Chapter 17: Conclusions and Next Steps

This book has shown that there are powerful people who had the means, motive and opportunity to accomplish the crimes of 9/11. Nineteen suspects were reviewed and reasons to investigate or bring charges against them were emphasized in each case. All of these men were linked in one way or another to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who were in perfect position on 9/11 to coordinate the attacks.

Cheney led the campaign of lies behind the first Gulf War and twelve years later he and Rumsfeld led a more intensive campaign of lies to start the disastrous Iraq War. In between these deceptions were the crimes of 9/11, in which Cheney and Rumsfeld were found to be central characters in a series of inexplicable failures to defend the nation. Therefore, this discussion of alternate 9/11 suspects began with a review of the histories of an “alternate OBL and KSM” — Dick and Don — in order to set the stage.

Frank Carlucci and Richard Armitage, deep state operatives who were old colleagues of Cheney and Rumsfeld, were examined. It was shown that both of these men had links to 9/11 and both were in positions to continue the illegal activities for which they had become known. Carlucci was meeting with a member of the Bin Laden family on 9/11, and had been the employer of Stratesec COO Barry McDaniel. Armitage was among those in the secure video teleconference who failed to defend the nation that morning, and his State Department had issued visas to the alleged hijackers.

The first of the major aspects of 9/11 that was left unaddressed by the official investigations was the failure of U.S. authorities to stop the attacks. Recalling those unexplained aspects as given in Chapter 1:

1. The many opportunities for U.S. intelligence agencies to track down and capture the alleged hijackers should have resulted in the attacks being stopped before they happened.

In Chapters 4 and 5, two U.S. intelligence community leaders were reviewed with regard to the lack of action taken in response to terrorism. That discussion began with Louis Freeh, who was Director of the FBI from 1993 to June 2001.

Under Freeh, the FBI failed miserably at preventing terrorism when preventing terrorism was the Bureau’s primary goal. The actions of FBI management suggest that it was facilitating and covering-up acts of terrorism throughout the time that Freeh was the Bureau’s director. Additionally, the FBI took extraordinary measures to hide evidence related to the 9/11 attacks and was remarkably uncooperative with the investigations.  

CIA Director George Tenet was responsible for an agency that hyped the threat of terrorism yet failed to perform its duties related to counterterrorism. Overall the evidence suggests that, as with Louis Freeh and the FBI, some of those failures were intentional. Concerns that have never been addressed include that Tenet and Freeh had developed secret paths of communication with certain Saudi authorities and that the two men appeared to have disrupted plans to capture and investigate al Qaeda suspects. Ten specific areas of inquiry for an ongoing investigation into George Tenet’s 9/11-related activities were given.

In Chapter 6, “Counterterrorism Czar” Richard Clarke was shown to be a close associate of the owners of the old terrorism funding network BCCI. As a good friend of the United Arab Emirates, Clarke personally thwarted at least two U.S. plans to capture or kill Osama bin Laden in the years just before 9/11. Moreover, he was a member of the secret Continuity of Government (COG) planning group, which implemented its plans on 9/11. Along with Clarke, the members of the COG group included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George H.W. Bush, Boeing director Kenneth Duberstein, and former CIA director James Woolsey.

Additionally, Clarke appears to have been deceptive with regard to a number of issues before and after 9/11. He was responsible for a May 2001 email alleging that Abu Zubaydah, whom Clarke called one of “Al Qaeda’s top operational managers,” was planning major terrorist plots.[1] It was later learned that none of this could have been true because Zubaydah was never associated with al Qaeda in any way.

In his book, Clarke attempted to give an alibi for the mysterious absence of Donald Rumsfeld on the morning of 9/11. Suggesting that Rumsfeld was present in the secure video teleconference during and after the Pentagon attack, Clarke gave the impression that Rumsfeld only left to move from one conference room to another.[2] The truth, however, was that Rumsfeld went directly out to the crash site and could not be contacted for approximately 30 minutes.[3]

Chapter 7 began considering the unanswered questions related to the U.S. national air defenses including the hijacking prevention systems. That is,

2. The four planes should not have been hijacked because the systems in place to prevent hijackings should have been effective.

