Center for Research on Globalization, Canada
July 29 2005
9/11 in Historical Perspective: Flawed Assumptions
Deep Politics: Drugs, Oil, Covert Operations and Terrorism, A
briefing for Congressional staff
by Peter Dale Scott
The American people have been seriously misled about the origins of
the al Qaeda movement blamed for the 9/11 attacks, just as they have
been seriously misled about the reasons for America’s invasion of
Iraq.
The truth is that for at least two decades the United States has
engaged in energetic covert programs to secure U.S. control over the
Persian Gulf, and also to open up Central Asia for development by
U.S. oil companies. Americans were eager to gain access to the
petroleum reserves of the Caspian Basin, which at that time were
still estimated to be `the largest known reserves of unexploited fuel
in the planet.'[1]
To this end, time after time, U.S. covert operations in the region
have used so-called `Arab Afghan’ warriors as assets, the jihadis
whom we loosely link with the name and leadership of al Qaeda.[2] In
country after country these `Arab Afghans’ have been involved in
trafficking Afghan heroin.
America’s sponsorship of drug-trafficking Muslim warriors, including
those now in Al Qaeda, dates back to the Afghan War of 1979-89,
sponsored in part by the CIA’s links to the drug-laundering Bank of
Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).[3] It was part of CIA
Director Casey’s strategy for launching covert operations over and
above those approved and financed by a Democratic-controlled
Congress.
The most conspicuous example of this alliance with drug-traffickers
in the 1980s was the Contra support operation. Here again foreign
money and drug profits filled the gap after Congress denied funds
through the so-called Boland amendments; in this case government
funds were used to lie about the Contras to the American people.[4]
This was followed by a massive cover-up, in which a dubious role was
played by then-Congressman Lee Hamilton, later of the 9/11
Commission.[5]
The lying continues. The 9/11 Commission Report assures Americans
that `Bin Ladin and his comrades had their own sources of support and
training, and they received little or no assistance from the United
States.'[6] This misleading statement fails to consider that:
1) Al Qaeda elements received considerable indirect U.S. Government
assistance, first in Afghanistan until 1992, and thereafter in other
countries such as Azerbaijan (1992-95). Before 1992, for example, the
Afghan leader Jallaladin Haqqani organized and hosted the Arab Afghan
volunteers known later as al Qaeda; and Haqqani `received bags of
money each month from the [CIA] station in Islamabad.'[7] The Arab
Afghans were also trained in urban terrorism, including car bombings,
by Pakistani ISI operatives who were in turn trained by the CIA.[8]
2) Key members of the network which became al Qaeda, such as Sheikh
Omar Abdel Rahman, Ali Mohamed, Mohamed Jamal Khalifa, and lead
hijacker Mohammed Atta, were granted visas to enter the United
States, despite being suspected of terrorism.[9] Al Qaeda foot
soldiers were also admitted to the United States for training under a
special visa program.[10]
3) At Fort Belvoir, Virginia, an al Qaeda operative was given a list
of Muslim candidates for al Qaeda’s jihad.[11]
4) When al Qaeda personnel were trained in the United States by a key
al Qaeda operative, Sergeant Ali Mohamed of the U.S. Army Special
Forces, Mohamed was still on the U.S. Army payroll.[12]
5) Repeatedly al Qaeda terrorists were protected by FBI officials
from investigation and prosecution.[13]
In part America’s limited covert assistance to al Qaeda after 1989
was in order not to offend al Qaeda’s two primary supporters which
America needed as allies: the intelligence networks of Saudi Arabia
and Pakistan. But unquestionably the entry of United States oil
companies into oil-rich Azerbaijan was achieved with the assistance
of a U.S.-organized covert program using `Arab Afghan’ operatives
associated with bin Laden. Oil was the driving force of U.S.
involvement in Central and South Asia, and oil led to U.S.
coexistence with both al Qaeda and the world-dominating Afghan heroin
trade.
This brings us to another extraordinary distortion in the 9/11
Report:
While the drug trade was a source of income for the Taliban, it did
not serve the same purpose for al Qaeda, and there is no reliable
evidence that Bin Ladin was involved in or made his money through
drug trafficking.[14]
That drug-trafficking does support al Qaeda-connected operations has
been energetically asserted by the governments of Great Britain and
many other European countries, as well as the head of the U.S.
