September 11 Was A Third-Rate Operation

Asia Times Online
By Bohdan Pilacinski
Mar 28, 2008
Courtesy Of: ATimes

In late April of 2001, just five months before the September 11 attack date, Mohamed Atta was stopped for driving erratically late at night near Ft Lauderdale, Florida. By then, the pilots all had their licenses, final-phase planning must have been under way. Yet, here was Osama bin Laden's field commander for the entire operation, driving a red Pontiac (though 15 years old), with Arabic stickers, and no driver's license, or at least none he would show.

Warned and lucky, Atta was told to show up for a court date, with a license, or a warrant would go out for his arrest. He got the license but failed to show. Ten weeks later, he was stopped for speeding, but unaccountably no computer coughed up a warrant. Now Florida has reciprocity; so at least in theory and for no good reason, the September 11 attack team functioned its last four months with an arrest warrant out for their leader in 50 states.

Having sorted out the contestants in their publicly touted "mastermind" of the month contest, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released this disclosure of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, (so successfully water-boarded in Pakistan). Zacarias Moussaoui, who'd presumably attracted Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) attention by advising his flight instructor that he wasn't much interested in take-offs and landings [1], hadn't been a member of the 9/11 teams at all; he was being held in reserve. Why? Because he was a belligerent loud-mouth and hence a security risk. As he so proved.

Point is, any decent handler with minimal judgment and authority would have yanked Moussaoui out of the country within days of this assessment. But no, he was left scheming on his own, possibly with consequences for al-Qaeda more severe than we know ... such as forcing the attack date.

No license, sloppy driving, even Arabic stickers; worse, an unbalanced agent working solo. These aren't just lapses in the learning curve of an amateur operation; these are ludicrous standards for operational security in any clandestine organization.

In the orchestrated fear campaign pursuant to the attack, we were systematically inundated with extravagant claims for al-Qaeda's potency, reach, cohesion, dedication, vision and Satanic focus. Dr No on petrodollars! Everything Vladimir Lenin could wish he'd had or been! Of course much of this has since - in the jargon of the financial press - been "subject to downward revision"; yet, to this day, insistence on al-Qaeda as a formerly monolithic, then metastasized, demon pathology of epic capacity for terror and evil, has been virtually obligatory throughout the US media: left, right and center.

As late as June 2, 2006, National Intelligence czar John Negroponte pronounced al-Qaeda as the biggest threat to America in the world today. Again, prima facia evidence to the contrary accumulated from day one. Why, if the enemy was so formidable, were a quarter of his assets hanging out over a hayfield in the middle of nowhere, an hour and a quarter past the initial strike on the North Tower? Why were the hijacker's identities rumbled so quickly; why didn't they have identification documents with Anglicized, or Europeanized or Latinized names? And the big tracking question: If they're this good tactically, how good are they strategically?

Our first clue came in late December. Having scored perhaps the most spectacular guerrilla attack in the history of warfare, what did al-Qaeda do for an encore? Would-be trans-Atlantic airline bomber Richard Reid, who couldn't find the bathroom to blow up his shoes.

There are perfectly satisfactory answers to the above questions and others like them, but these matter less than what they spell out collectively. September 11 was a minimalist operation, funded at the cost of a modest San Francisco Bay Area condominium, by a small, weak opponent. At its height, al-Qaeda's external operations never mounted to better than a third-rate execution.

Beyond that, al-Qaeda's been an American-made myth: fear, credulity ... and hype.

The military and the intellectuals - the social elements with perspective - were not that impressed, (the FBI and terrorism professionals were hysterical). Al-Qaeda wasn't even the first suspect; the initial law enforcement sweep was scattershot, and rolled up a large Israeli spy ring along with all the Arab males and foreigners. [2] New York was wounded but sober. It was the American TV audience that was blown away.

On closer examination - all publicly available information - every Washington-generated myth about al-Qaeda erodes or vaporizes. Here are two.

