{"id":55792,"date":"2013-08-05T05:36:46","date_gmt":"2013-08-05T04:36:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/us-government-protection-of-al-qaeda-terrorists-and-the-us-saudi-black-hole\/55792\/"},"modified":"2013-08-05T05:36:46","modified_gmt":"2013-08-05T04:36:46","slug":"us-government-protection-of-al-qaeda-terrorists-and-the-us-saudi-black-hole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/us-government-protection-of-al-qaeda-terrorists-and-the-us-saudi-black-hole\/","title":{"rendered":"US Government \u201cProtection\u201d of Al-Qaeda Terrorists and the US-Saudi \u201cBlack Hole\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

For almost two centuries American government, though always imperfect, was also a model for the world of limited government, having evolved a system of restraints on executive power through its constitutional arrangement of checks and balances.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Since 9\/11 however, constitutional American government has been overshadowed by a series of emergency measures to fight terrorism. The latter have mushroomed in size and budget, while traditional government has been shrunk. As a result we have today what the journalist Dana Priest has called<\/span><\/p>\n

two governments: the one its citizens were familiar with, operated more or less in the open: the other a parallel top secret government whose parts had mushroomed in less than a decade into a gigantic, sprawling universe of its own, visible to only a carefully vetted cadre \u2014 and its entirety\u2026visible only to God.<\/a><\/sup>[1]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

More and more, it is becoming common to say that America, like Turkey before it, now has what Marc Ambinder and John Tirman have called a deep state behind the public one.<\/a><\/sup>[2]<\/span><\/sup> And this parallel government is guided in surveillance matters by its own <\/span>Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, which according to the New York Times \u201c<\/span>has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court<\/span>.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[3]<\/span><\/sup> Thanks largely to Edward Snowden, it is now clear that the FISA Court has permitted this deep state to expand surveillance beyond the tiny number of known and suspected Islamic terrorists, to any incipient protest movement that might challenge the policies of the American war machine.<\/span><\/p>\n

Americans have by and large not questioned this parallel government, accepting that sacrifices of traditional rights and traditional transparency are necessary to keep us safe from al Qaeda attacks. However secret power is unchecked power, and experience of the last century has only reinforced the truth of Lord Acton\u2019s famous dictum that unchecked power always corrupts. It is time to consider the extent to which American secret agencies have developed a symbiotic relationship with the forces they are supposed to be fighting \u2014 and have even on occasion intervened to let al-Qaeda terrorists proceed with their plots.
<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIntervened to let al-Qaeda terrorists proceed with their plots\u201d? These words as I write them make me wonder yet again, as I so often do, if I am not losing my marbles, and proving myself to be no more than a zany \u201cconspiracy theorist.\u201d Yet I have to remind myself that my claim is not one coming from theory, but from certain undisputed facts, about incidents that are true even though they have been systematically suppressed or under-reported in the American mainstream media.
<\/span><\/p>\n

Worse, I am describing a phenomenon that occurred not just once, but consistently, almost predictably. We shall see that, among the al-Qaeda terrorists who were first protected and then continued their activities were<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a01)\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Ali Mohamed, identified in the 9\/11 Commission Report (p. 68) as the leader of the 1998 Nairobi Embassy bombing;<\/span><\/p>\n

2)\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, Osama bin Laden\u2019s close friend and financier while in the Philippines of Ramzi Yousef (principle architect of the first WTC attack) and his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (next)<\/span><\/p>\n

3)\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, identified in the 9\/11 Commission Report (p. 145) as \u201cthe principal architect of the 9\/11 attacks.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

4)\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. two of the alleged 9\/11 hijackers, whose presence in the United States was concealed from the FBI by CIA officers for months before 9\/11<\/span>.<\/a><\/sup>[4]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0It might sound from these three citations that the 9\/11 Commission marked a new stage in the U.S. treatment of these terrorists, and that the Report now exposed those terrorists who in the past had been protected. On the contrary, a principal purpose of my essay is to show that
<\/span><\/p>\n

1)\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>one purpose of protecting these individuals had been to protect a valued intelligence connection (the \u201cAl-Qaeda connection\u201d if you will);<\/span><\/p>\n

2)\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>one major intention in the 9\/11 Commission Report was to continue protecting this connection;<\/span><\/p>\n

3)\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>those on the 9\/11 Commission staff who were charged with this protection included at least one commission member (Jamie Gorelick), one staff member (Dietrich Snell) and one important witness (Patrick Fitzgerald) who earlier had figured among the terrorists\u2019 protectors.
<\/span><\/p>\n

In the course of writing this essay, I came to another disturbing conclusion I had not anticipated. This is that a central feature of the protection has been to defend the 9\/11 Commission\u2019s false picture of al-Qaeda as an example of non-state terrorism, at odds with not just the CIA but also the royal families of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. In reality, as I shall show, royal family protection from Qatar and Saudi Arabia (concealed by the 9\/11 Commission) was repeatedly given to key figures like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged \u201cprincipal architect of the 9\/11 attacks.\u201d
<\/span><\/p>\n

This finding totally undermines the claim that the wars fought by America in Asia since 9\/11 have been part of a global \u201cwar on terror.\u201d On the contrary, the result of the wars has been to establish a permanent U.S. military presence in the oil- and gas-rich regions of Central Asia, in alliance with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Pakistan \u2014 the principal backers of the jihadi terrorist networks the U.S. been supposedly fighting. Meanwhile the most authentic opponents in the region of these Sunni jihadi terrorists \u2014 the governments of Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Iran \u2014 have found themselves overthrown (in the case of Iraq and Libya) subverted with U.S. support (in the case of Syria), or sanctioned and threatened as part of an \u201caxis of evil\u201d (in the case of Iran). We should not forget that, just one day after 9\/11, \u201c<\/span>Rumsfeld was talking about broadening the objectives of our response and \u2018getting Iraq.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/a>[5]<\/span><\/span>
<\/span><\/p>\n

The protection to terrorists described in this essay, in other words, has been sustained partly in order to support the false ideology that has underlain U.S. Asian wars for more than a decade. And the blame cannot be assigned all to the Saudis. Two months before 9\/11, FBI counterterrorism expert John O\u2019Neill described to the French journalist Jean-Charles Brisard America\u2019s \u201cimpotence\u201d in getting help from Saudi Arabia concerning terrorist networks. The reason? In Brisard\u2019s paraphrase, \u201cJust one: the petroleum interests.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[6]<\/span><\/sup> Former CIA officer Robert Baer voiced a similar complaint in complained about the lobbying influence of \u201cthe Foreign Oil Companies Group, a cover for a cartel of major petroleum companies doing business in the Caspian. . . . The deeper I got, the more Caspian oil money I found sloshing around Washington.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[7]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

The decade of protection for terrorists demonstrates the power of this extra dimension to the American deep state: the dark forces in our society responsible for protecting terrorists, over and above the parallel government institutionalized on and after 9\/11.<\/a><\/sup>[8]<\/span><\/sup> Although I cannot securely define these dark forces, I hope to demonstrate that they are related to the black hole at the heart of the complex U.S-Saudi connection, a complex that involves the oil majors like Exxon, the military domination of oil and gas movements from the Perian Gulf and Central Asia, offsetting arms sales, Saudi investments in major U.S. corporations like Citibank and the Carlyle Group, and above all the ultimate United States dependency on Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and OPEC, for the defense of the petrodollar.<\/a><\/sup>[9]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0This deeper dimension of the deep state, behind its institutional manifestation in our parallel government, is a far greater threat than foreign terrorism to the preservation of U.S. democracy.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0The FBI\u2019s Intervention with the RCMP to Release Ali Mohamed, 1993<\/strong>
<\/span><\/p>\n

Let me begin this essay with the FBI\u2019s instruction in 1993 to the Canadian RCMP to release the al-Qaeda organizer Mohamed Ali, who then proceeded to Nairobi in the same year to begin planning the U.S. Embassy bombing of 1998.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0In early 1993 a wanted Egyptian terrorist named Essam Hafez Marzouk, a close ally of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, arrived at Canada\u2019s Vancouver Airport and was promptly detained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). A second terrorist named Mohamed Ali, \u201cthe primary U.S. intelligence agent for Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden,\u201d came from California to the airport to meet him; and, not finding him, made the mistake of asking about his friend at the Vancouver airport customs office. As a result the RCMP interrogated Mohamed Ali for two days, but finally released him, even though Ali had clearly come in order to smugle a wanted terrorist into the United States.<\/a><\/sup>[10]<\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n

If the RCMP had detained Mohamed Ali, who was much bigger game than the first terrorist, hundreds of lives might have been saved. After being released, Ali went on to Nairobi, Kenya. There in December 1993 he and his team photographed the U.S. Embassy, and then delivered the photos to Osama bin Laden in Khartoum, leading to the Embassy bombing of 1998.<\/a><\/sup>[11]<\/span><\/sup> Ali later told an FBI agent that at some point he also trained al Qaeda terrorists in how to hijack airplanes using box cutters.<\/a><\/sup>[12]<\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n

The RCMP release of Ali Mohamed was unjustified, clearly had historic consequences, and may have contributed to 9\/11. Yet the release was done for a bureaucratic reason: Ali Mohamed gave the RCMP the phone number of an FBI agent, John Zent, in the San Francisco FBI office, and told them, \u201cIf they called that number, the agent on the other end of the line would vouch for him.\u201d As Ali had predicted, Zent ordered his release.<\/a><\/sup>[13]<\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n

Ali Mohamed was an important double agent, of major interest to more important U.S. authorities than Zent. Although Mohamed was at last arrested in September 1998 for his role in the Nairobi Embassy bombing, the USG still had not sentenced him in 2006; and he may still not have gone to jail.<\/a><\/sup>[14]<\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n

The story of his release in Vancouver and its consequences is another example of the dangers of working with double agents. One can never be sure if the agent is working for his movement, for his agency, or \u2014 perhaps most likely \u2014 for increasing his own power along with that of both his movement and his agency, by increasing violence in the world.<\/a><\/sup>[15]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Ali Mohamed\u2019s Release as a Deep Event Ignored by the U.S. Media<\/span><\/strong>
<\/span><\/p>\n

Mohamed\u2019s release in Vancouver was a deep event, by which I mean an event predictably suppressed in the media and still not fully understandable. A whole chapter in my book The Road to 9\/11 was not enough to describe Mohamed\u2019s intricate relationships at various times with the CIA, U.S. Special Forces at Fort Bragg, the murder of Jewish extremist Meir Kahane, and finally the cover-up of 9\/11 perpetrated by the 9\/11 Commission and their witness, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald (Mohamed\u2019s former prosecutor).<\/a><\/sup>[16]<\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n

The deep event is also an example of deep politics, a mixture of intrigue and suppression involving not just a part of the U.S. Government, but also the governing media. To this day (according to a 2013 search of Lexis Nexis) the Vancouver release incident, well covered in Canada\u2019s leading newspaper The Toronto Globe and Mail (December 22, 2001), has never been mentioned in any major American newspaper.
<\/span><\/p>\n

More disturbingly, it is not hinted at the otherwise well-informed books and articles about Ali Mohamed by Steven Emerson, Peter Bergen, and Lawrence Wright.<\/a><\/sup>[17]<\/span><\/sup> Nor is there any surviving mention of it in the best insider\u2019s book about the FBI and Ali Mohamed, The Black Banners, by former FBI agent Ali Soufan (a book that was itself heavily and inexcusably censored by the CIA, after being cleared for publication by the FBI).<\/a><\/sup>[18]<\/span><\/sup> Since first publishing this paragraph, I have noticed that former CIA office Michael Scheuer also faults both Steve Coll and Lawrence Wright for their \u201cwhole-hog acceptance of the Saudi narrative\u201d that minimizes U.S.-Saudi differences.<\/a>[19]<\/span>
<\/span><\/p>\n

There is no doubt of the FBI\u2019s responsibility for Mohamed\u2019s release, It (along with other FBI anomalies in handling Mohamed) is frankly acknowledged in a Pentagon Internet article on Mohamed:
<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

In early 1993, Mohamed was detained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) at the Vancouver, Canada, airport. He had come to the airport to meet an Egyptian who had arrived from Damascus but was found to be carrying two forged Saudi passports. When Mohamed was about to be arrested as well, he told the RCMP he was collaborating with the FBI and gave them a name and phone number to call to confirm this. The RCMP made the call and Mohamed was released immediately at the request of the FBI. When the FBI subsequently questioned Mohamed about this incident, he offered information about a ring in California that was selling counterfeit documents to smugglers of illegal aliens. This is the earliest hard evidence that is publicly available of Mohamed being an FBI informant.<\/a><\/sup>[20]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Contrast this official candor about the FBI responsibility for Mohamed\u2019s release with the suppression of it in a much longer account of Mohamed (3200 words) by Benjamin Weiner and James Risen in the New York Times:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\u00a0[In 1993] he was stopped by the border authorities in Canada, while traveling in the company of a suspected associate of Mr. bin Laden\u2019s who was trying to enter the United States using false documents.<\/span><\/p>\n

Soon after, Mr. Mohamed was questioned by the F.B.I., which had learned of his ties to Mr. bin Laden. Apparently in an attempt to fend off the investigators, Mr. Mohamed offered information about a ring in California that was selling counterfeit documents to smugglers of illegal aliens.<\/span><\/a>[21]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/sup><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0A long Wall Street Journal account massages the facts even more evasively:
<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

At about the same time [1993], the elusive Mr. Mohamed popped up again on the FBI radar screen with information that underscored the emerging bin Laden threat. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police questioned Mr. Mohamed in the spring of 1993 after his identification was discovered on another Arab man trying to enter the U.S. from Vancouver \u2013 a man Mr. Mohamed identified as someone who had helped him move Mr. bin Laden to Sudan. The FBI located Mr. Mohamed near San Francisco in 1993, where he volunteered the earliest insider description of al Qaeda that is publicly known.<\/a><\/sup>[22]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0In 1998, after the Embassy bombings, Mohamed was finally arrested. In the ensuing trial an FBI Agent, Daniel Coleman, entered a court affidavit (approved by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald) which summarized the Vancouver incident as follows:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

In 1993, MOHAMED advised the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (\u201cRCMP\u201d) that he had provided intelligence and counter-intelligence training in Afghanistan to a particular individual\u2026. MOHAMED admitted that he had travelled to Vancouver, Canada, in the spring of 1993 to facilitate the entry of that individual into the United States\u2026. MOHAMED further admitted that he and the individual had transported Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan to the Sudan in 1991\u2026. MOHAMED told the RCMP that he was in the process of applying for a job as an FBI interpreter and did not want this incident to jeopardize the application. (In fact, MOHAMED then had such an application pending though he was never hired as a translator.)<\/a><\/sup>[23]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0Like the American media, this FBI affidavit suppressed the fact that Mohamed, an admitted ally of Osama bin Laden caught red-handed with another known terrorist, was released on orders from the FBI.
<\/span><\/p>\n

The Two Levels of American History: Official History and Deep History<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0The whole episode illustrates what has become all too common in recent American history, the way in which secret bureaucratic policies can take priority over the public interest, even to the point of leading to mass murder (since it contributed at a minimum to the 1998 Embassy bombings, if not also 9\/11). It is also an example of what I mean by the two levels of history in America, We can refer to them as those historical facts officially acknowledged, and those facts officially suppressed; or alternatively as those facts fit to be mentioned in the governing media, and those suppressed by the same media. This leads in turn to two levels of historical narrative: official or archival history, which ignores or marginalizes deep events, and a second level \u2014 called deep history by its practitioners or \u201cconspiracy theory\u201d by its critics \u2014 which incorporates them. The method of deep political research is to recover deep events from this second level. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0This activity sets deep political research at odds with the governing media, but not, I believe with the national interest. Speaking personally as an ex-diplomat, I should state clearly that the national interest does occasionally require secrets, at least for a time. Kissinger\u2019s trip to China, for example, which led to a normalization of U.S.-Chinese relations, probably required secrecy (at least at the time) in order to succeed.
<\/span><\/p>\n

When insiders and the governing media collaborate in the keeping of a secret, as in the case of the FBI-ordered release of Mohamed, they probably persuade themselves that they are protecting, not just the FBI, but national security. However national security in this case was conspicuously not served by the subsequent embassy bombings, let alone by 9\/11.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0In the glaring gap between these two levels of history is a third level \u2013 that of the privileged books about Mohamed \u2014 privileged in the sense that they have access to sources denied to others \u2013 that give important but selective parts of the truth. This selectivity is not necessarily culpable; it may for example be due to pressure from lawyers representing Saudi millionaires (a pressure I have yielded to myself).<\/a><\/sup>[24]<\/span><\/sup> But cumulatively it is misleading.<\/span><\/p>\n

I owe a considerable debt in particular to Lawrence Wright\u2019s book, The Looming Tower, which helped expose many problems and limitations in the official account of 9\/11. But I see now in retrospect that I, like many others, have been delayed by its selectivity on many matters (including for example Mohamed\u2019s RCMP release) from developing a less warped understanding of the truth.
<\/span><\/p>\n

