PART III - THE 9/11 BACKLASH

“In order to make sure that we're able to conduct a winning victory, we've got to have the best intelligence we can possibly have. And my report to the nation is we've got the best intelligence we can possibly have.”

—President George W. Bush in a September 26, 2001 speech to the CIA.

 

 

 

Fear mongering has always been a favored tool of despots and tyrants. After all, why would a free and prosperous population willingly give up their rights and liberties? Ever since 9/11, the Bush administration has gained increasing social control by holding the threat of terrorism over the heads of the American people.

A recent example of the use of this age-old device came in early 2006, when President Bush—under fire for the unresolved wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the torture of terrorist suspects, and unconstitutional spying on Americans—played the fear card yet again, declaring: “We cannot let the fact that America hasn't been attacked in four and a half years since September 11 lull us into the illusion that the threats to our nation have disappeared.” He then went on to detail what he described as a thwarted terrorist attack on Los Angeles in 2002. Bush revealed that the California strike was planned by a man named Hambali, reportedly a key lieutenant of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Both Hambali and Mohammed were reported captured in 2003.

Bush said these al Qaeda leaders recruited Asian men who were to use shoe bombs to blow open the cockpit door of a commercial airliner, which then would be crashed into the US Bank Tower in Los Angeles. Bush mistakenly referred to this building as “Liberty Tower,” but was quickly corrected that its original name had been “Library Tower.” Bush said the plot was foiled when a key Asian al Qaeda member was arrested but declined to name the suspect or his nationality.

Soon, this story filled the mass media airwaves with some stations airing scenes from the Hollywood alien invasion film Independence Day as graphic representation of the destruction of the US Bank Tower.

But even before Americans could heave a collective sign of relief at being spared this carnage, serious questions arose over Bush's statement. Many thoughtful persons wondered why Bush had not called attention to the saving of Los Angeles early in 2003 when such news might have blunted the large and numerous anti-war demonstrations conducted prior to the invasion of Iraq.

Concern increased when Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told newsmen he knew nothing of such an attempt and felt “blindsided” by Bush's announcement of the 2002 attack. He said communication regarding such an attack with the White House had been “nonexistent” despite at least two requests by him to meet with Bush regarding security issues.

“I’m amazed that the president would make this [announcement] on national TV and not inform us of these details through the appropriate channels,” Villaraigosa told newsmen. “I don't expect a call from the president, but somebody.”

Others were even less considerate in their characterization of Bush's sudden story of the 2002 Los Angeles attack. Doug Thompson, a writer for Capitol Hill Blue, the oldest political news site on the Internet, said he was contacted by members of the US intelligence community, who disputed Bush's claim. Thompson said he was able to confirm the intelligence credentials of at least four of the persons who contacted him. All asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals.

“The President has cheapened the entire intelligence community by dragging us into his fantasy world,” Thompson quoted a longtime CIA operative as saying. “He is basing this absurd claim on the same discredited informant who told us al Qaeda would attack selected financial institutions in New York and Washington.”

Indeed, in August 2004, during the heat of the Presidential election, the Bush White House had sought to increase the terror alert level by claiming attacks were imminent on major financial institutions. This alert was later withdrawn after officials admitted it was based on old information from a discredited source.

Thankfully, the siege mentality of some American leaders was not always as strong as those espoused by President Bush in 2006.

In prophetic testimony before joint hearings of the Senate Armed Services Appropriations and Intelligence committees in the spring of 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell explained why Americans should not give up their freedoms for the hope of security. “If we adopted this hunkereddown attitude, behind our concrete and our barbed wire, the terrorists would have achieved a kind of victory,” he declared.

But the rhetoric was to change completely as new and constitutionally questionable laws and regulations were put into effect later that year.

Within days of the 9/11 attacks, President Bush declared a “War on Terrorism.” He initially called it a “crusade,” but that term was quickly dropped when it was pointed out that Muslims, both within and without the Middle East, still remember the bloody history of that word and would take offense.

To initiate a war, there first must be a perceived enemy. That one grand enemy was now claimed to be Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network. As previously noted, the FBI announced a list of suspected hijackers with unbelievable speed, while at the same time acknowledging that the men used false identity papers. But this list was questioned in many quarters, including government agents.

