by Greg Palast
(Source: Citizens for an Informed Community, Bridgewater, MA. William D. Haff, designer.)
What we have here is the Great Con: to get us to pull each other’s hair over the sanctity of library card privacy. While Mr. Khan is out peddling nukes, we are dragged into a nitwit debate over “the balance between security and civil liberties”—with the defenders of America against terrorists sneering at the sissies from the ACLU.
Civil libertarians are all shook up that the FBI is going through our summer reading list. My concern is deeper. What I want to know is, who at the FBI is pouring over my choice of novels? How much do we pay this guy, and why isn’t he reviewing Swiss, Pakistani and Saudi bank transfer records instead?
You Speakie Terrorist?
Now that we’ve got the Mattituck Library staked out and can read over the shoulders of suspicious characters, our terror-huntin’ boys soon realized that the literature and Web sites of the dangerously disaffected are not all in the King’s English.
It so happened that one of our researchers’ friends, Selda Arman, a Muslim with patriotic notions and a fluency in Turkish, offered her translation services to our government. In response, Selda received a call from our nation’s protectors, which we’ve transcribed directly from her answering machine:
Hi. This message is for Selda. My name is Joe McCollum and I’m with the Department of Defense, calling you regarding a language analyst position available. I see that you speak Terrorist… uh, uh…Turkish!…
Selda’s response was, “Fucking assholes!” a Turkish phrase difficult to translate. Selda did not apply for the job.
She asked us not to use her real name, but I’ve included McCollum’s true name as a public service—in case you are seeking work and speak fluent Terrorist.
What You Ought Not to Know: The 199-I Document
Once our G-men obtained translators and library cards, they were ready to take on the big national security threats.
On May 28, 2004, the FBI and the “Joint Terrorism Task Force” surrounded the offices of a soccer league and kids’ club in suburban Falls Church, Virginia. Fifty Task Force paramilitaries in heavy armor hit the office suite like a bad scene from The Untouchables—and netted several soccer balls, baseball gloves and file cabinets filled with the goods on soccer moms and day campers. The commandoes then sealed off the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) sports and education office.
You may feel safer now that those World Cup posters are securely in federal custody.
But I don’t. Because I had in my hand a dozen-page fax marked, “199-I—WF” and “SECRET.” This was another piece of disturbing news unloaded and passed to our BBC team by some unhappy FBI agents who “accidentally” dropped the file on a desk at the National Security News Service.
The code “199-I” means “national security matter” in FBI-speak. It was about the soccer club, WAMY, which agents deemed “a suspected terrorist organization.”
What made the document special—and earned the anger of the two agents who “lost” it for us—is that it indicates that the “suspected terrorist” activities were not investigated until September 13, 2001, despite a desire by agents to investigate these characters years earlier when the file was first opened on them and then “closed.”
Was there good reason to have looked into this group, or was this another goofball assault on the civil liberties of Muslims?
The truth is, WAMY had more than soccer moms on its roster. According to the court record, the crew convicted of the first attack on New York’s World Trade towers in 1993 kept literature handed out by WAMY at their homes. At BBC we obtained some from the bombers’ lair. WAMY won U.S. tax-exempt status by stating its purpose as “fostering understanding and tolerance of all cultures.” Here’s a sample:
The Jews are enemies of the faithful, God and the angels. Teach our children to love taking revenge on the Jews and the oppressors.
And they provide several examples on what specifically to teach the children.
In 1989, Abdel-Hadi Nemim carried-out his own heroic operation while on Bus # 405 of Tel Aviv-Jerusalem line; he charged at the bus driver chanting “Allah Akbar,” twirled the steering wheel towards the cliff and causing the bus to take a big fall. As a result of his courageous act, 14 Israelis were killed and 27 were injured.
The literature supplied by WAMY is ecumenical in its venom. There is the claim that Shia Islam was created by a Jew to lead Muslims into evil. Amazingly, WAMY “educational” literature was handed out at a New York prison, even though tensions existed between Sunni and Shia inmates that would lead to the alleged beating of four Shia inmates at another New York penal facility. At BBC we got ahold of a talk at one of WAMY’s kiddy camps in Florida in which the speaker praised the seizing of Russian Orthodox hostages. Not everyone gets a bad rap from WAMY. One film sold by WAMY praises that “compassionate young man, Osama bin Laden.”
But, hey, it’s a free country and everyone’s entitled to their opinion. But it’s more than talk at issue. According to Dutch intelligence services we contacted, and officials of the Indian, Pakistani and Bosnian governments, WAMY is in the business of indoctrinating jihadis, recruiting them, and in some cases, transporting them to trouble spots on the globe—or spots where the jihadis would like to make trouble. WAMY denies ever being involved with or arming jihadis. It said it carefully restricted itself to sending and receiving “volunteers” to and from Bosnia.
So the question is not why was WAMY investigated, but why wasn’t it investigated until September 13, 2001?
Or, more precisely, who was exempt from investigation? For the answer, look to page 2 of the 199-I document. WAMY isn’t some little kids’ club. It operates in 55 countries; its budgets run into the high millions, cash that comes directly from the Saudi Arabian royals who control the network from Riyadh. The Saudi supreme dictator (they call him “King” Abdullah, but let’s remember that Saudi kings are simply dictators in robes) praised WAMY, saying, “There is no extremism in the defending of the faith.” That’s his opinion. WAMY’s U.S. founder? “ABL” in the 199-I document, Abdullah bin Laden, nephew of Osama. Investigators were looking for Abdullah as well as another relative, Omar bin Laden (or “Binladden” in the alternative translation of the Arabic name). But by September 13, when the restrictions on agents were removed, the bin Ladens were gone.
The WAMY offices in Falls Church, Virginia, are down the road from the home of the hijackers that hit the Pentagon. I am not surprised that WAMY’s offices were raided, but I am surprised that it took over two years. By that time, the Eliot Ness–style raid could collect only empty file cabinets and T-shirts. Why so long? And why, after sitting on their hands for two years, did the FBI suddenly strike at bin Ladens’ operation?
The answer is in Saudi Arabia. The FBI raid occurred just days after religious extremists blew up an oil workers’ compound in Riyadh. The snakes had bitten their master’s hand and the Saudis were in a vengeful mood. There you have it. Messing with the oil sheiks gets the Bush Administration’s attention. Falling towers in New York, however, are only good for Republican politician photo ops.
Yes, Bill Clinton was also a bit too tender toward the oil men of Arabia. The WAMY investigation was first shuttered in 1996 under his laid-back watch. But, in 2000, after the bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa, Clinton, we learned, sent two secret high-level delegations to Riyadh, one headed by Clinton’s national security Advisor, Sandy Berger, to suggest to the Saudi royal family that they crack down on “charitable donations” from their kingdom to the guys who blew up our embassies and first tried to take down the Trade Center in 1993.
Ronald Reagan’s “counterterrorism ambassador” Robert Oakley, advisor to the Bush Jr. transition team, said, “The only major criticism I have [of Clinton] is the obsession with Osama….” Whenthe failed oil man from Texas took over the White House in January 2001, the U.S. government “obsession” with Osama ended—until September 11.
In November 2001, whe
n we were about to televise the 199-I memo, the BBC sought out the FBI’s comment, assuming we’d get the usual, “It’s baloney, a fake, you misunderstand, it ain’t true.” But we didn’t get the usual response. Rather, FBI headquarters in Washington told us:
There are lots of things the intelligence community knows and other people ought not to know.
“Ought not to know”?
What else ought we not know, Mr. President? And when are we supposed to forget it?
The Frankenstein Factory
There is one big problem with theories that George Bush knew about the September 11 attack in advance. At BBC, my producer insists that one has to have solid evidence before accusing Bush of knowing anything at all.
So, who did it? Here is what we have on videotape:
We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower. We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all. (… Inaudible…) due to my experience in this field, I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only. This is all that we had hoped for.
The speaker is a grinning, chuckling, “optimistic” structural engineer, Osama bin Laden, recorded on film on December 13, 2001, in Afghanistan. Some would suggest it wasn’t really Osama—maybe it was Karl Rove in a turban stretched to six feet six. Sorry, it really is bin Laden. The point is that there is more than one flavor of evil on this sad planet. George Bush can’t account for it all, even with the help of Darth Cheney. An addiction to helping millionaires help themselves, carelessness about the deaths of thousands and a penchant for mendacity does not mean George and Dick planned the September 11 attack.
Connect the Dots
One of my readers, Mr. “Silver Lion” (no first name), cracked the case for us.
No way around it, Osama made The Plan. But who made Osama?
Jedda, Saudi Arabia, 1987
In 1987, attorney Michael Springmann, a State Department officer in Jedda, reviewed visa applications to the U.S. from “engineers” claiming they were going to an engineering conference. Springmann asked the engineers what engineering school they attended. They “couldn’t remember.” Visas denied. Then, over Springmann’s objections, the U.S. embassy gave the “engineers” their visas to enter the USA.
From 1987 through 1989, as Reagan autumn turned to Bush winter, more visas were issued to Pakistanis and others suspiciously shuttling through Saudi Arabia.
Other consular officers didn’t like what was going on. One, John Moller, quit over it:
I was against the issuance of nonimmigrant visas except within the regulations.…I was unable to get anyone torelent on the matter and, rather than endure the situation further, elected to take my retirement.
Yet another U.S. consulate official, Lonnie Washington, privately wondered why her questions, sent in plaintive telegrams to Washington, were purged from the files, unprecedented for missives classified “Secret.”
Still another U.S. embassy official in Saudi Arabia, Marvin Groeneweg, wondered why the CIA was “playing fast and loose” with visa applications.
Moller, Washington and Groeneweg had no idea what the heck was going on; Springmann suspected just some small-time embassy bribery scheme. But that didn’t explain the high-level disappearance of documents nor the CIA’s involvement. Back in Washington, Springmann uncovered the mystery.
It was, said Springmann, “An effort to bring recruits, rounded up by Osama bin Laden, to the United States for terrorist training.” To blow up the Pentagon? Heavens, no. These were part of the Reagan-Bush jihad against the Soviet Empire’s seizure of the Afghan oil pipeline route.
The film WAMY showed of the “compassionate young man, Osama bin Laden,” was part of this campaign. Recruitment for Afghanistan was smiled on, recruitment of jihadis for Bosnia winked at—so WAMY and other Saudi-linked charities must have been stunned when, in 2005, the Terrorism Task Force struck. After all, the Saudis were guests invited by the President’s father.
Paris, France, 1996
May 1996. The scene is now the très posh Hotel Royal Monceau in Paris. Saudi billionaires—including an investment “angel” who saved George W. Bush’s oil ventures—and the kingdom’s intelligence chief, Prince Turki al-Faisal, meet in private. According to our sources, they are joined by a financial bagman for Islamic charities whose money finds its way to Al-Qaeda.
Keep in mind, these Saudis don’t like Osama—he wants their heads, their yachts and their oil. But a hefty payment to charities that will send jihadis to educate Central Asians in their fundamentalist faith will keep Osama busy in the ’Stans (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, etc.) and away from mischief in the Gulf.
A well-known arms dealer, not a Muslim, but a profiteer in mayhem of any sort, attended. It is from the arms dealer’s partner I first received an attendance list. Another source within French intelligence obtained notes from the meeting and confirmed the attendees. It looked like protection money—Osama is more John Gotti than Ayatollah Khomeini—to keep Osama from blowing up the Saudis’ yachts. But there’s a problem with giving cash to freewheeling “charities.” Sometimes they misuse their allowance. As the lawyers for the families of the victims of 9/11 claim, with donors not looking closely, the money for “education” could end up buying flying lessons for people who don’t intend to land the plane.