Problems that contributed to the failure of the hijacking prevention systems centered on the FAA’s hijack coordinator, Michael Canavan. Just months before 9/11, Canavan had written an internal FAA memorandum that initiated a new policy of more lax fines for airlines and airports that had security problems. The memo suggested that, if the airlines or airports had a written plan to fix the problem, fines were not needed. This memo was repeatedly cited as a cause of failure to fix security problems in the months leading up to 9/11.

Additionally, according to Canavan’s Red Team leader Bogdan Dzakovic, in 2001 the FAA was grossly negligent with regard to the inspections being done. As discussed in Chapter 7, Dzakovic said that FAA officials knew something like 9/11 was going to happen and they covered-up the related evidence.

Features of airport security were discussed in Chapter 13 as well, concerning Barry McDaniel and Stratesec. With regard to Washington’s Dulles Airport, Stratesec not only had access to sensitive areas, but also worked on the video system that produced the evidence to implicate the alleged hijackers. As TIME magazine reported, early investigators suspected that the alleged hijackers may have had accomplices in the secure areas of airports. Apart from Stratesec, other companies like Securicor (Argenbright Security), Globe Aviation Services, and ICTS International (Huntleigh USA), all of which provided passenger screening services at the airports, were touched on as well.

Two policy changes enacted by the U.S. defense department also impacted the ability of the air defenses to respond. The first was a July 1997 order that requests for assistance with hijackings be approved by the Secretary of Defense.[4] A June 2001 update to this order included an exception for emergencies but still left the power in Rumsfeld’s hands with regard to “potentially lethal assistance.”[5] That is, to shoot down a commercial airliner, orders had to come through the secretary of defense (or the president). Therefore, the fact that both Bush and Rumsfeld were out of the loop in the critical moments meant that the normal hijacking response procedures could not be completed. 

Once it was known that multiple hijackings were in progress, the response from the nation’s leadership should have been swift. In other words,

3. The U.S. chain of command should have responded to the attacks immediately but it did not.

As seen in Chapter 8, Cheney now says that he was in charge on 9/11, and that he basically told the president to stay away from Washington. Cheney’s former protégé, Duane Andrews, was the country’s top expert on the defense communications systems that failed that day. One such failed system ensured that the president had difficulty reaching Rumsfeld and others for most of the morning on 9/11.

The U.S. Secret Service’s failures to protect the president were also relevant to the failed chain of command. Instead of simply being failures, the related anomalies could alternatively be explained as the intentional removal of the president from the scenarios in which he could have done something in response or been criticized for not doing so.

The other half of the national command authority, DOD secretary Donald Rumsfeld, was also missing in action. Instead of rushing to defend the United States as would be expected of the secretary of defense, Rumsfeld remained in meetings with the CIA and others and made several startling predictions that reflected what was happening. He then wandered out to the lawn and parking lot and was out of reach for approximately 30 minutes at the height of the attacks. The evidence suggests that Rumsfeld was aware of the attack plan and was removing himself from the situations in which he would be expected to lead the response.

4. The U.S. national air defenses should have responded effectively and some, if not all, of the hijacked aircraft should have been intercepted by military jets.

The failure of the U.S. air defenses on 9/11 can be traced to several people, three of whom were closely examined in this book. These people were the leaders of the FAA and NORAD.

Despite being given plenty of notice about the four planes hijacked on 9/11, FAA headquarters did not request military assistance to ensure the planes were intercepted before they crashed. The 9/11 Commission attributes this to a string of gross failures in communication between the FAA and the military on 9/11. However, the report places no blame on any of the people who were involved and doesn’t even mention the one person who was most important to this chain of communications.

That one person was the FAA’s hijack coordinator, Michael Canavan. A career special operations commander, Canavan had come to the civilian FAA job only nine months before 9/11 and would leave only one month after the attacks. One of the first things Canavan did in that job was lead and participate in exercises that, according to the FAA officer involved, were “pretty damn close to the 9/11 plot.”[6]

With regard to the communication failures, Canavan offered the unsolicited excuse that he was absent during the morning hours of 9/11, in Puerto Rico. The 9/11 Commission did not pursue this excuse nor did it ask who was filling the critical hijack coordinator role in Canavan’s absence.