“There are people within the US intelligence community who doubt that the hijacker list from 9/11 has much truth in it,” said one unnamed intelligence source as quoted by author Jon Rappoport. “They see it as a more-or-less invented list. They know that if you start with men showing false passports (or no passports) to get on four planes on 9/11, you can't assemble a correct list of nineteen suspects within a few days—especially since all those men are presumed dead and missing, untraceable.

“Al Qaeda is being used as a term to convince people that these terrorists are all connected in a vast, very well-organized network that is global in reach, that has a very sophisticated and far-flung communication setup, that issues orders from the top down to cells all over the world,” stated the intelligence source. “There are a number of people inside the US intelligence agencies who know this is a false picture. They know that false intelligence is being assembled in order to paint a picture which is distorted, so that the American people will have a single focus on one grand evil enemy.”

In October 2004, the BBC in England broadcast a documentary entitled The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear, which challenged the Bush administration's concept of al Qaeda as a multi-faceted globe-spanning octopus of terrorism. The three-hour documentary by writer/producer Adam Curtis raised some pertinent questions such as:

■ Why has the Bush administration, despite the roundup of hundreds of suspected terrorists and the use of torture, failed to produce any hard evidence of al Qaeda activities?

■ Of the 664 persons detained in Britain on suspicion of being terrorists, why have only 17 been found guilty of crimes and of these, none were proven members of al Qaeda?

■ Why has the administration prompted so much frightening speculation concerning “dirty” radioactive bombs when experts have stated that public panic will kill more people than radioactivity?

■ Why did Defense Secretary Rumsfeld claim on Meet the Press in 2001 that al Qaeda controlled massive high-tech cave complexes in Afghanistan, when none were later found following the military invasion?

While acknowledging that groups of disaffected terrorists do exist around the world, the BBC documentary nevertheless argued that, “the nightmare vision of a uniquely powerful hidden organization waiting to strike our societies is an illusion. Wherever one looks for this al Qaeda organization, from the mountains of Afghanistan to the ‘sleeper cells’ in America, the British and Americans are chasing a phantom enemy.”

According to Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer, “…the film, both more sober and more deeply provocative than Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, directly challenges the conventional wisdom by making a powerful case that the Bush administration, led by a tight-knit cabal of Machiavellian neoconservatives, has seized upon the false image of a unified international terrorist threat to replace the expired Soviet empire in order to push a political agenda.” He pointed out that everything we know about al Qaeda comes from only two sources, both with a vested interest in maintaining the concept of a well-financed and deeply entrenched enemy: the terrorists themselves and military and intelligence agencies. “Such a state of national ignorance about an endless war is, as The Power of Nightmares makes clear, simply unacceptable in a functioning democracy,” Scheer added.

The documentary also noted this was not the first time that American political figures had hyped a foreign enemy to achieve their own goals—in fact, by many of the same neoconservatives responsible for today's fear mongering.

Their goal was to cut short President Richard Nixon's efforts at “détente” with the Soviet Union in the early 1970s, and the leaders of this faction were none other than Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Chief of Staff Dick Cheney in the Gerald Ford administration. Both Rumsfeld and Cheney claimed that reconciliation with the Soviets was impossible because they were hiding weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), a new generation of nuclear submarines that were undetectable by current technology. This claim was firmly denied by the CIA at the time, which called it “complete fiction.” The charge ultimately proved false, but not before trillions were spent on the biggest peace-time military build up in American history during the subsequent Reagan administration.

In Britain it has been suggested that al Qaeda is not a real organization but rather a computer list of Arab mercenaries—freedom fighters/ terrorists for hire.

“Bin Laden…was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al Qaeda, literally ‘the database,’ was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians,” noted British commentator Robin Cook.

Often supposed enemies prove to be mirror images of each other. Noted author Thom Hartmann pointed out that both Bush's neocons and Muslim terrorists operate from the same ideology—both believe the end justifies the means and that people must be frightened into accepting religion and nationalism for the greater good of morality and a stable state.