9/11 AL QAEDA DID NOT ACT ALONE: STARTLING REVELATIONS FROM THE NEW BOOK “THE ELEVENTH DAY” BY ANTHONY SUMMERS AND ROBBYN SWAN
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/al-qaeda/8712299/911-al-Qaeda-didnt-act-alone.html
9/11: al-Qaeda didn’t act alone
For their new book, ‘The Eleventh Day’, Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan trawled through thousands of documents, piecing together a definitive account of the attacks.
On September 11, bereaved family members will mark the 10th anniversary of the cataclysmic terrorist attacks on American cities. They will gather around the pools of remembrance at the newly opened memorial, where the names of the 2,982 known victims who died on the day and in the earlier bombing of 1993 are engraved on parapets of bronze. President Obama and his predecessor, George W Bush will be on hand.
Two official inquiries have investigated the who, the how, and the why of 9/11. A decade on, however, many questions remain. Osama bin Laden and his terrorist cohort plotted and executed the operation, but did they act alone? Only days after the onslaught, President Bush’s defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said the terrorists “live and work and function and are fostered and encouraged, if not just tolerated, by a series of countries… I know a lot… It’s a sensitive matter.”
In the months that followed, President Bush and Vice President Cheney – especially Cheney – insinuated publicly that Iraq had been involved in 9/11. Polls showed that by 2003, when the US invaded Iraq, millions of Americans had come to believe that was the case. The US 9/11 Commission, however, would conclude that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks.
Rumsfeld’s other suspects after 9/11 had included Libya, Sudan and Iran, all countries associated with terrorism. No evidence was to emerge pointing to Libya or Sudan, though bin Laden was long based in Khartoum. Iran is another story.
The Iran connection is spelled out in a document filed by American attorneys working on a civil action known as the Havlish case. Fiona Havlish is the widow of an insurance consultant working for AON, the reinsurance giant, who died on 9/11 at the World Trade Center. She and six other bereaved relatives – including the widow of one of the airliners’ pilots – joined Iran to a suit brought against bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
Where the Commission found “no evidence” that Iran or Hizbollah, the paramilitary organisation it supports, knew in advance of the 9/11 plot, the Havlish memorandum asserts that they not only knew about it but were complicit.
This court document draws on affidavits by former 9/11 Commission staff members, a French investigative magistrate, former CIA officers, and an Israeli intelligence analyst. Great weight is given to sealed testimony obtained from three defectors – identified only as “X”, “Y” and “Z” – who had worked for Iran’s Ministry of Information and Security.
The submission tracks Iran’s involvement with al-Qaeda back to 1993. That year, it states, Hizbollah’s Iman Mughniyah, a terrorist credited with multiple operations against US citizens, met in Sudan with Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri, who, following bin Laden’s death in May, has now assumed the al- Qaeda leadership.
According to the Havlish memorandum, Iran facilitated bin Laden’s move three years later to Afghanistan. An Iranian intelligence officer met bin Laden there at about the time he first discussed airborne suicide attacks on American cities. During the ensuing period, when bin Laden was using a satellite phone, 10 per cent of his outgoing calls were to Iran.
Al-Qaeda operatives received training in Iran in airline hijacking, according to the memorandum. Significance is given to a communication four months before 9/11, in which a leading Iranian intelligence official authorised support for “al-Qaeda’s future plans”. The communication emphasised that “no traces must be left…” and that activity was to be limited to “existing contacts” between bin Laden’s henchman Zawahiri and Hizbollah’s Mughniyah.
It was Mughniyah, the new court document states, who “accompanied some of the future ‘muscle hijackers’ ” [who would murder aircrew and subdue passengers] on flights into and out of Iran in October 2000; Mughniyah who flew to Beirut on the same plane as Ahmed al Ghamdi, a future hijacker on one of the planes that would crash into the Trade Center; and Mughniyah, too, who “visited Saudi Arabia to coordinate activities there”. The first of the hijackers to arrive in the US, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, met fellow terrorists in Kuala Lumpur before their mission. On one night during their stay, according to an affidavit, they slept at the Iranian embassy. Would bin Laden and his associates, adherents to the Sunni branch of Islam, really have collaborated with Iranians who overwhelmingly belong to the Shia branch, which is estranged from the Sunnis? According to the Havlish memorandum, hostility towards America and Israel outweighs old religious enmities.
After 9/11, the then Iranian president, Muhammad Khatami, expressed condolences, saying Iran would spare no effort in fighting terrorism. The current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, struck a bizarre note when, last year, he simultaneously expressed sadness at the loss of life while claiming the attacks had been “a big fabrication…”
Iran‘s true position is unambiguous, insists the Havlish memorandum. It notes that the preamble to Iran’s constitution cites a passage in the Koran that calls on the faithful to “strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of God…”
If there are indications of an Iranian role in 9/11, facts far more troubling have emerged about Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, long seen as a friend of the US, some celebrated in the street on learning of the attacks. A poll of Saudi professionals conducted soon afterwards, suggested that 95 per cent favoured Osama bin Laden’s cause. Bin Laden was born in Saudi Arabia, into a fabulously wealthy family. For years before 9/11, though, he had supposedly been an exile, a pariah deprived of his Saudi citizenship and disinherited by his family. Not all observers believe that. The former head of the Security Intelligence department at France’s DGSE, Alain Chouet, dismisses the revocation of bin Laden’s citizenship as “a subterfuge aimed at the gullible, designed to cover a continuing clandestine relationship”.