Myth Number One: A fanatical brotherhood of impenetrable loyalty. As early as 1995, Moroccan and British intelligence tried to turn an al-Qaeda pilot into a double agent. L'Housssaine Kherchtou returned from his flying duties in Africa to find his pregnant wife begging in the streets of Khartoum (Sudan) for money to fund a cesarean section. He petitioned al-Qaeda for US$500 to cover the procedure ... and was denied. His loyalties faded, but he refused to turn. (Bin Laden was away and the Saudis had confiscated his assets. Al-Qaeda was suddenly bankrupt. A series of defections ensued). In the end, Kherchtou became the star witness in the New York trial which convicted four al-Qaeda terrorists in the bombing of the two US embassies in Africa. No deals ... this of his own free will. He's now in witness protection.

On to middle management: Ramzi bin al-Shiba, would-be pilot and hijacker, but for a US entry visa, became instead the 9/11 liaison between the Hamburg cell and al-Qaeda central. Worth $25 million to the US. With his bodyguards dead, taken without resistance after a three-hour gun battle with Pakistani police.

Consider: This fount of information knew what he'd face and might reveal. With three hours to give orders that he's not to be taken alive and/or to prepare his own death, he gave himself up with predictable consequences. The gravest of which was a trail leading to the apprehension six months later of al-Qaeda's operational chief, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed (KSM).

On the run with just one guard, surprised asleep at 3 am, he got off a few rounds with his Kalashnikov before he was overpowered. His cell phones gave him up. Though he'd juggled 30 numbers, or maybe only 10, American and Pakistani intelligence had gotten enough of them to either triangulate his location or to trace his last call. Such, anyway, is the official story, which was extremely useful to both President George W Bush and President Pervez Musharraf for different reasons at the time. He's now at Guantanamo. [3].

I don't mean to imply in an abbreviated presentation that al-Qaeda's operatives caved like dominoes; they didn't. But the myth of impenetrability was likely a function of, and cover for, a debased post-Cold War CIA. As The Atlantic reported in February of 1998, the agency was running on bureaucratic rot. Their intelligence stank, their agents were bought, their case officers were self-promoting liars, and their division heads knew no languages. Nearly everyone with integrity had quit. [4]. As recently reported by Le Monde and belying Washington's post factum claims of impenetrability, well before 9/11 French intelligence had penetrated al-Qaeda's Afghan training camps from three directions, one of them "up to the command structures".

A specific alert to the CIA's Paris station, dated January 5, 2001, of the certainty of al-Qaeda's commitment to hijack American planes, never reached the appropriate analysts within the agency and has left no trace in any American post 9/11 investigations. [5] And even as far back as the Afghan campaign, everything ran through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), without which the Americans were lost.

Relatively speaking, the Hamburg cell was of exceptional quality and mostly self-motivated. As for the rest, for every half competent operative there's a glaring embarrassment. Reid, Moussaoui ... consider the 20th hijacker:

One short, al-Qaeda's aspirants kept getting turned away as potential economic migrants. The key to US entry was a Saudi passport. In August, with the attack plan on hold, al-Qaeda finally got a Saudi as far as Orlando (Disney World). He arrived on a one-way ticket, with no credit cards, and insufficient money to cover his one-week vacation. Then he couldn't keep his story straight. He never got past airport security. [6] Again, they send a bozo out on his own. Where's the handler on this?

On the last leg of the plan - a plan five years in the making - the embarrassments really stack up. Days before the attack, Atta et al got drunk and started a row in a Florida oyster bar. Then they left a pile of flight manuals in a motel room. Then they abandoned rental cars with more Arabic paraphernalia. And then Atta's idiotic suitcase, with that bizarre will, and a roadmap for an investigation. Why did that suitcase exist? Why wasn't it packed with generic clothes and toilet articles?

The trail up the East Coast was one a blind dog could follow; so thick the FBI believed the hijackers wanted to be known. Esprit de corps, we were told, they're weird that way. But the sloppiness went further. One small delay at the jetport in Portland, and Atta and Omari would have missed their flight in Boston.

It would have taken very little more: a minder to stay cool in the oyster bar, cover tracks and pick up loose ends; return a rental car which was a credit card trail; very little extra to minimize exposure.

Did they want to be known? Al-Qaeda has never claimed its attacks. Bin Laden denied knowledge and responsibility for almost four years, by which time the whole world believed it his doing anyway. And was being known a tactical advantage or disadvantage to al-Qaeda?

