and Saeed, at the behest of al-Qaida, organized the money transfers to the hijackers as rogue elements in the ISI looked the other way, possibly not realizing that their "pro-Taliban" sympathies would facilitate the actions of September 11.

The whole cover story, however - with its endless obfuscations, diversions, and fallback explanations - cannot obscure the fact that it depends on a huge number of coincidences and conveniently timed set-ups to keep it in place. Moreover, evidence can be marshaled to show that the mainstream media - either as willful agents or as passive mouthpieces of the intelligence apparatus - planted disinformation that was meant to structure perceptions in a specific direction. The elaboration of the cover story bears the marks of its apparent mistakes and missteps.

But more disturbingly, the Omar Saeed/ Money Trail Story effectively shatters the credibility of the media/intelligence apparatus that provided virtually all the information on bin Laden and his al-Qaida network over the years. If this one small element of the overall 9/11 terror picture shows this much evidence of information management, one wonders how many other elements in this tale bear the marks of elaborate orchestration by the parties who have fed us all the data.

In intelligence operations, a credible "legend" is created through acting out all elements in the story rather than simply fabricating them for later use. Thus, "lead" hijacker Mohamed Atta most likely did receive a wire transfer of $100,000, arranged by an operative who was connected to al-Qaida, an organization that was fully financed, structured and "false-flagged" by Pakistanis and Saudis acting as operative proxy agents/patsies for what appears to be a globally connected Western elite intelligence apparatus.

As a crucial element in constructing the "legend" of 9/11, it was necessary to provide the links between the hijackers and al-Qaida. The paradox is this - an apparently sophisticated terror entity like al-Qaida would be required to maintain an elaborate evidential trail leading to its hijackers. Put simply, the names on those boarding passes would have to be the same names linked to various credit cards, witnesses, apartments, cell phone records, etc. Whether or not a hijacker by the name of Al-Suqami, al-Shehhi, or Atta was using a false passport would be largely irrelevant if it could be shown that someone employing the same false alias was linked to the same incriminating evidence. The evidence - culled from credit card charges, Internet communications, cell phone calls, and ATM withdrawls - revealed, according to a November 4, 2001 article in the New York Times, "...a picture in which the roles of the 19 hijackers are so well-defined as to be almost corporate in their organization and coordination." And that is the paradox. If the names on those boarding passes were used only once, there would be no evidence at all linking those hijackers to al-Qaida.

Here was an example of an anomaly "hiding in plain sight." With the hijackers conveniently sowing a consistent trail of the same names or aliases all over the place - establishing a "legend" that could be corroborated by real witnesses - the media could then be used to plant all kinds of disinformation and red herrings to divert attention from this most obvious anomaly. For example, where ABC News would report on September 12 that a passport belonging to a hijacker named Satam Al-Suqami was found in the rubble of the World Trade Center, the other mainstream outlets would widely report the discovery of the "mystery passport" days later - on September 16 - as having some kind of evidential significance. But it was an obvious red herring. At best, it would signify this - that a passport was found which bore the same name as someone whose boarding pass bore the same name as someone linked to an al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan. More "smoke" would then be wafted over the "mystery" surrounding this discovery when it was widely reported that FBI honcho Barry Mawn would not reveal the name on the passport (when all the media had to do was to check their Sept. 12 file clippings from ABC News).

