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WSWS : News & Analysis : The US War in Afghanistan
Was the US government alerted to the September 11 attack?
Part 3: The United States and Mideast terrorism
By Patrick Martin
22 January 2002
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An essential aspect of the official version of the attacks on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon—which maintains that these
attacks came as a complete surprise to the US government and its
intelligence apparatus—is the claim that the CIA and other
intelligence agencies relied too heavily on electronic surveillance
rather than on-the-spot agents infiltrated into the terrorist
organizations.
As a result, so the story goes, without agents among the Islamic
fundamentalists, the CIA and FBI were unable to discover the plans of
Osama bin Laden and forestall them. The absence of American agents is
simply asserted,
without any examination of the evidence. The argument is largely circular. The very
success of the attack on September 11 is taken to prove that the US government had no
agents in the milieu which supported the hijackers
.
There are two assumptions here: first, that US agents could not penetrate the
terrorist circles; and second, that American agents would have intervened to stop an
attack had they learned of it in advance. Both these assum
ptions are questionable.
The official claim of “no human intelligence” about September 11 is of course
difficult to analyze or refute on the basis of empirical or forensic evidence. It is
in the nature of such activities that they take place in s
ecret, and remain largely unknown to the public. But the credibility of this claim can
be judged in the light of the historical record of the relationship between American
imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism.
The United States has been deeply involved in the Middle East for more than half a
century, and in Afghanistan for more than two decades. US intelligence agencies have
had long and intimate ties with Islamic fundamentalis
ts and encouraged them to engage in terrorist violence. Without this US role there
would have been no al Qaeda, bin Laden would have remained a construction magnate in
Saudi Arabia, and September 11 would never have taken
place.
The origins of the mujahedin
Those who carried out the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were not even born
when the US government first began to sponsor violent Islamic fundamentalists and use
them against political opponents in the Middle Eas
t. As far back as the 1950s, the United States and its main Arab client state, Saudi
Arabia, gave financial support to fundamentalist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in
Egypt. US officials backed the fundamentalists ag
ainst the pan- Arab nationalism of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, as well as against
socialist elements in the Arab working class, especially in the Saudi oilfields.
One analyst of this process writes: “It was during the 1958-60 period that the US
State Department began to exaggerate the communist threat to the Middle East, and the
ARAMCO CIA, and indeed the Beirut and Cairo CIAs, beg
an supporting Islamic fundamentalist groups as a counterweight to Nasser. In part,
this was an extension of Kim Roosevelt’s earlier successful use of Muslim elements
(Fadayeen Islam) against leftists in Iran. The anti-Nas
ser Muslim Brotherhood was funded, religious leaders were prodded to attack the USSR
for its anti-Muslim ways (Said K. Aburish, The Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall of the
House of Saud, St. Martin’s Press, New York, NY,
1996, p. 161).
This relationship expanded quantitatively and qualitatively with the outbreak of civil
war in Afghanistan. Even before the invasion of the country by the Soviet Union in
December 1979, the United States had decided to giv
e financial and military backing to the Islamic fundamentalist parties engaged in
guerrilla warfare against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, which had come to power
in an April 1978 military coup.
US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski hoped that a full-scale war in
Afghanistan would prove as debilitating for the USSR as the Vietnam War had been for
the United States. The Carter administration began to po
ur in weapons and money, especially favoring the most right-wing Islamic
fundamentalists, those who became the ideological forebears of the Taliban and Osama
bin Laden.
Carter’s successor Ronald Reagan enthusiastically embraced the fundamentalists. He
hailed as “freedom fighters” political organizations that sought to establish a state
based on a medieval version of Islamic law: a religi
ous dictatorship which practiced slavery, oppression of women and barbaric mutilations
for alleged lawbreakers.
But the man who really deserved the title of “founding father” of al Qaeda was
Reagan’s CIA director, William Casey. It was Casey who initiated the campaign to
recruit Islamic militants from all over the world to come to
Afghanistan and fight in the anti-Soviet cause. Islamic fundamentalists from dozens of
countries—from Morocco to Indonesia, and including even some black Muslims from the
United States—traveled to Afghanistan under CIA au
spices, received training in weapons and explosives from CIA trainers and went into
combat with US- supplied arms.
Osama bin Laden himself was a product of this process. He first went to Afghanistan in
the early 1980s as a sympathizer of the Afghan mujahedin, using his knowledge of
construction to help build roads, bases and other fac
ilities, paid for with a combination of his own and US money. It was in Afghanistan
that he made the contacts among Islamic fundamentalists worldwide which made possible
the organization of later terrorist attacks on US t
argets. What the Bush administration and the American media today demonize as a global
conspiracy of Islamic extremists is thus a Frankenstein monster created by the
American government itself.
