Vol. 18, No. 26 December 30, 2002 Table of Contents

Burying the Truth
by William Norman Grigg

Acting on behalf of the behind-the-scenes ruling Establishment, President Bush has rigged the "independent" 9-11 Commission to cover up prior knowledge of the attack.

This article was written before Kissinger resigned from the 9-11 Commission. However, Bush’s initial appointment of Kissinger is still significant, since it signaled the administration’s desire to bury the truth. For perspective on Kissinger’s resignation, see "Kean in for Kissinger."

The primary impetus for the bipartisan commission on 9-11 came from family members of Americans killed in the attack, who seek accountability for intelligence and security lapses contributing to the disaster. Now that Henry Kissinger has been appointed to lead the inquiry into oblivion, those same family members have become the most outspoken critics of the commission.

"The White House is setting this [commission] up for a whitewash," complained Stephen Push, director of the group Families of September 11, in a telephone interview with THE NEW AMERICAN. "Because of foot-dragging by intelligence agencies, the congressional inquiry didn’t have access to the information they needed to find out what we knew in advance about the attack, and why it wasn’t acted upon.... And now the White House has appointed Henry Kissinger, the master of government secrecy, to head the commission."

To Push and his colleagues, the most important question is one that the Kissinger-led commission is designed to avoid: Did President Bush have detailed advance warning of the 9-11 attack? The administration’s position, as expressed by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice during a May 16th White House press briefing, is that nobody "could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile...."

Enough was learned during the abortive congressional investigation of 9-11 to know that Rice’s statement is a brazen falsehood. Despite CIA Director George Tenet’s refusal to declassify critical information, investigators for the joint House-Senate intelligence committee inquiry were able to document a string of critical warnings about 9-11 style attacks running back to 1994. Eleanor Hill, staff director for the joint House-Senate intelligence committee inquiry, testified on September 18th: "Our review has uncovered several examples of intelligence reporting on the possible use of airplanes as weapons in terrorist operations."

Even a brief overview of the relevant findings clearly refutes the Bush administration’s claim that nobody "could have predicted" the 9-11 attacks:

• In August 1998, U.S. intelligence sources learned "that a group of unidentified Arabs planned to fly an explosive-laden plane from a foreign country into the World Trade Center," reported Hill. A few months later, the Intelligence Community "received information concerning a bin Laden terrorist plot involving aircraft in the New York and Washington, D.C. areas."

• In April, 2001 "the Intelligence Community obtained information from a source with terrorist connections who speculated that bin Laden would be interested in commercial pilots as potential terrorists," continued Hill. "The source warned that the United States should not focus only on embassy bombings, that terrorists sought ‘spectacular and traumatic’ attacks, and that the first World Trade Center bombing would be the type of attack that would be appealing."

• A July 2001 report from sources in Afghanistan to the CIA revealed: "Everyone is talking about an impending attack" on the United States.

• In the same month, the FBI’s field office in Phoenix sent a memo to FBI Headquarters proposing "that the FBI open investigations into named individuals of Middle Eastern nationalities who were attending flight colleges and universities in the U.S. because of possible linkages to terrorist organizations overseas." The "Phoenix Memo" is particularly significant, notes Hill, "because an FBI agent on the ground in Phoenix had seen a pattern and laid out the prescient idea that foreign terrorists may use facilities and other resources inside the United States for training and preparation of attacks."

• The May 2002 memo of Coleen Rowley, chief attorney for the Minneapolis FBI office, disclosed that FBI headquarters worked to "deliberately sabotage" the investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui, a suspected 9-11 conspirator taken into custody several weeks before the attack. According to Rowley, "HQ personnel never disclosed to the Minneapolis agents that the Phoenix division had, only approximately three weeks earlier, warned of al-Qaeda operatives in flight schools seeking flight training for terrorist purposes!" As frustration mounted over FBI HQ’s obstructionism, field agents in Minneapolis bitterly joked that key officials in Washington "had to be spies or moles … working for Osama bin Laden."

• During congressional hearings into 9-11, an anonymous FBI special agent broke down in tears as he recounted urging his superiors to find and arrest Khalid Almihdhar, a known al-Qaeda associate who had been allowed to enter the country. Almihdhar was among those who hijacked Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon. Prior to 9-11, after being informed that it was impermissible to arrest Almihdhar on the basis of intelligence information, the FBI agent sent an angry — and prophetic — e-mail to Washington warning: "Someday someone will die — and … the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain ‘problems.’"

