The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 11 | Issue 29 | Number 1 | Article ID 3971 | Jul 28, 2013

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US Government Protection of Al-Qaeda Terrorists and the US-Saudi Black Hole 米政府によるアルカイダ擁護と米・サウジアラビアのブラックホール

Peter Dale Scott

For a lmost two centur ies Amer icangovernment, though always imperfect, was alsoa model for the world of limited government,having evolved a system of restraints onexecutive power through its constitutionalarrangement of checks and balances.

Since 9/11 however, constitutional practiceshave been overshadowed by a series ofemergency measures to fight terrorism. Thelatter have mushroomed in size, reach andbudget, while traditional government hasshrunk. As a result we have today what thejournalist Dana Priest has called twogovernments: the one its citizens were familiarwith, operated more or less in the open: theother a parallel top secret government whoseparts had mushroomed in less than a decadeinto a gigantic, sprawling universe of its own,visible to only a carefully vetted cadre – and itsentirety…visible only to God.1

More and more, it is becoming common to saythat America, like Turkey before it, now haswhat Marc Ambinder and John Tirman havecalled a deep state behind the public one.2 Andthis parallel government is guided insurveillance matters by its own ForeignIntelligence Surveillance Court, known as theFISA court, which according to the New YorkTimes, “has quietly become almost a parallelSupreme Court.”3 Thanks largely to EdwardSnowden, it is now clear that the FISA Courthas permitted this deep state to expandsurveillance beyond the tiny number of known

and suspected Islamic terrorists, to anyincipient protest movement that mightchallenge the policies of the American warmachine.

Americans have by and large not questionedthis parallel government, accepting thatsacrifices of traditional rights and traditionaltransparency are necessary to keep us safefrom al-Qaeda attacks. However secret poweris unchecked power, and experience of the lastcentury has only reinforced the truth of LordActon’s famous dictum that unchecked poweralways corrupts. It is time to consider theextent to which American secret agencies havedeveloped a symbiotic relationship with theforces they are supposed to be fighting – andhave even on occasion intervened to let al-Qaeda terrorists proceed with their plots.

“Intervened to let al-Qaeda terrorists proceedwith their plots”? These words as I write themmake me wonder yet again, as I so often do, if Iam not losing my marbles, and proving myselfto be no more than a zany “conspiracytheorist.” Yet I have to remind myself that myclaim is not one coming from theory, but restson certain undisputed facts about incidents thatare true even though they have beensystematically suppressed or under-reported inthe American mainstream media.

More telling, I am describing a phenomenonthat occurred not just once, but consistently,almost predictably. We shall see that, amongthe al-Qaeda terrorists who were first protectedand then continued their activities were

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1) Ali Mohamed, identified in the9/11 Commission Report (p. 68) asthe leader of the 1998 NairobiEmbassy bombing;

2) Mohammed Jamal Khalifa,Osama bin Laden’s close friendand f inancier , whi le in thePhilippines, of Ramzi Yousef(principal architect of the firstWTC attack) and his uncle KhalidSheikh Mohammed;

3) Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,identified in the 9/11 CommissionReport (p. 145) as “the principalarchitect of the 9/11 attacks.”

4) Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, two of the alleged 9/11hijackers, whose presence in theUnited States was concealed fromthe FBI by CIA officers for monthsbefore 9/11.4

It might sound from these three citations as ifthe 9/11 Commission marked a new stage inthe U.S. treatment of these terrorists, and thatthe Report now exposed those terrorists who inthe past had been protected. On the contrary, aprincipal purpose of my essay is to show that

1) one purpose of protecting theseindividuals had been to protect avalued intelligence connection (the“Al-Qaeda connection” if you will);

2) one major intention of the 9/11Commiss ion Report was toc o n t i n u e p r o t e c t i n g t h i sconnection;

3) those on the 9/11 Commissionstaff who were charged with thisprotection included at least onecommission member (Jamie

Gorelick), one staff member(Dietrich Snell) and one importantwitness (Patrick Fitzgerald) whoearlier had figured among theterrorists’ protectors.

In the course of writing this essay, I came toanother disturbing conclusion I had notanticipated. This is that a central feature of theprotection has been to defend the 9/11Commission’s false picture of al-Qaeda as anexample of non-state terrorism, at odds withnot just the CIA but also the royal families ofSaudi Arabia and Qatar. In reality, as I shallshow, royal family protection from Qatar andSaudi Arabia (concealed by the 9/11Commission) was repeatedly given to keyfigures like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, thealleged “principal architect of the 9/11attacks.”

This finding totally undermines the claim thatthe wars fought by America in Asia since 9/11have been part of a global “war on terror.” Onthe contrary, the result of the wars has been toestablish a permanent U.S. military presence inthe oil- and gas-rich regions of Central Asia, inalliance with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Pakistan– the principal backers of the jihadi terroristnetworks the U.S. has been supposedlyfighting. Meanwhile the most authenticopponents in the region of these Sunni jihaditerrorists – the governments of Iraq, Libya,Syria, and Iran – have been overthrown by U.S.invasion or military support (in the case of Iraqand Libya) subverted with U.S. support (in thecase of Syria), or sanctioned and threatened aspart of an “axis of evil” (in the case of Iran).

The protection to terrorists described in thisessay, in other words, has been sustainedpartly in order to support the false premisesthat have underlain U.S. Asian wars for morethan a decade. And the blame cannot beassigned all to the Saudis. Two months before9/11, FBI counterterrorism expert John O’Neilldescribed to the French journalist Jean-Charles

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Brisard America’s “impotence” in getting helpfrom Saudi Arabia concerning terroristnetworks. The reason? In Brisard’s paraphrase,“Just one: the petroleum interests.”5 FormerCIA officer Robert Baer voiced a similarcomplaint about the lobbying influence of “theForeign Oil Companies Group, a cover for acartel of major petroleum companies doingbusiness in the Caspian. . . . The deeper I got,the more Caspian oil money I found sloshingaround Washington.”6

The decade of protection for terroristsdemonstrates the power of this secretivedimension of the American deep state: the darkforces in our society responsible for protectingterrorists, over and above the parallelgovernment institutionalized on and after 9/11.7

Although I cannot securely define these darkforces, I hope to demonstrate that they arerelated to the black hole at the heart of thecomplex U.S-Saudi connection, a complex thatinvolves oil majors like Exxon, the militarycoordination of oil and gas movements from thePersian Gulf and Central Asia, offsetting armssales, Saudi investments in major U.S.corporations like Citibank and the CarlyleGroup, and above all the ultimate United Statesdependency on Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and OPEC,for the defense of the petrodollar.8

This deeper dimension of the deep state,behind its institutional manifestation in ourparallel government, is a far greater threatthan foreign terrorism to the preservation ofU.S. democracy.

The FBI’s Intervention with the RCMP toRelease Ali Mohamed, 1993

Consider the FBI’s instruction in 1993 to theCanadian RCMP to release the al-Qaedaorganizer Mohamed Ali, who then proceeded toNairobi in the same year to begin planning theU.S. Embassy bombing of 1998.

Ali Mohamed

In early 1993 a wanted Egyptian terroristnamed Essam Hafez Marzouk, a close ally ofOsama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri,arrived at Canada’s Vancouver Airport and waspromptly detained by the Royal CanadianMounted Police (RCMP). A second terroristnamed Mohamed Ali, “the primary U.S.intelligence agent for Ayman al-Zawahiri andOsama bin Laden,” came from California to theairport to meet him; and, not finding him, madethe mistake of asking about his friend at theVancouver airport customs office. As a resultthe RCMP interrogated Mohamed Ali for twodays, but finally released him, even though Alihad clearly come in order to smuggle a wantedterrorist into the United States.9

If the RCMP had detained Mohamed Ali, whowas much bigger game than the first terrorist,hundreds of lives might have been saved. Afterbeing released, Ali went on to Nairobi, Kenya.There in December 1993 he and his teamphotographed the U.S. Embassy, and thendelivered the photos to Osama bin Laden inKhartoum, leading to the Embassy bombing of1998.10 Ali later told an FBI agent that at somepoint he also trained al-Qaeda terrorists in howto hijack airplanes using box cutters.11

The RCMP release of Ali Mohamed was

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unjustified, clearly had historic consequences,and may have contributed to 9/11. Yet therelease was done for a bureaucratic reason: AliMohamed gave the RCMP the phone number ofan FBI agent, John Zent, in the San FranciscoFBI office, and told them, “If they called thatnumber, the agent on the other end of the linewould vouch for him.” As Ali had predicted,Zent ordered his release.12

Ali Mohamed was an important double agent,of major interest to more important U.S.authorities than Zent. Although Mohamed wasat last arrested in September 1998 for his rolein the Nairobi Embassy bombing, the USG stillhad not sentenced him in 2006; and he may stillnot have gone to jail.13

The story of his release in Vancouver and itsconsequences is another example of thedangers of working with double agents. Onecan never be sure if the agent is working for hismovement, for his agency, or – perhaps mostlikely – for increasing his own power along withthat of both his movement and his agency, byincreasing violence in the world.14

Ali Mohamed’s Release as a Deep EventIgnored by the U.S. Media

Mohamed’s release in Vancouver was a deepevent, by which I mean an event predictablysuppressed in the media and still not fullyunderstandable. A whole chapter in my bookThe Road to 9/11 was not enough to describeMohamed’s intricate relationships at varioustimes with the CIA, U.S. Special Forces at FortBragg, the murder of Jewish extremist MeirKahane, and finally the cover-up of 9/11perpetrated by the 9/11 Commission and theirwitness, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald(Mohamed’s former prosecutor).15

The deep event is also an example of deeppolitics, a mixture of intrigue and suppressioninvo lv ing not jus t a part o f the U.S .Government, but also the governing media. Tothis day (according to a 2013 search of Lexis

Nexis) the Vancouver release incident, wellcovered in Canada’s leading newspaper TheToronto Globe and Mail (December 22, 2001),has never been mentioned in any majorAmerican newspaper.

More disturbingly, it is not hinted at in theotherwise well-informed books and articlesabout Ali Mohamed by Steven Emerson, PeterBergen, and Lawrence Wright.16 Nor is thereany surviving mention of it in the best insider’sbook about the FBI and Ali Mohamed, TheBlack Banners, by former FBI agent Ali Soufan(a book that was itself heavily and inexcusablycensored by the CIA, after being cleared forpublication by the FBI).17

There is no doubt of the FBI’s responsibility forMohamed’s release, It (along with other FBIanomalies in handling Mohamed) is franklyacknowledged in a Pentagon Internet article onMohamed:

In early 1993, Mohamed wasdetained by the Royal CanadianMounted Police (RCMP) at theVancouver, Canada airport. He hadcome to the airport to meet anEgyptian who had arrived fromDamascus but was found to becarry ing two forged Saudipassports. When Mohamed wasabout to be arrested as well, het o l d t h e R C M P h e w a scollaborating with the FBI and

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gave them a name and phonenumber to call to confirm this. TheRCMP made the call and Mohamedwas released immediately at therequest of the FBI. When the FBIsubsequently questioned Mohamedabout this incident, he offeredinformation about a r ing inCal i fornia that was sel l ingcounter fe i t documents tosmugglers of illegal aliens. This isthe earliest hard evidence that ispublicly available of Mohamedbeing an FBI informant.18

Contrast this official candor about the FBIresponsibility for Mohamed’s release with thesuppression of it in a much longer account ofMohamed (3200 words) by Benjamin Weinerand James Risen in the New York Times:

[In 1993] he was stopped by theborder authorities in Canada, whiletraveling in the company of asuspected associate of Mr. binLaden's who was trying to enterthe United States using falsedocuments.

Soon after, Mr. Mohamed wasquestioned by the F.B.I., which hadlearned of his ties to Mr. binLaden. Apparently in an attempt tofend off the investigators, Mr.Mohamed offered informationabout a ring in California that wasselling counterfeit documents tosmugglers of illegal aliens. 19

A long Wall Street Journal account massagesthe facts even more evasively:

At about the same time [1993], theelusive Mr. Mohamed popped up

again on the FBI radar screen withinformation that underscored theemerging bin Laden threat. TheRoyal Canadian Mounted Policequestioned Mr. Mohamed in thes p r i n g o f 1 9 9 3 a f t e r h i sidentification was discovered onanother Arab man trying to enterthe U.S. from Vancouver -- a manMr. Mohamed ident i f ied assomeone who had helped himmove Mr. bin Laden to Sudan. TheFBI located Mr. Mohamed nearSan Francisco in 1993, where hevolunteered the earliest insiderdescription of al Qaeda that ispublicly known.20

In 1998, after the Embassy bombings,Mohamed was finally arrested. In the ensuingtrial an FBI Agent, Daniel Coleman, entered acourt affidavit (approved by prosecutor PatrickFitzgerald) which summarized the Vancouverincident as follows:

In 1993, MOHAMED advised the RoyalCanadian Mounted Police (“RCMP”) that hehad provided intelligence and counter-intelligence training in Afghanistan to aparticular individual…. MOHAMED admittedthat he had travelled to Vancouver, Canada, inthe spring of 1993 to facilitate the entry of thatindividual into the United States…. MOHAMEDfurther admitted that he and the individual hadtransported Osama bin Laden from Afghanistanto the Sudan in 1991…. MOHAMED told theRCMP that he was in the process of applyingfor a job as an FBI interpreter and did not wantthis incident to jeopardize the application. (Infact, MOHAMED then had such an applicationpending though he was never hired as atranslator.)21

Like the American media, this FBI affidavitsuppressed the fact that Mohamed, an admittedally of Osama bin Laden caught red-handedwith another known terrorist, was released on

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orders from the FBI.

The Two Levels of American History:Official History and Deep History

The whole episode illustrates what has becomeall too common in recent American history, theway in which secret bureaucratic policies cantake priority over the public interest, even tothe point of leading to mass murder

(since it contributed at a minimum to the 1998Embassy bombings, if not also to 9/11). It isalso an example of what I mean by the twolevels of history in America, We can refer tothem as those historical facts officiallyacknowledged, and those facts officiallysuppressed; or alternatively as those facts fit tobe mentioned in the governing media, andthose suppressed by the same media. Thisleads in turn to two levels of historicalnarrative: official or archival history, whichignores or marginalizes deep events, and asecond level – called deep history by itspractitioners or “conspiracy theory” by itscritics – which incorporates them. The methodof deep political research is to recover deepevents from this second level.

This activity sets deep political research atodds with the governing media, but not, Ibelieve with the national interest. Speakingpersonally as an ex-diplomat, I should stateclearly that the national interest doesoccasionally require secrets, at least for a time.Kissinger’s trip to China, for example, whichled to a normalization of U.S.-Chinese relations,probably required secrecy (at least at the time)in order to succeed.

When insiders and the governing mediacollaborate in the keeping of a secret, as in thecase of the FBI-ordered release of Mohamed,they probably believe that they are protecting,not just the FBI, but national security. Howevernational security in this case was conspicuouslynot served by the subsequent embassybombings, let alone by 9/11.

In the glaring gap between these two levels ofhistory is a third level -- that of the privilegedbooks about Mohamed – privileged in the sensethat they have access to sources denied toothers -- that give important but selective partsof the truth. This selectivity is not necessarilyculpable; it may for example be due to pressurefrom lawyers representing Saudi millionaires (apressure I have yielded to myself).22 Butcumulatively it is misleading.

