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September
12, 2001
Sense and Nonsense About
September 11
By Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St Clair
Did Os ama
bin-Laden outwit US intelligence agencies in a deadly game of
decoy or double bluff? CounterPunch has learned from two sources
that a) three weeks before the attack of September 11 security
at the World Trade Center was abruptly heightened and that b)
six weeks before the attack a US army base in New Jersey was
placed on top security alert.
As regards the heightened security
at the Trade Center, we are told that according to a businessman
working in World Trade Building number 7 (the 41-story structure
that collapsed after having been evacuated) "security was
heightened three weeks ago, including the introduction for the
first time of sniffer dogs and the physical search of all trucks
prior to their being waved into the entrance from the street.
The US army base in New Jersey
is the Arsenal at Picatinny. Our informant says that at the start
of July the Arsenal was placed at a very state of alert, with
some staff locked in their offices for a period.
Set this information against
the fact that Osama bin Laden, now prime suspect, said in an
interview three weeks ago with Abdel-Bari Atwan, the editor of
the London-based al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, that he planned
"very, very big attacks against American interests."
On the night of September 11 Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts
told CNN that CIA director George Tenet informed him before the
attack that the Agency had recently thwarted an attack by bin
Laden's organization.
So, was there an attempted
attack some time in August,  or was
it merely a feint by the bin Laden units, to prompt an alert,
then a relaxation of US security procedures?
US intelligence agencies, stung
with charges that they are responsible for a failure of catastrophic
proportions, are successfully pressing for bigger funding, with
the likelihood that the present $30 billion outlay will soar
upward.
The September 11th onslaughts
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are being likened
to Pearl Harbor and the comparison is just. From the point of
view of the assailants the attacks were near miracles of logistical
calculation, timing, courage in execution and devastation inflicted
upon the targets.
The Pearl Harbor base containing
America's naval might was thought to be invulnerable, yet in
half an hour 2000 were dead, and the cream of the fleet destroyed.
This week, within an hour on the morning of September 11, security
at three different airports was successfully breached, the crews
of four large passenger jets efficiently overpowered, the cockpits
commandeered, navigation coordinates reset.
In three of the four missions
the assailants attained successes probably far beyond the expectations
of the planners. As a feat of suicidal aviation the Pentagon
kamikaze assault was particularly audacious, with eyewitness
accounts describing the Boeing 767 skimming the Potomac before
driving right through the low lying Pentagon perimeter, in a
sector housing Planning and Logistics.
The two Trade Center buildings
were struck at what structural engineers say were the points
of maximum vulnerability. The strength of the buildings derived
entirely from the steel perimeter frame, designed so its
lead architect said only last week - to withstand the impact
of a Boeing 707. These buildings were struck full force on the
morning of September 11 by Boeings 767s, with fuel tanks fully
loaded for the long flights to the West Coast. Within an hour
of the impacts both buildings collapsed. By evening, a third
46-story Trade Center building had also crumbled.
Not in terms of destructive
extent, but in terms of symbolic obliteration the attack is virtually
without historic parallel, a trauma at least as great as the
San Francisco earthquake or the Chicago fire.
Here is bin-Laden, probably
the most notorious Islamic foe of America on the planet, originally
trained by the CIA, planner of other successful attacks on US
installations such as the embassies in East Africa, carrying
a $5 million FBI bounty on his head proclaiming the imminence
of another assault, and US intelligence was impotent, even though
the attacks must have taken months, if not years to plan, and
even though CNN has reported that bin-Laden and his coordinating
group al-Qa'ida had been using an airstrip in Afghanistan to
train pilots to fly 767s.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s,
when hijacking was a preoccupation, the possibility of air assaults
on buildings such as the Trade Center were a major concern of
US security and intelligence agencies. But since the 1980s and
particularly during the Clinton-Gore years the focus shifted
to more modish fears, such as bio-chemical assault and nuclear
weapons launched by so-called rogue states. This latter threat
had the allure of justifying the $60 billion investment in Missile
Defense aka Star Wars. The national security budget is grotesquely
tilted towards high tech, costly items, and this is reflected
in the procurement policies of the intelligence agencies which
have poured money into satellites, spy planes and snooping technologies,
(which are so incompetent they even failed to detect India's
nuclear detonations in June of 1998), all at the expense of human
intelligence.