Another of the most important people involved was Benedict Sliney, who had, just before 9/11, left a lucrative law career defending Wall Street financiers to return to work as a specialist at the FAA. As the FAA’s national operations manager, 9/11 was his first day on the job.

Investigation of NORAD Commander Ralph Eberhart would almost certainly reveal more of what the public needs to know. As stated in Chapter 8, military exercises were occurring on 9/11 under Eberhart’s command. Those exercises mimicked the attacks and caused confusion among the responders. Additionally, the apparent failures to follow air defense procedures were followed by a string of lies about those failures. NORAD officials, including Eberhart, covered up the facts about the lack of air defense on 9/11 by lying to the American people and by failure to cooperate with the 9/11 investigations.

5. The three WTC buildings should not have fallen through what should have been the path of most resistance.

The evidence indicates that the WTC buildings were brought down through a deceptive form of demolition. This means that a program for procuring and installing explosives throughout the WTC complex was needed. Frank Carlucci’s former colleague Barry McDaniel was well-qualified for the job. He and Wirt Walker should be prime suspects due to their access as leaders of Stratesec, which had a suspicious history.

Terrorism propagandists L. Paul Bremer and Brian Michael Jenkins also had strong connections to the World Trade Center. One was an employee of a WTC tower impact zone company who spent the day giving the public the official story before anyone knew what had happened. The other was the man who led the design of the WTC security program after the 1993 bombing.

Many reasons can be found to investigate New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani. His foreknowledge of the inexplicable demise of the towers and his destruction of the remaining evidence are important areas that require inquiry. Giuliani’s associations with organized crime as well as his early knowledge of the terrorism network BCCI provide further leads. His failure to replace the first responder radios that failed that day and his role in communicating the false notion that the air was safe to breathe at Ground Zero are other areas to study.

The fact that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were board members for the company that occupied all but ten of the 47 floors in WTC building 7 might be important. They both resigned from that board only eight months before 9/11. As the attacks began, WTC 7 was the scheduled site of a terrorism-related meeting planned by Larry Silverstein and the Secret Service. Military explosive disposal units were invited to this meeting while the leaders of the Secret Service were simultaneously huddled with Cheney in the White House bunker.

Duane Andrews and his company SAIC played a wide-ranging role relative to 9/11. This included creating the national databases that tracked and identified terrorists. SAIC also supplied U.S. airports with terrorism screening equipment, and predicted and then investigated terrorist attacks against U.S. infrastructure including the national defense networks and the World Trade Center.

SAIC helped to create the official account for what happened at the WTC both in 1993 and after 9/11. The company also provided the information to capture the alleged architect of the attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. SAIC’s extensive involvement in the facilities and systems that were affected on 9/11, as well as its involvement in providing the official account for what happened, calls out for close examination.

SAIC was also a leader in research on thermitic materials like those found in the WTC dust. What’s more, a new employee of the company, John Blitch, was in charge of the teams operating the robotic equipment used to search the pile at Ground Zero. That equipment had been designed for use in explosive ordnance disposal, giving reason to suspect that Blitch was looking for, and disposing of, explosive remnants.

Chapter 10 provided a realistic alternative to the official account for the attack on the Pentagon. This alternative centered on the Pentagon renovation project. It presented an evidence-based hypothesis that explains everything the official account does while also giving explanations for six major, previously unexplained, questions related to that event. This hypothesis implicates SECDEFs Paul Wolfowitiz, John Hamre, and John Deutch as managers of the renovation project, as well as Donald Rumsfeld’s long-time business colleague Peter Janson, whose company performed the work.

What Should be Examined More Closely

Some of the suspects reviewed in this book could be brought up on charges today. This includes George Tenet and Ralph Eberhart, both of whom lied to the U.S. Congress during the investigations. Wirt Walker can be charged with 9/11-related insider trading; Richard Clarke appears to be guilty of treason; and Rudy Giuliani should be tried for his role in deceiving first responders about the air quality at Ground Zero.

More detailed investigation will be required in order to evaluate the best path to justice with respect to other suspects. But there are good leads to follow. As discussed throughout this review, there are significant links between the suspects and deep state entities that were known for secretive plans. For example, the terrorist financing network BCCI was cited in the following ways.