I owe a considerable debt in particular toLawrence Wright’s book, The Looming Tower,which helped expose many problems andlimitations in the official account of 9/11. But Isee now in retrospect that I, like many others,have been delayed by its selectivity on manymatters (including Mohamed’s RCMP release)from developing a less warped understandingof the truth.

The Longer History of FBI and USGProtection for Ali Mohamed

Why did John Zent vouchsafe for Mohamed in1993, so that the RCMP released him? Theexplanation of Peter Lance, the best chroniclerof the FBI’s culpability in both the first andsecond WTC attacks, is that Zent did sobecause Mohamed was already working as hispersonal informant, “feeding Zent ‘intelligence’on Mexican smugglers who were moving illegalimmigrants into the United States from theSouth.”23 (FBI agent Cloonan confirms thatMohamed had been working as a local FBIinformant since 1992.24) Elsewhere Lancedescribes Zent as “trusting and distracted,” sothat he fa i led to rea l ize Mohamed’simportance. 2 5

But the FBI’s protection of Ali Mohamed didnot begin with Zent. It dated back at least to1989, when (according to the PentagonSecurity bio)

While serving in the Army at FortBragg, he traveled on weekends to

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Jersey City, NJ, and to Connecticutt o t r a i n o t h e r I s l a m i cfundamentalists in surveillance,weapons and explosives. …Telephone records show that whileat Fort Bragg and later, Mohamedmaintained a very close and activerelationship with the Office ofServices [Makhtab-al-Khidimat] ofthe Mujihadeen, in Brooklyn,which at that time was recruitingvolunteers and soliciting funds forthe jihad against the Soviets inAfghanistan. This was the mainrecruitment center for the networkthat , a f ter the Soviets le f tAfghanistan, became known as al-Qaida….

T h e F B I o b s e r v e d a n dphotographed Mohamed givingweapons training to a group ofNew York area residents duringfour successive weekends in July1989. They drove from the FarouqMosque in Brooklyn to a shootingrange in Calverton, Long Island,and they fired AK-47 assault rifles,semiautomatic handguns andrevolvers during what appeared tobe training sessions. For reasonsthat are unknown, the FBI thenceased its surveillance of thegroup.26

In the subsequent trial of Mohamed’s traineesand others for bombing the World TradeCenter, the defense attorney, Roger Stavis,established that Mohamed was giving the al-Kifah trainees “courses on how to make bombs,how to use guns, how to make Molotovcocktails.” He showed the court that a trainingmanual seized in Nosair’s apartment “showedhow to make explosives and some kind ofimprovised weapons and explosives.”27

So why would the FBI, having discovered

terrorist training, then cease its surveillance?Here the Wall Street Journal has what I amsure is the right answer: the FBI ceasedsurveillance because it somehow determinedthat the men were training “to help themujahedeen fighting the Soviet puppetgovernment in Afghanistan.”28 (Note that themujahedeen were no longer fighting the Sovietarmy itself, which had been withdrawn fromAfghanistan as of March 1989.)

Al-Kifah, Ali Mohamed, the Flow of Arabsto Afghanistan

Afghanistan is indeed the obvious explanationfor the FBI’s terminating its videotaping ofjihadists from the Brooklyn Al-Kifah RefugeeCenter. Incorporated officially in 1987 as“Afghan Refugee Services, Inc.,” the Al-KifahCenter “was the recruitment hub for U.S.-basedMuslims seeking to fight the Soviets. As manyas two hundred fighters were funneled throughthe center to Afghanistan.”29 More importantly,it was

a branch of the Office of Services[Makhtab-al-Khidimat]. thePakistan-based organization thatOsama bin Laden helped financeand lead and would later becomeal Qaeda. In fact, it was MustafaShalabi, an Egyptian who foundedand ran the center, whom binLaden called in 1991 when heneeded help moving to Sudan.30

As we shall see, the Makhtab, created in 1984to organize Saudi financial support to theforeign “Arab Afghans” in the jihad, was part ofa project that had the fullest support of theSaudi, Egyptian, and U.S. Governments. AndAli Mohamed, although he remained in the USArmy Reserves until August 1994, was clearlyan important trainer in that project, both inAfghanistan and in America.

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A privileged account of Mohamed’s career byPeter Bergen, in Holy Wars, Inc., claims that

A l i M o h a m e d … w a s a nindispensable player in al-Qaeda….At some point in the early eightieshe proffered his services as aninformant to the CIA, the first ofhis several attempts to work forthe U.S. government. The Agencywas in contact with him for a fewweeks but broke off relations afterdetermining he was “unreliable.”That would turn out to be amasterful understatement, asMohamed was already a memberof Egypt’s terrorist Jihad group.After being discharged from theEgyptian Army in 1984, Mohamed[took] a job in the counterterrorismdepartment of Egyptair. Thefollowing year he moved to theUnited States,31

Bergen’s most serious omission here is thatMohamed, though he was on the StateDepartment’s visa watch list, had beenadmitted to the U.S. in 1984 “on a visa-waiverprogram that was sponsored by the agency [i.e.CIA] itself, one designed to shield valuableassets or those who have performed valuableservices for the country.”32 This should beenough to question the CIA’s account that itfound Mohamed “unreliable.” (Later, one ofMohamed’s officers at Fort Bragg was alsoconvinced that Mohamed was "sponsored" by aU.S. intelligence service, "I assumed theCIA.")33 In addition Bergen omits that, beforeMohamed’s brief stint as a formal CIA agent, hehad been selected out of the Egyptian army in1981 for leadership training at Fort Bragg – animportant point to which we shall return.34

The FBI’s Cover-Up of Ali Mohamed in theKahane Murder

The CIA may have wanted to think that the Al-Kifah training was only for Afghanistan. But theblind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the mentorof the Center whom the CIA brought toAmerica in 1990, was preaching for the killingof Jews and also for the destruction of theWest.35 His preachings guided Mohamed’sMakhtab trainees: as a first step, in November1990, three of them conspired to kill MeirKahane, the founder of the Jewish DefenseLeague.

Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman

Kahane’s actual killer, El Sayyid Nosair, wasdetained by accident almost immediately, andby luck the pol ice soon found his twococonspirators, Mahmoud Abouhalima and

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Mohammed Salameh, waiting at Nosair’shouse. Also at the house, according to JohnMiller,

were training manuals from theArmy Special Warfare School atFort Bragg [where Ali Mohamed atthe time was a training officer].There were copies of teletypes thathad been routed to the Secretaryof the Army and the Joint Chiefs ofStaff.36

And the Pentagon bio, with yet another gentledig at the FBI, identifies the documents asMohamed’s:

In a search of Nosair’s home, thepolice found U.S. Army trainingmanuals, videotaped talks thatMohamed delivered at the JFKSpecial Warfare Center at FortBragg, operational plans for jointcoalition exercises conducted inEgypt, and other materials markedClassified or Top Secret. Thesedocuments belonged to Mohamed,who often stayed in New Jerseywith Nosair. The documents didnot surface during Nosair’s 1991trial for the Kahane murder. It isnot known if the FBI investigatedMohamed in connection with thesedocuments.

Yet only hours after the killing, Joseph Borelli,the chief of NYPD detectives, pronouncedNosair a “lone deranged gunman.”37 A moreextended account of his remarks in the NewYork Times actually alluded to Mohamed,though not by name, and minimized thesignificance of the links to terrorism in adetailed account of the Nosair home cache:

The files contained articles aboutfirearms and explosives apparentlyculled from magazines, like Soldierof Fortune, appealing to would-bemercenaries. But the police saidthe handwritten papers, translatedby an Arabic-speaking officer,a p p e a r e d t o b e m i n o rcorrespondence and did notmention terrorism or outline anyplan to kill the militant Jewishleader who had called for theremoval of all Arabs from Israel.

“There was nothing [at Nosair’shouse] that would st ir yourimagination," Chief Borelli said….A joint anti-terrorist task force ofNew York City police and theFederal Bureau of Investigationhas been set up to look into anypossible international links to theslaying, the official said, but so farhas not turned up anything.

"Nothing has transpired thatchanges our opinion that he actedalone," Chief Borrelli told a newsconference yesterday afternoon.38

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Meir Kahane

Later an FBI spokesman said the FBI alsobelieved “that Mr. Nosair had acted alone inshooting Rabbi Kahane.” “The bottom line isthat we can’t connect anyone else to theKahane shooting,” an FBI agent said.39

Blaming the New York County DistrictAttorney, Robert Morgenthau, the FBI laterclaimed that the evidence retrieved fromNosair’s home was not processed for two orthree years.40 But Robert Friedman suggeststhat the FBI were not just lying to the public,but also to Morgenthau (who had just helpedexpose and bring down the CIA-favored Muslimbank BCCI).

According to other sources familiarwith the case, the FBI told DistrictAttorney Robert M. Morgenthauthat Nosair was a lone gunman,not part of a broader conspiracy;

the prosecution took this positionat trial and lost, only convictingN o s a i r o f g u n c h a r g e s .Morgenthau speculated the CIAmay have encouraged the FBI notto pursue any other leads, thesesources say. ‘The FBI lied to me,’Morgenthau has told colleagues.‘They’re supposed to untangleterrorist connections, but theycan’t be trusted to do the job.’41

Using evidence from the Nosair trial transcript,Peter Lance confirms the tension betweenMorgenthau’s office, which wanted to pursueNosair’s international terrorist connections,and the FBI, which insisted on trying Nosairalone.42

The FBI’s Protection of Ali Mohamed inthe 1993 WTC Bombing

In thus limiting the case, the police and the FBIwere in effect protecting, not just Ali Mohamed,but also Nosair’s two Arab coconspirators,Mahmoud Abouhalima and MohammedSalameh, in the murder of a U.S. citizen. Thetwo were thus left free to kill again onFebruary 26, 1993, one month after the FBIsecured Mohamed’s release in Vancouver. BothAbouhalima and Salameh were ultimatelyconvicted in connection with the 1993 WorldTrade Center bombing, along with anotherMohamed trainee, Nidal Ayyad.

To quote the Pentagon bio yet again,

In February 1993, the terrorist cellthat Mohamed had tra inedexploded a truck bomb under theWorld Trade Center that killed sixand injured about 1,000 persons.The perpetrators of this bombingincluded people Mohamed hadtrained, and Mohamed had been inclose contact with the cell during

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the period leading up to thebombing [i.e. including January1993, the month of Mohamed’sd e t e n t i o n a n d r e l e a s e i nVancouver]. Mohamed's nameappeared on a list of 118 potentialun-indicted co-conspirators thatw a s p r e p a r e d b y f e d e r a lprosecutors.

Ali Mohamed was again listed as one of 172unindicted co-conspirators in the follow-up“Landmarks” case, which convicted SheikhRahman and others of plotting to blow up theUnited Nations, the Lincoln and Hollandtunnels, and the George Washington Bridge.43

The two cases were closely related, as much ofthe evidence for the Landmarks case camefrom an informant, Emad Salem, whom the FBIhad first planted among the WTC plotters. Butthe prosecutors’ awareness of Ali Mohamed’sinvolvement must be contrasted with thei n t e l l i g e n c e f a i l u r e a t t h e C I A ’ sCounterterrorism Center: according to SteveColl, the CTC “immediately established a seven-day, twenty-four hour task force to collectintelligence about the World Trade Centerbombing…but nothing of substance came in.”44

In the WTC bombing case, the FBI movedswiftly to bring the Al-Kifah plotters to trial onemonth later, in March. Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer,a DIA officer, later said that

we [i.e. DIA] were surprised howquickly they’d [i.e. FBI] made thearrests after the first World TradeCenter bombing. Only later did wefind out that the FBI had beenwatching some of these people formonths prior to both incidents [i.e.both the 1993 WTC bombing and9/11].45

Shaffer’s claim that the FBI had been watching

some o f the p lo t te r s i s abundant l ycorroborated, e.g. by Steve Coll in GhostWars.46

The U.S., Egyptian, and Saudi Backing forthe Makhtab Network

What was being protected here by the FBI?One obvious answer is an extension of Lance’sexplanation for Zent’s behavior: that Mohamedhad already been a domestic FBI informantsince 1992. However I entirely agree with NewYork County District Attorney RobertMorgenthau, who suspected that a much largerasset was being protected, the Saudi-sponsorednetwork which we now know was the Makhtab-i-Khidimat, by this time already evolving into al-Qaeda.

On the day the FBI arrested fourArabs for the World Trade Centrebombing, saying it had all of thesuspects, Morgenthau’s earspricked up. He didn’t believe thefour were ‘self-starters,’ andspeculated that there was probablya larger network as well as aforeign sponsor. He also had ahunch that the suspects would leadback to Sheikh Abdel Rahman. Buthe worried [correctly] that the dotsmight not be connected becauset h e U . S . g o v e r n m e n t w a sprotecting the sheikh for his helpin Afghanistan.47

This “larger network” of the Makhtab, althoughcreated in 1984, consolidated an assistanceprogram that had been launched by the U.S.government much earlier, at almost thebeginning of the Afghan war itself.

In January 1980, Brzezinski visitedEgypt to mobilize support for thejihad. Within weeks of his visit,

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Sadat authorized Egypt’s fullparticipation, giving permission forthe U.S. Air Force to use Egypt asa base…and recruiting, training,and arming Egyptian MuslimBrotherhood activists for battle….Not only were they packaged andshipped to Afghanistan, but [by theend of 1980] they received experttraining from U.S. Special Forces.48

U.S. military trainers had in fact already beenin Egypt since at least 1978 (the year of theIsrael-Egypt Camp David peace accords),training Sadat’s elite praetorian guard, ofwhich Mohamed Ali was at the time a member.At first the training was handled by a “private”firm, J.J. Cappucci and Associates, owned byformer CIA officers Ed Wilson and TheodoreShackley. But after Brzezinski’s visit in 1980,the contract was taken over by the CIA.49

In 1981 Ali Mohamed was selected out of theU.S.-trained praetorian guard for four monthsof Special Forces training at Fort Bragg:“Working alongside Green Berets, he learnedunconventional warfare, counterinsurgencyoperations, and how to command elite soldierson difficult missions.”50 The leadership aspectof this training almost certainly means thatMohamed was part of the Pentagon’sProfessional military education (PME) programfor future leaders; and that he was beingtrained to transmit to Egypt the kind ofAfghanistan-related skills that he later providedto Al-Kifah on Long Island in 1989.

Mohamed was thus in America when some ofhis fellow guard members, responding to afatwa or rel igious order from MuslimBrotherhood member Sheikh Omar AbdelRahman, assassinated Sadat in October 1981.The assassination only accelerated the exportto Afghanistan of Muslim Brotherhoodmembers accused of the murder. Theseincluded two of Mohamed’s eventual closeassociates, Sheikh Abdel Rahman and

Rahman’s then friend Ayman al-Zawahiri, towhom Mohamed swore a bayat or oath ofallegiance in 1984, after his return to Egypt.51

The Al-Kifah Target in 1993: NotAfghanistan but Bosnia

Morgenthau’s suspicions about Afghanistan in1993 were very pertinent, but also somewhatanachronistic; by 1993, under its new directorJames Woolsey, the CIA had lost interest inAfghanistan. The new interim president ofAfghanistan, Mojaddedi, under pressure fromWashington, announced that the Arab Afghansshould leave. Pakistan followed suit, closed theoffices of all mujahedin in its country, andordered the deportation of all Arab Afghans.52

But the Al-Kifah support network had newtargets in mind elsewhere.