Congressional Task Force on Terrorism. Heroin-trafficking has been a
source of income in particular for al Qaeda-related warriors in
Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Chechnya, and Kosovo. Most
recently it has supported terrorist attacks in the Netherlands and
Spain.
U.S. support for al Qaeda elements, particularly in Azerbaijan and
Kosovo, has increased dramatically the flow of heroin to Western
Europe and the United States.
The Example of Azerbaijan
In the former Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan, Arab Afghans clearly
assisted this effort of U.S. oil companies to penetrate the region.
In 1991-92, Richard Secord, Heinie Aderholt, and Ed Dearborn, three
veterans of U.S. operations in Laos and Iran-Contra, turned up in
Baku under the cover of an oil company, MEGA Oil.[15] MEGA never did
find oil, but did contribute materially to the removal of Azerbaijan
from the sphere of post-Soviet Russian influence.
As MEGA operatives in Azerbaijan, Secord, Aderholt, Dearborn, and
their men engaged in military training, passed `brown bags filled
with cash’ to members of the government, and above all set up an
airline on the model of Air America which soon was picking up
hundreds of Mujahideen mercenaries in Afghanistan.[16] (Secord and
Aderholt claim to have left Baku before the Mujahideen arrived.)
Meanwhile, Mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Afghanistan, who
at the time was still allied with bin Laden, was `observed recruiting
Afghan mercenaries [i.e. Arab Afghans] to fight in Azerbaijan against
Armenia and its Russian allies.'[17] At this time, heroin flooded
from Afghanistan through Baku into Chechnya, Russia, and even North
America.[18] It is difficult to believe that MEGA’s airline (so much
like Air America) did not become involved.[19]
The triple pattern of drugs, oil, and al Qaeda was seen again in
Kosovo in 1998, where the Al-Qaeda-backed Islamist jihadis of the
Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) received overt American assistance from
the U.S. Government.[20] Though unmentioned in mainstream books on
the war, both the al Qaeda and drug backgrounds of the KLA are
recognized by experts and to my knowledge never contested by
them.[21]
Though the origins of the Kosovo tragedy were rooted in local
enmities, oil and drugs were prominent in the outcome. At the time
critics charged that US oil interests were interested in building a
trans-Balkan pipeline with US Army protection; although initially
ridiculed, these critics were eventually proven correct.[22] BBC News
announced in December 2004 that a $1.2 billion pipeline, south of a
huge new U.S. Army base in Kosovo, has been given a go-ahead by the
governments of Albania, Bulgaria, and Macedonia.[23] Meanwhile by
2000, according to DEA statistics, Afghan heroin accounted for almost
20 percent of the heroin seized in the United States — nearly double
the percentage taken four years earlier. Much of it is now
distributed by Kosovar Albanians.[24]
Sergeant Ali Mohamed and U.S. Intelligence Links to the Al Qaeda
Leadership
The Report describes Ali Mohamed as `a former Egyptian army officer
who had moved to the United States in the mid-1980s, enlisted in the
U.S. Army, and become an instructor at Fort Bragg,’ as well as
helping to plan the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya (68). In
fact Ali Mohamed was an important al Qaeda agent who, as the 9/11
Commission was told, “trained most of al Qaeda’s top leadership,”
including “persons who would later carry out the 1993 World Trade
Center bombing.”[25] But the person telling the 9/11 Commission this,
U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald, misrepresented Ali Mohamed’s FBI
relationship. He told the Commission that, “From 1994 until his
arrest in 1998, [Mohamed] lived as an American citizen in California,
applying for jobs as an FBI translator and working as a security
guard for a defense contractor.”[26]
Ali Mohamed was not just an FBI job applicant. Unquestionably he was
an FBI informant, from at least 1993 and maybe 1989.[27] And almost
certainly he was something more. A veteran of the CIA-trained
bodyguards of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, he was able, despite
being on a State Department Watch List, to come to America around
1984, on what an FBI consultant has called `a visa program controlled
by the CIA’, and obtain a job, first as a security officer, then with
U.S. Special Forces.[28] In 1988 he took a lengthy leave of absence
from the U.S. Army and went to fight in Afghanistan, where he met
with Ayman al-Zawahiri (later bin Laden’s chief deputy in al Qaeda)
and the `Arab Afghan’ leadership.[29] Despite this, he was able to
receive an Honorable Discharge one year later, at which point he
established close contact with bin Laden in Afghanistan.
