Dead Men Tell No Tales: The CIA, 9/11 and the Awlaki Assassination
by Tom Burghardt
Global Research, October 9, 2011
Antifascist Calling...
On September 30, the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC)
assets under the Agency's control, assassinated the alleged "external
operations" chief of the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western
intelligence assets, also known as Al-Qaeda, Anwar al-Awlaki, and a
second American citizen, Samir Khan, the 25-year-old editor of Inspire
magazine, in a drone strike in Yemen.
As The Washington Post reported last month, the "commingling" of CIA
officers, JSOC paramilitary troops and contractors "occupy an
expanding netherworld between intelligence and military operations"
where "congressional intelligence and armed services committees rarely
get a comprehensive view."
Or any "view" at all, which is precisely what the CIA and Pentagon
have long desired; an oversight-free zone where American policymakers
operate, as Dick Cheney infamously put it, on the "dark side," a
position fully-embraced by the "hope and change" administration of
Barack Obama.
Awlaki's state-sponsored killing, like the May 2 murder of Osama Bin
Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, resurface many unanswered questions
concerning the 9/11 attacks, the so-called trigger for America's
global "War on Terror."
But before turning to those issues, it is necessary to take a detour
and examine administration actions; specifically the deliberations
undertaken by Obama's national security team which culminated in
Awlaki's death.
White House "Death Panel"
Unlike the fantasies of the corporate-controlled Tea Party who charged
during the run-up to the White House sell-out of health care reform
that the administration would create "death panels" to deny care to
the elderly, it has since emerged that Team Obama has stood-up the
authentic article.
According to The Washington Post, President Obama's Justice Department
"wrote a secret memorandum authorizing the lethal targeting" of
Awlaki. The Post reports that the memorandum "was produced following a
review of the legal issues raised by striking a U.S. citizen and
involved senior lawyers from across the administration. There was no
dissent about the legality of killing Aulaqi."
That memorandum, according to The New York Times, was drafted in June
2010, some six months after Awlaki had been placed on the White House
hit list, by Office of Legal Counsel attorneys "David Barron and
Martin Lederman."
Both former OLC lawyers are prominent "liberals" from prestigious
universities; Barron at Harvard and Lederman at Georgetown University.
Ironically enough, in several scholarly articles they had railed
against the previous administration's adaptation of the "Unitary
Executive Theory" promulgated by "torture memo" authors Jay Bybee and
John Yoo.
Under Bush, OLC opinions were used to justify everything from
warrantless wiretapping, the domestic deployment of the military to
arrest Americans, to the torture and indefinite detention of
"terrorist" suspects at the Guantánamo Bay prison gulag and CIA "black
sites."
This of course begs the question: if Awlaki's murder was "legal," why
then was the authorization to do so reached in camera by officials
following a deliberative process which can't be shared with the public
because of "national security"?
The answer should be chilling and shocking to all Americans: because
the nucleus of a death squad state recalling those stood-up in Chile
and Argentina during the "dirty war" period of the 1970s may now
exist.
Reuters disclosed that Americans "are placed on a kill or capture list
by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then
informs the president of its decisions, according to officials."
"There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the
panel," reporter Mark Hosenball wrote, "which is a subset of the White
House's National Security Council. ... Neither is there any law
establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is
supposed to operate."
According to Reuters, "targeting recommendations are drawn up by a
committee of mid-level National Security Council and agency officials.
Their recommendations are then sent to the panel of NSC 'principals,'
meaning Cabinet secretaries and intelligence unit chiefs, for
approval."
A "former official" told Hosenball that "one of the reasons for making
senior officials principally responsible for nominating Americans for
the target list was to 'protect' the president," i.e., provide Obama
legal cover under the thin veneer afforded by "plausible deniability."
McClatchy News reported that "broadly speaking" White House orders to
kill Awlaki were based on claims that "the nation's inherent right of
self-defense [is] recognized under international law." However,
"international law also imposes limits: Targeted killing is banned
except to protect against 'concrete, specific and imminent' danger."
And although the administration now claims that Awlaki was targeted
for death because "his role in AQAP had gone 'from inspirational to
operational'," Reuters disclosed that "officials acknowledge that some
of the intelligence purporting to show Awlaki's hands-on role in
plotting attacks was patchy."
In fact, the White House has failed to provide any proof whatsoever
that Awlaki posed an "imminent danger" to the United States, although
there is considerable evidence that he was on the radar of U.S. and
allied secret state intelligence agencies for more than a decade, had
close ties to several of the 9/11 hijackers and could have been picked
up and indicted at any time.
Instead, federal law enforcement officials gave Awlaki a green light
to leave the United States, unlike thousands of innocent Muslim-
Americans swept-up and detained by the FBI in the post-9/11 hysteria
that followed the attacks.
A "former military intelligence officer who worked with special
operations troops to hunt down high-value terrorism targets," told the
right-wing Washington Times: "I think it's pretty easy to understand
why they didn't take him alive. Would you want to deal with the hassle
of trying to put him on trial, an American citizen that has gotten so
much press for being the target of a CIA kill order? That would be a
nightmare. The ACLU would be crawling all over the Justice Department
for due process in an American court."
That about sums up the dominant mindset of an Empire in sharp decline:
the rule of law and due process for criminal suspects reduced to a
"hassle."
Slouching Towards Dictatorship
Obama's national security team justified whacking Awlaki, as with
their earlier hit on Osama Bin Laden, by referencing the Bush-era
Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), hastily passed by
Congress in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
"A decade later," McClatchy reported, "the Obama administration
contends that this wartime authority remains even if it's evolved for
reasons the administration won't fully elucidate."
The relevant section of AUFM reads: "IN GENERAL -- That the President
is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those
nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized,
committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September
11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to
prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United
States by such nations, organizations or persons." (emphasis added)
Readers will undoubtedly note that in passing the resolution, Congress
not only ceded its authority to declare war to the Executive Branch
but also planted the seeds of the administration's preemptive war
doctrines along with an unprecedented expansion of its domestic
surveillance powers.
More pertinently, is the reason why the administration "won't fully
elucidate" how the Bush-era AUMF "evolved" chiefly due to the fact
that secret annexes now exist which authorize the killing of
Americans, not only in Yemen or other "War on Terror" fronts, but
right here in the United States itself?
After all, it's not beyond the Obama administration to play fast and
loose with the truth or hide repressive policies under layers of top
secret presidential "findings" or a multitude of CIA and Pentagon
black programs, as did the previous Bush government.
Recall that during the run-up to the reauthorization of three expiring
provisions of the USA Patriot Act, civil libertarians decried the use
of secret legal memos justifying everything from unchecked access to
internet and telephone records to the deployment of government-
sanctioned malware on private computers during "national security"
investigations.
Recall too, that the Obama administration, as The New York Times
disclosed in June, handed the FBI "significant new powers to its
roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases,
go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the
lives of people who have attracted their attention."
These "news rules," the Times averred, will give agents "more
latitude" to investigate citizens even when there is no evidence they
have exhibited "signs of criminal or terrorist activity."
It gets worse.
Last month, The New York Times revealed that the FBI "is permitted to
include people on the government's terrorist watch list even if they
have been acquitted of terrorism-related offenses or the charges are
dropped."
Under these new standards, the Bureau may deem someone a "known or
suspected terrorist," not based on evidence gathered through a
criminal investigation, but solely if officials have "particularized
derogatory information," including that derived from First Amendment
protected activities, to support to support an individuals' watch
listing or placement on a "no-fly" list.
One administration wag, speaking on condition of anonymity because to
do otherwise would reveal "closely held deliberations within the
administration," but did so anyway because this was clearly a
sanctioned leak to stenographer Peter Finn, told The Washington Post
that "what constitutes due process in [the Awlaki case] is a due
process in war."
"The administration officials refused to disclose the exact legal
analysis used to authorize targeting Aulaqi," Finn wrote, "or how they
considered any Fifth Amendment right to due process."
We now know, thanks to Reuters, that authorization came from a White
House death panel, an extra-constitutional committee of anonymous
officials operating outside the rule of law.
As we have seen since Barack Obama took office, as under the previous
Bush government, the Constitution is a meaningless scrap of paper with
some words on it, duly trotted out on national holidays only to be
cast aside in practice; that is, when it isn't used as a rhetorical
hammer against assorted "new Hitlers" or geopolitical rivals whose
resources corporate America seek to "liberate."
Dead Men Tell No Tales
As toxic to democratic norms and the rule of law as the Awlaki affair
clearly is, there are underlying parapolitical themes surrounding his
murder which strengthen suspicions that what took place in Yemen on
September 30 is more than just another story about an overt power grab
by the Executive Branch.
While the government and media continue to cover-up the role played by
the CIA and other secret state agencies in alleged intelligence
"failures" leading up to the 9/11 attacks, evidence suggests that the
Awlaki killing, as with last May's murder of former bête noire and on-
again, off-again ally, Osama Bin Laden, may have been a "clean-up"
operation designed to remove inconvenient witnesses with knowledge of
Agency involvement in the plot.
As Antifascist Calling reported nearly two years ago in the wake of
the aborted 2009 bombing of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas
Day over Detroit, a plot for which Awlaki was accused of
orchestrating, though evidence can't be supplied because it's
"secret," The Washington Post disclosed that Awlaki had extensive
contacts with 9/11 hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi, Khalid Almihdhar and Hani
Hanjour who "had spent time at his mosques in California and Falls
Church."
In a series of 2010 articles (here, here, here and here), I reported
on the stark parallels between September 11 and the Flight 253 affair.
Similar to the 2001 attacks we were told "changed everything," far
from being a failure to "connect the dots," intelligence and law
enforcement officials possessed sufficient information that should
have prevented accused bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, from
boarding that plane and placing the lives of nearly 300 air passengers
at risk.
And wile Awlaki wasn't given a free pass by the administration in that
botched attack, earlier government failures to apprehend him certainly
set the stage.
According to History Commons, "shortly before the [FBI] investigation
[into Awlaki's alleged ties to the now-shuttered Holy Land Foundation]
is closed," in 2000, Awlaki "is beginning to associate with hijackers
Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar shortly before the investigation
ends."
"For instance," History Commons avers, "on February 4, one month
before the FBI investigation is closed, al-Awlaki talks on the
telephone four times with hijacker associate [and suspected Saudi
intelligence agent] Omar al-Bayoumi."
"The 9/11 Commission will later speculate that these calls are
related to Alhazmi and Almihdhar, since al-Bayoumi is helping them
that day, and that Alhazmi or Almihdhar may even have been using al-
Bayoumi's phone at the time. Al-Bayoumi had also been the subject of
an FBI counterterrorism investigation in 1999."
Keep in mind that at least two of the hijackers, Nawaf Alhazmi and
Khalid Almihdhar, figure prominently in recent revelations by
researcher Kevin Fenton, the author of Disconnecting the Dots.
In a recent conversation with Boiling Frogs Post's Sibel Edmonds and
Peter B. Collins, Fenton said that during the course of his
investigation, drawn from the Congressional 9/11 Joint Inquiry, the
9/11 Commission, the Justice Department's Inspector General's report,
and the CIA's still-redacted Inspector General's report, he discovered
that the CIA had deliberately withheld information from the FBI that
the future hijackers had entered the United States with multiple entry
visas issued in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
Even though the Agency had identified the pair as international
terrorists who attended a 2000 Al-Qaeda summit in Malaysia where they
and others, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Khallad Bin Attash,
one of the principle architects of the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in
Kenya and Tanzania, planned the assault on the USS Cole and the 9/11
attacks, they kept this from the FBI, information that could have led
straight to the heart of Al-Qaeda's "planes operation."
Fenton provides substantial evidence that the CIA's Alec Station
Director Richard Blee and deputy, Tom Wilshire, concealed intelligence
from investigators, concluding this "information was intentionally
omitted in order to allow an al-Qaeda attack to go forward against the
United States."
As part of this continuing cover-up, Awlaki's ties to the 9/11
hijackers were far more extensive than secret state officials have led
us to believe.
In fact, although the Obama administration has justified killing
Awlaki with false claims that he was AQAP's "external operations"
chief, his role before 9/11 was substantially more significant from an
investigatory perspective: that of a "fixer," first in San Diego where
he assisted Saudi spook Omar al-Bayoumi in "settling" Alhazmi and
Almihdhar, and later in Falls Church, Virginia, where he did the same
for Hani Hanjour.
In 2002, Newsweek revealed that "some federal investigators suspect
that al-Bayoumi could have been an advance man for the 9-11 hijackers,
sent by Al Qaeda to assist the plot that ultimately claimed 3,000
lives."
"Two months after al-Bayoumi began aiding Alhazmi and Almihdhar,"
Newsweek disclosed, "al-Bayoumi's wife began receiving regular
stipends, often monthly and usually around $2,000, totaling tens of
thousands of dollars.
Payments arrived "in the form of cashier's checks, purchased from
Washington's Riggs Bank by Princess Haifa bint Faisal, the daughter of
the late King Faisal and wife of Prince Bandar, the Saudi envoy who is
a prominent Washington figure and personal friend of the Bush family."
With startling similarities to the Awlaki case, ten days after the
attacks, al-Bayoumi is picked up by British authorities in London,
where he had relocated in July 2001, at the request of the FBI.
Although his phone calls, bank accounts and associations are
scrutinized, the Bureau claim they found no connections to terrorism.
The Washington Post will report that by 2002 the FBI had concluded,
the same year Awlaki leaves the U.S., "that no evidence could be found
of any organized domestic effort to aid the hijackers."
Recall that new information linking some members of the Saudi royal
family and its intelligence apparatus to the attacks has recently
surfaced. Last month, The Miami Herald revealed that two weeks before
the kamikaze assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a
Saudi family "abruptly vacated their luxury home near Sarasota,
leaving a brand new car in the driveway, a refrigerator full of food,
fruit on the counter--and an open safe in a master bedroom."
Investigative reporters Anthony Summers and Dan Christensen learned
that "law enforcement agents not only discovered the home was visited
by vehicles used by the hijackers, but phone calls were linked between
the home and those who carried out the death flights--including leader
Mohamed Atta--in discoveries never before revealed to the public."
"Ten years after the deadliest attack of terrorism on U.S. soil,"
Summers and Christensen wrote, "new information has emerged that shows
the FBI found troubling ties between the hijackers and residents in
the upscale community in southwest Florida, but the investigation
wasn't reported to Congress or mentioned in the 9/11 Commission
Report."
In a follow-up piece that significantly advanced the story, researcher
Russ Baker reported on the WhoWhatWhy web site "that those alleged
confederates were closely tied to influential members of the Saudi
ruling elite."
Building on information first disclosed by the Herald, Baker, the
author of Family of Secrets, reports that this "now-revealed link"
between those who consorted with the hijackers in Florida "and the
highest ranks of the Saudi establishment, reopens questions about the
White House's controversial approval for multiple charter flights
allowing Saudi nationals to depart the U.S., beginning about 48 hours
after the attacks, without the passengers being interviewed by law
enforcement--despite the identification of the majority of the
hijackers as Saudis."
Is there a pattern between the hands-off treatment afforded well-
connected Saudis and Anwar al-Awlaki's casual, and inexplicable,
flight from the United States?
"After 9/11" History Commons points out, "the FBI will question al-
Awlaki, and he will admit to meeting with Alhazmi several times, but
say he does not remember what they discussed. He will not claim to
remember Almihdhar at all." Other accounts suggest that the
relationship was much closer.
"The 9/11 Congressional Inquiry," History Commons avers, "claim that
Alhazmi and Almihdhar 'were closely affiliated with [al-Awlaki] who
reportedly served as their spiritual adviser during their time in San
Diego. ... Several persons informed the FBI after September 11 that
this imam had closed-door meetings in San Diego with Almihdhar,
Alhazmi, and another individual, whom al-Bayoumi had asked to help the
hijackers'."
"Around August 2000," History Commons reports, "al-Awlaki resigns
as imam and travels to unknown 'various countries.' In early 2001, he
will be appointed the imam to a much larger mosque in Falls Church,
Virginia. During this time frame, Alhazmi, Almihdhar, and fellow
hijacker Hani Hanjour will move to Virginia and attend al-Awlaki's
mosque there."
Anecdotally, in 2003 Newsweek reports: "Lincoln Higgie, an antiques
dealer who lived across the street from the mosque where Aulaqi used
to lead prayer, told Newsweek that he distinctly recalls the imam
knocking on his door in the first week of August 2001 to tell him he
was leaving for Kuwait. 'He came over before he left and told me that
something very big was going to happen, and that he had to be out of
the country when it happened,' recalls Higgie."
The antiques dealer later told The New York Times, that when he
learned that Awlaki would be permanently leaving San Diego, "he told
the imam to stop by if he was ever in the area--and got a strange
response." Higgie said, "'I don't think you'll be seeing me. I won't
be coming back to San Diego again. Later on you'll find out why'."
Although the FBI suspected Awlaki "had some connection with the 9/11
plot," authorities claim there wasn't enough evidence to charge him,
nor can he be deported because he's an American citizen. And when the
Bureau hatched an ill-conceived plan to arrest him on an obscure
charge of "transporting prostitutes across state lines," that plan
collapsed when Awlaki left the U.S. in March 2002.
"But on October 10, 2002," History Commons reports, "he makes a
surprise return to the U.S." Although his name is on a terrorist watch
list and he is detained by Customs' officials when he lands in New
York, they are informed by the FBI that "his name was taken off the
watch list just the day before. He is released after only three
hours."
"Throughout 2002," History Commons informs us, Awlaki is the
"subject of an active Customs investigation into money laundering
called Operation Greenquest, but he is not arrested for this either,
or for the earlier contemplated prostitution charges. At the time, the
FBI is fighting Greenquest, and Customs officials will later accuse
the FBI of sabotaging Greenquest investigations."
Awlaki again leaves the U.S., this time for good. Although the FBI
admits they were "very interested" in Awlaki, they fail to stop him
leaving the country. One FBI source told U.S. News and World Report,
"We don't know how he got out."
Inexplicably however, it was not until 2008 that secret state
officials concluded that Awlaki was an Al-Qaeda operative! This
beggars belief, and raises the question as to why he was allowed to
leave in the first place. It certainly can't be for lack of evidence
or that when Awlaki set-up shop, first in London and finally in Yemen,
he is continually under surveillance by British, Yemeni and American
intelligence agencies.
Although interviewed four times by the FBI after September 11, the
Bureau concluded, according to The New York Times, that Awlaki's
"contacts with the hijackers and other radicals were random."
Other investigators however, disagreed. "One detective," the Times
reported, whose name has been scrubbed from 9/11 Commission files,
told staff that he believed Awlaki "was at the center of the 9/11
story." At the time of the Flight 253 affair, I wrote that "despite,
or possibly because of these dubious connections he was allowed to
leave the country."
In fact, the curious disinterest exhibited by authorities in bringing
Awlaki to ground following September 11, were neither "errors in
judgement" nor "mistakes" by overtaxed investigators but are rather, a
modus operandi which suggests that Awlaki and others were part of a
CIA domestic operation which allowed the 9/11 plot to go forward.
Nothing in what I have written above should be construed as
justification for the extrajudicial assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki.
In fact, the opposite conclusion can be drawn. The available evidence
indicates that Awlaki could have been arrested multiple times. At the
least serious end of the criminal justice spectrum he could have been
charged with providing "material support to a designated foreign
terrorist organization," to whit, Al-Qaeda, and legally taken out of
circulation.
That he wasn't and continued to operate freely as a propagandist,
despite substantial corroboration from multiple law enforcement
sources that he was a key figure in the pre-9/11 domestic support
network, suggests that Awlaki may have been a double agent, albeit one
who had decidedly gone "off the reservation."
Awlaki's handling by authorities raise serious questions about just
how extensive U.S. support for Al-Qaeda was prior to, and possibly
even after the September 11 attacks, particularly in resource-rich
global hot-spots.
As numerous journalists and researchers have painstakingly documented,
Al-Qaeda, allied terrorist outfits and international narco-trafficking
networks have a long, sordid history of supporting U.S. covert
operations that targeted America's geopolitical rivals even as Bin
Laden's far-flung organization plotted to attack the United States
itself.
In this light, Awlaki's "targeted killing" as with the earlier hit on
Osama Bin Laden, may be part of a larger CIA/Pentagon operation to
remove inconvenient participants and witnesses from the scene who
might have a thing or two to say about the crimes and intrigues
hatched by the imperialist Empire.
After all, dead men tell no tales...
Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco
Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and
Global Research, he is a Contributing Editor with Cyrano's Journal
Today. His articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence
Daily, Pacific Free Press, Uncommon Thought Journal, and the
whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. He is the editor of Police State
America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK
Press and has contributed to the new book from Global Research, The
Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century.
Tom Burghardt is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global
Research Articles by Tom Burghardt
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27001
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