One of the biggest proponents
of the bio-chemical threat was Al Gore's security advisor, Leon
Fuerth, who wailed plaintively amid the rubble of the Pentagon
that "In effect the country's at war but we don't have the
coordinates of the enemy."
In the aftermath of the attack,
calls for retribution mounted rapidly, few with more venom that
the oration in Congress from the junior senator from New York,
who was positively blood curdling in contrast to Mayor Rudy Giuliani's
commendable performance as a leader and as a public voice counseling
against over-hasty identification of the attackers.
The phrases "faceless
coward" and "faceless enemy" have been bandied
about. This phrase has a savage resonance to those who recall
its use in America's war in Vietnam. In 1965 CIA officer George
Carver wrote an infamous article in Foreign Affairs titled "The
Faceless Vietcong", which rationalized the US campaign of
assassination and torture of civilians in South Vietnam that
came to be known as the Phoenix Program.
The lust for retaliation traditionally
outstrips precision in identifying the actual assailant. By early
evening, September 11, America's national security establishment
was calling for a removal of all impediments on the assassination
of foreign leaders. Led by President Bush, they were endorsing
the prospect of attacks not just on the perpetrators but on those
who might have harbored them. From the nuclear priesthood is
coming the demand that mini-nukes be deployed on a preemptive
basis against the enemies of America.
The targets abroad will be
all the usual suspects: rogue states, (most of which, like the
Taleban or Saddam Hussein, started off as creatures of US intelligence).
The target at home will be the Bill of Rights. Less than a week
ago the FBI raided Infocom, the Texas-based web host for Muslim
groups such as the Council on Islamic Relations, the Islamic
Society of North America, the Islamic Association for Palestine,
and the Holy Land Foundation.
Declan McCullagh, political
reporter for Wired, has described how within hours of the blast
FBI agents began showing up at internet service providers demanding
that they place "Carnivore system" traces to track
e-mail traffic on their systems. In some cases the FBI offered
to underwrite the costs of installing "Carnivore".
McCullagh quotes one Microsoft engineer as saying that Microsoft
"officials have been receiving calls from the San Francisco
FBI office since mid-Tuesday morning and are cooperating with
their expedited request for information about a few specific
accounts. Most of the account names start with the word 'Allah'
and contain messages in Arabic."
Palestinians have been denied
visas, and those in this country can, under the terms of the
Counter-Terrorism Act of the Clinton years, be held and expelled
without due process. The explosions were not an hour old before
terror pundits like Anthony Cordesman, Wesley Clark, Robert Gates
and Lawrence Eagleburger were saying that these attacks had been
possible "because America is a democracy", adding that
now some democratic perquisites might have to be abandoned. What
might this mean? Increased domestic snooping by US law enforcement
and intelligence agencies; ethnic profiling; another drive for
a national ID card system.
The aftermath of the attacks
did not offer a flattering exhibition of America's leaders. For
most of the day the only Bush who looked composed and in control
was Laura, who happened to waiting to testify on Capitol Hill.
Her husband gave a timid and stilted initial reaction in Sarasota,
Florida, then disappeared for an hour before resurfacing Barksdale
airbase in Shreveport, Louisiana, where he gave another flaccid
address with every appearance of bring on tranquilizers. He was
then flown to a bunker in Nebraska, before someone finally had
the wit to suggest that the best place for an American president
at time of national emergency is the Oval Office.
Other members of the cabinet
were equally elusive. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who has
managed to avoid almost every site of crisis or debate was once
again absent from the scene, in Latin America. Defense Secretary
Donald Runsfeld remained invisible most of the day, even though
it would have taken him only a few short steps to get to the
Pentagon pressroom and make some encouraging remarks. When he
did finally appear the substance of his remarks and his demeanor
were even more banal and unprepossessing than those of his commander
in chief. At no point did Vice President Cheney appear in public.