French intelligence was concerned. U.S. agencies, apparently, were not. The money trail went cold.
Washington, DC, USA, 2005
In July 2005, the airport security system at Dulles International set off alarms when Sarah Zapolsky’s eleven-month-old baby tried to board a plane to Phoenix. The suspect child was on the Terrorism Watch List. Two months later, the original funder and strategist for the Taliban slipped into the same capital airport, grabbed a limo to his elegant new home and prepared for his meeting at the White House. Prince Turki, the man reportedly at the Hotel Monceau meeting, former chief of Saudi Arabia’s feared intelligence apparatus, presented his credentials as Ambassador to Condoleezza Rice and received his two-cheek kiss from President George W. Bush.
Did our President know that he had offered his cheek to the co-funder, with Osama, of the Taliban? Robert Ebel, formerly the CIA’s top expert on oil, compiled a series of excellent briefing papers on Central Asian oil, including this note:
In the 1980s, Arab volunteers, financed by Saudi money…founded Wahabi schools…waged a campaign against Afghanistan’s indigenous Islam… and destroyed Sufi sacred sites (zyarats). The Taliban are the final and most formidable product of this long-term strategy…. They are part of the post-1992 U.S. strategy to maintain a high level of influence in the energy belt from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf….
The question of whether the United States actively supported the Taliban or, as one U.S. ex-official put it, merely “winked” as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia did the actual work, is controversial and difficult to resolve.3
Whether the USA supported or winked at the Taliban is not the point. America’s policy was bent to this purpose: stopping the Iranians from supplanting the Saudi’s control over OPEC. Seizing OPEC was the real, if unannounced, dream of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Shia mullah-crats in Iran when they attacked Iraq in September 1980. They hoped for a Shia uprising to overthrow Saddam that would join their state with Iran. That failed and Iran then looked to the Shia minority to its north, in Afghanistan.
Had Iran controlled the Afghan corridor to the Caspian, this combine of Shia states could have created an oil colossus rivaling the Saudis’, thereby making Iran “swing” producer and controller of OPEC. The United States, the Saudis—and bin Laden—could not let that happen. Here was something the USA, Saudi Arabia and Al-Qaeda could all agree on: No “Shia dogs” (the Iranians, in Qaeda terminology) were going to control a new oil caliphate from Kazakhstan to the Tig
ris.
To prevent this scenario, everyone did their share. America aided Pakistan, whose Interior Minister (i.e., head of the secret police, the ISI) said, “I’ll see to it that Iran is neutralized in Afghanistan” by arming the Taliban. The Saudis, under the direction of their Intel chief al-Turki, funded the Taliban for the same purpose. Bin Laden did his share. Besides murdering every Iranian in their Afghan embassy, he created the Taliban’s only effective fighting unit, Arab Battalion 055. To block the Iranians, the U.S. winked, blinked and nodded at the blood-bathed birthing of the Taliban terror state, demanding solely the arrest of Osama himself.
In 1995, Unocal Petroleum’s deal with the Taliban to run a natural gas pipe to Pakistan through Afghanistan was not significant as an energy source. It was, however, significant as a Saudi/CIA stick in Iran’s eye.
At the time, a few U.S. congressmen grew a bit uncomfortable about cuddling up with Al-Qaeda’s sponsors. One, Benjamin Gilman, Republican of New York, Chairman of the House International Relations Committee, demanded confidential documents he was certain would detail Prince Turki’s engineering, with U.S. and Saudi approval, the Taliban’s seizure of power in Afghanistan. On May 21, 1999, Gilman wrote to the Clinton State Department:
