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September 11 cover-up crumbles: Who was covering for Moussaoui, and why?
By Patrick Martin
29 May 2002
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The revelations over the past two weeks about advance warnings of the September
11 terrorist attacks have focused particularly on the role of Zaccarias Moussaoui, the
Islamic fundamentalist arrested last August in Minneapolis. Moussaoui is the only
person facing criminal charges for allegedly playing a role in the attacks that
destroyed the World Trade Center and killed more than 3,000 people.
Fragments of a May 22 letter from Colleen Rowley, an official in the Minneapolis FBI
office, to FBI Director Robert Mueller were reported in the press last week. Virtually
the entire text of the letter is published in the current issue of Time magazine and
posted on its web site, www.time.com. The letter documents not merely
incompetence and bureaucratic indifference, but active opposition to an investigation
of Moussaoui, sabotage so obvious that it led Minneapolis FBI personnel to joke that
agents of Osama bin Laden must have penetrated the J. Edgar Hoover building.
Ever since September 11 the Bush administration has steadfastly maintained its
opposition to any investigation into the circumstances leading up to the suicide
hijackings, while offering shifting and contradictory explanations of how it was
possible for terrorists to seize control of four commercial airliners simultaneously
and
hit the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
At first the White House, FBI and CIA claimed that the attacks came as a bolt from
the blue, taking the US government totally by surprise, despite its vast intelligence
apparatus employing hundreds of thousands of personnel. Anyone who questioned
this claim, especially in view of the longstanding ties between the US intelligence
services and Osama bin Laden, the alleged inspirer of the attacks, was branded a
�conspiracy theorist.�
The administration launched its long-planned war against Afghanistan, bombing and
then invading that impoverished country, killing thousands of people�from Taliban
rank-and-file soldiers to civilians in peasant villages and urban centers�who had no
demonstrable connection to the destruction of the World Trade Center.
In the name of the �war on terrorism,� the administration drafted and pushed through
Congress legislation that vastly expanded the powers of the government to spy on,
arrest and imprison both American citizens and immigrants. These new powers were
needed, according to Attorney General Ashcroft and other Bush spokesmen, to
prevent a repetition of the �surprise attack� of September 11.
One lie replaces another
Then came the revelation this month that September 11 was not such a surprise.
Press reports compelled the White House to admit that Bush had been briefed on
August 6, 2001� more than a month before the attacks on New York and
Washington�about Al Qaeda threats to hijack US commercial airliners.
The official story changed abruptly. Instead of no advance warning, White House and
FBI spokesmen now claimed there had been too many warnings. The evidence had
been plentiful, but so fragmentary that no one was able to put it together in time to
forestall the hijackings.
With undisguised contempt for public opinion, the White House offered a new cover
story that directly contradicted the old one that the White House had maintained for
eight months. The new version, however, failed to explain why Bush & Co. had
concealed the August 6 briefing and other evidence of advance warnings for months
on end.
The American media dutifully swallowed the new set of lies without protest. Press
accounts were filled with references to the failure to �connect the dots,� as though
elaborate mental gymnastics were required to see the relationship between a
warning of Islamic fundamentalist activity at US pilot-training schools (from the
Arizona FBI) and the arrest (by the Minneapolis FBI) of Moussaoui, an Islamic
fundamentalist who paid cash to be trained to fly a Boeing 747 while he could not
even pilot a small plane.
This new cover story lasted barely a week before it was exploded by Rowley�s 13-
page letter to Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee. Among other things,
Rowley revealed that the local FBI reports from Arizona and Minneapolis had ended
up on the desk of the same official at FBI headquarters, David Frasca, head of the
Radical Fundamentalists Unit. Even on the morning of September 11, as the
Minneapolis FBI agents were watching television coverage of the suicide attacks on
the Twin Towers, Frasca called Rowley to tell her not to proceed with an investigation
of Moussaoui because Minneapolis might �screw up� something else going on
elsewhere in the country.
Nor were these the isolated actions of a single misguided official. Rowley points out,
�Despite FBI leaders� full knowledge of all the items mentioned herein ... the SSA
[supervisory special agent], his unit chief, and other involved HQ personnel were
allowed to stay in their positions and, what�s worse, occupy critical positions in the
FBI�s SIOC Command Center post- September 11th. (The SSA in question actually
received a promotion some months afterward!)�
Rowley�s letter confirms that there was extensive discussion within the government
on the danger of hijackings by Islamic fundamentalists, although the public was not
informed. Repeated efforts to investigate were being thwarted. Top-level FBI officials
were protecting Moussaoui and his confederates, running interference for him when
his own reckless and impulsive conduct brought him to the attention of the
authorities. The question is, why?
The CIA and Islamic fundamentalism
There are two possible explanations. The first is that Moussaoui and others were
being protected because they were engaged in operations that had the support of the
US government�in Chechnya or other territories of the former Soviet Union, in
Bosnia, or elsewhere. Moussaoui himself was active in recruiting Islamic
fundamentalists to fight in Chechnya against the Russian army.
CIA Director William Casey initiated the recruitment of Islamic fundamentalists from
around the world to go to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight in the decade-long
guerrilla war against the Soviet military intervention. They received training in
terrorist
tactics, including the planting of bombs, from US intelligence agents. This was the
milieu out of which Osama bin Laden� himself a collaborator with the CIA in
Afghanistan�recruited the initial forces for his Al Qaeda organization.
After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, many of these fighters, most of them
Arabs, were allowed entry into the United States as a reward for their services in the
war. In the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, some of these Islamic fundamentalists
turned against the US government, bombing the World Trade Center in 1993 and
carrying out other attacks on US targets overseas. The phenomenon of former CIA-
backed guerrillas using their US training to attack American targets became known
as �blowback.�
Many Islamic fundamentalists continued to make common cause with American
imperialism, particularly in Bosnia, Chechnya, and other brutal guerrilla wars on the
periphery of the former Soviet bloc. The US intelligence apparatus worked closely
with these forces, particularly in Bosnia, Kosovo and Albania, but also in Chechnya
and the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. US administrations regularly
denounced the Russian military intervention in Chechnya�a position taken by
George W. Bush as a candidate, which he abandoned only after September 11 in
pursuit of Russian support for the US intervention in Central Asia.
It is thus quite possible that top US intelligence officials were aware of Moussaoui�s
role as a recruiter for the Islamic fundamentalist forces fighting Russian troops in
Chechnya and sought to protect him from the attentions of lower-level FBI agents.
There is a second possibility, which largely coincides with the first, but with the
sinister addition that the alliance of the CIA with Islamic fundamentalist terrorists
may
have included actions within the United States itself. In other words, the US
intelligence apparatus was aware at some level of the unfolding plans for terrorist
strikes against US targets, and let them proceed in order to provide a suitable pretext
for the military action that the Bush administration and the Pentagon were planning to
undertake in Central Asia.
Copyright 1998-2002
World Socialist Web Site
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