• The network was created with the blessing of then-DCI George H.W. Bush, father of Stratesec’s Marvin Bush and President George W. Bush.
• The UAE helped start the BCCI network and then bought up the remnants as Richard Clarke began working with the country’s leaders.
• BCCI was linked to George W. Bush’s former company, Harken Energy, through several investors.[7]
• Duane Andrews and Dick Cheney worked together on the House Intelligence Committee as the CIA was working with BCCI. George Tenet worked for the Senate intelligence committee at the same time. Presumably, these men were informed of the CIA’s involvement with the terrorist financing bank.
• Kissinger Associates, then led by L. Paul Bremer, had a number of meetings with BCCI representatives but refused to release its documents related to BCCI during the related Senate investigation.
• Rudy Giuliani led the enforcement actions against BCCI and his associate Louis Freeh may also have been involved. Giuliani also worked for White & Case, which represented BCCI.
• Wirt Walker’s KuwAm Corporation was linked to BCCI through its director Hamzah Behbehani as well as an unnamed director from Patton, Boggs, & Blow. KuwAm’s Mish’al Al-Sabah was the cousin of Jabir Adbhi Al-Sabah who worked closely with BCCI nominee Faisal Al-Fulaij.
• BCCI was inseparable from the Pakistani ISI, which on 9/11 was led by a man who was meeting with suspects Porter Goss and Paul Wolfowitz as the attacks began.

Knowledge of past crimes against democracy, including the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, Operation Gladio, the “October Surprise,” Iran-Contra, and the deceptions behind the first Gulf War, call for a comparative analysis with regard to 9/11. Such an investigation should carefully consider these suspects and review the potentially related activities of private network leader Ted Shackley. There are good reasons to suspect that both Barry McDaniel and Frank Carlucci were involved in the Iran-Contra crimes, and at least five of the suspects reviewed were connected in one way or another to Shackley.

• Shackley was “very close friends” with Frank Carlucci.
• Richard Armitage had a long, close relationship with Shackley as well.
• Michael Canavan’s JSOC, perhaps the most secretive U.S. agency, was started by Shackley’s OPC colleague Richard Stillwell. An assassination squad of the JSOC was placed under Cheney’s command after 9/11.
• Shackley’s activities in Kuwait paralleled those of KuwAm director Wirt Walker.
• Porter Goss worked with Shackley at the CIA station JM/WAVE and also in Operation 40.

Solving the case of 9/11 is not a question of whether the crimes were perpetrated by “the terrorists” or “the government.” In fact, many U.S. government officials tried to get to some aspect of the truth and retaliation was their reward. These included congressional representatives Cynthia McKinney, Curt Weldon and Dennis Kucinich, along with Senators Max Cleland and Mark Dayton.

What’s more, half of the suspects in this book were not in government positions on 9/11. It does seem clear, however, that the U.S. could not have been attacked so easily, with the national defenses being so handily defeated, without the involvement of some members of the U.S. government and military. Apart from the nineteen suspects named, former Senator David Boren stands out as someone who should be examined more closely.

Further investigation must prioritize the activities and people involved in the Continuity of Government (COG) program. Some of the reasons that COG is so important to understanding 9/11 include the following.

• At least three of the suspects reviewed here, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Clarke, were among a select few involved in COG planning over a period of 20 years.
• Clarke revised the COG plan in 1998 to make it a response to an act of terrorism like 9/11. This happened at the same time as there was a concerted effort to hype the threat of terrorism from al Qaeda.
• Richard Clarke implemented the secretive COG plan for the first time on 9/11, thereby effectively installing a “shadow government.” That shadow government was still in effect in 2002 and may still be today.
• A secret communications system developed for COG implementation, called SRAS, was activated on 9/11 before the attacks began. Duane Andrews’ company provided oversight to the agency which activated the system.
• Since 9/11, requests from U.S. congressional representatives to review COG documentation have been refused by the White House.[8]

Throughout the book, evidence was presented that implicates certain oil-rich royals in non-democratic kingdoms of the Middle East. The possibility that the government of Saudi Arabia might have been involved in the 9/11 plot appeared to have been intentionally emphasized by the Joint Congressional Inquiry, through redaction of the report and through hints made by Bob Graham afterward. However, Graham and others failed to emphasize the strong Saudi relationships with Western governments. Instead, the evidence implicating Saudi leaders seems to be used as a political tool more than a vehicle for justice.

