31. September 11

PNAC 

Before the 9/11 attacks, Omar Sheikh—a British-born Islamist militant who fought in Afghanistan with al-Qaeda, and who was charged with the murder of Adam Pearl—on the instructions of General Mahmoud Ahmed, then head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), wired $100,000 to Mohammed Atta, the purported ringleader of the attacks. As to what such a connection implies, in an article for the Guardian, Michael Meacher pointed out that, “the case of Ahmed confirms that parts of the ISI directly supported and financed al-Qaeda, and it has long been established that the ISI has acted as go-between in intelligence operations on behalf of the CIA.”[1] According Newsweek, the Washington Post and the New York Times, U.S. military officials gave the FBI information “suggesting that five of the alleged hijackers received training in the 1990s at secure U.S. military installations.”[2] 9/11 Hijackers may have been trained in strategy and tactics at the Air War College in Montgomery Alabama. Two were former Saudi Air Force pilots. Mohammed Atta, their supposed ringleader, attended International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, while Abdulaziz Alomari attended Aerospace Medical School at Brooks Air Force base in Texas, and Saeed Alghambi the Defense Language Institute in Monterey California.[3]

9/11 provided a crucial opportunity for the architects of the Iraq War to initiate the War on Terror, as a means of advancing Israeli foreign policy by proxy. These include neoconservatives of Le Cercle and Team B members, such as former U.S. Defense Secretary and President of the World Bank Paul Wolfowitz, former Secretary of Defense  Donald Rumsfeld, and former Chairman of the Defense Department’s Defense Policy Board and JINSA board member, Richard Perle. As explained by Joseph Trento:

 

In the Team B experiment Bush allowed the conservatives a foot in the CIA door and at the same time discredited the liberals and their work inside the Agency. These conservatives would one day control the policy and practices of the intelligence community under presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush. They would report in the early 1980s that America was falling behind the Soviet Union militarily and would encourage the massive buildup of American military hardware that occurred under Reagan. Under the elder Bush, they would encourage the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and under the younger Bush support the unproven missile defence system and another war in Iraq.[4]

 

A telling example of collusion between neoconservatives and Israel began with the publication of A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, a policy document that was prepared in 1996 by a study group led by Perle for Benjamin Netanyahu, then Prime Minister of Israel. The report has since been criticized for advocating an aggressive new policy, including the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and the containment of Syria by engaging in proxy warfare and highlighting its possession of “weapons of mass destruction.”[5] Jason Vest wrote in The Nation that the report was “a kind of US-Israeli neoconservative manifesto” provides “perhaps the most insightful window” into the “policy worldview” of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and Center for Security Policy (CSP).[6] Ian Buruma wrote in August 2003 in The New York Times:

 

Douglas Feith and Richard Perle advised Netanyahu, who was prime minister in 1996, to make “a clean break” from the Oslo accords with the Palestinians. They also argued that Israeli security would be served best by regime change in surrounding countries. Despite the current mess in Iraq, this is still a commonplace in Washington. In Paul Wolfowitz’s words, “The road to peace in the Middle East goes through Baghdad.” It has indeed become an article of faith (literally in some cases) in Washington that American and Israeli interests are identical, but this was not always so, and “Jewish interests” are not the main reason for it now.[7]

 

The neoconservatives’ new strategy began to achieve dangerous proportions when in 1992 Wolfowitz, as Dick Cheney’s undersecretary of defense for policy, authored a “Defense Planning Guidance Paper,” which outlined the US’ strategic priorities in the post-Cold War era. Leaked to the New York Times, the document prescribed securing global supremacy for the US through military confrontation with various regimes, calling for America to assert its interests wherever they existed, with particular emphasis on oil supplies and the security of Israel. According to the authors, it was time for the US to achieve unparalleled military superiority through a massive buildup of the country’s military capabilities. This same worldview was furthered with the creation of a specifically designed think tank, known as the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), which was supported with funding from the Bradley Foundation, John M. Olin Foundation and Scaife Foundations.[8] The signatories to the project included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and leading neoconservatives, like Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle and Elliot Abrams, who had been found guilty of lying about his role in the Iran-Contra operation, but was later pardoned by George H.W. Bush. Dick Cheney, John Bolton, and Douglas Feith were all on JINSA’s Board of Advisors before they entered the Bush administration.[9]