The Longer History of FBI and USG Protection for Ali Mohamed<\/strong>
<\/span><\/p>\n

Why did John Zent vouchsafe for Mohamed in 1993, so that the RCMP released him. The explanation of Peter Lance, the best chronicler of the FBI\u2019s culpability in both the first and second WTC attacks, is that Zent did so because Mohamed was already working as his personal informant, \u201cfeeding Zent \u2018intelligence\u2019 on Mexican smugglers who were moving illegal immigrants into the United States from the South.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[25]<\/span><\/sup> (FBI agent Cloonan confirms that Mohamed had been working as a local FBI informant since 1992.<\/a><\/sup>[26]<\/span><\/sup>) Elsewhere Lance describes Zent as \u201ctrusting and distracted,\u201d so that he failed to realize Mohamed\u2019s importance.<\/a><\/sup>[27]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

But the FBI\u2019s protection of Ali Mohamed did not begin with Zent. It dated back at least to 1989, when (according to the Pentagon Security bio)
<\/span><\/p>\n

While serving in the Army at Fort Bragg, he traveled on weekends to Jersey City, NJ, and to Connecticut to train other Islamic fundamentalists in surveillance, weapons and explosives. \u2026 Telephone records show that while at Fort Bragg and later, Mohamed maintained a very close and active relationship with the Office of Services [<\/span>Makhtab-al-Khidimat] <\/span>of the Mujihadeen, in Brooklyn, which at that time was recruiting volunteers and soliciting funds for the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan. This was the main recruitment center for the network that, after the Soviets left Afghanistan, became known as al-Qaida\u2026.<\/span><\/p>\n

The FBI observed and photographed Mohamed giving weapons training to a group of New York area residents during four successive weekends in July 1989. They drove from the Farouq Mosque in Brooklyn to a shooting range in Calverton, Long Island, and they fired AK-47 assault rifles, semiautomatic handguns and revolvers during what appeared to be training sessions. For reasons that are unknown, the FBI then ceased its surveillance of the group.<\/a><\/sup>[28]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0(Similarly in 1993 an FBI supervisor would again abruptly close down surveillance of another group from the al-Kifah Center at a militant training camp in Pennsylvania.)<\/a>[29]<\/span>
<\/span><\/p>\n

In the subsequent trial of Mohamed\u2019s trainees and others for bombing the World Trade Center, the defense attorney, Roger Stavis, established that Mohamed was giving the al-Kifah trainees \u201ccourses on how to make bombs, how to use guns, how to make Molotov cocktails.\u201d He showed the court that a training manual seized in Nosair\u2019s apartment \u201cshowed how to make explosives and some kind of improvised weapons and explosives.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[30]<\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n

So why would the FBI, having discovered terrorist training, then cease its surveillance? Here the Wall Street Journal has what I am sure is the right answer: the FBI ceased surveillance because they somehow determined that the men were training \u201cto help the mujahedeen fighting the Soviet puppet government in Afghanistan.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[31]<\/span><\/sup> (Note that the mujahedeen were no longer fighting the Soviet army itself, which had been withdrawn from Afghanistan as of March 1989.) <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Al-Kifah, Ali Mohamed, the Flow of Arabs to Afghanistan<\/strong>
<\/span><\/p>\n

Afghanistan is indeed the obvious explanation for the FBI\u2019s terminating its videotaping of jihadists from the Brooklyn <\/span>Al-Kifah Refugee Center. Incorporated officially in 1987 as \u201cAfghan Refugee Services, Inc.,\u201d the Al-Kifah Center \u201cwas the recruitment hub for U.S.-based Muslims seeking to fight the Soviets. As many as two hundred fighters were funneled through the center to Afghanistan.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[32]<\/span><\/sup> More importantly, it was <\/span><\/p>\n

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\u00a0a branch of the Office of Services [Makhtab-al-Khidimat]. the Pakistan-based organization that Osama bin Laden helped finance and lead and would later become al Qaeda. In fact, it was Mustafa Shalabi, an Egyptian who founded and ran the center, whom bin Laden called in 1991 when he needed help moving to Sudan.<\/a><\/sup>[33]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As we shall see, the Makhtab, created in 1984 to organize Saudi financial support to the foreign \u201cArab Afghans\u201d in the jihad, was part of a project that had the fullest support of the Saudi, Egyptian, and U.S. Governments. And Ali Mohamed, although he remained in the US Army Reserves until August 1994, was clearly an important trainer in that project, both in Afghanistan and in America.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0A privileged account of Mohamed\u2019s career by Peter Bergen, in Holy Wars, Inc., claims that
<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Ali Mohamed\u2026was an indispensable player in al-Qaeda\u2026. At some point in the early eighties he proffered his services as an informant to the CIA, the first of his several attempts to work for the U.S. government. The Agency was in contact with him for a few weeks but broke off relations after determining he was \u201cunreliable.\u201d That would turn out to be a masterful understatement, as Mohamed was already a member of Egypt\u2019s terrorist Jihad group. After being discharged from the Egyptian Army in 1984, Mohamed [took] a job in the counterterrorism department of Egyptair. The following year he moved to the United States,<\/a><\/sup>[34]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0Bergen\u2019s most serious omission here is that Mohamed, though he was on the State Department\u2019s visa watch list, had been admitted to the U.S. in 1984 \u201con a visa-waiver program that was sponsored by the agency [i.e. CIA] itself, one designed to shield valuable assets or those who have performed valuable services for the country.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[35]<\/span><\/sup> This should be enough to question the CIA\u2019s account that it found Mohamed \u201cunreliable.\u201d (Later, o<\/span>ne of Mohamed\u2019s officers at Fort Bragg was also convinced that Mohamed was \u201csponsored\u201d by a U.S. intelligence service, \u201cI assumed the CIA.\u201d)<\/a><\/sup>[36]<\/span><\/sup> In addition Bergen omits that, before<\/span> Mohamed\u2019s brief stint as a formal CIA agent, he had been selected out of the Egyptian army in 1981 for a leadership training at Fort Bragg \u2014 an important point to which we shall return.<\/a><\/sup>[37]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0The FBI\u2019s Cover-Up of Ali Mohamed in the Kahane Murder<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0The CIA may have wanted to think that the Al-Kifah training was only for Afghanistan. But the blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the mentor of the Center whom the CIA brought to America in 1990, was preaching for the killing of Jews and also for the destruction of the West.<\/a><\/sup>[38]<\/span><\/sup> His preachings guided Mohamed\u2019s Makhtab trainees: as a first step, in November 1990, three of them conspired to kill Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League.
<\/span><\/p>\n

Kahane\u2019s actual killer, El Sayyid Nosair, was detained by accident almost immediately, and by luck the police soon found his two coconspirators, Mahmoud Abouhalima and Mohammed Salameh, waiting at Nosair\u2019s house. Also at the house, according to John Miller,
<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

were training manuals from the Army Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg [where Ali Mohamed at the time was a training officer]. There were copies of teletypes that had been routed to the Secretary of the Army and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.<\/a><\/sup>[39]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0And the Pentagon bio, with yet another gentle dig at the FBI, identifies the documents as Mohamed\u2019s:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\u00a0In a search of Nosair\u2019s home, the police found U.S. Army training manuals, videotaped talks that Mohamed delivered at the JFK Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, operational plans for joint coalition exercises conducted in Egypt, and other materials marked Classified or Top Secret. These documents belonged to Mohamed, who often stayed in New Jersey with Nosair. The documents did not surface during Nosair\u2019s 1991 trial for the Kahane murder. It is not known if the FBI investigated Mohamed in connection with these documents.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Yet only hours after the killing, Joseph Borelli, the chief of NYPD detectives, pronounced Nosair a \u201clone deranged gunman.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[40]<\/span><\/sup>A more extended account of his remarks in the New York Times actually alluded to Mohamed, though not by name, and minimized the significance of the links to terrorism in a detailed account of the Nosair home cache:<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u00a0The files contained articles about firearms and explosives apparently culled from magazines, like Soldier of Fortune, appealing to would-be mercenaries. But the police said the handwritten papers, translated by an Arabic-speaking officer, appeared to be minor correspondence and did not mention terrorism or outline any plan to kill the militant Jewish leader who had called for the removal of all Arabs from Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cThere was nothing [at Nosair\u2019s house] that would stir your imagination,\u201d Chief Borelli said\u2026. A joint anti-terrorist task force \u00a0\u00a0 of New York City police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been set up to look into any possible international links to the slaying, the official said, but so far has not turned up anything.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNothing has transpired that changes our opinion that he acted alone,\u201d Chief Borrelli told a news conference yesterday afternoon.<\/a><\/sup>[41]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0Later<\/span> an FBI spokesman said the FBI also believed \u201cthat Mr. Nosair had acted alone in shooting Rabbi Kahane.\u201d \u201cThe bottom line is that we can\u2019t connect anyone else to the Kahane shooting,\u201d an FBI agent said.<\/a><\/sup>[42]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Blaming the New York County District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau, the FBI later claimed that the evidence retrieved from Nosair\u2019s home was not processed for two or three years.<\/a><\/sup>[43]<\/span><\/sup> But Robert Friedman suggests that the FBI were not just lying to the public, but also to Morgenthau (who had just helped expose and bring down the CIA-favored Muslim bank BCCI).
<\/span><\/p>\n

According to other sources familiar with the case, the FBI told District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau that Nosair was a lone gunman, not part of a broader conspiracy; the prosecution took this position at trial and lost, only convicting Nosair of gun charges. Morgenthau speculated the CIA may have encouraged the FBI not to pursue any other leads, these sources say. \u2018The FBI lied to me,\u2019 Morgenthau has told colleagues. \u2018They\u2019re supposed to untangle terrorist connections, but they can\u2019t be trusted to do the job.\u2019<\/a><\/sup>[44]<\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n

Using evidence from the Nosair trial transcript, Peter Lance confirms the tension between Morgenthau\u2019s office, which wanted to pursue Nosair\u2019s international terrorist connections, and the FBI, which insisted on trying Nosair alone.<\/a><\/sup>[45]<\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n

The FBI\u2019s Protection of Ali Mohamed in the 1993 WTC Bombing<\/strong>
<\/span><\/p>\n

In thus limiting the case, the police and the FBI were in effect protecting, not just Ali Mohamed, but also Nosair\u2019s two Arab coconspirators, Mahmoud Abouhalima and Mohammed Salameh, in the murder of a U.S. citizen. The two were thus left free to kill again on February 26, 1993, one month after the FBI secured Mohamed\u2019s release in Vancouver. Both Abouhalima and Salameh were ultimately convicted in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, along with another Mohamed trainee, Nidal Ayyad.
<\/span><\/p>\n

To quote the Pentagon bio yet again,
<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

In February 1993, the terrorist cell that Mohamed had trained exploded a truck bomb under the World Trade Center that killed six and injured about 1,000 persons. The perpetrators of this bombing included people Mohamed had trained, and Mohamed had been in close contact with the cell during the period leading up to the bombing [i.e. including January 1993, the month of Mohamed\u2019s detention and release in Vancouver]. Mohamed\u2019s name appeared on a list of 118 potential un-indicted co-conspirators that was prepared by federal prosecutors.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Ali Mohamed was again listed as one of 172 unindicted co-conspirators in the follow-up \u201cLandmarks\u201d case, which convicted Sheikh Rahman and others of plotting to blow up the United Nations, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, and the George Washington Bridge.<\/a><\/sup>[46]<\/span><\/sup> The two cases were closely related, as much of the evidence for the Landmarks case came from an informant, Emad Salem, whom the FBI had first planted among the WTC plotters. But the prosecutors\u2019 awareness of Ali Mohamed\u2019s involvement must be contrasted with the intelligence failure at the CIA\u2019s Counterterrorism Center: according to Steve Coll, the CTC \u201cimmediately established a seven-day, twenty-four hour task force to collect intelligence about the World Trade Center bombing\u2026but nothing of substance came in.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[47]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0In the WTC bombing case, the FBI moved swiftly to bring the Al-Kifah plotters to trial one month later, in March. Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, a DIA officer, later said that
<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

we [i.e. DIA] were surprised how quickly they\u2019d [i.e. FBI] made the arrests after the first World Trade Center bombing. Only later did we find out that the FBI had been watching some of these people for months prior to both incidents [i.e. both the 1993 WTC bombing and 9\/11].<\/a><\/sup>[48]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0Shaffer\u2019s claim that the FBI had been watching some of the plotters is abundantly corroborated, e.g. by Steve Coll in Ghost Wars.<\/a><\/sup>[49]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

The U.S., Egyptian, and Saudi Backing for the Makhtab Network<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0What was being protected here by the FBI? One obvious answer is an extension of Lance\u2019s explanation for Zent\u2019s behavior: that Mohamed had already been a domestic FBI informant since 1992. However I entirely agree with New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, who suspected that a much larger asset was being protected, the Saudi-sponsored network which we now know was the Makhtab-i-Khidimat, by this time already evolving into Al-Qaeda.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the day the FBI arrested four Arabs for the World Trade Centre bombing, saying it had all of the suspects, Morgenthau\u2019s ears pricked up. He didn\u2019t believe the four were \u2018self-starters,\u2019 and speculated that there was probably a larger network as well as a foreign sponsor. He also had a hunch that the suspects would lead back to Sheikh Abdel Rahman. But he worried [correctly] that the dots might not be connected because the U.S. government was protecting the sheikh for his help in Afghanistan.<\/a><\/sup>[50]<\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n

This \u201clarger network\u201d of the Makhtab, although created in 1984, consolidated an assistance program that had been launched by the U.S. Government much earlier, at almost the beginning of the Afghan war itself.
<\/span><\/p>\n

In January 1980, Brzezinski visited Egypt to mobilize support for the jihad. Within weeks of his visit, Sadat authorized Egypt\u2019s full participation, giving permission for the U.S. Air Force to use Egypt as a base\u2026and recruiting, training, and arming Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood activists for battle\u2026. Not only were they packaged and shipped to Afghanistan, but [by the end of 1980] they received expert training from U.S. Special Forces.<\/a><\/sup>[51]<\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n

U.S. military trainers had in fact already been in Egypt since at least 1978 (the year of the Israel-Egypt Camp David peace accords), training Sadat\u2019s elite praetorian guard, of which Mohamed Ali was at the time a member. At first the training was handled by a \u201cprivate\u201d firm, J.J. Cappucci and Associates, owned by former CIA officers Ed Wilson and Theodore Shackley. But after Brzezinski\u2019s visit in 1980, the contract was taken over by the CIA.<\/a><\/sup>[52]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

In 1981 Ali Mohamed was selected out of the U.S.-trained praetorian guard for four months of Special Forces training at Fort Bragg: \u201cWorking alongside Green Berets, he learned unconventional warfare, counterinsurgency operations, and how to command elite soldiers on difficult missions.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[53]<\/span><\/sup> The leadership aspect of this training almost certainly means that Mohamed was part of the Pentagon\u2019s Professional military education (PME) program for future leaders; and that he was being trained to transmit to Egypt the kind of Afghanistan-related skills that he later provided to Al-Kifah on Long Island in 1989.
<\/span><\/p>\n

Mohamed was thus in America when some of his fellow guard members, responding to a fatwa or religious order from Muslim Brotherhood member Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, assassinated Sadat in October 1981. The assassination only accelerated the export to Afghanistan of Muslim Brotherhood members accused of the murder. These included two of Mohamed\u2019s eventual close associates, Sheikh Abdel Rahman and Rahman\u2019s then friend Ayman al-Zawahiri, to whom Mohamed swore a bayat or oath of allegiance in 1984, after his return to Egypt.<\/a><\/sup>[54]<\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n

The Al-Kifah Target in 1993: Not Afghanistan but Bosnia<\/strong>
<\/span><\/p>\n

Morgenthau\u2019s suspicions about Afghanistan in 1993 were very pertinent, but also somewhat anachronistic; by 1993, under its new director James Woolsey, the CIA had lost interest in Afghanistan. The new interim president of Afghanistan, Mojaddedi, under pressure from Washington, announced that the Arab Afghans should leave. Pakistan followed suit, closed the offices of all mujahedin in its country, and ordered the deportation of all Arab Afghans.<\/a><\/sup>[55]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

But the Al-Kifah support network had new targets in mind elsewhere.<\/span><\/p>\n