After 1991 the Al-Kifah center was focusedchiefly on training people for jihad in Bosnia,and at least two sources allege that AliMohamed himself visited Bosnia in 1992 (whenhe also returned to Afghanistan).53

Al-Kifah’s English-languagenewsletter Al-Hussam (The Sword)also began publishing regularupdates on j ihad act ion inBosnia….Under the control of theminions of Shaykh Omar AbdelR a h m a n , t h e n e w s l e t t e raggressively incited sympatheticMuslims to join the jihad in Bosniaand Afghanistan themselves….TheAl-Kifah Bosnian branch office inZagreb, Croatia, housed in amodern, two-story building, wasevidently in close communicationw i t h t h e o r g a n i z a t i o n a lheadquarters in New York. Thedeputy director of the Zagreboffice, Hassan Hakim, admitted toreceiving all orders and fundingdirectly from the main UnitedStates office of Al-Kifah on Atlantic

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Avenue controlled by Shaykh OmarAbdel Rahman.54

One of Ali Mohamed’s trainees at al-Kifah,Rodney Hampton-El, assisted in this supportprogram, recruiting warriors from U.S. Armybases like Fort Belvoir, and also training themto be fighters in New Jersey.5 5 In 1995Hampton-El was tried and convicted for his role(along with al-Kifah leader Sheik Omar AbdelRahman) in the plot to blow up New Yorklandmarks. At the trial Hampton-El testifiedhow he was personally given thousands ofdollars for this project by Saudi Prince Faisal inthe Washington Saudi Embassy.56 (In addition,“Saudi intelligence has contributed to SheikhRahman’s legal-defence fund, according toMohammed al-Khilewi, the former firstsecretary to the Saudi mission at the U.N.)”57

Al-Kifah, Al-Qaeda, Tajikistan, and Drugs

Meanwhile the ISI had not lost interest in binLaden’s Arabs, but began to recruit them withbin Laden’s support for battle in new areas,notably Kashmir.58 Bin Laden in the sameperiod began to dispatch his jihadis into areasof the former Soviet Union, notably to theinfant Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU)in Tajikistan.

The outbreak of Islamist violencein Tajikistan…moved bin Laden tosend a limited number of Al-Qaedacadre to support Tajik Islamistforces, among them his closeassociate Wali Khan Amin Shah [anUzbek later working in thePhilippines with Ramzi Yousuf andKhalid Sheikh Mohammed] and thesoon-to-be-famous mujahid, IbnKhattab. In addition, bin Laden,even after his 1991 move to Sudan,continued to run training camps inAfghanistan, where he welcomedthe chance to train Tajiks, Uzbeks,

Uighurs, and Chechens.59

In an al-Qaeda document captured in Iraq, binLaden wrote

with the grace of Allah, we weresuccessful in cooperating with ourbrothers in Tajikistan in variousfields including training. We wereable train a good number of them,arm them and deliver them toTajikistan. Moreover, Allahfaci l i tated to us del iveringweapons and ammunition to them;we pray that Allah grants us allvictory60

Many other accounts report that the delivery ofarms and ammunition was facilitated by theinvolvement of the IMU and bin Laden in themassive flow of heroin from Afghanistan intothe former Soviet Union. According to AhmedRashid,

Much of the I.M.U.’s financingcame from the lucrative opiumtrade through Afghanistan. RalfMutschke, the assistant director ofInterpol’s Criminal IntelligenceDirectorate, estimated that sixtyper cent of Afghan opium exportswere moving through Central Asiaand that the “I.M.U. may beresponsible for seventy per cent ofthe total amount of heroin andopium transiting through thearea.”61

Among the experts confirming the IMU-al-Qaeda-drug connection is Gretchen Peters,

The opium trade… supported theglobal ambitions of Osama bin

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Laden…. There was … evidencet h a t b i n L a d e n s e r v e d a smiddleman between the Talibanand Arab drug smugglers…. WithMullah Omar’s approval, bin Ladenhijacked the state-run ArianaAirlines, turning it into a narco-terror charter service… accordingto former U.S . and Afghanofficials…. One U.S. intelligencerepor t seen by the au thordescribed a smuggling routesnaking up through Afghanistan’snorthwest provinces if Baghdis,F a r y a b , a n d J o w z a n i n t oTurkmenistan. It was being used asof mid-2004 by “extremistsassociated with the Taliban, theIslamic Movement of Uzbekistanand al-Qaeda,” the report said.Traffickers would move “bothheroin and terrorists” along theroute and “then onwards into othercountries in Central Asia,” the CIAdocument said.62

It has been widely reported that in the early1990s, as US financial support dwindled andbin Laden’s finances were being rapidlyexhausted in Sudan, his new involvement withthe IMU and later the Taliban involved al-Qaeda also in the growing Afghan herointraffic. Peters saw a CIA document confirmingthis.63 Yet the 9/11 Report, in contortedlanguage, denied this, as did a Staff Report:

No persuasive evidence exists thatal Qaeda relied on the drug tradeas an important source of revenue,had any substantial involvementwith conflict diamonds, or wasfinancially sponsored by anyforeign government.64

This surprising claim was at odds with the

views of many U.S. intelligence operatives. Italso contradicted the official position of theBritish government, which told its Parliamentin 2001,

Usama Bin Laden and Al Qaidahave been based in Afghanistansince 1996, but have a network ofoperations throughout the world.The network includes trainingc a m p s , w a r e h o u s e s ,communication facilities andcommercial operations able toraise significant sums of money tosupport its activity. That activityincludes substantial exploitation ofthe i l legal drugs trade fromAfghanistan.65

And there were allegations that the BrooklynAl-Kifah Center, as well as bin Laden, wasinvolved in drug trafficking. Back in 1993, theNew York Times reported that, according toinvestigators, “Some of the 11 men charged inthe [Day of Terror] plot to bomb New York Citytargets are also suspected of trafficking indrugs.”66 Mujahid Abdulqaadir Menepta, aMuslim suspect in both the 9/11 case and the1995 Oklahoma City bombing, was linked bytelephone numbers on his cell phones toongoing criminal investigations, involving“organized cr ime, drugs, and moneylaundering.”67 And Raed Hijazi, an al Qaedaterrorist arrested in Jordan in 1999, hadpreviously become an FBI informant in order toavoid drug charges.68

Was the U.S. Protection of the Al-KifahCenter Intended to Help Export Jihadis?

There is also no treatment in the 9/11 Report,and almost none elsewhere, of the allegationsfrom Steven Emerson that by 1987, the Al-KifahCenter Al-Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn “hadbecome a center for counterfeiting tens ofthousands of dollars.”69 Similarly there has

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been no government follow-up of the allegationby Yossef Bodansky, citing FBI informant EmadSalem, that one of the Al-Kifah cell leaders(Siddiq Ibrahim Siddig Ali)

had offered to sell a million dollars[of counterfeit currency] for$150,000, well below marketvalue. … Quantities of counterfeit$100 bills were later found at theapartment of Sheikh Umar Abdel-Rahman.70

J.M. Berger goes further, reporting from courttestimony: “In order to support Al Kifah’soperations,” Mustafa Shalabi, the head of theAl-Kifah Center until his murder in 1991,“employed a number of for-profit criminalenterprises, including gunrunning, arson forhire, and a counterfeiting ring set up in thebasement of the jihad office.”71 Yet the 9/11Report is silent about these serious charges,which U.S. prosecutors at the time did notpursue.

Why this official reticence? The answer may liein the fact that by 1996 bin Laden was“supporting Islamists in Lebanon, Bosnia,Kashmir, Tajikistan, and Chechnya.”72 And instep with bin Laden, the al-Kifah Center wasalso support ing j ihad after 1992 “ inAfghanistan, Bosnia, the Philippines, Egypt,Algeria, Kashmir, Palestine, and elsewhere.”73

But bin Laden and Al-Kifah were not acting ontheir own, they were supporting projects,especially in Tajikistan (1993-95) and thenChechnya (after 1995), where their principalally, Ibn al-Khattab (Thamir Saleh Abdullah Al-Suwailem) also enjoyed high-level support inSaudi Arabia.74

Khattab enjoyed a certain amountof logistical and financial supportfrom Saudi Arabia. Saudi sheikhs

declared the Chechen resistance alegitimate jihad, and private Saudidonors sent money to Khattab andhis Chechen colleagues. As late as1996, mujahidin wounded inChechnya were sent to SaudiArabia for medical treatment, apractice paid for by charities andtolerated by the state.75

Ali Soufan adds that America also supportedthis jihad: by 1996, “the United States hadbeen on the side of Muslims in Afghanistan,Bosnia, and Chechnya.”76

By protecting the Al-Kifah Center and itsassociates (including Mohamed) and notprosecuting them for their crimes (includingmurder), the U.S. Government was in effectkeeping open a channel whereby those inAmerica who wished to wage jihad were helpedto wage jihad in other countries, not here.(After the arrest of Sheikh Rahman in 1993 theAl Kifah closed itself down. But we shall seethat an allied institution, Sphinx Trading,continued to be protected, even after the FBIknew it had helped one of the alleged 9/11hijackers prepare for 9/11.)

Was all this protection intended to keep justsuch a channel open? It was certainly anintentional result of the protection and supportfor the Makhtab al-Khidimat in Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Support for the Makhtab, and Laterfor Al Qaeda

The Saudis, like the Egyptians, had domesticreasons for wishing to export as many MuslimBrotherhood members to possible death inAfghanistan, Bosnia, or anywhere else. Until1979 Saudi Arabia had provided a home toBrotherhood members fleeing persecution incountries like Syria and Egypt, where some ofthem had tried to assassinate the Saudis’political enemy Gamel Abdel Nasser. But in1979 radical Wahhabis, condemning the ruling

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Saudi family as corrupt infidels, seized theGrand Mosque at Mecca and defended it forweeks.77 Profoundly shaken, the Saudi familyused its foundations, like the World MuslimLeague (WML), to subsidize the emigration ofpolitical Islamists, above all to the new jihad inAfghanistan, which opened one month lateragainst the Soviet Union.78

In Afghanistan both Rahman and al-Zawahiriworked with the Makhtab al Khidamat that hadbeen created in 1984 by two other members ofthe Muslim Brotherhood, the PalestinianAbdullah Azzam and the Saudi Osama binLaden.79 All that the 9/11 Commission Reporthas to say about the Makhtab’s financing isthat “Bin Laden and his comrades had theirown sources of support and training, and theyreceived little or no assistance from the UnitedStates” (p. 56). But the Pakistani author AhmedRashid makes clear the support coming fromthe Saudi royal family, including Prince Turki(the head of Saudi intelligence), and also royalcreations like the World Muslim League:

Bin Laden, although not a royal,was close enough to the royals andcertainly wealthy enough to leadthe Saudi contingent. Bin Laden,P r ince Turk i and Genera l[Hameed] Gul [the head of thePakistani ISI] were to become firmfriends and allies in a commoncause. The center for the Arab-Afghans was the offices of theWorld Muslim League and theMuslim Brotherhood in Peshawarwhich was run by Abdullah Azam.Saudi funds flowed to Azam andthe Makhtab al Khidamat orServices Center which he createdin 1984 to service the new recruitsand receive donations from Islamiccharities. Donations from SaudiIntel l igence, the Saudi RedCrescent, the World Muslim

League and private donations fromSaudi princes and mosques werechanneled through the Makhtab. Adecade later the Makhtab wouldemerge at the center of a web ofradical organizations that helpedcarry out the World Trade Centerbombing [ in 1993] and thebombings of US Embassies inAfrica in 1998.80

Former Ambassador Peter Tomsen hasdescribed how the evolution of the Makhtabinto al-Qaeda was accomplished with supportfrom the of f ices of royal ly ordainedorganizations like the World Muslim League(WML) and the World Assembly of MuslimYouth (WAMY):

Bin Laden’s brother-in-law,Mohammad Jamal Khalifa, headedthe Muslim World League office inPeshawar during the mid-1980s. In1988, he moved to Manila andopened a branch office of theWorld Assembly of Muslim Youth.He made the charity a front for binLaden's terrorist operations in thePhilippines and Asia. Al Qaedaoperatives, including Khalid SheikhMohammed, mastermind of the9/11 attacks, and his nephewRamzi Yusuf [master bomb-makerof the 1993 WTC bombing],traveled to Manila in the early1990s to help Khalifa strengthenal-Qaeda networks in SoutheastAsia and plan terrorist attacks inthe region.81

There are many other examples of WML andWAMY connections to Al-Qaeda. For exampleMaulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil, a signatory ofOsama bin Laden's 1998 fatwa to kill Jews andAmericans, was invited in 1996 to the 34th

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WML Congress in Mecca and also spoke thereto WAMY.8 2 Yet there are only minimalreferences to Maulana Fazlur Rehman in thewestern (as opposed to the Asian) media, andnone (according to a Lexis Nexis search in July2013) linking him to the WML or WAMY.

The FBI’s hands-off attitude towards WAMY inAmerica may help explain its protection of AliMohamed. According to former federalprosecutor John Loftus and others, there was ab lock in fo rce in the 1980s aga ins tantiterrorism actions that might embarrass theSaudis.83 This block explains for example theprotection enjoyed by the chair of WAMY inVirginia, Osama bin Laden’s nephew Abdullahbin Laden. The FBI opened an investigation ofAbdullah bin Laden in February 1996, callingWAMY “a suspected terrorist organization,” butthe investigation was closed down six monthslater.84

How and Why Did a Passportless OsamaLeave Saudi Arabia?

