Launching the U.S. Terror War: the CIA, 9/11, Afghanistan, and Central Asia 米国テロ戦争の開始ーー中央情報局、9.11、アフ ガニスタン、中央アジア
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Volume 10 | Issue 12 | Number 3 | Article ID 3723 | Mar 12, 2012 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Launching the U.S. Terror War: the CIA, 9/11, Afghanistan, and Central Asia 米国テロ戦争の開始ーー中央情報局、9.11、アフ ガニスタン、中央アジア Peter Dale Scott Launching the U.S. Terror War: the areas of mostly rural resistance -- areas where CIA, 9/11, Afghanistan, and Central conventional forms of warfare, for either geographic or cultural reasons, prove Asia1 Spanish translation available; inconclusive. French translationavailable ; Portuguese translationavailable ; Terror War was formally declared by George Italian translation available; Russian W. Bush on the evening of September 11, 2001, translation available; German with his statement to the American nation that "we will make no distinction between the translation available. terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them."3 But the notion that Bush’s Peter Dale Scott terror war was in pursuit of actual terrorists The engineering of a series of provocations to lost credibility in 2003, when it was applied to justify military intervention is feasible and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a country known to could be accomplished with the resources have been targeted by terrorists but not to 4 available. - Report of May 1963 to Joint Chiefs have harbored them. It lost still more of Staff1 credibility with the 2005 publication in Britain of the so-called Downing Street memo, in which Bush’s Terror War and the Fixing of the head of the British intelligence service MI6 Intelligence reported after a visit to Washington in 2002 that "Bush wanted to remove Saddam Hussein, On September 11, 2001, within hours of the through military action, justified by the murderous 9/11 attacks, Bush, Rumsfeld, and conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the Cheney had committed America to what they intelligence and facts were being fixed around later called the “War on Terror.” It should more the policy."5 False stories followed in due properly, I believe, be called the “Terror War,” course linking Iraq to WMD, anthrax, and Niger one in which terror has been directedyellowcake (uranium). repeatedly against civilians by all participants, both states and non-state actors. It should also This essay will demonstrate that before 9/11 a be seen as part of a larger, indeed global, small element inside the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit process in which terror has been used against and related agencies, the so-called Alec Station civilians in interrelated campaigns by all major Group, were also busy, “fixing” intelligence by powers, including China in Xinjiang and Russia suppressing it, in a way which, accidentally or in Chechnya, as well as the United States.2 deliberately, enabled the Terror War. They did Terror war in its global context should perhaps so by withholding evidence from the FBI before be seen as the latest stage of the age-long 9/11 about two of the eventual alleged secular spread of transurban civilization into hijackers on 9/11, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf 1 10 | 12 | 3 APJ | JF al-Hazmi, thus ensuring that the FBI could not establishment of U.S. forward-based bases surveil the two men or their colleagues. around the oil fields of Central Asia. This failure to share was recognized in the 9/11 In short, the withholding of evidence should be Commission Report, but treated as an accident seen as part of the larger ominous pattern of that might not have occurred “if morethe time, including the malperformance of the resources had been applied.”6 This explanation, U.S. government (USG) in response to the 9/11 however, has since been refuted by 9/11 attacks, and the murderous anthrax letters Commission Chairman Tom Kean. Asked which helped secure the passage of the Patriot recently by two filmmakers if the failure to deal Act. appropriately with al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi could have been a simple mistake, Kean I am now persuaded by Fenton that Lawrence replied: Wright’s explanation, that the CIA was protecting a covert operation, may explain the beginnings of the withholding in January 2000, Oh, it wasn’t careless oversight. It but cannot explain its renewal in the days just was purposeful. No question about before 9/11. Fenton analyzes a list of thirty-five that .… The conclusion that we different occasions where the two alleged came to was that in the DNA of hijackers were protected in this fashion, from these organizations was secrecy. January 2000 to about September 5, 2001, less And secrecy to the point of ya don’t than a week before the hijackings.11 We shall 7 share it with anybody. see that in his analysis, the incidents fall into two main groups. The motive he attributes to the earlier ones, was “to cover a CIA operation In 2011 an important book by Kevin Fenton, that was already in progress.”12 However after Disconnecting the Dots, demonstrated “the system was blinking red” in the summer of conclusively that the withholding was 2001, and the CIA expected an imminent purposive, and sustained over a period of attack, Fenton can see no other explanation eighteen months.8 This interference and than that “the purpose of withholding the manipulation became particularly blatant and information had become to allow the attacks to controversial in the days before 9/11; it led one go forward.”13 FBI agent, Steve Bongardt, to predict accurately on August 29, less than two weeks before 9/11, that “someday someone will die.”9 As will be seen, the motives for this withholding remain inscrutable. At one time I was satisfied with Lawrence Wright’s speculations that the CIA may have wanted to recruit the two Saudis; and that “The CIA may also have been protecting an overseas operation [possibly in conjunction with Saudi Arabia] and was afraid that the F.B.I. would expose it.”10 The purpose of this essay is to suggest that the motives for the withholding may have had to do with the much larger neocon objective being imposed on American foreign policy at this same time: the consolidation of U.S. global hegemony by the 2 10 | 12 | 3 APJ | JF Caspian.”14 I shall suggest that the purpose as well as the result of protecting the two Saudis may have been to fulfill the objectives of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) neocon group for establishing “forward-based forces” in Central Asia.15 We shall see that a phone call on 9/11 from CIA Director Tenet to Stephen Cambone, a key PNAC figure in the Pentagon, apparently transmitted some of the privileged information that never reached the FBI. This neocon agenda was partially to maintain American and Israeli domination of the region for security purposes, and (as we shall see) to create the conditions for future unilateral preemptive actions against unfriendly states Fenton’s second sentence would imply that a like Iraq. In particular it was designed to homicidal crime was committed by members of establish new secure bases in the Middle East, the Alec Station group, even if the crime was anticipating Donald Rumsfeld’s predictable one of manslaughter (unintended homicide) announcement in 2003 that the U.S. would pull rather than deliberate and premeditated “virtually all of its troops, except some training murder. One can imagine benign reasons for personnel,” out of Saudi Arabia.16 But it was withholding the information: for example, the partly also to strengthen American influence in CIA may have been tolerating the behavior of particular over the newly liberated states of the two Saudis in order to track down their Central Asia, with their sizable unproven oil associates. In this case, we would be dealing and gas reserves. with no more than a miscalculation – albeit a homicidal miscalculation. Fenton’s alarming conclusion about CIA actions leading up to the 9/11 attacks makes more The Terror War and the Rumsfeld-Cheney- sense in the context of this agenda, and also in Wolfowitz Project of Global Dominion the context of three other revealing anomalies about Bush’s Terror War. The first is the But in the course of this essay I shall dwell on paradox that this supposed pursuit of al Qaeda the activities of the head of the CIA’s Bin Laden was conducted in alliance with the two nations, Unit, Richard Blee, in Uzbekistan as well as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, that were most Afghanistan. Uzbekistan was an area ofactively supporting al Qaeda in other parts of concern not only to Blee and his superior Cofer the world. In this essay we shall see U.S. and Black; it was also in an area of major interest to Saudi intelligence cooperating in such a way as Richard Cheney, whose corporation Halliburton to protect, rather than neutralize, Saudi agents had been active since 1997 or earlier in in al Qaeda. developing the petroleum reserves of Central Asia. Cheney himself said in a speech to oil The second anomaly is that although the CIA industrialists in 1998, "I cannot think of a time may have been focused on crushing al Qaeda, when we have had a region emerge as suddenly Rumsfeld and Cheney were intent from the to become as strategically significant as the outset on a much wider war. In September 3 10 | 12 | 3 APJ | JF 2001 there was no intelligence on 9/11 linking Pentagon in November 2001, one the attacks to Iraq, yet Defense Secretary of the senior military staff officers Donald Rumsfeld, supported by his deputy Paul had time for a chat. Yes, we were Wolfowitz, was already observing on still on track for going against September 12 “that there were no decent Iraq, he said.