After 1991 the Brooklyn center was focused chiefly on training people for jihad in Bosnia, and at least two sources allege that Ali Mohamed himself visited Bosnia in 1992 (when he also returned to Afghanistan).<\/a><\/sup>[56]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Al-Kifah\u2019s English-language newsletter Al-Hussam (The Sword) also began publishing regular updates on jihad action in Bosnia\u2026.Under the control of the minions of Shaykh Omar Abdel Rahman, the newsletter aggressively incited sympathetic Muslims to join the jihad in Bosnia and Afghanistan themselves\u2026.The Al-Kifah Bosnian branch office in Zagreb, Croatia, housed in a modern, two-story building, was evidently in close communication with the organizational headquarters in New York. The deputy director of the Zagreb office, Hassan Hakim, admitted to receiving all orders and funding directly from the main United States office of Al-Kifah on Atlantic Avenue controlled by Shaykh Omar Abdel Rahman.<\/a><\/sup>[57]<\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n

One of Ali Mohamed\u2019s trainees at al-Kifah, Rodney Hampton-El, assisted in this support program, recruiting warriors from U.S. Army bases like Fort Belvoir, and also training them to be fighters in New Jersey.<\/a><\/sup>[58]<\/span><\/sup> In 1995 Hampton-El was tried and convicted for his role (along with al-Kifah leader Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman) in the plot to blow up New York landmarks. At the trial Hampton-El testified how he was personally given thousands of dollars for this project by Saudi Prince Faisal in the Washington Saudi Embassy.<\/a><\/sup>[59]<\/span><\/sup> (In addition, \u201cSaudi intelligence has contributed to Sheikh Rahman\u2019s legal-defence fund, according to Mohammed al-Khilewi, the former first secretary to the Saudi mission at the U.N.)\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[60]<\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n

Al-Kifah, Al-Qaeda, Tajikistan, and Drugs<\/strong>
<\/span><\/p>\n

Meanwhile the ISI had not lost interest in bin Laden\u2019s Arabs, but began to recruit them with bin Laden\u2019s support for battle in new areas, notably Kashmir.<\/a>[61]<\/span> Bin Laden in the same period began to dispatch his jihadis into areas of the former Soviet Union, notably to the infant Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) in Tajikistan.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0The outbreak of Islamist violence in Tajikistan\u2026moved bin Laden to send a limited number of Al-Qaeda cadre to support Tajik Islamist forces, among them his close associate Wali Khan Amin Shah [an Uzbek later working in the Philippines with Ramzi Yousuf and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] and the soon-to-be-famous mujahid, Ibn Khattab. In addition, bin Laden, even after his 1991 move to Sudan, continued to run training camps in Afghanistan, where he welcomed the chance to train Tajiks, Uzbeks, Uighurs, and Chechens.<\/a>[62]<\/span>
<\/span><\/p>\n

In an al-Qaeda document captured in Iraq, bin Laden wrote
<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

with the grace of Allah, we were successful in cooperating with our brothers in Tajikistan in various fields including training. We were able train a good number of them, arm them and deliver them to Tajikistan. Moreover, Allah facilitated to us delivering weapons and ammunition to them; we pray that Allah grants us all victory<\/a><\/sup>[63]<\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Many other accounts report that the delivery of arms and ammunition was facilitated by the involvement of the IMU and bin Laden in the massive flow of heroin from Afghanistan into the former Soviet Union. According to Ahmed Rashid,<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Much of the I.M.U.\u2019s financing came from the lucrative opium trade through Afghanistan. Ralf Mutschke, the assistant director of Interpol\u2019s Criminal Intelligence Directorate, estimated that sixty per cent of Afghan opium exports were moving through Central Asia and that the \u201cI.M.U. may be responsible for seventy per cent of the total amount of heroin and opium transiting through the area.\u201d<\/a>[64]<\/span>
<\/span><\/p>\n

Among the experts confirming the IMU-al-Qaeda-drug connection is Gretchen Peters,
<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The opium trade\u2026 supported the global ambitions of Osama bin Laden\u2026. There was \u2026 evidence that bin Laden served as middleman between the Taliban and Arab drug smugglers\u2026. With Mullah Omar\u2019s approval, bin Laden hijacked the state-run Ariana Airlines, turning it into a narco-terror charter service\u2026 according to former U.S. and Afghan officials\u2026. One U.S. intelligence report seen by the author described a smuggling route snaking up through Afghanistan\u2019s northwest provinces if Baghdis, Faryab, and Jowzan into Turkmenistan. It was being used as of mid-2004 by \u201cextremists associated with the Taliban, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and al-Qaeda,\u201d the report said. Traffickers would move \u201cboth heroin and terrorists\u201d along the route and \u201cthen onwards into other countries in Central Asia,\u201d the CIA document said.<\/a>[65]<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0It has been widely reported that in the early 1990s, as US financial support dwindled and bin Laden\u2019s finances were being rapidly exhausted in Sudan, his new involvement with the IMU and later the Taliban involved al-Qaeda also in the growing Afghan heroin traffic. Peters saw a CIA document confirming this.<\/a>[66]<\/span> Yet the 9\/11 Report, in contorted language, denied this, as did a Staff Report:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\u00a0No persuasive evidence exists that al Qaeda relied on the drug trade as an important source of revenue, had any substantial involvement with conflict diamonds, or was financially sponsored by any foreign government.<\/a>[67]<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0This surprising claim was at odds with the views of many U.S. intelligence operatives. It also contradicted the official position of the British government, which told its Parliament in 2001, <\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\u00a0Usama Bin Laden and Al Qaida have been based in Afghanistan since 1996, but have a network of operations throughout the world. The network includes training camps, warehouses, communication facilities and commercial operations able to raise significant sums of money to support its activity. That activity includes substantial exploitation of the illegal drugs trade from Afghanistan.<\/a><\/sup>[68]<\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And there were allegations that the Brooklyn Al-Kifah Center, as well as bin Laden, was involved in drug trafficking.Back in 1993, the New York Times reported that, according to investigators, \u201cSome of the 11 men charged in the [Day of Terror] plot to bomb New York City targets are also suspected of trafficking in drugs.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[69]<\/span><\/sup> Mujahid Abdulqaadir Menepta, a Muslim suspect in both the 9\/11 case and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, was linked by telephone numbers on his cell phones to ongoing criminal investigations, involving \u201corganized crime, drugs, and money laundering.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[70]<\/span><\/sup> And Raed Hijazi, an al Qaeda terrorist arrested in Jordan in 1999, had previously become an FBI informant in order to avoid drug charges.<\/a><\/sup>[71]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Was the U.S. Protection of the Al-Kifah Center Intended to Help Export Jihadis?<\/strong>
<\/span><\/p>\n

There is also no treatment in the 9\/11 Report, and almost none elsewhere, of the allegations from Steven Emerson that by 1987, the Al-Kifah Center Al-Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn \u201chad become a center for counterfeiting tens of thousands of dollars.\u201d<\/a>[72]<\/span> Similarly there has been no government follow-up of the allegation by Yossef Bodansky, citing FBI informant Emad Salem, that one of the Al-Kifah cell leaders (Siddiq Ibrahim Siddig Ali)
<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

had <\/span>offered to sell a million dollars [of counterfeit currency] for $150,000, well below market value. \u2026 Quantities of counterfeit $100 bills were later found at the apartment of Sheikh Umar Abdel-Rahman.<\/a>[73]<\/span>
<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

J.M. Berger goes further, reporting from court testimony: \u201cIn order to support Al Kifah\u2019s operations,\u201d Mustafa Shalabi, the head of the Al-Kifah Center until his murder in 1991, \u201cemployed a number of for-profit criminal enterprises, including gunrunning, arson for hire, and a counterfeiting ring set up in the basement of the jihad office.\u201d<\/a>[74]<\/span> Yet the 9\/11 Report is silent about these serious charges, which U.S. prosecutors at the time did not pursue.
<\/span><\/p>\n

Why this official reticence? The answer may lie in the fact that by 1996 bin Laden was \u201csupporting Islamists in Lebanon, Bosnia, Kashmir, Tajikistan, and Chechnya.\u201d<\/a>[75]<\/span> And in step with bin Laden, the al-Kifah Center was also supporting jihad after 1992 \u201cin Afghanistan, Bosnia, the Philippines, Egypt, Algeria, Kashmir, Palestine, and elsewhere.\u201d<\/a>[76]<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0But bin Laden and Al-Kifah were not acting on their own, they were supporting projects, especially in Tajikistan (1993-95) and then Chechnya (after 1995), where their principal ally, Ibn al-Khattab (Thamir Saleh Abdullah Al-Suwailem) also enjoyed high-level support in Saudi Arabia.<\/a>[77]<\/span>
<\/span><\/p>\n

Khattab enjoyed a certain amount of logistical and financial support from Saudi Arabia. Saudi sheikhs declared the Chechen resistance a legitimate jihad, and private Saudi donors sent money to Khattab and his Chechen colleagues. As late as 1996, mujahidin wounded in Chechnya were sent to Saudi Arabia for medical treatment, a practice paid for by charities and tolerated by the state.<\/a><\/sup>[78]<\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n

Ali Soufan adds that America also supported this jihad: by 1996, \u201cthe United States had been on the side of Muslims in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya.\u201d<\/a>[79]<\/span>
<\/span><\/p>\n

By protecting the Al-Kifah Center and its associates (including Mohamed) and not prosecuting them for their crimes (including murder), the U.S. Government was in effect keeping open a channel whereby those in America who wished to wage jihad were helped to wage jihad in other countries, not here. (After the arrest of Sheikh Rahman in 1993 the Al Kifah closed itself down. But we shall see that an allied institution, Sphinx Trading, continued to be protected, even after the FBI knew it had helped one of the alleged 9\/11 hijackers prepare for 9\/11.)
<\/span><\/p>\n

Was all this protection intended to keep just such a channel open? It was certainly an intentional result of the protection and support for the Makhtab al-Khidimat in Saudi Arabia.<\/span><\/p>\n

Saudi Supportfor the Makhtab, and Later for Al Qaeda<\/strong>
<\/span><\/p>\n

The Saudis, like the Egyptians, had domestic reasons for wishing to export as many Muslim Brotherhood members to possible death in Afghanistan, Bosnia, or anywhere else. Until 1979 Saudi Arabia had provided a home to Brotherhood members fleeing persecution in countries like Syria and Egypt, where some of them had tried to assassinate the Saudis\u2019 political enemy Gamel Abdel Nasser. But in 1979 radical Wahhabis, condemning the ruling Saudi family as corrupt infidels, seized the Grand Mosque at Mecca and defended it for weeks.<\/a><\/sup>[80]<\/span><\/sup> Profoundly shaken, the Saudi family used its foundations, like the World Muslim League (WML), to subsidize the emigration of political Islamists, above all to the new jihad in Afghanistan which opened one month later against the Soviet Union.<\/a><\/sup>[81]<\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n

In Afghanistan both Rahman and al-Zawahiri worked with the Makhtab al Khidamat that had been created in 1984 by two other members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Palestinian Abdullah Azzam and the Saudi Osama bin Laden.<\/a><\/sup>[82]<\/span><\/sup> All that the 9\/11 Commission Report has to say about the Makhtab\u2019s financing is that \u201cBin Laden and his comrades had their own sources of support and training, and they received little or no assistance from the United States\u201d (p. 56). But the Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid makes clear the support coming from the Saudi royal family, including Prince Turki (the head of Saudi intelligence), and also royal creations like the World Muslim League:
<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Bin Laden, although not a royal, was close enough to the royals and certainly wealthy enough to lead the Saudi contingent. Bin Laden, Prince Turki and General [Hameed] Gul [the head of the Pakistani ISI] were to become firm friends and allies in a common cause. The center for the Arab-Afghans was the offices of the World Muslim League and the Muslim Brotherhood in Peshawar which was run by Abdullah Azam. Saudi funds flowed to Azam and the Makhtab al Khidamat or Services Center which he created in 1984 to service the new recruits and receive donations from Islamic charities. Donations from Saudi Intelligence, the Saudi Red Crescent, the World Muslim League and private donations from Saudi princes and mosques were channeled through the Makhtab. A decade later the Makhtab would emerge at the center of a web of radical organizations that helped carry out the World Trade Center bombing [in 1993] and the bombings of US Embassies in Africa in 1998.<\/a><\/sup>[83]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Former Ambassador Peter Tomsen has described how the evolution of the Makhtab into al-Qaeda was accomplished with support from the offices of royally ordained organizations like the World Muslim League (WML) and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY):
<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Bin Laden\u2019s brother-in-law, Mohammad Jamal Khalifa, headed the Muslim World League office in Peshawar during the mid-1980s. In 1988, he moved to Manila and opened a branch office of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth. He made the charity a front for bin Laden\u2019s terrorist operations in the Philippines and Asia. Al Qaeda operatives, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of the 9\/11 attacks, and his nephew Ramzi Yusuf [master bomb-maker of the 1993 WTC bombing], traveled to Manila in the early 1990s to help Khalifa strengthen al-Qaeda networks in Southeast Asia and plan terrorist attacks in the region.<\/a><\/sup>[84]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0There are many other examples of WML and WAMY connections to Al-Qaeda. For example Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil, a signatory of Osama bin Laden\u2019s 1998 fatwa to kill Jews and Americans, was invited in 1996 to the 34th WML Congress in Mecca and also spoke there to WAMY.<\/a><\/sup>[85]<\/span><\/sup> Yet there are only minimal references to Maulana Fazlur Rehman in the western (as opposed to the Asian) media, and none (according to a Lexis Nexis search in July 2013) linking him to the WML or WAMY.
<\/span><\/p>\n

The FBI\u2019s hands-off attitude towards WAMY in America may help explain its protection of Ali Mohamed. According to former federal prosecutor John Loftus and others, there was a block in force in the 1980s against antiterrorism actions that might embarrass the Saudis.<\/a><\/sup>[86]<\/span><\/sup> This block explains for example the protection enjoyed by the chair of WAMY in Virginia, Osama bin Laden\u2019s nephew Abdullah bin Laden. The FBI opened an investigation of Abdullah bin Laden in February 1996, calling WAMY \u201ca suspected terrorist organization,\u201d but the investigation was closed down six months later.<\/a><\/sup>[87]<\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n

How and Why Did a Passportless Osama Leave Saudi Arabia?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

None of the official or privileged sources on Ali Mohamed has linked him to Saudi intelligence activities. But there is at least one such link, his trip, as described in the Coleman FBI affidavit, when he \u201ctravelled to Afghanistan to escort Usama bin Laden from Afghanistan to the Sudan.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[88]<\/span><\/sup> The FBI affidavit presents this, without explanation, as an act in furtherance of an al-Qaeda \u201cmurder conspiracy.\u201d But Osama\u2019s move to Sudan was synchronized with a simultaneous investment in Sudan by his bin Laden brothers, including an airport construction project that was largely subsidized by the Saudi royal family.<\/a><\/sup>[89]<\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n

A great deal of confusion surrounds the circumstances of bin Laden\u2019s displacement in 1991-92, from Saudi Arabia via Pakistan and perhaps Afghanistan) to the Sudan. But in these conflicted accounts one fact is not contested: bin Laden\u2019s trip was initially arranged by someone in the royal family.<\/a><\/sup>[90]<\/span><\/sup> Steven Coll in Ghost Wars reports that this person was Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki, who blamed it on pressure from the U.S:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\u00a0Peter Tomsen and other emissaries from Washington discussed the rising Islamist threat with [Saudi intelligence chief] Prince Turki in the summer of 1991\u2026. At some of the meetings between Turki and the CIA, Osama bin Laden\u2019s name came up explicitly. The CIA continued to pick up reporting that he was funding radicals such as Hekmatyar in Afghanistan\u2026. \u201cHis family has disowned him,\u201d Turki assured the Americans about bin Laden. Every effort had been made to persuade bin Laden to stop protesting against the Saudi royal family. These efforts had failed, Turki conceded, and the kingdom was now prepared to take sterner measures\u2026. Bin Laden learned of this when Saudi police arrived at his cushion-strewn, modestly furnished compound in Jeddah to announce that he would have to leave the kingdom. According to an account later provided to the CIA by a source in Saudi intelligence, the officer assigned to carry out the expulsion assured bin Laden that this was being done for his own good. The officer blamed the Americans. The U.S. government was planning to kill him, he told bin Laden, by this account, so the royal family would get him out of the kingdom for his own protection. The escort put bin Laden on a plane out of Saudi Arabia.<\/a><\/sup>[91]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0Coll\u2019s magistral but privileged book appeared in February 2004. Six months later the 9\/11 Commission Report published a quite different account, implying that by 1991 the Saudi government was estranged from bin Laden:
<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The Saudi government\u2026 undertook to silence Bin Laden by, among other things, taking away his passport. With help from a dissident member of the royal family, he managed to get out of the country under the pretext of attending an Islamic gathering in Pakistan in April 1991.<\/a><\/sup>[92]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0Lawrence Wright claims that the prince returning Osama\u2019s passport was Interior Minister Prince Naif, after bin Laden persuaded him he was needed in Peshawar \u201cin order to help mediate the civil war among the mujahideen.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[93]<\/span><\/sup> Prince Naif, the most anti-American of the senior Saudi royals, gave back bin Laden\u2019s passport on one condition, that he \u201csign a pledge that he would not interfere with the politics of South Arabia or any Arab country.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[94]<\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n