None of the official or privileged sources on AliMohamed has linked him to Saudi intelligenceactivities. But there is at least one such link, histrip, as described in the Coleman FBI affidavit,when he “travelled to Afghanistan to escortUsama bin Laden from Afghanistan to theSudan.”85 The FBI affidavit presents this,without explanation, as an act in furtherance ofan al-Qaeda “murder conspiracy.” But Osama’smove to Sudan was synchronized with asimultaneous investment in Sudan by his binLaden brothers, including an airportconstruction project that was largely subsidizedby the Saudi royal family.86

A great deal of confusion surrounds thecircumstances of bin Laden’s displacement in1991-92, from Saudi Arabia via Pakistan (andperhaps Afghanistan) to the Sudan. But inthese conflicted accounts one fact is notcontested: bin Laden’s trip was initiallyarranged by someone in the royal family.87

Steve Coll in Ghost Wars reports that thisperson was Saudi intelligence chief PrinceTurki, who blamed it on pressure from the U.S:

Peter Tomsen and other emissariesfrom Washington discussed therising Islamist threat with [Saudiintelligence chief] Prince Turki inthe summer of 1991…. At some ofthe meetings between Turki andthe CIA, Osama bin Laden’s namecame up explicit ly. The CIAcontinued to pick up reporting thathe was funding radicals such asHekmatyar in Afghanistan…. “Hisfamily has disowned him,” Turkiassured the Americans about binLaden. Every effort had been madeto persuade bin Laden to stopprotesting against the Saudi royalfamily. These efforts had failed,Turki conceded, and the kingdomwas now prepared to take sternermeasures…. Bin Laden learned ofthis when Saudi police arrived athis cushion-strewn, modestlyfurnished compound in Jeddah toannounce that he would have toleave the kingdom. According to anaccount later provided to the CIAby a source in Saudi intelligence,the officer assigned to carry outthe expulsion assured bin Ladenthat this was being done for hisown good. The officer blamed theAmericans. The U.S. governmentwas planning to kill him, he toldbin Laden, by this account, so theroyal family would get him out oft h e k i n g d o m f o r h i s o w nprotection. The escort put binLaden on a plane out of SaudiArabia.88

Coll’s magisteral but privileged book appearedin February 2004. Six months later the 9/11

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Commission Report published a quite differentaccount, implying that by 1991 the Saudigovernment was estranged from bin Laden:

The Saudi government… undertookto silence Bin Laden by, amongother things, taking away hispassport . With help from adissident member of the royalfamily, he managed to get out ofthe country under the pretext ofattending an Islamic gathering inPakistan in April 1991.89

Lawrence Wright claims that the princereturning Osama’s passport was InteriorMinister Prince Naif, after bin Ladenpersuaded him he was needed in Peshawar “inorder to help mediate the civil war among themujahideen.”90 Prince Naif, the most anti-American of the senior Saudi royals, gave backbin Laden’s passport on one condition, that he“sign a pledge that he would not interfere withthe politics of South Arabia or any Arabcountry.”91

The “Islamic gathering” is almost certainly areference to the on-going negotiations inPeshawar which eventually produced theSaudi-backed Peshawar Accord (finalized inApril 1992) to end the Afghan Civil War. Byseveral well-informed accounts, Bin Laden didplay an important part in these negotiations, infurtherance (I would argue) of Prince Turki’sown policies. Like Sheikh Rahman before himin 1990, bin Laden tried, vainly, to negotiate atruce between the warring mujahideen leaders,Massoud and Hekmatyar. In these negotiations(according to Peter Tomsen, who was there),Saudi Arabia , Pakis tan , the Musl imBrotherhood and al-Qaeda were all united inseeking the same objective: a united Sunniarmy that (in opposition to American appealsfor Shia representation) that could retakeKabul by force.92

Thus I believe it is quite clear that bin Laden, inhis mediation attempts to bring Hekmatyar intothe Peshawar consensus, was acting in linewith official Saudi and Pakistani interests.Others disagree. Without documentation, theauthor of the Frontline biography of bin Ladenasserts,

Contrary to what is a lwaysreiterated bin Laden has never hadofficial relations with the Saudiregime or the royal family. All hiscontacts would happen through hisbrothers. [As noted above, AhmedRashid claims that bin Laden andPrince Turki became “firm friendsand al l ies” (Tal iban, 131).]Specifically he had no relation withTurki al-Faisal head of Saudiintelligence. He used to be verys u s p i c i o u s o f h i s r o l e i nAfghanistan and once had openconfrontation with him in 1991 andaccused him of being the reason ofthe f i gh t be tween A fghanfactions. 9 3

Michael Scheuer, once head of the CIA’sCounterterrorism Center, endorsed this claim,and reinforced it with the testimony of Sa’ad al-Faqih (a critic of the Saudi royal family who hasbeen accused by the U.S. Treasury of beingaffiliated with al-Qaeda) that, “after the Sovietswithdrew ‘Saudi intelligence [officers] wereactually increasing the gap between Afghanifactions to keep them fighting.’”94

But this claim if true must have been afterKabul fell to the jihadis in 1992, whenMassoud, backed by the favored Saudi clientAbdul Rasul Sayyaf, began to fight Hekmatyar,the favored client of Pakistan’s ISI. Before thistime the U.S. State Department’s Afghan policywas to promote a broad-based opposition to therump Communist government in Kabul, while“side-lining the extremists,” including both

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Hekmatyar and Sayyaf,95 Pakistan’s ISI in thesame period clearly wanted a strong rebelalliance united behind Hekmatyar, and both theCIA and the Saudis agreed. As Barnett Rubinreports, “During this period, political ‘unity’ ofsome sort among the mujahidin groups was amajor goal of U.S.-Pakistani-Saudi policy.”96

Hekmatyar

I conclude that bin Laden’s mediation efforts inPeshawar in 1991 were in accordance withPrince Turki’s preferences, as were also AliMohamed's efforts, in organizing bin Laden'ssubsequent move from Afghanistan andPakistan to the Sudan. As Steve Coll reports,the break between bin Laden and the Saudiroyal family did not become serious until 1993,after the involvement of bin Laden’s ally SheikhRahman in the first WTC bombing.97

As noted above, Ahmed Rashid claims that binLaden and Prince Turki became “firm friendsand allies” in the same cause (Taliban, 131).

Meanwhile Saudi royal support for this web ofradical organizations, in which Ali Mohamedwas a central organizer and trainer, continueduntil at least 1995, well after the WTC bombingof 1993. Anthony Summers reports that Turkimay have personally renewed a deal with binLaden as late as 1998:

In sworn statements after 9/11,former Taliban intelligence chiefMohammed Khaksar said that in1998 the prince sealed a dealunder which bin Laden undertooknot to attack Saudi targets. Inreturn, Saudi Arabia would providefunds and material assistance tothe Taliban…. Saudi businesses,meanwhile, would ensure thatmoney also flowed directly to binLaden. Turki would deny after 9/11that any such deal was done withbin Laden. One account has it,however, that he himself met withbin Laden – his old protégé fromthe days of the anti-Soviet jihad –during the exchanges that led tothe deal.98

In 1991 the Soviet troops had been out of Kabulfor two years; and, as former US AmbassadorTomsen has reported, the CIA’s objective of aPakistan-backed military overthrow in Kabulwas at odds with the official U.S. policy ofsupport for “a political settlement restoringAfghanistan’s independence.”99 AmbassadorTomsen himself told the CIA Station Chief inIslamabad (Bill) that, by endorsing Pakistan’smilitary attack on Kabul,

he was violating fundamental U.S.policy precepts agreed to inWashington by his own agency.American pol icy was to cutHekmatyar off, not build him up.Bill looked at me impassively as Ispoke. I assumed his superiors inLang ley had approved theoffensive. The U.S. governmentwas conducting two diametricallyopposed Afghan policies.100

Steve Coll agrees that “By early 1991, theAfghan policies pursued by the State

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Department and the CIA were in opencompet i t ion wi th each o ther…. TheCIA…continued to collaborate with Pakistanimilitary intelligence on a separate militarytrack that mainly promoted Hekmatyar andother Islamist commanders.”101

This conflict between the State Department andCIA was far from unprecedented. In particularit recalled the CIA-State conflict in Laos in1959-60, which led to a tragic war in Laos, andeventually Vietnam.102 Just as oil companies hada stake in that conflict, so too in 1990-92 theCIA was thinking not just of Afghanistan but ofthe oil resources of Central Asia, where some ofthe al-Kifah-trained “Arab Afghans” were aboutto focus their attention.

The State Department in Afghanistanrepresented the will of the National SecurityCouncil and the public state. The CIA, on theother hand, was not “rogue” (as has sometimesbeen suggested). It was pursuing the goals ofoil companies and their financial backers – orwhat I have called the deep state -- inpreparing for a launch into the former Sovietrepublics of central Asia.

In 1991 the leaders of Central Asia “began tohold talks with Western oil companies, on theback of ongoing negotiations betweenKazakhstan and the US company Chevron.”103

The first Bush Administration activelysupported the plans of U.S. oil companies tocontract for exploiting the resources of theCaspian region, and also for a pipeline notcontrolled by Moscow that could bring the oiland gas production out to the west.

In the same year 1991, Richard Secord, HeinieAderholt, and Ed Dearborn, three veterans ofU.S. operations in Laos, and later of OliverNorth’s operations with the Contras, turned upin Baku under the cover of an oil company,MEGA Oil.104 This was at a time when the firstBush administration had expressed its supportfor an oil pipeline stretching from Azerbaijan

across the Caucasus to Turkey.105 MEGA neverdid find oil, but did contribute materially to theremoval of Azerbaijan from the sphere of post-Soviet Russian influence.

As MEGA operatives in Azerbaijan, Secord,Aderholt, Dearborn, and their men engaged inmilitary training, passed “brown bags filledwith cash” to members of the government, andabove all set up an airline on the model of AirAmerica which soon was picking up hundredsof mujahedin mercenaries in Afghanistan.106

(Secord and Aderholt claim to have leftAzerbaijan before the mujahedin arrived.)Meanwhile, Hekmatyar, who at the time wasstill allied with bin Laden, was “observedrecruiting Afghan mercenaries [i.e. ArabAfghans] to fight in Azerbaijan against Armeniaand its Russian allies.”Meanwhile, Hekmatyar, who at the time wasstill allied with bin Laden, was "observedrecruiting Afghan mercenaries [i.e. ArabAfghans] to fight in Azerbaijan against Armeniaand its Russian allies."107 Hekmatyar was anotorious drug trafficker; and, at this time,heroin flooded from Afghanistan through Bakuinto Chechnya, Russia, and even NorthAmerica.108

Bin Laden, Ali Mohamed, and the SaudiRoyal Family

By attempting to negotiate Hekmatyar’sreconciliation with the other Peshawarcommanders, bin Laden in 1991 was clearly animportant part of this CIA effort. So, a yearearlier, had been the blind Sheikh Omar AbdulRahman:

In 1990, after the assassination ofAbdullah Azzam, Abd al-Rahmanwas invited to Peshawar, where hishost was Khalid al-Islambouli,brother of one of the assassins ofSadat…. On this trip, reportedlypaid for by the CIA, Abd al-Rahmanpreached to the Afghans about the

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necessity of unity to overthrow theKabul regime.109

This presumably was shortly before SheikhAbdul Rahman, even though he was on a StateDepartment terrorist watch list after beingimprisoned for the murder of Egyptianpresident Anwar Sadat, was issued a multiple-entry U.S. visa in 1990 “by a CIA officerworking undercover in the consular section ofthe American embassy in Sudan.”110 This wasthe same CIA-sponsored program that six yearsearlier had admitted Ali Mohamed, “a visa-waiver program that was … designed to shieldvaluable assets or those who have performedvaluable services for the country.”111

And Ali Mohamed himself was, according to theNew York Times, part of the CIA’s plan for amilitary solution: “In the fall of 1992, Mr.Mohamed returned to fight in Afghanistan,training rebel commanders in military tactics,United States officials said.”112

Before this, Mohamed had been charged withthe major task of moving bin Laden, his fourwives, and his seventeen children fromAfghanistan to Sudan. The task was a majorone, for Osama moved with his assistants, “astable of Arabian horses, and bulldozers.”113

The Turki-bin Laden connection, which wascemented by Turki's chief of staff and binLaden's teacher Ahmed Badeeb, may have beenrenewed as late as 1998:

In sworn statements after 9/11,former Taliban intelligence chiefMohammed Khaksar said that in1998 the prince sealed a dealunder which bin Laden undertooknot to attack Saudi targets. Inreturn, Saudi Arabia would providefunds and material assistance tothe Taliban…. Saudi businesses,meanwhile, would ensure that

money also flowed directly to binLaden. Turki would deny after 0/11that any such deal was done withbin Laden. One account has it,however, that he himself met withbin Laden – his old protégé fromthe days of the anti-Soviet jihad –during the exchanges that led tothe deal.114

Bin Laden’s move to the Sudan in 1991-92, themove organized by Ali Mohamed, appears tohave been done in collaboration with his family.There is hotly contested evidence that Osamaparticipated with his brothers in theconstruction of the Port Sudan airport, aproject underwritten with funds from the Saudiroyal family.115 According to Lawrence Wright,“the Saudi Bnladen Group got the contract tobuild an airport in Port Sudan, which broughtOsama frequently into the country to overseethe construction. He finally moved to Khartoumin 1992….”116

Not contested, but largely overlooked, is theevidence of how bin Laden financed his move,through investing $50 million in the Sudaneseal-Shama Islamic bank – a bank that also hadsupport from both the bin Laden family and theSaudi royal family. As the Chicago Tribunereported in November 2001,

Accord ing to a 1996 Sta teDepartment report on bin Laden’sfinances, bin Laden co-founded theAl Shamal bank with a group ofwealthy Sudanese and capitalizedit with $50 million of his inheritedfortune…..117

According to public records,among the investors in the AlShamal Islamic Bank is a Geneva-b a s e d f i n a n c i a l s e r v i c e sconglomerate headed by PrinceMohamed al-Faisal al-Saud,

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[brother of Prince Turki], son ofthe late King [Faisal al-]Saud and acousin [i.e. nephew] of the currentSaudi monarch, King Fahd.

The Al Shamal bank, which openedfor business in 1990, admits thatOsama bin Laden held threeaccounts there between 1992 and1997, when he used Sudan as hisbase of operations before fleeing toAfghanistan. But the bank insistsin a written statement that binLaden “was never a founder or ashareholder of Al Shamal IslamicBank.”

Told of the bank’s statement, theState Department official repliedthat “we stand by” the assertionthat bin Laden put $50 million intothe bank.

T h e A l S h a m a l b a n k d o e sacknowledge that among its five“main founders” and principalshareholders is another Khartoumbank, the Faisal Islamic Bank ofSudan. According to publicrecords, 19 percent of the FaisalIslamic Bank is owned by the DarAl-Maal Al-Islami Trust, headed bySaudi Prince [Mohammed al-Faisal] al-Saud.

Faisal Islamic Bank of Sudan

(The Dar Al-Mal Al-Islami or DMI Trust, “basedin the Bahamas and with its operations centerin Geneva,” was one of a spate of banks, mostlydominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, thatwere set up with western guidance andassistance – in DMI’s case the assistance camefrom Price Waterhouse and eventually HarvardUniversity.118 DMI was one of the two mainbanks which, according to Jane’s IntelligenceReview, had been funding the Makhtab andalso the International Is lamic Rel iefOrganization (IIRO), of which more below.)119

The $3.5 billion DMI Trust, whoseslogan is “Allah is the purveyor ofsuccess,” was founded 20 yearsago to foster the spread of Islamicbanking across the Muslim world.Its 12-member board of directorsinc ludes Haydar MohamedBinladen, according to a DMIspokesman, a half-brother ofOsama bin Laden…..

Though small, the Al ShamalIslamic Bank enabled bin Laden tomove money quickly from onecountry to another through itscorrespondent relationships with

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some of the world’s major banks,several of which have beensuspended since Sept. 11.

The Al Shamal bank was identifiedas one of bin Laden’s principalfinancial entities during the trialearlier this year of four Al Qaedaoperatives convicted in the 1998bombings of two U.S. embassies inAfrica.120

One might have expected this early andrevealing insight into bin Laden’s finances tohave been developed in the spate of privilegedbin Laden and al Qaeda books that appeared inthe years after 2001. In fact I have located onlyone brief inconsequential reference, in SteveColl’s The Bin Ladens: “Osama had reorganizedhis personal banking at the Al-Shamal Bank inKhartoum, but his accounts gradually driedup.”121

There is of course no mention of the al-ShamalBank in the 9/11 Commission Report.

Federal Protection for Osama bin Laden’sBrother-in-Law, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa

It seems clear that the 1980s official USG blockagainst antiterrorism actions that mightembarrass the Saudis was still in force inAmer ica in 1995 . We see th i s in theextraordinary federal protection extended toMohamed Jamal Khalifa, Osama bin Laden’sbest friend and brother-in-law.