The evidence argues there was an al-Qaeda infrastructure in Hamburg, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan. There was nothing on American soil. No handlers, no minders, no oversight. A near total absence of tradecraft and a minimal knowledge of terrain. (In San Diego, Nawaf al-Hamzi and Khalid al-Mihdhar actually rented a bedroom from a top FBI counterterrorism informant). [7] The one thing the hijackers did right was keep their mouths shut; but not a trained spook in the entire organization in so much as a consulting capacity; not even a fundamentalist moonlighting from the ISI. There was no depth.

No depth and no breadth ... this introduces Washington's second al-Qaeda myth.

Myth Number Two: Al-Qaeda's deep threat with global reach. Traditionally, as any moviegoer knows, a top priority of a clandestine operation is to cover identities. Suppose the passenger lists on the four crashed planes hadn't revealed a quota of five Arabic names each (except for flight 93, which had four)? The evidence, after all, was going up in smoke; the hijackers all expected to incinerate themselves. From the site in New York, we don't even have a set of teeth.

Absent a pattern on the passenger lists, how would this have stretched the investigation? How long would it have been delayed? And when the FBI finally located 19 nonexistent passengers, ciphers all, what then? What effect might lengthened exposure to the unknown have had on the American public? What advantage, if any, might a lengthened and confused investigation have yielded al-Qaeda in Afghanistan?

These begin as tactical questions but turn into strategic ones.

In September of 2001, in northern Afghanistan, the Taliban were about to finish off the Northern Alliance, which militarily was a spent force. On September 9, bin Laden's assassins got to Ahmad Shah Massoud, the alliance's brilliant commander and only figure capable of keeping the alliance together. Only because the "French TV journalists", with their cameras full of explosives, had been detained incommunicado waiting for their interview was the assassination three weeks late. But for that one turn of fate, by 9/11 the Taliban would have been mopping up America's only available proxy ground force. The Americans would have had to invade in winter and do their own fighting - in the snow, and on the ground as in Iraq.

As Professor Michael Doran wrote in Political Science Quarterly, "Bin Laden engineered the decapitation of the Northern Alliance in order to throw it into such disarray that it would be useless to the United States as an instrument of retribution." [8] Which raises the question: Why crowd the planning so tightly, with no margin for error? Why 9/11? Why not 10/11, or just before winter? And if 9/11, why not delay American resolve by whatever means, including confusion; consolidate and maintain the initiative?

How difficult would it have been to use misleading identities? To procure them, then cover them with airfares? To smuggle a 20th hijacker across the border? Would it have justified the additional risks? The short answers are: Easily, fairly easily, fairly easily, and no. Al-Qaeda acted rationally within its limitations ... which were severe.

By 2001, America had won the Cold War, owned the future, had no enemies, and security was lax. That was then. Five years later, on August 1, 2006, the Associated Press reported that undercover investigators had entered the US using fake documents at nine border crossings on both the Mexican and Canadian borders repeatedly that year. Same in 2003 and 2004. On May 5, 2006, on "All Things Considered", National Public Radio reported that very convincing fake IDs - driver's licenses and social security cards - could be had on any number of street corners in Los Angeles for $100. The Los Angeles Police Department vouched for the quality. Criminals including a murderer, "have walked out of police stations" with these.

The hijackers all boarded showing legitimate US driver's licenses, which deflected any potentially embarrassing lines of inquiry regarding country of origin. The pilots, of course, had licenses from living here. Two hijackers paid a Salvadoran in a convenience store parking lot $50 each to vouch for them as Virginia residents, which was all Virginia required; they then vouched in turn for five new arrivals - "muscle" in the plot. Keep it simple ...

Getting fake IDs might have been easy. Using them courted unforeseeable risks. Non-Arabic names call for non-Arabic language skills; 13 of the men were new arrivals, 12 of them Saudis. Dealing with unfamiliar criminal elements, especially outside one's own ethnic group, can also generate unforeseeable complications. And finally, paying for the tickets ... cash is a security tip-off; a convincing set of credit card trails would have required some finesse and the infrastructure wasn't there.