The \u201cIslamic gathering\u201d is almost certainly a reference to the on-going negotiations in Peshawar which eventually produced the Saudi-backed Peshawar Accord (finalized in April 1992) to end the Afghan Civil War. By several well-informed accounts, Bin Laden did play an important part in these negotiations, in furtherance (I would argue) of Prince Tuki\u2019s own policies. Like Sheikh Rahman before him in 1990, bin Laden tried, vainly, to negotiate a truce between the warring mujahideen leaders, Massoud and Hekmatyar. In these negotiations (according to Peter Tomsen, who was there), Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda were all united in seeking the same objective: a united Sunni army that (in opposition to American appeals for Shia representation) that could retake Kabul by force.<\/a><\/sup>[95]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

Thus I believe it is quite clear that bin Laden, in his mediation attempts to bring Hekmatyar into the Peshawar consensus, was acting in line with official Saudi and Pakistani interests. Others disagree. Without documentation, the author of the Frontline biography of bin Laden asserts,<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Contrary to what is always reiterated bin Laden has never had official relations with the Saudi regime or the royal family. All his contacts would happen through his brothers.<\/a>[96]<\/span> \u2026. Specifically he had no relation with Turki al-Faisal head of Saudi intelligence. He used to be very suspicious of his role in Afghanistan and once had open confrontation with him in 1991 and accused him of being the reason of the fight between Afghan factions.<\/a><\/sup>[97]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0Michael Scheuer, once head of the CIA\u2019s Counterterrorism Center, endorsed this claim, and reinforced it with the testimony of Sa\u2019ad al-Faqih (a critic of the Saudi royal family who has been accused by the U.S. Treasury of being affiliated with al-Qaeda) that, \u201cafter the Soviets withdrew \u2018Saudi intelligence [officers] were actually increasing the gap between Afghani factions to keep them fighting.\u2019\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[98]<\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n

But<\/span> this claim if true must have beenafter Kabul fell to the jihadis in 1992, when <\/span>Massoud, backed by the favored Saudi client Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, <\/span>began to fight<\/span> Hekmatyar, the favored client of Pakistan\u2019s ISI. Before this time the U.S. State Department\u2019s Afghan policy was to promote a broad-based opposition to the rump Communist government in Kabul, while \u201cside-lining the extremists<\/span>,\u201d including both Hekmatyar and<\/span> Sayyaf.<\/a><\/sup>[99]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

Pakistan\u2019s ISI in the same period clearly wanted a strong rebel alliance united behind Hekmatyar, and both the CIA and the Saudis continued to support them. <\/span>As Barnett Rubin reports, \u201cDuring this period, political \u2018unity\u2019 of some sort among the mujahidin groups was a major goal of U.S.-Pakistani-Saudi policy.\u201d<\/a>[100]<\/span><\/span>And in 1990-91, as Washington cut its allocation for the CIA\u2019s covert Afghan program by 60 percent, Prince Turki more than made up for the shortfall by increased contributions from Saudi Arabia.<\/a><\/sup>[101]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0I conclude that bin Laden\u2019s mediation efforts in Peshawar in 1991 were in accordance with Prince Turki\u2019s preferences, just as did Ali Mohamed, in organizing bin Laden\u2019s subsequent move from Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Sudan. As Steve Coll reports, the break between bin Laden and the Saudi royal family did not become serious until 1993, after the involvement of bin Laden\u2019s ally Sheikh Rahman in the first WTC bombing.<\/a><\/sup>[102]<\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n

Meanwhile Saudi royal support for this web of radical organizations, in which Ali Mohamed was a central organizer and trainer, continued until at least 1995, well after the WTC bombing of 1993. Anthony Summers reports that Turki may have personally renewed a deal with bin Laden as late as 1998:
<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

In sworn statements after 9\/11, former Taliban intelligence chief Mohammed Khaksar said that in 1998 the prince sealed a deal under which bin Laden undertook not to attack Saudi targets. In return, Saudi Arabia would provide funds and material assistance to the Taliban\u2026. Saudi businesses, meanwhile, would ensure that money also flowed directly to bin Laden. Turki would deny after 9\/11 that any such deal was done with bin Laden. One account has it, however, that he himself met with bin Laden \u2014 his old prot\u00c3\u00a9g\u00c3\u00a9 from the days of the anti-Soviet jihad \u2014 during the exchanges that led to the deal.<\/a><\/sup>[103]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0In 1991 the Soviet troops had been out of Kabul for two years; and, as former US Ambassador Tomsen has reported, the CIA\u2019s objective of a Pakistan-backed military overthrow in Kabul was at odds with the official U.S. policy of support for \u201ca political settlement restoring Afghanistan\u2019s independence.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[104]<\/span><\/sup> Ambassador Tomsen himself told the CIA Station Chief in Islamabad (Bill) that, by endorsing Pakistan\u2019s military attack on Kabul,
<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

he was violating fundamental U.S. policy precepts agreed to in Washington by his own agency. American policy was to cut Hekmatyar off, not build him up. Bill looked at me impassively as I spoke. I assumed his superiors in Langley had approved the offensive. The U.S. government was conducting two diametrically opposed Afghan policies.<\/a><\/sup>[105]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Steve Coll agrees that \u201cBy early 1991, the Afghan policies pursued by the State Department and the CIA were in open competition with each other\u2026. The CIA\u2026continued to collaborate with Pakistani military intelligence on a separate military track that mainly promoted Hekmatyar and other Islamist commanders.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[106]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0This conflict between the State Department and CIA was far from unprecedented. In particular it recalled the CIA-State conflict in Laos in 1959-60, which led to a tragic war in Laos, and eventually Vietnam.<\/a><\/sup>[107]<\/span><\/sup> Just as oil companies had a stake in that conflict, so too in 1990-92 the CIA was thinking not just of Afghanistan but of the oil resources of Central Asia, where some of the al-Kifah-trained \u201cArab Afghans\u201d were about to focus their attention.
<\/span><\/p>\n

The State Department in Afghanistan represented the will of the National Security Council and the public state. The CIA, on the other hand, was not \u201crogue\u201d (as has sometimes been suggested), it was pursuing the goals of oil companies and their financial backers \u2014 or what I have called the deep state \u2013 in preparing for a launch into the former Soviet republics of central Asia.
<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1991 the leaders of Central Asia \u201cbegan to hold talks with Western oil companies, on the back of ongoing negotiations between Kazakhstan and the US company Chevron.\u201d<\/a>[108]<\/span> The first Bush Administration actively supported the plans of U.S. oil companies to contract for exploiting the resources of the Caspian region, and also for a pipeline not controlled by Moscow that could bring the oil and gas production out to the west.
<\/span><\/p>\n

In the same year 1991, Richard Secord, Heinie Aderholt, and Ed Dearborn, three veterans of U.S. operations in Laos, and later of Oliver North\u2019s operations with the Contras, turned up in Baku under the cover of an oil company, MEGA Oil.<\/a>[109]<\/span> This was at a time when the first Bush administration had expressed its support for an oil pipeline stretching from Azerbaijan across the Caucasus to Turkey.<\/a>[110]<\/span> MEGA never did find oil, but did contribute materially to the removal of Azerbaijan from the sphere of post-Soviet Russian influence. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0As MEGA operatives in Azerbaijan, Secord, Aderholt, Dearborn, and their men engaged in military training, passed \u201cbrown bags filled with cash\u201d to members of the government, and above all set up an airline on the model of Air America which soon was picking up hundreds of mujahedin mercenaries in Afghanistan.<\/a>[111]<\/span> (Secord and Aderholt claim to have left Azerbaijan before the mujahedin arrived.) <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Meanwhile, Hekmatyar, who at the time was still allied with bin Laden, was \u201cobserved recruiting Afghan mercenaries [i.e. Arab Afghans] to fight in Azerbaijan against Armenia and its Russian allies.\u201d<\/a>[112]<\/span><\/span>Hekmatyar was a notorious drug trafficker; and, at this time, heroin flooded from Afghanistan through Baku into Chechnya, Russia, and even North America.<\/a>[113]<\/span>
<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Bin Laden, Ali Mohamed, and the Saudi Royal Family<\/strong>
<\/span><\/p>\n

By attempting to negotiate Hekmatyar\u2019s reconciliation with the other Peshawar commanders, bin Laden in 1991 was clearly an important part of this CIA effort. So, a year earlier, had been the blind Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0In 1990, after the assassination of Abdullah Azzam, Abd al-Rahman was invited to Peshawar, where his host was Khalid al-Islambouli, brother of one of the assassins of Sadat\u2026. On this trip, reportedly paid for by the CIA, Abd al-Rahman preached to the Afghans about the necessity of unity to overthrow the Kabul regime.<\/span><\/a>[114]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n

This presumably was shortly before Sheikh Abdul Rahman, even though he was on a State Department terrorist watch list after being imprisoned for the murder of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, was issued a multiple-entry U.S. visa in 1990 \u201cby a CIA officer working undercover in the consular section of the American embassy in Sudan.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[115]<\/span><\/sup> This was the same CIA-sponsored program that six years earlier had admitted Ali Mohamed, \u201ca visa-waiver program that was \u2026 designed to shield valuable assets or those who have performed valuable services for the country.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[116]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

And Ali Mohamed himself was, according to the New York Times, part of the CIA\u2019s plan for a military solution: \u201cIn the fall of 1992, Mr. Mohamed returned to fight in Afghanistan, training rebel commanders in military tactics, United States officials said.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[117]<\/span><\/sup> Before this, Mohamed had been charged with the major task of moving bin Laden, his four wives, and his seventeen children from Afghanistan to Sudan. The task was a major one, for Osama moved with his assistants, \u201ca stable of Arabian horses, and bulldozers.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[118]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0The Turki-bin Laden connection, which was cemented by <\/span>Turki\u2019s chief of staff and bin Laden\u2019s teacher Ahmed Badeeb, may have been renewed<\/span> as late as 1998:
<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

In sworn statements after 9\/11, former Taliban intelligence chief Mohammed Khaksar said that in 1998 the prince sealed a deal under which bin Laden undertook not to attack Saudi targets. In return, Saudi Arabia would provide funds and material assistance to the Taliban\u2026. Saudi businesses, meanwhile, would ensure that money also flowed directly to bin Laden. Turki would deny after 0\/11 that any such deal was done with bin Laden. One account has it, however, that he himself met with bin Laden \u2014 his old prot\u00c3\u00a9g\u00c3\u00a9 from the days of the anti-Soviet jihad \u2014 during the exchanges that led to the deal.<\/a><\/sup>[119]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0Bin Laden\u2019s move to the Sudan in 1991-92, the move organized by Ali Mohamed, appears to have been done in collaboration with his family. There is hotly contested evidence that Osama participated with his brothers in the construction of the Port Sudan airport, a project underwritten with funds from the Saudi royal family.<\/a><\/sup>[120]<\/span><\/sup> According to Lawrence Wright, \u201cthe Saudi Bnladen Group got the contract to build an airport in Port Sudan, which brought Osama frequently into the country to oversee the construction. He finally moved to Khartoum in 1992\u2026.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[121]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

Not contested, but largely overlooked, is the evidence of how bin Laden financed his move, through investing $50 million in the Sudanese al-Shama Islamic bank \u2014 a bank that also had support from both the bin Laden family and also the Saudi royal family. As the Chicago Tribune reported in November 2001,
<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

According to a 1996 State Department report on bin Laden\u2019s finances, bin Laden co-founded the Al Shamal bank with a group of wealthy Sudanese and capitalized it with $50 million of his inherited fortune\u2026..<\/a><\/sup>[122]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

According to public records, among the investors in the Al Shamal Islamic Bank is a Geneva-based financial services conglomerate headed by Prince Mohamed al-Faisal al-Saud, [brother of Prince Turki], son of the late King [Faisal al-]Saud and a cousin [i.e. nephew] of the current Saudi monarch, King Fahd.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Al Shamal bank, which opened for business in 1990, admits that Osama bin Laden held three accounts there between 1992 and 1997, when he used Sudan as his base of operations before fleeing to Afghanistan. But the bank insists in a written statement that bin Laden \u201cwas never a founder or a shareholder of Al Shamal Islamic Bank.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Told of the bank\u2019s statement, the State Department official replied that \u201cwe stand by\u201d the assertion that bin Laden put $50 million into the bank.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Al Shamal bank does acknowledge that among its five \u201cmain founders\u201d and principal shareholders is another Khartoum bank, the Faisal Islamic Bank of Sudan. According to public records, 19 percent of the Faisal Islamic Bank is owned by the Dar Al-Maal Al-Islami Trust, headed by Saudi Prince [Mohammed al-Faisal] al-Saud.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0(The Dar Al-Mal Al-Islami or DMI Trust, \u201cbased in the Bahamas and with its operations center in Geneva,\u201d was one of a spate of banks, mostly dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, that were set up with western guidance and assistance \u2014 in DMI\u2019s case the assistance came from Price Waterhouse and eventually Harvard University.<\/a><\/sup>[123]<\/span><\/sup> DMI was one of the two main banks which, according to Jane\u2019s Intelligence Review, had been funding the Makhtab and also the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), of which more below.)<\/a><\/sup>[124]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0The $3.5 billion DMI Trust, whose slogan is \u201cAllah is the purveyor of success,\u201d was founded 20 years ago to foster the spread of Islamic banking across the Muslim world. Its 12-member board of directors includes Haydar Mohamed Binladen, according to a DMI spokesman, a half-brother of Osama bin Laden\u2026..<\/span><\/p>\n

Though small, the Al Shamal Islamic Bank enabled bin Laden to move money quickly from one country to another through its correspondent relationships with some of the world\u2019s major banks, several of which have been suspended since Sept. 11.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Al Shamal bank was identified as one of bin Laden\u2019s principal financial entities during the trial earlier this year of four Al Qaeda operatives convicted in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.<\/a><\/sup>[125]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0One might have expected this early and revealing insight into bin Laden\u2019s finances to have been developed in the spate of privileged bin Laden and al Qaeda books that appeared in the years after 2001. In fact I have located only one brief inconsequential reference, in Steve Coll\u2019s The Bin Ladens: \u201cOsama had reorganized his personal banking at the Al-Shamal Bank in Khartoum, but his accounts gradually dried up.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[126]<\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n

There is of course no mention of the al-Shamal Bank in the 9\/11 Commission Report.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Federal Protection for Osama bin Laden\u2019s Brother-in-Law, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0It seems clear that the 1980s official USG block against antiterrorism actions that might embarrass the Saudis was still in force in America in 1995. We see this in the extraordinary federal protection extended to Mohamed Jamal Khalifa, Osama bin Laden\u2019s best friend and brother-in-law.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0On December 16, 1994, the San Francisco FBI arrested Khalifa in Morgan Hills (not far from Ali Mohamed\u2019s home). Khalifa\u2019s business card had been discovered in a search one year earlier of Sheikh Rahman\u2019s residence, after which he had been named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Landmarks case. Soon afterwards, a State Department cable described him as <\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\u00a0a known financier of terrorist operations and an officer of an Islamic NGO in the Philippines that is a known Hamas front. He is under indictment in Jordan in connection with a series of cinema bombings earlier this year.<\/a><\/sup>[127]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0Khalifa, in other words, was like Ali Mohamed involved in terrorist operations on an international level. He was an important source of information and talked freely to the FBI agents who arrested him. In his possession they found \u201cdocuments that connected Islamic terrorist manuals to the International Islamic Relief Organization, the group that he had headed in the Philippines.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[128]<\/span><\/sup> And in his notebook they found evidence linking him directly to Ramzi Yousef, who at the time was the FBI\u2019s most-wanted terrorist for his role in the 1993 WTC bombing.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0But as Peter Lance narrates, \u201cThe Feds never got a chance to question him.\u201d Instead, in January 1995, a decision was made by Secretary of State Warren Christopher and supported by Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick to whisk Khalifa from the United States to Jordan for trial, where he was soon \u201cacquitted of terrorism charges and allowed to move to Saudi Arabia.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[129]<\/span><\/sup>There \u201cSaudi officials greeted him at the airport.\u201d<\/a>[130]<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cI remember people at CIA who were ripshit at the time\u201d over the decision, says Jacob L. Boesen, an Energy Department analyst then working at the CIA\u2019s Counterterrorism Center. \u201cNot even speaking in retrospect, but contemporaneous with what the intelligence community knew about bin Laden, Khalifa\u2019s deportation was unreal.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[131]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Even more unreal was the decision of a court in a civil case to return to Khalifa before his deportation the contents of his luggage, including his notebook and other computer files.<\/a><\/sup>[132]<\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n