In September 2000, PNAC drafted a plan for U.S. global domination. Titled, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century,” the PNAC report envisioned an expanded global military role for the US, by stipulating, “The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. A “core mission” for the U.S. military, according to the PNAC, is to “fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars.” While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” However, it added, “even should Saddam pass from the scene,” the plan states, U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain, despite domestic opposition in the Gulf states to the permanent stationing of U.S. troops. Iran, it says, “may well prove as large a threat to U.S. interests as Iraq has.” Ominously, the document stated: “the process of transformation,” the plan further clarified, “is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”[10]

 

Clean Break

The Machiavellian purpose of the tragedy of 9/11 was described by Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission. While at Harvard, Zelikow had worked on the use of history in policymaking. He and his fellow researchers observed, as Zelikow noted in his own words, that “contemporary” history is “defined functionally by those critical people and events that go into forming the public’s presumptions about its immediate past.”[11] In writing about the importance of beliefs about history, Zelikow has called attention to what he has referred to as “searing” or “molding” events take on “transcendent” importance and, therefore, retain their power even as the experiencing generation passes from the scene.[12] In the November-December 1998 issue of Foreign Affairs, he co-authored an article entitled “Catastrophic Terrorism,” in which he speculated that if the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center had succeeded:

 

…the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America’s fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. Like Pearl Harbor, the event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects and use of deadly force. More violence could follow, either future terrorist attacks or U.S. counterattacks. Belatedly, Americans would judge their leaders negligent for not addressing terrorism more urgently.[13]

 

Again, during his tenure on a highly knowledgeable and well-connected body known as the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), which reports directly to the president, Zelikow revealed the true aims behind the US’ invasion of Iraq, which had supposedly been in retaliation for 9/11. Zelikow told a crowd at the University of Virginia on September 10, 2002, speaking on a panel of foreign policy experts:

 

Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I’ll tell you what I think the real threat [is] and actually has been since 1990—it’s the threat against Israel…

And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don’t care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.[14]

 

The obvious pretext of the 9/11 attacks were revealed by General Wesley Clark, who would later join the 2004 race for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. In an interview with Democracy Now in 2007, Clark related that on September 20, 2001, only nine days after the attack, he visited the offices in the Pentagon of the Joint Staff who used to work for him, and was told confidentially by one of the generals, “We’re going to war with Iraq!” When Clark asked why, the general said, “I don’t know… I guess they don’t know what else to do.” When he went back to see him a few weeks later, by which time the Americans were already bombing Afghanistan, Clark recounts:

 

I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs”—meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office—“today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.[15]

 

Finally, just prior to America’s invasion of Iraq, Brian Whitaker reported in The Guardian in 2002 that “with several of the Clean Break paper’s authors now holding key positions in Washington, the plan for Israel to transcend its foes by reshaping the Middle East looks a good deal more achievable today than it did in 1996. Americans may even be persuaded to give up their lives to achieve it.”[16] “In the wake of 11 September 2001,” explains Kevin Toolis, “American neoconservatives such as Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle incorporated the Israeli counter-terrorist model into US foreign policy.”[17] Toolis further adds:

 

Almost all western counter-terrorist academic centres are closely linked to Israeli institutions such as the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, whose executive director, Boaz Ganor, is a political ally of Netanyahu’s. Israeli research into groups such as Hamas can be extremely insightful but it can also be corrupted by the prevailing Islamophobia of the Israeli security establishment. Academic counter-terrorism becomes just another weapon in the war against Arabs and a means to vindicate the assassination policies of Ariel Sharon’s Likud government. The boundary between academic research and black propaganda is again blurred.[18]