Mohammed Jamal Khalifa

On December 16, 1994, the San Francisco FBIarrested Khalifa in Morgan Hills (not far fromAli Mohamed’s home). Khalifa’s business cardhad been discovered in a search one yearearlier of Sheikh Rahman’s residence, afterwhich he had been named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Landmarks case. Soonafterwards, a State Department cabledescribed him as

a known financier of terroristoperations and an officer of anIslamic NGO in the Philippines thatis a known Hamas front. He isunder indictment in Jordan inconnection with a series of cinemabombings earlier this year.122

Khalifa, in other words, was like Ali Mohamedinvolved in terrorist operations on aninternational level. He was an important sourceof information and talked freely to the FBIagents who arrested him. In his possession theyfound “documents that connected Islamicterrorist manuals to the International IslamicRelief Organization, the group that he hadheaded in the Philippines.”123 And in his

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notebook they found evidence linking himdirectly to Ramzi Yousef, who at the time wasthe FBI’s most-wanted terrorist for his role inthe 1993 WTC bombing.

But as Peter Lance narrates, “The Feds nevergot a chance to question him.” Instead, inJanuary 1995, a decision was made bySecretary of State Warren Christopher andsupported by Deputy Attorney General JamieGorelick to whisk Khalifa from the UnitedStates to Jordan for trial, where he was soon“acquitted of terrorism charges and allowed tomove to Saudi Arabia.”124

“I remember people at CIA whowere ripshit at the time” over thedecision, says Jacob L. Boesen, anEnergy Department analyst thenw o r k i n g a t t h e C I A ’ sCounterterrorism Center. “Noteven speaking in retrospect, butcontemporaneous with what theintelligence community knewabout b in Laden, Khal i fa ’sdeportation was unreal.” 1 2 5

Even more unreal was the decision of a court ina civil case to return to Khalifa before hisdeportation the contents of his luggage,including his notebook and other computerfiles.126

I believe that Peter Lance, after all hismeticulous scholarship, failed to identify whowas really being protected by this evasivemeasure. He writes that Khalifa, from 1983 to1991, “had been trusted by al Qaeda withrunning the Philippines branch of theInternational Islamic Relief Organization(IIRO), one of their key NGOs.”127

But the IIRO was in the hands of a far greaterpower than al Qaeda, which in any case did notexist in 1983. It was a charitable organizationthat had been authorized in 1979 by Saudi

royal decree, as an affiliate of another keyinstitution of the royal family, the MuslimWorld League (MWL).128 According to formerCIA officer Robert Baer, the IIRO has been run“with an iron hand” by Prince Salman ibnAbdul-Aziz al Saud (the brother of Saudi KingAbdullah), who “personally approved allimportant appointments and spending.”129

The creation date of 1979 reflects theimportant shift in that year of the Saudi royalfamily’s attitude towards the political Islamismof the Muslim Brotherhood or Ikhwan (of whichMohammed Jamal Khalifa was a seniormember). As already noted, 1979 was the yearradical Wahhabis, seized the Grand Mosque atMecca. In response, the Saudi familyfoundations like the IIRO, moved to subsidizethe emigration of the Muslim Brotherhood.130

Thus Khalifa’s status in the IIRO was notanomalous. Besides the bombings in Jordan,the IIRO has also been linked to support ofterrorists in the Philippines,131 India,132

Indonesia,133 Canada,134 Albania, Chechnya,Kenya,135 and other countries, notably Bosnia.136

In particular Khalifa personally has beenaccused of financing the Philippine terroristgroup Abu Sayyaf (which in 1993 hadkidnapped an American Bible translator).137 Yet“The U.S. government has not designatedKhalifa as a financial supporter of terrorism.”138

Federal Protection for Al-Qaeda PlotterKhalid Sheikh Mohammed

The Saudi royal protection for Jamal Khalifawas more than matched by the Qatari royalprotection of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM),Ramzi Yousuf’s uncle and co-conspirator in thePhilippines. The 9/11 Commission, who judgedKSM to be “the principal architect of the 9/11attacks,” made a muted acknowledgment ofthis Qatari protection of him:

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed --Yousef's uncle, then located in

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Qatar -- was a fellow plotter ofYousef's in the Manila air plot andhad also wired him some moneyprior to the Trade Center bombing.The U.S. Attorney obtained anindictment against KSM in January1996, but an of f ic ia l in thegovernment of Qatar probablywarned him about it. Khalid SheikhMohammed evaded capture (andstayed at large to play a centralpart in the 9/11 attacks).139

From other sources, notably Robert Baer whowas then a CIA officer in Qatar, we learn thatthe “official” was Sheikh Abdallah bin Khalidbin Hamad al-Thani, the Qatari minister of theInterior and the brother of then Qatari EmirSheik Hamad bin Khalid al-Thani.140 Accordingto ABC News,

Mohammed is believed to have fledQatar with a passport provided bythat country's government. He isalso believed to have been given ahome in Qatar as well as a job atthe Department of Public WaterWorks. Officials also said binLaden himself visited Abdallah binKhalid al-Thani in Qatar betweenthe years of 1996 and 2000.141

In Triple Cross, Peter Lance, who does notmention KSM’s escape from Qatar, focusesinstead on the way that, later in the same year,federal prosecutors kept his name out of thetrial of Ramzi Yousuf in connection with the1993 World Trade Center bombing:

Assistant U.S. Attorneys MikeGarc ia and D ie t r i ch Sne l lpresented a riveting, evidencecase… and characterized thematerial retrieved from Ramzi’s

Toshiba laptop as ‘the mostdevastating evidence of all.”….While Yousuf’s Toshiba laptop…contained the full details of theplot later executed on 9/11, not aword o f tha t scenar io wasmentioned during trial. …. Mostsurprising, during the entiresummer-long trial, the name of thefourth Bojinka conspirator, KhalidS h a i k h M o h a m m e d … w a smentioned by name only once, inreference to a letter found in[Yousuf’s apartment].142

Lance repeatedly suggests that U.S.prosecutors in New York, and particularlyDietrich Snell, were responsible for minimizingthe role of Khalid Sheikh Mohamed and othershortcomings, because they were seeking “tohide the ful l truth behind the JusticeDepartment’s failures.”143 But the matter ofKSM’s escape in 1996, like the release of JamalKhalifa, was sensitive at a much higher levelthan that of prosecutors. It was a matter thatreached back into the black hole that isrepresented by the ultimate United Statesdependency on Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and OPEC,for the defense of the petrodollar.

In other words, the suppression of KSM’s namewas not surprising at all. On the contrary, itwas totally consistent with one of the mostsensitive and controversial features of the 9/11story: the much-discussed fact that before CIAtwo counterterrorist officers protected two ofthe alleged hijackers from detection andsurveillance by the FBI.

Federal Protection for Alleged 9/11Hijackers

Morgenthau’s hypothesis that the CIA wasprotecting Saudi criminal assets receivedfurther corroboration in the wake of 9/11.T h e r e i s n o w e v i d e n c e , m u c h o f i tsystematically suppressed by the 9/11

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Commission, that before 9/11 CIA officersRichard Blee and Tom Wilshire inside the CIA’sBin Laden Unit, along with FBI agents DinaCorsi et al., were protecting from investigationand arrest two of the eventual alleged hijackerson 9/11, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi-- much as the FBI had protected Ali Mohamedfrom arrest in 1993.

There are also indications that al-Mihdhar andal-Hazmi, like Hampton-El before them, mayhave been receiving funds indirectly from theSaudi Embassy in Washington:

“[B]etween 1998 and 2002, up toUS $73,000 in cashier cheques wasfunneled by [Saudi AmbassadorPrince] Bandar's wife Haifa - whoonce described the elder Bushes aslike "my mother and father" - totwo Californian families known tohave bankrolled al-Midhar and al-Hazmi. … Princess Haifa sentregular monthly payments ofbetween $2,000 and $3,500 toMajeda Dweikat, wife of OsamaBasnan, believed by variousinvestigators to be a spy for theSaudi government. Many of thecheques were signed over to ManalBajadr, wife of Omar al-Bayoumi,himself suspected of covertlyworking for the kingdom. TheBasnans, the al-Bayoumis and thetwo 9/11 hijackers once shared thesame apartment block in SanDiego. It was al-Bayoumi whogreeted the killers when they firstarrived in America, and providedthem, among other assistance,with an apartment and socialsecurity cards. He even helped themen enroll at flight schools inFlorida.”144

The Report of the Joint Congressional Inquiry

into 9/11 (173-77), though very heavilyredacted at this point, supplies corroboratinginformation, including a report that Basnan hadonce hosted a party for the “Blind Sheikh”Omar Abdel Rahman. In other words, theCongressional investigation found indicationsthat the same protection extended to thoseprotected in the crimes of 1993, were protectedagain in 9/11.

The 9/11 Commission Report recognized thatthere had been an intelligence failure withrespect to al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, but treatedit as an accident that might not have occurred“if more resources had been applied.”145 Thisexplanation, however, has since been rejectedby 9/11 Commission Chairman Tom Kean.Asked if the failure to deal appropriately withal-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi could have been asimple mistake, Kean replied:

Oh, it wasn’t careless oversight. Itwas purposeful. No question aboutthat.…The conclusion that wecame to was that in the DNA ofthese organizations was secrecy.And secrecy to the point of ya don’tshare it with anybody.146

In 2011 an important book by Kevin Fenton,Disconnecting the Dots, demonstratedconclusively that the withholding waspurposive, and sustained over a period ofeighteen months.147 This interference andmanipulation became particularly blatant andcontroversial in the days before 9/11; it led oneFBI agent, Steve Bongardt, to predictaccurately on August 29, less than two weeksbefore 9/11, that “someday someone will die.”

148

Before reading Fenton’s book, I was satisfiedwith Lawrence Wright’s speculations that theCIA may have wanted to recruit the two Saudis;and that “The CIA may also have beenprotecting an overseas operation [possibly inconjunction with Saudi Arabia] and was afraid

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that the F.B.I. would expose it.”149 However Iam now persuaded that Lawrence Wright’sexplanation, that the CIA was protecting acovert operation, may explain the beginnings ofthe withholding in January 2000, but cannotexplain its renewal in the days just before 9/11.

Fenton analyzes a list of thirty-five differentoccasions where the two alleged hijackers wereprotected in this fashion, from January 2000 toabout September 5, 2001, less than a weekbefore the hijackings.150 In his analysis, theincidents fall into two main groups. In theearlier incidents he sees an intention “to covera CIA operat ion that was a l ready inprogress.”151 However, after “the system wasblinking red” in the summer of 2001, and theCIA expected an imminent attack, Fenton cansee no other explanation than that “the purposeof withholding the information had become toallow the attacks to go forward.”152

In support of Fenton’s conclusion, there isevidence (not mentioned by him) indicatingthat in mid-2001 the CIA’s CounterterrorismCenter (CTC), who were the chief suppliers ofthe CIA protection, believed an al-Qaeda attackwas imminent, and that al-Mihdhar wasimpor tan t t o i t . On Augus t 15 , C IACounterterrorism Chief Cofer Black told asecret Pentagon conference, “We’re going to bestruck soon…. Many Americans are going todie, and it could be in the U.S.”153 Three weeksearlier, CTC Deputy Chief Tom Wilshire hadwritten that ““When the next big op is carriedout… Khallad [bin Attash] will be at or near thetop ….Khalid Midhar should be very highinterest.”154 Yet Wilshire (like his superior,Richard Blee), instead of expediting to the FBIthe transmission of his knowledge about al-Mihdhar, did the opposite: he

not only failed to tell anyone elseinvolved in the hunt [for Al-Mihdhar] that Almihdhar wouldlikely soon be a participant in a

major al-Qaeda attack inside theUS, but also supported a dubiousprocedure which meant that theFBI was only able to focus afraction of the resources it had onthe hunt.155

Fenton’s serious al legation has to beconsidered in the light of the earlier instancesof protection we have surveyed:

1) the protection given to Salamehand Abouhalima in the 1990Kahane murder, leaving them freeto participate in the 1993 WorldTrade Center bombing;

2) the failure for two or three yearsto process A l i Mohamed ’sdocuments seized in 1990, whichcould have prevented the 1993World Trade Center bombing;

3) the release of Ali Mohamed fromRCMP detention in 1993, leavinghim free to participate in the 1998Nairobi Embassy bombing;

4) the treatment of Ali Mohamedas an “unindicted coconspirator” inthe 1993 WTC bombing case andLandmarks case, leaving him freeto participate in the 1998 NairobiEmbassy bombing.

There are other indicators thatthese events were part of a singlelong-term cover-up, one that is stillongoing. One of the connectors isSheikh Abdul Rahman’s Al–SalaamMosque in Jersey City, visited byAli Mohamed and his trainees in1989, and allegedly frequented bytwo of the alleged 9/11 hijackers(Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi) in 2000-01.156

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Next door to the Mosque in Jersey City was theSphinx Trading Company, whose incorporatorand director, Waleed Abouel Nour, was like AliMohamed listed as an unindicted coconspiratorin the 1995 Landmarks conspiracy case. (TheNew York Times later reported that the FBIhad identified Nour as a terrorist.)157

At minimum, two Ali Mohamed-trained members of the New Yorkcell -- El Sayyid Nosair and SiddigAli Siddig -- are confirmed to havekept mailboxes at Sphinx Tradingduring the 1990s, as did the blindSheikh himself. A decade later, themailboxes were still being used byal Qaeda-l inked terrorists .Testifying in a sealed proceedingin 2002, a New Jersey policemansaid the FBI told him that "severalof the hijackers involved in theSeptember 11th event also hadmailboxes at that location." Policesearched the office of a New Jerseybusinessman [Mohamed el-Atriss]whose name appeared on theSphinx Trading Co. incorporationpapers and found the names andphone numbers o f severa lhijackers among his papers. Thebusinessman eventually admittedhaving sold fake identificationcards to two of the hijackers.158

[One of the fake IDs was given toKhalid Al-Mihdhar.]159

This important inquiry into the infrastructure ofthe Ali Mohamed connection was quickly shutdown by the FBI:

The police officer testified in 2002that the FBI had shut down theNew Jersey police investigation ofthese connections, withoutexplanation but amid unconfirmed

rumors (reported by the New YorkTimes) that the businessman washimself an FBI informant. Allterrorism charges against thebusinessman were eventuallydropped.160

The Saudi-American Petroleum Complexand the Defense of the Petrodollar

This on-going cover-up of a terroristinfrastructure spanning a decade is mirroredby the censorship of the Joint Inquiry findingsabout Osama Basnan, involved in the pass-through of Saudi Embassy funds to al-Mihdhar,and earlier the host of a party for Sheikh AbdulRahman. One factor enabling the cover-up isthe over-arching and little-understood U.S.-Saudi relationship, to understand which wemust also consider the context of petrodollars,OPEC and the major oil companies.

The export of Saudi oil, paid for by allcustomers in U.S. dollars, and in the U.S. caselargely offset by the export of U.S. arms toSaudi Arabia, is a major underpinning ofAmerica’s petrodollar economy. As I havedocumented elsewhere, its current strength issupported by OPEC's requirement (secured bya secret agreement in the 1970s between theUS and Saudi Arabia) that all OPEC oil sales bedenominated in dollars.161 $600 billion of theSaudi dollar earnings have been reinvestedabroad, most of it in U.S. corporations likeCitibank (where the two largest shareholdersare members of the Saudi Royal family).162

This fusion of U.S. and Saudi governinginterests is as much political as economic. Thefirst oil price hike of 1972-73, arranged byNixon with the King of Saudi Arabia and theShah of Iran, helped pay to arm Iran and SaudiArabia as U.S. proxies in the region, followingthe withdrawal of British troops from theregion in 1971.163 The oil price hikes of1979-80, on the other hand, were assuredly notthe intention of President Carter, a political

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victim of the increases. They have howeverbeen credibly attributed to the work of oilmajors like BP, possibly acting in collusion withRepublicans; and had the result of helping toelect Ronald Reagan (as well as MargaretThatcher in England).164

I am suggesting that there is a high-level fusionof interests between the U.S. and Saudigovernments, oil companies and banks (not tomention facilitating alliances like the CarlyleGroup) which the CIA tends to representcontinuously, and not just ad hoc for the sakeof any one particular goal. The on-goingprotection given through the years to criminalslike Salameh, Ali Mohamed, al-Mihdhar, and al-Hazmi should be seen as symptoms of this high-level fusion of interests. Needless to add, the99 percent of ordinary American people, havingas a result now suffered a series of recurringattacks (the first World Trade Center bombing,the 1998 Embassy bombings, possibly even9/11 itself) have been losers from thisarrangement.