I believe that Peter Lance, after all his meticulous scholarship, failed to identify who was really being protected by this evasive measure. He writes that Khalifa, from 1983 to 1991, \u201chad been trusted by al Qaeda with running the Philippines branch of the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), one of their key NGOs.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[133]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0But the IIRO was in the hands of a far greater power than al Qaeda, which in any case did not exist in 1983. It was a charitable organization that had been authorized in 1979 by Saudi royal decree, as an affiliate of another key institution of the royal family, the Muslim World League (MWL).<\/a><\/sup>[134]<\/span><\/sup> According to former CIA officer Robert Baer, the IIRO has been run \u201cwith an iron hand\u201d by Prince Salman ibn Abdul-Aziz al Saud (the brother of Saudi King Abdullah), who \u201cpersonally approved all important appointments and spending.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[135]<\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n

The creation date of 1979 reflects the important shift in that year of the Saudi royal family\u2019s attitude towards the political Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood or Ikhwan (of which Mohammed Jamal Khalifa was a senior member). As already noted, 1979 was the year radical Wahhabis, seized the Grand Mosque at Mecca. In response, the Saudi family foundations like the IIRO, to subsidize the emigration of the Muslim Brotherhood.<\/a><\/sup>[136]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Thus Khalifa\u2019s status in the IIRO was not anomalous. Besides the bombings in Jordan, the IIRO has also been linked to support of terrorists in the Philippines,<\/a><\/sup>[137]<\/span><\/sup> India,<\/a><\/sup>[138]<\/span><\/sup> Indonesia,<\/a><\/sup>[139]<\/span><\/sup> Canada,<\/a><\/sup>[140]<\/span><\/sup> Albania, Chechnya, Kenya,<\/a><\/sup>[141]<\/span><\/sup> and other countries, notably Bosnia.<\/a><\/sup>[142]<\/span><\/sup> In particular Khalifa personally has been accused of financing the Philippine terrorist group Abu Sayyaf (which in 1993 had kidnapped an American Bible translator<\/span>)<\/span>.<\/a><\/sup>[143]<\/span><\/sup> Yet \u201cThe U.S. government has not designated Khalifa as a financial supporter of terrorism.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[144]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Federal Protection for Al-Qaeda Plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed<\/strong>
<\/span><\/p>\n

The Saudi royal protection for Jamal Khalifa was more than matched by the Qatari royal protection of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), Ramzi Yousuf\u2019s uncle and co-conspirator in the Philippines. The 9\/11 Commission, who judged KSM to be \u201cthe principal architect of the 9\/11 attacks,\u201d made a muted acknowledgment of this Qatari protection of him:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed \u2013 Yousef\u2019s uncle, then located in Qatar \u2013 was a fellow plotter of Yousef\u2019s in the Manila air plot and had also wired him some money prior to the Trade Center bombing. The U.S. Attorney obtained an indictment against KSM in January 1996, but an official in the government of Qatar probably warned him about it. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed evaded capture (and stayed at large to play a central part in the 9\/11 attacks).<\/a><\/sup>[145]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0From other sources, notably Robert Baer who was then a CIA officer in Qatar, we learn that the \u201cofficial\u201d was Sheikh Abdallah bin Khalid bin Hamad al-Thani, the Qatari minister of the Interior and the brother of then Qatari Emir Sheik Hamad bin Khalid al-Thani.<\/a><\/sup>[146]<\/span><\/sup> According to ABC News,
<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Mohammed is believed to have fled Qatar with a passport provided by that country\u2019s government. He is also believed to have been given a home in Qatar as well as a job at the Department of Public Water Works. Officials also said bin Laden himself visited Abdallah bin Khalid al-Thani in Qatar between the years of 1996 and 2000.<\/a><\/sup>[147]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In Triple Cross, Peter Lance, who does not mention KSM\u2019s escape from Qatar, focuses instead on the way that, later in the same year, federal prosecutors kept his name out of the trial of Ramzi Yousuf in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing:
<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Mike Garcia and Dietrich Snell presented a riveting, evidence case\u2026 and characterized the material retrieved from Ramzi\u2019s Toshiba laptop as \u2018the most devastating evidence of all.\u201d\u2026. While Yousuf\u2019s Toshiba laptop\u2026 contained the full details of the plot later executed on 9\/11, not a word of that scenario was mentioned during trial. \u2026. Most surprising, during the entire summer-long trial, the name of the fourth Bojinka conspirator, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed\u2026was mentioned by name only once, in reference to a letter found in [Yousuf\u2019s apartment].<\/a><\/sup>[148]<\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Lance repeatedly suggests that U.S. prosecutors in New York, and particularly Dietrich Snell, were responsible for minimizing the role of Khalid Sheikh Mohamed and other shortcomings, because they were seeking \u201cto hide the full truth behind the Justice Department\u2019s failures.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[149]<\/span><\/sup> But the matter of KSM\u2019s escape in 1996, like the release of Jamal Khalifa, was sensitive at a much higher level than that of prosecutors. It was a was a matter that reached back into the black hole that is represented by the ultimate United States dependency on Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and OPEC, for the defense of the petrodollar.
<\/span><\/p>\n

In other words, the suppression of KSM\u2019s name was not surprising at all. On the contrary, it was totally consistent with one of the most sensitive and controversial features of the 9\/11 story: the much-discussed fact that before CIA two counterterrorist officers protected two of the alleged hijackers from detection and surveillance by the FBI.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Federal Protection for Alleged 9\/11 Hijackers<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0Morgenthau\u2019s hypothesis that the CIA was protecting Saudi criminal assets received further corroboration in the wake of 9\/11. There is now evidence, much of it systematically suppressed by the 9\/11 Commission, that b<\/span>efore 9\/11 CIA officers Richard Blee and Tom Wilshire inside the CIA\u2019s Bin Laden Unit, along with FBI agents Dina Corsi et al., were protecting from investigation and arrest two of the eventual alleged hijackers on 9\/11, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi \u2013 much as the FBI had protected Ali Mohamed from arrest in 1993.
<\/span><\/p>\n

There are also indications that al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, like Hampton-El before them, may have been receiving funds indirectly from the Saudi Embassy in Washington:
<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\u201c[B]etween 1998 and 2002, up to US$73,000 in cashier cheques was funneled by [Saudi Ambassador Prince] Bandar\u2019s wife Haifa \u2014 who once described the elder Bushes as like \u201cmy mother and father\u201d \u2014 to two Californian families known to have bankrolled al-Midhar and al-Hazmi. \u2026 Princess Haifa sent regular monthly payments of between $2,000 and $3,500 to Majeda Dweikat, wife of Osama Basnan, believed by various investigators to be a spy for the Saudi government. Many of the cheques were signed over to Manal Bajadr, wife of Omar al-Bayoumi, himself suspected of covertly working for the kingdom. The Basnans, the al-Bayoumis and the two 9\/11 hijackers once shared the same apartment block in San Diego. It was al-Bayoumi who greeted the killers when they first arrived in America, and provided them, among other assistance, with an apartment and social security cards. He even helped the men enroll at flight schools in Florida.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[150]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Report of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9\/11 (pp. 173-77), though very heavily redacted at this point, supplies corroborating information, including a report that Basnan had once hosted a party for the \u201cBlind Sheikh\u201d Omar Abdul Rahman. In other words, the Congressional investigation found indications that the same protection extended to those protected in the crimes of 1993, were protected again in 9\/11.
<\/span><\/p>\n

The 9\/11 Commission Report, overruling FBI reports, simplydenied that Saudi embassy money had supported the two hijackers.<\/a>[151]<\/span> It recognized that there had been an intelligence failure with respect to the <\/span>al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi<\/span>, but treated it as an accident that might not have occurred \u201cif more resources had been applied.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[152]<\/span><\/sup> This explanation, however, has since been rejected by 9\/11 Commission Chairman Tom Kean. Asked if the failure to deal appropriately with al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi could have been a simple mistake, Kean replied:
<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Oh, it wasn\u2019t careless oversight. It was purposeful. No question about that .\u2026 The conclusion that we came to was that in the DNA of these organizations was secrecy. And secrecy to the point of ya don\u2019t share it with anybody.<\/a><\/sup>[153]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0In 2011 an important book by Kevin Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, demonstrated conclusively that the withholding was purposive, and sustained over a period of eighteen months.<\/a><\/sup>[154]<\/span><\/sup> This interference and manipulation became particularly blatant and controversial in the days before 9\/11; it led one FBI agent, Steve Bongardt, to predict accurately on August 29, less than two weeks before 9\/11, that \u201csomeday someone will die.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[155]<\/span><\/sup><\/span>
<\/span><\/sup><\/p>\n

Before reading Fenton\u2019s book, I was satisfied with Lawrence Wright\u2019s speculations that the CIA may have wanted to recruit the two Saudis; and that \u201cThe CIA may also have been protecting an overseas operation [possibly in conjunction with Saudi Arabia] and was afraid that the F.B.I. would expose it.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[156]<\/span><\/sup> However I am now persuaded that Lawrence Wright\u2019s explanation, that the CIA was protecting a covert operation, may explain the beginnings of the withholding in January 2000, but cannot explain its renewal in the days just before 9\/11. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Fenton analyzes a list of thirty-five different occasions where the two alleged hijackers were protected in this fashion, from January 2000 to about September 5, 2001, less than a week before the hijackings.<\/a><\/sup>[157]<\/span><\/sup> In his analysis, the incidents fall into two main groups. In the earlier incidents he sees an intention \u201cto cover a CIA operation that was already in progress.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[158]<\/span><\/sup> However after \u201cthe system was blinking red\u201d in the summer of 2001, and the CIA expected an imminent attack, Fenton can see no other explanation than that \u201cthe purpose of withholding the information had become to allow the attacks to go forward.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[159]<\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n

In support of Fenton\u2019s conclusion, there is evidence (not mentioned by him) indicating that in mid-2001 the CIA\u2019s Counterterrorism Center (CTC), who were the chief suppliers of the CIA protection, believed an al Qaeda attack was imminent, and that al-Mihdhar was important to it. On August 15, CIA Counterterrorism Chief Cofer Black told a secret Pentagon conference, \u201cWe\u2019re going to be struck soon\u2026. Many Americans are going to die, and it could be in the U.S.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[160]<\/span><\/sup> Three weeks earlier, CTC Deputy Chief Tom Wilshire had written that \u201c\u201cWhen the next big op is carried out\u2026Khallad [bin Attash] will be at or near the top \u2026.Khalid Midhar should be very high interest.\u201d<\/a><\/sup>[161]<\/span><\/sup> Yet Wilshire (like his superior, Richard Blee), instead of expediting to the FBI the transmission of his knowledge about al-Mihdhar, did the opposite: he<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\u00a0not only failed to tell anyone else involved in the hunt [for Al-Mihdhar] that Almihdhar would likely soon be a participant in a major al-Qaeda attack inside the US, but also supported a dubious procedure which meant that the FBI was only able to focus a fraction of the resources it had on the hunt.<\/a><\/sup>[162]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0Fenton\u2019s serious allegation has to be considered in the light of the earlier instances of protection we have surveyed:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a01)\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>the protection given to Salameh and Abouhalima in the 1990 Kahane murder, leaving them free to participate in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing;<\/span><\/p>\n

2)\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>the failure for two or three years to process Ali Mohamed\u2019s documents seized in 1990, which could have prevented the 1993 World Trade Center bombing;<\/span><\/p>\n

3)\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>the release of Ali Mohamed from RCMP detention in 1993, leaving him free to participate in the 1998 Nairobi Embassy bombing;<\/span><\/p>\n

4)\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>the treatment of Ali Mohamed as an \u201cunindicted coconspirator\u201d in the 1993 WTC bombing case and Landmarks case, leaving him free to participate in the 1998 Nairobi Embassy bombing.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0There are other indicators that these events were part of a single long-term cover-up, one that is still ongoing. One of the connectors is Sheikh Abdul Rahman\u2019s Al\u2014Salaam Mosque in Jersey City, visited by Ali Mohamed and his trainees in 1989, and allegedly frequented by two of the alleged 9\/11 hijackers (Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi) in 2000-01.<\/a><\/sup>[163]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Next door to the Mosque in Jersey City was the Sphinx Trading Company, whose incorporator and director, Waleed Abouel Nour, was like Ali Mohamed listed as an unindicted coconspirator in the 1995 Landmarks conspiracy case. (The New York Times later reported that the FBI had identified Nour as a terrorist.)<\/a><\/sup>[164]<\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n

At minimum, two Ali Mohamed-trained members of the New York cell \u2013 El Sayyid Nosair and Siddig Ali Siddig \u2013 are confirmed to have kept mailboxes at Sphinx Trading during the 1990s, as did the blind Sheikh himself.
<\/span><\/p>\n

A decade later, the mailboxes were still being used by al Qaeda-linked terrorists.<\/span><\/p>\n

Testifying in a sealed proceeding in 2002, a New Jersey policeman said the FBI told him that \u201cseveral of the hijackers involved in the September 11th event also had mailboxes at that location.\u201d
<\/span><\/p>\n

Police searched the office of a New Jersey businessman [Mohamed el-Atriss] whose name appeared on the Sphinx Trading Co. incorporation papers and found the names and phone numbers of several hijackers among his papers. The businessman eventually admitted having sold fake identification cards to two of the hijackers.<\/a><\/sup>[165]<\/span><\/sup> [One of the fake IDs was given to Khalid Al-Mihdhar.]<\/a><\/sup>[166]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

This important inquiry into the infrastructure of the Ali Mohamed connection was quickly shut down by the FBI:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0The police officer testified in 2002 that the FBI had shut down the New Jersey police investigation of these connections, without explanation but amid unconfirmed rumors (reported by the New York Times) that the businessman was himself an FBI informant. All terrorism charges against the businessman were eventually dropped.<\/a><\/sup>[167]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0The Saudi-American Petroleum Complex and the Defense of the Petrodollar<\/strong>
<\/span><\/p>\n

This on-going cover-up of a terrorist infrastructure spanning a decade is mirrored by the censorship of the Joint Inquiry findings about Osama Basnan, involved in the pass-through of Saudi Embassy funds to al-Mihdhar, and earlier the host of a party for Sheikh Abdul Rahman. One factor enabling the cover-up is the over-arching and little-understood U.S.-Saudi relationship, to understand which we must also consider the context of petrodollars, OPEC and the major oil companies. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0The export of Saudi oil, paid for by all customers in U.S. dollars, and in the U.S. case largely offset by the export of U.S. arms to Saudi Arabia, is a major underpinning of America\u2019s petrodollar economy. As I have documented elsewhere, its current strength is supported by OPEC\u2019s requirement (secured by a secret agreement in the 1970s between the US and Saudi Arabia) that all OPEC oil sales be denominated in dollars.<\/a><\/sup>[168]<\/span><\/sup> $600 billion of the Saudi dollar earnings have been reinvested abroad, most of it in U.S. corporations like Citibank (where the two largest shareholders are members of the Saudi Royal family).<\/a><\/sup>[169]<\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n

This fusion of U.S. and Saudi governing interests is as much political as economic. The first oil price hike of 1972-73, arranged by Nixon with the King of Saudi Arabia and the Shah of Iran, helped pay to arm Iran and Saudi Arabia as U.S. proxies in the region, following the withdrawal of British troops from the region in 1971.<\/a><\/sup>[170]<\/span><\/sup> The oil price hikes of 1979-80, on the other hand, were assuredly not the intention of President Carter, a political victim of the increases. They have however been credibly attributed to the work of oil majors like BP, possibly acting in collusion with Republicans; and had the result of helping to elect Ronald Reagan (as well as Margaret Thatcher in England).<\/a><\/sup>[171]<\/span><\/sup>
<\/span><\/p>\n

I am suggesting that there is a high-level fusion of interests between the U.S. and Saudi governments, oil companies and banks (not to mention facilitating alliances like the Carlyle Group) which the CIA tends to represent continuously, and not just ad hoc for the sake of any one particular goal. The on-going protection given through the years to criminals like Salameh, Ali Mohamed, al-Mihdhar, and al-Hazmi should be seen as symptoms of this high-level fusion of interests. Needless to add, the 99 percent of ordinary American people, having as a result now suffered a series of recurring attacks (the first World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 Embassy bombings, possibly even 9\/11 itself) have been losers from this arrangement.
<\/span><\/p>\n

I am confident that the mystery of USG protection to terrorists can be traced in part to this \u201croof\u201d of inscrutable governmental, financial, and corporate relationships between the United States and Saudi Arabia. There is a \u201cblack hole\u201d at the center of this roof in which the interests of governments, petrodollar banks, and multinational oil companies, are all inscrutably mixed.<\/span><\/p>\n

Notes<\/strong>
<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a>[1]<\/span><\/span>Dana Priest and William Arkin, <\/span>Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State<\/span> (New York: Little Brown, 2011), 52.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\n