In the years before 9/11, a former US official has claimed, at least two Saudi princes paid bin Laden what amounted to protection money. “The deal was,” the official said, “they would turn a blind eye to what he was doing elsewhere. ‘You don’t conduct operations here, and we won’t disrupt them elsewhere’.” The former BBC and Financial Times journalist Simon Henderson, now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, has cited US and British sources as naming the royals in question as senior government officials.
According to FBI counter-terrorism chief John O’Neill, speaking before 9/11, the Saudi involvement went further than protection money. “All the answers, all the clues that would enable us to dismantle Osama bin Laden’s organisation,” he said, were in Saudi Arabia.
The 9/11 Commission Report did not categorically exonerate the Saudis of involvement in 9/11, and decisions as to what the final report would say were made amid discord. As last-minute edits were under way, investigators discovered that superiors planned to excise key parts of the Saudi-related material they had submitted. Talk of resignations was in the air, but a compromise was struck. Much of the Saudi information survived, but in the tiny print of the endnotes, where few readers would see it.
The investigators had focused especially on the first two future hijackers to arrive in the US, Mihdhar and Hazmi – the pair who had stayed at an Iranian embassy en route. Both men were Saudis, as were 13 others of the 19 hijackers, and it was Saudis with official connections who gave them help and succour on arrival.
One witness, an imam and diplomat appointed by the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs, arranged for the two men to be given a familiarisation tour of greater Los Angeles. A Saudi named Omar al-Bayoumi, said to have had frequent contact with the imam, travelled with an associate to the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles, before going on to meet the two terrorists. Shortly afterwards, he found them an apartment in the block where he himself lived.
According to Bayoumi, the encounter with the terrorists occurred by chance. A report by the Los Angeles Times, however, including an alleged detail straight out of a bad spy novel, feeds into doubt that he was telling the truth. At the restaurant where they met, according to the Times, Bayoumi dropped a newspaper on the floor, bent to retrieve it, and only then approached the two terrorists.
Bayoumi did no known work, but received a salary from a Saudi company. Payments to him were made by a Saudi official whose son’s photograph was later found on a computer disk in Pakistan – a disk that also contained photographs of some of the hijackers. Five people interviewed by the FBI, meanwhile, thought Bayoumi was a Saudi government agent.
The following year, when Mihdhar and Hazmi spent the night before 9/11 at a Marriott hotel near Washington, a Saudi religious official stayed there too. Later, when FBI agents tried to question him, he began “muttering and drooping his head,” then appeared briefly to lose consciousness. Doctors found nothing wrong, and an agent later suggested the official had “feigned a seizure”.
As Iran had done, Saudi Arabia officially expressed sympathy with the US in the aftermath of 9/11. Its ambassador, Prince Bandar, spoke of his country standing “shoulder to shoulder” with its American friends. US investigators working the case, however, encountered merely obstruction. Requests for information and access to the hijackers’ families were rejected.
Three months after the attacks, the Saudi Interior Minister, Prince Naif, was still saying he did not believe 15 of the hijackers had been Saudis. Defence Minister Prince Sultan doubted that only bin Laden and his followers had been responsible, hinting that “another power with advanced technical expertise” had been behind 9/11. Allegations of Saudi involvement, he said, were down to “[US] congressmen wearing Jewish yarmulkes.” Prince Naif said flatly, “I think they [Zionists] are behind these events.”
President Bush, for his part, welcomed Saudi ambassador Bandar with an embrace and a cigar two nights after the attacks, and received Crown Prince Abdullah to his ranch in early 2002. He said Saudi Arabia was cooperating in the fight against terrorism. The following year, when the report of Congress’s Joint Inquiry into 9/11 was published, its final 28 pages were blank. All that remained was the heading: “Finding, Discussion and Narrative Regarding Certain Sensitive National Security Matters.” Virtually the entire contents had been withheld from the public, on the personal orders of George W Bush. The suppressed material, said the inquiry’s staff director, Eleanor Hill, was “very disturbing. It had to do with sources of foreign support for the hijackers.” Sources made it clear that there had been “direct, very specific links” with Saudi officials and “apparent connections between high-level Saudi princes and associates of the hijackers.”
The inquiry’s co-chairmen, Democrat and Republican alike, said release of the censored material would not compromise national security. More than 40 senators demanded that the censorship be lifted – in vain. Senator Graham, the Democratic co-chair, has charged that Bush “engaged in a cover-up”, that it was “as if the President’s loyalty lay more with Saudi Arabia than with America’s safety.”
President Obama told the widow of one of the 9/11 victims after his inauguration that he was prepared to get the suppressed material released. More than two years on, it is still withheld.
One can guess at the reason, reflected in a concern expressed as early as 11.13 am on September 11 2001. The once “TOP SECRET” log of a conference call involving then Vice President Cheney, Defence Secretary Rumsfeld, and military top brass, shows that – even as the US leadership reinforced fighter cover over Washington – they worried about vital areas overseas. “We need to know,” said a general, speaking for the Defence Secretary, “…whether we have a CAP [Combat Air Patrol] over sensitive areas such as Saudi…”
Saudi Arabia‘s oilfields are a vital resource, and their protection was a vital priority on 9/11. For that same reason, it was seen as necessary to preserve America’s “friendship” with the Saudi regime – even when some of its members were suspected of complicity in the most dastardly terrorist onslaught in history.
Comments are closed.