So the 9/11 teams didn't cover their identities and obliterate their trail because they couldn't. It was beyond their competence. But if al-Qaeda couldn't expect to stall American mobilization, why hadn't central command delayed the attack date to follow on the Taliban offensive? [9]

Assuming the CIA video found in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, is genuine [10], bin Laden was notified of the 9/11 attack date six days in advance. Stateside, attempted ticket purchases (though unsuccessful as they failed a credit check), began 33 days in advance. This would mean compartmentalization was so extreme that al-Qaeda central did not determine, control or know the attack date.

In fact, the record argues that bin Laden had long pressed for a much earlier attack, but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Atta had resisted. So it seems that in the planning stage, the 9/11 plot was unrelated to ongoing events in Afghanistan, and in its final stage, was not strategically coordinated with the Taliban's offensive against the Northern Alliance.

Conversely, it's unlikely the Taliban leadership even suspected al-Qaeda's intent. The French intelligence documents referred to above maintain the Taliban leadership consented to the "tactical" hijacking of American commercial airliners; but as noted in follow-up commentary, hijacking an airplane prior to September 11 meant forcing it "to land at an airport to conduct negotiations" - for which there were standard procedures. [5] Peter Bergen, CNN's terrorism analyst, flatly states that Taliban leader Mullah Omar was not informed, certainly not of a plan to fire-bomb American targets, and would have vetoed such had he known. [11]

Was there a strategy behind 9/11? According to Abu Hafs, al-Qaeda's military commander and bin Laden's closest confederate, it was to provoke an American invasion of Afghanistan. [12] But an American invasion, of an exhausted and divided country, without the knowledge or consent of one's ally and host, expecting him to destroy the "second superpower" as the mujahideen had the first? With supply lines from where? Russia, which was crushing Chechnya? Pakistan, where Musharraf was and is a balancing act? This is a strategy? It's a regional civil war or it's nothing.

The US overran Afghanistan, destroyed bin Laden's ally and his base, and garnered the sympathy of most of the Muslim world. Would it had stopped there. Bin Laden has succeeded not for his strategy, but because the US overreached and unmasked itself in Iraq.

In all the government and media hyperbole about the terrorist threat, the most hystericized has been al-Qaeda's imminent procurement of a nuclear weapon. They tried to buy one from the Russians, we're told. They were scammed in Sudan buying uranium and were probably scammed repeatedly thereafter. But they still want a nuclear weapon? The entire subject of terrorist nukes has been framed in nearly unrestrained speculation. Intent is far from capability.

Concretely, in narrative shorthand: Already under surveillance, KSM'S top in-house bomb maker (who was good), got himself busted because his lab caught fire. [13] Bin Laden's attempts to assemble a team of foreign scientists; to procure necessary materials, technologies and workable plans; let alone to establish production facilities, never got past the wishful thinking stage.

The proper question asked nowhere in the press is what, in the decade that Russia was on its knees, as the Russian army sold itself for food, as a Russian admiral sank his fleet in Vladivostok harbor for scrap, while Russia regressed to a barter economy and everything was for sale; in this decade of Russia's collapse and chaos and gangster capitalism, what did al-Qaeda with all its alleged petrodollars actually get?

Nothing. We already know they got no spooks. Weapons? All leftovers from America's proxy war against the Red Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Sophisticated communications equipment? None. And well before 9/11, Russia was supplying the Northern Alliance.

And they got no intelligence. Neither al-Qaeda nor the Taliban was prepared for the American assault. It's unlikely anyone there even read Jane's Defence Weekly. That's your ... deep threat with global reach.

The American people have been far, far too impressed with a hole in the middle of New York City. Al-Qaeda's capability was to damage those buildings and to kill several hundred people; to trap or destroy the top 15 floors was the most that they hoped for. [14]. The collapse of the twin towers was entirely a function of their structural engineering.

Imagine a large zipper opening from the top. Three floors - crashed and weakened by fire - create a slider of some 15 floors above. On every floor, the outer sheath is held in tension to the tower's core by steel floor joists beneath a concrete tray. As the "slider" hits the floors, the joists give and pull the sheath in after them. With every floor, the "slider's" weight and speed increases, pulling the next floor in and down before it. Very clean, and unforeseen, and emphatically not al-Qaeda's doing.