<\/a>[2]<\/span><\/span> E.g. Marc Ambinder and D.G. Grady, Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry (New York: Wiley, 2013); John Tirman, \u201cThe Quiet Coup: No, Not Egypt. Here,\u201d HuffingtonPost, July 9, 2013, http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/john-tirman\/nsa-deep-state_b_3569316.html.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[3]<\/span><\/span> Erich Lichtblau, \u201cIn Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers of N.S.A.,\u201d New York Times, July 6, 2013.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[4]<\/span><\/span> In addition there are unproven allegations that the United States granted a green card to <\/span>Ayman al Zawahiri, identified in the 9\/11 Commission Report (p. 57) as \u201cthe most important Egyptian in bin Laden\u2019s circle\u201d (p. 57), and since 2011 the leader of al-Qaeda (Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War On Truth:<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

9\/11, Disinformation And The Anatomy Of Terrorism<\/span> [Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2005], 46). It is not contested that \u201cForeign trial transcripts and U.S. court records confirmed that Zawahiri had previously flown to America, once in the early 1990s, and again in 1994\u2026. Ali Mohamed, bin-Laden\u2019s American-trained military adviser, served as Zawahiri\u2019s host during the 1994 American fundraising campaign\u201d (Jayna Davis, The third terrorist: the Middle East connection to the Oklahoma City bombing [<\/span>Nashville, TN: WND Books, 2004], 318-19).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[5]<\/span><\/span> Richard Clarke, <\/a>Against All Enemies: Inside America\u2019s War on Terror(New York: Free Press, 2004), 30.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[6]<\/span><\/span> Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasqui\u00c3\u00a9, Ben Laden: la v\u00c3\u00a9rit\u00c3\u00a9 interdite(<\/span>Paris: Deno\u00c3\u00abl, 2001), 14.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[7]<\/span><\/span> Robert Baer, See No Evil: the true story of a ground soldier in the CIA\u2019s war on terrorism (New York : Crown Publishers, 2002), 243-44; discussion in Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, oil, and war: the United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). 28-31; The Road to 9\/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 170-72.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[8]<\/span><\/span> Cf. my enlargement of the concept of an American deep state beyond parallel government in <\/span>Peter Dale Scott, <\/span>American War Machine<\/span> (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 20-23; Peter Dale Scott, \u201cThe \u2018Deep State\u2019 behind U.S. democracy,\u201d VoltaireNet, April 6, 2011, <\/span>http:\/\/www.voltairenet.org\/article169316.html<\/a><\/span>; etc.<\/span>
<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[9]<\/span><\/span> All of America\u2019s military engagements since 1950 have involved defense of the petrodollar system. See Peter Dale Scott, \u201cThe Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System,\u201d Asian-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, April 27, 2011, http:\/\/japanfocus.org\/-Peter_Dale-Scott\/3522.<\/span>
<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[10]<\/span><\/span> Peter Lance, Triple Cross: How bin Laden\u2019s Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI \u2013 and Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him(New York: Regan\/ HarperCollins, 2006), 120-25. Cf. <\/span>Toronto Globe<\/span> and Mail, November 22, 2001; <\/span>Tim Weiner, Enemies: a history of the FBI (New York: Random House, 2012), 397.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[11]<\/span><\/span>Ali H. Soufan, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9\/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda (New York: Norton, 2011), 75-77.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[12]<\/span><\/span> Lance, Triple Cross, 373. Cf. J.M. Berger, \u201cPaving the Road to 9\/11,\u201d Intelwire, http:\/\/intelwire.egoplex.com\/unlocking911-1-ali-mohamed-911.html<\/a>: \u201c<\/span>Ali Mohamed was the utility player who created al Qaeda\u2019s terrorist infrastructure in the United States \u2013 a series of connections, ideas, techniques and specific tools used by the [9\/11] plot\u2019s hijackers and masterminds\u2026. Mohamed described teaching al Qaeda terrorists how to smuggle box cutters onto airplanes.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[13]<\/span><\/span> Lance, Triple Cross, 123-24.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[14]<\/span><\/span>Soufan, The Black Banners, 561. The testimony of former FBI agents like Ali Soufan that Mohamed was not incarcerated has been challenged in a curious book by Special Forces veteran Pete Blaber, The Mission, The Men, and Me: Lessons from a Former Delta Force Commander (New York: Berkley Trade, 2010). Blaber claims to have interviewed Mohamed in a prison cell, after reading Mohamed\u2019s perceptive document on how to track down Osama bin Laden. Blaber argues strenuously that Mohamed was not a double agent, but fails to deal with any of the countervailing evidence (such as the RCMP release). <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[15]<\/span><\/span>\u201cD.E.A. Deployed Mumbai Plotter Despite Warning,\u201d <\/span>New York Times<\/span>, November 8, 2009; cf. Peter Dale Scott, <\/span>American War Machine<\/span> (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 246-47. Cf. <\/span>The Globe and Mail<\/span> (Canada), May 26, 2011: \u201cFBI thought Mumbai massacre plotter worked for them, court told<\/span>.\u201dAnother much simpler domestic example of this puzzle is Richard Aoki, the FBI informant who in the 1960s supplied the Black Panthers in Oakland with arms (Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives: The FBI\u2019s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan\u2019s Rise to Power [New York: Macmillan, 2012], 418-24, etc.). <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[16]<\/span><\/span> Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9\/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 151-60. For a summary, see Peter Dale Scott, \u201cBosnia, Kosovo, and Now Libya: The Human Costs of Washington\u2019s On-Going Collusion with Terrorists,\u201d Asian-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, July 29, 2011, http:\/\/japanfocus.org\/-Peter_Dale-Scott\/3578.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[17]<\/span><\/span> Steven Emerson, American jihad: the terrorists living among us (New York: Free Press, 2002), 57-58; Peter L. Bergen, Holy war, Inc.: inside the secret world of Osama bin Laden(<\/span>New York: Free Press, 2001), 135<\/span>;<\/span>Lawrence Wright, <\/span>The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9\/11<\/span> (New York: Knopf, 2006), 181-82. Wright gives a detailed summary of John Zent\u2019s ensuing interview with Mohamed in May 1993, but says not a word about Zent\u2019s intervention with the RCMP. To my knowledge the only privileged book to do so is Tim Weiner, <\/span>Enemies: a history of the FBI<\/span>(New York: Random House, 2012), 397: \u201cHe explained that he was working for the FBI and he offered the telephone number of his Bureau contact in San Francisco. The Canadians released Mohamed after the agent vouched for him.\u201d Weiner\u2019s relative candor came in 2012, long after this FBI scandal had already been publicized by Lance and other authors, including myself.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[18]<\/span><\/span> Cf. Washington Post, June 1, 2012: \u201cSoufan\u2019s case was unusual because he never worked for the CIA. The PRB\u2019s [<\/span>Publications Review Board\u2019s]<\/span> authority [i.e. legal authority] is grounded in the secrecy agreements signed by agency employees that require them to submit any material prepared for public disclosure \u2018either during my employment . . . or at anytime thereafter.\u2019\u201d In other words, the CIA\u2019s PRB had no legal right to censor Soufan\u2019s book, but did so anyway \u2014 an example of the blurring of past bureaucratic distinctions in today\u2019s shadow state.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[19]<\/span><\/span> Michael Scheuer, Osama bin Laden (<\/span>New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 218n.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[21]<\/span><\/span> Benjamin Weiner and James Risen, \u201cThe Masking of a Militant: A special report; A Soldier\u2019s Shadowy Trail In U.S. and in the Mideast,\u201d New York Times, December 1, 1998. This embarrassing exercise in damage control cannot be found on Lexis Nexis.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[22]<\/span><\/span> Peter Waldman, Gerald F. Seib, Jerry Markon, Christopher Cooper, \u201cSergeant Served U.S. Army and bin Laden, Showing Failings in FBI\u2019s Terror Policing,\u201d Wall Street Journal, November 26, 2001.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[24]<\/span><\/span> I had no choice but to remove certain relevant material from The Road to 9\/11. As British and American lawyers pointed out to me, my sources had already retracted their statements before me.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[25]<\/span><\/span> Lance, Triple Cross, 125. Cf. Steven Emerson, \u201cOsama bin Laden\u2019s Special Operations Man,\u201d Journal of Counterterrorism and Security International,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

