9/11 in Historical Perspective: Flawed
Assumptions
Deep Politics: Drugs, Oil, Covert Operations and Terrorism, A briefing for
Congressional staff
By Dr. Peter Dale Scott
July 29, 2005
pdscott - 2005-07-22
The American people
have been seriously misled about the origins of the al
Qaeda movement blamed for the 9/11 attacks,
just as they have been seriously misled about the reasons for America’s
invasion of Iraq.
The truth is that for
at least two decades the United States has engaged in energetic covert
programs to secure U.S. control over the Persian Gulf, and also to open up
Central Asia for development by U.S. oil companies. Americans were eager
to gain access to the petroleum reserves of the Caspian Basin, which at
that time were still estimated to be “the largest known reserves of
unexploited fuel in the planet.”
To this end, time
after time, U.S. covert operations in the region have used so-called “Arab
Afghan” warriors as assets, the jihadis whom
we loosely link with the name and leadership of al
Qaeda.
In country after country these “Arab Afghans” have been involved in
trafficking Afghan heroin.
America’s sponsorship
of drug-trafficking Muslim warriors, including those now in Al
Qaeda, dates back to the Afghan War of
1979-89, sponsored in part by the CIA’s links to the drug-laundering Bank
of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).
It was part of CIA Director Casey’s strategy for launching covert
operations over and above those approved and financed by a
Democratic-controlled Congress.
The most conspicuous example of this alliance with drug-traffickers in the
1980s was the Contra support operation. Here again foreign money and drug
profits filled the gap after Congress denied funds through the so-called
Boland amendments; in this case government funds were used to lie about
the Contras to the American people.
This was followed by a massive cover-up, in which a dubious role was
played by then-Congressman Lee Hamilton, later of the 9/11 Commission.
The lying continues.
The 9/11 Commission Report assures Americans that “Bin
Ladin and his comrades had their own sources
of support and training, and they received little or no assistance from
the United States.”
This misleading statement fails to consider that:
1) Al
Qaeda elements received considerable
indirect U.S. Government assistance, first in Afghanistan until 1992,
and thereafter in other countries such as Azerbaijan (1992-95). Before
1992, for example, the Afghan leader Jallaladin
Haqqani organized and hosted the Arab Afghan
volunteers known later as al Qaeda; and
Haqqani “received bags of money each month
from the [CIA] station in Islamabad.”
The Arab Afghans were also trained in urban terrorism, including car
bombings, by Pakistani ISI operatives who were in turn trained by the CIA.
2) Key members of the
network which became al Qaeda, such as Sheikh
Omar Abdel Rahman,
Ali Mohamed, Mohamed Jamal
Khalifa, and lead hijacker Mohammed
Atta, were granted visas to enter the United
States, despite being suspected of terrorism.
Al Qaeda foot soldiers were also admitted to
the United States for training under a special visa program.
3) At Fort
Belvoir, Virginia, an al
Qaeda operative was given a list of Muslim candidates for al
Qaeda’s jihad.
4) When al
Qaeda personnel were trained in the United
States by a key al Qaeda operative, Sergeant
Ali Mohamed of the U.S. Army Special Forces, Mohamed was still on the
U.S. Army payroll.
5) Repeatedly al
Qaeda terrorists were protected by FBI
officials from investigation and prosecution.
In part America’s
limited covert assistance to al Qaeda after
1989 was in order not to offend al Qaeda’s two
primary supporters which America needed as allies: the intelligence
networks of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. But unquestionably the entry of
United States oil companies into oil-rich Azerbaijan was achieved with the
assistance of a U.S.-organized covert program using “Arab Afghan”
operatives associated with bin Laden. Oil was the driving force of U.S.
involvement in Central and South Asia,
and oil led to U.S. coexistence
with both al Qaeda and the world-dominating
Afghan heroin trade.
This brings us to
another extraordinary distortion in the 9/11 Report:
While the drug trade
was a source of income for the Taliban, it did
not serve the same purpose for al Qaeda, and
there is no reliable evidence that Bin Ladin
was involved in or made his money through drug trafficking.