I am confident that the mystery of USGprotection to terrorists can be traced in part tothis “roof” of inscrutable governmental,financial, and corporate relationships betweenthe United States and Saudi Arabia. There is a“black hole” at the center of this roof in whichthe interests of governments, petrodollarbanks, and multinational oil companies, are allinscrutably mixed.

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomatand English Professor at the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oila n d W a r(http://amzn.com/0742525228?tag=theasipacjo0 b - 2 0 ) , T h e R o a d t o 9 / 1 1(http://amzn.com/0520237730?tag=theasipacjo0b-20), and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, andt h e D e e p P o l i t i c s o f W a r(http://amzn.com/0980121361?tag=theasipacjo0b-20). His most recent book is American WarMachine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug

Connection and the Road to Afghanistan(http://amzn.com/0742555941?tag=theasipacjo0b-20). His website, which contains a wealth ofh i s w r i t i n g s , i s h e r e(http://www.peterdalescott.net/q.html) .

Related Articles

• Peter Dale Scott, Systemic Destabilization inRecent American History: 9/11, the JFKAssassination and the Oklahoma City Bombinga s a S t r a t e g y o f T e n s i o n(https://apjjf.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3835)

• Peter Dale Scott, Why Americans Must EndA m e r i c a ' s S e l f - G e n e r a t i n g W a r s(https://apjjf.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3819)

• Jeremy Kuzmarov, Police Training, “NationBuilding” and Polit ical Repression inP o s t c o l o n i a l S o u t h K o r e a(https://apjjf.org/-Jeremy-Kuzmarov/3785)

• Peter Dale Scott, The NATO Afghanistan Warand US-Russian Relations: Drugs, Oil, and War(https://apjjf.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3759)

• Peter Dale Scott, The Doomsday Project andDeep Events: JFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and9/11 (https://apjjf.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3650)

• Peter Dale Scott, Norway's Terror asSystemic Destabilization: Breivik, the Arms-for-Drugs Milieu, and Global Shadow Elites(https://apjjf.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3955)

Recommended citation: Peter Dale Scott, TheAsia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 29, No. 1,July 29, 2013.

Notes

1 Dana Priest and William Arkin, Top SecretAmerica: The Rise of the New AmericanSecurity State (New York: Little Brown, 2011),52.

2 E.g. Marc Ambinder and D.G. Grady, DeepState: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry

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(New York: Wiley, 2013); John Tirman, “TheQuiet Coup: No, Not Egypt. Here,” HuffingtonP o s t , J u l y 9 , 2 0 1 3 , h e r e(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-tirman/nsa-deep-state_b_3569316.html).

3 Erich Lichtblau, “In Secret, Court VastlyBroadens Powers of N.S.A.,” New York Times,July 6, 2013.

4 In addition there are unproven allegationsthat the United States granted a green card toAyman al Zawahiri, identified in the 9/11Commission Report (p. 57) as “the mostimportant Egyptian in bin Laden’s circle” (p.57), and since 2011 the leader of al-Qaeda(Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War On Truth:

9/11, Disinformation And The Anatomy OfTerrorism [Northampton, MA: Olive BranchPress, 2005], 46). It is not contested that“Foreign trial transcripts and U.S. courtrecords confirmed that Zawahiri had previouslyflown to America, once in the early 1990s, andagain in 1994…. Ali Mohamed, bin-Laden’sAmerican-trained military adviser, served asZawahiri’s host during the 1994 Americanfundraising campaign” (Jayna Davis, The thirdterrorist: the Middle East connection to theOklahoma City bombing [Nashville, TN: WNDBooks, 2004], 318-19).

5 Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié,Ben Laden: la vérité interdite (Paris : Denoël,2001), 14.

6 Robert Baer, See No Evil: the true story of aground soldier in the CIA's war on terrorism(New York : Crown Publishers, 2002), 243-44;discussion in Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, oil, andwar: the United States in Afghanistan,Colombia, and Indochina (Lanham, MD:Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). 28-31; The Roadto 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future ofAmerica (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 2007), 170-72.

7 Cf. my enlargement of the concept of an

American deep state beyond paral lelgovernment in Peter Dale Scott, American WarMachine (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,2010), 20-23; Peter Dale Scott, “The ‘DeepState’ behind U.S. democracy,” VoltaireNet,A p r i l 6 , 2 0 1 1 , h e r e(http://www.voltairenet.org/article169316.html); etc.

8 All of America’s military engagements since1950 have involved defense of the petrodollarsystem. See Peter Dale Scott, “The Libyan War,American Power and the Decline of thePetrodollar System,” Asia-Pacific Journal: JapanF o c u s , A p r i l 2 7 , 2 0 1 1 , h e r e(https://apjjf.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3522).

9 Peter Lance, Triple Cross: How bin Laden'sMaster Spy Penetrated the CIA, the GreenBerets, and the FBI -- and Why PatrickFitzgerald Failed to Stop Him (New York:Regan/ HarperCollins, 2006), 120-25. Cf.Toronto Globe and Mail, November 22, 2001;Tim Weiner, Enemies: a history of the FBI (NewYork: Random House, 2012), 397.

10 Ali H. Soufan, The Black Banners: The InsideStory of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda(New York: Norton, 2011), 75-77.

11 Lance, Triple Cross, 373. Cf. J.M. Berger,“Paving the Road to 9/11,” Intelwire, here(http://intelwire.egoplex.com/unlocking911-1-ali-mohamed-911.html): “Ali Mohamed was theutility player who created al Qaeda's terroristinfrastructure in the United States -- a series ofconnections, ideas, techniques and specifictools used by the [9/11] plot's hijackers andmasterminds…. Mohamed described teachingal Qaeda terrorists how to smuggle box cuttersonto airplanes.”

12 Lance, Triple Cross, 123-24.

1 3 Soufan, The Black Banners, 561. Thetestimony of former FBI agents like Ali Soufanthat Mohamed was not incarcerated has beenchallenged in a curious book by Special Forces

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veteran Pete Blaber, The Mission, The Men,and Me: Lessons from a Former Delta ForceCommander (New York: Berkley Trade, 2010).Blaber claims to have interviewed Mohamed ina prison cell, after reading Mohamed’sperceptive document on how to track downOsama bin Laden. Blaber argues strenuouslythat Mohamed was not a double agent, but failsto deal with any of the countervailing evidence(such as the RCMP release).

14 “D.E.A. Deployed Mumbai Plotter DespiteWarning,” New York Times, November 8, 2009;cf. Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010),246-47. Cf. The Globe and Mail (Canada), May26, 2011: “FBI thought Mumbai massacreplotter worked for them, court told.” Anothermuch simpler domestic example of this puzzleis Richard Aoki, the FBI informant who in the1960s supplied the Black Panthers in Oaklandwith arms (Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives: TheFBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan'sRise to Power [New York: Macmillan, 2012],418-24, etc.).

15 Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth,Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley:University of California Press, 2007), 151-60.For a summary, see Peter Dale Scott, "Bosnia,Kosovo, and Now Libya: The Human Costs ofWashington's On-Going Collusion withTerrorists," Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus,J u l y 2 9 , 2 0 1 1 , h e r e(https://apjjf.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3578).

16 Steven Emerson, American jihad: theterrorists living among us (New York: FreePress, 2002), 57-58; Peter L. Bergen, Holy war,Inc.: inside the secret world of Osama binLaden (New York: Free Press, 2001), 135;Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf,2006), 181-82. Wright gives a detailedsummary of John Zent’s ensuing interview withMohamed in May 1993, but says not a wordabout Zent’s intervention with the RCMP. To

my knowledge the only privileged book to do sois Tim Weiner, Enemies: a history of the FBI(New York: Random House, 2012), 397: “Heexplained that he was working for the FBI andhe offered the telephone number of his Bureaucontact in San Francisco. The Canadiansreleased Mohamed after the agent vouched forhim.” Weiner’s relative candor came in 2012,long after this FBI scandal had already beenpublicized by Peter Lance and other authors,including myself.

17 Cf. Washington Post, June 1, 2012: “Soufan'scase was unusual because he never worked forthe CIA. The PRB's [Publications ReviewBoard’s] authority [i.e. legal authority] isgrounded in the secrecy agreements signed byagency employees that require them to submitany material prepared for public disclosure‘either during my employment . . . or at anytimethereafter.’" In other words, the CIA’s PRB hadno legal right to censor Soufan’s book, but didso anyway – an example of the blurring of pastbureaucratic distinctions in today’s shadowstate.

18 “Ali Mohamed Case,” Defense HumanResources Activity (DHRA), Department ofD e f e n s e , h e r e(http://www.dhra.mil/perserec/adr/counterterrorism/mohamed.htm); citing the Toronto Globeand Mail.

19 Benjamin Weiner and James Risen, “TheMasking of a Militant: A special report; ASoldier's Shadowy Trail In U.S. and in theMideast,” New York Times, December 1, 1998.This embarrassing exercise in damage controlcannot be found on Lexis Nexis.

20 Peter Waldman, Gerald F. Seib, JerryMarkon, Christopher Cooper, “Sergeant ServedU.S. Army and bin Laden, Showing Failings inFBI's Terror Policing,” Wall Street Journal,November 26, 2001.

21 Daniel Coleman, Affidavit, Sealed Complaint,United States of America v Ali Abdelseoud

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Mohamed, U.S. District Court, SouthernDistrict of New York, September 1998(obtained by INTELWIRE.com), p.7, here(http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fintelfiles.egoplex.com%2Fali-mohamed-coleman-affidavit.pdf&h=UAQFrJ-ys). In factMohamed had been an FBI informant since atleast 1992 (see below).

22 I had no choice but to remove certainrelevant material from The Road to 9/11. AsBritish and American lawyers pointed out tome, my sources had already retractedstatements that they had made.

2 3 Lance, Triple Cross , 125. Cf. StevenEmerson, “Osama bin Laden's SpecialOperations Man,” Journal of Counterterrorismand Security International,

S e p t e m b e r 1 , 1 9 9 8 , h e r e(http://www.investigativeproject.org/187/osama-bin-ladens-special-operations-man): “In aseemingly bizarre twist, while in California,Mohammed volunteered to provide informationto the FBI on a smuggling operations involvingMexicans and other aliens not connected toterrorist groups. Within time, officials say, therelationship allowed Mohammed to divert theFBI's attention away from looking at his realrole in terrorism into examining theinformation he gave them about othersmuggling.” But it could not have diverted theFBI’s attention for very long. By May 1993, fivemonths later, Mohamed had described to Zentin some detail his activities with Obama and al-Qaeda (Wright, Looming Tower, 181-82;Berger, Ali Mohamed, 31-32).

24 Lance, Triple Cross, 95. Cf. Tim Weiner,Enemies, 397.

25 Lance, Triple Cross, 99. Similarly Tim Weinerwrites that the FBI agents handling Mohamed“did not comprehend him” (Weiner, Enemies: ahistory of the FBI, 397).

26 “Ali Mohamed Case,” Defense Human

Resources Activity (DHRA), Department ofD e f e n s e , h e r e(http://www.dhra.mil/perserec/adr/counterterrorism/mohamed.htm), emphasis added.

2 7 U.S. vs. Omar Abdel Rahman et al . ,September 11, 1995; quoted in Berger, AliMohamed, 210; cf. Lance, Triple Cross, 48.

28 “Sergeant Served U.S. Army and bin Laden,”Wall Street Journal, November 26, 2001: “Atthe time, the FBI wrote them off as harmlesszealots, fired up to help the mujahedeenfighting the Soviet puppet government inAfghanistan.”

29 Bergen, Holy War, Inc., 134. The al-KifahCenter (al-Kifah means “the struggle”) was“known informally as ‘the jihad office.’… Therewas no problem finding volunteers, who mightstay in Afghanistan up to three months at atime.... The volunteers joined the forces of theHezb-I-Islami (Party of Islam), led by GulbuddinHekmatyar" (Stephen Franklin, “Slain MuslimHad Link To Radical Cleric,” Chicago Tribune,J u l y 1 1 , 1 9 9 3 , h e r e(http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1993-07-11/news/9307110208_1_world-trade-center-bombing-sheik-omar-abdel-rahman-mustafa-shalabi).)

30 Mitchell D. Silber, The Al Qaeda Factor: PlotsAgainst the West (Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press, 2012), 169-70.

31 Peter Bergen, Holy Wars, Inc., 130-31.

32 Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf,2006), 180; citing Boston Globe, February 3,1995; cf. Robert Friedman, “The CIA’s Jihad,”New Yorker, March 17, 1995; Paul L. Williams,Al Qaeda: brotherhood of terror ([Parsippany,NJ?]: Alpha, 2002), 117.

33 Lance Williams and Erik McCormick, "AlQaeda terrorist worked with FBI,” SanFrancisco Chronicle, November 4, 2001.

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3 4 “Ali Mohamed Case,” Pentagon, here(http://www.dhra.mil/perserec/adr/counterterrorism/mohamed.htm), Cf. Emerson, “Osama binLaden's Special Operations Man:” “He hadbeen in the United States earlier that decade,having graduated as a captain from a SpecialForces Officers School at Fort Bragg in 1981 ina program for visiting military officials fromforeign countries.”

35 Robert Friedman, “The CIA and the Sheik,”Village Voice, March 30, 1993; Evan Kohlmann,Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe (New York: Berg,2004), 26.

36 John Miller, Michael Stone, Chris Mitchell,The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the FBIand CIA Failed to Stop It (New York: Hyperion,2002), 44. Cf. J.M. Berger, Jihad Joe: Americanswho go to war in the name o f I s lam ,(Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2011), 44:“The stash included military training manualsand documents given to Nosair by Sergeant AliMohamed, the jihadist mole at Fort Bragg.”

37 Newsday, November 8, 1990.

38 New York Times, November 8, 1990.

39 New York Times, December 16, 1990. Asbefore, it is instructive to compare thePentagon’s version of the training given byMohamed (“surveillance, weapons andexplosives”) with that in the long article aboutMohamed in the New York Times: “Mr.Mohamed met the local Muslims at anapartment in Jersey City, and taught themsurvival techniques, map reading and how torecognize tanks and other Soviet weapons,according to testimony by one of his students atMr. Nosair's 1995 Federal trial” (Weiner andRisen, “The Masking of a Militant: A specialreport,” New York Times, December 01, 1998;cf. Berger, Ali Mohamed, ).