The 9/11 Commission made a point of covering for the Saudis in several of its “we found no evidence” claims. However, the world’s leading insurance provider, Lloyd’s of London, filed a lawsuit alleging that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was a major sponsor of al Qaeda and a “knowing and material participant in al Qaeda’s conspiracy to wage jihad against the United States.” The suit claimed that without the Saudi sponsorship, “al Qaeda would not have possessed the capacity to conceive, plan and execute the September 11th Attacks.”[9] Although Lloyd’s dropped the lawsuit just days later without explanation, the 154-page legal filing described a good deal of evidence for Saudi backing of al Qaeda.

Lloyd’s was not the first to contradict the Commission on this topic, as many of the 9/11 victims’ relatives joined together to file a multi-trillion dollar lawsuit against the Saudis. That lawsuit was thrown out on a technicality related to the ability to sue a foreign government and, later, the Obama Administration backed the Saudis during the appeal. What’s important to realize, however, is that it was only the 9/11 Commission that claimed that no evidence for Saudi financing could be found. Obviously, such evidence could be found, it just could not be used to prosecute the Saudi government in the United States.

The governments of two other foreign countries that benefited should be at the top of the list to be examined. These are Kuwait, whose royal family included the owners of KuwAm Corporation; and the United Arab Emirates, the country with so many links to the alleged hijackers and whose leaders bought up the remnants of BCCI. Like Saudi Arabia, these countries are non-democratic monarchies and therefore calling for investigation of prominent members of the royal families (for example Freeh and Tenet’s confidant Prince Bandar) is analogous to calling for investigation of the governments.

Also of great interest are a number of British companies. This includes AMEC, which did the construction and cleanup at the Pentagon impact zone and also led the cleanup of the WTC site. The British firms Bovis Lend Lease, the other major contractor that cleaned up Ground Zero; and Securicor, which managed airport screening, are also of interest. Furthermore, a number of the suspects later went to work at the British defense firm purchased by the Carlyle Group — QinetiQ.

Israel has also been discussed in terms of the possibility that elements of its government were involved. Unfortunately, such claims are often made without supporting evidence and coherent reasoning. Although there is evidence that Israeli intelligence knew details about the attacks in advance – the story of the “Dancing Israelis” verified this foreknowledge[10] – many governments had advanced knowledge of the attacks as indicated by the warnings issued.

If there was an Israeli operative in this group of suspects, Carl Truscott might be a candidate in that he went on to work with a leading official from the Israeli Security Agency. Paul Wolfowitz and his advisor Douglas Feith would also be candidates as they were both strong supporters of Israel.[11] On the other hand, Wolfowtiz’s history suggests that his connections to a deeper, non-national state, as indicated by the training that he and Richard Perle received from Dean Acheson, might be more important.

Considering 9/11 as a product of a deeper, non-national (or trans-national) state brings to mind the Safari Club and Cercle Pinay, which preceded and drove organizations like BCCI, as well as the “CIA within the CIA” private intelligence network. Further investigation might focus on the Iranian exiles working with Shackley, Sensi, and Walker to determine if they were linked to the Safari Club network. How these groups related to COG and CSIS, and to certain people who seemed to be behind the scenes with respect to 9/11, would also be useful avenues of further inquiry.

It was known that Rumsfeld deferred to Richard Perle on many issues in 2001, sometimes in an obsequious manner.[12] Additionally, PNAC members Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz and Armitage were all known to be followers of Andrew Marshall, the man behind the calls for a revolution in military affairs. People like Arnaud de Borchgrave, Henry Kissinger, Fred Ikle, and James Woolsey also turned up repeatedly throughout this discussion of suspects. 