 

Feith had studied under Richard Pipes of Team B. His father was a member of the Betar, a Revisionist Zionist youth organization founded by Zeev Jabotinsky. In the lead up to the war in Iraq, Feith played a key role in promoting the claim that the Saddam Hussein regime had a relationship with al-Qaeda. In September 2002, Rumsfeld charged Wolfowitz and Feith to create the Office of Special Plans (OSP), to supply senior Bush administration officials with “raw intelligence” pertaining to Iraq.[19] In an interview with the Scottish Sunday Herald, former CIA officer Larry C. Johnson said the OSP was “dangerous for US national security and a threat to world peace. [The OSP] lied and manipulated intelligence to further its agenda of removing Saddam. It's a group of ideologues with pre-determined notions of truth and reality. They take bits of intelligence to support their agenda and ignore anything contrary. They should be eliminated.”[20] Lawrence Franklin, an analyst and Iran expert in the Feith office, has been charged with espionage as part of a larger FBI investigation, for passing information regarding American policy towards Iran to Israel by way of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Feith’s role was also being investigated. The Guardian explained the nature of Feith’s office’s relationship with Israel’s intelligence services:

 

The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon’s office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam’s Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise.

“None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels,” said one source familiar with the visits. Instead, they were waved in on Mr Feith’s authority without having to fill in the usual forms.

The exchange of information continued a long-standing relationship with Mr Feith and other Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel’s Likud party.[21]

 

Franklin was one of two American officials who held meetings with Iranian dissidents, including Manucher Ghorbanifar, brokered by fellow Iran-Contra conspirator, Michael Leeden, an attendee of Netanyahu’s Jerusalem conferences, and a founding member of JINSA.[22] Despite his dubious credentials, Ledeen’s ideas were quoted daily by such figures as Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. Formerly Rome correspondent for the New Republic, and the founding editor of the Washington Quarterly, Ledeen became Foreign Editor of the American Spectator, a contributor to the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, The International Economy, and National Review. Jonah Goldberg, Ledeen’s colleague at the National Review, coined the term “Ledeen Doctrine” in a 2002 column. This tongue-in-cheek “doctrine” is usually summarized as “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business,” which Goldberg remembered Ledeen saying in an early 1990s speech.[23] A very misleading bio of Ledeen is provided on the JINSA website:

 

Michael A. Ledeen is one of the world’s leading authorities on contemporary history and international affairs. In a few years in government, he carried out some of the most sensitive and dangerous missions in recent American history. He has been profiled in the New York Times, and was the subject of a front-page article and a lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal. A profile of him concluded that “a portrait emerges of a man with an intense knowledge of 20th-century history, a deep commitment to democracy, and a willingness to be adventurous. This is a man who has helped shape American foreign policy at its highest levels.”[24]

 

Ledeen prescribed that a destructive dynamism would transform the Middle East, not only Iraq, but also Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and beyond. According to Ledeen, the governments of all those countries must be overthrown, either by a US-supported internal rebellion or by outright military invasion. Ledeen predicted:

 

Our unexpectedly quick and impressive victory in Afghanistan is a prelude to a much broader war, which will in all likelihood transform the Middle East for at least a generation, and reshape the politics of many other countries around the world.[25]

 

Evidently, the countries Ledeen lists in the Middle East do not present a “clear and present” danger to the United States. All these abstract articulations were designed to hide the ignoble pursuit of Israeli foreign policy objectives, as outlined in the Clean Break strategy. Acts of “preemption,” as it prescribed, would therefore include Israel engaging Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran, by confronting their proxies in Lebanon. Political commentator Phyllis Bennis pointed to the obvious similarities between the strategies outlined in the Clean Break and the subsequent 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict.[26] Already in September 2006, Taki of The American Conservative reported:

 

…recently, Netanyahu suggested that President Bush had assured him Iran will be prevented from going nuclear. I take him at his word. Netanyahu seems to be the main mover in America’s official adoption of the 1996 white paper A Clean Break, authored by him and American fellow neocons, which aimed to aggressively remake the strategic environments of Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. As they say in boxing circles, three down, two to go.