September 1, 1998, http:\/\/www.investigativeproject.org\/187\/osama-bin-ladens-special-operations-man: \u201c<\/span>In a seemingly bizarre twist, while in California, Mohammed volunteered to provide information to the FBI on a smuggling operations involving Mexicans and other aliens not connected to terrorist groups. Within time, officials say, the relationship allowed Mohammed to divert the FBI\u2019s attention away from looking at his real role in terrorism into examining the information he gave them about other smuggling.\u201d But it could not have diverted the FBI\u2019s attention for very long. By May 1993, five months later, Mohamed had described to Zent in some detail his activities with Obama and al-Qaeda (Wright, Looming Tower, 181-82; Berger, Ali Mohamed, 31-32).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[26]<\/span><\/span> Lance, Triple Cross, 95. Cf. Tim Weiner, Enemies, 397.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[27]<\/span><\/span> Lance, Triple Cross, 99. Similarly Tim Weiner writes that the FBI agents handling Mohamed \u201cdid not comprehend him\u201d (Weiner, Enemies: a history of the FBI, 397).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[29]<\/span><\/span> John Miller, Michael Stone, Chris Mitchell, The Cell: Inside the 9\/11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It (<\/span>New York: Hyperion, 2002), 90-91.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[30]<\/span><\/span> U.S. vs. Omar Abdel Rahman et al., September 11, 1995; quoted in Berger, Ali Mohamed, 210; cf. Lance, Triple Cross, 48.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[31]<\/span><\/span> \u201cSergeant Served U.S. Army and bin Laden,\u201d Wall Street Journal, November 26, 2001: \u201cAt the time, the FBI wrote them off as harmless zealots, fired up to help the mujahedeen fighting the Soviet puppet government in Afghanistan.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[32]<\/span><\/span> Bergen, Holy War, Inc., 134. The al-Kifah Center (al-Kifah means \u201cthe struggle\u201d) was \u201c<\/span>known informally as \u2018the jihad office.\u2019\u2026 There was no problem finding volunteers, who might stay in Afghanistan up to three months at a time\u2026. The volunteers joined the forces of the Hezb-I-Islami (Party of Islam), led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar\u201d (Stephen Franklin, \u201cSlain Muslim Had Link To Radical Cleric,\u201dChicago Tribune, July 11, 1993, http:\/\/articles.chicagotribune.com\/1993-07-11\/news\/9307110208_1_world-trade-center-bombing-sheik-omar-abdel-rahman-mustafa-shalabi.)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[33]<\/span><\/span> Mitchell D. Silber, The Al Qaeda Factor: Plots Against the West (<\/span>Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 169-70.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[34]<\/span><\/span> Peter Bergen, Holy Wars, Inc., 130-31.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[35]<\/span><\/span>Lawrence Wright, <\/span>The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9\/11<\/span> (New York: Knopf, 2006), 180; citing Boston Globe, February 3, 1995; cf. <\/span>Robert Friedman, \u201c<\/span>The CIA\u2019s Jihad,\u201d New Yorker, March 17, 1995;<\/span>Paul L. Williams, Al Qaeda: brotherhood of terror ([Parsippany, NJ?]: Alpha, 2002), 117.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[36]<\/span><\/span>Lance Williams and Erik McCormick, \u201cAl Qaeda terrorist worked with FBI,\u201dSan Francisco Chronicle, November 4, 2001.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[37]<\/span><\/span> \u201cAli Mohamed Case,\u201d Pentagon, http:\/\/www.dhra.mil\/perserec\/adr\/counterterrorism\/mohamed.htm<\/a>, Cf. <\/span>Emerson, \u201cOsama bin Laden\u2019s Special Operations Man:\u201d<\/span> \u201c<\/span>He had been in the United States earlier that decade, having graduated as a captain from a Special Forces Officers School at Fort Bragg in 1981 in a program for visiting military officials from foreign countries.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[38]<\/span><\/span> Robert Friedman, \u201cThe CIA and the Sheik,\u201d Village Voice, March 30, 1993; Evan <\/span>Kohlmann, <\/span>Al-Qaida\u2019s Jihad in Europe<\/span> (New York: Berg, 2004)<\/span>, 26.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[39]<\/span><\/span> John Miller, Michael Stone, Chris Mitchell, The Cell: Inside the 9\/11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It (<\/span>New York: Hyperion, 2002), 44.<\/span> Cf. J.M. Berger, Jihad Joe: Americans who go to war in the name of Islam, (<\/span>Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2011), <\/span>44: \u201cThe stash included military training manuals and documents given to Nosair by Sergeant Ali Mohamed, the jihadist mole at Fort Bragg.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[40]<\/span><\/span>Newsday<\/span>, November 8, 1990.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[41]<\/span><\/span>New York Times<\/span>, November 8, 1990. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[42]<\/span><\/span>New York Times<\/span>, December 16, 1990. As before, it is instructive to compare the Pentagon\u2019s version of the training given by Mohamed (\u201csurveillance, weapons and explosives\u201d) with that in the long article about Mohamed in the New York Times: \u201c<\/span>Mr. Mohamed met the local Muslims at an apartment in Jersey City, and taught them survival techniques, map reading and how to recognize tanks and other Soviet weapons, according to testimony by one of his students at Mr. Nosair\u2019s 1995 Federal trial\u201d (<\/span>Weiner and Risen, \u201cThe Masking of a Militant: A special report,\u201d New York Times, December 01, 1998; cf. Berger, Ali Mohamed, ).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[43]<\/span><\/span>TV journalist John Miller, a former New York deputy police commissioner who would later become the FBI\u2019s Assistant Director for Public Affairs, reported in The Cell (44) that the disputed evidence from Nosair\u2019s home was withheld from NYPD officer Edward Morris, who prepared the NYPD case against Nosair: \u201cOn the third say after the shooting, while Norris was out to lunch, the FBI removed Nosair\u2019s 16 boxes of files from Norris\u2019s squad room. Unfortunately the evidence was about to enter a black hole. The FBI now says it turned the files the evidence was about to enter a black hole. The FBI now says it turned the files over to the Manhattan District Attorney\u2019s Office, after it was decided, following a series of meetings and phone calls, that the local prosecutor and the NYPD would have exclusive jurisdiction over the murder case. The Manhattan DA\u2019s office won\u2019t comment on what was done with the files before Nosair\u2019s trail, though Norris was never informed they were available. But this much is certain: The bulk of the material remained untranslated and unread for nearly three years.\u201d [This last sentence is hard to reconcile with the detailed description given at the time by Borelli.]<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[44]<\/span><\/span> Friedman, \u201c<\/span>The CIA\u2019s Jihad.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[45]<\/span><\/span> Lance, Triple Cross, 58-62.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[46]<\/span><\/span> For the list, see Lance, Triple Cross, 574-75.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[47]<\/span><\/span> Steve Coll, Ghost wars: the secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet invasion to September 10, 2001 (<\/span>New York: Penguin Press, 2004)<\/span>, 251.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[48]<\/span><\/span> Quoted in Peter Lance, Triple Cross, 383. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[49]<\/span><\/span> Steve Coll, Ghost Wars, 255; \u201cSince 1989 the FBI had been running paid informants inside circles of Islamic radicals in New York and New Jersey. In 1990, the FBI carted away forty-seven boxes of documents and training manuals from the home of El Sayyid Nosair.\u201d Cf. Lance, Triple Cross, 73-75, etc.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[50]<\/span><\/span> Robert Friedman, \u201c<\/span>The CIA\u2019s Jihad,\u201d New Yorker, March 17, 1995.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[51]<\/span><\/span> Robert Dreyfuss, Devil\u2019s Game: how the United States helped unleash fundamentalist Islam (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003), 274-75; quoting Jiohn Cooley, Unholy Wars (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 31-32: \u201cBy the end of 1980, U.S. military trainers were sent to Egypt to impart the skills of the U.S. Special Forces to those Egyptians who would, in turn, pass on the training to the Egyptian volunteers flying to the aid of the mujahideen in Afghanistan.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[52]<\/span><\/span> Joseph J. Trento, Prelude to terror: the rogue CIA and the legacy of America\u2019s private intelligence network (New York: Carrol and Graf, 2005), 150, 247.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[54]<\/span><\/span> Lance, Triple Cross, 194 (oath).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[55]<\/span><\/span> Scott, Road to 9\/11, 161-62; citing <\/span>Guardian<\/span> (London), January 7, 1993; Evan F. Kohlmann, Al-Qaida\u2019s Jihad in Europe: The Afghan-Bosnian Network (Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers, 2004), 16.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[56]<\/span><\/span> Ferrukh Mir, Half Truth (<\/span>iUniverse.com, 2011), 163-64: \u201cIn 1992, Ali Mohamed, a double agent and ex-US Special Forces office with close ties to Al-Kifah, led a group of US militants who were all ex-US soldiers to train and fight in Bosnia. Abu Obadiah Yahiya, an ex-US Marine and security chief at the Brooklyn branch, lead [sic] a second group of US militants to fight in Bosnia.\u201d Cf. Mark Huband, Trading Secrets: spies and intelligence in an age of terror(New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 112; \u201cMohamed \u2014 using the nom-de-guerre Abu \u2018Abdallah \u2014 travelled to Bosnia as part of a team which trained and armed Muslim fighters there until June 1993, when he travelled on to Khartoum and was asked by bin Laden to set up the al-Qaeda cell in Nairobi, Kenya.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[57]<\/span><\/span> Evan <\/span>Kohlmann, <\/span>Al-Qaida\u2019s Jihad in Europe<\/span> (New York: Berg, 2004)<\/span>, 39-41; citing Steve Coll and Steve LeVine, \u201cGlobal Network Provides Money, Haven,\u201d <\/span>Washington Post<\/span>, August 3, 1993. Bin Laden also gave money to the Third World Relief Agency to buy weapons for Bosnian fighters (<\/span>Anonymous [Michael Scheuer], Through our enemies\u2019 eyes: Osama bin Laden, radical Islam, and the future of America [<\/span>Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2006], 151).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[58]<\/span><\/span>Scott, <\/span>Road to 9\/11<\/span>, 149-50; Kohlmann, <\/span>Al-Qaida\u2019s Jihad in Europe<\/span>, 45, 73-75.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[59]<\/span><\/span>Scott, <\/span>Road to 9\/11<\/span>, 149; Kohlmann, <\/span>Al-Qaida\u2019s Jihad in Europe<\/span>, 73. I have been unable to identify this Prince Faisal securely. He is perhaps Prince Faisal bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, who frequently visited the United States in connection with his horsebreeding interests in Kentucky. In 2003 Gerald Posner claimed that Faisal\u2019s older brother and business partner Ahmed bin Salman had had ties to al-Qaeda and advance knowledge of 9\/11 (Gerald Posner, Why America slept: the failure to prevent 9\/11 [New York: Random House, 2003]), 202. Cf. <\/span>Anthony Summers and Robbyn Day, The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9\/11 and Bin Laden (New York: Ballantine Books, 2011)<\/span>, 405-07, 419, 563-64.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[60]<\/span><\/span> Friedman, \u201c<\/span>The CIA\u2019s Jihad.\u201d <\/span>About this time, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in 2013 the leader of al Qaeda, came without difficulty to America to raise funds in Silicon Valley, where he was hosted by Ali Mohamed (Lawrence Wright, New Yorker: \u201cZawahiri decided to look for money in the world center of venture capitalism-Silicon Valley. He had been to America once before, in 1989, when he paid a recruiting visit to the mujahideen\u2019s Services Bureau branch office in Brooklyn. According to the F.B.I., he returned in the spring of 1993, this time to Santa Clara, California, where he was greeted by Ali Mohamed, the double agent.\u201d)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[61]<\/span><\/span> Bruce O. Riedel, The Search for Al Qaeda: Its Leadership, Ideology, and Future (<\/span>Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2008),<\/span> 43: \u201cOsama also worked with ISI in the creation of a key Kashmiri jihadist group in the late 1980s, the Lashkar-e-Tayyiba.\u201d Cf. Yossef Bodansky, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America (<\/span>Rocklin, CA: Forum, 2001),<\/span> 320.<\/span>
<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[62]<\/span><\/span> Michael Scheuer, \u201cCentral Asia in Al-Qaeda\u2019s Vision of the Anti-American Jihad, 1979-2006,\u201d China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly (2006), 3. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[63]<\/span><\/span> The Black Vault, www.theblackvault.com\/documents\/capturediraq\/mullah.pdf\u00e2\u20ac\u017d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[64]<\/span><\/span> Ahmed Rashid, \u201cThey\u2019re Only Sleeping: Why militant Islamicists in Central Asia aren\u2019t going to go away,\u201d New Yorker, January 14, 2002, http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/archive\/2002\/01\/14\/020114fa_FACT<\/a>; cf. Ahmed Rashid, Jihad(New Haven:Yale UP, 2002), 165; Svante Cornell, \u201cNarcotics, Radicalism and Security in Central Asia: The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan,\u201d Uppsala University, December 2004, 19: \u201cBolot Januzakov, Head of the Kyrgyz Security Council, asserted in 2000 that the IMU controlled the majority, perhaps up to 70%, of the heroin entering Kyrgyzstan.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[65]<\/span><\/span> Gretchen Peters, Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and Al Qaeda (New York: Macmillan, 2009), 69, 87, 89, 132-33.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[66]<\/span><\/span> Peters, Seeds of Terror, 132-33.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[67]<\/span><\/span> 9\/11 Commission, \u201cMonograph on Terrorist Financing: Staff Report to the Commission,\u201d 7. Cf. 9\/11 Commission Report, 171: \u201cAl Qaeda has been alleged to have used a variety of illegitimate means, particularly drug trafficking and conflict diamonds, to finance itself\u2026. While the drug trade was a source of income for the Taliban, it did not serve the same purpose for al Qaeda.\u201d Yhe footnote to this sentence (p. 499) adds: \u201cNo evidence indicates any such involvement in drug trafficking, and none of the detained al Qaeda operatives has indicated that this was a method of fund-raising.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[68]<\/span><\/span>\u201c<\/span>Evidence Presented to the British Parliament, 4th October 2001<\/a><\/span>,\u201d Los Angeles Times, October 4, 2001<\/span>. Cf. New York Times, October 4, 2001. For further documentation, see Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 32, 36.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[69]<\/span><\/span>New York Times<\/span>, 7\/20\/93. Cf. J. R. de Szigethy, \u201c<\/span>Crime Scene \u2013 World Trade Center<\/a><\/span>,\u201d AmericanMafia.com, September 2004: <\/span>\u201cThe murders [from the 1993 WTC bombing] were the result of a plot by members of an organized crime syndicate involved in drug trafficking.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[70]<\/span><\/span>Jayna Davis, The Third Terrorist: The Middle East Connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing (Nashville: WND Books\/Thomas Nelson, 2004), 303.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[71]<\/span><\/span>Boston Herald<\/span>, 10\/17\/01; cf. 9\/11 Report, 175.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[72]<\/span><\/span> Steven Emerson, American jihad: the terrorists living among us (<\/span>New York: Free Press, 2002), 28.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[73]<\/span><\/span> Yossef Bodansky, Terror! The Inside Story of the Terrorist Conspiracy in America (<\/span>New York: S.P.I. Books, 1994),<\/span> 166. Similarly Gerald Posner notes \u201crumors that [Mustafa] Shalabi [the head of the al-Kifah Center until he was murdered in February 1991] \u2026 might be involved in counterfeiting\u201d (<\/span>Posner, Why America slept, 8). <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[74]<\/span><\/span> Berger, Jihad Joe, 37; citing USA v. Rahman, S5 93 Cr. 181, court transcript, April 3, 1995.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[75]<\/span><\/span> Scheuer, Through Our Enemies\u2019 Eyes, 151.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[76]<\/span><\/span> Emerson, American jihad, 28.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[77]<\/span><\/span> Bin Laden\u2019s and al-Qaeda\u2019s proximity to Khattab is both asserted and disputed at high levels. See Robert W. Schaefer, The insurgency in Chechnya and the North Caucasus: from gazavat to jihad (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Security International, 2011), 165-66.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[78]<\/span><\/span>Thomas Hegghammer.Jihad in Saudi Arabia : violence and pan-Islamism since 1979 (<\/span>Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2010), 56.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[79]<\/span><\/span> Soufan, Black Banners, 62. Jeremy Scahill also writes of Special Operations veterans in Blackwater with previous \u201cexperience in Chechnya\u201d (Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield [New York: Nation Books, 2013], 408.).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[80]<\/span><\/span> Yaroslav Trofimov, The Siege of Mecca: The 1979 Uprising at Islam\u2019s Holiest Shrine (New York: Anchor, 2008).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[81]<\/span><\/span> Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 179-82, 195-99.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[82]<\/span><\/span> Steve Coll, Ghost wars: the secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet invasion to September 10, 2001 (<\/span>New York: Penguin Press, 2004)<\/span>, 155. For Azzam\u2019s and OBL\u2019s Muslim Brotherhood memberships, see Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: an Arabian family in the American century (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 148, 253.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[83]<\/span><\/span> Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001), 131. Cf. Steven A. Yetiv, The Petroleum Triangle: Oil, Globalization, and Terror (Ithaca, NY: <\/span>Cornell University Press, 2011), 65.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[84]<\/span><\/span> Peter Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan: messianic terrorism, tribal conflicts, and the failures of great powers (<\/span>New York: PublicAffairs, 2011)<\/span>, 198.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[85]<\/span><\/span> Scott, Road to 9\/11, 171; citing Rajeev Sharma, Pak Proxy War (New Delhi: Kaveri Books, 2002), 145-46.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[86]<\/span><\/span> Cf. <\/span>John J. Loftus\u00a0, <\/span>\u00a0\u201cWhat Congress Does Not Know about Enron and 9\/11,\u201d May 2003, http:\/\/www.informationclearinghouse.info\/article4219.htm<\/a>: \u201c<\/span>The \u2026 block order, in force since the 1980\u2019s, was against any investigation that would embarrass the Saudi Royal family. Originally, it was designed to conceal Saudi support for Muslim extremists fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan and Chechnya, but it went too far. Oliver North noted in his autobiography, that every time he tried to do something about terrorism links in the Middle East, he was told to stop because it might embarrass the Saudis. This block remains in place.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[87]<\/span><\/span> Scott, Road to 9\/11, 172; citing Greg Palast and David Pallister, \u201cIntelligence: FBI Claims Bin Laden InquiryWas Frustrated,\u201d Guardian, November 7, 2001, http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/world\/2001\/nov\/07\/afghanistan.september11.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[88]<\/span><\/span> Coleman affidavit, 2; in Berger, Ali Mohamed, 26.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[89]<\/span><\/span> Coll, The Bin Ladens, 399-401.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[90]<\/span><\/span> For a summary of some of the conflicting accounts, see Anthony Summers and Robbyn Day, The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9\/11 and Bin Laden (New York: Ballantine Books, 2011), 215-16.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[91]<\/span><\/span> Coll, Ghost Wars, 231. In 2001 Peter Bergen had claimed that bin Laden \u201cused his family connections with King Fahd to convince the [Saudi] government that he needed to leave the country to sort out some business matters in Pakistan. Arriving there in April 1991, he then sent a letter to his family telling them that he would not be able to return home. After some months in Afghanistan he arrived in Sudan\u201d (Bergen, Holy Wars, Inc., 81-82).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[92]<\/span><\/span>9\/11 Commission Report<\/span>, 57. In the December 2004 paperback edition of Ghost Wars (231-32), Coll adjusted his account to reconcile with the 9\/11 Report. He replaced his sentence, \u201cThe escort put bin Laden on a plane out of Saudi Arabia,\u201d with two new ones: \u201cTwo associates of bin Laden later offered a different version while under interrogation. They said a dissident member of the royal family helped him leave the country by arranging for bin Laden to attend an Islamic conference in Pakistan during the spring of 1991.\u201d The \u201cIslamic conference\u201d is almost certainly a reference to the negotiations in Peshawar which produced the Saudi-backed Peshawar Accord (finalized in April 1992) to end the Afghan Civil War. Bin Laden did play a part in these negotiations. Like Sheikh Rahman before him, he tried, vainly, to negotiate a truce between the warring mujahideen leaders, Massoud and Hekmatyar (Wright, Looming Tower, 161; <\/span>Roy Gutman. How We Missed the Story: Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban and the Hijacking of Afghanistan [Washington DC., Endowment of the United States Institute of Peace,2008], 34).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[93]<\/span><\/span> Steve Coll also suggests that the \u201cinterior ministry\u201d (headed by Prince) supplied bin Laden with \u201ca one-time exit visa to travel to Pakistan to liquidate investments there\u201d (Coll, The Bin Ladens, 381). Both motives may have been present in bin Laden\u2019s mind, but his capacity to serve as a mediator may have been more influential in persuading the Saudis to arrange for his departure.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[94]<\/span><\/span> Wright, Looming Tower, 161. For Naif (or Nayef) as anti-American, see Coll, Ghost Wars, 399; Coll, The Bin Ladens, 437, 626n.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[95]<\/span><\/span> Tomsen, Wars of Afghanistan, 485: \u201cAl-Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood extremists, and Prince Turki\u2019s General Intelligence Directorate supported the ISI\u2019s extremist-centered Afghan strategy.\u201d <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[96]<\/span><\/span> Against this odd claim cf. e.g. Wright, Looming Tower, 154: \u201cThe minister of the interior, Prince Naif, \u2026 summoned bin Laden to his office\u2026. Bin Laden had reported to Naif\u2026many times during the Afghan jihad.\u201d As noted above, Ahmed Rashid claims that bin Laden and Prince Turki became \u201cfirm friends and allies\u201d in the same cause (Taliban, 131).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[97]<\/span><\/span> \u201cA Biography of Osama bin Laden,\u201d Frontline, PBS, http:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wgbh\/pages\/frontline\/shows\/binladen\/who\/bio2.html.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[98]<\/span><\/span> Anonymous [Michael Scheuer], Through our enemies\u2019 eyes: Osama bin Laden, radical Islam, and the future of America (<\/span>Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2006), 131.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[99]<\/span><\/span> Coll, Ghost Wars, 207.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[100]<\/span><\/span> Barnett R. Rubin, Afghanistan in the Post-Cold war Era (New York: Oxford UP, 2013), 86.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[101]<\/span><\/span> Coll, Ghost Wars, 215-16.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[102]<\/span><\/span> Coll, The Bin Ladens, 403-05.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[103]<\/span><\/span> Summers, The Eleventh Day, 393: \u201cCiting a U.S. intelligence source, the author Simon Reeve reported as much in 1999 \u2014 well before it became an issue after 9\/11.\u201d It is not contested that when bin Laden exited Sudan in 1996, his plane stopped in Qatar. \u201cAt the airport in Doha, Qatar\u2019s capital, government officials boarded the plane and greeted bin Laden warmly\u201d (Coll, Ghost Wars, 325).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[104]<\/span><\/span> Peter Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan: messianic terrorism, tribal conflicts, and the failures of great powers (<\/span>New York: PublicAffairs, 2011)<\/span>, 337.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[105]<\/span><\/span> Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 406-07.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[106]<\/span><\/span> Steve Coll, Ghost wars: the secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet invasion to September 10, 2001 (<\/span>New York: Penguin Press, 2004)<\/span>, 225.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[107]<\/span><\/span> Scott, American War Machine, 94-105; <\/span>Peter Dale Scott,<\/span> The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9\/11, and the Deep Politics of War<\/span> (Ipswich MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008)<\/span>, 98-103.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[108]<\/span><\/span>Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001), 145.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[109]<\/span><\/span>Thomas Goltz, Azerbaijan Diary: A Rogue Reporter\u2019s Adventures in an Oil-Rich, War-Torn, Post-Soviet Republic (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 272-75. Cf. Mark Irkali, Tengiz Kodrarian and Cali Ruchala, \u201cGod Save the Shah,\u201d Sobaka Magazine, May 22, 2003, http:\/\/www.diacritica.com\/sobaka\/2003\/shah2.html . A fourth operative in MEGA Oil, Gary Best, was also a veteran of North\u2019s Contra support effort. For more on General Secord\u2019s and Major Aderholt\u2019s role as part of Ted Shackley\u2019s team of off-loaded CIA assets and capabilities, see Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 26-30, 36-42, 197-98.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[110]<\/span><\/span>It was also a time when Congress, under pressure from Armenian voters, had banned all military aid to Azerbaijan (under Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act). This ban, reminiscent of the Congressional ban on aid to the Contras in the 1980s, ended after 9\/11. \u201cIn the interest of national security, and to help in `enhancing global energy security\u2019 during this War on Terror, Congress granted President Bush the right to waive Section 907 in the aftermath of September 11th. It was necessary, Secretary of State Colin Powell told Congress, to `enable Azerbaijan to counter terrorist organizations\u2019\u201d (Irkali, Kodrarian and Ruchala, \u201cGod Save the Shah,\u201d Sobaka Magazine, May 22, 2003).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[111]<\/span><\/span>Goltz, Azerbaijan Diary, 272-75; Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 7. As part of the airline operation, Azeri pilots were trained in Texas. Dearborn had previously helped Secord advise and train the fledgling Contra air force (Marshall, Scott, and Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection, 197). These important developments were barely noticed in the U.S. press, but a Washington Post article did belatedly note that a group of American men who wore \u201cbig cowboy hats and big cowboy boots\u201d had arrived in Azerbaijan as military trainers for its army, followed in 1993 by \u201cmore than 1,000 guerrilla fighters from Afghanistan\u2019s radical prime minister, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.\u201d (Washington Post, 4\/21\/94) Richard Secord was allegedly attempting also to sell Israeli arms, with the assistance of Israeli agent David Kimche, another associate of Oliver North. See Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 7, 8, 20. Whether the Americans were aware of it or not, the al Qaeda presence in Baku soon expanded to include assistance for moving jihadis onwards into Dagestan and Chechnya.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[112]<\/span><\/span>Cooley, Unholy Wars, 180; Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 7. These important developments were barely noticed in the U.S. press, but a Washington Post article did belatedly note that a group of American men who wore \u201cbig cowboy hats and big cowboy boots\u201d had arrived in Azerbaijan as military trainers for its army, followed in 1993 by \u201cmore than 1,000 guerrilla fighters from Afghanistan\u2019s radical prime minister, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.\u201d (Washington Post, April 21, 1994). The Azeri \u201cAfghan Brigade\u201d was formally dissolved in 1994, after which it focused more on sabotage and terrorism (Cooley, Unholy Wars, 181),<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[113]<\/span><\/span>As the 9\/11Commission Report notes (58), the bin Laden organization established an NGO in Baku, which became a base for terrorism elsewhere. It also became a transshipment point for Afghan heroin to the Chechen mafia, whose branches \u201cextended not only to the London arms market, but also throughout continental Europe and North America (Cooley, Unholy Wars, 176).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[114]<\/span><\/span> Rubin, Afghanistan from the Cold War, 86.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[115]<\/span><\/span> Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: inside the secret world of Osama bin Laden (New York: Free Press, 2001), 67. Cf. Ali Soufan, Black Banners, 565 (murder of Anwar Sadat, watch list); Berger, Jihad Joe, 24 (watch list).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[116]<\/span><\/span>Lawrence Wright, <\/span>The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9\/11<\/span> (New York: Knopf, 2006), 180; cf. <\/span>Paul L. Williams, Al Qaeda: brotherhood of terror ([Parsippany, NJ?]: Alpha, 2002), 117.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[117]<\/span><\/span> \u201cA Soldier\u2019s Shadowy Trail In U.S. and in the Mideast,\u201d New York Times, December 1, 1998, http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1998\/12\/01\/international\/120198LADEN_SHADOW.html?pagewanted=4.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[118]<\/span><\/span> Phil Karber, Fear and faith in paradise: exploring conflict and religion in the Middle East (<\/span>Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), ZZ; cf. Wright, Looming Tower, 164-65.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[119]<\/span><\/span> Summers, The Eleventh Day, 393: \u201cCiting a U.S. intelligence source, the author Simon Reeve reported as much in 1999 \u2014 well before it became an issue after 9\/11.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[120]<\/span><\/span> Coll, The Bin Ladens, 399-401. Cf. Geoffrey Wawro, Quicksand: America\u2019s pursuit of power in the Middle East (<\/span>New York: Penguin Press, 2010), ZZ: \u201cOsama mixed business and religion. He committed to build an airport at Port Sudan;\u201d <\/span>Karber, Fear and faith in paradise, ZZ: \u201cBin Laden promised the people of Sudan an airport at Port Sudan.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[121]<\/span><\/span> Wright, Looming Tower, 165.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[122]<\/span><\/span> The text of the State Department paper of August 14, 1996, \u201cState Department Issues Factsheet on Bin Ladin,\u201d is reproduced in Brisard and Dasqui\u00c3\u00a9, Ben Laden: la v\u00c3\u00a9rit\u00c3\u00a9 interdite, 257-58.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[123]<\/span><\/span> Dreyfuss, Devil\u2019s Game, 180-81.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[124]<\/span><\/span>Jane\u2019s Intelligence Review<\/span>, August 1, 2001; quoted in Scott, Road to 9\/11, 356.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[125]<\/span><\/span>John Crewdson, \u201cSwiss Officials Freeze Bank Accounts Linked to Supporters of Terrorist Groups.\u201d Chicago Tribune, November 3, 2001, http:\/\/www.sudanreeves.org\/2004\/12\/22\/us-state-departments\u2014growing-expediency-in-dealing-with-khartoums-terrorist-connections-november-5-2001\/<\/a>. Cf. Ahmed, War on Truth, 98; Financial Times,<\/span> November 29 2001, http:\/\/specials.ft.com\/attackonterrorism\/FT3RNR3XMUC.html<\/span> : \u201cA US State Department report in 1996 and a French investigation into the bank separately concur that bin Laden invested $50m in the bank on his arrival in Sudan in 1991, an allegation Mr Ismail [of the bank] denies.\u201d Cf. also Brisard, Ben Laden: La Verit\u00c3\u00a9 Interdite, 119-21, 308-10, etc.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[126]<\/span><\/span> Coll, The Bin Ladens, 413. There is a brief reference to the State Department White Paper in Bergen, Holy Wars, Inc. (2001), 83: \u201cBin Laden\u2026sank $50 million of his own money into the Al-Shamal Islamic Bank in Khartoum\u201d (cf. 264n). The controversial author Yossef Bodansky links both the Faisal Islamic Bank and the Al-Shamal Bank to significant jihad activities, as well as possible drug trafficking (Yossef Bodansky, Bin Laden: the man who declared war on America (Rocklin, CA: Forum, 2001), 42-43.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[127]<\/span><\/span> Lance, Triple Cross, 157-59, citing State Department Cable 1994STATE335575. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[128]<\/span><\/span> Steve A. Yetiv, The petroleum triangle: oil, globalization, and terror (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2011), 114-15.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[129]<\/span><\/span> Zachary Abuza, Militant Islam in Southeast Asia: Crucible of Terror (Boulder, CO:<\/span>Lynne Rienner, 2003)<\/span>, 108. <\/span>At ease in Saudi Arabia, Khalifa became a misleading source, rather than a topic of inquiry, in privileged bin Laden books like Lawrence Wright\u2019s The Looming Tower (112-13, 450).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[130]<\/span><\/span> Anonymous [Michael Scheuer], Through our enemies\u2019 eyes, 151.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[131]<\/span><\/span> Lance, Triple Cross, 161, citing personal interview.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[132]<\/span><\/span> Lance, Triple Cross, 162.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[133]<\/span><\/span> Lance, Triple Cross, 157-58.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[134]<\/span><\/span> Khalifa also \u201cheaded the Muslim World League office in Peshawar in the 1980s. In 1988, he moved to Manila and opened a branch office of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth [an allied royal creation]\u201d (Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 198).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[135]<\/span><\/span> Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil (New York: Crown, 2003), 167, 140.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[136]<\/span><\/span> Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 179-82, 195-99.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[137]<\/span><\/span> Abuza, Militant Islam in Southeast Asia, 93.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[138]<\/span><\/span> Baer, Sleeping with the Devil, 69; Aaron Mannes, Profiles In Terror: The Guide To Middle East Terrorist Organizations(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 41. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[139]<\/span><\/span> Kumar Ramakrishna (ed.), After Bali: The Threat of Terrorism in Southeast Asia (<\/span>Singapore: Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, 2003)<\/span>, 139.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[140]<\/span><\/span> Wesley J. L. Anderson, Disrupting Threat Finances: Utilization of Financial Information to Disrupt Terrorist Organizations in the Twenty-First Century (<\/span>S.l.<\/span>: BiblioScholar, 2012), 14.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[141]<\/span><\/span> Girma Yohannes Iyassu Menelik, Europe: The future Battleground of Islamic Terrorism, 95.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[142]<\/span><\/span> Kohlmann, <\/span>Al-Qaida\u2019s Jihad in Europe<\/span>, 41-42. Before being captured in Pakistan, Ramzi Yousuf was being sheltered by his maternal uncle Zahid al-Shaikh, a principal with Mercy International (<\/span>Lance, 1000 Years for Revenge<\/span>, 189). Mercy International was another Islamic NGO involved in recruiting \u201cinternational volunteers\u201d for the war in Bosnia (Richard Lab\u00c3\u00a9vi\u00c3\u00a8re, <\/span>Dollars For Terror: The United States and Islam<\/span> (New York: Algora, 2000), 151.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[143]<\/span><\/span> Larry Niksch, Abu Sayyaf: Target of Philippine-U. S. Anti-Terrorism Cooperation (<\/span>Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, 2007), CRS-4.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[144]<\/span><\/span> Peter L. Bergen, The Osama Bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of Al Qaeda\u2019s Leader (<\/span>New York: Free Press, 2006), 444.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[145]<\/span><\/span> 9\/11 Commission Report, 73; citing Joint Inquiry Report (classified version), 324-28. Cf. pp. 146, 148: \u201cIn 1992, KSM\u2026 moved his family to Qatar at the suggestion of the former minister of Islamic affairs of Qatar, Sheikh Abdallah\u2026, In January 1996, well aware that U.S. authorities were chasing him, he left Qatar for good.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[146]<\/span><\/span> Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil, 18-19, 194-96. Baer heard from another member of the al-Thani family, former police chief Hamad bin Jasim bin Hamad al-Thani, that when KSM came from the Philippines, Abdallah bin Khalid gave him 20 blank Qatari passports. Later, <\/span>\u201cAs soon as the FBI showed up in Doha\u201d in 1996, the emir ordered Abdallah to move KSM out of his apartment to his beach estate, and eventually out of the country (pp. 195-96).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[147]<\/span><\/span> Brian Ross and David Scott, \u201cAl Qaeda Ally? Member of Qatari Royal Family Helped Senior Al Qaeda Official Get Away,\u201d ABCNEWS.com, February 7, 2003, http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20030209235027\/http:\/\/abcnews.go.com\/sections\/wnt\/DailyNews\/qatar_alqaeda030207.html.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[148]<\/span><\/span> Lance, Triple Cross, 253; emphasis in original. Lance does discuss the role of Qatar\u2019s Sheikh Abdullah in helping KSM to escape the FBI (Cover up: what the government is still hiding about the war on terror [New York: Regan Books, 2004], 168-69).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[149]<\/span><\/span> Lance, Triple Cross, 342. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[150]<\/span><\/span> Anthony Summers and Robbyn Day, The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9\/11 and Bin Laden (New York: Ballantine Books, 2011), 410-15, 559-62; Former Senator Bob Graham, Keys to the Kingdom, 131-32; cf. David B Ottaway, The king\u2019s messenger:Prince Bandar bin Sultan and America\u2019s tangled relationship with Saudi Arabia (<\/span>New York: Walker & Company, 2008), 198-99.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[151]<\/span><\/span> 9\/11 Commission, \u201dAppendix A: The Financing of the 9\/11 Plot, Staff Report, Terrorist Financing, 1.\u201cDespite persistent public speculation, there is no evidence that the hijackers who initially settled in San Diego, Mihdhar and Hazmi, received funding from Saudi citizens Omar al Bayoumi and Osama Bassnan, or that Saudi Princess Haifa al Faisal provided any funds to the hijackers either directly or indirectly. A number of internal FBI documents state without reservation that Bayoumi paid rent on behalf of Mihdhar and Hazmi, a claim reflecting the initial view of some FBI agents. More thorough investigation, however, has determined that Bayoumi did not pay rent or provide any funding to the hijackers.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[152]<\/span><\/span>9\/11 Commission Report<\/span>, 266-72 (272).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[153]<\/span><\/span>Rory O\u2019Connor and Ray Nowosielski, \u201cWho Is Rich Blee?\u201d 911Truth.org, September 21, 2111, http:\/\/www.911truth.org\/article.php?story=20110921153919600; Rory O\u2019Connor and Ray Nowosielski, \u201cInsiders voice doubts about CIA\u2019s 9\/11 story,\u201d Salon, October 14, 2111, http:\/\/www.salon.com\/writer\/rory_oconnor_and_ray_nowosielski\/. O\u2019Connor and Nowosielski add corroboration from former Counterterrorism Chief Richard Clarke. \u201cClarke said he assumed that \u2018there was a high-level decision in the CIA ordering people not to share that information.\u2019 When asked who might have issued such an order, he replied, \u2018I would think it would have been made by the director,\u201d referring to Tenet \u2013 although he added that Tenet and others would never admit to the truth today \u201ceven if you waterboarded them.\u2019<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[154]<\/span><\/span>Kevin Fenton, <\/span>Disconnecting the Dots<\/span> (Walterville, OR: TrineDay, 2011); cf. Peter Dale Scott, ZZ, in James R Gourley, ed., The 9\/11 Toronto Report: International Hearings on the Events of September 11, 2001 (Seattle, WA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012). According to Fenton (pp. 72-79), the post-9\/11 cover-up of Wilshire\u2019s behavior was principally the work of one person, Barbara Grewe, who worked first on the Justice Department Inspector General\u2019s investigation of Wilshire\u2019s behavior, then was transferred to two successive positions with the 9\/11 Commission\u2019s staff.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[155]<\/span><\/span>9\/11 Commission Report, 259, 271; Lawrence Wright, <\/span>The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9\/11<\/span> (New York: Knopf, 2006), 352\u201454; Peter Dale Scott, <\/span>American War Machine<\/span> (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 203.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[156]<\/span><\/span>Lawrence Wright, \u201cThe Agent,\u201d <\/span>New Yorker<\/span>, July 10 and 17, 2006, 68; cf. Wright,\u00a0Looming Tower, 339-44; discussion in Peter Dale Scott,<\/span> The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9\/11, and the Deep Politics of War<\/span> (Ipswich MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008), 355, 388-89. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[157]<\/span><\/span>Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 383-86.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[158]<\/span><\/span>Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 48. Cf. Lawrence Wright, \u201cThe Agent,\u201d New Yorker, July 10 and 17, 2006, 68; quoted approvingly in Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine, 399.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[159]<\/span><\/span>Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 371, cf. 95.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[160]<\/span><\/span> Quoted in Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars, 21.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[161]<\/span><\/span> Tom Wilshire, July 23, 2001, in \u201cUnited States v. Zacarias Moussaoui (No. 01-455), Substitution for the Testimony of \u2018John.\u2019\u201d U.S. Court for the District of Alexandria, July 31, 2006; quoted in Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 274, 401.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[162]<\/span><\/span>Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 276.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[163]<\/span><\/span> Berger, Ali Mohamed, 17; citing <\/span>Wayne Parry, \u201cMysterious pair in custody perplexes federal investigators,\u201d Associated Press, November 11, 2001; Falasten M. Abdeljabbar, \u201cNeighborhood tired of suspicions and fear,\u201d The Jersey Journal, December 18, 2001.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[164]<\/span><\/span>Robert Hanley and Jonathan Miller, \u201c4 Transcripts Are Released In Case Tied to 9\/11 Hijackers,\u201d New York Times, June 25, 2003.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[165]<\/span><\/span> Berger, Ali Mohamed, 18; citing John Kifner, \u201cKahane Suspect Is a Muslim With a Series of Addresses,\u201d New York Times, November 7, 1990; Transcript, Sealed Bail Hearing, US v. El-Atriss, November 19, 2002. The transcripts were unsealed after a lawsuit by several organizations including the New York Times and the Washington Post. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[166]<\/span><\/span>Wayne Parry, \u201cSeptember 11 Fake ID Suspect Flees U.S.,\u201d Associated Press, July 31, 2003, http:\/\/911review.org\/Wiki\/Mohamed-El-Atriss.html.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[167]<\/span><\/span> Berger, Ali Mohamed, 18; citing <\/span>Robert Hanley and Jonathan Miller, \u201c4 Transcripts Are Released In Case Tied to 9\/11 Hijackers,\u201d New York Times, June 25, 2003; Wayne Parry, \u201cJudge releases transcripts in Sept. 11 fake IDs case,\u201d Associated Press, June 24, 2003. The New York Times story is worth quoting further: \u201c*Mr. Atriss was a co-founder of a Jersey City check-cashing company, Sphinx Trading Company, that had bank accounts with millions of dollars and had as a co-owner Waleed Abouel Nour, whom the F.B.I. had identified as a terrorist.That business was at the same location, on Kennedy Boulevard, used as a mailing address by several of the hijackers and earlier by Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, whose followers were convicted of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[168]<\/span><\/span> Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 53. Cf. <\/span>David E. Spiro, The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999), x: \u201cIn 1974 [Treasury Secretary William] Simon negotiated a secret deal so the Saudi central bank could buy U.S. Treasury securities outside of the normal auction. A few years later, Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal cut a secret deal with the Saudis so that OPEC would continue to price oil in dollars. These deals were secret because the United States had promised other industrialized democracies that it would not pursue such unilateral policies.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[169]<\/span><\/span> See e.g. <\/span>Michael Quint, \u201cSaudi Prince Becomes Citicorp\u2019s Top Stockholder.\u201d New York Times, February 22, 1991.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[170]<\/span><\/span> Andrew Scott Cooper, The Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East (New York: <\/span>Simon & Schuster, 2011), 275, etc.<\/span>; Scott, Road to 9\/11, 33-34.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Republished from: Global Research<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For almost two centuries American government, though always imperfect, was also a model for the world of limited government, having evolved a system of restraints on executive power through its constitutional arrangement of checks and balances. \u00a0Since 9\/11 however, constitutional American government has been overshadowed by a series of emergency measures to fight terrorism. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-55792","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55792"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55792\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}