Ali Mohamed clearly enjoyed U.S. protection: in 1993, when detained
by the RCMP in Canada, a single phone call to the U.S. secured his
release. This enabled him to play a role, in the same year, in
planning the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya in 1998.[30]
Congress should determine the true relationship of the U.S.
Government to Ali Mohamed, who was close to bin Laden and above all
Zawahiri, who has been called the `main player’ in 9/11.[31]
(Al-Zawahiri is often described as the more sophisticated mentor of
the younger bin Laden.)[32] In particular Congress should determine
why Patrick Fitzgerald chose to mislead the American people about
Mohamed’s FBI status.
In short, the al Qaeda terror network accused of the 9/11 attacks was
supported and expanded by U.S. intelligence programs and covert
operations, both during and after the Soviet Afghan War. Congress
should rethink their decision to grant still greater powers and
budget to the agencies responsible for fostering this enemy in the
first place.
Sane voices clamor from the Muslim world that the best answer to
terrorism is not war but justice. We should listen to them. By using
its energies to reduce the injustices tormenting Islam, the United
States will do more to diminish terrorism than by creating any number
of new directorates in Washington.
——————————————————————————–
Notes
[1] Michael Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in
Afghanistan (London: Pluto Press, 2001), 115. Exploration in the
1990s has considerably downgraded these estimates.
[2] Western governments and media apply the term `al Qaeda’ to the
whole `network of co-opted groups’ who have at some point accepted
leadership, training and financing from bin Laden (Jason Burke,
Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam [London: I.B. Tauris,
2004], 7-8). From a Muslim perceptive, the term `Al Qaeda’ is clumsy,
and has led to the targeting of a number of Islamist groups opposed
to bin Laden’s tactics. See Montasser al-Zayyat, The Road to
Al-Qaeda: The Story of Bin Lden’s Right-Hand Man [London: Pluto
Press, 2004], 100, etc.).
[3] Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, False Profits: The Inside Story of
BCCI, the World’s Most Corrupt Financial Empire (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1992), 132; Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War (Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 42.
[4] Robert Parry, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from
Watergate to Iraq (Arlington, VA: Media Consortium, 2004), 213-28,
235-39, 245-47.
[5] For Hamilton’s role on the conspiratorial whitewashing of contra
drug activities, see Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane
Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert
Operations in the Reagan Era (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 179-81.
At least eight men in the current Bush Administration were criticized
for their roles in Iran-Contra, including two (Poindexter and
Abrams)who were convicted.
[6] 9/11 Commission Report, 56.
[7] Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA,
Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10,
2001 (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 157 (hosted); George Crile,
Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert
Operation in History (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003), 521
(bags).
[8] George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War (New York: Atlantic Monthly
Press, 2003), 335 (car bombings); Steve Coll, Washington Post,
7/19/92 (ISI/CIA).
[9] Rahman was issued two visas, one of them `by a CIA officer
working undercover in the consular section of the American embassy in
Sudan’ (Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of
Osama bin Laden [New York: Free Press, 2001], 67; cf. 218 (Khalifa).
FBI consultant Paul Williams writes that Mohamed `settled in America
on a visa program controlled by the CIA’ ((Paul L. Williams, Al
Qaeda: Brotherhood of Terror [[Upper Saddle River, NJ]: Alpha/
Pearson Education, 2002], 117). Others allegedly admitted despite
being on the State Department watch list include Mohammed Atta and
possibly Ayman al-Zawahiri (Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Truth:
9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism [Northampton, MA:
Olive Branch Press, 2005], 205, 46).
[10] Former State Department officer Michael Springmann, BBC 2,
11/6/01; Ahmed, War on Truth, 10.
[11] US v.. Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman et al, Federal Court, SDNY,
Testimony of Rodney Hampton-El, 8/3/95.
[12] Peter Lance, Cover Up: What the Government Is Still Hiding
about the War on Terror [New York: Regan Books/ HarperCollins, 2004],
25); Andrew Marshall, Independent, 11/1/98,
“Mr.
