September 11th — Unanswered Questions

by Salim Muwakkil

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1202-12.htm

The Bush administration consistently ignored intelligence that was
opposed to its ideological agenda in Iraq. About that, there now is
little doubt.

The likelihood is increasing that the Bushites also may have ignored
intelligence that could have prevented, or at least attenuated the
attacks that killed nearly 3000 people, destroyed the World Trade
Center towers, and poked holes in the Pentagon and Pennsylvania on
Sept 11, 2001. Was the administration blinded by ideology in that case
as well?

The answer to that question was one charge of the National Commission
on Terrorist Attacks; created last year to probe the Sept 11 attacks.
But, according to a number of influential critics, the commission has
been hampered by a lack of cooperation and commitment from the White
House.

The bipartisan, 10-member commission was created to find reasons for
the failures of intelligence and security that allowed the terrorist
to wreak such spectacular havoc. Both the White House and key members
of Congress initially resisted efforts to form such a commission.

They relented only under intense pressure from family members of those
killed in the attacks. When he signed the commission into existence
last Nov. 27, Bush said it "should carefully examine all the evidence
and follow all the facts, wherever they lead."

Organized under the rubric of The Family Steering Committee, those
family members now believe the administration is blocking the
commission’s attempt to follow the facts. "Unfortunately, the
production of a timely report no longer seems to be possible, in large
part because of the delays caused by the Bush administration and the
agencies that report to it," the group said in a statement last week
marking the commission’s anniversary. The group is seeking an
extension of the commission’s May 27 deadline.

Two of the commission’s five Democrats, Max Cleland, former Senator
from Georgia and Tim Roemer, former Indiana Rep., agree with the
family group. Both have complained about the commission’s restricted
access. Cleland said the Bush administration is trying to "slow walk"
the commission into irrelevancy. The White House argues that turning
over all of the documents the commission could compromise intelligence
sources.

But many Americans are beginning to question the administration’s
preoccupation with secrecy. If the commission’s job is to determine
what went wrong in order to insure there is no repeat, they ask, then
why is the administration hampering that task? Does it have something
to hide?

Cleland suspects that an unfettered investigation may reveal the Bush
administration was more anxious to use the 9/11 attacks to justify an
Iraq invasion than to apprehend al Qaida, the alleged perpetrators.
"They had a plan to go to war (with Iraq), and when 9/11 happened
that’s what they did; they went to war," Cleland told Salon’s Eric
Boehlert in a November 21 story.

The "they" to which Cleland refers is Asst. Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney, who crafted a draft policy
paper in 1991 that among other things urged the overthrow of Saddam
Hussein while both served in the administration of the previous
President Bush.

Their arguments were dismissed as too combative at the time, but they
(and an influential coterie of policy allies) continued making the
case. Many of these same people organized themselves as the Project
for the New American Century and, in a 1998 public letter, urged
President Clinton to focus on ousting Iraq’s Hussein. Clinton had
another focus.

The 2000 victory of the Bush-Cheney administration gave these forces
an inside track. Many members of the Project for the New American
Century, or their ideological sympathizers, were appointed to key
foreign policy slots within the Bush administration.

Cleland, a disabled vet who has become a vocal critic of the Bush
administration’s Iraq policy, is convinced the terrorist attacks were
exploited to mobilize emotion for an invasion of Iraq. His argument is
bolstered by the tendentious "evidence" the Bushites offered to
justify the invasion.

Cleland voted to authorize the president’s action while he was still a
Senator, but it’s a vote he deeply regrets. "I feel like I have been
duped, I don’t mind telling you," he told Boehlert. "Everybody in the
administration was selling this used car. The problem is all the
wheels have fallen off the car and we’ve got a lemon."

The White House’s reluctance to cooperate with the 9/11 commission
feeds a growing but largely unspoken suspicion that certain forces
within the administration were willing to tolerate terrorist attacks
if they provided a pretext for an Iraq invasion.

Alternative media are rife with such speculation. Some analysts liken
the situation to the controversial allegation that President Franklin
D. Roosevelt provoked the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor to jolt
Americans out of their isolationist torpor and into World War II. Such
speculation remains idle for now. Americans are reluctant to attribute
that kind of duplicity to their chief executive; at least, not until
after the fact.

But the White House’s reticence is fueling suspicions they may want
some questions about 9/11 to remain unanswered. One of those questions
concerns the extent of warnings from outside sources, and a story
about an extensive network of Israeli espionage agents that was caught
spying in the U.S.

The news of an Israeli spy ring operating within the U.S. first broke
into the mainstream through a four-part series on Fox News Channel
from Dec 12-15, 2001. By late December, however, the story was removed
from the Fox website and disappeared for several months. Because of
renewed interest in the issue, the story has been reposted.

In introducing the piece two years ago, Fox News anchor Britt Hume
said, " - Fox News has learned some U.S. investigators believe that
there are Israelis again very much engaged in spying in and on the
U.S., who may have known things they didn’t tell us before September
11.

In the first story, reporter Carl Cameron said, "Since Sept. 11, more
than 60 Israelis have been arrested or detained, either under the new
Patriot anti-terrorism law, or for immigration violations." He
reported that the detainees "failed polygraph questions" when asked if
they were spies.

"There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9-11
attacks," Cameron continued, "but investigators suspect that the
Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance,
and not shared it. A highly placed investigator said there are ’tie-
ins.’ " When Cameron asked details, the investigator said, "evidence
linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified."

Although the story virtually vanished in the mainstream after
Cameron’s series, it has been kept alive by a dogged reporter named
John Sugg, who writes for an Atlanta-based alternative publication
called Creative Loafing. Sugg obtained and published on-line a
confidential 60-page Drug Enforcement Administration document that
details the apparent spying by Israeli "art students" who tried to
gain access to sensitive federal buildings, military bases and
intelligence officials’ homes.

The Forward, a New York-based Jewish publication, also has reported on
the issue. In a March 15, 2002 story, the Forward referred to five
Israeli employees of a New Jersey moving company (Urban Moving
Systems) who were arrested after being observed celebrating the fall
of the twin towers. The Forward reported, "the assessment (from a U.S.
officials) was that Urban Moving Systems was a front for the Mossad
and operatives employed by it."

The specifics of the story are clear, less clear are the implications.
Investigators suspect, as reported in the Nov. 2, 2003 edition of the
(Scotland) Sunday Herald, that Israeli intelligence had been shadowing
the al-Qaeda hijackers throughout the Middle East, Europe and into
America where they trained as pilots and made preparations for their
audacious attack.

If the Israelis had preliminary knowledge of the September 11 attacks
why would they not have informed U.S. officials? One motive would be
to bind Israel and the U.S. together in mutual suffering. If Americans
felt the collective pain of civilian deaths at the hands of
terrorists, then Israel would have an unbreakable bond with the
world’s only superpower.

But according to the Fox News report, Israel’s Mossad probably shared
the information with U.S. officials. "There was a report that the
Mossad did indeed send representatives to the U.S. to warn, just
before 9/11, that a major terrorist attack was imminent," Hume
intoned. Reporter Cameron said his sources told him, "the principal
question is how they could have not known?"

Those are some of the questions that could be answered if the 9/11
commission had the access the president promised.

Salim Muwakkil can be reached at Salim4X@aol.com