 

Shortly after, Joshua Muravchik, a self-confessed “dyed-in-the-wool, true-believer neocon,” outlined the pretext for America spreading “democracy” at the point of a gun. Speaking for the neoconservatives:

 

We agreed on the need to address the root causes of terrorism, but for us that root cause was the political culture of the Middle East. Political culture did not mean Islam. Rather, it meant a habit of conducting politics by means of violence. At the time of the attacks, not one of the region’s rulers (apart from Israel’s) had been freely elected to his post. All relied on force and intimidation.

The neocon solution involved overhauling the way the region thinks about politics so that terrorism would no longer seem reasonable. This was a wildly ambitious idea, of course, but similar transformations had occurred in Europe and much of Asia over the previous half-century. If democracy had shown its potency in discouraging war elsewhere, it stood to reason that it also could be a cure to terrorism in the Middle East.[27]

 

Similarly, Richard Perle’s book An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, coauthored with fellow neoconservative David Frum, son of well-known Canadian journalist and broadcaster Barbara Frum, in 2004, criticizes American bureaucracy, suggesting that “we” as “Americans” must “overhaul the institutions of our government to ready them for a new kind of war against a new kind of enemy” including the FBI, CIA, armed forces, and State Department.[28] The book also defends the 2003 invasion of Iraq and outlines important neoconservative aspirations, including ways to abandon all Israeli-Palestinian peace processes, invade Syria, and implement strict US domestic surveillance, with biometric identity cards and public vigilance to hinder potential terrorist immigrant or terrorist sympathizer threats. Perle and Frum conclude, shamelessly: “For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation’s great cause… There is no middle way for Americans: it is victory or holocaust.”[29]

 

First Earth Battalion

Strangely, there are at least two prominent cases that link Atta and the 9/11 hijackers with the CIA’s MK-Ultra “mind-control” program, and the so-called First Earth Battalion inspired by the New Age thinking that emerged from the influence of Human Potential Movement at Esalen, and the psychic research conducted at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), which included experiments in LSD on behalf of the CIA as part of Operation Stargate. First Earth Battalion grew out of the attempt to make use of the new proposed methods psychotronics and psychic abilities for military warfare and intelligence gathering. In 1980, Maj. Michael Aquino—former member of Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan, and then PSYOP Research & Analysis Team Leader and simultaneously the occult leader of the Temple of Set—and Paul E. Vallely, Commander of the 7th PSYOP Group, wrote “From PSYOP To MindWar: The Psychology Of Victory,” inspired by Col. John B. Alexander’s “The New Mental Battlefield” published in the same year. The MindWar paper argued for the application of Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) and “psychotronics” at the national level both in the target country and at home. Vallely and Aquino wrote:

 

Psychotronic research is in its infancy, but the U.S. Army already possesses an operational weapons systems designed to do what LTC Alexander would like ESP to do – except that this weapons system uses existing communications media. It seeks to map the minds of neutral and enemy individuals and then to change them in accordance with U.S. national interests. It does this on a wide scale, embracing military units, regions, nations, and blocs. In its present form it is called Psychological Operations (PSYOP).