Mohamed, it is clear from his record, was working for the U.S.
government at the time he provided the training: he was a Green
Beret, part of America’s Special Forces…. A confidential CIA internal
survey concluded that it was ‘partly culpable’ for the World Trade
Centre bomb, according to reports at the time.” Williams writes that
Mohamed’s `primary task as a U.S. soldier was to train Muslims to
fight the Soviets in Afghanistan’ (Williams, Al Qaeda: Brotherhood of
Terror. 117). Cf. 9/11 Commission Report, 68.
[13] The most prominent example was the blocking by David Frasca at
FBI HQ of the investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui under the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Frasca also failed to act on
the July 2001 request from the Phoenix FBI office urging a systematic
review of Muslim students at U.S. flight schools (Ahmed, War on
Truth, 251-57).
[14] 9/11 Commission Report, 171. This statement is one-sided and
misleading. But so is the opposite claim of Yossef Bodansky: `The
annual income of the Taliban from the drug trade is estimated at $8
billion. Bin Laden administers and manages these funds – laundering
them through the Russian mafia…’ (Bodansky, Bin Laden, 315).
[15] Thomas Goltz, Azerbaijan Diary: A Rogue Reporter’s Adventures in
an Oil-Rich, War-Torn, Post-Soviet Republic (Armonk, NY: M. E.
Sharpe, 1999), 272-75. A fourth operative in MEGA Oil, Gary Best, was
also a veteran of North’s Contra support effort. For more on General
Secord’s and Major Aderholt’s role as part of Ted Shackley’s team of
off-loaded CIA assets and capabilities, see Marshall, Scott, and
Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection, 26-30, 36-42, 197-98.
[16] Goltz, Azerbaijan Diary, 272-75; Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil,
and War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 7. As part of the
airline operation, Azeri pilots were trained in Texas. Dearborn had
previously helped Secord advise and train the fledgling Contra air
force (Marshall, Scott, and Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection, 197).
Richard Secord was allegedly attempting also to sell Israeli arms,
with the assistance of Israeli agent David Kimche, another associate
of Oliver North. See Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 7, 8, 20. Whether
the Americans were aware of it or not, the al Qaeda presence in Baku
soon expanded to include assistance for moving jihadis onwards into
Dagestan and Chechnya.
[17] Cooley, Unholy Wars, 180; Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 7. These
important developments were barely noticed in the U.S. press, but a
Washington Post article did belatedly note that a group of American
men who wore “big cowboy hats and big cowboy boots” had arrived in
Azerbaijan as military trainers for its army, followed in 1993 by
`more than 1,000 guerrilla fighters from Afghanistan’s radical prime
minister, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.’ (Washington Post, 4/21/94). The Azeri
`Afghan Brigade’ was formally dissolved in 1994, after which it
focused more on sabotage and terrorism (Cooley, Unholy Wars, 181).
[18] Cooley, Unholy Wars, 176.
[19] As the 9/11Commission Report notes (58), the bin Laden
organization established an NGO in Baku, which became a base for
terrorism elsewhere. It also became a transshipment point for Afghan
heroin to the Chechen mafia, whose branches `extended not only to the
London arms market, but also throughout continental Europe and North
America (Cooley, Unholy Wars, 176).
[20] See Lewis Mackenzie (former UN commander in Bosnia), `We Bombed
the Wrong Side?’ National Post, 4/6/04: `Those of us who warned that
the West was being sucked in on the side of an extremist, militant,
Kosovo-Albanian independence movement were dismissed as appeasers.
The fact that the lead organization spearheading the fight for
independence, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), was universally
designated a terrorist organization and known to be receiving support
from Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda was conveniently ignored….The Kosovar
Albanians played us like a Stradivarius violin. We have subsidized
and indirectly supported their violent campaign for an ethnically
pure Kosovo. We have never blamed them for being the perpetrators of
the violence in the early 1990s, and we continue to portray them as
the designated victim today, in spite of evidence to the contrary.
When they achieve independence with the help of our tax dollars
combined with those of bin Laden and al-Qaeda, just consider the
message of encouragement this sends to other terrorist-supported
independence movements around the world.” Cf. John Pilger, New
Statesman, 12/13/04.
[21] “Many members of the Kosovo Liberation Army were sent for
training in terrorist camps in Afghanistan,’ said James Bissett,
former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia and an expert on the
Balkans. `Milosevic is right. There is no question of their
participation in conflicts in the Balkans. It is very well
documented’ (National Post, 3/15/02,
).