40 TV journalist John Miller, a former New Yorkdeputy police commissioner who would laterbecome the FBI’s Assistant Director for Public

Affairs, reported in The Cell (44) that thedisputed evidence from Nosair’s home waswithheld from NYPD officer Edward Morris,who prepared the NYPD case against Nosair:“On the third say after the shooting, whileNorris was out to lunch, the FBI removedNosair's 16 boxes of files from Norris's squadroom. Unfortunately the evidence was about toenter a black hole. The FBI now says it turnedthe files the evidence was about to enter ablack hole. The FBI now says it turned the filesover to the Manhattan District Attorney'sOffice, after it was decided, following a seriesof meetings and phone calls, that the localprosecutor and the NYPD would have exclusivejurisdiction over the murder case. TheManhattan DA's office won't comment on whatwas done with the files before Nosair's trail,though Norris was never informed they wereavailable. But this much is certain: The bulk ofthe material remained untranslated and unreadfor nearly three years." [This last sentence ishard to reconcile with the detailed descriptiongiven at the time by Borelli.]

41 Friedman, “The CIA’s Jihad.”

42 Lance, Triple Cross, 58-62.

43 For the list, see Lance, Triple Cross, 574-75.

44 Steve Coll, Ghost wars: the secret history ofthe CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from theSoviet invasion to September 10, 2001 (NewYork: Penguin Press, 2004), 251.

45 Quoted in Peter Lance, Triple Cross, 383.

46 Steve Coll, Ghost Wars, 255; “Since 1989 theFBI had been running paid informants insidecircles of Islamic radicals in New York and NewJersey. In 1990, the FBI carted away forty-seven boxes of documents and training manualsfrom the home of El Sayyid Nosair.” Cf. Lance,Triple Cross, 73-75, etc.

47 Robert Friedman, “The CIA’s Jihad,” NewYorker, March 17, 1995.

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48 Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game: how theUnited States helped unleash fundamentalistIslam (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003),274-75; quoting Jiohn Cooley, Unholy Wars(London: Pluto Press, 1999), 31-32: “By the endof 1980, U.S. military trainers were sent toEgypt to impart the skills of the U.S. SpecialForces to those Egyptians who would, in turn,pass on the training to the Egyptian volunteersflying to the aid of the mujahideen inAfghanistan.”

49 Joseph J. Trento, Prelude to terror: the rogueCIA and the legacy of America's privateintelligence network (New York: Carrol andGraf, 2005), 150, 247.

5 0 “ A l i M o h a m e d C a s e , ” h e r e(http://www.dhra.mil/perserec/adr/counterterrorism/mohamed.htm).

51 Lance, Triple Cross, 194 (oath).

52 Scott, Road to 9/11, 161-62; citing Guardian(London), January 7, 1993; Evan F. Kohlmann,Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe: The Afghan-BosnianNetwork (Oxford and New York: BergPublishers, 2004), 16.

53 Ferrukh Mir, Half Truth (iUniverse.com,2011), 163-64: “In 1992, Ali Mohamed, adouble agent and ex-US Special Forces officerwith close ties to Al-Kifah, led a group of USmilitants who were all ex-US soldiers to trainand fight in Bosnia. Abu Obadiah Yahiya, an ex-US Marine and security chief at the Brooklynbranch, lead [sic] a second group of USmilitants to fight in Bosnia.” Cf. Mark Huband,Trading Secrets: spies and intelligence in anage of terror (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013),112; “Mohamed – using the nom-de-guerre Abu‘Abdallah – travelled to Bosnia as part of a teamwhich trained and armed Muslim fighters thereuntil June 1993, when he travelled on toKhartoum and was asked by bin Laden to setup the al-Qaeda cell in Nairobi, Kenya.”

54 Evan Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe

(New York: Berg, 2004), 39-41; citing SteveColl and Steve LeVine, “Global NetworkProvides Money, Haven,” Washington Post,August 3, 1993

55 Scott, Road to 9/11, 149-50; Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe, 45, 73-75.

56 Scott, Road to 9/11, 149; Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe, 73. I have been unableto identify this Prince Faisal securely. He isperhaps Prince Faisal bin Salman bin AbdulazizAl Saud, who frequently visited the UnitedStates in connection with his horse breedinginterests in Kentucky. In 2003 Gerald Posnerclaimed that Faisal’s brother and businesspartner Ahmed bin Salman had had ties to al-Qaeda and advance knowledge of 9/11 (GeraldPosner, Why America slept: the failure toprevent 9/11 [New York: Random House,2003]), 202. Cf. Anthony Summers and RobbynDay, The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11and Bin Laden (New York: Ballantine Books,2011), 405-07, 419, 563-64.

57 Friedman, “The CIA’s Jihad.” About this time,Ayman al-Zawahiri, in 2013 the leader of al-Qaeda, came to America without difficulty toraise funds in Silicon Valley, where he washosted by Ali Mohamed (Lawrence Wright, NewYorker: “Zawahiri decided to look for money inthe world center of venture capitalism-SiliconValley. He had been to America once before, in1989, when he paid a recruiting visit to themujahideen's Services Bureau branch office inBrooklyn. According to the F.B.I., he returnedin the spring of 1993, this time to Santa Clara,California, where he was greeted by AliMohamed, the double agent.”)

58 Bruce O. Riedel, The Search for Al Qaeda: ItsLeadership, Ideology, and Future (Washington,D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2008), 43:“Osama also worked with ISI in the creation ofa key Kashmiri jihadist group in the late 1980s,the Lashkar-e-Tayyiba.” Cf. Yossef Bodansky,Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on

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America (Rocklin, CA: Forum, 2001), 320.

59 Michael Scheuer, “Central Asia in Al-Qaeda’sVision of the Anti-American Jihad, 1979-2006,”China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly (2006), 3.

6 0 T h e B l a c k V a u l t ,www.theblackvault.com/documents/capturediraq/mullah.pdf

61 Ahmed Rashid, “They’re Only Sleeping: Whymilitant Islamicists in Central Asia aren’t goingto go away,” New Yorker, January 14, 2002,http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002/01/14/020114fa_FACT; cf. Ahmed Rashid, Jihad (NewHaven:Yale UP, 2002), 165; Svante Cornell,“Narcotics, Radicalism and Security in CentralAsia: The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan,”Uppsala University, December 2004, 19: “BolotJanuzakov, Head of the Kyrgyz SecurityCouncil, asserted in 2000 that the IMUcontrolled the majority, perhaps up to 70%, ofthe heroin entering Kyrgyzstan.”

62 Gretchen Peters, Seeds of Terror: HowHeroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and Al Qaeda(New York: Macmillan, 2009), 69, 87, 89,132-33.

63 Peters, Seeds of Terror, 132-33.

64 9/11 Commission, “Monograph on TerroristFinancing: Staff Report to the Commission,” 7.Cf. 9/11 Commission Report, 171: “Al Qaedahas been alleged to have used a variety ofillegitimate means, particularly drug traffickingand conflict diamonds, to finance itself…. Whilethe drug trade was a source of income for theTaliban, it did not serve the same purpose for alQaeda.” The footnote to this sentence (p. 499)adds: “No evidence indicates any suchinvolvement in drug trafficking, and none of thedetained al Qaeda operatives has indicated thatthis was a method of fund-raising.”

6 5 "Evidence Presented to the Brit ishP a r l i a m e n t , 4 t h O c t o b e r 2 0 0 1(https://apjjf.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott)," Los

Angeles Times, October 4, 2001. Cf. New YorkTimes , October 4 , 2001. For furtherdocumentation, see Peter Dale Scott, Drugs,Oil, and War, 32, 36.

6 6 New York Times, 7/20/93. Cf. J. R. deSzigethy, "Crime Scene -- World Trade Center(h t tps : / / ap j j f . o rg / -Pe te r _Da le -Sco t t ) , "AmericanMafia.com, September 2004: "Themurders [from the 1993 WTC bombing] werethe result of a plot by members of an organizedcrime syndicate involved in drug trafficking."

67 Jayna Davis, The Third Terrorist: The MiddleEast Connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing(Nashville: WND Books/Thomas Nelson, 2004),303.

68 Boston Herald, 10/17/01; cf. 9/11 Report,175.

69 Steven Emerson, American jihad: theterrorists living among us (New York: FreePress, 2002), 28.

70 Yossef Bodansky, Terror! The Inside Story ofthe Terrorist Conspiracy in America (New York:S.P.I. Books, 1994), 166. Similarly GeraldPosner notes “rumors that [Mustafa] Shalabi[the head of the al-Kifah Center until he wasmurdered in February 1991] … might beinvolved in counterfeiting” (Posner, WhyAmerica slept, 8).

71 Berger, Jihad Joe, 37; citing USA v. Rahman,S5 93 Cr. 181, court transcript, April 3, 1995.

72 Scheuer, Through Our Enemies' Eyes, 151.

73 Emerson, American jihad, 28.

74 Bin Laden’s and al-Qaeda’s proximity toKhattab is both asserted and disputed at highlevels. See Robert W. Schaefer, The insurgencyin Chechnya and the North Caucasus: fromgazavat to jihad (Santa Barbara, CA: PraegerSecurity International, 2011), 165-66.

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75 Thomas Hegghammer. Jihad in Saudi Arabia :violence and pan-Islamism since 1979(Cambridge, UK ; New York : CambridgeUniversity Press, 2010), 56.

76 Soufan, Black Banners, 62. Jeremy Scahillalso writes of Special Operations veterans inBlackwater with previous “experience inChechnya” (Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: TheWorld Is a Battlefield [New York: Nation Books,2013], 408.).

77 Yaroslav Trofimov, The Siege of Mecca: The1979 Uprising at Islam's Holiest Shrine (NewYork: Anchor, 2008).

78 Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 179-82,195-99.

79 Steve Coll, Ghost wars: the secret history ofthe CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from theSoviet invasion to September 10, 2001 (NewYork: Penguin Press, 2004), 155. For Azzam’sand OBL’s Muslim Brotherhood memberships,see Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: an Arabianfamily in the American century (New York:Penguin Press, 2008), 148, 253.

80 Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oiland Fundamentalism in Central Asia (NewHaven: Yale UP, 2001), 131. Cf. Steven A.Yet iv , The Petro leum Tr iangle : Oi l ,Globalization, and Terror (Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, 2011), 65.

81 Peter Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan:messianic terrorism, tribal conflicts, and thefa i lures of great powers (New York:PublicAffairs, 2011), 198.

82 Scott, Road to 9/11, 171; citing RajeevSharma, Pak Proxy War (New Delhi: KaveriBooks, 2002), 145-46.

83 Cf. John J. Loftus , “What Congress Does NotKnow about Enron and 9/11,” May 2003, here(http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4219.htm): “The … block order, in force since

the 1980’s, was against any investigation thatwould embarrass the Saudi Royal family.Originally, it was designed to conceal Saudisupport for Muslim extremists fighting againstthe Soviets in Afghanistan and Chechnya, but itwent too far. Oliver North noted in hisautobiography, that every time he tried to dosomething about terrorism links in the MiddleEast, he was told to stop because it mightembarrass the Saudis. This block remains inplace.”

84 Scott, Road to 9/11, 172; citing Greg Palastand David Pallister, “Intelligence: FBI ClaimsBin Laden Inquiry Was Frustrated,” Guardian,N o v e m b e r 7 , 2 0 0 1 , h e r e(http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/nov/07/afghanistan.september11).

85 Coleman affidavit, 2; in Berger, Ali Mohamed,26.

86 Coll, The Bin Ladens, 399-401.

87 For a summary of some of the conflictingaccounts, see Anthony Summers and RobbynDay, The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11and Bin Laden (New York: Ballantine Books,2011), 215-16.

88 Coll, Ghost Wars, 231. In 2001 Peter Bergenhad claimed that bin Laden “used his familyconnections with King Fahd to convince the[Saudi] government that he needed to leave thecountry to sort out some business matters inPakistan. Arriving there in April 1991, he thensent a letter to his family telling them that hewould not be able to return home. After somemonths in Afghanistan he arrived in Sudan”(Bergen, Holy Wars, Inc., 81-82).

8 9 9/11 Commission Report , 57. In theDecember 2004 paperback edition of GhostWars (231-32), Coll adjusted his account toreconcile with the 9/11 Report. He replaced hissentence, “The escort put bin Laden on a planeout of Saudi Arabia,” with two new ones: “Twoassociates of bin Laden later offered a different

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version while under interrogation. They said adissident member of the royal family helpedhim leave the country by arranging for binLaden to attend an Islamic conference inPakistan during the spring of 1991.” (Wright,Looming Tower, 161; Roy Gutman. How WeMissed the Story: Osama Bin Laden, theTaliban and the Hijacking of Afghanistan[Washington DC: Endowment of the UnitedStates Institute of Peace, 2008], 34).

90 Steve Coll also suggests that the “interiorministry” (headed by Prince) supplied binLaden with “a one-time exit visa to travel toPakistan to liquidate investments there” (Coll,The Bin Ladens, 381). Both motives may havebeen present in bin Laden’s mind, but hiscapacity to serve as a mediator may have beenmore influential in persuading the Saudis toarrange for his departure.

91 Wright, Looming Tower, 161. For Naif (orNayef) as anti-American, see Coll, Ghost Wars,399; Coll, The Bin Ladens, 437, 626n.

92 Tomsen, Wars of Afghanistan, 485: “Al-Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood extremists, andPrince Turki’s General Intelligence Directoratesupported the ISI’s extremist-centered Afghanstrategy.”

93 “A Biography of Osama bin Laden,” Frontline,P B S ,http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/who/bio2.html.

94 Anonymous [Michael Scheuer], Through ourenemies' eyes: Osama bin Laden, radical Islam,and the future of America (Washington, D.C.:Potomac Books, Inc., 2006), 131.

95 Coll, Ghost Wars, 207.

96 Barnett R. Rubin, Afghanistan from the ColdWar Through the War on Terror (New York:Oxford UP, 2013), 86.

97 Coll, The Bin Ladens, 403-05.

98 Summers, The Eleventh Day, 393: “Citing aU.S. intelligence source, the author SimonReeve reported as much in 1999 – well before itbecame an issue after 9/11.” It is not contestedthat when bin Laden exited Sudan in 1996, hisplane stopped in Qatar. “At the airport in Doha,Qatar’s capital, government officials boardedthe plane and greeted bin Laden warmly” (Coll,Ghost Wars, 325).

99 Peter Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan:messianic terrorism, tribal conflicts, and thefa i lures of great powers (New York:PublicAffairs, 2011), 337.

100 Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 406-07.

101 Steve Coll, Ghost wars: the secret history ofthe CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from theSoviet invasion to September 10, 2001 (NewYork: Penguin Press, 2004), 225.

102 Scott, American War Machine, 94-105; PeterDale Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, andthe Deep Politics of War (Ipswich MA: MaryFerrell Foundation Press, 2008), 98-103.

103 Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oiland Fundamentalism in Central Asia (NewHaven: Yale UP, 2001), 145.

104 Thomas Goltz, Azerbaijan Diary: A RogueReporter’s Adventures in an Oil-Rich, War-Torn, Post-Soviet Republic (Armonk, NY: M. E.Sharpe, 1999), 272-75. Cf. Mark Irkali, TengizKodrarian and Cali Ruchala, “God Save theShah,” Sobaka Magazine, May 22, 2003,http://www.diacritica.com/sobaka/2003/shah2.html . A fourth operative in MEGA Oil, GaryBest, was also a veteran of North’s Contrasupport effort. For more on General Secord’sand Major Aderholt’s role as part of TedShackley’s team of off-loaded CIA assets andcapabilities, see Jonathan Marshall, Peter DaleScott, and Jane Hunter, The Iran-ContraConnection: Secret Teams and CovertOperations in the Reagan Era (Boston: SouthEnd Press, 1987), 26-30, 36-42, 197-98.