Another point to consider is that the events of 9/11 appear to have revealed a few well-tested mechanisms by which societies are deceived en masse. One such mechanism is something called controlled opposition. That is, pitting two opponents against each other, while backing or manipulating both, can be an effective means by which a more powerful group can direct aggression away from itself while profiting immensely from the process. This worked with the eight-year long Iran-Iraq War, for example, and with similar conflicts that led to massive gains for the military-industrial complex. The concept is also reflected in the superficial left-right paradigm of U.S. politics, in which national discussions are often framed around relatively meaningless issues while the facts about things like 9/11, or the vulnerabilities of electronic voting machines, are largely ignored.

Controlled opposition is the basic concept behind the idea that al Qaeda works for an international intelligence network to induce public support for policy when needed. Might the Arab-Israeli conflict be partly co-opted and aggravated in such ways as well, by those representing a deeper state? It seems possible. If true, then a continued exacerbation of both sides in the conflict would serve the purposes of the deep state, perhaps by keeping the resource-rich region unstable and in need of continued intervention.

In any case, an honest investigation into the events of 9/11 must proceed from the evidence regarding what happened and who was in a position to make it happen, no matter where that evidence leads. Considering the knowledge and access to the facilities and systems needed to accomplish the attacks, the evidence suggests that the 19 people reviewed in this book should be examined first. 

Other Motivations

The people who committed the crimes of 9/11 probably thought that they were doing the right thing. Whether they were Arab extremists who were fighting a jihad, or people posing as Arab extremists in covert operations, they undoubtedly believed their actions were part of a difficult but necessary good. Similarly, any U.S. players involved in promoting an “Islamic” terrorist threat, disabling the air defenses, demolishing the WTC, or accomplishing the other necessary activities, most likely thought they were acting in the nation’s best interest. In fact, that Machiavellian concept has been attributed to Bush Administration officials many times.[13]

Actions taken since 9/11 indicate that the crimes of that day were part of a power play coordinated by powerful, trans-national interests. The events provided the pretext for implementation of pre-existing plans to seize critical resources and implement more government control over citizenry. The seizure of resources like oil and natural gas is necessary in order for Western economies to continue functioning without major upheaval.[14] And more protection for the most wealthy and powerful will likely be necessary as the gap between the demand and availability of energy resources continues to widen, causing economic hardship. Since 9/11, the actions taken to protect the public from terrorism cannot be distinguished from actions that would be taken to protect governments, and the wealthiest of their sponsors, from the public.  

U.S. government leaders have known about the risks of energy resource depletion for some time and Cheney’s secret energy taskforce of early 2001 appears to have been a confirmation of that knowledge. It would therefore not be surprising that a secretive group of deep state operatives embedded within the U.S. government might have taken action to secure the nation’s interests for the long term. 

It appears that production of illicit drugs might have also played a part. As discussed earlier, many U.S. covert operations have been dependent on drug trafficking. Richard Armitage was involved with such activities in Southeast Asia, Porter Goss’ district in Florida was a center for drug trafficking (including Huffman Aviation, where the alleged hijackers trained), and the Iran-Contra crimes depended on drug funding. Therefore it is relevant that, less than two years after 9/11, occupied Afghanistan became the world’s largest heroin producer.[15] Afghani opium production continued to rise through 2012.[16]

Most of the suspects reviewed here were shown to have benefited from the 9/11 attacks through promotions, or political or business gains. However, there is an intangible benefit to consider as well. Many of them were players in the last war in which the United States was defeated. 

For example, Ralph Eberhart began his military career as a forward air controller stationed out of Pleiku Air Base in South Vietnam. Benedict Sliney, who was in charge of FAA operations on 9/11, was an air traffic controller stationed in Pleiku at about the same time. Duane Andrews was also an Air Force Special Operations soldier in Vietnam. 

Fighting in related operations was Michael Canavan; the FAA’s missing hijack coordinator on 9/11, who was in the 5^th Special Forces Group (SFG). Also in the 5^th SFG were Brian Michael Jenkins, who as Deputy Chairman of Kroll designed the WTC security systems; and CJCS Hugh Shelton, who was yet another high-level leader missing on 9/11. Special Forces soldier Richard Armitage was active in Vietnam as well.