The remaining loose thread in this narrative, the fate of flight 93 which crashed in Pennsylvania, again illustrates both the intelligence and the vulnerability of the plot.

It's self evident that minimum exposure maximizes odds of mission success in a surprise attack by a weak opponent on a strong one; and the plan was for a near synchronous takeoff. But flight 93 was delayed 40 minutes, and took off as the first plane crashed the North Tower. So - an hour and three quarters of hang time in red alert, but still doable; target approach would be from an unforeseen direction.

The hijacking was executed as late as possible, as the plane neared the north-south flight corridor of Detroit-Washington, DC, which dictated a sharp left turn. Had the takeoff been on time, this turn would have been executed before there'd been any reason for alarm on the ground; and with the transponder off, it might well have gone undetected. Instead, ground radar stayed on track despite losing the transponder signal (which is harder); and feedback from the ground leaked back onto the plane through cell phone conversations. [15].

That's it. That's how big and bad and deep al-Qaeda was. This is the platform for America's "war on terror", which migrated so glibly onto the biggest remaining oil field in the Middle East. By comparison, Columbian drug cartels had secure routes for money, drugs and personnel; near untraceable money laundering operations; and one lost a half-built, 100- foot submarine to police in a suburb of Bogota. Russian documents were found at the site. [16].

Al-Qaeda's leadership was rolled up in fairly short order because it was few to begin with. The Economist now says, "Al-Qaeda probably never had more than a few hundred committed members." [17]. Ted Galen Carpenter of the libertarian Cato Institute tells us to get some perspective: "The closest historical analogy for the radical Islamic terrorist threat ... is the violence perpetrated by anarchist forces during the last third of the 19th century." [18].

Even the current official line, that al-Qaeda was a cohesive organization since gone to seed, is just half true. For example, Spanish police concluded there was no link between al-Qaeda and the Madrid bombings of 2004. Bin Laden never controlled Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or "al-Qaeda in Iraq". [19]. After a four-year investigation, the LA Times' Terry McDermott concluded:

Al-Qaeda itself was never the huge organization its opponents sometimes portrayed. Its core was at most a couple hundred men. [It] sat at the center of ... a web of other like-minded organizations spread across the globe ... but was never in any sense in control of [them].

The tight, operational group around bin Laden was quite small. Then, McDermott's view on the brunt of this article:

One underappreciated aspect of al-Qaeda operations was how crude many of them were. Intelligence analysts sometimes cited the plans' complexity and sophistication, as if blowing up buildings or boats or vehicles was high-end science. In fact, many al-Qaeda plots have been marked by the haphazardness of their design and execution. Over the years, many of the plots seemed harebrained at worst, ill-conceived at best, pursued by ill-equipped and unprepared, inept men. Some were almost comical in their haplessness: boats sank, cars crashed, bombs blew up too soon. Some of the men virtually delivered themselves to police. The gross ineptitude of the execution often disguised the gravity of the intent, and hid, also, the steadfastness of the plotters. [20].

A threat, but not a danger, was the likely view of Western intelligence agencies. But the plot succeeded for one big reason which the American public holds in denial; it walked through a
series of open doors. I'm not referring to the lax security and all the government has been faulted for. I'm referring to the atmosphere and attitude which then pervaded the country from top to bottom.

The plot encountered no resistance because America was in a frenzy of narcissistic triumphalism: every form of self- inflation and as arrogant as possible. Let's revisit that period.

The government's priorities were plundering the public trust and institutionalizing crony capitalism. The world was our casino. Cultural leadership had passed to the voice of the sewer. From frenzied corporate racketeering, to "in-your-face" aggression in sports, to the spew of invective then called "rap", to the anger of youth for show ... at every social stratum America gloried in the liberation of the sociopath.

The codes which temper the power of the strong over the weak had so collapsed that the lionized National Football League "role models" routinely beat up, and occasionally murdered, their girlfriends; multiple-victim schoolyard shootings impelled by bullying were occurring in the white, suburban heartland every six months down to the junior high school level. In the fashion magazines, the models looked like they'd been raped, and want to know what happens next.