That drug-trafficking
does support al Qaeda-connected
operations has been energetically asserted by the governments of Great
Britain and many other European countries, as well as the head of the U.S.
Congressional Task Force on Terrorism. Heroin-trafficking has been a
source of income in particular for al Qaeda-related
warriors in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Chechnya, and
Kosovo. Most recently it has supported
terrorist attacks in the Netherlands and Spain.
U.S. support for al
Qaeda elements, particularly in Azerbaijan and
Kosovo, has increased dramatically the flow of
heroin to Western Europe
and the United States.
The Example of
Azerbaijan
In the former Soviet
Republic of Azerbaijan, Arab Afghans clearly assisted this effort of U.S.
oil companies to penetrate the region. In 1991-92, Richard
Secord, Heinie
Aderholt, and Ed Dearborn, three veterans of
U.S. operations in Laos and Iran-Contra, turned up in
Baku
under the cover of an oil company, MEGA Oil.
MEGA never did find oil, but did contribute materially to the removal of
Azerbaijan from the sphere of post-Soviet Russian influence.
As MEGA operatives in
Azerbaijan, Secord, Aderholt, Dearborn, and
their men engaged in military training, passed “brown bags filled with
cash” to members of the government, and above all set up an airline on the
model of Air America which soon was picking up hundreds of
Mujahideen mercenaries in Afghanistan.
(Secord and Aderholt claim to have left Baku before the Mujahideen
arrived.) Meanwhile, Mujahideen leader
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
in Afghanistan, who at the time was still allied with bin Laden, was
“observed recruiting Afghan mercenaries [i.e. Arab Afghans] to fight in
Azerbaijan against Armenia and its Russian allies.”
At this time, heroin flooded from Afghanistan through
Baku
into Chechnya, Russia, and even
North America.
It is difficult to believe that MEGA’s airline
(so much like Air America)
did not become involved.
The triple pattern of
drugs, oil, and al Qaeda was seen again in
Kosovo in 1998, where the Al-Qaeda-backed
Islamist jihadis
of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) received
overt American assistance from the U.S. Government.
Though unmentioned in mainstream books on the war, both the al
Qaeda and drug backgrounds of the KLA are
recognized by experts and to my knowledge never contested by them.
Though the origins of
the Kosovo tragedy were rooted in local
enmities, oil and drugs were prominent in the outcome. At the time critics
charged that US oil interests were interested in building a trans-Balkan
pipeline with US Army protection; although initially ridiculed, these
critics were eventually proven correct.
BBC News announced in December 2004 that a $1.2 billion pipeline, south of
a huge new U.S. Army base in Kosovo, has been
given a go-ahead by the governments of Albania, Bulgaria, and Macedonia.
Meanwhile by 2000, according to DEA statistics, Afghan heroin accounted
for almost 20 percent of the heroin seized in the United States -- nearly
double the percentage taken four years earlier. Much of it is now
distributed by Kosovar Albanians.
Sergeant Ali
Mohamed and U.S. Intelligence Links to the Al Qaeda
Leadership
The Report describes
Ali Mohamed as “a former Egyptian army officer who had moved to the United
States in the mid-1980s, enlisted in the U.S. Army, and become an
instructor at Fort Bragg,” as well as helping to plan the bombing of the
U.S. Embassy in Kenya (68). In fact Ali Mohamed was an important al
Qaeda agent who, as the 9/11 Commission was
told, "trained most of al Qaeda's top
leadership," including "persons who would later carry out the 1993 World
Trade Center bombing."
But the person telling the 9/11 Commission this, U.S. Attorney Patrick J.
Fitzgerald, misrepresented Ali Mohamed’s FBI relationship. He told the
Commission that, "From 1994 until his arrest in 1998, [Mohamed] lived as
an American citizen in California, applying for jobs as an FBI
translator and working as a security guard for a defense contractor."
Ali Mohamed was not just an FBI job applicant. Unquestionably he was an
FBI informant, from at least 1993 and maybe 1989.
