THE WAR ON FREEDOM
U.S. COMPLICITY IN 9-11 AND THE NEW IMPERIALISM
© Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
Institute for Policy Research & Development
Suite 414, 91 Western Road,
Brighton, East Sussex,
BN1 2NW
This paper is dedicated to the innocent civilians murdered in the terrorist attacks on the 11th September, their friends, their families and to all the other victims of terrorism around the world.
Contents
Introduction
I. U.S. Military Plans for War on Afghanistan
II. U.S. Policy in Afghanistan, 1994-1999
III. U.S. Foreknowledge of the 11th September Attacks
IV. U.S. Complicity in 11th September: Allowing the Attacks
Introduction
On the 11th September 2001, a catastrophe occurred which signalled unprecedented transformations in world order. Two hijacked jetliners hit the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York and a third hit the Pentagon outside Washington. A fourth hijacked plane crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. Trading on Wall Street stopped. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) halted all flight operations at U.S. airports. President Bush addressed the nation, vowing to “find those responsible and bring them to justice.” Hundreds of New York City firemen and policemen sent to rescue WTC workers were lost when the WTC Twin Towers collapsed. It has been estimated that just under 3,000 people were killed.
The world has, indeed, changed forever - but not necessarily in the way that has been slavishly described by the majority of academic and media commentators. This paper analyses in detail the events of the 11th September 2001, the responses of the U.S. government and military, and the historical, strategic and economic context of current U.S. policy. The paper examines the development of U.S. policy prior to and in the aftermath of the 11th September attacks, in relation to Afghanistan and the surrounding region, as well as within the U.S. It builds on the conclusions of previous papers by this author, Afghanistan, the Taliban and the United States: The Role of Human Rights in Western Foreign Policy and Distortion, Deception and Terrorism: The Bombing of Afghanistan, as well as the work of other researchers.
It begins by examining evidence that a war on Afghanistan had been planned for several years prior to the terrible tragedy that occurred on the 11th September on U.S. soil. It attempts to explore the interests from which these U.S. military plans may have sprung, principally those related to the strategic and economic domination of Central Asia and the Caspian. The paper further investigates the degree to which the U.S. may or may not have had advanced foreknowledge of the 11th September attacks, and in that context considers in detail the U.S. response to those attacks.
I. U.S. Military Plans for War on Afghanistan
The United States, leading an international coalition of powers, began a military invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, purportedly in response to the 11th September attacks in the United States. The objective of the invasion was to find and eliminate the Al-Qaeda terrorist network responsible for the attacks, in particular the latter’s leader Osama Bin Laden.
However, it is a matter of record that a military invasion of Afghanistan was planned long before 11th September. Extensive evidence exists indicating that the United States had been planning a war on Afghanistan for October 2001 in concert with several other powers, including Russia, India and Pakistan. Frederick Starr, Chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins’s Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, reported in December 2000 in the Washington Post that:
“… the United States has quietly begun to align itself with those in the Russian government calling for military action against Afghanistan and has toyed with the idea of a new raid to wipe out Osama bin Laden. Until it backed off under local pressure, it went so far as to explore whether a Central Asian country would permit the use of its territory for such a purpose.”
Accordingly, meetings between U.S., Russian and Indian government officials took place at the end of 2000 “to discuss what kind of government should replace the Taliban... [T]he United States is now talking about the overthrow of a regime that controls nearly the entire country, in the hope it can be replaced with a hypothetical government that does not exist even on paper.” The extensive military planning for a war on Afghanistan was also noted by the Canadian journalist Eric Margolis, a specialist in Middle East and Central Asian affairs with firsthand experience of Afghanistan. In a December 2000 edition of the Toronto Sun he reported that the United States was planning to invade Afghanistan to topple the Taliban regime and target Osama Bin Laden:
“The United States and Russia may soon launch a joint military assault against Islamic militant, Osama Bin Laden, and against the leadership of Taliban, Afghanistan’s de facto ruling movement. Such an attack would probably include U.S. Delta Force and Navy Seals, who would join up with Russia’s elite Spetsnaz and Alpha commandos in Tajikistan, the Central Asian state where Russian has military bases and 25,000 troops. The combined forces would be lifted by helicopters, and backed by air support, deep into neighboring Afghanistan to attack Bin Laden’s fortified base in the Hindu Kush mountains.”
By March 2001, Jane’s Intelligence Review confirmed that India had joined “Russia, the USA and Iran in a concerted front against Afghanistan’s Taliban regime… Several recent meetings between the newly instituted Indo-U.S. and Indo-Russian joint working groups on terrorism led to this effort to tactically and logistically counter the Taliban.” The U.S., Russia, India and Iran were already providing military, informational and logistical support to anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan. “Military sources indicated that Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are being used as bases to launch anti-Taliban operations by India and Russia”.
By June 2001, the public affairs magazine India Reacts reported the escalation of joint U.S.-Russian plans to conduct a military assault on Afghanistan. According to Indian officials: “India and Iran will only play the role of ‘facilitator’ while the U.S. and Russia will combat the Taliban from the front with the help of two Central Asian countries, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan”. The magazine clarified that: “Tajikistan and Uzbekistan will lead the ground attack with a strong military back up of the U.S. and Russia. Vital Taliban installations and military assets will be targeted. India and Iran will provide logistic support.” In a Moscow meeting in early June, “Russian President Vladimir Putin [had] already hinted of military action against the Taliban to CIS nation”. According to diplomats, the formation of this anti-Taliban front “followed a meeting between U.S. Secretary of State Collin Powel and Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and later between Powell and Indian foreign minister Jaswant Singh in Washington. Russia, Iran and India have also held a series of discussions and more diplomatic activity is expected.”
Further revelations came from former Pakistani diplomat Niaz Naik, who stated that U.S. officials had informed him in July 2001 that they were planning military action against Afghanistan for mid-October. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reported that:
Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, was told by senior American officials in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October… U.S. officials told him of the plan at a UN-sponsored international contact group on Afghanistan which took place in Berlin… [A]t the meeting the U.S. representatives told him that unless Bin Laden was handed over swiftly America would take military action to kill or capture both Bin Laden and the Taleban leader, Mullah Omar. The wider objective, according to Mr Naik, would be to topple the Taleban regime and install a transitional government of moderate Afghans in its place - possibly under the leadership of the former Afghan King Zahir Shah.