This history is well understood by the more conscious strategists for American
imperialism. Zbigniew Brzezinski suggested cynically a few years ago that the
emergence of al Qaeda was an acceptable price to further US inte
rests in the Middle East and internationally. He told a French newspaper: “Which was
more important in world history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet empire? A few
over-excited Islamists or the liberation of Central
Europe and the end of the Cold War?” (Interview with Vincent Javert in Le Nouvel
Observateur, January 15-21, 1998)
Al Qaeda and the CIA
Bin Laden, as is now widely reported, turned against the United States in 1991-92
after the deployment of large numbers of American troops in Saudi Arabia in the course
of the Persian Gulf War. The official story is that
this marked the end of all contacts between US intelligence agencies and the Islamic
fundamentalists who would go on to form al Qaeda.
Here our analysis necessarily moves into an area where established facts are few and
far between, and inference and probability must be relied on. Is it credible that the
CIA, after a decade of the most intimate ties with
the Afghan mujahedin, was suddenly cut off from all information and unable to
determine what its erstwhile protégés were doing?
The servile American media has never challenged Bush administration, Pentagon or FBI
spokesmen on this subject, and one should not hold one’s breath until a highly paid
American journalist puts his job on the line by aski
ng such questions. But the long-term, close-knit relationship between the CIA and the
Afghan mujahedin makes the sudden drying up of all sources of intelligence unlikely.
The CIA is in the business of knowing its collaborators intimately, and it worked with
bin Laden and his supporters and followers for a dozen years. Even today, after a
decade of increasing hostilities, those described by
US government sources as key bin Laden aides are for the most part drawn from the
Egyptian and Saudi Islamic fundamentalists radicalized during the war in Afghanistan.
The CIA knew their families, their weaknesses and th
eir vices, and it has never been squeamish about using such information to compromise
individuals and secure cooperation with its purposes.
That is not to say that there was not a real conflict between bin Laden and the US
government, or that al Qaeda is simply a front organization. It is not necessary to
resort to such a conspiracy theory to reject the claim
that the US government had no idea of the plans being laid by the terrorist group. It
is the official version which is preposterous and far fetched: the claim that the most
extensive and well-financed intelligence appara
tus in the world could not make a dent in an organization consisting largely of its
former employees.
Despite the current official mystification, bin Laden & Co. were a far more accessible
target than, say, such Stalinist-ruled regimes as North Vietnam or North Korea. The
CIA has cultivated sources among the Islamic funda
mentalists since the 1950s. Moreover, friendly intelligence services, including at
least those of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan—to say nothing of Israel—would have
had their own contacts as well.
The role of agents provocateurs
It is critical to consider September 11 in the context of earlier terrorist attacks on
American targets, particularly the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the 1998
bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
In both these attacks, it has come to light that American agents provocateurs played
a central role. This casts doubt on the claims that US intelligence was unable to
penetrate al Qaeda. And it raises the question whethe
r similar agents had some connection to September 11.
Those charged in the 1993 World Trade Center attack and for a subsequent conspiracy to
blow up other targets in New York City were mostly former guerrilla fighters in
Afghanistan who entered the United States with the cov
ert assistance of US intelligence agencies. Among them was a former Egyptian
intelligence agent and US government informer, Emad Salem, who was identified as a
principal instigator of plans to bomb targets in the New York
City area.
Salem and the FBI claimed that he had functioned as an informer in 1991-92 and then
again from April 1993 on, but not during the period of the actual organization of the
March 1993 bomb blast which killed six people and d
estroyed the sub-basement area of the twin towers. This was a transparent effort to
avoid questions being raised about why the FBI, tipped off by its informant, did
nothing to stop the attack.
In the 1998 events, it was revealed that the US government received advance warning of
the Kenya bombing two weeks before it took place. During the trial last year of four
men charged in the bombings, defense lawyers were
able to demonstrate that US officials did not pass on the warnings to the personnel
of the threatened embassies, thus contributing to the high death toll, especially
among local civilians who were in or near the faciliti
es at the time of the blasts.
As with at least one of the warnings about September 11, this information came through
the Israeli intelligence service Mossad. Moreover, one of those charged in the Kenya
and Tanzania bombings was a former Green Beret se
rgeant and special warfare instructor, Ali A. Mohamed, another former Egyptian
security officer who was brought into the United States under a special CIA program to
provide citizenship for key informants. Although Mohame
d supposedly turned against the US government because of the 1991 Gulf War, he was
still serving as a government informant as late as 1995.
No doubt most of those who participated in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the
bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and similar outrages, were
Islamic fundamentalists who believed that they were som
ehow striking a blow against the US government. But in the murky world of agents,
double agents, and agents provocateurs, they may well have been used to serve the
purposes of American imperialism, which has utilized terr
orist attacks—and above all September 11—as the pretext for carrying out military
actions overseas and attacks on democratic rights at home.
Terrorist attacks on innocent civilians, whatever the motivation or pretext, are
politically reactionary. Moreover, because terrorism substitutes the armed action of a
tiny minority for a struggle to develop the political
consciousness of the masses, it is much easier for imperialist agents to feign
sympathy and penetrate and manipulate the organization involved. From this political
standpoint, the claim that US intelligence was unable to
infiltrate al Qaeda is not believable.
Some curious connections
Perhaps the murkiest aspect of September 11 is establishing the actual relationship
between bin Laden himself and the US government. He was, of course, a CIA asset for
more than a decade. He is one of several dozen sons o
f a Saudi construction billionaire whose family has longstanding ties to the United
States and, in particular, to the family of George W. Bush. (The bin Ladens were
investors in the Carlyle Group, the multibillion-dollar
venture capital firm which employs the president’s father, the former president, as a
well-paid “rainmaker,” drumming up business in the Middle East. They sold their
holdings in the firm after September 11.)
As late as 1996, more than four years after Osama bin Laden announced his intention to
drive the US out of Saudi Arabia, the US government declined an offer by Sudan to
extradite him. US officials suggested there was not
enough evidence to convict bin Laden of terrorist actions in a US court. Even after
the 1998 embassy bombings made him a household name, the CIA had surprising difficulty
in locating him in Afghanistan.
Last October 31, the French daily newspaper Le Figaro —one of the country’s more
conservative journals—published a sensational story claiming that bin Laden had met
with CIA officials at some point during a nearly two-wee
k stay, July 4-14, 2001, at the American Hospital in Dubai, in the United Arab
Emirates, where he was treated for kidney disease.
The report was roundly denied by US and UAE officials, and there is no way to verify
it independently. But the newspaper is certainly well-connected. One of its major
investors is the Carlyle Group, the private equity fir
m which directly links the Bush family and the bin Laden family.
There are other indications that the relations between the US government and Islamic
terrorists are not as they appear in the American media.
There is the case of Nabil al-Marabh, who was caught at the Niagara Falls, New York
border crossing in June 2001, stowed away inside a tractor-trailer with a forged
passport, and was turned back to Canada by US immigratio
n officials. “Nine months earlier, he had been identified to American intelligence
agents as one of Osama bin Laden’s operatives in the United States. American customs
agents knew about money he had transferred to an asso
ciate of Osama bin Laden in the Middle East. And the Boston police had issued a
warrant for his arrest after he violated probation for stabbing a friend with a
knife.” Al-Marabh was released on bail in Canada, and later a
rrested near Chicago after the September 11 attacks. While he was jailed in Canada,
“Marabh boasted to his cellmates that he was ‘special’ to the F.B.I.” ( New York
Times, October 5, 2001)
Then there is the report which appeared September 24 in Newsweek. The weekly magazine
reported that on September 10 “a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled
travel plans for the next morning, apparently becaus
e of security concerns.” This suggests that some level of the American state had
knowledge, not only of the imminence of the attack, but even of its exact timing.
Needless to say, no major American publication has followe
d up this report.
And what is one to make of an article that appeared in the Washington Post September
23, on the newspaper’s front page, under a double headline: “Investigators Identify 4
to 5 Groups Linked to Bin Laden Operating in US. N
o Connection Found Between ‘Cell’ Members and 19 Hijackers, Officials Say”?
The article reports that the FBI had identified multiple al Qaeda groups operating
“for the last several years” in the United States, but found no connection between
them and the 19 hijackers who carried out the September
11 attack. This is an astonishing admission, given that the entire US military
campaign against Afghanistan has been predicated on holding Osama bin Laden
responsible for the suicide hijackings. The article continues:
“The FBI has not made any arrests because the group members entered the country
legally in recent years and have not been involved in illegal activities since they
arrived, the officials said.
“Government officials say they do not know why the cells are here, what their purpose
is or whether their members are planning attacks. One official even described their
presence as ‘possibly benign,’ though others have a
more sinister interpretation and give assurances that measures are in place to
protect the public.”
Here the mind boggles: amid a nationwide dragnet, with hundreds of Arab-Americans and
Muslim-Americans rounded up and questioned for no other reason than their national
origin and religion, the FBI tells the principal dai
ly newspaper in the nation’s capital that it has not arrested known collaborators of
Osama bin Laden because they have done nothing wrong since they arrived in the US.
Their presence may even be “benign,” an astonishing a
djective to use after the murder of nearly 3,000 people.
The Post article was written jointly by Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus, a fact which
adds to its significance. Woodward needs no introduction to those familiar with the
Watergate scandal. He was the recipient of the most
famous leak in US history, obtaining inside information about Nixon’s actions in
Watergate from a source Woodward dubbed “Deep Throat,” never identified but believed
to be a top official in the national security apparatus
. Walter Pincus is a national-security reporter for the Post, covering the CIA and
Pentagon. He worked as a CIA operative in the 1960s, as a member of the National
Student Association, a fact which was only revealed two d
ecades later.
An article by these two individuals, given the prominence of front-page publication in
the Washington Post, should be understood as a semiofficial hint by the US
intelligence services that their relationship with Osama bi
n Laden is considerably more complex than that presented in the propaganda which now
dominates the media.
To be concluded Thursday, January 24
Copyright 1998-2001
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