Marilyn Ferguson, author of The Aquarian Conspiracy, board member of IONS and protégé SRI chairman Willis Harman, was a friend Lt. Col. Jim Channon who was responsible for introducing New Age ideas that were to use psychotronic methods of the CIA’s Project Stargate as a form of psychic warfare.[30] A former Army master sergeant who became a fixture on the human-potential circuit, Channon wrote a paper in 1979 called the “First Earth Battalion Operations Manual,” a long and loopy treatise on using New Age concepts to create a breed of mind-expanded future soldiers, or “Warrior Monks,” who would utilize paranormal abilities and counterculture principles to better prevail in future conflicts with the nation’s adversaries. At a subsequent briefing at the Fort Knox, Kentucky, Channon presented his concepts to “commanders,” who he claims immediately made him the first commander of the First Earth Battalion.[31]

John B. Alexander, along with General Albert Stubblebine, who was deeply influenced by the New Age philosophy of the First Earth Battalion, would then become leading figures in what became known as the CIA’s Operation Stargate, intended to explore the use of psychic abilities for warfare and espionage. The details were explored in the book The Men Who Stare at Goats by journalist Jon Ronson, which became the basis for the movie with the same title, released in Autumn 2009, and starring George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey. Ronson confirmed that a facility at al-Qa’im was conducting “interrogations” of captured Iraqi insurgents, after playing, non-stop, for days at a time, the theme song from Barney the Purple Dinosaur, “I Love You.” Ronson is convinced that the music was a cover for subliminal frequencies, very high- or very low-frequency sounds that affect brain functioning, to break prisoners’ resistance. The prisoners were kept in metal shipping containers in the scorching sun, blindfolded and in crouching positions, surrounded by barbed wire, with the music (and subliminals) blaring. Ronson also convincingly connects some of the bizarre torture techniques used on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, with similar techniques employed during the FBI siege of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. FBI agents blasted the Branch Davidians all night with such obnoxious sounds as screaming rabbits, crying seagulls, dentist drills, and Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walking.” The U.S. military employed the same technique on Iraqi prisoners of war, instead using the theme song from the PBS kids series Barney and Friends.[32]

 

Hijackers 

Ronson asked Stuart Heller, the friend of Marilyn Ferguson and Jim Channon, if he could name one soldier who was “the living embodiment” of the First Earth Battalion. Without a second thought, Heller replied: “Bert Rodriguez.” “He’s a martial arts guy down in Florida… His gym is always full of ex-military guys, ex-Special Forces, Spooks… Bert’s one of the most spiritual guys I’ve ever met,” Heller told Ronson. “No. Spiritual is the wrong word. He’s occultic. He’s like a walking embodiment of death. He can stop you at a distance. He can influence physical events just with his mind. If he catches your attention he can stop you without touching you.”[33] Bert had once taught the head of security for a Saudi prince. Most importantly, Rodriguez trained for six months with Ziad Jarrah, a friend of Marwan al-Shehhi, the hijacker-pilot of United Airlines Flight 175, crashing the plane into the South Tower of the World Trade Center as part of the September 11 attacks. Marwan al-Shehhi was the right-hand man of Mohammed Atta, the alleged terrorist ringleader and pilot of Flight 11.

When Marwan al-Shehhi checked out of the Panther Motel on September 10, 2001, among the items he left behind were three martial arts manuals written by Bert Rodriguez. When Ronson asked Rodriguez what he taught Ziad Jarrah, he answered:

 

The choke hold. You use it to put someone to sleep or kill them. I taught him the choke hold and the kamikaze spirit. You need a code you’d die for, a do-or-die desire. And that’s what gives you the sixth sense, the ability to see into the opponent and know if he’s bluffing. Yeah. I taught him the choke hold and the kamikaze spirit.[34]

 

Aside from the various theories that claim some sort of foul play in the 9/11 incident, it is investigative reporter Daniel Hopsicker, author of Welcome to Terrorland: Mohamed Atta & the 9-11 Cover-up in Florida, who discovered a hornet’s nest of intrigue in and around a flight school in Venice Florida, connected to the CIA drug smuggling operations of Barry Seal through Mena, Arkansas, when Bill Clinton was governor of that state. Hopsicker reveals that at least eight of the terrorist pilots received their initial training in Venice, Florida, at either of the flight schools owned by Arne Kruithof and Rudi Dekkers, the owner of Huffman Aviation, who had reportedly been indicted in his native Holland, on charges that included fraud and money laundering. These include Mohammed Atta and his right-hand man Marwan al-Shehhi, the hijacker-pilot of United Airlines Flight 175, crashing the plane into the South Tower of the World Trade Center as part of the September 11 attacks. Yeslam bin Laden also provided several students for training at Huffman, though he claimed to be estranged from his step-brother Osama.[35] More might have been known about Dekkers’ dubious history, but following 9/11, the FBI removed the files at Huffman, and loaded them onto a C-130 military cargo plane at the Sarasota airport, which took off for Washington with Governor Jeb Bush on board.[36]