Along with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, all these men were undoubtedly devastated by the defeat in Vietnam. Author Kevin Phillips noted that memories of the loss in Vietnam “became an important seedbed for aggressiveness with respect to Iraq” and that Rumsfeld, Cheney, Shackley and George H.W. Bush were all “embarrassed or embittered” by the setback.[17]

Cheney and Rumsfeld experienced their only other significant career loss when President Ford was defeated in the 1976 election a year later. Other people who played critical roles on 9/11 and also worked in the Ford Administration included L. Paul Bremer, Frank Carlucci, Rudy Giuliani, and DOD employees Richard Clarke, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Armitage.

The defeats in Vietnam and the 1976 presidential election made their marks on these men. Years later, the attacks of 9/11 brought all of them a late chance for redemption and victory. And it made them all heroes.

Using 9/11 for the purposes realized required identification of an enemy that could be pursued throughout all of the most strategically important lands. That pursuit of al Qaeda in the “War on Terror” has led to the oppression of more countries than Afghanistan and Iraq. The West has pursued “regime change” in Libya, Syria and other countries of the Middle East as well. 

What goes little noticed in all of this is that al Qaeda was an ally of the U.S. in the recent efforts to effect regime change in Libya, and was apparently working on the same side as the U.S. in Syria as well.[18] None of that is surprising given that al Qaeda was born of the CIA-funded Afghan Mujahideen in the 1980s.

Unfortunately, these facts are missed as mainstream media and government leaders continue to use threats about al Qaeda for political purposes. This might be surprising to some but others have realized that the “media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them.”[19] As a result, the evidence that al Qaeda is a controlled opponent, making political hay for its supposed enemies at every opportunity, goes largely unnoticed.[20]

Adding to the suspicion that U.S. authorities continue to be behind terrorist acts are the reports that the FBI has planned terrorism and has engaged in entrapment of the related “terrorists” since 9/11. Journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote that, in the decade after 9/11, the FBI’s actions included “purposely seeking out Muslims (typically young and impressionable ones) whom they think harbor animosity toward the U.S. and who therefore can be induced to launch an attack despite having never taken even a single step toward doing so before the FBI targeted them. Each time the FBI announces it has disrupted its own plot, press coverage is predictably hysterical (new Homegrown Terrorist caught!), fear levels predictably rise, and new security measures are often implemented in response.”[21]

It appears that the CIA has been caught in the same kind of trickery. In the case of a would-be “underwear bomber,” it was later revealed that the suspect was working for the CIA and Saudi intelligence.[22] These kinds of manipulations, and related questions about 9/11, continue to go unreported by the U.S. media, despite the historical revelations of Operation Gladio, Operations Northwoods, and the Gulf of Tonkin non-event.  

There is no longer any question that the official reports for 9/11 failed to address a majority of the evidence and left most of the critical questions unanswered. This was due in part to the fact that the related investigations, completed when Cheney and Rumsfeld were still leading the country, were produced through a process that suffered from uncooperative, deceptive maneuvers among the agencies involved.

The U.S. government will not conduct an honest investigation into the events of 9/11. That much is clear. But there are many other countries that were impacted and many whose citizens were killed that day. People from 59 different countries perished in the 9/11 attacks.[23] Eight were Pakistanis, ten from Italy, eleven from Germany, an amazing 47 from the Dominican Republic, and 14 from Trinidad and Tobago. These 59 countries have the right, and the responsibility, to open their own investigations into the deaths of their citizens. An effort to bring about one or more such investigations could do much for the cause of truth and justice. The work of independent investigators and activists is the key to further progress today. 

The attacks of 9/11 were crimes that have never been appropriately investigated. This is despite the fact that the citizens of the world have invested their futures in the myth surrounding those events. As of June 2011, a conservative estimate of the cost of the wars resulting from 9/11 was over 225,000 lives and approximately $4 trillion.[24] A more recent estimate puts the financial cost at $6 trillion.[25] As this financial disaster continues, the expected fate of the U.S. economy will resound throughout the world.

Civilian deaths resulting from the Iraq War alone have been estimated to be over one million.[26] The U.S. soldiers who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan number more than double the victims from the 9/11 attacks. The wounded go uncounted. And according to the United Nations refugee agency, Afghanistan and Iraq continue to lead the world in generation of refugees, millions of them, primarily due to the wars of aggression being conducted in those countries. 