Some presidential contenders
make haste to present themselves to the press.. John McCain curdled
the air with threats against America's foes, as did John Kerry,
who immediately blamed bin-Laden and who stuck the knife firmly
into CIA director George Tenet, citing Tenet as having told him
not long ago that the CIA had neutralized an impending attack
by bin-Laden. Orrin Hatch told CNN, "This looks like the
signature of Osama bin-Laden. We're going to find out who did
this and we're going after the bastards. Yes, this is the same
Hatch who was a senior Republican on the senate intelligence
committee when the CIA was arming bin-Laden and the Afghan rebels.
In 1998 Hatch told MSNBC that he would support the fundamentalist
Afghan rebels again even if he knew that it would create another
bin Laden. "It was worth it", Hatch said.
Absent national political leadership,
the burden of rallying the nation fell as usual upon the TV anchors,
all of whom seem to have resolved early on to lower the emotional
temper, though Tom Brokaw did lisp a declaration of War against
Terror. One of the more ironic sights was Dan Rather talking
about retaliation against bin Laden. It was of course Rather,
wrapped in a turban, who voyaged to the Hindu Kush in the early
1980s to send back paeans to the Mujahiddeen (trained and supplied
by the CIA in its largest ever operation), which ushered onto
the world stage such well trained cadres as those now deployed
against America.
The eyewitness reports of the
collapse of the two Trade Center buildings were not inspired,
at least for those who have heard the famous eyewitness radio
reportage of the crash of the Hindenberg zeppelin in Lakehurst,
New Jersey in 1937 with the anguished cry of the reporter, "Oh
the humanity, the humanity". Radio and TV reporters these
days seem incapable of narrating an ongoing event with any sense
of vivid language or dramatic emotive power.
The commentators were similarly
incapable of explaining with any depth the likely context of
the attacks. It was possible to watch the cream of the nation's
political analysts and commentating classes, hour after hour,
without ever hearing the word "Israel", unless in the
context of a salutary teacher in how to deal with Muslims. One
could watch hour after hour without hearing any intimation that
these attacks might be the consequence of the recent Israeli
rampages in the Occupied Territories that have included assassinations
of Palestinian leaders and the slaughter of Palestinian civilians
with the use of American aircraft; that these attacks might also
stem from the sanctions against Iraq that have seen upward of
a million children die; that these attacks might in part be a
response to US cruise missile attacks on the Sudanese factories
that had been loosely fingered by US intelligence as connected
to bin-Laden.
In fact September 11 was the
anniversary of George W. Bush's speech to Congress in 1990, heralding
war against Iraq. It was also the anniversary of the Camp David
accords, which signalled the US buy-out of Egypt as any countervailing
force for Palestinian rights in the Middle East. One certain
beneficiary of the attacks is Israel. Polls had been showing
popular dislike here for Israel's recent tactics, which may have
been the motivation for Colin Powell's few bleats of reproof
to Israel. We will be hearing no such bleats in the weeks to
come. The attackers probably bet on that too, as a way of making
the US's support for Israeli intransigence even more explicit,
finishing off Arafat in the process.
"Freedom," said George
Bush in Sarasota in the first sentence of his first reaction,
"was attacked this morning by a faceless coward." That
properly represents the stupidity and blindness of almost all
of the mainstream political commentary. By contrast, the commentary
on economic consequences was more informative, even though the
possibility of a deep plunge in the world economy was barely
dealt with. Yet before the attacks the situation was extremely
precarious, with the possibility of catastrophic deflation as
the 1990s bubble bursts, and the stresses of world over-capacity
and lack of purchasing power take an ever-greater toll.
Worst hit, and therefore most
likely precipitate of a wider crash, is the insurance industry,
whose predicament is now desperate, with an exposure that is,
in the words of a spokesman for Swiss Re, the world's second
largest reinsurer, "completely inestimable" . Likely
outfall in the short-term: hiked energy prices, a further drop
in global stock markets. George Bush will have no trouble in
raiding the famous lock-box, using Social Security Trust Funds
to give more money to the Defense Department. That about sums
it up. Three planes are successfully steered into three of America's
most conspicuous buildings and America's response will be to
put more money in missile defense as a way of bolstering the
economy. CP
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