The former Pakistani Minister of Foreign Affairs further stated that, according to information passed on to him by the same U.S. officials in July, “Washington would launch its operation from bases in Tajikistan, where American advisers were already in place”, and “Uzbekistan would also participate in the operation… 17,000 Russian troops were on standby.” He was also told that “if the military action went ahead it would take place before the snows started falling in Afghanistan, by the middle of October at the latest.” He noted that the 11th September attacks provided a convenient trigger for these war plans. “[H]e was in no doubt that after the World Trade Center bombings this pre-existing U.S. plan had been built upon and would be implemented within two or three weeks”, noted the BBC. Indeed, the plans did not even appear to have as their prime motive the capture of Osama Bin Laden: “[H]e said it was doubtful that Washington would drop its plan even if Bin Laden were to be surrendered immediately by the Taleban.”
The facts presented here clarify beyond any reasonable doubt that the U.S. war on Afghanistan that began in October had been planned quite independently of the 11th September attacks. Rather than being a reaction to those attacks, it seems that those attacks in fact provided a pretext to justify, “build upon” and implement already extant plans for a military invasion.
It also appears that the U.S. war plans have roots in strategic and economic concerns stretching as far back as 4 years ago. In his 1997 study, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives, former National Security Adviser under the Carter Administration, Zbigniew Brzezinski, wrote extensively of U.S. interests in “Eurasia” and the need for a “sustained and directed” U.S. involvement in the Central Asian region to secure these interests. “Ever since the continents started interacting politically, some five hundred years ago, Eurasia has been the center of world power,” he observes. Eurasia consists of all the territory east of Germany and Poland, all the way through Russia and China to the Pacific Ocean, including the Middle East and most of the Indian subcontinent. Brzezinski notes that the key to controlling Eurasia lies in establishing control over the republics of Central Asia. He further describes Russia and China, both of which border Central Asia, as the two main powers who might threaten U.S. interests in the region, Russia being the more prominent threat. The U.S. must accordingly manage and manipulate the “lesser” surrounding powers such as Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Iran and Kazakhstan, as buffers to Russian and Chinese moves to control the oil, gas and minerals of the republics of Central Asia, namely Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. He also notes that any nation becoming predominant in Central Asia would thus pose a direct threat to U.S. control of oil resources both within the region and in the Persian Gulf. The Central Asian republics, he records, “are of importance from the standpoint of security and historical ambitions to at least three of their most immediate and more powerful neighbors, namely Russia, Turkey and Iran, with China also signalling an increasing political interest in the region…
“But the Eurasian Balkans are infinitely more important as a potential economic prize: an enormous concentration of natural gas and oil reserves is located in the region, in addition to important minerals, including gold… The world’s energy consumption is bound to vastly increase over the next two or three decades. Estimates by the U.S. Department of energy anticipate that world demand will rise by more than 50 percent between 1993 and 2015, with the most significant increase in consumption occurring in the Far East. The momentum of Asia’s economic development is already generating massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy and the Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea … Kazakhstan is the shield and Uzbekistan is the soul for the region’s diverse national awakenings … Uzbekistan is, in fact, the prime candidate for regional leadership in Central Asia. … Once pipelines to the area have been developed, Turkmenistan’s truly vast natural gas reserves augur a prosperous future for the country’s people… In fact, an Islamic revival - already abetted from the outside not only by Iran but also by Saudi Arabia - is likely to become the mobilizing impulse for the increasingly pervasive new nationalisms, determined to oppose any reintegration under Russian - and hence infidel - control … For Pakistan, the primary interest is to gain Geostrategic depth through political influence in Afghanistan - and to deny to Iran the exercise of such influence in Afghanistan and Tajikistan - and to benefit eventually from any pipeline construction linking Central Asia with the Arabian Sea … Moreover, sensible Russian leaders realize that the demographic explosion underway in the new states means that their failure to sustain economic growth will eventually create an explosive situation along Russia’s entire southern frontier Turkmenistan… has been actively exploring the construction of a new pipeline through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Arabian Sea.”
He then pointed out from the above that: “It follows that America’s primary interest is to help ensure that no single power comes to control this geopolitical space and that the global community has unhindered financial and economic access to it.”
“… China’s growing economic presence in the region and its political stake in the area’s independence are also congruent with America’s interests … America is now the only global superpower, and Eurasia is the globe’s central arena. Hence, what happens to the distribution of power on the Eurasian continent will be of decisive importance to America’s global primacy and to America’s historical legacy … the Eurasian Balkans - threatens to become a cauldron of ethnic conflict and great-power rivalry.”
He then comes to the crucial conclusion that: “Without sustained and directed American involvement, before long the forces of global disorder could come to dominate the world scene. And the possibility of such a fragmentation is inherent in the geopolitical tensions not only of today’s Eurasia but of the world more generally.” Elaborating, he observes that:
“With warning signs on the horizon across Europe and Asia, any successful American policy must focus on Eurasia as a whole and be guided by a Geostrategic design … That puts a premium on maneuver and manipulation in order to prevent the emergence of a hostile coalition that could eventually seek to challenge America’s primacy … The most immediate task is to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitration role … In the long run, global politics are bound to become increasingly uncongenial to the concentration of hegemonic power in the hands of a single state. Hence, America is not only the first, as well as the only, truly global superpower, but it is also likely to be the very last … Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.
Long-standing U.S. aims to establish hegemony - the “decisive arbitration role” of “America’s primacy” - over “Eurasia” through control of Central Asia thus entailed the use of “sustained and directed American involvement”, justified through the manufacture of “a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat”. All this clearly establishes the broad economic and strategic agenda behind the military plans that were in place long before 11th September 2001.