• That special agent’s tragic testimony confirmed the report in our March 11, 2002 issue ("Did We Know What Was Coming?"). Therein, three active or former federal law enforcement officers told THE NEW AMERICAN that in the weeks prior to 9-11, counter-terrorist investigators were aware of an impending attack by al-Qaeda in New York City. An active federal counter-terrorism investigator told us that "in some cases, these field agents predicted, almost precisely, what happened on September 11th. So we were all holding our breath … hoping that the situation would be remedied."

Sticking to the Story

Nevertheless, the White House and its allies continue to peddle the fiction that the 9-11 attacks came as a completely unforeseen bolt from the blue. During a December 4th meeting in incoming Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott’s office, recalled Stephen Push, "We were told — once again — that ‘We couldn’t possibly have imagined that anybody could have used commercial jetliners to attack us.’ That was the line the White House took a year ago, and it’s an insult to our intelligence that the White House and its supporters still hand out that line now."

Despite the largely successful effort by the FBI, CIA, and the White House to withhold damaging information from the congressional 9-11 inquiry, "we know that the White House and our intelligence community had numerous advance warnings of potential al-Qaeda attacks on U.S. soil, and that they had specific warning of an al-Qaeda threat to U.S. commercial aviation," Push observed. "We know that President Bush received a briefing on August 6 [2001] about potential al-Qaeda attacks, and that there were warnings about possible attacks using jetliners as bombs going back to 1994. We don’t know whether making that information public would have changed what happened, but the outrage here is that this information was withheld from the public, and 3,000 Americans died."

Push’s wife was aboard Flight 77, the plane that was crashed into the Pentagon. He points out that during the summer of 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft stopped using commercial flights because of a "threat assessment." (See "Foreknowledge and Failure" in our June 17, 2002 issue.) "There’s no way my wife would have been flying that morning if she had known what we now know the administrators knew," Push told THE NEW AMERICAN.

"The actions of the White House and its allies show little regard for public security and the principle of public accountability," continued Push. "And their actions display great callousness toward the family members who lost loved ones that morning and who simply want to know the truth."

Stacking the Deck

Membership of the Kissinger Commission will be evenly divided, with the Republican and Democratic congressional leaders choosing five members apiece. "The White House required that six members approve of each subpoena, which would allow the Republican members to kill any subpoena through bloc voting," Push pointed out. "We agreed to support a compromise version of the bill after we received assurances from Lott’s office that they would allow Senator [John] McCain to help select one of the Republican Commission members."

Push’s group, with McCain’s support, favored including former Maine Republican Senator Warren Rudman, "who has been critical of President Bush for ignoring important issues of homeland security." On the Democrat side of the panel, Push continued, "we’d like to see former Senator Gary Hart included as well." He also mentioned that "there’s been some lobbying by the Clintons to include a member of their administration, as a way to protect their interests."

Given the magnitude of their personal tragedies, and their frustrations over White House stonewalling, it’s understandable that Families of September 11 would demand that the independent Commission include figures not beholden to the Bush administration. But their endorsement of Rudman and Hart reflects a lack of understanding of the covert machinations of the Establishment behind the Bush administration. While the two former senators are independent of the Bush White House, they share an important connection with Henry Kissinger (and, for that matter, Senator McCain) — namely, membership in the Council on Foreign Relations.

Moreover, Hart and Rudman served as co-chairs of the United States Commission on National Security/21st Century. That panel, created at the urging of Bill Clinton and then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1998, was entirely a CFR-run operation. New World Coming, a report issued by the Hart-Rudman Commission prior to 9-11, predicted that "Americans will become increasingly vulnerable to hostile attack on our homeland.... Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers."

Shortly after President Bush took office in 2001, the Hart-Rudman Commission presented him with a report entitled Road Map for National Security. The report called for creating a "National Homeland Security Agency" consolidating in one Cabinet-level office the functions of numerous federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies and oversight of state and local law enforcement. Just as the attack envisioned by the Hart-Rudman panel came to pass, the police-state "solution" it recommended has been implemented as well.

Rather than ensuring the body’s independence, placing Hart and Rudman on the Kissinger Commission would help ensure that the inquiry’s work advances the agenda of the same Establishment that foresaw the attack, and offered a pre-positioned "solution."

 © Copyright 2002 American Opinion Publishing Incorporated