With no enemies, and on its own terms, this America was on a roll. Accountability to the outside world rated zip. Nobody, let alone an upstart like al-Qaeda, merited American attention, unless there was money to be made. Why should they, when the world consisted of us, and a planet full of wannabes?

But off stage the world's scorned realities persisted ...

The Palestinians were a nation crucified on the politics of oil, and Oslo had been a fraud. So? A generation of Iraqi children were stunted for malnutrition. "That's just the price we have to pay," said US secretary of state Madeleine Albright. [21] Both of these were explicitly proffered as a cause for war by bin Laden. [22]. And this may have gotten by you: the entire Muslim delegation virtually begged the US to send representation to a racism conference in Durban, South Africa; top of the agenda was Israeli apartheid. The US blew them off in a manner just short of insulting.

America had lost its soul and never noticed the difference; but a champion rose up for Muslim victims in the form of bin Laden. He has yet to be acknowledged here as such, his enemy so base it offers only slanders. [23].

The terrorists attacked a great American symbol. Of what? Of multiculturalism, and internationalism and inclusiveness, which had hosted every kind of urban activity; "our way of life". [24] A symbol of course, is a munificent propaganda asset: it means what one wants it to mean, generates no feedback loops and is responsible for nothing. Within three months the media successfully obfuscated that the Twin Towers had been the thickest hive of finance capitalism on Earth, let alone what that might mean. [25]. Everyone was strenuously "innocent" ... and so remain.

And so it came to pass and the above is all it took:

- To lock in a propaganda culture.
- To generate a blank check for war.
- To destroy two countries, convert them into gangster states, and incite a civil war in the middle of the world's energy supplies.
- To earn the fear and hatred of much of the world.
- To bring a proto-police state out of the closet.
- To institutionalize torture.
- To ruin the US Army.

And the ramifications may take decades to play out ... because the people were afraid, and have been shunted around like a school of fish.

Notes

1. "Presumably" because the flight instructor, who's supposed to be the primary source for this assertion, denies it happened. Moussaoui was referred for a security check because of incongruities in his story and in how he presented himself. He was then detained for overstaying his visa as this was investigated. Moreover, prior to his arrest, he was only regarded as unstable; he deteriorated in custody. Of course the report of his expressed disinterest in take-offs and landings didn't fabricate itself. See: Seymour Hersh, Chain Of Command, 106, 110-112.

2. About 120 Mossad agents and trainees conducting a multi-tiered operation. This is a story in itself.

3. The official story is almost certainly a fabrication, but the likelier options don't affect the contention of this essay. See: Simon Denyer, "Pakistan Accused of Staging bin Laden Aide Arrest", Reuters, November 3, 2003; and the exhaustively annotated maze of media reports in Paul Thompson's "Is There More to the Capture of ..."; both via. In the latest version, as told by senior CIA officials to Ron Suskind (The One Percent Doctrine), Mohammed was turned in by an al-Qaeda defector, and not even for the money. Clearly, "healthy Islam turned him in", plays better than "we got him with our intrusive technology and coercive methods"; but who knows?

4. Edward Shirley (CIA officer, Directorate of Operations), "Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?" The Atlantic, February 1998, pp 45-. And the earlier CIA wasn't that impressive either. As Ward Churchill pointed out, with a quarter of a million people on its payroll, it couldn't predict the Tet Offensive.

5. Guillaume Dasquie, September 11, 2001: "The French Knew Much About It," Le Monde, April 16, 2007. Synopsis of a leaked, classified, 328 page DGSE (French secret services) al-Qaeda file.

6. Terry McDermott, Perfect Soldiers, 228 and 304 n 54.

7. McDermott, 191 and 304 n 51.

8. Quoted in Imperial Hubri Michael Scheuer 34.

9. Moussaoui's arrest was August 16. The first and unsuccessful attempt to purchase 9/11 tickets, was just over a week earlier, August 8. In a rushed book and on no real supporting data, terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna asserted that Moussaoui's arrest forced the advance of the 9/11 plot. (Inside Al Qaeda, 2002, p 109). After four years of researching 9/11, the LA Times' Terry McDermott concluded that "In the end, the Moussaoui arrest caused more upset than action". But his "disappearance would have been a powerful argument against" delaying the plot. (226 and 304 n 50 )

10. Theoretically, it could have been planted by either side. The grainy video shows a bin Laden character with his alleged lieutenants and a religious notable discussing the attack. The incriminating element is just several sentences on the voice track; easily spliced and inadmissible as evidence in an American court (and so received in the Arab world). So, were it a CIA plant, why not a stickier indictment than six days advance notice? If an al-Qaeda plant, why contradict Bin Laden's public position? And his mother said it wasn't him.