Having established the existence of these long-standing military plans to invade Afghanistan, rooted in broad strategic and economic concerns related to Eurasia and Central Asia, the next issue that must be investigated relates to the principal events leading up to the formulation of these war plans for Afghanistan in recent years. The answers can be found on examination of the broader history of U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan.
II. U.S. Policy in Afghanistan, 1994-1999
There is considerable evidence establishing beyond all reasonable doubt that the anti-Taliban stance of the United States constitutes a shift in policy. The documentary record proves clearly that from 1994 to 1999, the United States supported the Taliban in accordance with attempting to secure the strategic and economic interests discussed extensively by Brzezinsky. U.S. support of the Taliban was envisaged to be a vehicle of “sustained and directed” American involvement in the region.
Amnesty International (AI) reports that although the “United States has denied any links with the Taleban”, according to then U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Robin Raphel Afghanistan was a “crucible of strategic interest” during the Cold War, though she denied any U.S. influence or support of factions in Afghanistan today, dismissing any possible ongoing strategic interests. However, former Department of Defense official Elie Krakowski, who worked on the Afghan issue in the 1980s, points out that Afghanistan remains important to this day because:
“[It] is the crossroads between what Halford MacKinder called the world’s Heartland and the Indian sub continent. It owes its importance to its location at the confluence of major routes. A boundary between land power and sea power, it is the meeting point between opposing forces larger than itself. Alexander the Great used it as a path to conquest. So did the Moghuls. An object of competition between the British and Russian empires in the 19th century, Afghanistan became a source of controversy between the American and Soviet superpowers in the 20th. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has become an important potential opening to the sea for the landlocked new states of Central Asia. The presence of large oil and gas deposits in that area has attracted countries and multinational corporations... Because Afghanistan is a major strategic pivot what happens there affects the rest of the world.”
Raphel’s denial of U.S. interests in the region also stands in contradiction to the fact that, as Amnesty reports, “many Afghanistan analysts believe that the United States has had close political links with the Taleban militia. They refer to visits by Taleban representatives to the United States in recent months and several visits by senior U.S. State Department officials to Kandahur including one immediately before the Taleban took over Jalalabad.” AI further refers to a comment by The Guardian: “Senior Taleban leaders attended a conference in Washington in mid-1996 and U.S. diplomats regularly travelled to Taleban headquarters.” The Guardian points out that although such “visits can be explained”, “the timing raises doubts as does the generally approving line which U.S. officials take towards the Taleban.” Raphel’s denial also stands in contradiction to her own behaviour. Agence France Presse reported that:
“In the months before the Taliban took power, former U.S. assistant secretary of state for South Asia Robin Raphel waged an intense round of shuttle diplomacy between the powers with possible stakes in the [UNOCAL] project. ‘Robin Raphel was the face of the Unocal pipeline’, said an official of the former Afghan government who was present at some of the meetings with her… In addition to tapping new sources of energy, the [project] also suited a major U.S. strategic aim in the region: isolating its nemesis Iran and stifling a frequently mooted rival pipeline backed by Tehran, experts said.”
Amnesty goes on to confirm that recent “accounts of the madrasas (religious schools) which the Taleban attended in Pakistan indicate that these [Western] links [with the Taleban] may have been established at the very inception of the Taleban movement…
“In an interview broadcast by the BBC World Service on 4 October 1996, Pakistan’s then Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto affirmed that the madrasas had been set up by Britain, the United States, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan during the Jihad, the Islamic resistance against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.”
The CIA’s sponsoring of the Taliban movement through Pakistan and Saudi Arabia has been documented extensively by Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa, Canada. According to Selig Harrison, an expert on U.S. relations with Asia, the creation of the Taliban was “actively encouraged by the [Pakistani] ISI and the CIA.” As former Pakistani Interior Minister, Major General (Retd) Naseerullah Babar, commented: “[The] CIA itself introduced terrorism in the region and is only shedding crocodiles tears to absolve itself of the responsibility.” Thus, when the Taliban succeeded in gaining power, U.S. State Department spokesperson Glyn Davies explained that the U.S. found “nothing objectionable” in the event. Indeed, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Near East and South East, Senator Hank Brown, announced gleefully that: “The good part of what has happened is that one of the factions at last seems capable of developing a new government in Afghanistan.” However, U.S. support of the Taliban did not end there, but in fact continued throughout most of the 1990s. Professor William O. Beeman, an anthropologist specialising in the Middle East at Brown University who has conducted extensive research into Islamic Central Asia, points out:
“It is no secret, especially in the region, that the United States, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have been supporting the fundamentalist Taliban in their war for control of Afghanistan for some time. The U.S. has never openly acknowledged this connection, but it has been confirmed by both intelligence sources and charitable institutions in Pakistan.”
Professor Beeman observes that the U.S.-backed Taliban “are a brutal fundamentalist group that has conducted a cultural scorched-earth policy” in Afghanistan. Extensive documentation shows that the Taliban have “committed atrocities against their enemies and their own citizens... So why would the U.S. support them?” Beeman concludes that the answer to this question “has nothing to do with religion or ethnicity - but only with the economics of oil. To the north of Afghanistan is one of the world’s wealthiest oil fields, on the Eastern Shore of the Caspian Sea in republics formed since the breakup of the Soviet Union.” Caspian oil needs to be transhipped out of the landlocked region through a warm water port, for the desired profits to be accumulated. The “simplest and cheapest” pipeline route is through Iran - but Iran is essentially an ‘enemy’ of the U.S., due to its over independence. As Beeman notes: “The U.S. government has such antipathy to Iran that it is willing to do anything to prevent this.” The alternative route is one that passes through Afghanistan and Pakistan, which “would require securing the agreement of the powers-that-be in Afghanistan” - the Taliban. Such an arrangement would also benefit Pakistani elites, “which is why they are willing to defy the Iranians.” Therefore, as far as the U.S. is concerned, the solution is “for the anti-Iranian Taliban to win in Afghanistan and agree to the pipeline through their territory.” Apart from the oil stakes, Afghanistan remains a strategic region for the U.S. in another related respect. The establishment of a strong client state in the country would strengthen U.S. influence in this crucial region, partly by strengthening Pakistan - at that time a prime supporter of the Taliban - which is the region’s main source of regional leverage. Of course, this also furthers the cause of establishing the required oil and gas pipelines to the Caspian Sea, while bypassing Russia and opening up the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) - the Central Asian republics - bordering Russia to the U.S. dominated global market. “The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis,” commented one U.S. diplomat in 1997. “There will be Aramco [consortium of oil companies controlling Saudi oil], pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that.”