Britannia Aviation, which operated from a hangar at Huffman Aviation at the Venice Airport, had a “green light” from the DEA, and the Venice Police Department “had been warned to leave them alone.”[37] Britannia was contracted to operate a large maintenance facility at the Lynchburg, Virginia, Regional Airport, though virtually nothing was known of the company. Britannia’s move to Lynchburg was eased because Wally Hilliard, Dekkers’ financier, had loaned televangelist Jerry Falwell a million dollars, which he showed no indication of intending to repay. Falwell needed the money because he was being foreclosed upon by BCCI-connected Jackson Stephens of Little Rock, Arkansas, who played a part in the CIA-supervised cocaine smuggling operation based in Mena, Arkansas, during Bill Clinton’s term as governor of that state during the 1980s.[38] Stephens was among the richest people in Arkansas and was also a major donor and backer of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He also played a key role in the rise of Walmart.[39] It was also found that Britannia had been providing maintenance services for Caribe Air, a CIA proprietary carrier that had been seized a decade before by federal officials, at the Mena airbase. Many flight trainers who trained the Arab terrorists also moonlighted by flying “Christian missionary” flights to Central and South America, out of the Venice and Sarasota Airports, for Falwell’s crony Pat Robertson’s Operation Blessing, which had been part of the Iran-Contra operation.[40]

Less than three months before the two terrorists began flight training, a Lear jet owned by Hilliard, carrying 43 pounds of heroin, was seized by DEA. Hilliard was then loaned a plane—a Beechcraft King Air 200, worth over $2 million—by Truman Arnold for only one dollar. Arnold, the chief fund-raiser for the Democratic Party in 1995, also played golf with Clinton. The plane was conveyed from Arnold to a Hilliard company, Oryx, founded by Sheik Kamal Adham—former director of Saudi intelligence, and BCCI front-man—and Adnan Khashoggi. Hilliard also did business with Myron Du Bain, a World War II OSS and CIA operative who became chairman of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in 1985. In addition to belonging to the exclusive Bohemian Club, Du Bain served as chairman of the United Way of the Bay Area, director of the San Francisco Opera, and a governor of the San Francisco Symphony. In a quote in his obituary, Henry Kissinger, characterized as “Du Bain’s longtime friend,” calling him a man of “boundless optimism, tremendous buoyancy and patriotism.”[41]

Though Dekkers denied the relationship, according to Venice cab driver Bob Simpson, he and Mohammed Atta, “knew each other well, really well. They were friends.”[42] As discovered by Hopsicker, Atta lived two months with Amanda Keller, an American stripper and lingerie model. He apparently loved the nightlife, to drink, and snorted cocaine. Though, under pressure from the FBI, Keller publicly retracted her story. Similarly, according to two employees of a bar in Ft. Lauderdale, Atta and two companions had gotten “wasted,” and Atta blurted “F*ck God!” However, these witnesses too mysteriously retracted their statements.[43] An eyewitness from a bar, where Atta had embarked on a drinking binge, explained that, “he was just kind of strange, because he was just staring. Everytime I’d walk in and out, he had the same look on his face, so God knows what was going through his mind.”[44]

Hilliard was also involved in the mysterious evacuation of a number of leading Saudis on September 13, in the days immediately following 9/11, at a time when every other private plane in the nation was grounded. The Tampa Tribune called it “The Phantom Flight from Florida,” because the federal government denied it ever took place. It carried a Saudi Arabian prince, the son of that nation’s defense minister, as well as the son of a Saudi army commander, and it flew from Tampa to Lexington, Kentucky. The flight was arranged out of Raytheon Airport Services, a private hangar on the outskirts of Tampa International Airport. Private investigators Dan Grossi, who was offered the job of escorting the trio to Lexington, was told the clearance came from the White House as a favor to the prince’s family from former President Bush.[45] As Hopsicker discovered, they flew on Wally Hilliard’s charter aircraft to private fields of military contractor Raytheon, and departed on a 747.[46]

Lexington was a frequent destination for Saudi horse-racing enthusiasts. “My understanding is that there were other Saudis in Kentucky buying racehorses at that time, and they were going to fly back together,” explained Grossi. All over the country, members of the extended bin Laden family, the House of Saud, and their associates were being assembling in different locations. Although the FBI denied providing any cooperation, according to Prince Bandar, “With coordination with the FBI,” he told CNN, “we got them all out.”[47] Boarding a plane from Lexington, on September 16, was Prince Ahmed bin Salman, a nephew of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. Ahmed’s father, Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz, was the governor of Riyadh and member of the Sudairi clan, who had worked closely with Osama bin Laden during the Afghanistan war. Ahmed was better known as the owner of many top racehorses, like Point Given, the 2001 Horse of the Year, which won two legs of the Triple Crown. When Abu Zubayda, the chief of operations for al Qaeda, was captured in Pakistan. The CIA attempted to intimidate him into confessing by sending a team of Arab Americans posing as Saudi security agents, because of their reputation for brutality. The opposite was the effect. Instead, Zubaydah was relieved, and provided the agents the contact information for Prince Ahmed bin Salman, explaining, “he will tell you what to do.” He said that, several years earlier, the royal family had settled a deal with al Qaeda, by which the Saudis would help the Taliban, if al Qaeda would refrain from attacking Saudi Arabia. Therefore, Zubayda added, he dealt with Prince Ahmed.[48]

 


[1] Michael Meacher. “The Pakistan connection.” The Guardian (July 22, 2004). Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jul/22/usa.september11

[2] Larry Wheeler. “Pensacola NAS link faces more scrutiny.” Pensacola News Journal (September 17, 2001).

[3] Guy Gugliotta & David S. Fallis. “2nd Witness Arrested; 25 Held for Questioning.” The Washington Post (September 15, 2001). p. A29. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38270-2001Sep15?language=printer

[4] Trento. Prelude to Terror, p. 98.

[5] Ernest Hollings. Making Government Work (University of South Carolina Press, 2009). p. 299; Greg Cashman. An Introduction to the Causes of War: Patterns of Interstate Conflict from World War I to Iraq. (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) p. 331.

[6] Jason Vest. “The Men From JINSA and CSP.” The Nation (August 15, 2002). Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20050216182251/http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020902&c=3&s=vest

[7] Ian Buruma. “How to Talk About Israel.” The New York Times (August 31, 2003).

[8] “Grants to New Citizenship Project, Inc.” Media Transparency (accessed February 7, 2008).

[9] “The myth of the ‘Jewish lobby’.” Frontline, 20:20 (September 27, 2003). Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20060629142452/http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl2020/stories/20031010000906000.htm

[10] “America Pearl Harbored.” American Free Press (April 12, 2004). Retrieved from http://www.americanfreepress.net/12_24_02/America_Pearl_Harbored/america_pearl_harbored.htm

[11] Philip Zelikow. “Thinking About Political History.” Miller Center Report, Winter 1999.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ashton B. Carter, John Deutch, & Philip Zelikow “Catastrophic Terrorism: Tackling the New Danger,” Foreign Affairs (November/December 1998).

[14] Emad Mekay. “Iraq was invaded ‘to protect Israel’—US official,” Asia Times (Mar 31, 2004).