Other red herrings would follow. The "full" passenger lists, for instance, would be released without the names of the purported hijackers on it - leaving some to sniff that the government had "something to hide." But quite simply, the main fact worth hiding is the notion that the hijackers worked so assiduously to build a convenient evidential trail with their supposed aliases. Take Mohamed Atta, for example. If he weren't so wedded to spreading his name like seed, then we would have no money trail story, no incriminating flight manuals in rented cars, no surveillance videos, no flight school witnesses - in fact, nothing at all on which we could hinge a legend for Mohamed Atta. The mainstream media repeatedly assured us that the hijackers were quite meticulous in staying below the radar, following the professional protocols of the Al-Qaida Handbook. Yet at every step of the way, they risked blowing their cover, going so far as to book flights under names that were either already on FBI watch lists or that could easily be linked to "shady" associates. By smothering the public with an apparent abundance of evidence, by conjuring the illusion that thousands of federal agents were compiling a comprehensive paper trail, the terror "experts" diverted us from the obvious fact that the 9/11 hijackers - purportedly the most cunning operatives for the most sophisticated terror operation in history - were instead certified morons, leaving us the gift of their boarding passes as the slim thread that would tie them to the Potemkin facade that is al-Qaida.

Someone by the name of Marwan Al-Shehhi was careful to rent a hotel room in Deerfield Beach, taking further care to leave behind Boeing 757 manuals and "an eight-inch stack of East Coast flight maps." Someone under the name of Marwan Al-Shehhi was also careful to use that name in activating his cell phone account so that one day, on November 4, 2001, Don Van Natta and Kate Zernike of the New York Times would be able to write: "Mohamed Atta, in seat 8D in business class, dialed his cellphone ... [reaching] Marwan Al-Shehhi in seat 6C on United Airlines Flight 175." How Van Natta and Zernike were also able to report that Atta called Al-Shehhi his "cousin" on that particular phone call perhaps reveals my ignorance over what can be divined through paper records of cell phone calls.

Moreover, it was convenient that someone by the name of Mohamed Atta took care to fasten his name tag on the luggage that he so thoughtfully left behind - in addition to the rented car he abandoned in the airport parking lot - so that authorities could find "a five-page handwritten document in Arabic that includes...practical reminders to bring 'knives, your will, IDs, your passport, all your papers.'" The existence of a written reminder for professional hijackers - who were presumably intensively trained to commandeer those airplanes with knives - to pack blades for their flight bears no rational explanation (except to confirm to us that, indeed, the hijackers did use sharp implements to take those planes).

But for all his credit card charges, cell phone calls, and bar tab receipts, Mohamed Atta was most fastidious in setting up a bank account in his name, so that he would be able to receive a wire transfer of $100,000 from someone who could definitively be linked to al-Qaida. That would be the paper trail, the "money" shot, the financial link to 9/11. And, best of all, the evidence would be unimpeachable because the whole transaction was in fact carried out by this "lead" hijacker who so consistently provided the evidence in elaborating the "legend" of 9/11. But it was not meant to be. At some point, the lines crossed, a seam showed, a careless inconsistency bore its ugly head. Amid the confusion, this emergent "smoking gun" needed to be aborted.

In the aftermath, new "smoking guns" would emerge, more smoke would be blown. And what of that illusion - the one that in those early days after 9/11 seemed to conjure an image of thousands of federal agents building a paper forest of evidence implicating the hijackers? "The hijackers left no paper trail," declared FBI director Robert Mueller on April 30, 2002. "In our investigations, we have not uncovered a single piece of paper ... that mentioned any aspect of the Sept. 11 plot." In other words, they no longer needed to stand guard and defend the mountains of innuendo and smoke that was blown in those early days to provide you with the authorized account of 9/11. Mueller, with his carefully worded lawyerly formulation - "piece of paper", "mentioned", etc. - would thus have it both ways: throwing up the innuendo without legally obligating himself to defend it.

In the end, the smoking gun was not the money trail. Nor was it the "whistle-blowing" article that appeared to expose it. Instead, the smoking gun lay in the actions, words, and deceptions of those who so cynically took it upon themselves to direct our perceptions - to tell us what, why, and how we know what we know. For in so closely managing the flow of information, by weaving in so many coincidences and synchronicities that could only be explained by willful orchestration, they exposed the seams of their duplicity, and in so doing, exposed before our eyes the intricate workings of a vast, all-pervasive disinformation apparatus that now risks its own destruction - for its contours can now be perceived by all who care to look.

End