A critical obligation to future generations becomes obvious when, to all of this, we add the loss of civil rights reflected in police-state legislation, the moral losses involved in torture, and the near total loss of public trust in government. These facts should help us focus on the common root cause of these tragedies – the origin of the War on Terror.

Although the response to public skepticism has been to ignore or belittle those questioning the events of 9/11, this book provides a next step for those wanting to know the truth. People around the world know what is needed to make corrections to the destructive path that we have taken since September 11, 2001, and start moving toward peace, justice, and lasting positive change. We need to know what happened on 9/11.

Notes to Chapter 17

1. The 9/11 Commission Report references this NSC email, from Clarke to Rice and Hadley, entitled Stopping Abu Zubaydah’s attacks, May 29, 2001
2. Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, Simon & Schuster, 2004, pp 7-9
3. See CNN video footage of August 16, 2002
4. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Aircraft Piracy (Hijacking) And Destruction of Derelict Airborne Objects, July 31, 1997, http://tinyurl.com/czn9hrd 
5. See 911Review.com, The ‘Stand-Down Order’, http://911review.com/means/standdown.html 
6. 9/11 Commission Memorandum for the Record (MFR) on John Hawley interview, October 8, 2003
7. Stephen Pizzo, Family Values, Mother Jones Magazine Sep-Oct 1992
8. In the summer of 2007, Congressman Peter DeFazio, a member of the U.S. Homeland Security Committee, was denied access to the White House’s COG planning documents. This was after it was discovered that, in 2002, President Bush had hid the facts from members of Congress. For more details see Washingtons Blog, Do I Have to Obey Orders From an Unconstitutional Government?, September 11, 2008  
9. For details on the Lloyd’s lawsuit against the Saudis, see Russ Baker’s article “Saudi 9/11 Alert: Here’s That Missing Lloyd’s Lawsuit” at WhoWhatWhy.com, November 10, 2011
10. Christopher Ketcham, The Israeli “art student” mystery, Salon, May 7, 2002
11. James Mann, Rise Of The Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet, Viking Press, 2004
12. Andrew Cockburn, Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy, Scribner, 2007
13. See, for example, Paul Alexander, Machiavelli’s Shadow: The Rise and Fall of Karl Rove, Rodale, 2008
14. The concept of Peak Oil is important in understanding one probable motivation for those behind 9/11. A good place to start learning about Peak Oil is the website of Richard Heinberg, http://richardheinberg.com/. 
15. Andy McSmith and Phil Reeves, Afghanistan regains its Title as World’s biggest Heroin Dealer, The Independent, June 22, 2003
16. Alissa J. Rubin, Opium Cultivation Rose This Year in Afghanistan, U.N. Survey Shows, The new York Times, November 20, 2012
17. Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush, Penguin, 2004
18. Peter Dale Scott, Who are the Libyan Freedom Fighters and Their Patrons? Global Research, March 25, 2011. Also see Joseph Wakim, Al-Qaeda now a US ally in Syria, The Canberra Times, September 11, 2012
19. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Random House, 1988 and 2002
20. The idea that al Qaeda was working for the CIA and its allies was proposed shortly after 9/11 by Canadian professor Michel Chossudovsky. His book “War and Globalisation: the Truth Behind September 11” (Global Outlook, 2002) gives some of the details behind this theory.
21. Glenn Greenwald, The FBI again thwarts its own Terror plot, Salon, Sep 29, 2011, 
22. Paul Harris and Ed Pilkington, ‘Underwear bomber’ was working for the CIA, The Guardian, 8 May 2012 
23. Wikipedia page – Casualties of the September 11 attacks
24. Deborah Baum, Estimated cost of post-9/11 wars: 225,000 lives, up to $4 trillion, Brown University “Cost of War” Project, June 29, 2011
25. Robert Dreyfuss, The $6 Trillion Wars, The Nation, March 29, 2013
26. The more conservative estimates include that of Iraq Body Count (http://www.iraqbodycount.org/) which puts the number of civilian deaths at about 100,000. Others, including Just Foreign Policy (http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq), estimate the deaths from the Iraq War at over 1.4 million. Middle range estimates include that of the British medical journal The Lancet, which in 2008 put the number near 700,000.