[15] Video Interview with General Wesley Clark. Democracy Now (March 2, 2007).

[16] Brian Whitaker. “Playing skittles with Saddam,” Guardian Unlimited (September 3, 2002).

[17] Kevin Toolis. “Rise of the terrorist professors.” The New Statesman (June 12, 2004). Retrieved from https://www.newstatesman.com/long-reads/2004/06/rise-of-the-terrorist-professors; Cited in Teacher. Rogue Agents, p. 279 n. 29.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Larisa Alexandrovna. “Senate Intelligence Committee Stalling Prewar Intelligence Archived 2019-09-02 at the Wayback Machine.” The Raw Story (December 2, 2005). Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20190902132332/https://www.rawstory.com/news/2005/Senate_Intelligence_Committee_stalling_prewar_intelligence_1202.html

[20] Neil Mackay. “Revealed: The secret cabal which spun for Blair.” Sunday Herald (June 8, 2003). Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20030810012529/http://www.sundayherald.com/34491

[21] Julian Borger. “The Spies Who Pushed for War.” The Guardian (July 17, 2003). Retrieved fromhttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jul/17/iraq.usa

[22] Yossi Selman. “Accused Israel Spy Hints at FBI anti-Semitism in AIPAC Probe.” Haaretz (July 23, 2009). Retrieved from https://www.haaretz.com/2009-07-23/ty-article/accused-israel-spy-hints-at-fbi-anti-semitism-in-aipac-probe/0000017f-e130-d7b2-a77f-e337fb860000

[23] Jonah Goldberg. “Baghdad Delenda Est, Part Two.” National Review (April 23, 2002). Retrieved from http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg042302.asp

[24] Retrieved from https://jinsa.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Michael-Ledeen-Bio.pdf

[25] Jim Lobe. “Veteran neo-con advisor moves on Iran.” Asia Times (June 26, 2003).

[26] Phyllis Bennis. “Washington’s Latest Middle East War,” Common Dreams (July 25, 2006).

[27] Joshua Muravchik. “Can the Neocons Get Their Groove Back?” The Washington Post (Sunday, November 19, 2006).

[28] Janine R. Wedel. Shadow Elite (2009), p.147–191

[29] Gary Kamiya, “‘An End to Evil’ by David Frum and Richard Perle.” Salon (January 30, 2004).

[30] Jon Ronson. The Men Who Stare at Goats (Simon and Schuster, 2011).

[31] Ibid.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Daniel Hopsicker. Welcome to TerrorLand: Mohamed Atta & the 9-11 Cover-up in Florida (MadCow Press, 2004), p. 31.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Daniel Hopsicker. “The Secret History of Jerry Falwell.” Mad Cow Morning News (May 18, 2007).

[38] Ibid.

[39] Whitney Webb. “‘From “Spook Air’ to the ‘Lolita Express’: The Genesis and Evolution of the Jeffrey Epstein-Bill Clinton Relationship” MintPress News (October 2, 2019). Retrieved from https://www.mintpressnews.com/genesis-jeffrey-epstein-bill-clinton-relationship/261455/

[40] Ibid.

[41] Daniel Hopsicker. “The Man Who Paid the Men Who Stare at Goats.” Retrieved from https://www.madcowprod.com/2009/10/15/the-man-who-paid-the-men-who-stare-at-goats/

[42] Ibid, p. 82.

[43] Hopsicker, Welcome to Terrorland, p. 82.

[44] Ibid., p. 335

[45] Kathy Steele, Brenna Kelly & Elizabeth Lee Brown. “Phantom Flight from Florida.” Tampa Tribune (October 5, 2001). Retrieved from https://www.911research.wtc7.net/cache/post911/aviation/tampa_phantom.html

[46] Hopsicker, Welcome to Terrorland.

[47] Unger. House of Bush, House of Saud. p. 10.

[48] Ibid.. p. 268-7.

Divide & Conquer