Strategic and economic interests therefore motivated what The Guardian referred to as “the generally approving line that U.S. officials take towards the Taleban.” Elaborating, Cable News Network (CNN) reported that the “United States wants good ties [with the Taliban] but can’t openly seek them while women are being repressed” - hence they can be sought covertly. The Intra Press Service (IPS) reported that underscoring “the geopolitical stakes, Afghanistan has appeared prominently in U.S. government and corporate planning about routes for pipelines and roads opening the ex-Soviet republics on Russia’s southern border to world markets.” Hence, amid the fighting, “some Western businesses are warming up to the Taliban despite the movement’s” institutionalisation of terror, massacres, abductions, and impoverishment. “Leili Helms, a spokeswoman for the Taliban in New York, told IPS that one U.S. company, Union Oil of California (Unocal), helped to arrange the visit last week of the movement’s acting information, industry and mines ministers. The three officials met lower-level State Department officials before departing for France, Helms said. Several U.S. and French firms are interested in developing gas lines through central and southern Afghanistan, where the 23 Taliban-controlled states” just happen to be located, as Helms added, to the ‘chance’ convenience of American and other Western companies. Leili Helms was hired by the Taliban to be their PR representative in Washington. She happens to be well-versed in the arcana of U.S. intelligence agencies - her uncle, Richard Helms, is a former director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
An article appearing in the prestigious German daily Frankfurter Rundschau, in early October 1996, reported that UNOCAL “has been given the go-ahead from the new holders of power in Kabul to build a pipeline from Turkmenstein via Afghanistan to Pakistan. It would lead from Krasnovodsk on the Caspian Sea to Karachi on the Indian Ocean coast.” The same article noted that UN diplomats in Geneva believe that the war in Afghanistan is the result of a struggle between Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Russia and the United States, “to secure access to the rich oil and natural gas of the Caspian Sea.” Other than UNOCAL, companies that are jubilantly interested in exploiting Caspian oil, apparently at any human expense, include AMOCO, BP, Chevron, EXXON, and Mobile. It is in this context that Franz Schurmann, Professor Emeritus of History and Sociology at the University of California, commented on “Washington’s discreet backing of the Taliban”, noting the announcement in May 1996 “by UNOCAL that it was preparing to build a pipeline to transport natural gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan through Western Afghanistan... UNOCAL’s announcement was premised on an imminent Taliban victory.”
It therefore comes as no surprise to see the Wall Street Journal reporting that the main interests of American and other Western elites lie in making Afghanistan “a prime transhipment route for the export of Central Asia’s vast oil, gas and other natural resources”. “Like them or not,” the Journal continues without fear of contradiction, “the Taliban are the players most capable of achieving peace in Afghanistan at this moment in history.” The Journal is referring to the same faction that is responsible for the severe repression of women; massacres of civilians; ethnic cleansing and genocide; arbitrary detention; and the growth of widespread impoverishment and underdevelopment. Despite all this, as the New York Times similarly reported that: “The Clinton Administration has taken the view that a Taliban victory... would act as a counterweight to Iran... and would offer the possibility of new trade routes that could weaken Russian and Iranian influence in the region.”
In a similar vein, the International Herald Tribunal reported that in the summer of 1998, “the Clinton administration was talking with the Taleban about potential pipeline routes to carry oil and natural gas out of Turkmenistan to the Indian Ocean by crossing Afghanistan and Pakistan”, clarifying why the U.S. would be interested in ensuring that the region is destabilised enough to prevent the population from being able to mobilise domestic resources, or utilise the region’s strategic position, for their own benefit. P. Stobdan reported in New Delhi’s respected journal Strategic Analysis that:
“Afghanistan figures importantly in the context of American energy security politics. Unocal’s project to build oil and gas pipelines from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan for the export of oil and gas to the Indian subcontinent, viewed as the most audacious gambit of the 1990s Central Asian oil rush had generated great euphoria. The U.S. government fully backed the route as a useful option to free the Central Asian states from Russian clutches and prevent them getting close to Iran. The project was also perceived as the quickest and cheapest way to bring out Turkmen gas to the fast growing energy market in South Asia. To help it canvass for the project, Unocol hired the prominent former diplomat and secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, and a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Robert Oakley, as well as an expert on the Caucasus, John Maresca… The president of Unocol even speculated that the cost of the construction would be reduced by half with the success of the Taliban movement and formation of a single government.”
Worse still, this corporate endeavour backed wholeheartedly by the U.S. involved direct military support of the Taliban: “It was reported by the media that the U.S. oil company had even provided covert material support to help push the militia northward against Rabbani’s forces.” However, as Stobdan also notes, the American corporation UNOCAL indefinitely suspended work on the pipeline in August 1999. Since 1999, the U.S. grew progressively more hostile towards the Taliban, and began exploring other possibilities to secure its regional hegemony while maintaining basic ties with the regime to negotiate a potential non-military solution.
Even members of the U.S. government have criticized U.S. covert support of the Taliban. One should note, for instance, the authoritative testimony of U.S. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher concerning American policy toward Afghanistan. Rohrabacher has been involved with Afghanistan since the early 1980s when he worked in the White House as Special Assistant to then U.S. President Ronald Reagan, and he is now a Senior Member of the U.S. House International Relations Committee. He has been involved in U.S. policy toward Afghanistan for some 20 years. In 1988 he traveled to Afghanistan as a member of the U.S. Congress with mujahideen fighters and participated in the battle of Jalalabhad against the Soviets. He testified before a Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee:
“Having been closely involved in U.S. policy toward Afghanistan for some twenty years, I have called into question whether or not this administration has a covert policy that has empowered the Taliban and enabled this brutal movement to hold on to power. Even though the President and the Secretary of State have voiced their disgust at the brutal policies of the Taliban, especially their repression of women, the actual implementation of US policy has repeatedly had the opposite effect.”
After documenting a large number of factors indicating tacit U.S. support of the Taliban, Rohrabacher concludes:
“I am making the claim that there is and has been a covert policy by this administration to support the Taliban movement’s control of Afghanistan… [T]his amoral or immoral policy is based on the assumption that the Taliban would bring stability to Afghanistan and permit the building of oil pipelines from Central Asia through Afghanistan to Pakistan… I believe the administration has maintained this covert goal and kept the Congress in the dark about its policy of supporting the Taliban, the most anti-Western, anti-female, anti-human rights regime in the world. It doesn’t take a genius to understand that this policy would outrage the American people, especially America’s women. Perhaps the most glaring evidence of our government’s covert policy to favor the Taliban is that the administration is currently engaged in a major effort to obstruct the Congress from determining the details behind this policy. Last year in August, after several unofficial requests were made of the State Department, I made an official request for all diplomatic documents concerning US policy toward the Taliban, especially those cables and documents from our embassies in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. As a senior Member of the House International Relations Committee I have oversight responsibility in this area. In November, after months of stonewalling, the Secretary of State herself promised before the International Relations Committee that the documents would be forthcoming. She reconfirmed that promise in February when she testified before our Committee on the State Department budget. The Chairman of the Committee, Ben Gilman, added his voice to the record in support of my document request. To this time, we have received nothing. There can only be two explanations. Either the State Department is totally incompetent, or there is an ongoing cover-up of the State Department’s true fundamental policy toward Afghanistan. You probably didn’t expect me to praise the State Department at the end of this scathing testimony. But I will. I don’t think the State Department is incompetent. They should be held responsible for their policies and the American people should know, through documented proof, what they are doing.”
While establishing its war plans, the Bush Administration attempted to save its relationship with the brutal regime despite the danger of erosion. Shortly after taking power in January 2001, the U.S. began to negotiate with the Taliban. U.S. and Taliban diplomatic representatives met several times in February 2001 in Washington, Berlin and Islamabad. The last meeting between U.S. and Taliban representatives took place in August 2001 - five weeks before the attacks on New York and Washington. Christina Rocca, then head of Central Asian affairs at the U.S. Department of State, met the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan in Islamabad.
This documentation shows clearly that the U.S. was certainly supportive of the Taliban while they were scoring sweeping victories throughout Afghanistan. As has been noted by Central Asia specialist Ahmed Rashid, the Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Daily Telegraph (London), from 1994 to 1997 at least, the United States “did support the Taliban, and [the Americans] cannot deny that fact.” In an important study of the issue, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia published by Yale University Press, Rashid showed that “between 1994-96 the U.S. supported the Taliban politically through its allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, essentially because Washington viewed the Taliban as anti-Iranian, anti-Shia and pro-western... [B]etween 1995-97, U.S. support was driven by the UNOCAL oil/gas pipeline project.”
However, U.S. support of the Taliban only continued to decline with the coming of the Bush Administration. The primary reason for this certainly appears to be the fact that the Taliban is incapable of playing the U.S.-friendly role of a “servile government”. As Ahmed Rashid points out:
“The UNOCAL project was based on the premise that the Taliban were going to conquer Afghanistan. This premise was fed to them by various countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and elements within the U.S. administration. Essentially it was a premise that was very wrong, because it was based on conquest, and would therefore make it absolutely certain that not only would they not be able to build the pipeline, but they would never be able to have that kind of security in order to build the pipeline.”
Once this became absolutely clear to the United States, it also became clear that the Taliban was incapable of providing the security essential to allow the pipeline to go ahead as required. Thus, by 1999 the U.S. began to see the Taliban as a fundamental obstacle to U.S. interests. Due to this, U.S. policy toward the Taliban took an about-turn. This sequence of events has been perhaps described in most detail by the French intelligence analysts, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, who record that the “U.S. government’s main objective in Afghanistan was to consolidate the position of the Taliban regime and thereby obtain access to the oil and gas reserves in Central Asia.” Brisard and Dasquie both have an extensive record of expertise in their field. Jean-Charles Brisard was until the late 1990s Director of Economic Analysis and Strategy for Vivendi, a French company. Additionally, for several years he worked for French intelligence, writing a 1997 report on the Al-Qaeda network. Guillaume Dasquie is an investigative journalist and the publisher of the highly respected Internet newsletter Intelligence Online, which specialises in diplomacy, economic analysis and strategy.
In their recently released study of the subject, Bin Laden: the forbidden truth they report that until as late as August 2001, the U.S. government hoped that the Taliban regime would be “a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of an oil pipeline across Central Asia”, from the rich oilfields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. From 1999 until 2001, it is clear that U.S. hopes in this respect had grown increasingly sceptical. The negotiations with the Taliban in 2001 appear to have been conducted by the Bush Administration as a last ditch attempt to salvage a viable relationship with the regime. The recognition that the Taliban would not be capable of maintaining security through “conquer” meant that the U.S. was still hoping the regime would agree to a joint government in Afghanistan in alliance with the other factions - although the U.S. seemed also to be aware that this was exceedingly unlikely. Until now, observe Brisard and Dasqui, “the oil and gas reserves of Central Asia have been controlled by Russia. The Bush government wanted to change all that.” However, confronted with the Taliban’s refusal to accept U.S. conditions, “this rationale of energy security changed into a military one.” In an interview in Paris, Brisard noted that: “At one moment during the negotiations, the U.S. representatives told the Taliban, either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.”
Describing the key theme of some of the several meetings that occurred in 2001, the intelligence analysts record that:
“Several meetings took place this year under the arbitration of Francesc Vendrell, personal representative of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, to discuss the situation in Afghanistan. Representatives of the U.S. government and Russia, and the six countries that border with Afghanistan, were present at these meetings. Sometimes, representatives of the Taliban also sat around the table.”
These meetings, called “6+2” due to the number of states involved (six Central Asian neighbours, plus the new partners Russia and the U.S.) have also been confirmed by the former Pakistani Minister for Foreign Affairs Naiz Naik. In an interview for French television in early November 2001, Naik testified that during one of these “6+2” meetings in Berlin in July 2001, the discussions focused on: “… the formation of a government of national unity. If the Taliban had accepted this coalition, they would have immediately received international economic aid. And the pipelines from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan would have come.” Naik clarified that the U.S. Representative at the meetings, Tom Simons, openly threatened both the Taliban and Pakistan.
“Simons said, ‘either the Taliban behave as they ought to, or Pakistan convinces them to do so, or we will use another option’. The words Simons used were ‘a military operation’.”
The shift in U.S. policy in Afghanistan from pro-Taliban to anti-Taliban was thus clearly rooted in America’s attempts to secure its strategic and economic interests. Since the Taliban no longer played a suitably subservient role, U.S. policy grew increasingly hostile to the faction. While establishing extensive war plans, the U.S. continued to conduct negotiations with the regime to ascertain whether it would conform to the latest requirements. Faced with the Taliban’s consistent refusals, the shift in policy against the regime - which occurred “without public discussion, without consultation with Congress” - was fully sealed in August, although it had already been largely established before then. The war plans for Afghanistan were by then firmly grounded. All that was then required was a trigger. As already noted, former Pakistani diplomat Naiz Naik testified that U.S. officials had informed him early on in the year 2001 of U.S. plans to invade Afghanistan by mid-October. Clearly, the U.S. had envisaged that the trigger providing a justification to implements its long-standing war plans would manifest some time between August and October: i.e. September. Indeed, even 4 years ago former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski recorded the necessity of “a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat” to justify a “sustained and directed American involvement” in the region.
III. U.S. Foreknowledge of the 11th September Attacks
There is considerable evidence demonstrating beyond all reasonable doubt that the United States and the Western powers had extensive foreknowledge of the 11th September attacks on New York and Washington, but despite this knowledge did nothing to prevent those attacks. According to the 1999 edition of the FAA’s annual report on Criminal Acts Against Aviation, a radical Islamic leader living in British exile warned in August 1998 that bin Laden “would bring down an airliner, or hijack an airliner to humiliate the United States.” The respected German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung, reported that: “U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies received warning signals at least three months ago that Middle Eastern terrorists were planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture”. The newspaper quoted anonymous German intelligence sources admitting that the primarily Anglo-American “Echelon spy network was being used to collect information about the terrorist threats, and that U.K. intelligence services apparently also had advance warning.” As far back as “six months ago western and near-east press services were receiving information that such attacks were being planned… Within the American intelligence community, the warnings were taken seriously and surveillance intensified.” It was further revealed by a United Press International (UPI) report by U.S. terrorism correspondent Richard Sale on Echelon’s monitoring of Bin Laden and other terrorist groups that:
“The targets of Echelon center on the penetration of the major components of most of the world’s telephone and telecommunications systems. This could cover conversations NSA targets. Also included are all the telexes carried over the world’s telecommunications networks, along with financial dealings: money transfers, airline destinations, stock information, data on demonstrations or international conferences and much more.”
Echelon’s effectiveness against Bin Laden’s network was further revealed in relation to a case against him in a U.S. District Court in Manhattan, illustrating that the National Security Agency was able to penetrate Bin Laden’s most secure communications. The case, Sale noted, “is based mainly on National Security Agency intercepts of phone calls between bin Laden and his operatives around the world - Afghanistan to London, from Kenya to the United States.” The technology had been used since at least 1995. Ben Venzke, Director of Intelligence and Special Projects for iDefense, a Virginia information warfare firm, is also quoted: “Since Bin Laden started to encrypt certain calls in 1995, why would they now be part of a court record? ‘Codes were broken,’ U.S. officials said, and Venzke added that you don’t use your highest levels of secure communications all the time. It’s too burdensome and it exposes it to other types of exploitation’.” The UPI report clarifies that much of the evidence in the case had been obtained in Echelon intercepts subsequent to the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa.
Indeed, Western intelligence had been aware of plans for such terrorist attacks as early as 1995. Both the FBI and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had detailed information about the possible use of hijack/suicide attacks by terrorists connected to Osama bin Laden. The New York Times reported that:
“In 1994, two jetliners were hijacked by people who wanted to crash them into buildings, one of them by an Islamic militant group. And the 2000 edition of the FAA’s annual report on Criminal Acts Against Aviation, published this year, said that although Osama bin Laden ‘is not known to have attacked civil aviation, he has both the motivation and the wherewithal to do so,’ adding, ‘Bin Laden’s anti-Western and anti-American attitudes make him and his followers a significant threat to civil aviation, particularly to U.S. civil aviation.’”
The Chicago Sun-Times elaborated that:
“The FBI had advance indications of plans to hijack U.S. airliners and use them as weapons, but neither acted on them nor distributed the intelligence to local police agencies. From the moment of the September 11th attacks, high-ranking federal officials insisted that the terrorists’ method of operation surprised them. Many stick to that story. Actually, elements of the hijacking plan were known to the FBI as early as 1995 and, if coupled with current information, might have uncovered the plot.”
Another respected German daily, Die Welt, reported that: “Western secret services knew as far back as 1995 that suspected terror mastermind Osama bin Laden planned to attack civilian sites using commercial passenger planes.” Quoting sources “close to western intelligence agencies”, the newspaper reported that: “The plan was discovered in January 1995 by Philippine police who were investigating a possible attack against Pope John Paul II on a visit to Manila…
“They found details of the plan in a computer seized in an apartment used by three men who were part of Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network. It provided for 11 planes to be exploded simultaneously by bombs placed on board, but also in an alternative form for several planes flying to the United States to be hijacked and flown into civilian targets. Among targets mentioned was the World Trade Center in New York, which was destroyed in the September 11 terror attacks in the United States that killed thousands.”
This plot “re-surfaced during the trial in New York in 1997 of Pakistani Ramsi Youssef, the mastermind of the attack on the World Trade Center in 1993... [The] U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and CIA would have known about the plan at the latest at this time.” Further detailed elaboration on this matter is provided by the Washington DC-based media watch group, Accuracy In Media (AIM), which has harshly criticised the media for largely ignoring it:
“In 1995, the CIA and the FBI learned that Osama bin Laden was planning to hijack U.S. airliners and use them as bombs to attack important targets in the U.S. This scheme was called Project Bojinka. It was discovered in the Philippines, where authorities arrested two of bin Laden’s agents, Ramzi Yousef and Abdul Hakim Murad. They were involved in planting a bomb on a Philippine airliner. Project Bojinka, which Philippine authorities found outlined on Abdul Murad’s laptop, called for planting bombs on eleven U.S. airliners and hijacking others and crashing them into targets like the CIA building…
“It required aviators like Japan’s kamikaze pilots who were willing to commit suicide. Bin Laden had no such pilots in 1995, but he set out to train young fanatics willing to die for him to fly airliners. Abdul Murad, whose laptop had revealed the plan, admitted that he was being trained for a suicide mission. Bin Laden began training pilots in Afghanistan with the help of an Afghan pilot and a Pakistani general.”
“Project Bojinka was known to the CIA and the FBI. It was described in court documents in the trial in New York of Ramzi Yousef and Abdul Murad for their participation in the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. Since the CIA had been mentioned as one of the targets in Project Bojinka, it should have had an especially strong interest in any evidence that bin Laden was preparing to carry it out. The most obvious indicator, and one that should have been watched most carefully, was the recruitment of young, dedicated followers to learn to fly American airliners. That would require keeping a close watch on flight schools where that training is given.”
The Washington Post further noted that: “Since 1996, the FBI had been developing evidence that international terrorists were using flight schools to learn to fly jumbo jets.” This evidence began to accumulate shortly after the FBI learned of Project Bojinka. Over the past two years, for instance, the CIA made the FBI aware of the names of about 100 suspected members of Bin Laden’s terrorist network thought to be headed to, or already in, the United States. An August 23rd cable specifically referred to Khalid Al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi, who were allegedly aboard the hijacked airplane that crashed into the Pentagon.
Echelon’s findings thus clearly served to provide categorical confirmation by 2001 that the plans first discovered in 1995 were about to be implemented in only a few months time. Indeed, Echelon’s findings were buttressed further by dire warnings from Israeli intelligence. The London Telegraph reported a few days after the 11th September attacks that: “Israeli intelligence officials say that they warned their counterparts in the United States last month that large-scale terrorist attacks on highly visible targets on the American mainland were imminent…
“The Telegraph has learnt that two senior experts with Mossad, the Israeli military intelligence service, were sent to Washington in August to alert the CIA and FBI to the existence of a cell of as many of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation… [They] linked the plot to Osama bin Laden.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin, a leading actor in the new international coalition against terrorism and a close ally of President Bush and Prime Minister Blair, informed interviewers on MS-NBC that the Russian government had warned the U.S. of imminent attacks on airports and government buildings in the strongest possible terms for several weeks prior to the 11th September attacks. According to a former CIA official, Russian intelligence had notified the U.S. government of the attacks and told them that 25 pilots had been specifically trained for the suicide missions. WorldNetDaily, the Internet news service of the U.S. non-profit Western Journalism Center, reports other pertinent revelations:
“The FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies also knew that two of the hijackers were in the country, according to the Los Angeles Times. They were on a terrorist watch list. But the airlines were not notified… The FBI had several terrorists under surveillance, according to the Oct. 1 issue of Newsweek. They intercepted communications just prior to Sept. 11 that suggested something very big was about to happen… Still, there were more clues. Zacarias Moussaoui was arrested after flight trainers tipped off the feds that he wanted to learn how to fly a 747 but wasn’t interested in takeoffs or landings. Zacarias was traveling on a French passport. When contacted, the French government reported that he was a suspected terrorist [linked to Osama Bin Laden].”
Reuters reported in relation to Zacarias that: “The FBI arrested an Islamic militant in Boston last month and received French intelligence reports linking him to Saudi-born dissident Osama Bin Laden but apparently did not act on them, a French radio station said on Thursday…
“Europe 1 radio reported that U.S. police arrested a man with dual French and Algerian nationality who had several passports, technical information on Boeing aircraft and flight manuals. The man had been taking flying lessons, it added. Asked for information by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, French security services provided a dossier clearly identifying him as an Islamic militant working with bin Laden.”
Indeed, the U.S. government actively prevented a further investigation from being conducted. The government’s Justice Department plus top FBI officials blocked an FBI request for a national security warrant to search Zacarias’ computer, claiming that FBI agents lacked sufficient information to justify the warrant.
Further indication of U.S./Western foreknowledge of attacks can be found from analysis of financial transactions before 11th September. Only three trading days before the 11th September, shares of United Airlines - the company whose planes were hijacked in the attacks on New York and Washington - were purchased in masses by as yet unknown investors, and then suddenly sold in bulk making millions of dollars in profit. These transactions indicate that the investors had foreknowledge of an event that was about to occur within a few days, drastically jeopardising the price of those shares, thus necessitating that they be sold immediately before the drop in price. ‘Put options’ amount to a bet that a share will drop in price, while ‘call options’ amount to the opposite. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that:
“Investors have yet to collect more than $2.5 million in profits they made trading options in the stock of United Airlines before the Sept. 11, terrorist attacks, according to a source familiar with the trades and market data. The uncollected money raises suspicions that the investors - whose identities and nationalities have not been made public - had advance knowledge of the strikes.
“… October series options for UAL Corp. were purchased in highly unusual volumes three trading days before the terrorist attacks for a total outlay of $2,070; investors bought the option contracts, each representing 100 shares, for 90 cents each [representing 230,000 shares]. Those options are now selling at more than $12 each. There are still 2,313 so-called ‘put’ options outstanding [representing 231,300 shares valued at $2.77 million] according to the Options Clearinghouse Corp.