And almost certainly he was something more. A veteran of the CIA-trained
bodyguards of Egyptian President Anwar
Sadat, he was able, despite being on a State
Department Watch List, to come to America around 1984, on what an FBI
consultant has called “a visa program controlled by the CIA”, and obtain a
job, first as a security officer, then with U.S. Special Forces.
In 1988 he took a lengthy leave of absence from the U.S. Army and went to
fight in Afghanistan, where he met with Ayman
al-Zawahiri (later bin
Laden’s chief deputy in al Qaeda) and
the “Arab Afghan” leadership.
Despite this, he was able to receive an Honorable Discharge one year
later, at which point he established close contact with bin Laden in
Afghanistan.
Ali Mohamed clearly
enjoyed U.S. protection: in 1993, when detained by the RCMP in Canada, a
single phone call to the U.S. secured his release. This enabled him to
play a role, in the same year, in planning the bombing of the U.S. Embassy
in Kenya in 1998.
Congress should
determine the true relationship of the U.S. Government to Ali Mohamed, who
was close to bin Laden and above all Zawahiri,
who has been called the “main player” in 9/11.
(Al-Zawahiri is often described as the more
sophisticated mentor of the younger bin Laden.)
In particular Congress should determine why Patrick Fitzgerald chose to
mislead the American people about Mohamed’s FBI status.
In short, the al
Qaeda terror network accused of the 9/11
attacks was supported and expanded by U.S. intelligence programs and
covert operations, both during and after the Soviet Afghan War. Congress
should rethink their decision to grant still greater powers and budget to
the agencies responsible for fostering this enemy in the first place.
Sane voices clamor
from the Muslim world that the best answer to terrorism is not war but
justice. We should listen to them. By using its energies to reduce the
injustices tormenting Islam, the United States will do more to diminish
terrorism than by creating any number of new directorates in Washington.
Notes
[1] Michael Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind: The
Taliban Movement in
Afghanistan (London:
Pluto Press, 2001), 115. Exploration in the 1990s has considerably
downgraded these estimates.
Western governments and media apply the term “al
Qaeda” to the whole “network of co-opted groups” who have at some
point accepted leadership, training and financing from bin Laden (Jason
Burke, Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical
Islam [London: I.B. Tauris, 2004], 7-8).
From a Muslim perceptive, the term “Al Qaeda”
is clumsy, and has led to the targeting of a number of
Islamist groups opposed to bin
Laden’s tactics. See
Montasser al-Zayyat, The Road to Al-Qaeda:
The Story of Bin Lāden’s Right-Hand Man
[London: Pluto Press, 2004], 100, etc.).
Robert Parry, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from
Watergate to Iraq
(Arlington,
VA: Media Consortium, 2004), 213-28, 235-39, 245-47.
Peter Lance, Cover Up: What the Government Is Still Hiding about the
War on Terror [New York: Regan Books/ HarperCollins, 2004], 25);
Andrew Marshall, Independent, 11/1/98, http://billstclair.com/911timeline/1990s/independent110198.html:
"Mr. Mohamed, it is clear from his record, was working for the U.S.
government at the time he provided the training: he was a Green Beret,
part of America's Special Forces…. A confidential CIA internal survey
concluded that it was 'partly culpable' for the World Trade
Centre bomb, according to reports at the
time." Williams writes that Mohamed’s “primary task as a U.S. soldier was
to train Muslims to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan” (Williams, Al
Qaeda: Brotherhood of Terror. 117). Cf.
9/11 Commission Report, 68.
Goltz,
Azerbaijan Diary,
272-75; Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 7. As part of the
airline operation, Azeri pilots were trained in Texas.
Dearborn
had previously helped Secord advise and train
the fledgling Contra air force (Marshall, Scott, and Hunter, The
Iran-Contra Connection, 197). Richard Secord
was allegedly attempting also to sell Israeli arms, with the assistance of
Israeli agent David Kimche, another associate
of Oliver North. See Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 7, 8, 20. Whether
the Americans were aware of it or not, the al Qaeda
presence in
Baku soon expanded to
include assistance for moving jihadis onwards
into Dagestan
and Chechnya.
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