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105 It was also a time when Congress, underpressure from Armenian voters, had banned allmilitary aid to Azerbaijan (under Section 907 ofthe Freedom Support Act) . This ban,reminiscent of the Congressional ban on aid tothe Contras in the 1980s, ended after 9/11. “Inthe interest of national security, and to help in`enhancing global energy security’ during thisWar on Terror, Congress granted PresidentBush the right to waive Section 907 in theaftermath of September 11th. It was necessary,Secretary of State Colin Powell told Congress,to `enable Azerbaijan to counter terroristorganizations’” (Irkali, Kodrarian and Ruchala,“God Save the Shah,” Sobaka Magazine, May22, 2003).

106 Goltz, Azerbaijan Diary, 272-75; Peter DaleScott, Drugs, Oil, and War (Lanham, MD:Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 7. As part of theairline operation, Azeri pilots were trained inTexas. Dearborn had previously helped Secordadvise and train the fledgling Contra air force(Marshall, Scott, and Hunter, The Iran-ContraConnect ion , 197) . These importantdevelopments were barely noticed in the U.S.press, but a Washington Post article didbelatedly note that a group of American menwho wore “big cowboy hats and big cowboyboots” had arrived in Azerbaijan as militarytrainers for its army, followed in 1993 by “morethan 1,000 guerrilla fighters from Afghanistan’sradical prime minister, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.”(Washington Post, 4/21/94) Richard Secord wasallegedly attempting also to sell Israeli arms,with the assistance of Israeli agent DavidKimche, another associate of Oliver North. SeeScott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 7, 8, 20. Whetherthe Americans were aware of it or not, the alQaeda presence in Baku soon expanded toinclude assistance for moving jihadis onwardsinto Dagestan and Chechnya.

107 Cooley, Unholy Wars, 180; Scott, Drugs, Oil,and War, 7. These important developmentswere barely noticed in the U.S. press, but aWashington Post article did belatedly note that

a group of American men who wore "bigcowboy hats and big cowboy boots" had arrivedin Azerbaijan as military trainers for its army,followed in 1993 by “more than 1,000 guerrillafighters from Afghanistan's radical primeminister, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.” (WashingtonPost, April 21, 1994). The Azeri “AfghanBrigade” was formally dissolved in 1994, afterwhich it focused more on sabotage andterrorism (Cooley, Unholy Wars, 181),

108 As the 9/11Commission Report notes (58),the bin Laden organization established an NGOin Baku, which became a base for terrorismelsewhere. It also became a transshipmentpoint for Afghan heroin to the Chechen mafia,whose branches “extended not only to theLondon arms market, but also throughoutcontinental Europe and North America (Cooley,Unholy Wars, 176).

109 Rubin, Afghanistan from the Cold War, 86.

110 Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: inside thesecret world of Osama bin Laden (New York:Free Press, 2001), 67. Cf. Ali Soufan, BlackBanners, 565 (murder of Anwar Sadat, watchlist); Berger, Jihad Joe, 24 (watch list).

111 Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf,2006), 180; cf. Paul L. Williams, Al Qaeda:brotherhood of terror ([Parsippany, NJ?]:Alpha, 2002), 117.

112 “A Soldier's Shadowy Trail In U.S. and in theMideast,” New York Times, December 1, 1998,h e r e(http://www.nytimes.com/1998/12/01/international/120198LADEN_SHADOW.html?pagewanted=4).

112 Phil Karber, Fear and faith in paradise:exploring conflict and religion in the MiddleEast (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,2012), ZZ; cf. Wright, Looming Tower, 164-65.

113 Summers, The Eleventh Day, 393: “Citing a

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U.S. intelligence source, the author SimonReeve reported as much in 1999 – well before itbecame an issue after 9/11.”

114 Coll, The Bin Ladens, 399-401. Cf. GeoffreyWawro, Quicksand: America's pursuit of powerin the Middle East (New York: Penguin Press,2010), ZZ: “Osama mixed business and religion.He committed to build an airport at PortSudan;” Karber, Fear and faith in paradise, ZZ:“Bin Laden promised the people of Sudan anairport at Port Sudan.”

115 Wright, Looming Tower, 165.

116 The text of the State Department paper ofAugust 14, 1996, “State Department IssuesFactsheet on Bin Ladin,” is reproduced inBrisard and Dasquié, Ben Laden: la véritéinterdite, 257-58.

117 Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game, 180-81.

118 Jane’s Intelligence Review, August 1, 2001;quoted in Scott, Road to 9/11, 356.

1219 John Crewdson, “Swiss Officials FreezeBank Accounts Linked to Supporters ofTerrorist Groups.” Chicago Tribune, November3 , 2 0 0 1 , h e r e(http://www.sudanreeves.org/2004/12/22/us-state-departments--growing-expediency-in-dealing-wi th -khar toums- terror i s t -connect ions -november-5-2001/). Cf. Ahmed, War on Truth,98; Financial Times, November 29 2001, here(http://specials.ft.com/attackonterrorism/FT3RNR3XMUC.html): “A US State Departmentreport in 1996 and a French investigation intothe bank separately concur that bin Ladeninvested $50m in the bank on his arrival inSudan in 1991, an allegation Mr Ismail [of thebank] denies.” Cf. also Brisard, Ben Laden: LaVerité Interdite, 119-21, 308-10, etc.

121 Coll, The Bin Ladens, 413. There is a briefreference to the State Department White Paperin Bergen, Holy Wars, Inc. (2001), 83: “BinLaden…sank $50 million of his own money into

the Al-Shamal Islamic Bank in Khartoum” (cf.264n). The controversial author YossefBodansky links both the Faisal Islamic Bankand the Al-Shamal Bank to significant jihadactivities, as well as possible drug trafficking(Yossef Bodansky, Bin Laden: the man whodeclared war on America (Rocklin, CA: Forum,2001), 42-43.

122 Lance, Triple Cross, 157-59, citing StateDepartment Cable 1994STATE335575.

123 Steve A. Yetiv, The petroleum triangle: oil,globalization, and terror (Ithaca, NY: CornellUP, 2011), 114-15.

124 Zachary Abuza, Militant Islam in SoutheastAsia: Crucible of Terror (Boulder, CO: LynneRienner, 2003), 108. At ease in Saudi Arabia,Khalifa became a misleading source, ratherthan a topic of inquiry, in privileged bin Ladenbooks like Lawrence Wright’s The LoomingTower (112-13, 450).

125 Lance, Triple Cross, 161, citing personalinterview.

126 Lance, Triple Cross, 162.

127 Lance, Triple Cross, 157-58.

128 Khalifa also “headed the Muslim WorldLeague office in Peshawar in the 1980s. In1988, he moved to Manila and opened a branchoffice of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth[an allied royal creation]” (Tomsen, The Warsof Afghanistan, 198).

129 Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil (NewYork: Crown, 2003), 167, 140.

130 Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 179-82,195-99.

131 Abuza, Militant Islam in Southeast Asia, 93.

132 Baer, Sleeping with the Devil, 69; AaronMannes, Profiles In Terror: The Guide To

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Middle East Terrorist Organizations (Lanham,MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 41.

133 Kumar Ramakrishna (ed.), After Bali: TheThreat of Terrorism in Southeast Asia(Singapore: Institute of Defence and StrategicStudies, 2003), 139.

134 Wesley J. L. Anderson, Disrupting ThreatFinances: Utilization of Financial Informationto Disrupt Terrorist Organizations in theTwenty-First Century (S.l.: BiblioScholar,2012), 14.

135 Girma Yohannes Iyassu Menelik, Europe:The future Battleground of Islamic Terrorism,95.

136 Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe, 41-42.Before being captured in Pakistan, RamziYousuf was being sheltered by his maternaluncle Zahid al-Shaikh, a principal with MercyInternational (Lance, 1000 Years for Revenge,189). Mercy International was another IslamicNGO involved in recruiting “internationalvolunteers” for the war in Bosnia (RichardLabévière, Dollars For Terror: The UnitedStates and Islam (New York: Algora, 2000),151.

1 3 7 Larry Niksch, Abu Sayyaf: Target ofPhilippine-U. S. Anti-Terrorism Cooperation(Washington, D.C.: Congressional ResearchService, Library of Congress, 2007), CRS-4.

138 Peter L. Bergen, The Osama Bin Laden IKnow: An Oral History of Al Qaeda's Leader(New York: Free Press, 2006), 444.

139 9/11 Commission Report, 73; citing JointInquiry Report (classified version), 324-28. Cf.pp. 146, 148: “In 1992, KSM… moved his familyto Qatar at the suggestion of the formerminister of Islamic affairs of Qatar, SheikhAbdallah…, In January 1996, well aware thatU.S. authorities were chasing him, he left Qatarfor good.”

140 Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil, 18-19,194-96. Baer heard from another member ofthe al-Thani family, former police chief Hamadbin Jasim bin Hamad al-Thani, that when KSMcame from the Philippines, Abdallah bin Khalidgave him 20 blank Qatari passports. Later, "Assoon as the FBI showed up in Doha" in 1996,the emir ordered Abdallah to move KSM out ofhis apartment to his beach estate, andeventually out of the country (pp. 195-96).

141 Brian Ross and David Scott, “Al Qaeda Ally?Member of Qatari Royal Family Helped SeniorAl Qaeda Official Get Away,” ABCNEWS.com,F e b r u a r y 7 , 2 0 0 3 , h e r e(http://web.archive.org/web/20030209235027/http://abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/DailyNews/qatar_alqaeda030207.html).

142 Lance, Triple Cross, 253; emphasis inoriginal. Lance does discuss the role of Qatar’sSheikh Abdullah in helping KSM to escape theFBI (Cover up: what the government is stillhiding about the war on terror [New York:Regan Books, 2004], 168-69).

143 Lance, Triple Cross, 342.

144 Anthony Summers and Robbyn Day, TheEleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and BinLaden (New York: Ballantine Books, 2011),410-15, 559-62; Former Senator Bob Graham,Keys to the Kingdom, 131-32; cf. David BOttaway, The king's messenger: Prince Bandarbin Sultan and America's tangled relationshipwith Saudi Arabia (New York: Walker &Company, 2008), 198-99.

145 9/11 Commission Report, 266-72 (272).

146 Rory O’Connor and Ray Nowosielski, “WhoIs Rich Blee?” 911Truth.org, September 21,2 1 1 1 , h e r e(http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20110921153919600); Rory O’Connor and RayNowosielski, “Insiders voice doubts about CIA’s9/11 story,” Salon, October 14, 2111, here(http://www.salon.com/writer/rory_oconnor_and

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_ray_nowosielski/). O’Connor and Nowosielskia d d c o r r o b o r a t i o n f r o m f o r m e rCounterterrorism Chief Richard Clarke. “Clarkesaid he assumed that ‘there was a high-leveldecision in the CIA ordering people not toshare that information.’ When asked who mighthave issued such an order, he replied, ‘I wouldthink it would have been made by the director,”referring to Tenet — although he added thatTenet and others would never admit to thetruth today “even if you waterboarded them.’

147 Kevin Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots(Walterville, OR: TrineDay, 2011). According toFenton (pp. 72-79), the post-9/11 cover-up ofWilshire’s behavior was principally the work ofone person, Barbara Grewe, who worked firston the Justice Department Inspector General’sinvestigation of Wilshire’s behavior, then wastransferred to two successive positions with the9/11 Commission’s staff.

1 4 8 9/11 Commission Report, 259, 271;Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf,2006), 352–54; Peter Dale Scott, American WarMachine (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,2010), 203.

149 Lawrence Wright, “The Agent,” New Yorker,July 10 and 17, 2006, 68; cf. Wright, LoomingTower, 339-44; discussion in Peter Dale Scott,The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the DeepPolitics of War, 355, 388-89.

150 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 383-86.

151 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 48. Cf.Lawrence Wright, “The Agent,” New Yorker,July 10 and 17, 2006, 68; quoted approvingly inPeter Dale Scott, American War Machine, 399.

152 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 371, cf. 95.

153 Quoted in Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars, 21.

154 Tom Wilshire, July 23, 2001, in “UnitedStates v. Zacarias Moussaoui (No. 01-455),

Substitution for the Testimony of ‘John.’” U.S.Court for the District of Alexandria, July 31,2006; quoted in Fenton, Disconnecting theDots, 274, 401.

155 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 276.

156 Berger, Ali Mohamed, 17; citing WayneParry, “Mysterious pair in custody perplexesfederal investigators,” Associated Press,November 11, 2001; Falasten M. Abdeljabbar,“Neighborhood tired of suspicions and fear,”The Jersey Journal, December 18, 2001.

157 Robert Hanley and Jonathan Miller, “4Transcripts Are Released in Case Tied to 9/11Hijackers,” New York Times, June 25, 2003.

158 Berger, Ali Mohamed, 18; citing John Kifner,"Kahane Suspect Is a Muslim With a Series ofAddresses," New York Times, November 7,1990; Transcript, Sealed Bail Hearing, US v. El-Atriss, November 19, 2002. The transcriptswere unsealed after a lawsuit by severalorganizations including the New York Timesand the Washington Post.

159 Wayne Parry, “September 11 Fake IDSuspect Flees U.S.,” Associated Press, July 31,2 0 0 3 , h e r e(http://911review.org/Wiki/Mohamed-El-Atriss.html).

160 Berger, Ali Mohamed, 18; citing RobertHanley and Jonathan Miller, “4 Transcripts AreReleased In Case Tied to 9/11 Hijackers,” NewYork Times, June 25, 2003; Wayne Parry,“Judge releases transcripts in Sept. 11 fake IDscase,” Associated Press, June 24, 2003. TheNew York Times story is worth quoting further:“*Mr. Atriss was a co-founder of a Jersey Citycheck-cashing company, Sphinx TradingCompany, that had bank accounts with millionsof dollars and had as a co-owner Waleed AbouelNour, whom the F.B.I. had identified as aterrorist. That business was at the samelocation, on Kennedy Boulevard, used as amailing address by several of the hijackers and

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earlier by Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, whosefollowers were convicted of the 1993 bombingof the World Trade Center.”

161 Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 53. Cf.David E. Spiro, The Hidden Hand of AmericanHegemony: Petrodollar Recycling andInternational Markets (Ithaca: Cornell UP,1999), x: "In 1974 [Treasury Secretary William]Simon negotiated a secret deal so the Saudicentral bank could buy U.S. Treasury securitiesoutside of the normal auction. A few yearslater, Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthalcut a secret deal with the Saudis so that OPECwould continue to price oil in dollars. Thesedeals were secret because the United Stateshad promised other industrialized democraciesthat it would not pursue such unilateralpolicies.

162 See e.g. Michael Quint, “Saudi Prince

Becomes Citicorp’s Top Stockholder.” NewYork Times, February 22, 1991.

163 Andrew Scott Cooper, The Oil Kings: Howthe U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed theBalance of Power in the Middle East (NewYork: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 275, etc.;Scott, Road to 9/11, 33-34.

164 F. William Engdahl, A Century of War:Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New WorldOrder (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 173;Andrew Gavin Marshall, “The Imperial Anatomyof Al-Qaeda. The CIA’s Drug-Running Terroristsand the ‘Arc of Crisis.’” GlobalResearch,S e p t e m b e r 4 , 2 0 1 0 , h e r e(http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-imperial-anatomy-of-al-qaeda-the-cia-s-drug-running-terrorists-and-the-arc-of-crisis/20907). Cf.Scott, Road to 9/11, 86-89.