“…The source familiar with the United trades identified Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown, the American investment banking arm of German giant Deutsche Bank, as the investment bank used to purchase at least some of these options…”
But the United Airlines case was not the only dubious financial transaction indicating in the Chronicle’s words, “advanced knowledge of the strikes.” The Israeli Herzliyya International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism documented the following transactions related to 11th September, involving American Airlines - whose planes were also used in the attacks - and other companies with offices in the Twin Towers:
“Between September 6 and 7, the Chicago Board Options Exchange saw purchases of 4,744 put options on United Airlines, but only 396 call options… Assuming that 4,000 of the options were bought by people with advance knowledge of the imminent attacks, these ‘insiders’ would have profited by almost $5 million.
“On September 10, 4,516 put options on American Airlines were bought on the Chicago exchange, compared to only 748 calls. Again, there was no news at that point to justify this imbalance;… Again, assuming that 4,000 of these options trades represent ‘insiders’, they would represent a gain of about $4 million [the above levels of put options were more than six times higher than normal]
“No similar trading in other airlines occurred on the Chicago exchange in the days immediately preceding Black Tuesday.
“Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co., which occupied 22 floors of the World Trade Center, saw 2,157 of its October $45 put options bought in the three trading days before Black Tuesday; this compares to an average of 27 contracts per day before September 6. Morgan Stanley’s share price fell from $48.90 to $42.50 in the aftermath of the attacks. Assuming that 2,000 of these options contracts were bought based upon knowledge of the approaching attacks, their purchasers could have profited by at least $1.2 million.
“Merrill Lynch & Co., with headquarters near the Twin Towers, saw 12,215 October $45 put options bought in the four trading days before the attacks; the previous average volume in those shares had been 252 contracts per day [a dramatic increase of 1200%]. When trading resumed, Merrill’s shares fell from $46.88 to $41.50; assuming that 11,000 option contracts were bought by ‘insiders’, their profit would have been about $5.5 million.
“European regulators are examining trades in Germany’s Munich Re, Switzerland’s Swiss Re, and AXA of France, all major reinsurers with exposure to the Black Tuesday disaster [AXA also owns more than 25% of American Airlines stock].”
These multiple, massive and unprecedented financial transactions point unequivocally to the fact that the investors behind these trades were speculating in anticipation of a mid-September 2001 catastrophe that would involve both United Airlines and American Airlines, and offices in the Twin Towers, thus drastically reducing their share price - a clear demonstration of their foreknowledge or involvement in the 11th September attacks. But as noted by U.S. investigative journalist and former Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) narcotics detective Michael C. Ruppert, who rose to fame for uncovering the CIA role in drug-running operations in the 1980s and who has been interviewed by both the House and the Senate due to his expertise on CIA covert operations: “It is well documented that the CIA has long monitored such trades - in real time - as potential warnings of terrorist attacks and other economic moves contrary to U.S. interests.” The UPI also reported that the U.S.-sponsored ECHELON intelligence network closely monitors stock trading. Elaborating, he observes that:
“It has been documented that the CIA, the Israeli Mossad and many other intelligence agencies monitor stock trading in real time using highly advanced programs reported to be descended from Promis software. This is to alert national intelligence services of just such kinds of attacks. Promis was reported, as recently as June, 2001 to be in Osama bin Laden’s possession and, as a result of recent stories by FOX, both the FBI and the Justice Department have confirmed its use for U.S. intelligence gathering through at least this summer. This would confirm that CIA had additional advance warning of imminent attacks.”
Ruppert further describes the CIA’s tracking of financial transactions as follows:
“One of the primary functions of the Central Intelligence Agency by virtue of its long and very close history of relationships with Wall Street… the point where the current executive vice president of the New York Stock Exchange is a retired CIA general counsel, has had a mandate to track, monitor, all financial markets worldwide, to look for anomalous trades, indicative of either economic warfare, or insider currency trading or speculation which might affect the U.S. Treasury, or, as in the case of the September 11 attacks, to look for trades which indicated foreknowledge of attacks like we saw.
“One of the vehicles that they use to do this is a software called Promis software, which was developed in the 1980s, actually 1979, by Bill Hamilton and a firm called INSLAW, in [the] Washington D.C. area. And Promis is very unique for two reasons: first of all, it had the ability to integrate a wide range of databases using different computer languages and to make them all into one readable format. And secondly, in the years since, Promis has been mated with artificial intelligence to even predict moves in markets and to detect trades that are anomalous, as a result of those projections.
“So, as recently as last year, I met with members of the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] national security staff, who came down to Los Angeles where I am, who are investigating stolen applications of Promis software and its applications, and we reconfirmed at that time that, not only the U.S., but Israel, Canada, and many other countries use Promis-like software to track real-time trades in the stock markets to warn them of these events.”
However, he clarifies that such software is not necessary for intelligence agencies to note the ominous implications of the trades going on shortly before 11th September:
“The key evidence… was the trades themselves, the so-called put options and the short selling of American Airlines, United Airlines, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and a couple of reinsurance companies in Europe, which are just really off the maps. You wouldn’t need software to look at these trades and say, ‘Oh my God, this is directly connected to World Trade Center.’
“Herzliyah, International Policy Institute in Israel which tracks counter-terrorism, also tracks financial trading. That’s a clear cut sign about how closely the two are related. And their reports are very clear that between September 6 and 7 the Chicago Board Options Exchange, CBOE, saw purchases of 4,744 put options on UAL, but only 396 call options. On September 10, the day before the attacks, 4,516 put options were placed on American Airlines, against only 748 calls, calls being bets that the stock will go up, puts being that the stock will go down. No similar trading in any other airlines occurred on the Chicago Exchange in the days immediately preceding Black Tuesday. That means that someone had advance knowledge that only the stocks of these two airlines would be adversely impacted. Had it just been an industry-wide slump, then you would have seen the same kind of activity on every airline, not just these two. But what is also very anomalous, very out of whack here, is the fact that the number of put options placed, that the level of these trades was up by 1,200 percent in the three days prior to the World Trade Center attacks.”
Ruppert has also provided evidence that the relationship between Wall Street and the CIA is akin to a ‘revolving door’. For instance, one of the key firms involved in th
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