|
|
The pit bull with lipstick gave a rousing send-off
to U.S. soldiers
headed for Iraq:
You are going to "defend the innocent from the enemies who
planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of
Americans." Guess what? The establishment reacted with horror!
The Washington Post complained the governor did not understand that any
idea Saddam Hussein had been involved in 9/11 was quite discredited,
while the McCain camp rushed to explain she was speaking about al
Qaeda in Iraq,
rather than Saddam.
Whatever Sarah Palin meant, Saddam did rejoice at the 9/11
attacks. He asserted on September 12, "The United States reaps
the thorns that its rulers have planted in the world." We might
make more of that, and Saddam's subsequent gloating, but the
"entrenched interests" Palin challenged so powerfully at
the Republican National Convention also exist when it comes to
understanding terrorism, particularly the 9/11 attacks. At stake are
careers, and the CIA and others past and present who have dealt with
terrorism are heavily invested in absolving Iraq
for 9/11. If Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks, it means they all
made a tremendous blunder during the previous eight years back to
1993 and the first assault on the World Trade Center. That is, the Clinton
administration more broadly; along with the Republicans who led
Congress then, and subsequently even the Bush White House which failed
to question the Clinton-era explanation of terrorism with any
meaningful vigor -- that it was all basically the product of
stateless, messianic Islamic networks.
A Clan of Terrorist Masterminds
In 2002, CIA chief George Tenet told the US Congress, "We now believe that a
common thread runs between the first attack on the World Trade
Center in
February 1993 and the 11 September attacks." Tenet explained
that the 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), was the uncle
of Ramzi Yousef, who masterminded the 1993 Trade Center bombing,
implying the same party was responsible for both attacks. In 1993, senior figures in New York FBI (pdf), the lead
investigative agency, had suspected Saddam's hand in the Trade Center bombing, but the
feckless Clinton White House did not want to hear that. Instead, by
means that included the ever-rising "wall" that Deputy Attorney
General Jamie Gorelick (later, a 9/11 Commissioner) imposed between
criminal and intelligence investigations, the Clinton administration
blocked any truly informed and coordinated effort that might have
shown that the terrorist attacks that occurred on its watch might be
a matter of state instead of the mere "criminal justice
matter" they became.
Following the Trade Center bombing, KSM and Ramzi Yousef began
preparations in the Philippines
to bomb a dozen U.S.
airliners, before the plot went awry in January 1995 when Yousef
accidentally started a fire mixing explosives. Yousef fled, but was
arrested a month later in Islamabad.
As the New York Times' John Burns reported:
The Pakistan
newspaper, The News, which is said to have good sources in the
Pakistani military's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, said that
"if features could betray geography," Mr. Yousef appeared
to Pakistani investigators "as if he is from the coastal belt of
Baluchistan."... Pakistani
investigators had noted that President Saddam Hussein's Government in
Iraq had tried to
exploit animosities against the Iran Government among Baluch tribal
people in southeastern Iran during the Iran-Iraq
war in the 1980's. The newspaper said this could explain how Mr.
Yousef came into possession of the Iraqi passport that he used when
he arrived in New York in September
1992, six months before the World Trade
Center bombing.
"If Ramzi is in fact of Iranian Baluch origin, it would not have
been big problem for him to get an Iraq passport," the
newspaper said.
KSM, for his part, hid in Qatar. In early 1996, as U.S. officials sought to arrest him,
he was alerted and fled again, soon joining up with bin Laden, who
was expelled from Sudan
to Afghanistan
that May.
It is the official U.S. position that one Baluch family -- KSM and
his nephews -- lies at the heart of the most ambitiously lethal
terrorist plots directed against U.S. targets, starting with the
Trade Center bombing, culminating in the 9/11 attacks, and even
continuing beyond. After KSM was captured in March 2003, U.S.
officials told the Washington Post that "they are
concerned that his nephews -- the brothers of imprisoned terrorist
Ramzi Yousef -- may be positioned to take over planning of future
terror attacks." Two men were named, and one proved a central
figure in a plot to bomb U.S. financial centers,
as well as British targets, that was disrupted in the summer of 2004.
Yet another KSM nephew, a cousin to Ramzi Yousef and his brothers --
Ali Abdul Aziz Ali (aka Ammar al Baluchi) -- was KSM's
"right-hand man" in carrying out the 9/11 attacks, as
Deputy Attorney General James Comey explained.
Most people, oddly including many U.S. officials involved
in the war on terrorism, are unaware of the centrality of this clan
to these major terrorist plots! To borrow a phrase from Roberta
Wohlstetter's prize-winning Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision,
the existence of this clan of terrorist masterminds is a
"signal" -- important information -- lost amid a lot of
"noise" -- unimportant information. And it acquires even
more significance when one more point is considered.
Al Qaeda's Conspiracy Began in 1996
The official U.S. position holds that al Qaeda's conspiracy against
the United States began with Osama bin Laden's August 1996
"Declaration of Jihad," issued a few months after he was
forced to leave Sudan for Afghanistan. Al Qaeda's first major attack
on a U.S. target
was the August 7, 1998, bombings of two embassies in Africa. This is reflected in the charges against KSM and other Guantanamo Bay detainees
It is also reflected in the just-completed military trial of bin
Laden's driver, Salim Hamdan. The FBI agent who had interrogated
Hamdan testified, telling the jury, "Before the 1998
embassies bombings, Hamdan did not know the intended targets...but
reported that he heard from an al Qaeda aide that this would be 'the
very first time that bin Laden was going head to head with America.
So they were careful and nervous about that.'"
Thus, the major terrorist attacks against the United States
began with KSM and his nephews. Then al Qaeda began its major
attacks, five years later in 1998, after KSM had joined up with bin
Laden. This sequence suggests the possibility of an alternative
explanation -- one raised by Edward
Jay Epstein among a handful of others, including this author: KSM
and his Baluch clan may represent something more sophisticated: that
a terrorist state may have covertly penetrated al Qaeda and helped
bin Laden do what he wanted to do, but otherwise lacked the ability
to execute.
Because KSM and his nephews are Baluch, and the Baluch were known for
their ties to Saddam's Iraq
-- those ties are also described by Mary Anne Weaver, who has covered the
Muslim world for The New Yorker for over 20 years -- Iraq
would be the top suspect as the terrorist state behind this family of
Baluch terrorist masterminds.
So if Sarah Palin intended an Iraq-al Qaeda role in 9/11, she may
well prove more correct than the intelligence establishment and its
political and media allies, as history begins to provide factual
evidence to support the suggestion that Saddam may well have provided
critical expertise, and perhaps other resources, for al Qaeda's most
lethal terrorism.
Laurie Mylroie (lauriemylroie.com) is an adjunct fellow at the
American Enterprise Institute and author of Study of Revenge: The
First World Trade Center
Attack and Saddam Hussein's War Against America (AEI Press).
|
|