Cf. Frank Ciluffo of the Globalized Organized Crime Program, in
testimony presented to the House of Representatives Judicial
Committee (12/13/00): “What was largely hidden from public view was
the fact that the KLA raise part of their funds from the sale of
narcotics.’ Contrast e.g. Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War : Kosovo and
Beyond (New York: Metropolitan/ Henry Holt, 2000), 13: `the KLA, at
first a small band of poorly trained and amateurish gunmen.’ For the
al Qaeda background to the UCK and its involvement in
heroin-trafficking, see also Marcia Christoff Kurop, `Al Qaeda´s
Balkan Links,’ Wall Street Journal Europe, 11/1/01. `According to
Michel Koutouzis, the DEA’s website once contained a section
detailing Kosovar trafficking, but a week before the U.S.-led
bombings began, the section disappeared’ (Peter Klebnikov, `Heroin
Heroes,’ Mother Jones, January/February 2000,
).
[22] George Monbiot, Guardian, 2/15/01.
[23] BBC News, 12/28/04. Those who charged that such a pipeline was
projected were initially mocked but gradually vindicated (Guardian,
2/15/01; Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 34). See also Marjorie Cohn,
`Nato Bombing of Kosovo: Humanitarian Intervention or Crime against
Humanity?’ International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, March
2002, 79-106.
[24] Klebnikov, `Heroin Heroes,’ Mother Jones, January/February 2000.
[25] Cf. 9/11 Commission Report, 68.
[26] Patrick Fitzgerald, Testimony before 9/11 Commission, June 16,
2004, , emphasis
added.
[27] Fitzgerald must have known he was dissembling. Even the
mainstream account by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon (The Age of
Sacred Terror [New York: Random House, 2002], 236) records that `When
Mohamed was summoned back from Africa in 1993 [sic, Mohamed in his
confession says 1994] to be interviewed by the FBI in connection with
the case against Sheikh Rahman and his coconspirators, he convinced
the agents that he could be useful to them as an informant.’ Cf.
Lawrence Wright, New Yorker, 9/16/02: `In 1989…Mohamed talked to an
F.B.I. agent in California and provided American intelligence with
its first inside look at Al Qaeda.’ Larry C. Johnson, a former State
Department and CIA official, faulted the FBI publicly for using
Mohamed as an informant, when it should have recognized that the man
was a high-ranking terrorist plotting against the United States. In
Johnson’s words, “It’s possible that the FBI thought they had control
of him and were trying to use him, but what’s clear is that they did
not have control’ (San Francisco Chronicle, 11/04/01).
[28] Lance, 1000 Years, 30 (Watch List); Williams, Al Qaeda:
Brotherhood of Terror, 117 (visa program); Bergen, Holy War, Inc.,
128 (security officer).
[29] Yossef Bodansky, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America
(New York: Random House/Prima, 2001), 106; cf. Richard H. Shultz, Jr.
and Ruth Margolies Beitler, Middle East Review of International
Affairs, June 2004,
In 1995
Mohamed accompanied Ayman al-Zawahiri of Islamic Jihad, already
effectively merged with al-Qaeda, on a secret fund-raising trip
through America (Bodansky, Bin Laden, 105; Peter L. Bergen, Holy War,
Inc. [New York: Free Press, 2001], 201).
[30] Cf. 9/11 Commission Report, 68. The Globe and Mail later
concluded that Mohamed “was working with U.S. counter-terrorist
agents, playing a double or triple game, when he was questioned in
1993′ (Globe and Mail, 11/22/01,
).
[31] al-Zayyat, The Road to Al-Qaeda, 98: `I am convinced that
[Zawahiri] and not bin Laden is the main player in these events.’ In
contrast the 9/11 Commission Report (151) assigns no role to Zawahiri
in the 9/11 plot. Was Mohamed in touch with Zawahiri at this time?
The San Francisco Chronicle has written that `until his arrest in
1998 [by which time the 9/11 plot was already under way], Mohamed
shuttled between California, Afghanistan, Kenya, Somalia and at least
a dozen other countries’ (San Francisco Chronicle, 10/21/01).
[32] Burke, Al-Qaeda, 150.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress