Nexus - 0905 - New Times Magazine-pages

Page Content (OCR)

THE WAR FREEDOM This analysis of available evidence suggests the complicity of covert US government, military and intelligence groups in the events surrounding September 11, 2001. Editor's Note: The following article is extracted and edited from the concluding sec- tion of Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed's book, The War on Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked, September 11, 2001 (http://www.thewaronfreedom.com). It is reprinted with permission of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, UK. In examining any crime, a central question must be: "who benefits?" The princi - pal beneficiaries of the destruction of the World Trade Center are in the United States: the Bush administration, the Pentagon, the CIA and FBI, the weapons industry, the oil industry. It is reasonable to ask whether those who have profited to such an extent from this tragedy contributed to bringing it about. — Investigative journalist Patrick Martin CONCLUSIONS s far as the facts on record are concerned, the best explanation of them, in the opinion of this author, is one that points directly to US state responsibility for the events of September 11, 2001. A detailed review of the facts points not only to Kabul but to Riyadh, Islamabad and, most principally, Washington. Furthermore, in the opinion of this author, the documentation presented in this study strongly suggests, though not necessarily conclusively, that significant elements of United States government, military and intelligence agencies had extensive advance warning of the September 11 attacks, and in various ways had complicity in those attacks. This is certainly not a desirable inference, but it is one that best explains the available data. This examination has found that a specific war on Afghanistan, to be launched in October 2001, had been planned for at least a year and, in general terms related to regional strategic and economic interests, had actually been rooted in at least four years of strategic planning. This planning, in turn, is the culmination of a decade of regional strategising. All that was required was a trigger for these war plans, which was amply provided by the tragic events of September 11. We have also discussed compelling evidence that not only did US government, military and intelligence agencies anticipate what was going to happen on September 11, but no public warnings were given and no appropriate measures were taken. It is a fact that the American intelligence community received multiple authoritative warnings, both general and specific, of a terrorist attack on the US using civilian airliners as bombs, targeting key buildings located in the nation's capital and New York City, and likely to occur around early to mid September. It is also a recorded fact that emergency response systems suffered consistently inex- plicable failures on that day, allowing the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon to continue without an effective air response. A detailed investigation of the actual chronology of events on September 11 strongly suggests that this sort of massive systematic failure was possible only through wilful obstructions from key US government and military officials. It is a documented fact that the Bush administration furthermore systematically blocked investigations of terrorists involved or strongly suspected of being involved—including Osama bin Laden, his family and suspect Saudi royals who support him—prior to September 11. Even after September 11, the Bush administration has continued to misdi- rect investigations and block pertinent inquiries, with the FBI concentrating futile efforts on Germany rather than Saudi Arabia—where, according to the late former FBI Deputy by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed © 2002 Executive Director Institute for Policy Research & Development Brighton, East Sussex, UK Email: info@globalresearch.org Website: http://www.globalresearch.org by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed © 2002 Executive Director Institute for Policy Research & Development Brighton, East Sussex, UK NEXUS = 11 AUGUST - SEPTEMBER 2002 www.nexusmagazine.com