11. Peter Bergen, The Osama bin Laden I Know, xxx (introduction).

12. Bergen, 255. Account of Ahmad Zaidan, al-Jazeera's bureau chief in Pakistan; all the more credible as Abu Haf's claim followed the attack on the USS Cole, and predated 9/11 by nearly a year.

13. Ramzi Yousef, the Manila airline bomb plot of January 1995. For details, see McDermott, 144-154 and 287 n 49 and 50.

14. Transcript of above video: Bin Laden, "As regards the towers, we assumed [casualties] in the three or four floors the planes would crash into. That was all we estimated. I was the most optimistic. Due to the nature of my profession and work [construction], I figured that the fuel in the plane would raise the temperature in the steel to the point that it becomes red and loses its properties. So if the plane hits the building here [he gestured with his hands] the portion of the building above will collapse. That was the most we could hope for." This is the most convincing translation, by Ali al-Ahmed, used in Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower, 370.

15. Quoting a NORAD source, McDermott writes that flight 93's transponder went off just before the turn; and implies that no fighter jets ever got near it. Lots of planes were scrambled, but only two F-16s from Langley were ever in position in time to defend a target, and they were chasing the ghost of Atta's flight 11, on the mistaken belief that it had passed New York and was headed toward Washington. It was that bad. (240 and 241).

16. BBC online, September 7, 2000. The comparison is flawed insofar as domestic drug distribution is American, which qualifies the drug trade as a criminal joint venture. But the issue here is means and extent of external penetration of territorial security, and that comparison holds.

17. The Economist, September 2, 2006, p 26.

18. Ted Galen Carpenter, "Keeping the al-Qaeda threat in perspective", San Jose Mercury News, October 9, 2006, page 1.

19. Mary Anne Weaver, "Inventing al-Zarqawi," The Atlantic, July, 2006, pp 87-.

20. McDermott, 174.

21. Who now runs her own emerging markets hedge fund. Alan Abelson, Barron's, January 22, 2007, p 6.

22. "Crucified" in the literal Christian sense of the term. In Rene Girard's thesis, all civilizations have been and are, built on the cornerstone of the designated victim. Though the terms of occupation are Israel's, the world at large assents because the Palestinians have been sacrificed to the global politics of oil.

23. Who bin Laden was is beyond the scope of this article, but if Che Guevara has legitimacy, then bin Laden has it in spades. Peter Bergen's summary assessment: "In my view, bin Laden is an intelligent political actor who is fighting a deeply felt religious war against the West." Bergen, 389. This corroborates Michael Scheuer's representation in Imperial Hubris, whose publication was sponsored by the CIA.

24. A Benetton commercial of global harmony and goodwill; this is standard. For its latest issue, see Lawrence Wright (staff writer for the New Yorker, Pulitzer Prize 2007), The Looming Tower, 2006, p 368. "Al-Qaeda had aimed ... at America, but it struck all of humanity."

25. Multiple sources, including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and CNN, posted a listing; CNN's included square footage (this is no longer on the website). Over 75% of the occupied space was some kind of financial institution; 83% including law firms and consultants. Morgan Stanley had 21 floors. "War on Wall Street" screamed that week's cover of Barron's.

(For an expansion of the theme implicit in this essay (that the "war on terror" is both a misconception and a fraud), at the elite levels of journalism, see William Pfaff, "A 'long war' designed to perpetuate itself", October 2, 2006, and Olivier Roy, June 9, 2006 at www.iht.com; the archives at www.williampfaff.com; and John Mueller, "Why al-Qaeda Hasn't Hit the US Again", Foreign Affairs, September/October, 2006, p 2.)

Bohdan Pilacinski claims no credentials whatsoever; the essay stands on its own merits.

(Copyright 2008 Bohdan Pilacinski.)